People I Love | The Organic Sister

Good Men Do Exist

December 15, 2010 By TheOrganicSister 78 Comments

I remember being pregnant with Zeb and facing the decision every young mother is forced to faced. Being 17 and looking at single-motherhood pretty much guarantees that people will go to great lengths to scare the shit out of you.

The intentions might be well-meaning but the message still feels pretty miserable: Parenting sucks, it’s too hard for you to do alone, you’re too young to do this right and oh, by the way, you’re doomed to be single and miserable because no guy will ever date a woman with a kid.

To one extent or another, by someone in my young life, I was told those things. And I could talk at length at about each one of them and what they did to my thoughts and intentions.

But I’m going to focus on the last one right now.

…you’re doomed to be single and miserable because no guy will ever date a woman with a kid.

It was a pretty classic men-are-dogs message that I heard and a fairly damaging one at that. Not only was I was told to hate Zeb’s bio-dad, I was told to expect the worst from any other man I happened to come across.

And it was total bullshit.

There are men out there who aren’t acting maliciously toward their children or the mother’s of their children. There are men out there who are nothing but human beings doing the best they can with what they have.

There are good men out there who do incredible things for children who are and aren’t biological their own.

I’m married to one. And I had a child with another.

Really Emotional News

Zeb’s bio-dad backed out of the picture when Zeb was two. He wasn’t a “dead beat dad”…he was a deeply conflicted and hurting man. He was living the consequences of several negative choices he had made. And he was doing the best he could with the tools he had.

By leaving, he did the very best thing for his son at that time.

It takes an incredible amount of strength to do that and I won’t begrudge him that.

Justin came into our lives when Zeb was only one year old. I don’t remember when Zeb started calling him Dad, probably somewhere around the age of three, when we were married.

Over the past ten years of the three of us being together, I’ve watched this remarkable man stretch himself to grow into the father that Zeb needed him to be. I’ve watched him teach Zeb to ride a bike, play catch or just cuddle on the couch together. I’ve watched the two of them fight together and fart together…you know, like fathers and sons do.

Over the past ten years, there has never been any doubt in anyone’s minds that Justin is Zeb’s dad, but inspired by Heather, we decided to align the legalities with the Truth.

Justin, with the help of Zeb’s bio-dad, is adopting Zeb.

I’m overwhelmed by these two amazing men: One, who had the courage and love to step into fatherhood so many years ago…

And the other, with more love than I’ve ever heard in anyone’s voice, through his own pain and without any ego, gave the greatest gift to his child that he had to give.

My heart is so full of love for Zeb’s bio-dad. I hold no resentment or anger toward him. I see his heart and I know he’s only ever done the best he could.

My heart is so full of passion for my husband and Zeb’s Dad. He fills our lives with his love each and every day. This adoption is just paperwork to confirm what’s been true for years.

Such enormous choices, such enormous gifts.

Only truly incredible men can do what they have both done.

Here’s to good men everywhere, doing the best they can and in unconventional ways.

Filed Under: Organic Parenting, People I Love Tagged With: adoption, fatherhood, generosity, Justin, love, Zeb

Inspiration Monday – The Halfway Point

November 29, 2010 By TheOrganicSister 8 Comments

We’re about halfway through our interim in Las Vegas and finally feeling as though we’re making some progress in our transition out of Benny and into a new rig. We’re still keeping our eyes on a January departure, although possibly mid-January now.

We’ve sold the old truck (yay!) and it looks as though we may have Benny sold soon too (yay!). We’re getting ready to sort through our storage boxes and sell even more items and we’re hoping to head up to Eugene, OR soon to do the veggie conversion. (If you’re in the area, let us know!)

The time is really flying by and I hate to admit we were a little ambitious in our plans. We’re so swamped with the transition, it’s been difficult to find time to spend with friends and family as much as we’d like.

But we’re trying! We finally had the opportunity to hang with our nephews for a day and took them to the park. They are so amazing.

Can I admit something?

Of all the people we missed while on the road, our littlest nieces and nephews topped the list. I don’t anticipate that changing when we head back out.

In the coming weeks we have plenty of things to do, some more exciting then others, some we didn’t have planned but feel oh-so-right. Has anyone mastered the art of sleepless nights…or maybe human cloning? I could use a lot more time. Or a personal assistant. In the meantime…

Some new places you can find me on the web:

A new article on Sustainable Baby Steps: Fabric Gift Wrap
An interview at The Very Next Thing

And some inspiration from my week:

Very cool!
These too!
Loveliness.
We could all use a few of these tools.
Really glad to find this one.
Dreamy.
Justin new fave song.
And Zeb’s too!
Want a locally made pair of these.
Something to make me move in my seat.
And an early birthday present to me!

What’s Inspiring You?

The things with which we fill our spirits and our minds has the power to transform our perceptions, our moods and our lives. That’s the purpose behind these Inspiration Monday posts.

Inspiration Monday gives you the opportunity throughout the week to seek out and save the things that inspire you with the sole purpose of helping to inspire others.

