It’s a beautiful old hymn that I used to sing in church when I was a girl. I can still hear the tinny piano music and the voices of the sweet older ladies, earnestly harmonizing together to make a beautiful haunting sound on a Sunday morning.

Love lifted me… love lifted me… when nothing else could help, love lifted me.

This past weekend, while the snow fell and covered the roads here in my town, I got on a plane and went to Arizona.

Arizona, the land of warm red rocks and clear bright air. Arizona, where my heart often dwells in homesick nostalgia. Where mountains hold the land in peaceful saftey, and the sun shines down hard and hot.

I was excited – jumping-out-of-my-skin excited – when I found out I’d be able to go. The Lift Off retreat was a huge deal to consider, let alone ATTEND AT ALL. When I realized that I’d be MEETING PAM SLIM, and MEETING CHARLIE GILKEY, and probably HUGGING THEM BOTH, I could hardly contain my giddy anticipatory joy.

When I finally arrived, I immediately reverted to my shy, outsider, I’m-not-that-cool self. The self that doesn’t think she’s awesome at all, that believes she’s ridiculously awkward, and feels like an uneducated hick who doesn’t know how to use silverware. (Yes, I’m aware that none of that is true – but it doesn’t change feeling like it is.)

But then – I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it was probably partway through some shared laughter, or in the middle of one of the many hugs we all shared during the weekend – I suddenly felt loved.

I felt understood. I felt cared about, surrounded, and supported. I felt lifted up.

All my life, I’ve been the weird one. I read books and climbed trees as a child, and grew up on a farm while being homeschooled. We didn’t have a TV, and I played the piano for fun. My friends were few and far between, and most of them couldn’t relate to my way of being.

As an adult, I put aside wanting to do what my heart wanted, and did the things that were expected of me: I married early, started having kids, tried to learn housekeeping and billpaying and other wife-y stuff. When my first husband took off like the bastard he turned out to be, my world shifted in a huge way.

I learned how to be strong (like I already was). I learned how to find ways to make things happen (like I already knew how to do).

Years have passed since that first shift, and I’ve experienced many more. The most recent shift in my world was my entrance into that special club of entrepreneurs, those people who have their own businesses, who spend more time loving their work than they used to spend hating their jobs.

And then, I met a whole bunch of other people just like me. Fourteen others, in fact, not including Pam and Charlie. And I was home.

What I learned from the weekend cannot be summed up here, it cannot be bullet-pointed, and it sure as hell cannot be expressed in any coherent way except by my life and my actions and the way my world makes sense again. I met people who, by their love and their creativity and their innate them-ness, reminded me and retaught me that we were meant to live in community.

We need each other, and not just because we get lonely. We need each other because you can’t always see how amazing you are, but I can see it. We need each other because I can help you, but I can’t help myself – I need you for that.

Love lifted me this past weekend, and I won’t ever forget it. It’s part of me now, and it will always be woven into the fabric of my life.

P.S. I love you too.

I woke up to the wind blowing so hard it sounded like it was trying to take the roof off the house altogether, or at least bully it into falling off by itself. I also woke up to some small person in the bathroom, although whoever-it-was was trying very hard to be quiet, so points for that.

I got up, drank water, went to the bathroom, washed my face. I put in my contact lenses. I exercised (for only about five minutes), I made a pot of coffee. I drank more water.

Now I am upstairs in my robe, at my computer, and I just finished sorting my morning email. My new office – Joey’s old room – is filled with lovely morning light. The sun is shining against the trees at the edge of the road like it was a flashlight pointing at them. The sky is light-light porcelain blue, with some very long stretched-out clouds across it. People are driving and going places and getting things done, I imagine.

And I sit here, comfy in my office, at my desk, in my cozy robe, listening to my children trying to be quiet until it’s time to get up. I sit here and I dream and I wonder what is the next big thing for me, for us; I have the luxury of being awake and alive at a time of my own choosing.

I am so thankful to be here. So grateful. The world cannot contain my gratefulness.

