I can hardly believe that the holidays are here again! I always think of my family when I think of holidays. It seems only a few days ago that I was planning to go to Victoria, Canada where both my children, Charles and Louise live. I will be returning again for the Christmas holidays. I always look forward to being together with them and their friends.

There are songs about the holidays like “There’s no place like home for the holidays” or “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go…” These songs are joyous with connotations of love, togetherness, connectedness, and happiness. And that is truly what this time of the year is all about.

When I was in undergraduate school at Salem College, I remember how I couldn’t wait for my last class to end so I could drive to Monroe in my Pontiac Tempest. I would always be packed and ready to go. As I drove from Winston-Salem, NC to Monroe, NC I could see the corn stalks in shocks and the barren fields readied for winter.  Most of the vibrant colored leaves had fallen, so there were only bare trees leaves stripped by a cold wind. But I was always so excited to be going home.

My parents were always anxiously awaiting my arrival. My father worked and my mom was a housewife. She usually greeted me first, and then when my dad arrived I could see the relief in his eyes that I was safely home. As I entered our home I could smell wonderful aromatic odors of some of my favorite foods being prepared. Of course my mom would have baked one of her wonderful pound cakes. I would dash up the stairs to my old bedroom. I was home!!!

What can you do this year to make your family feel loved…to create happy memories for your loved ones? Too often the holidays can be a time of negative emotions, arguments, gossip, and selfishness and too much to do with too little time to do it. Maybe the emphasis is on the wrong values. You know the greatest gift is love. Show your loved ones that you love them in simple ways. Ask them about how they are…spend time with them helps them feel important and loved. Help with the many chores of the holidays…help with preparing the meals, planning the activities. Give lots of sincere compliments and many hugs.

This year my family is giving donations to several charities instead of expensive gifts. There are so many people, especially children in the world who don’t have even clean water…much less any food. There are animals that are treated poorly. The holidays are about LOVE. How can you show your love? How can you teach your family unselfishness? You always receive such wonderful feelings back when you share and give to others. Why not make these holidays different from last year?

So another year has gone by and I realize that my family and I are truly blessed. This year we will give thanks that we can all be together once more with thanksgiving and grateful hearts to celebrate that we live in a country at peace and we have people in our lives who love us.

Christmas 2008, Victoria BC / with my children – Charles & Louise

I can’t believe that Monday was the Fourth of July! I’m still taking stock of all the moments of reflection and learning that manifested for me in June.

Some of what I learned feels important, so I’ve decided to mention it here in my blog.

There were many opportunities for celebration this June: Summer Solstice, a Lunar Eclipse, and Father’s Day.

Father’s Day?

In fact, yes. Father’s Day. This year the third Sunday in June gave me pause, but it wasn’t always the case.

My own father died over 40 years ago, and growing up in Monroe, NC, my family celebrations were limited to children’s birthdays and Christian holidays.

Therefore most of my ideas about Father’s Day were shaped by greeting card commercials. And the affectionate families in those TV scenes always seemed more like a Hollywood romance than any household I’d ever known.

Father’s Day was just another summer weekend as far as I was concerned. I associated it with the end of a school year and the beginning of vacation time. Most years I probably didn’t notice the day at all.

So I will always remember the first Father’s Day that would shape my experience forever.

Sunday, June 19^th, 1966. On this special Father’s Day, my husband, Charles, and I had a 6-month-old baby boy. So this time the occasion was just one more opportunity to celebrate the beautiful life we’d created together, and more importantly: to notice with unspoken trepidation that our lives had irrevocably changed.

Having a son transformed almost everything about our experience as a couple, and in more ways than we knew how to manage. We were so young and so very naïve. I had incorrectly assumed that adding my new role as a mother to my existing role as a wife would be an easy and seamless transition for myself and for my husband. To say that we were mistaken would be a polite understatement and I think our young son sensed our anxiety, which manifested for him physically as months of painful colic.

The three of us did not know how to communicate our needs to each another and I often found myself crying right along with my baby boy. I feel certain that our first Father’s Day was a stressful sleep-deprived occasion. And I feel equally certain that neither my husband nor I discussed this fact with each other.

I can say for myself that I was too afraid of what he might think of me. Wasn’t everything supposed to be perfect? What was wrong with me?

My husband and I had been together 7 years, 4 of them as husband and wife. And we were crazy about each other. I loved my husband, Charles, as much as I knew how to love someone. We met in college on a blind date and I never looked back. Our adventures together during our twenties, when it was just the two of us, are to this day some of the best times of my life. Those memories are treasures.

We intentionally decided to wait before having children. We were married in June after our college graduations and were both eager to build our home, start our careers, and explore the world together. And so we did. Those early years that we took for ourselves were a tremendous gift we gave each other.

And on Father’s Day in 1966 I felt doubly blessed with another gift, being the mother to our young son. The birth of my son, Charles IV, completely changed my experience of what it meant to love another human being. I felt safe to love unconditionally my helpless newborn in part, I think, because he was completely and totally dependent on me and I liked feeling needed in that way. I liked it so much in fact that I focused all of my energy and attention on his care and well being. On the one hand, I thought that’s what I was “supposed” to do, and on the other hand… I had fallen in love with motherhood and I didn’t realize that there was room in my heart for much else.

It has taken me 44 years to realize that on Father’s Day in 1966 while I was celebrating my new son, what I wish I had also been celebrating was my beloved husband.

I now know that I have an enormous capacity for loving and for allowing myself to be loved. What gave me pause on Father’s Day this past June was when I realized that now, after all these years, I am still quietly celebrating my beautiful son, and I’m also quietly honoring his father (even though we’ve been divorced almost 30 years).

