Happy Mother’s Day

Normally, I write posts in advance and schedule them for posting at a later date. During this time, they are carefully edited, right down to placement of commas sometimes–many drafts will be saved over the time that a post waits for its schedule day in the sun. Perfectionism is a battle I fight constantly, but that’s a different story. This post is a completely off-the-cuff thought-spill. We’ll see where it goes, and if it makes any sense at all when I get done. I will try not to care, and just let it flow and go where it decides to go. That is not an easy thing for me to do.

Just because it is old…

Recently, I was going through the last few bins from our recent move, deciding what to keep, what to toss, and how to store what I am keeping. One of the bins I went through is a catch-all bin where I packed unsorted stuff that my wife and I knew was important to keep, even though it was mostly stuff we would almost never look at: folders with important papers, documents from my parents’ estates, tax records, educational certificates–stuff like that. It is the kind of stuff you need to keep, but you pretty much never look at it.

Family estrangements

Many an ex-Christian Scientist acquaintance of mine has spoken of being estranged from their still-in-Christian Science family members. I’ve often felt that I couldn’t personally relate to their situations simply because I have no family that remains in Christian Science. My parents and myself were the only ones on either side of my family that stayed with Christian Science, and my parents are dead. My cousins that had exposure to Christian Science, or who went to Sunday School are all either hostile or ambivalent about it. Most of my family thinks Christian Science is a huge bucket of crazy.

The value of friendship and a new sense of family…

Image credit: Emerging Gently.

Over the last six or so years since my parents died, and some major changes happened in my life, I’ve come to realize the true value and meaning of friendship. When you lose all of your immediate family, your sense of family undeniably changes.