It has taken me years to realize that my children do not have to be happy all the time, or be mirror representations of myself, to be ‘okay’ or ‘great’ or even the elusive ‘good’. I realize, now, that they are four different and unique people. Sometimes they don’t respond to life’s twisty-turny-ness the way that I would (or will). Sometimes they learn a lesson eagerly and move on joyfully. Sometimes they get stuck, can’t see their way out, and won’t listen to anyone no matter how helpful or wise. Sometimes they do the same boneheaded behavior over and over (even and especially when that behavior is a no-no around here), and can’t understand why they keep running up against it.

Sometimes they are like me, and sometimes they are wildly not-me. I only compare them to myself because I am their mother, their beginning, and all the things I taught them have made an impression somewhere upon their souls, no matter how slight. I see them as part of the canvas of my being, and it is not always easy to see them as a separate thing: a canvas all their own, pasted with fingerpaints and torn-out comics from the funny pages and the broken treasures found under beds and behind doors.

And now the point of all this ruminating is really this: I am an entrepreneur who is also a mother and a wife. Being an entrepreneur - master of my own island domain, creator of my own crown – means that my life is lived as a stunningly vivid example of how to do business (and how not to do business). Living this example-life in my home, day in and out, where the little-people-becoming-big-people see me every day and can observe with their spider senses how I am doing, means two great and terrible things.

1. It means that their idea of freelancing, or self-employment, or entrepreneurship, is fully informed by what they see me doing; and 2. it means that their idea of motherhood is fully informed by how they see me acting.

Do I behave like this is all too hard? Do I complain about my clients? Do I complain about household chores or grocery trips or getting their schoolwork together? Do I whine about the time I have to spend working, and spend all my waking moments inside my office, ignoring the world (and the people who are my world)?

Or, do I model rising to the challenge? Do I show them that it’s possible to be a really great business-person AND be a really great mother? Do I use positive language about my work and my clients and my never-ending task lists? Do I express my joy in my job, through my words and my body language? Do I put everything aside to take care of whoever needs it, when my mommy-ness is needed? Do I cook dinner for everyone and read stories to them and go for walks together?

When people say that their children made them better people, they were truth-telling indeed. There is no deeper soul-truth than this: my children make me better. And in so doing, I am able to shape their betterness as well.

Yesterday, my sweet baby girl became a year old. (There are a few more photos at the Caffeinated Kids website today.)

Hilariously, she woke up four minutes before her time of birth: 1:51AM Friday. Troy and I were watching television and had forgotten momentarily what time it actually was – and then we heard her wake up, heard her start to fuss, and realized that, obviously, she’d woken up for her birthday.

(Yes, we subscribe to the mushiest, most supernatural, most fantastical explanations for a lot of things; but if you knew us, I think you’d agree.)

My baby girl was born on a snowy morning in the coldest month of the year. It was dark outside and dim in the hospital room when it was time for her to arrive.

Once she was born, she would hardly open her eyes; everything seemed so bright, and she would rather just shut her soft little eyelids and wait for a better time. The on-staff pediatricians struggled with checking her eyesight, because she absolutely was not in the mood to look at anything, especially not when there was a bright light shining right in her face.

She nursed well, and she slept well for such a wee thing. She cuddled with me and she cuddled with her daddy.

Two days after she was born, I went under anasthesia for a routine no-more-kids-thanks surgery, expecting to wake up in 20 minutes and go home the next morning.

Instead, I woke up with a sore throat and blurry eyes four hours later, parked behind the nurse’s station with four nurses working on me. It took them an hour to find my veins so they could run simultaneous IVs of magnesium. I was swollen up everywhere and could hardly breathe through my throat or my nose (I have a chronically stuffy nose anyway).

I wanted my husband, but it was so late he had to go to his factory job, even though he didn’t want to. I wanted my baby, and they brought her, crying, once he had to leave. I couldn’t reach her. I couldn’t feed her. I had to lie there helplessly, pinned down by mag lines and a catheter, as they fed her a bottle of formula.

It took me several days to pull through, and aside from almost dying during the surgery when my blood pressure spiked, I started to drift away late that night, the magnesium having become – quite suddenly – far too much for my body to handle. I barely pressed the nurse call button, unable to wake Troy where he had fallen asleep across the room because my voice was so tiny and quiet. By the time the nurses got there, I was willing myself to stay alive.

