For most of my adult life I’ve self-identified as a butt-kicker. I launched a writing career in my early 20s, while raising a houseful of small children; published several books by the time I was 30, and have re-invented myself through hard times and career shifts more times than I can count. I’ve never met a problem I can’t hustle my way out of.

At least, that’s what I’ve always told myself.

Maybe that’s partly why, after a rough holiday that included your typical divorced-parent stressors and regrets, plus the unexpected addition of a sudden and painful breakup, I dove headlong into a New Year’s challenge at my yoga studio. The challenge? To take 60 studio classes, in two months (59 days, since February is a short month, but who’s counting?).

In my typically action-oriented way, I reasoned that keeping busy would help me: create a distraction, give me something else to focus on rather than playing and re-playing scenarios in my head.

And it has helped – immensely, actually, but not always for the reasons I anticipated at the beginning.

On the first day of the challenge, my instructor talked about santosha which was the studio’s focus for the month of January. Santosha is a Sanskrit word that can be loosely translated to mean “contentment”.

I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty happy person, so I wasn’t sure what lessons I’d be able to glean from this particular focus. But. “It’s not about being happy – that’s a different thing,” my instructor explained that first day of January. “Santosha means finding contentment with what is happening right now, even if it’s hard or negative.”

Wait. Being content with what is? Like, right now? You mean, instead of trying to fix it?

But what if “what is”, you know, sucks?

I used to reference riding the short bus to make fun of myself, or tease others, or to express frustration with their choices and actions. It’s not the only ableist insensitivity I’m ashamed of in my life.

My child rides a short bus. The strongest people in my life ride a short bus. They ride it every day, into a world made for everyone but them. This environment doesn’t understand their tubes, prepare roads for their amazing minds, accommodate their wheels and equipment and seizures.

They push into a space meticulously designed for typically abled people, and keep coming back, hungry for the chance, working for growth, cherishing the community.

Suddenly, my insensitivity isn’t funny any more. Nobody works harder than my Lulu. She celebrates school. She stomps into speech therapy seven times a week. She pushes her tongue around unfamiliar sounds, and mashes words together in ingenious ways, just to make her little soul known. She gets frustrated when all her effort still can’t make her words work.

She spent her first year and a half trying to tell us things weren’t ok. She screamed nearly constantly. She got sick frequently. Despite being in the doctor’s office every 1-2 weeks, and being diagnosed as failure to thrive, her physicians never got beyond trying to calm her frightened parents.

So, smart girl stopped eating one day. It forced us to take her to the hospital. The initial admission for dehydration turned into a two week stay – including a surgery to put in her feeding tube. Months later, we got the results of her genetic testing.

She’s missing 9 genes, and it turns out, that has an impact on how she develops. We don’t have the benefit of knowing exactly how, though, because she was the first case her geneticist is aware of missing this exact segment of DNA code. Only three of the genes are even studied and known for how they work in the body and development.

I was editing the podcast when the first earthquake happened. Meagan and I had just finished up an Independence Day recording session (#summerworkingmomlife). I thought the dog had jumped up and landed on the bed where I was sitting, but when I looked up from my computer he was lying still, staring back at me (he probably though I’d rocked the bed!). From where I live near the coast in Orange County, about 170 miles south of Ridgecrest, CA, where the 6.4M quake originated, it was just a hint of a tremor, about what you feel when a big truck lumbers by your house.

Bryan had the kids at a 4th of July carnival and they didn’t feel it at all. After obsessively refreshing the Los Angeles Times Twitter feed for about an hour, I was able to ditch the earthquake-related jitters and get back to celebrating the 4th. We even watched fireworks from Bryan’s office on the 10th floor of a building in Newport Beach and I didn’t give our venue choice a passing thought.

When the 7.1M struck the same region around 8:20 Friday evening, Bryan and I were on the couch watching The West Wing (we’re re-watching the whole series). The older two kids were in their rooms, awake and reading; Violet was already asleep. When the rolling tremors stopped we went upstairs to talk to the kids. They knew what had happened, seemed more surprised than anxious, and didn’t appear fazed.

