Miracles

Hello again. In case anyone reads this who doesn't actually know us personally, my name is Jessie and my daughter, the "fourteen-year-old", is Cierra. As you may have noticed from her writing, she is not shy, and has a solid sense of self. In fact, my family has often joked that she suffers from too much self-esteem. And although I sometimes feel I need to instill some sense of modesty into her incredibly exuberant personality, I also know that she is full of love and integrity, and cares deeply for her friends and family. Actually, it's very refreshing to see a teenager who loves herself and knows who she is because I work in a high school and help teenagers with their emotional problems, so I see a lot of kids who really hate themselves. And from the two previous posts, you may also have noticed that my daughter definitely has better self-esteem than I do, despite her age. She is, in fact, very inspiring, and often times shows me that my thinking is backwards, and it gets me stuck in a negative downward spiral. It is difficult to be depressed in the presence of Cierra!



I'm often on the lookout for miracles. So I have to point them out when I see them. It's usually easy for me to believe that other people can have miracles happen in their lives, but not so easy for me to believe in them happening to me. The idea for this blog came about through several small miracles. The first being that my daughter Cierra and I are very close and have not, (yet), gone through the usual "mother daughter hate each-other" phase. I don't know if we ever will. In fact, we usually appreciate each-other greatly, and say this to one another quite often. I marvel at the fact that she tells me I'm a fabulous mom. But also I appreciate her and respect her on so many levels, and most of the time I don't question our solid relationship. instead I remind myself to be grateful. So whether it's through luck, my own work on myself helping me be a good parent, something about our temperaments being in alignment, or all of the above, we really like spending time together.


But back to the miracles. I still read to Cierra sometimes at night. More recently she also reads to me if I'm cooking and we are in the middle of a really good book. We have a favorite author who has inspired the idea for this blog. Her name is Wendelin Van Draanen, and we have been reading her books together for about four years. www.randomhouse.com/kids/vandraanen
The inspiration of writing about our trip to Italy from both our perspectives came from the book we just read together, called Flipped, which is a story about two people who live across the street from each-other and each chapter is from their different perspectives.

Cierra and I have thought of writing together for years, but somehow it never seems to happen, until Thursday when the idea came to me that we should write about our trip to Italy in the same way that Flipped was written. As soon as I had the idea, I texted Cierra and she said, "Oooooo! Ya, I like that a lot!!!!". So I said, "Me too, like in Flipped how each chapter is back and forth perspectives". And she said, "YES! OMG, this is BRILLIANT!" And so, here we are. But the next part really solidified the fact that this was, indeed, a miracle. I went to lunch with some friends, several of whom are writers, business owners, travelers, and very successful people. I mentioned my idea of writing about my trip with my daughter, and my friend Leslie, who teaches writing classes and is a published author herself, suggested that we blog the trip while we are there. I realized this would be perfect, except that we don't have a laptop, and I said as much to the group at lunch. Then another friend at the table, who just got back from traveling herself, offered to lend us her MacBook Air for our trip!! At that moment, I knew we HAD to do this. It felt like a sign from the Universe that something special was going to happen.

The next thing is that Cierra is so inspired and JAZZED to be doing this writing and sharing it with friends and family, and we are having a lot of fun so far. I actually probably would not have had the guts to do this without Cierra's enthusiasm, because of the above mentioned lack of confidence I have in myself. A perfect example of the differences in our self-esteems in the way we both are feeling about the blog publishing of what we have written. When I wrote my first blog, I thought, "should I really let people see this?, Is it good enough?, maybe it needs editing". Whereas Cierra said, as she was writing, "THIS IS SO GOOD!" Then she immediately told her friends to read it.

Now, with all the small miracles seeming to line themselves up, and the BIG miracle that we are actually really going to Italy and France together, I am going to promise myself that I will believe that miracles can happen to us, and are happening all the time when we open our eyes and accept them into being real. Maybe just by my writing these words, I am creating the next perfect moment to come into being, allowing my dreams to come true...