Life should be Inspired, not required. Let’s get inspired!

Write your own blog post and share its link in the form below. Or leave a comment on this post.

If it’s not an Inspiration post, please don’t link it in the form!

Filed Under: Inspiration, Life on the Road, People I Love Tagged With: links, music, newphews

Inspiration Monday – All This Free Time

October 25, 2010 By TheOrganicSister 13 Comments

The new website is ready, the giveaway sponsors are set, tomorrow is the big day. The day I “launch” the site.

I’m excited, anxious, can’t sit still. All my hard work will be put out into the world and I can only hope you love it as much as I do. Oh, no, it’s not perfect. But it’s really good. (Or at least I hope.)

In the midst of all the excitement I also feel a bit of letdown. I’ve dedicated a lot of hours lately to this site. Getting it Just Right has been my project, and although I’ll be continuously adding to it for some time to come, I can’t help but feel a little unsure what to do with all this free time on my hands.

All my passion and inspiration has been poured into it. What do I do now?

The past few days I’ve felt a little lost, not sure what to do with myself. But yesterday I started to remember. I went to the park with my sister and two of my nieces. And for the first time in a long time I felt inspired to capture the moment, inspired enough to play around with the photos, too.

And I’ve enjoyed some other bits of distraction while I pass the time until tomorrow. Here are a few tunes I’ve been enjoying:

A song to move to.
And whistle to.
Something to hoop to.
And something to make me breath.
And breath deeper.
And make me remember.
Okay one more for good measure, because who can resist?

And a bit of what I’m loving:

She pointed these out to me.
Some parenting thoughts.
I believe it.
I heart small spaces.
We can attest to this.
Thought-provoking, tear-jerking, funny, beautiful. Must read it.

What’s been inspiring you lately?

Leave a comment below or add your own blog post to the form!

Filed Under: Inspiration, People I Love Tagged With: attachment parenting, links, mindful parenting, music, niece, photography, praise, sustainble baby steps, tiny house, unjobbing, work

Odessa, Texas – My Father’s Hometown

September 24, 2010 By TheOrganicSister 17 Comments

I wasn’t really sure why I added #8: Visit my father’s hometown, until we were actually pulling closer to Odessa, Texas. It had always been he and my brother who spoke about visiting. But as we were driving down the 20 it suddenly became very clear.

There were quite a few gaps in our relationship, some as wide as three years of silence. Others were smaller, missing pieces that you only come to miss when someone’s gone. It is the history, the connection to his past that I crave.

Based on what he spoke about I know exactly four things about his childhood:

That any good dentist could tell where he was raised, because the water there was known for the stains on his teeth.
That he moved away from his hometown and to Las Vegas when he was about 12 or 13.
That he developed diabetes when he was 13 years old.
That he and his friends used to cruise Fremont St before it became the “Experience”.

After he passed away, I found that he was born in Odessa, a bit of history he never really spoke about (he always just bragged about being Texan). I also found I had an uncle I never knew about (I searched all the Harold’s I could find and ended up meeting him and my beautiful cousin a day before the funeral; they never stayed in touch though). I also found a letter from his biological father just after he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and a photo of him that I still own that looks eerily like my dad.

How strange is it to know so little of my dad before he was My Dad? My mom used to tell me stories about her and her siblings. I would visit her childhood home every summer until my grandparents finally moved. And I’ve watched home videos of her growing up. There is a history there, an ancestry I understand. I know my mother’s mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and their stories. But for my dad it’s almost as if he sprang into existence sometime in his 20′s.

So I went to Odessa, in hopes of drawing some map in my mind of who my father The Baby or The Toddler might have been. I guess in the back of my mind I was hoping to stumble across someone who had known my grandparents before they were grandparents, when they were still young and wide-eyed and bringing home a newborn baby boy. I was hoping to sit beside some old lady and hear stories of how my dad, The Baby, would cry or laugh or play with a toy truck while the adults ate together and drank ice tea in the heat.

Instead we found a directory that told me my grandfather was a truck driver, an address of where they lived when my dad would have been two, and a birth announcement with the address of his first home.

That home was gone, replaced with a concrete slab. The neighbors said it was a boarding house torn down in the 70′s, giving me more questions than answers.

The second home was there, though, and I tried to imagine my dad, The Toddler, playing in the yard. I tried to hear some child laughing or see some ghost of history there, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t picture what he looked like before the age of 29 or a grandmother who wasn’t in her 70′s.

Did I mention my grandmother died in June? No one called me to tell me. My other grandma found the obituary and my mom broke the news to me. And all I could do was sigh with the sadness of it all as that ancestral gap widen in my heart.

I didn’t know until now that I didn’t know the man I called Dad. I loved him and he loved me. But there was always something missing. Connection. History. Maybe he couldn’t give what he didn’t have.

But I can. I can love my dad for who he was, even if I’m not sure who that is. I can love the family I didn’t understand. And I can take what he didn’t give me as a gift, one of understanding just how important it is for your child to walk through the streets of your hometown and know where you once stood.

