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Contests & Giveaways, Guest Posts, Manifestation Retreats, motherhood

Final Essay Winner For The Scholarship to Emily Rapp/Jen Pastiloff Retreat in Vermont.

September 22, 2015

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station:

This was not easy. This is not easy. I had one spot to give away to our retreat (and yes, we will do it again next year as this is our third year leading the Vermont retreat.) I had one spot which then turned into FOUR, thanks to various generous donors including Lidia Yuknavitch, Amy Ferris, Elizabeth Quant and three others.

And yet and still, we have 70 essays to get through. You read that right: 70. In just a few days, 70 essays piled in.

I sat reading through all of them with eyes spilling over. I was so moved that I decided I could not stop here. I would keep giving and finding ways to be of service. My teacher and mentor, Dr. Wayne Dyer, passed away last week- that was his big message. How many I serve?

I intend to carry on that legacy.

I decided I could not stop at these 4 spots to Vermont so I am giving away 3 spots to my New Years Retreat in Ojai, California as well. Nothing makes me feel better than to do this.

And yet and still, there are so many others that were not chosen. There was not one essay that didn’t move me. There was not one essay that did not want me to push through my computer screen and embrace the woman who wrote it. Not one. I had a team helping me as I could not do this alone. I think we need to remember that more often: we cannot do this alone.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

Lisa Gray has been notified and will be attending the retreat with Emily and I next month in Stowe. The retreat is sold out. Thank you to every single woman who applied. We will do more!!

I hope you all will be moved to share this. I know I was. Especially with my own history.

At the end of my life, when I ask one final, “What have I done?” Let my answer be, “I have done love.”

Love, Jen Pastiloff

ps, I just returned from New York. The launch of my labor of love, my Girl Power: You Are Enough workshops, was this past weekend in Princeton and NY. It was beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I will keep you all posted on the next one. This movement is so needed.

"It was an emotional revolution." Two teens at my NYC 'Girl Power: You Are Enough' workshop!

A Heavy Heart

By Lisa Gray

To say what you are seeing out loud makes something real. When I first noticed something, I chose my words carefully.

“My daughter is cutting back.” Always someone who ate with gusto, the behavior change seemed a bit of a relief. “My daughter used to have no off button. She’s finally paying attention to when she is full,” I confided to a friend.

But then a well-meaning acquaintance chimed in. “She’s finally growing up! Finally got outta that chunky phase. Thank god, right?”

Binders, Guest Posts, motherhood

Sixteen

September 10, 2015

By Debi Lewis

Sixteen times, I’ve stood at the side of a raised gurney in an operating room and sung my daughter to sleep.

Sixteen times, I could faintly smell the scented oil the anesthesiologists rub inside the mask, the mask that delivered sleeping gas, the oil they put there to cover the smell of the gas, the gas she could still smell and taste, making her grimace until she was overcome.

Sixteen times, I kept singing. Sixteen times, I planted a kiss on her still-warm skin above the mask. Sixteen times, I walked back to the pre-operative room and gathered up my husband and our belongings, and sixteen times I shrugged and stiffly shook the vision of my limp and drugged daughter from my head.

“She’s fine,” I answered my husband when he looked at me, questioning. Though who knows? By then, many times, she may have had tubes down her throat, things pinching and scraping her insides in places I would never see with my own eyes. Fine? I suppose.

****

Sometimes, I must have cried, a little. Most times, I don’t believe I did. The routine of it makes them all blend together; the coffee sipped while we waited, the nausea rising at the smell of a hospital breakfast, the same sixteen pages of sixteen books read a hundred times, all of them dull and timeless. Always, I wondered how she could still be in there. Every time, the clock was a demon, moving slowly as they mucked around with my daughter’s insides. My eyes and mind paced when she was asleep, circling around the room.

No matter the conversations I had while we waited, I walked and moved to the beat of the song I’d sung as she fell asleep, my eyes locked on hers so that, if she didn’t wake up again, my face would be the last thing she saw in this world. She was born into medical equipment, strange doctors’ faces, suctioning, poking, bright light. I would not let her leave like that. Let the end be a comfort, I always thought, and so I always found myself as focused as a yogi at her bedside in the operating room. I imagined myself an angel, a guide, and I stared peacefully into her eyes and sang. I sang lullabies from my childhood and hers; nursery rhymes when she was a toddler; a pop song called “You and I” that she was learning to play on the ukulele. I sang and held her hand and I was not scared. I did not want her to think I was scared. And after I walked out of the operating room, my soul was alert for the sensation of hers, leaving or staying.