Everything got quiet in my head, and pillowy soft. As the nurses flipped buttons and tapped my arms and face and told me to ‘hang on,’ I thought about the reasons I ought to stay. I knew in my heart that everyone would be okay without me, but I chose to stay. For them. For myself. For whatever it is I need to do in this world. I chose to breathe, to live, to stay alive.

I’ve never regretted my decision, and tomorrow I will celebrate one year of being alive by my own choice.

Yes, it’s hard here. It sucks and things are ridiculous and hardly anything is ever fair. But I want to be here just the same.

Happy birthday to my darling girl child, and happy alive-day to me.

Ahhh, December. Here you are again. With your promise of excessively cold temperatures, snow flurries when I would rather you waited until January, and spending lots of money on Christmas sillinesses.

You also bring cozy cuddling by the fireplace, wearing my favorite scarves and hats, and the anticipation of a new year, so close I can almost taste it. Okay, that’s probably the coffee I haven’t finished yet.

Leaving November behind is like taking a deep breath and letting the trials and the joys of that whole month roll off my back, down my arms, and onto the floor into a shiny pile of precious little lessons.

I learned that I CAN finish National Novel Writing Month if I have the time, but I did not actually have that much time. I had about half the time, which is why I got halfway there. But I am serenely okay with that. (AND we still beat Chris Baty!)

I learned that I have a lot to learn about business still, but that what I already know is valuable to a lot of other people.

I learned that making friends who come over to hang out with your family is more awesome than I thought it would be. (I LOVE YOU MATT AND SARAH!)

I learned that I am still doing that thing where I give myself wayyy too much to do, but I am actually learning to be nicer to myself in that regard. I actually took Thanksgiving weekend, the entire four days, COMPLETELY OFF. This is a first for me since, I don’t know, back in the spring?

I learned how to eat better, thanks to Nathalie (the Raw Foods Witch!), and have been amazed at the way my body feels with only some small changes in my diet. I am eating way more greens now and feeling a hell of a lot better.

I learned that our house is NOT BABYPROOFED ENOUGH for this crawling, wiggling, cruising, ridiculously happy baby that will be one year old next month.

What did you learn?

Today, I don’t have much to post about. It has been a nice sort of day – the sun was shining for a while, which is a BIG DEAL up here in the FROZEN TUNDRA of Michigan. Ha.

I have been thinking a lot about my business, and the general direction of my professional life; I have been doing a lot of Serious Grownup Planning about the next (bigger!) stages of my work. It is bizarre to be in this position already, when it was only February last year when I decided to be a web designer for real, and only March of this year when I became the family breadwinner. I am so thankful for how far life has taken me, and how far I have taken myself.

Without further ado, your Caffeinated Takeaway for today:

Life is not going to hand you a set of perfect opportunities and then wait for you to act on them. Life is not going to patiently hold off on crises, whether large or small, while you figure out what you are going to do next.

Life is YOURS. You choose what you will do next, and life is there to bend and compromise with what you intend. Yes, make good plans first. Yes, get good advice. Yes, follow your head as well as your heart.

But don’t wait around. Make steps, don’t just take them. Forge your own path, because the feet meant to travel it are your own.

Dear Beautiful Friend,

I recently realized just how badly I have treated you, and I need to ask your forgiveness.

I rush you when you would rather I let you slowly and carefully act. I expect you to stay awake when you are tired. I expect you to work when you’re sick, pretend you don’t need breaks, and eat an unhealthy diet in the name of getting more done.

I stress you out over things that are minor, because I’m always worried you’re just not going to live up to my expectations. I make you feel guilty whenever you do anything for yourself. I’ve told you that you are fat, ugly, not good enough, and a failure. And even though I have said those cruel things to you, I still expect you to keep going and stay cheerful, stay happy, stay positive. I make you feel like a bad mother and a bad wife, even though you have proven yourself to be good at both of those things.

When you have a sad day, I’m disappointed in you. When you make a mistake, I’m so ashamed of you. I kick you when you’re down.

I am far crueler to you than anyone else I know. I believe the bad things other people say about you, and insist that you prove to me they’re wrong, when I am the only one who knows you this well.

I’m so sorry. I can’t express how sorry. I love you, my dear friend, and I should never treat you so badly. Please forgive me, and let me start over.

Sorrowfully yours,
Rachael