After the second, larger quake I had a much harder time moving through the stages of comprehension and anxiety–the ones that start with “Holy Cow, the EARTH is moving” and move on through “Wow, that was an earthquake” and “Whoa, what if that had been bigger? Would we have been prepared?”, finally landing on “Okay, we’re safe, it was centered pretty far from here, and everyone’s okay.” Instead of progressing through these mental states like I had the previous morning, on Friday night I got stuck. Stuck refreshing Twitter. Stuck clicking on sensational headlines. And stuck in the What if stage.

You are made for connection. You are deserving of kindness. That thing in your life that’s unnerving you right now? The situation that’s bringing out the worst in you? The relationship that’s gone sideways and feels awkward now? Take some time to sit with it. Acknowledge it. Be curious about it. To look deeply at our feelings and reactions does not have to mean they will overtake us. This was the lesson of a lifetime for me. I thought if I ever stopped and truly experienced my feelings at their deepest, darkest places, if I let the floodgates open the pain would wash me away and I’d never recover. Sometimes it feels that way though, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing: It’s not true. I’ve gone there and lived to tell about it. Heck, I’d go so far as to say I wasn’t living before I learned how to feel my feelings. I certainly wasn’t thriving, and I didn’t know joy.

I don’t know where the bottle of Jack Daniels came from, but I have a guess.

My guess is that Dad went to the liquor store—probably to buy the bottle of Barefoot chardonnay I threw away when I cleaned out his refrigerator—and somehow ended up getting all the way home with a bottle of Tennessee whiskey he hadn’t paid for. Had it been bought by another customer and accidentally placed in his bag? Had he unintentionally shoplifted it? Was this an episode of The Simpsons?

Whatever had happened, it ate at him. He’d received something he hadn’t earned, and this was unacceptable. He’d deprived someone else of something they had earned, and that was even more unacceptable. He mentioned in conversations how much it bothered him. At any rate, at some point—I don’t remember when or why—my brother, my husband, and I had consumed that bottle.

So when we found the second handle of Jack at the bottom of one of Dad’s kitchen cabinets, never opened, bright orange price tag blazing like a HELLO MY NAME IS sticker, I assumed Dad had done what I, as his child, would have: He went back to the same liquor store and purchased a bottle of Jack Daniels. To try to even things up. But also to avoid having to tell the person at the counter, hey, I stole some liquor so can I just pay for it now? Because he’s eighty-four and doesn’t need those kind of problems; he just figured he’d do his best to make it as right as possible. Lower his lifetime ratio of bottles of alcohol stolen to those purchased lawfully.

So as we are wont to do, my brother John and I opened the bottle. We’d spent three days cleaning out Dad’s house once he’d decided—finally and after great consternation on the part of his five children and his ex-wife—after his most recent trip to the hospital, that living in the middle of nowhere by himself was no longer an option.

It turns out your shenanigans and missteps and oopsies may be an important part of what people love about you, when things are said and done, and you inch your way through your last breaths.

Your grandkids may take your nurse in the hall to laugh/cry their way through stories of drinking beer with you when they were way too young for such things, and sneaking you to the VFW for a little R&R.

It may be that you won your nurse over in the first place by telling her, "I don't give a shit." She gotta respect that, right?

Do you ever get blind-sided by social media? You're scrolling along thinking about how you should be heading to bed and BAM!- a picture pops into your feed and suddenly you're overcome by (insert strong emotion of the moment).

That's me tonight. I did not see this one coming, and as such I had no way to anticipate the reactivity of my emotions. So here I am. Bawling.

I don't know about you, but social struggles have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Friendships have never come easily, and many have not stood the test of time. I readily own my part in each of those endings, it does take two to tango after all. I have always been imperfect and that's not gonna change. Maturity has helped me see the natural ebb and flow of relationships. Though it never stops feeling weird, I've grown accustomed to how friendships change with new seasons of life, and some fade away. Some we leave because they're not healthy. The endings are all hard for me.

