Soup

There comes a time when only soup will suffice. Your Nana’s homemade chicken soup. That tomato soup you always had with grilled cheese sandwiches when you were a kid. Thick, hearty minestrone that you get from the corner deli. Mulligatawny, zuppa di pesce, avoglomeno, menudo, borscht. Soup winds around your bones and finds its way into every nook and cranny of your soul and warms you from the inside out. Soup is as comfortable as a bear hug and twice as soothing. It quiets down cranky children and anxious adults and gets the thumbs-up when nothing else will do. When a sandwich is too much and a salad too little, soup hits the sweet spot. Steaming in bowls and mugs, tickling noses and warming hands, soup offers pure love in every spoonful and a meal in every can. For super-duper suppers, nothing satisfies like soup.

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Forgiveness

The most important person you’ll ever forgive is you. Forgive yourself for not being the perfect mother (whatever that is!). Forgive yourself for being blinded by love (or by fear or by attraction or by fill-in-the-blank). Forgive yourself for having children too early, too late, in or out of the right or wrong marriage, or any combination of the above. Wash away guilt with forgiveness. Cleanse yourself of regret through forgiveness. If you can’t find a way to forgive yourself for making choices that now seem less than ideal, how can you imagine that others can possibly find their way? How will you move through forgiveness? Write a letter of forgiveness to yourself. Sing a forgiving song. Dance your forgiveness into the floor. Bead a necklace of forgiveness, knit a scarf of forgiveness, and let forgiveness drop out of every finger as you work. Wear your forgiveness close to you heart, where you’ll be certain not to forget it.

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Freedom

Find your freedom in mothering. Taste the freedom of leaving the high-pressure work world for time at home. Feel free enough to play and discover. To ask questions and seek answers and grow alongside your child in beautiful ways. In the company of young ones, a freedom exists that you won’t find in the adult world. Take a deep breath of this freedom. With every step of independence your children take, take a few steps of your own. Free up your thinking; liberate old attitudes and ways of being that keep everyone in the house from soaring free. Structure isn’t a prison; it’s a framework that can support you as you test out new freedoms. What tools for living free will you hand to your child? How will you help him to free up his passion? How will you show her to live her own truth? Exercise your right to choose. Flex your muscles of freedom.

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