What I realized upon reflection during Father’s Day of this year was how profoundly I’d underestimated my heart’s capacity to love. I also noticed that it’s never too late for experiencing love in all its unexpected forms. I feel grateful for this noticing and for all of my heart’s connections, even the quiet ones I keep to myself.

I used to wish that things in my life had taken a different path. Yet sitting here today, I wouldn’t trade my life and all of its lessons for anything.

In my new book, Reaching for Your New Life: Healthy Recovery from Divorce, I share in more detail the lessons I learned during my marriage, divorce and the 30 year journey that has brought me here today. I have never been happier and I hope the lessons I’ve learned might comfort and inspire someone else.

For anyone who is a new mother or a long-time parent: I encourage you to celebrate your husband every chance you get, don’t wait until Father’s Day. Raising a child with a partner you love is a gift every day. If your relationship has ended or is struggling, I believe the best thing is to keep moving forward. Every experience is an opportunity for learning and that includes learning new ways to love.

I plan to explore and enjoy new and different ways of finding love for as long as I live. I know now that there is room in my heart for each and every one of you.

~ Dr. Sara

My son, Charles IV, with his father, Charles III

Mother’s Day is almost here!

Is your family planning anything special?

Will you be seeing your children?

I have two wonderful children, a son named Charles and a daughter named Louise.

Recently, my daughter and I spent some quality time together at my home. She had not made it home for a visit, by herself, in a long time.

During our week together, we went shopping, visited with special  friends, got manicures together (never even taking a breath while still talking), and spent lots of time just reminiscing. These were precious golden moments of sharing for both of us.

Just last month, some friends of mine hosted a book-signing party for me to celebrate the release of my new book, Reaching for Your New Life: Healthy Recovery from Divorce. My daughter, Louise, was one of several people who helped me develop the book and was very supportive during the years that it took me to complete such an enormous project.

The party was to be a “graduation” of some sort, an acknowledgment of my work and an occasion to witness (and autograph!) the newly-printed results. I told my daughter how much it would mean to me if she could come and join this rite-of-passage celebration. I was deeply moved when she accepted and said, “Mom, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

It’s a true blessing that even though my children have grown up and moved on to live their own lives, we are still discovering new ways to remain connected and to support one another.

I see so much of myself in my adult daughter and looking at her I’m reminded of the woman that I was at thirty-six years old. Louise would have been just a toddler back then, when I was her age, having no idea of the woman her mother had been before she came along.

It’s funny how our children often think of their parent’s lives as having begun on the day they were born! I guess that comes naturally, because a mother’s life is so instantly re-focused on the needs of her children. She transforms into the person that her children know and love right before their eyes, so the change is imperceptible. My children only knew me as “Mom.”

What a gift it is to get to know your children all over again after they’ve grown up!

At the same time, your children have the tremendous opportunity to know more about your life experience and how it’s shaped who you are as a person. The joys of parenthood are only part of the story!

For me, it’s felt like a chance to know and love my daughter all over again, and on a whole new level. I’m grateful she has chosen to get to know me also, and understand so many things we weren’t able to discuss or make sense of when she was a child.

I look at her now and I realize what a child I was myself, in so many ways, when I was her age… and yet my focus was on my husband and 2 children. It’s no wonder I struggled to make sense of my own needs, I was still figuring out how to be a woman when I was quickly swept into the role of wife and mother. It makes sense that I felt like I was starting my life from scratch after my divorce and then again in some ways after my children were grown. Who was I if not someone’s wife and mother? At first, I didn’t know how to be anything else. But I got the chance to find out.

It was this opportunity for learning and self discovery that led to my writing Reaching for Your New Life: Healthy Recovery from Divorce.

I learned many things during my unique journey, from a precocious southern debutant, then a young mother of 2, to my fairy tale adventure as the wife of a US Congressman, followed by a painful divorce and the challanges of single motherhood.

And now my path has brought me to another new role: I am the chosen friend of my adult son and daughter, to whom I’ll always be “Mom” but now I get to share with them even more.

It’s never too late to love your children or to give them the chance to know and love you.

How about your children? What kind of relationship do you have with them? What are you doing this Mother’s Day to celebrate?

I invite you to share and reminisce with me…and as a special way to celebrate Mother’s Day, As a gift to you, I want to answer just one question you may have for me…your most burning question… or hear about your relationship with your children. I’m here to listen.

You may call or email me anytime this week.

Sunday May 9th, Mother’s Day, is the deadline.

You may email me at support@drsararose.com

or call me at 704-525-1213.

Wishing all of you love and blessings on this Mother’s Day and always.

~Dr. Sara

Louise Rose with author Dr. Sara Rose

I invite your active participation, ideas and thoughts in this divorce support and relationship counseling oriented forum:

• What questions would you like to see answered here?
• Are you contemplating ending your relationship?
• What words of encouragement would you share with others going through a relationship or marriage breakup?
• If you’ve read my new book, Reaching for Your New Life—Healthy Recovery from Divorce, please share your feedback on this blog or send me a letter by email.

© Dr. Sara Rose, 2010.

Thank you for visiting my new website, DrSaraRose.com, which was launched with the publication of my new book: Reaching for Your New Life—Healthy Recovery from Divorce.

While there are shelves of how-to guides for dating and divorce, ironically until now, no how-to book existed to explain the basics of what you need to do when your marriage or relationship ends. My website and book offer practical steps and resources for you to follow as you move on with your life.

I have a Ph.D. and I am a licensed professional counselor with over 20 years of experience guiding couples and individuals through the divorce or relationship breakup process. My practice, which is based in North Carolina, is dedicated to divorce support and relationship counseling.

Stay tuned to this blog for as long as it serves you, and be sure to share this online resource with others who can also benefit from it. I encourage your comments or welcome your emails.

© Dr. Sara Rose, 2010.