Posted on Apr 7, 2014 in Blog |

From my latest column at Women’s Voices magazine: http://www.womensvoicesmagazine.com/2014/04/01/a-loving-connection-is-the-best-part-of-any-every-day/ When our son Stephen got into the car from school each day, he was quick to tell me the worst part of his day. It often involved another student making fun of him or not doing something the teacher wanted them to do. Stephen was an ardent rule-follower, so when someone else broke the rules, it was quite disturbing to Stephen. Almost as a self defense mechanism, I started asking Stephen, “What was the BEST part of your day?” He would think hard with the initial answers usually being “lunch” or “recess.” When I started ruling those options out, he looked more closely at his interactions with others. And eventually, he started finding more “best parts” of his day. When I started treatment for advanced Lyme disease, there were days and weeks that were absolutely miserable. Stephen would come home and ask me how my day was, and I immediately went to the worst of my day. With a small grin on his face, he would ask, “Well, then what was the BEST part of your day?” The student had become the teacher. For my birthday last month, I didn’t do anything in particular. But the best part of my day was eating lunch with my husband and two employees. The food was delicious, but it was the time we spent laughing, talking, and connecting that made it really special. Two days after my birthday, I watched my 58 year old husband Jeffrey endure a heart attack. For 36 hours we went from a little cough to bronchitis, to a possible pulmonary embolism, to a heart attack, to a heart attack and a blood clot, to the catheterization lab where they placed four stents, three of which are in the “widowmaker” artery. The weird part of this is that throughout the entire crisis, I was the calm one. Let me rephrase that. After I watched him have the heart attack, with his blood pressure up at 213/175, and thinking he would die at that very moment; AFTER that, I was overcome with the most mysterious but completely grounded confirmation that...

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