“stormy night” -mixed media- art studio for children
I am trying to best understand what separates the broken from the not and how we can manoeuvre through life with as much courage, strength and grace as possible. I figure if I can gain all of these things during easier days then when hard days hit I can handle anything with a performance deserving a standing o.
But the irony is always that you can best gain depth of character through hardship, rarely with that other smooth sailing ship.
When I was in my twenties I met an older woman and I can’t remember where and I can’t remember how but I do remember she had a shoebox for her relationships. The lesson might have been a little lost on me then and I never thought about it much until recently when I was discussing a break up a young close teenage friend had had with her first serious boyfriend. Somehow it was there in my tool box and it came out in our conversation.
The woman had told me that she had two shoeboxes under her bed throughout her romantic life. In one she put little pieces of paper with all the things she loved about each of her boyfriends. In the other she put little pieces of paper with all the things that she couldn’t get past- not ridiculous, not the fussy , not the little but the big stuff that she could not embrace. They were her items- it did not matter that they may have not been important to anyone else.
On Monday I shared the story of Jennifer’s parents’ divorce in my post FAMILY MEETING.
But there was more to her speech to a few hundred girls the other day. Remarkably and finally(!) she attacked the notion that divorce takes no prisoners and leaves an indelible destructive mark on children and denied that it has to leave them broken.
hallelujah