So if she asks, “what did you do when I went to sleep in the hospital?,” how can I ever tell the truth? Played cards. Checked my email. Barely noticed the time going by; it was so quick!

**** Continue Reading…

Family, Guest Posts, Letting Go, motherhood

More Faithful Than I Intended To Be

June 7, 2015

By Leslie Kendall Dye

I traveled around a great deal…I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something…Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music…I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! -Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

At 12 pm the line starts forming outside the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, New Jersey. Hundreds of children wearing bright costumes and clutching their parents’ hands stare at the posters in the window announcing the arrival of the Australian children’s band, The Wiggles: a quartet consisting of one ballet dancer, one opera singer, one classical pianist and one guitar-playing musical encyclopedia.

I hold my little girl on my hip as we wait to have our ticket scanned. We squint in the late September sun. Fall has not arrived; we’re sweating in our dress-up clothes. She has qualms. She says she might prefer to see them only on DVD. Will they be too big? Will they look directly at her? Will she be asked to join them in dancing? Alas, I assure her, we must stay in our seats. She smiles brightly and crookedly and I feel a shiver pass through her. She’s excited to see Emma Watkins up close even though she doesn’t know what up close is, really. We enter the cavernous theater and she sees the sets that are so familiar from youtube uploads of other Wiggles concerts.

You always get butterflies in a theatre. Every neuron in the brain tingles: something big is going to happen.

Today also marks my mother’s 75th birthday. She was supposed to go to the theater as well. Her boyfriend has tickets to see Cabaret. Instead, she is in the Close Observation unit of a hospital. She’s been delirious all week; her thyroid is riding a roller coaster.

Later I will wrap my mother’s legs in a heating pad, sing a surreal happy birthday with the hospital nursing staff—they have birthday cakes in case—coax her to eat half a sandwich and beg the on-call doctor for more pain medication.

When I tell my mother I have to leave to put my baby girl to sleep, she will grip my arm wildly. Please don’t leave, she’ll say. I’ll kiss her goodbye until tomorrow. She reminds me of my daughter, who clutched me so tightly today as the concert began that she cut off my airway.

My mother follows me. At the concert I watch my daughter dance with toddler-abandon and try to scale the stage to join the cast. And there is my mother, at my shoulder. My mother was a dancer. My mother was on the Broadway stage. My mother is having a birthday in a hospital today and I am a state away.

And she is right there, at my shoulder. I’m watching my child in the thrall of her first theater experience. She is so much like my mother when my mother was a young girl. I am so much like my mother, too. My daughter’s fresh-from-the-bath curls that I’ve combed for the show are the same curls that my mother combed on my head. When I look at my daughter, I now see what my mother sees–feel what my mother feels—when she looks at me. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, healing, parenting

How My Father Taught Me I Was Not Beautiful

June 7, 2015

By Heidi Paulson

My parents split up when I was nine. A tender age where everything is up in the air anyway, from your laugh, to your smile to the way you walk in the world. A very pliable age.

It wasn’t long before my Dad starting looking around for women to date. All kids want is for their parents to be happy. My brother and I watched as Dad would ogle women in the grocery store, say certain things and join social groups to be around more possibilities. Before the divorce, I hadn’t thought much about attraction, dating and how people actually got together. You have your Mom and you have your Dad, and they walk around the house and feed you.

It was back in the 80’s. The internet was just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. The only way to meet people was at work, church, through friends or by writing a personal ad in the Willamette Week newspaper. We did not attend church, so Dad wrote an ad. I remember when the letters came pouring in. Dad sat with me on the couch and showed them to me. All interested women responding to his classified.

It is here where the damage began. He would shuffle through the letters; the ones with the photos were kept the others thrown away. Then the next tier of decision making began. I am sure he did read the letters as a stroke of his ego; however the next cut would be made by looks. “She’s pretty, we will keep her.” It went on and on. He started to date, and meet these women. Sometimes, if he liked them very much they would come and meet us.

A pattern soon emerged. Blondes. Tall blondes, that were thin. It was his preference. Mom had been blonde when they got together, bleached hair like straw, but blonde. In good shape from tennis.

I came along after a number of years. Dark, dark brunette hair, blue eyes that turned to hazel. Actually I have the coloring of my Dad. My Mom thought I was beautiful, she loved the contrast of my pale skin and dark hair, “My Snow White,” she said. Your Mom is supposed to tell you that you hung the moon, so I put it aside as just another reference point.

