Musician's Widow

Tomorrow is the big day for February. Valentine’s Day. Red hearts, red roses, and boxes of chocolate. Teddy bears, dinner dates and romance in the air.

Or not.

My Twitter and Facebook are already starting to light up with disgruntled singles, calling it “Singles’ Awareness Day.” There are even couples complaining about the expense of the day and how they aren’t going to exchange gifts. There isn’t all love on this day of love.

I say bah humbug to ‘em all.

Valentine’s Day can be awesome no matter what your stage in life.

As a kid, its fun to exchange cards with classmates. There is art to make, and you can do like my sister-in-law did with my niece and nephew and their cousins… have a cupcake decorating night!

If you are single, you can spoil yourself! I have bought myself flowers before. Take a bubble bath, or treat yourself to a massage day. (Or both!) Buy yourself that new thing you’ve been wanting but “just can’t justify buying.”

Spoil your friends, parents, nieces and nephews, or just go buy those kiddie cards and give them to anyone and everyone. The cashier at the store. Your cab driver. Send one in with your deposit at the bank. Okay, maybe not the last one, lest they think its a robbery attempt. Or send it but not in an envelop. Yeah, that would work.

Celebrate love in general!

If you are in a relationship and are grumbling about the cost of it, write a love letter instead! Go old school and cut hearts out of construction paper. You don’t have to spend much. Or perhaps agree to each give to your favorite charity instead of spending the money on flowers and candy.

There are SO MANY things you can do to embrace Valentine’s Day without being cliché or bitter about it. Just think outside the box and with an open heart. It doesn’t have to be about romantic love… it’s about love in general.

And I, for one, Love that.

I am VERY excited to participate in my first Life Well Lived Getting Happy panel this week!

This week’s question: How do you practice self-acceptance and find unconditional love for yourself? How does practicing love first help you attract more love and happiness in your life?

What an amazing question!! When I read it earlier this week, my mind went racing in about a bazillion different directions. I spent the last couple of days trying desperately to reign in my thoughts and put them in order.

I have a friend who everyone adores. She is just one of those people that you can’t really help but love once you meet her. If you ever end up mad at her, its probably because you don’t get to spend enough time with her!

Her favorite quote is:

“Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.”
- Arthur Rubinstein

And I think that is the key… she loves people, and in turn they love her. I felt like this tied into this prompt beautifully.

If you give yourself unconditional love, you’re more likely to give that love to others as well. Give and you shall receive.

But how does one start with step one? Giving yourself unconditional love. It’s easier said than done! People are notoriously their own worst critics. Beyond that, unconditional love of self is all too easily confused with being narcissistic. So it seems only right to not love yourself to avoid such a thing happening… right?

That being said… raise your hand if you truly enjoy spending time with someone who constantly puts them self down. You enjoy hearing someone belittle their looks, what they ate, what they wore and what they do for a living?

Right. Didn’t think so. You find yourself stroking that person’s ego, trying to convince them other wise. It’s exhausting!

Personally,  I’d much rather spend time with someone who is confident, happy, and doesn’t look for reassurance from the outside to make up for the self-loathing inside. I find myself drawn to those people, and it in turn makes me happier.

So… step 1… surround yourself with happy people. Spend time with people you want to be more like and let their natural positive energy draw you up. Don’t second guess the time you spend with them. Don’t go, “Oh they’re just being polite.” NO! Stop right there. Let go and enjoy yourself! Let their loving, positive energy draw over you and into you… and you’ll find yourself walking away with a spring in your step and a smile on your face.

Now, step 2, go look in the mirror. No, really, take that high you have from being around other positive people, and look in the mirror. Smile. Stop looking for imperfections and anything you don’t like about yourself. Look yourself in the eye. Look yourself straight in the eye and say the words, “I love me. I’m not perfect, but I embrace my imperfections as things that make me uniquely me. I love me. I deserve love and am loved.”

Say it over and over again. Say any variation of it. However often you have to say it. When you see a mirror, do it again.

I’ve grown to love taking reflection self portraits. I was leery of it at first. Would that seem… weird. Would I appear stuck on myself? But I did it. And I did it again. And again. And I started to find so much fun in it. It gave me this self confidence I didn’t even know was lacking! It started to show this quirky, goofy side of myself that I didn’t even know existed. And I LOVED THAT ABOUT MYSELF.

Step 3, find beauty in your faults. Seriously. Remember when I said to ignore those imperfections? Well… now pay attention to them. But look for the beauty in them. That scar just below your left eye? The one you try to hide with make-up? Well, there’s a story behind it. It’s a part of who you are. Embrace it! Love it! Love that history and instead of hiding it, tell its story to anyone who stares at it. Suddenly that imperfection is something someone else loves about you.

