Image Attribution: Public Domain “Cross” is licensed under CCO

After posting my dark blog last week, I (weirdly) felt a bit lighter in spirit, as if the heaviness of my soul was lifted after sending those words out into cyberspace. Along with slightly more positive thinking this past week, I have had a growing realization that just maybe…I don’t have to hurt, rage, sulk, whine, or have “why me” pity parties for the next few weeks until my daughter’s sentencing date. I can choose (now) to have a different attitude.

Maybe I can purposely “breathe” through these next four weeks instead. I can choose to lift my head up and actually smile at the remainder of my life that I see stretching out before me, despite circumstances being less than what I envisioned when my children were babies. I can choose to imagine a hopeful future for however many years I have left, even though I will be the parent of a prison inmate for some of those years. Maybe I can still look in the mirror and choose to say, “I’m OK” even though I will be the parent of a prison inmate.

Am I embarrassed to say,“I am the parent of a prison inmate”? Of course, I am. We raised our kids in church. I homeschooled them for part of their education to teach them morality and character traits that they would have with them for a lifetime. I planned on having these wonderful kids that would be models of society (even at a young age), outstanding students who would get flooded with scholarship offers, and as adults they would be leaders in their community. Having one of my kids spin-out into criminal behavior was NEVER part of my plan. It’s hard for me to talk about except to close friends. This is not Christmas letter material.

Turning the focus from inward to outward now, this is Easter day. As a Christian, I celebrate Jesus’s resurrection. This is so often depicted with a sunrise; rays of light behind a silhouette of crosses or as shown in a mural at the church service I attended, rays of light behind the shape of a tomb with a stone rolled away. Either way, those images represent hope when life is really, really dark. Like now. It represents that life does go on and it does get better. There is still something to look forward to. The wrong behavior on the part of one of my kids doesn’t make me a failure as a person.

I’m going to spend this week looking for light rays. I’m going to focus on positive things in my life. The “cup is half full” mentality has always been a stretch for me since I have historically spent a lot of energy worrying about what could go wrong. I’m going to try to be different this week.

The cartoon below by artist Nina Paley is for my Hubbie. I tell him sometimes he is just annoyingly positive…but really, I wish I were more like that.