Don’t be surprised if during a happy moment or during a pleasurable experience you are hit with a moment of grief or regret. 

You are probably not regressing. 

You’re probably not dealing with unsuccessful self-forgiveness. 

Your mind, your thinking, your experience (in the present) and your memory (of the past) with all its traumas, disappointments, losses and your unspent emotions will easily collide, and collide they will when you at your most relaxed, your happiest, and when you least expect. 

Without being too dramatic or analytic, it is as if your unexpected happy moments, your moments of non-anxiety, your moments of “letting go,” undergo a form or survivor’s guilt and want to clearly remind you of the losses and regrets and the failures you have known and survived. It’s when you are healthy and enjoying a moment that the loss of a beloved spouse or a breakup in a marriage may come calling, calling you to be grounded, to remember, to be aware, that happiness and success are built against a context of loss and defeat.

It’s not regression but progression.

It’s not a lack of self-forgiveness.

It is a reminder that laughter and joy and peace and kindness can live boldly within the lives of those who have known deep suffering.

From the shore of Lake Geneva — a coffee shop’s view

Yesterday, in much of the Western world, mothers were celebrated, and appropriately so. I would like to extend my congratulations to the fabulous mothers who read this column and to those who don’t and to those who will never see it:

I take my hat off to mothers who work themselves out of a role, week-by-week, month-by-month, slowly, but surely, teaching their children that they are fully capable of living life independently. This is true mothering

I take my hat off to mothers of few resources. There are mothers who carry water on their heads, walking hours, to their children every day. There are women who spend days selling meager goods at markets to put food on the table for their children, often without the assistance of a husband or any help at all.

I take my hat off to the woman I’ve met who lived in extreme anxiety because of the behavior of the immature man (or men) in their lives and make a priority of protecting their children to give them the best life possible.

I take my hat off, I bow my head, to women who have decided the best option was the difficult but caring choice of adoption.