They all did the best they could with what they had. I have the chance to do better.

Filed Under: Life on the Road, Organic Parenting, People I Love Tagged With: dad, death, family, father, history, odessa, sadness, texas

Making Love Last

August 27, 2010 By TheOrganicSister

A reminder to focus on my love.

You know sometimes I’m amazed Justin and I not only made it this far, and are still so in love with each other. We had both come from divorced parents and I especially didn’t have very many healthy relationship models. Neither one of us really knew what love was or what marriage took to succeed. But we did know we didn’t want to put our child(ren) through the pain we experienced as children.

A few of our single friends have asked us in the past how we did it: how we found “the right one”, how we made things work and how in the world we stayed so passionate for each other. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past few weeks, trying to understand our own romantic journey and discovery, or self-discovery really, trying to find our own “keys to marital success”.

The journey is different for everyone, I’m sure, but here are the things that made the difference for us:

Letting go of our type: I was The Bagel Girl and Justin was a construction runner at the time; we both had daily stops at a tool warehouse in town. He spotted me and worked on intuition. My first impression of Justin was “not my type” (based on my type until that point, I can now see that was a good sign), and although he didn’t say so, I wasn’t exactly his either. Justin was accustomed to thoughtless, high school girls; I was accustomed to assholes. So when I started talking philosophy and theology on our first date, he knew I wasn’t the standard cookie-cutter girl. Likewise when I watched him turn his truck’s system down (yeah, he was one of those guys with extremely large and loud speaker systems in his truck) upon entering a residential area, I was literally shocked. Neither of us would have been able to get to that point of noticing these new and interesting qualities had we not stepped outside what we thought we knew about “the perfect date”.
Letting go of the fairy tale: A very well-meaning woman had once told me, as I was sobbing over a broken heart, that “if it was meant to be it wouldn’t be so hard”. I loved her to death but something about those words didn’t sit right with me. For all of our lives, we’re read fairy tales and “happily ever after” stories. But love doesn’t always come in and sweep us off our feet, carrying us away to Perfect Marriage Land – especially when you’re entering into the relationship with so much baggage. Justin and I went into our relationship knowing that we were in love and that we would have a lot of work to do to figure out how exactly we should put that into action. The first two years of our relationship and several periods throughout were fucking hard. There were moments no one thought we would (or should) make it through. But because we accepted in advance that it wouldn’t always come easily, we didn’t let the worst of times tear us apart. We kept pushing through it, focusing on what we wanted with each other and building our partnership skills along the way. I can’t imagine where we’d be if we had given up.
Remembering it’s not 50/50. This one came from my Grandma (who has been happily married since 1954) and is probably the greatest key to our success. I had asked her several months before our wedding what her best advice would be and she was quite adamant that a good relationship is never 50/50. It’s closer to 80/20…you just have to be willing to give more than you take. This one challenged me at the time, but she insisted that marriage needs to move from a place of generosity. She explained what I now know to be true in regards to marriage or parenting: unconditional love and endless generosity do not create selfish people who walk over you; it creates an environment of kindness and compassion. It fills people up until they have no choice but to pour it back into those around them.
Never letting myself go. This one also came from my grandma as well and seriously rubbed up against my feminist mind. After all, shouldn’t Justin love me regardless of whether I wear makeup or gain weight? The answer is yes. But letting yourself go has more to do with Who You Are than what you look like. Justin fell in love with me because I was determined, strong-willed and cared deeply about myself; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. If I “let myself go” – stopped learning and fighting for what I believe in, sat on the couch eating junk food in my pajamas watching trash TV, stopped being the best person I could be…if I let go of my role in our partnership and did a 180 on my personality, he was obviously going to feel differently. He fell in love with me for Who I Am, for my best qualities and for my desire to impress him with those qualities as I did when we first dated. And he’ll miss that person if she leaves just because “we’re married now.”
Filling each other’s voids. I used to feel resentful anytime I felt I was “mothering” Justin. Likewise I felt uncomfortable admitting that I needed him to care for me the same way. But recently we’ve come to see the amazing healing power and stronger connection that can be had when we symbolically “parent” each other. I believe we marry the person who can love us the way we’ve never been loved and our gift of understanding, kindness and generosity has the power to fill voids we’ve been aching to fill. Together we can right the wrongs of one another’s pasts, giving each other what we may not have had enough of and sheltering one another just as a loving parent unconditionally and automatically shelters their child.

There are a myriad of other things I feel contributed to our success: being open and honest but knowing when honesty would be more hurtful than helpful, understanding our first role is as Zeb’s parents but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to neglect our needs as lovers, being silly together and that sometimes we need reminders of it all.

I’m glad to have written these things out; I love when messages like these come through me, as well as to me. The past few weeks have given us new challenges as we navigate this life and our unjobbing experiences and it’s good to be reminded of these principles of mindfully choosing unconditional love, generosity and compassion.