Welcoming Bliss

I've been traveling the last two weeks and arriving in Chattanooga this week, I was fortunate enough to witness a father's homecoming. I had no idea how long he'd been traveling or where he'd been, but I did know that he was loved and honored because after he cleared security, two little girls screamed Daddy and launched themselves into his open arms. Homecomings are played out hundreds of times a day at airports, train stations, and homes across the country and despite their similarities, each one is special and unique.


Witnessing these two little girls welcome their daddy home, got me to thinking about how wonderful it was to come home and be welcomed with open arms. To know that someone loves you unconditionally and is really glad to be reunited with you. Reflecting, I realize that I take homecomings for granted and don't acknowledge how fortunate I am when my loved ones come home to me or when I come home to them. My daughter flew home from DC several weeks ago and I didn't take the opportunity to tell her how glad I was that she'd gotten to have the experience of going to JEA and how glad I was that she came home.

As the days tick down until the holiday season, thoughts of family fill the air and I realize how lucky I am to have a husband and two kids who love me and who are glad I'm home. I might not get the cliched homecoming, but I know I have folks who love me and are glad I'm home and in the end that's really all that matters.

Twenty One Years of Bliss

Hubby and I celebrate twenty-one years of wedded bliss today and although in honesty it hasn't been 100% bliss, it's been more bliss than not. We've had our share of arguments and disagreements, but overall we've learned to work together and become a team. We married six months after we met and I'm sure there are folks that thought our marriage would never last, but through stubbornness, love, and perseverance, we've managed to make it work.

First and foremost, hubby is my best friend and the person I can turn to and talk to about just about anything. He's also been my moving buddy through more than 10 moves. We moved from St. Louis to Okinawa, back to Chicago, down to Central Illinois and then back to Chicago. We acquired two kids along the way and have shared our lives with a couple of dogs.

So what lessons have I learned through twenty-one years of marriage?

1. Friendship is the most important thing in a marriage. Lust comes and goes, but love helps keep you together. My husband has always been there for me and he's been my moving buddy through more than 10 moves. Even when I had no one else to help me pack up boxes and move, hubby was there for me and we managed to get ourselves moved.
2. Stick together through the rough stuff. Every marriage has ups and downs and our marriage has seem some rocky financial patches, but we managed to get through them by sticking together.
3. Make time for each other. It's really hard to carve time out to just be spouses and not parents, but we get along better when we make time for each other.
4. Learn to like some of the things your spouse likes. From wanting to spend time with hubby, I've learned to like Star Trek and James Bond. He's still trying to get me to like football, but somehow I don't think I'll ever become a football fan.
5. Welcome each other home with genuine happiness. Some of the sweetest homecomings have been the simplest. I will always remember the time when I came home two hours late after battling through a horrendous rain storm and my husband had a white candle burning and had been praying for my safe return.
6. Have fun together. Our first date was to the zoo and I remember the exact moment I fell in love with my husband. He'd put his arms around me by the aviary and I learned against him and realized this was someone who would always be there for me.
7. Share the work. We don't always do such a great job with this one, but we try. We both work and contribute to the bills and we try to share the housework, but that doesn't always work out perfectly.
8. Really listen. Sometimes your significant other just wants to share his/her thoughts and doesn't necessarily want a solution.
9. Marraige doesn't make you Siamese twins. When we first got married, I thought we had to do everything together, but I've since learned that we each have to be our own people too in order for us to be successful.
10. Stay connected. We try to reach out to each other at least once during the work day. Sometimes it's a "love tap" text message, somedays it's a phone call, and other days it's an email.
11. Have out of your world experiences together. Vacations don't have to be month long sabbaticals, but you need to take some time out of the ordinary together. Your mini sabbaticals can be trips to the local farmer's market, overnights in local hotels, any other way you can escape from the ordinary for a few hours.
12. Be yourself. There's too much game playing in the world, too much falseness, too much hiding. Being yourself means being honest with yourself and your significant other about who you really are.
13. Be your best. It might sound contradictory ot be yourself and be your best, but being your best doesn't mean hiding who you really are, it means taking time to dress up and put your best foot forward for the person you love. All to often we take time to dress up and be special for people who don't really matter, but we show up in jeans and torn underwear for the person we love.
14. Bring your manners. We say things to the people we love that we would never say to strangers. Just because you love someone, doesn't mean you get to slack on manners.
15. Accept your love one just the way he/she is. We're all human and we all make mistakes and part of loving someone is being able to accept their humanity. My husband is an expert at accepting me for who I am with all my faults (losing things, leaving the lid off the toothbrush, and more).
16. Don't make your who life your kids. Our kids are an important part of our life together, but they are not our entire life together and sometimes we need to make time for just the two of us. The kids don't always like it, but if you don't make time for just the two of you througout your marraige, you'll end up empty nesters with nothing in common.
17. Learn together. Learning together keeps things interested and ensures you have new things to learn about. Learning doesn't have to be taking classes together, it can be sharing knowledge that you've learned with your partner. For instance, I've learned a lot about blogging from "My Everyday Bliss" and I've shared the lessons I've learned with my husband.
18. Money isn't everything. Sometimes I've gotten so caught up in working and striving to make more money, that I've forgotten that I've neglected my husband and family in pursuit of more money. I'm learning, that I need to give up success at work to have time for my family and the people who really matter.
19. It's the thought that counts. I struggle with this one because I like to give and receive the perfect presents and hubby doesn't always deliver what I consider the perfect present. Over twenty-one years, I've learned to put aside my disappointment at not getting exactly what I wanted and embrace the thought that went into the gifts.
20. Family matters. My husband has taught me so much by how he treats my family and the love and respect he shows them. He is unfailingly polite to my family and gives up his time to spend time with my family.
21. Love one another. Love isn't just the spark of lust that newlyweds share, it's the enduring love that long term partners have for each other and it is a cumulation of all the things above.

