Hula Hoop Your Way to Wholeness

Life is meant to be unscrambled like a jigsaw puzzle.

I'm a girl born in 1955. As early as five, I was asking for money from my father. My mother was a homemaker, so I knew to go to Dad for change for ice cream, a headband, or a hula hoop. A few years later I found ways to make money on my own by doing chores and selling Sunshine greeting cards door to door in the rural area of Michigan where we lived when my Dad was in the Air Force.

My father when he only knew joy.

I saved up for a ceramic poodle figurine that changed colors with the weather; a slinky, a yoyo, and a rubber banded object that when pulled by the hands spun in balance. Looking back, I feel empowered that I figured out ways to earn my own money. But yet, it was during this same time that I experienced not feeling like I was a part of the whole financial wheel, not balanced like my rubber band toy.

One Saturday morning, the six of us were piled into our station wagon to drive up to Alpena for a shopping day, I witnessed my father writing a check as we sat in the bank parking lot. I asked him what was he doing and he told me it was to get money from the bank. "Make it for whatever you want!" I shouted in glee. The thought of a book of checks to write out amounts sounded like the most delicious part of life I'd ever heard and why then were we not writing with the speed of a jet? He turned and looked at me with frustration and now as a parent I understand when he said, "It doesn't work that way." And I felt embarrassment roll over me. But why? I wanted to ask.

I never got any more of an explanation, and the years trailed on, and suddenly I was in charge of my own family, feeling as overwhelmed as my parents probably felt back then. Thank goodness for Suze Orman who helps us everyday. And as much as I know from her generosity, the connection I am making in my journey now is how I need to know I am quite capable to value myself enough to earn a sensational living while giving to my community in beautiful ways. And so connecting with my self esteem has become Mission #1 and I am so grateful to Caroline Myss and her program on self esteem.

Just last Saturday, I checked my mail and found a free copy of Louise Hay and Cheryl Richardson's book,  You Can Create an Exceptional Life after participating in a contest to describe my idea of what an exceptional life for me would look like. This book is helping me to see how ultra successful women - like Cheryl and Louise - indeed walk the same rocky path as me, as all of us, and find sterling and flexible ways to incorporate joy and wealth into their lives. This little book is saving me, once again.

I am a knowledge fiend.

As the creator of Workshops by Wolford, I am constantly seeking ways to improve, reinvent, and to fortify the human experience so that we can live whole, free lives. I like the idea of looking at a checkbook and not sweating the amount I need to write down. And I want to give to society through work that thrills and satisfies me.

Yet, I've spent too long worrying about how to accomplish that and now I know worry is just a fearmonger and has no place in our lives because there is plenty of money for ice cream and headbands and anything else inbetween. Knowing this, owning this, and applying this through spiritual and active practice is the key.

I am writing a new workshop titled: "The Problem is Worrying: How to Make Friends with Your Unconscious Patterns".  I will be pulling together lots of loose strings and will offer it online as well as in person in New York, and I am excited to do this. Not only does it feel great to be swimming in the knowledge and wisdom of my value, but it also feels incredible to know I am giving what I am learning to you, you who are waiting to take this information and to let go and to grow! It's never too late. Headbands and weather poodles for all!

Familial Tenderness, Raw and Uncooked is Okay

My mother and me in 1988

My first recollection of Thanksgiving must have been when I was about four or five. My mother was standing and leaning down, gazing into the oven, a hot pad in her hand and a frown on her face.

The oven had not been turned on and guests were to arrive in an hour.

I felt my mother's panic that first Thanksgiving with her at the festive helm. There would be 50 more years with her planning or attending Thanksgiving dinners whether made by her own hands, together with mine, or fixed by someone else. Several years she ordered from Furr's Cafeteria, the whole meal, and we'd pick it up for her, my sister and I or my sister and brother in law. There were years when I fixed the dinner at Mom's house and one year everyone came to my place, the last Thanksgiving my daughters and I lived in El Paso. Each year means something. When I was a kid, it meant eating pecan or pumpkin pie, turkey, stuffing with celery and onions, jellied cranberry sauce later replaced with whole berries, cool whip, drinking from stemmed glasses and hearing the conversations of relatives from my Uncle Tex and Grandmother Hastings to Aunt Shirley with lopsided lipstick smudges to later my children and nieces and nephews running through the house, the warmth and confusion of familial tenderness.