Dad’s years of chasing blondes wore on me to where I could not even look at blonde women without feeling inferior. Ugly. I had no blonde friends, as I instantly felt like the ugly stepsister of the group. I was also petite, so the vision of the tall blonde, blue eyed women was the polar opposite of what I was. And in his eyes that was beauty. No room for someone like me to be “Beautiful.” Continue Reading…

cancer, Grief, Guest Posts

Scared

May 25, 2015

By Trish Cook

“Scared,” my dad croaks, pointing painstakingly at me, then my brother, then my mom.

It’s an understatement.

We’ve summoned his personal physician to our home today to hopefully deny, but probably confirm, our suspicions: The cancer has gone to his brain.

We hold our collective breath as the doctor asks my father, “Who is the President of the United States?”

An underwater, foggy pause. Finally, Dad replies, “Reagan.”

The three healthy people in the room exhale a sigh of relief. He got it right! This must count for something, we think. A small shred of hope still inhabits the homey little den we’re all crowded into. Our prayers, crossed fingers, and wishes on stars and eyelashes might yet magically release him from cancer’s insidious clutches.

My dad is only fifty-two on this day. I am twenty-four, though, so both he and the non-descript middle-aged male doctor seem something close to old to me. Not old old, sitting in a rocking chair waiting to die old, but old enough to have really lived, to have really made it count. I hold on to this thought, stroke it for comfort inside my head like a beloved baby blanket. Even if Dad doesn’t beat this thing in the end, at least he made it far enough to look back and know he lived a long and satisfying life.

Today, at fifty, this notion seems ridiculous. My father was not old then, just as I am not old now. Not nearly old enough to die willingly, anyway, or to feel as though everything that needed accomplishing had been accomplished. Continue Reading…

Binders, Guest Posts, motherhood

Rebound Tenderness

May 12, 2015

By Laurie Easter

I nearly let my child die.

There it is—the stark truth, according to my mother’s-guilt brain. It’s been many years since it happened, but this fact has bored into my psyche the way carpenter bees bore into wood, settling there like an egg in a perfect hole inches below the surface. I don’t talk about it with anyone, not even my husband.

This is how it would go if I could reverse time:

My twelve-year-old daughter comes home from the pizza parlor and says “My stomach hurts.” I quiz her like a professional, asking “Where does it hurt?” And even though she says “all over,” I ask more questions and run through a series of tests for appendicitis—despite the fact I have no medical training and only know now, in retrospect, what signs to look for.

I palpate the lower right quadrant of her abdomen, applying hand pressure slowly and gently with a quick release to check for sudden pain in that area. Rebound Tenderness.

“How does this feel?” I ask as I palpate the lower left side of her abdomen, pressing down slowly and gently then releasing quickly to check for sudden pain in the lower right quadrant. The Rovsing’s sign.

I have her lie supine and apply resistance to her knee as she flexes her right hip by raising her leg against the pressure of my hand. If she feels pain, I have her turn and lie on her left side and extend her right leg behind her to check again for increased pain with this movement. The Psoas sign.

Once I finish with any number of these procedures, intuiting the signs of acute appendicitis, I whisk her to the emergency room, where the doctors confirm my suspicion and prep her for surgery to remove the as of yet un-perforated appendix. They catch the appendicitis in the preliminary stages, and using Laparoscopy, they slice into her with a one-inch cut that heals into a barely noticeable sliver of white near her bikini line. She spends at most two nights in the hospital and is back at the gym, working out with her gymnastics team, in a couple of weeks.

Yes, that’s how it would go. Neat and clean and orderly.

This is how it went:

My daughter came home from the pizza parlor two days after recovering from the flu and said “my stomach hurts” to which I asked “where does it hurt?” She said “all over.” I worried I had let her go out too soon after being sick and thought maybe she was having a relapse. I tucked her in and said good night.

She slept until noon and complained about her stomach when she awoke; then she began vomiting. Her temperature was 101 degrees. She had no desire for food, but I made miso broth and herbal tea and encouraged her to drink as much as she could as often as possible so she wouldn’t become dehydrated. She spent two days in bed, getting up occasionally to go to the bathroom or lie on the couch in the living room. On that second day, she said she was feeling better and had relief from the previous stomach pain. But she was weak from the fever and vomiting and continued to rest in bed.

That’s when it happened.

