I want to write about shrapnel. Shrapnel. The word I’ve decided to use when a little piece of something from the past lodges itself into the present unexpectedly.

There is also my first memory and its reality or lack there of. It’s very vivid and has been my whole life. I think I remember it through interpretation. My childhood mind trying to make sense of something outside the understanding of a child. Instead of a memory, it seems more like a story told from a child’s point of view. As an adult I see through the childhood interpretation, but without someone to tell me what really happened, it’s reality is a question.

All of these blogs will someday be pieced together to form the book I know I have to write and this earliest memory is giving that book a shape, a beginning. I’m excited and scared to write it.

I need to write about love. The amazing love I found through this blog. For the longest time, and I’ve shared it previously, I felt unworthy of love (shrapnel). I am loved though.

I realize my true struggle was always loving myself. My defense mechanism for the majority of my life was to be harder on myself, to hate myself more than the way I perceived others felt about me. That way when someone in my childhood didn’t show up or failed me or hurt me in some way, it would never hurt as bad as what I already believed about myself.

Writing it all out, my journey with joy, the loss of my sister…it all suddenly became so clear. I am the one that needs to love me and needs to be kind to me.

I read a passage today in a book about joy.

“There is a wall in my heart that I know was erected as a protection from being hurt. But I am ready to let it come down so that my heart can heal.”

This is the perfect description of where you find me today.

A big part of finding myself ready to let it come down is faith, my family, my husband, motherhood you, your gifts, the little notes, the kind words. They made me realize that if a person that barely knows me can think of me and see good, then it is time that I do so as well.

I gave an interview today. It was an interview on parenting children with exceptionalities. It was a more difficult interview than I imagined. There was conversation about what I hope for my children’s future. I cried. It is hard for me to think of the future because when I do my deepest fear of my children not part of it is there, in my future. It forces me to think about the uncertainties. I don’t like it, it hurts.At the end of the interview though, I was able to say to myself that I am doing a good job as a mom. I’m not perfect, I still beat myself up sometimes (shrapnel), but I think I’m doing a good job. I think I am not a perfect mom, but I think I take good care of my children.I might as well have moved a mountain. Love is changing me. The wall is coming down.