My special place...

It’s hard to decide which I find more therapeutic:  writing or baking cookies.  

Everyone needs to have a special place or activity, mothers especially!  Something they can go to when the world has stressed her to her breaking point.  Mine are writing and baking cookies.

Obviously one is better for the snugness of which I wear my skinny jeans, but honestly both feel like a creative, nurturing process.  Both activities I am building something from scratch.  With baking I am taking flour as a base, sugar to sweeten and/or brown, eggs (or an egg replacer such as applesauce in this house) to hold the batter together, and baking powder to rise it up.  Each ingredient plays a special role in how the cookies turn out.  Forget one and everything’s off.  

With writing my ingredients are different but still present.  My writing never turns out without a realistic topic for the base, personal experience to hold everything together, some good honest emotion which makes it rich and inviting, and of course humor for a lightening agent.

If I try to write without a topic of meaning to me, I fall flat and my batter doesn’t rise.  If I try and write without my personal opinion being involved there is no raw honesty.  There would be no richness of flavor and no relatability of anyone to me.  I never, ever explain my way to be “the way.”  Oh god, I think I’ve learned a thing or two more about motherhood than that!  But if I don’t stick myself out on a limb and say “this, this is what I believe in.  This is what my heart tells me to do even if there is no other reasonable explanation involved or science or research.  This is me,” then I have absolutely no more to offer anyone than an encyclopedia.  Approximate truth (at least what most thought the truth was at the point when written).  

Motherhood is all about instinct.  That gut feeling, that grounded, firm, feeling like you can feel roots coming out of your feet and cementing you to the ground in your belief, that this is the way it’s going to work for me and my family.

Now if we could only all manage to feel firm in our decisions and beliefs while extending the same courtesy to other mothers of holding firm in their own decisions and beliefs.  I like to think that is where we are moving in society (and obviously after the last statement, feel free to disagree with me, hehe.)  The minute we as mothers begin to pick apart each other’s decisions, that is the moment we lose all connection with one and other.  We lose our sense of self in the larger community of mothers because we are choosing to see the worst in others rather than that they are following their hearts with all the tools they have been given.  So instead extend hands and offer up the best version of yourself, the truest, the brightest.  One thing my children have taught me is that I can yak their ear off about “the right behaviour” but they only learn it when they see me displaying it.  The same is true with adults.

So tonight I write (and bake cookies).  I think both turned out sweet and hit the spot.