I perhaps am making it sound easy. I know its not. I’m a naturally happy person, but I have my bad days. I have days I hate the world and hate myself for one reason or another. I run into walls that knock me backwards on my butt.

Step 4, understand that sh*t happens and what matters is how you react to it. NO ONE will begrudge you a bad day. So don’t deny yourself that as well. Bad days happen, and I like to think they just make the good days sweeter.

I have several friends who recently went through hard heart breaks. Relationships have ended, and… nothing will make you question love faster than a broken heart! Inevitably, the questioning turns inwards. “Was I not good enough to love? Could anyone ever love me?”

The answer is without a doubt that we all deserve love, and we all have people who love us. But if in that moment you can’t think of a single person who loves you… you can always say, “I love me.” Start your mantra again. Say until you believe it and feel it. Realize that its not the heartbreak that matters; what matters is how you pick yourself up afterwards. Love yourself enough to keep going. Love yourself and watch as you find yourself giving love again… and how you start to get it back again.

February is a month that the word “Love” gets thrown around a lot. I see many unhappy people curse that fact.

I remember one Valentine’s Day… I was single and embracing that fact. I went and I got my belly button pierced. It was a huge, “I am fabulous!” thing. I was embracing being single. I was embracing MYSELF. I was LOVING ME. It was my last Valentine’s Day single, ironically. Nonetheless, five years married, I still look at my belly button (where I no longer wear any jewelry but can still see where it was pierced) and I smile with satisfaction.

I Love Me. And I wish nothing more than for you to love you.

♥ ♥ ♥

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The other night, on our way home from downtown, I (admittedly out of the blue) went, “I am so happy with my life.”

My husband was happy to hear that, but at the same time was rather baffled by my statement. Where did it come from?

It came from taking a step back for awhile, and taking stock of things. I looked around at other’s lives and realized I am where I am supposed to be. I’m in no way knocking anyone else’s life!! No, don’t get me wrong there. If anything, I could be accused of, now and then, watching others and thinking, “Why am I not doing that?” or, “Man that looks like fun.” or, “I want that.” Face it, we all do that. There’s that whole grass is greener thing that happens to us all.

But that night, I sat back and realized how happy I am to just be me. To be married to my husband. To be living where I live. To do the work I do. To dream the dreams I dream. To have the friends I have. To have a wonderful family. I am thankful for all I have to show for what I’ve done in my life. I’m thankful for the places I can show you where I’ve thoroughly screwed up… because those are lessons that have also helped shape me and my life.

I am right where I am supposed to be for me right now.

There is a wonderful peace in that realization. There’s a wonderful happiness in it. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. For every thing I take for granted, there is quite possibly someone else who is wishing for that same thing.

Love the life you have. Live it to its fullest. Strive for the next big thing, but also be completely be happy in the moment you are in right now.

I sure am.

My husband and his "other woman"

I noticed yesterday that I had a hit on this blog with the search, “musicians love music more than spouce.” Yeah, I didn’t fix the spelling. Keepin’ it real here.

That really made me stop. It really made me a little sad. It really made me want to share my point of view on that.

There was a period of time when my husband and I were dating that I thought that myself. In fact, for awhile it made things easier to think, “The music comes first. And I come second.” Deep down, I spent a lot of time wrestling with that thought and the feelings that accompanied it. Was I okay with that? Was that even true?

Here I am, four and a half years into our marriage, and I realize that thought I had couldn’t be further from the truth. And maybe… maybe I can help the person who did that search come to realize what I’ve come to realize.

Music isn’t something my husband loves. No, its simply a part of who he is. Music is in his soul. It’s as much a part of him as is his arms and legs. It’s practically in his DNA. He needs it like he needs air and water. Even if he were to quit the music tomorrow, he’d still play. He’d still pick apart songs on the radio. He’d still tune my voice out to listen to whatever is being piped through the little speakers in a restaurant.

It’s not that he loves music more than me. It’s that the music is a part of him. And it is in that fact, that I love the music, too.  I have always loved music, but I love it in a different way today. It is a part of our life — at times it IS our life — because its just who he is.

We have a running joke that his Leslie speaker is his “other woman.”  And that I bought her for him. He sees her more than he sees me these days. It’s a lighthearted humor we have in this crazy life.

We’ve talked at length about how WE come before the music. We’ve at least once faced the possibility of walking away from the music, because we thought it was what we needed. Thankfully? Unseen forces threw us right back into the life… wild, crazy, wacky and stressful as it is. I am thankful. Because its just a part of who my husband is… dare I say he is most alive when he’s on stage and everything is clicking. Harmonies, mixes, his piano sound, the Leslie is singing… even when he’s exhausted there’s the light in his eyes.

Simply put, music is a huge part of the man I fell in love with and married. It doesn’t come first, because for a musician… it is not a thing TO come first.

