If your daughter is ready to talk about feminism, and really it is a conversation best started early, please go here.

When you need a moment to reflect and commiserate on the challenges of raising a daughter or of being a girl, please go here.

Among the positive things I learned at home: Girls can do anything, it doesn’t matter what other people think, do your own thing, march to the beat of your own drum, don’t follow the lemmings off the cliff…

Hopefully I can pass these messages along to both my daughter and my son.

I was maybe a little sheltered or oblivious to feminist issues in general. I remember getting to college and being shocked that there were only philosophical works by women included in the feminism class. That for the most part, to learn about women’s contributions to any field of study, you had to take courses in the Women’s Studies department. Later, getting into the work world and being paid less for the same job, being treated a lesser, suspect, fragile, or unreliable — shocked the living hell out of me.

What decade is this? What century?

And now? With the conservatives trying to take away rights to birth control? In what not-overpopulated world does that even make sense? On what planet-that-is-not-being-decimated is that OK?

So, tell your girls they are smart, capable, invincible, and unique. Inspire them and embrace them. They’ve got battles ahead of them that I thought were won ages ago. Prepare them to be more than decorations on a handbasket quickly going to hell.

First, when I got to class, I got a hug from a student who had heard that I was gone because there was a death in my family. It was heartfelt and quite unexpected. Thankfully it didn’t throw me into a tailspin.

Then, as people filed in, some of their faces lit up at seeing me. A few even expressed happiness that I was back.

Before leaving class, a student stopped to tell me that they would be gone for a few weeks for work and that they would miss me and my class. How kind that they included me in that statement.

Finally, in the locker room a student stopped me and said, “Dawn, you are my favorite yoga teacher. I just love your class.” To be honest, I usually keep my head down and mind my own business in the locker room. But that was pretty darn nice. The fact that the student and I were both fully dressed for this interaction was like icing on the cake.

I’m not sharing these things on my blog to brag. Rather, I want to share with you all the good things in my life, along with the challenges. We remember an insult far longer than a compliment. Goodness knows there are moments when I feel a fraud and wonder what in the world possessed me to start teaching yoga.

But then there are these days. Where so much joy and appreciation is reflected back to me that my heart just overflows.

How lucky am I?

I spent time in Pennsylvania over the weekend. I was born there. The house my mom was living in when she passed away is the same one my parents lived in when I was born. Goodness knows we lived in a few in between. Though we moved all across the country, that house, the one that belonged to my Nana and Pop, has definitely been one of the most stable things in my life. Even if it never felt quite like home to me.

Over the weekend, Lannia and I tooled all over in our rental car without a map and without a Garmin. We took care of a myriad of errands. I couldn’t tell you North, South, East or West while standing there spinning in circles. I don’t even really know the names of streets. Yet somehow we always got to our destinations. Like over the years the place imprinted on my mental map, whether I wanted it to or not.

There is something in me that strongly identifies with the mountains, the trees, the rock faces leaking spring water. And below the surface, the coal mines and the boom and bust of it all. The flooding rivers, people who say “Yous” as the plural of you. As in, “Yous be careful out there.” I’m not one of them. I’m not a Pennsylvanian, but I am of them.

It isn’t a simple process where you move from one stage to another and eventually get to the end. It is a messy forward and backward progression that can stop and stall. But it is normal.

The one that strikes me most today is bargaining. I always thought this was people saying, “Dear god, if you take away my loved one’s cancer, I’ll never gamble again!” I suppose there are people out there who literally pose such bargains. For many of us, though, it is a litany of coulda/shoulda/woulda. If I got her to listen to me about eating fruits and vegetables and drinking water. If I had only encouraged her more to force her doctors to get to the bottom of her feeling unwell for YEARS. If only I had dropped everything and gone and cared for her myself. If only. You see how easily one can move back and forth between bargaining, second guessing, and guilt.

No one is perfect. No amount of beating yourself up will change what is.

Oh, and am I angry? Good golly yes. Just ask my husband and kids. My anger just kind of sits there under the surface, until someone pushes past the nice exterior. Sorry guys. Hopefully it will pass. And my angry core will sink deeper and come out less often. It is always easier to be angry than to be sad. For me, anyway.

A hollow ache. Yep, that’s there, too.

All in good time, I suppose. All in good time.

I’m sure in time there will be much to say about her, but today I am just trying take the advice of David Harkins:

You can shed tears that she is gone,
or you can smile because she has lived.
You can close your eyes and pray that she’ll come back,
or you can open your eyes and see all she’s left.
Your heart can be empty because you can’t see her,
or you can be full of the love you shared.
You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday,
or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.
You can remember her only that she is gone,
or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.
You can cry and close your mind,
be empty and turn your back.
Or you can do what she’d want:
smile, open your eyes, love and go on.

Love you Mom.

Later, in college, a friend convinced me to pick up a shift in catering. At least you got to pick your own hours, right? I was hooked. After graduating and a few other mishaps, I found myself assistant to the executive chef. When the applications to graduate school fell through, I considered chef school. Then the realization hit that I couldn’t afford to dig myself deeper in debt, I was still paying off my B.A.

But the fascination continues. I love gadgets, reading about healthy foods and nutrition, I love cooking shows, Alton Brown, Iron Chef, Triple D, you name it.

This week, I followed a friend’s link to healthier recipes for the Superbowl, and I found Gina’s Skinny Recipes and they look GOOD. I can not wait to dig in and try more than a dozen of these. Join me!