Later that afternoon, I walked into my daughter’s room to check on her while she was sleeping. Her face, normally alabaster in complexion, had a sallow pallor. I knew this look. I had seen it once before. It was the look of death. Five years earlier, my friend, Teri, who had cancer, had this same sallow skin tone when she refused to go to the hospital to be treated for a common infection. We called the ambulance anyway. The doctors at the emergency room said that if we hadn’t brought Teri in, the infection, not the cancer, would have killed her. As I looked at my daughter’s face, this memory flitted across my consciousness like a butterfly alighting on a flower, only to rise into the air and flutter away.

That was the moment. The omen I did not heed. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, love, motherhood

How To Talk To Your Mother

May 7, 2015

By Amanda Prager

How To Talk To Your Mother

You forget your old address.

She cries at the door, she cries in the car, she cries when you step foot on campus. You cry too – two parts sad, one part relief. She drove like crazy and when you finally arrive, you throw up. In between lemonade and half-chewn corndogs – here, living proof that you exist.

Hips and thighs appear, curved like silver spoons. You have your mother’s breasts. You google ‘orgasm’. You practice screaming. You plunder your mother’s books – not the ones on the main shelf, but the ones under her bed. They are all about sailors and firemen. It doesn’t do anything for you.

The boy markets the slash on his neck as a hickey. People taunt and ask prying questions. Mother looks pleased and another queer expression that you have never seen before. You go away to Florida to Father and you remember that forgetting is the human condition.

A boy asks you out on a date. Immediately, you are suspicious – you start wearing thongs. He takes you to sushi, to ice cream, to his car. He takes you in and you take him out. Apologize. He looks as angry as the red mark on his neck. Apologize.

All adults have a rulebook they will pass along to you when you become one of them. Many encyclopedias with chapters like Don’t Spit Your Food and How to Write a Check are in them, along with How to Make Small Talk with Relatives and Where, Exactly, You Get Hair.

In Sunday School, you learn how to shrink yourself. They teach you how to Sit Proper, Don’t Slouch. The next day you steal your mother’s heels. You pretend to be interested in them. She pretends to be angry about it.

Binders, Dear Life., Guest Posts, Relationships

Dear Life: Is This The End of My Relationship?

March 10, 2015

Welcome to Dear Life: An Unconventional Advice Column.

Your questions get sent to various authors from around the world to answer (and please keep sending because I have like 567 writers that want to answer your burning questions. Click here to submit a letter or email dearlife@jenniferpastiloff.com.) Different writers offer their input when it comes to navigating through life’s messiness. We are “making messy okay.” Today’s letter is answered by MaryBeth Bonfiglio.

Send us your questions because there loads of crazy authors waiting to answer ‘em. Just kidding, they aren’t crazy.

Well okay, maybe a little. Aren’t we all? xo, Jen Pastiloff, Crazy Beauty Hunter. ps, I will see you in NJ & Philly in a couple weeks at my Manifestation Workshop: On Being Human! NYC sold for March 21st is sold out. 🙁

The 12 Day Detox is here. Sign up now. Space is limited.This detox comes at just the perfect time. Reprogram your body and mind as we move into the new season of spring. This is your time of rejuvenation and renewal.This is not a juice fast, or a detox based on deprivation.

Dear Life,

I met my current husband when my daughter was 14. We met online. His profile stated clearly that he wanted to meet someone without children. She was not a child anymore. She was a teenager and perfectly able to stay home alone on my date nights. He agreed to date me, and after the third date, we continued. Eight and a half years later, we are still together and married.

Should I have seen the early warning signs? Should I have noticed how she bristled in his presence, how he became awkward and uncomfortable in hers? Should I have paid more attention to that first major fight they got into about how much cheese she wanted to buy when we went on that first trip together to Santa Fe, the nausea that ensued for me, the migraine? My body was being very clear with me, but I ignored it.

She was 16 at the time, and I chalked it up to her never wanting to accept anyone else in my life. I never moved him into our house. To this day, we still live apart due to work circumstances. To this day, we live apart due to more than that when I’m truthful about it.

She’s 23 now, and things are worse than ever. She’s learned to stand up for herself. She notices the language of control. She hears the cadence of judgment. She will not abide with his way of being. Recently, her car broke down and she called to get my help with the situation. While I was speaking with her, he had a suggestion. She heard him in the background, and told me to tell him that this was between us. He would not be quiet. He persisted. So, I handed him the phone. It was the biggest mistake I could have made. He kept trying to tell her his suggestion, while she was trying to tell him that it was a bigger problem, but he wouldn’t listen to her. Then he said, “You never listen to me!” She hung up on him.