YOU, their spouse, come first. You keep them grounded. You give them the momentum and reason to keep going. Support them. Love them. Love the music. And you’ll find a beautiful harmony in your life.

In continuation of yesterday’s, “I went to the movies” post, what I went to see was the movie Bridesmaids. I really didn’t know much about it except that a lot of people on Twitter feed were going to see it, and that they all had a different opinion about if it was good/bad/ugly.

A big reason I opted to go to the movie (because, seriously, that whole Twitter feed thing happens every weekend, but the movies never even really register with me) is because this is a year of weddings for me and my husband. I am SO GLAD so many of our friends and family have found the loves of their lives… I just want to know why they all found them at the same time! ;)

I am in one wedding, and my husband is in another. As such, a day does not go by that I don’t think about someone’s wedding, and so a title like Bridesmaids just screamed, “SEE ME!” So I did.

It was okay. I summed it up on Facebook as, “Hollywood’s version of a wedding with adult language and junior high humor.” So, as I said, it was okay. I think they tried a little TOO hard to get laughs, and the funniest parts were the ones that I think every woman in the theater could relate to having experienced themselves.

Because, seriously… weddings are serious business. And anything serious business is just RIPE for comedy. Oh, when you’re going through it, you can’t laugh. Noooo… the world really MUST stop because you can’t find the perfect garter to wear under your dress. This. Is. TRAGIC.

Then years later you facepalm yourself and wonder what the big deal really was.

The big deal, though, really is how you get from engagement to wedding without alienating everyone around you… because of those serious-tragedies-that-really-aren’t. And THAT, my dear friends, was the part of the movie that rung the most true.

It is so easy to get wrapped up in everything being perfect that you lose sight of the people around you, and the fact that they are the ones that truly matter. You forget that the world does not stop for your wedding, and that every person you’ve surround yourself with in the wedding planning is still living a day-to-day life that can not be put on hold. Watching that movie, there were moments when reality smacked ME in the face, and I looked back on my own wedding planning with a few regrets at how I handled things.

I’m excited for every one of my friends and family members who are getting married this year. I hope they find as much joy and satisfaction in marriage as I have. I can’t wait to hear those “I dos” and watch the bouquet be tossed (thankful I am no longer out there trying to catch it!). I can’t wait to hug the bride and groom and wish them all the best.

Because whether myself or my husband are in the wedding party, a wedding IS a party. Its a celebration of love and a new life beginning. And its in that moment that all the stress of planning, all the no-tragic-tragedies of planning cease to matter and the hurt feelings fade away. It’s in that moment that its all made worth it.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand the hate I see towards Valentine’s Day.

“Oh you’re married. No wonder you don’t get it,” I’m sure someone out there is thinking. Well, I wasn’t ALWAYS married, people. Heck, I was single all they way through college and beyond!!! And I don’t ever recall having the level of hate I see towards this day.

I always looked at it as a day to celebrate love in general! Love for my family. Love for my friends. Love for MYSELF! I was guilty of sending myself flowers on Valentine’s Day once! I seriously do not recall ever hating Valentine’s Day with the passion I see others hate it with…

Some of my favorite Valentine’s Day memories:

Kindergarten – My parents gave me a book (that came with heart shaped lollipops!) that was a cute story about Valentine’s Day. I remember taking it to school that day and my teacher reading it to the whole class. ♥

Coffee Mugs – I don’t remember the year now, but ironically Mom and I talked about it just yesterday… the year she got my brother and me coffee mugs full of conversation hearts. Those mugs are still around and still make me smile!

Rose to myself – I don’t remember the details now, but in high school we were able to purchase a single rose for someone one year. I sent one to myself. Why shouldn’t I get one!?

My First Concert – Bryan White concert in Waco, Texas. My first concert ever. Pretty much changed my life and focus.

Navel piercing – I got my bellybutton pierced on Valentine’s Day. It was a big ol’, “Single and fabulous!” moment.

Flowers for the first time – I got a bouquet of flowers from a friend in thanks for being there for them. Big bouquet of mixed pink flowers. First time I got flowers without asking for them.

Class parties – Oh come ON! We all know it somewhat sucked to have to buy Valentine’s for the whole class in elementary school, but we also all got a big kick out of them, too. I always loved how many different ways people had to spell “Denise” back then. And, seriously, it always made me happy to have a class party! Why can’t we still buy little cheesy cards for all our friends?

I love you – My husband and I said that for the first time to each other on Valentine’s Day.

So, c’mon… whether you are single or not, you must have SOME good story for Valentine’s Day. If not… why not make this year the year you make a good story! Go buy yourself a bottle of wine and chocolate and take a long bubble bath celebrating yourself. Or do something super nice for a random stranger who just might be more miserable for a much more legitimate reason that you. Or call a family member and tell them you love them.

Valentine’s Day isn’t just romantic love. It’s love in general.

Love one another… today and every day.