My mother's last few years were spent eating at my sister's house. My mother loved Thanksgiving as do I. She loved coming together around a table as do I. She prayed no one would argue, and I had to shrug off the frustration when she began to be at the helm of the controversies and bedlam, but still I know today she wanted it to go right, as we all do each year, and sometimes it does, and sometimes it is as chilly and pale as a turkey in an oven not yet turned on.

My older daughter and nephew playing in the leaves in El Paso.

This is our second Thanksgiving without her. Two Novembers ago, I fought with her telling her the reasons why she needed to move into an adult care residence. She'd been living with my sister and my mother's stubbornness to allow the proper help was becoming a nightmare. Finally, she agreed. It was on her birthday of October 26, 2009, her 80th birthday. We had had a big birthday party for her the Saturday prior and on Monday, her actual birth date, we ate pizza with her grandchildren, one son, two daughters, and one son in law, around my sister's table, and I struggled not to cry as she sang, as we all sang little songs to lift the bruising finality of the mood. She was different that night, a resignation, a resolve, a sadness that still makes my heart choke. But she had to go. And she did enjoy her time at the facility where she stayed until she had a stroke on February 28, 2010. I held her hand and watched her pulse stop at 5:50 CST on April 13, 2010.

I hope my children, nieces and nephews remember their Thanksgivings in El Paso with the same ease and satisfactions I did as a child. It is my intent to take on that role again and to make it once more a time of refreshment and gratefulness, remembering my mother's face while opening the oven door to an uncooked turkey. It was and is the beginning of the family tradition, and it is in that honesty and stark realness and moments for laughter - as we have on many occasions - in which I vow to impose each Thanksgiving, starting tomorrow, November 24, 2011, and onward, for as many as I am lucky and thankful enough to have.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Dedicated to my birth family.

A Strike

I got the idea from being a substitute tutor over the summer. So I posted an ad onto Craigslist to be a private tutor for anyone needing conversational English help. He contacted me. I saw the marks above his email that told me he was Asian. I had received two emails from others that didn't pan out, well, one, the other was spam. So I read his and responded, wondering if this was a prank, too? He said he'd meet me the next week at 4 pm. I didn't hear back and thought that was that. But he texted me on that day and hour, asking where was I, as he was where we had agreed to be.

He's real! He said he had sent a returning email, but I never found it. So I apologized and we met the next week.

When I was about eight years younger than my student is now.

He sat there at the cafe. I knew he was Korean. I noticed he was tall and had hair as black as the coffee he was drinking. Young, about the age of my daughter, Sarah, he seemed shy and a bit agitated. We took a table in the back and began what now includes six weeks of conversation developing into such a delightful association. When he leaves for Korea in December, I shall miss him, but am so glad to have met him.

We have talked about bowling, beer, Sex and the City (he writes down the phrases and I explain it), why "john" is a toilet, baseball, parents, girlfriends, ex-husbands, daughters, the future, but most of all NYC. He loves NYC and today we talked about Halloween. "I am jealous because in Korea, we do not have this custom," he said. He told me about going to the Halloween parade and how it was "fabulous." He rode home on the train next to Batman. It is in these moments when we snorkel with laughter that I thank NYC for allowing me to sit in this cafe and talk to this young man.

Today, we also talked about his first day here. And how scared he was. But he came here, alone, and not knowing this city at all. He said he stood in Times Square and shook with happiness. He went on to Queens where he is subletting and found it quiet and boring. A true Manhattanite.

I feel so vital sitting and talking to him, listening, forcing him to listen to me. And the laughter that erupts. And how he is a writer who I am encouraging to write about these six months here before it is back to Korea where he will return and go to college to become a computer tech, hoping to work for Sony. We Googled Silicon Valley and his eyes bore into mine. "You are giving me hope," he said.

The aggression I felt on that first day turned out to be his dismay from the tutor he hired before me, a man who forced grammar exercises on him when what he really wanted was to talk.

I can do that. I think I've found another niche.

Tonight we walked together after our session, him for the N train, me for the F. We had been talking about trying to give directions to tourists and accidentally sending them in the wrong direction. Well, me, that is. I pointed to the right and said, "That's your subway station, isn't it?" And he said, "No it is one street more. You did that last week, too." Laughter.

I will miss him. I feel blessed beyond words.I am so thankful he answered my ad. I would have missed such a hilariously good time. And such a beautiful friend.