Marraige is the hardest thing I've ever done becuase it's meant I've had to get out of myself and spend time thinking of other people and being there for someone other than myself. After 21 years, however, it's definately worth it.

Hometown Bliss

There's something about the town that you call home that reverberates deep within your soul and makes you feel as if all is right with the world when you're in that place. I've never really known the feeling of being home in a town until the last few months when I was contemplating moving from Chicago to Chattanooga. I love Chattanooga as it's a funky and fun little town nestled in the mountains. From Chattanooga, you can drive to the mountains of North Carolina or the beaches of South Carolina.

However, just thinking about leaving Chicago caused a visceral tug in my gut that reminded me that there'd be no skyscrapers, no family, and that it would take me a while to settle in and find the best pizza place, the grocery store with the freshest produce, and all those other things that I take for granted. We've lived in the Northwest suburbs for almost 10 years and that's the longest time we've ever spent in one area and after 10 years, it's finally starting to feel like home. We know our way around, we know which shortcuts will help us avoid the traffic, and we know where to find most things we'd every hope to need.

Since Sean's been downtown, I've been working to expand my horizon and am learning to love being by a big and diverse city where there is always something going on. I can find Mexican, Chinese, Italian, or anything else I want downtown without too much effort. I'm also learning to love Sean's neighborhood and all of its diversity.

The hills and valleys of the mountains will always draw me and I will always love feeling the peacefulness of the country, but I'm learning to appreciate the beauty in the concrete jungle. There's a majesty in man made mountains that almost rivals that of natural mountains as you think about all the creativity and ingenuity that it took to build skyscrapers that tower over the earth. Just like Westminster Abbey is as a tribute to the residents of 960 London who built the Abbey, Chicago's skyscrapers are a tribute to the architects and construction workers of the 20th century who built them upon the ruins of a city destroyed in 1871 in the Great Chicago Fire. Out of the ashes of that tragedy, a bright, beautiful, and cosmopolitan city grew.

I will always love to travel the world, but right now it is feeling mighty blissful to look upon the towers of Chicago and know that I'm home.