Growing up, all I wanted was to fit in. I never did. Other kids could sense my fear, I was desperate to be part of the crowd. I never was. I walked around for 41 years wanting to be seen and known and loved for who I am, but not able to give that to myself, much less experience it from others. As a kid, and teen, and twenty and thirty something, I always felt like too much. I am extra to be sure. By design, I feel things in deep and intense ways lots of people don't. It's what makes me who I am, and it's the place from which my gifts were born. Feelings are my superpower. But being a sensitive feeler didn't do me any favors in the social arena. I cried a lot as a kid. I was teased mercilessly, an easy target.

After many years of hiatus, I recently began going to church again.

I hadn’t lost my faith, exactly. In retrospect, I had just gotten tired. Sunday-morning services, once meaningful to me, started feeling like a chore; the messages, often conflicting from church to church, became more confusing than clarifying. I didn’t know what to believe, so it seemed easier to simply believe nothing, or at least, not to think about it very hard. And as often happens when people have a spiritual crisis, I simply drifted away.

But in January I decided one Sunday morning to pop into a church that had been recommended by a few friends, and I’ve been going pretty regularly ever since.

It’s kind of a stretch to call this Sunday morning gathering “church” at all, at least in the traditional sense. There are no obvious hierarchies, no written statement of belief, no objects of sacrament. The congregation doesn’t recite creeds or sing hymns – instead, a (fantastic) band comes out every so often and performs a mix of secular and religious songs, after which we clap – a pretty un-churchy thing to do, but a huge relief for someone like me, who always feels just plain weird not applauding someone’s performance.

The services take place in the high school auditorium, with the house darkened so all eyes gravitate toward the stage. The speaker (I don’t think anyone is referred to as a pastor) delivers a fully-executed presentation that incorporates video and other multi-media elements, punctuated only by well-timed breaks for another song, and always with a conclusion that brings it all home so the message lands every time.

The “congregation” doesn’t have to do anything beyond watch and learn. The whole thing is so non-traditional, that the first few times I went I jokingly referred to it as a “Ted Talk For God”.

My daughter Lulu doesn’t look like me. She doesn’t look like anyone. She doesn’t look like her differently organized genetics, or like a child who can’t eat and requires a feeding tube.

But all the things she doesn’t look like are there, burrowed in her skin and bones and cells. My genetics and courage. Her dad’s genetics and silliness. The inability to eat. The extra hard work to learn to speak. The struggle to orient herself in loud, chaotic situations. The seizures. The indomitable resilience.

Disability can dog the most typically presenting people. There are struggles – physical, emotional, mental – that don’t have the pitiful grace to hang on our outsides. They don’t make themselves known without observation and empathy.

It’s a blessing and curse. People don’t place unfair limitations on the invisibly disabled. But, they also don’t provide understanding.

Once, I wrote a piece about Lulu riding the short bus to special needs school. I included a photo of her marching toward her beloved bus. A woman angrily responded, “It’s a toddler getting on the bus for preschool. That’s the bus toddlers ride. Don’t act like you know when you don’t.”

My father is a bluegrass musician. He founded a band in the early ’70s called Mountain Smoke. They are notable for several reasons, but the most widely known is Mountain Smoke was Vince Gill’s first band. They opened for Kiss and have had wild things happen, like playing on the White House lawn for several presidents, being written about by Billboard, and most recently, they were featured and had a song licensed in Ken Burns’ 8-part documentary series, Country Music. By the late ’70s, my Dad had left the band behind for the world of business. But music was in his blood, and in so much of how he raised me. Decades later, he would reunite with the band and his love of playing. They still perform today.

My dad set music aside and went on to be a very successful businessman. He took deep pride in providing for his family, and he worked and travelled a whole lot of the time. Although we have since repaired the wound of his absence, the truth is he missed many of the little moments in my childhood. One of the most crystallized memories I have as a young girl follows here.My dad has a huge vintage vinyl record collection. He isn’t just a musician, he is a true music lover. Among his collection, he owns a 45 record for every hit single from the years 1955 t0 1965, and many, many more. He once ran into our burning house to rescue the records and his vintage guitars from certain destruction.

On the rare nights I remember him being home at my bedtime, if I played my cards right I’d get to go down to his study in my pajamas, hair still wet from my requisite bath. Dad would play records for me, I would dance and we’d sing along. It was the freest I ever saw him—no stress, no weight of the world, no anger—just his love of music.