My mom has been fighting cancer of the pancreas for 15 months now. This is quite the rarity. She’s an extraordinary and shockingly strong woman.

She is doing the whole experience on her own terms. She does not want anyone sitting around crying over her. She does not want her children involved in her care. She wants to live in her own home and do as she pleases. Which sounds great, right?

Well, she’s slimmed down, to say the least. She’s not willing (or able?) to eat much. Her muscles are gone. Between the muscles fleeing the scene and the powerful pain pills, and goodness knows what else, she’s been falling down. When? Why? Good questions. We don’t know. She hides it. From her brother who lives next door and helps her out all h can. From her sister, a retired nurse, who does all she can. From her children most especially.

So she fell (again) or passed out, or something of the kind and spiked a fever and was not responsive on Saturday evening and got herself a trip in an ambulance to the ER. Followed by a nice, strictly enforced, rest in the PCU for a couple days. I say strictly enforced because she was literally tagged with multiple day-glow wristbands that proclaimed SEVERE FALL RISK, and a bed alarm that would sound if she so much as picked her behind up off the bed.

The social worker came to talk to us. First, can I just say, if you are going to be a social worker in a hospital, particularly on the PCU floor, get the damn flu vaccine and stop wearing a mask. It does not help you evoke trust or transmit caring to the people around you. It says you’d rather be elsewhere and you don’t give a fig about the people in front of you, but the hospital requires you to wear a mask.

OK. Moving on. She said that mom would be evaluated by Physical Therapy, to see if she needed Rehab to go home. She asked Mom some questions. Thankfully Tammie told her straight away, “She can hear you just fine.” So she stopped yell-talking. She asked mom if she’d been able to bathe and dress herself before coming to the hospital. Mom said, “Yes.” And we all stood there, as she lied. We, as her children, had been added to her chart for the cancer ward, but not the PCU, so our input was neither desired nor required.

We all told her that she should go to rehab. Maybe they’d be able to get some protein in her and get some muscle tone back, so she wouldn’t fall so much. Maybe. I mean, honestly, there’s a tiny shocked part of me that thinks that even though she’s been told that surgery is out of the question, that she’s been at this for 15 months, maybe she could actually recover?

So she managed to snow the Physical Therapist and maybe even the social worker, and has been sent home, alone, today. To do what she does. To do what she can.

Who fights cancer with chemo for 15 months straight? Who keeps on fighting if their quality of life is sitting in a recliner in front of a TV most of the time, only consuming milk and melons, and falling down on a regular basis? Who won’t accept help unless it is exactly on her terms? Who? Who does these things?

My mom. Does all this and more. Exactly on her own terms. It isn’t what she wished for herself. She’s mad as hell. You can see it in her clear blue eyes. You can see it in her rosy smooth cheeks and the set of her jaw. She didn’t see this coming, didn’t want cancer, didn’t want to be a victim.

Go ahead and save your tears. She doesn’t want them. Don’t tell her what she does and doesn’t need. Don’t tell her that you just want her to be safe. She sure as hell didn’t choose to get sick, but pretty much everything since that day has been on her own terms. You may not like it, but you have to respect her for it.

So very much about the whole situation sucks on a level that I can not even begin to articulate and you know what? I don’t know the half of it. She keeps me in the dark as much as she is able. You think I’m kidding? I still don’t know what STAGE of cancer she was diagnosed with 15 months ago. How’s that for in the dark?

As I said earlier today, I am sad and frustrated because I just want to make it all better. And I know that I can’t make anything better for her and that is just kicking my butt today. So I’ll put on the “Rehab” song and at least laugh at the irony of her strength of will… Stand humbled by her dignity. Know that as long as she is fighting and doing everything on her own terms, that she is still the woman that raised me.

The harder she is to deal with, the more she is just herself. My mom.

Love you, mom.

You can ‘like’ Upward Facing Dawn on facebook, to be kept abreast of my latest thoughts on yoga as well as my teaching schedule.

Business cards are coming soon and I’ve made 8 new malas to sell at our MOMS Club Holiday Boutique.

If there’s something you make or a service you provide, and you’d like to participate in our Boutique, please follow the link above.

Turns out there was a rather large spider hanging out on the floor. “Good thing I have high arches.” Can’t imagine squishing a big spider under my bare foot first thing in the morning. Yuck. But I did take care of it.

It’s a good thing I am not totally squeamish about bugs, because I think that one deserved a good squeak, if not a little scream.

Being an account manager at a trade show company in California during the height of the dotcom boom, was a little like being a show hall girl during the gold rush.

No, really. Money flowed, dreams were made real and every day was a new party! The hours and pressure to please were excruciating, clients were often surly, overbearing, cheap, and ungrateful. We just had to paste on our smiles, serve up something good, and carry on.

During one particularly difficult day, a asked a brilliant coworker how she managed to keep so calm in the face of deadlines, money issues, and surly clients. She told me this, “I just imagine them all, as they are ranting and raving and carrying on, as tiny little new born chicks. So new and helpless. They’re really just asking for our help, in the only way they are able.”

Well, I was never quite able to achieve her level of equanimity and zen on the job. That perspective has helped me to learn to handle criticism and feedback better, it may even have helped me to stay calm with a screaming infant in my arms. Most of all it has helped me to overlook squawking and complaining, general harshness and ugliness, that once I would have reacted negatively to, to realize that people just need help.

OK, that advice and a regular yoga and meditation practice.