Goodness is Bliss

The news is filled with stories of terror, murder, and senseless violence. Some days it is hard to believe that there are good people left in this world. I've been in a funk lately because it has been almost a year since my daddy died and there are days when I'm not sure if the goodness, decency, humanity, and work ethic that my daddy embodied still exists in this world anymore.

I met a man today who made me get outside of myself and realize that there is still goodness and decency in this world, you just have to be open to seeing it. The cab driver who took me from the Chattanooga Airport to my hotel was a nice older Southern gentleman. Even though he was a wizened black man, when he spoke, it was like listening to my daddy. He had that sweet Southern drawl that fills space with its graciousness and makes you believe that everything will be all right. He spoke of ordinary things like work, family, church, but as I listened, I realized that the values he espoused where those of my father.

He had to go to a church meeting after dropping me off and rather than just show up late, he called to make sure they knew he was still coming. He showed this courtesy even though he told me his church was a "Primitive Baptist" church and everyone would be at least 30 minutes late anyway. That sparked a conversation about the value of being on time and he told me he'd worked at a company for 36 years and hadn't been late even one day. That told me he shared the same work ethic that my daddy embodied his entire work life.

We ended up talking about good people and he said that good people were to be found everywhere and it didn't matter what race. He told me about a group of Asian businessman he'd driven to a hotel and they'd invited him out for drinks. He didn't take them up on it, but he was thrilled to have been asked.

Our encounter was brief and I'm sure to him it wasn't anything special, just a ride to the hotel with a white Northerner, but to me it was a reminder that goodness, decency, and humanity were not my father's alone and that all I needed to do to find them was to look and to listen.

I miss you Daddy!

Comfortable Bliss

Old shoes may not be glamorous, but it is sure comfortably blissful to slip your feet into a pair of shoes that have molded themselves to fit your feet perfectly. Sometimes in our search for bliss, we assume that bliss is something to be found and not something we already have. There are so many blissbringers in this world that bring bliss precisely because they are comfortable. Here's a list of my top 10 comforting blissbringers:

1. Snuggling back into the covers on a cold winter morning when you realize you have 10 or 15 minutes before you absolutely have to get up. I can't sleep in a hot room, so I generally leave the window open as late as possible into the fall so that the bedroom is a little bit chilly at night. This morning I woke and realized that it had surpassed chilly and was downright frigid. I hustled out of bed to shut the window and then climbed back beneath the covers that were still warm from my body heat. I snuggled under my microsuede comforter that I got from Goodwill and just relaxed and let my mind wander.



2. Friends that you can pick up the phone and continue a previous conversation with without having to regroup and bring them back up to speed.



3. Inside jokes. I work with people from both our plants and headquarters and the folks at one of the plants play buzzword bingo when they have meetings with us and tick off the buzzwords as we say them. They consider me one of their own so they shared the game with me and now when I'm in a meeting with both corporate and plant folks, ever so often I'll send a text during the meeting saying "bingo" and we all understand what that means.


4. Old shoes that fit perfectly and feel as if they were made for your feet.


5. Spaghetti with tomato sauce and Parmesan. This isn't some fancy pasta dish, it's just pure comfort food that reminds me of being a kid at my grandmother's dinner table and the pure heaven that her pasta brought.



6. Snuggling in front of the fireplace on a cold winter's day. Watching the flames is highly hypnotic and can put me into a snuggly warm state.


7. Days without running errands, chores, or playing taxi driver. Every so often, I will be lucky enough to get a day that I get to spend at home without having to go anywhere. Those are perfect days that are lazy and fun and very relaxing.


8. Soaking in a hot bathtub with music playing and no responsibilities.


9. Chocolate pudding eaten while it is still sorta warm and not quite set up yet.


10. Snuggling with my husband. I feel so safe when I snuggle up with him as if nothing could hurt me and as if I'm safe from all the cares of the world.

My blissmakers are comfortable and satisfying and bring complete happiness.