The Cost of a Speeding Ticket      Your life is moving as fast as a Corvette.  When you look out of the window on your journey, all you can see are blurs of beautiful colors but you can't make out what the objects are.  You are under the impression that if you stop the vehicle to take in the scenery, you will inevitably be late to your destination.  What exactly is your destination?  Where are you going in such a hurry?  Maybe it's the dishes.  Those dishes will not shatter if they are left in the sink.  Spend that extra time listening to your children ramble on about nothing at all.  Talk to your family about the upcoming day and make plans for your evening.  The dishes do not care about you.  Are you rushing around to make the bed?  Spend the extra five minutes cuddled up to your husband in that messy pile of sheets and blankets.  He wants nothing more than for you to just relax.  That unmade bed does not care about you, but you are your husband's entire world.  Is the

     Are we, as mothers, living as Jane Does?  It seems that mothers have lost their name.  You are no longer Sally, a woman who has tunnel vision of her life's dreams and aspirations.  You are now Johnny and Kate's mom.  Are we losing ourselves in our master status of Mom with no other option to become Sally again?  Or have we simply allowed ourselves to get lost in the chaos of family?  At times, we feel as if we can't have both worlds, but we can.  I only recently realized this myself.  I decided that my children will move out in a few short years, and the thing that  they will leave behind is this empty house.  They have their own dreams to fulfill.  What will my husband and I do when this happens?  I realized that it's not too late to do what I love.  We, as mothers, have spent most of our adult life nurturing not only our children, but everyone else's as well.  After all, it takes a village to raise children, doesn't it?  Thank God for all of the people in

     When I am home all alone, I often get the creeps.  I make sure that all the doors are closed and locked at all times.  It occurred to me today that we all do that mentally as well.  We leave most doors in our lives closed out of fear.  It's a fear of rejection.  We are scared of being made fun of, especially in this small town, where everyone knows every single detail of your life, or at least they THINK that they do.  We are afraid of failure, and we are scared of our feelings of inadequacy.  We all dream endlessly of pursuing the life that we want, but we are just too afraid to go after it.  Why is this fear woven into our minds so tightly?  So what if you fail?  After all, isn't this what we try to teach our own children?  Do we not tell them to follow their dreams?  Are we hypocrites?  We have to start investing in our own lives.  Do you ever find yourself judging someone that is trying to better themselves?  We all do it.  We do it because we are secretly jealous that

     When I was 8 years old, I received a gift.  I can't even remember who it was from, but I opened a gift, and in it was a beautiful white jewelry box with a ballerina inside.  You know the kind...you wind up the little piece of metal on the bottom of the box, and poof, you have a twirling ballerina inside the middle of it and places to put your jewelry on both sides of her.  That ballerina sure could twirl, but that wasn't all that she could do.  She could see everything that happened in that small bedroom that I lived in.  She knew me more than anyone.  She saw a girl that would spend hours listening to read-a-long records, and she knew that I would sing all day long if I could.  She knew that I lived to play my little keyboard and pretend that I was in a band.  She saw the hardships that I had with my father and she watched my brother and I hide out in the middle of our adjoining closets.  She knew that my brother and I fought to the death most days, especially during sum

Bring Back the Dinner Table        Lucky are the children who grew up in the 1980's.  They were poorer but much richer times.  I got out of bed on a Saturday morning in 1984 and poured myself a bowl of Lucky Charms, careful not to pour too much, because cereal was considered gold in my house.  We didn't have the option to eat cereal for dinner just because mom was making minute steaks with mushroom gravy.  We ate that minute steak like it was the last meal we would have for the day, because it was.  If I was lucky enough to find that magical toy in the cereal box, then I would have to fight for it.  I would fight my brother like that toy was worth one million dollars. The toys in the Lucky Charms boxes were better than the Cornflake boxes where you had to mail in your proof of purchase and a five dollar money order in exchange for an "Olympic" jacket.  Boy was I disappointed when I received a basic piece of plastic in the mail after waiting for six long weeks.