Emails have ensued between them. He feels he’s owed an apology. She has, but with an explanation for how she was feeling, which he did not accept. I think he needs to drop it, and move on, but that’s not his way.

I’ve seen him lose many friends over these eight and a half years over smaller infractions. And now he’s got my daughter in his cross-hairs. My inclination is to step in front of his aim this time. This is my daughter. Yes, she hung up. But it’s not black and white. This time, I cannot, and I will not take his side.

I keep asking myself if this is going to be the moment, or the situation that will wreck this relationship. I don’t know if I can continue to be with a person who has burned many bridges with friends, and is now ready to sever ties with my daughter over this incident. No, it wasn’t the first time they’ve had a fight, and it wouldn’t be the last, but the absolutism of this argument, has me feeling sad and sick. She could get over it and move on for the sake of the situation, he could not.

At the end of the day, she’s my kiddo, and I love her more than life itself. He’s my current guy in a long line of long term relationships. He’s someone whose crazy matched my own in many ways. We get each other and it’s comfortable. We also have this great set up where we live apart during the week so I get my alone time, something I cherish. But not being able to share my joys and sorrows about the life of my one and only child with my partner seems like a gulf I cannot bridge. What about holidays? What happens when she gets married or has a child? He can’t just break up with my kid!

The older I get, the more I realize that I can live the rest of my life on my own if I had to, something I don’t think I thought I could do eight years ago. It all seems to go back to that online post that I failed to pay attention to. Why do we so often fail to pay attention to the biggest signs even when they are spelled out so clearly? Is this the end?

Signed, Is This The End?

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being. Yoga + Writing + Connection. We go deep. Bring an open heart and a sense of humor- that’s it! Summer or Fall 2015. It is LIFE CHANGING!

Binders, death, Grief, Guest Posts

Pretty Things.

February 13, 2015

By Cagney Nay.

Alone at night in my mother’s house, shortly after her death, I tidy up and look around and think about how much my mom liked pretty things. This is not to say that she liked things to be fancy. In fact, her aesthetic could almost be described as plain. She enjoyed things that had beautiful lines and an elegant quality of design that, once you got to know her, was unmistakably her taste. I look at all of the things that she collected over her lifetime – her life with my father and then another life with my stepfather – and I wonder what it was all for. I am struck with the thought of “you can’t take it with you”, and I wonder why we bother collecting all the things that we will inevitably leave behind and that will, by their very nature, have little or no meaning to anyone but us. But I quickly dismiss that thought and the sense of hopelessness that accompanies it, and I start to rationalize, answering my own question “we bother with those things precisely because we can’t take it with us”. In this short life why not surround ourselves with pretty things? With things that make us happy? The artist, Betty Woodman says that she wanted to become a potter and create functional objects, “because if you have beautiful things to use, it changes the kind of person you are”. My mom would have agreed.

For creative people, it is important to constantly be visually stimulated by their environment. In another life, given other opportunities, having been adopted by different parents, having been with men who made her creativity a priority, having had more money or time, my mother would have been an artist. In my mind I can conjure up an image of what her work would have looked like – something with simple lines and only a small punch of color, perhaps even nearly abstract with an almost Asian quality to it. Recently she had become interested in mid-century architecture and design. Again, I can’t help but feel that, in another life and in another relationship, she would have been living in something out of a Julius Shulman photograph. In fact, when I cleaned out her desk I found a museum-issued calendar of Shulman photographs that I had given to her. She had requested it for Christmas. Her second-to-last Christmas. The last Christmas before we knew she was sick. It was her singular request and she knew that I would happily indulge it. Now I see that she had put the beautifully packaged portfolio of photos away and never used it. When I mention this to my step-father and lament that I wish she had used the calendar he replies simply, “she probably just wanted it for the pictures”. She wanted it for the photographs – photographs that she would never put on display. In fact, none of her interests were ever put on display.

Family, Guest Posts, motherhood

It Gets Cold in Florida.

January 24, 2015

By Victoria Fedden.

It gets cold in Florida. Most people don’t realize that, but around Thanksgiving the temperature predictably dips down into the 40s, at least at night, and shocks all the tourists. I should’ve known better. I’ve lived here for the past fifteen years, but this morning I’m not prepared for anything, least of all shivering in a prison yard, sockless, without a jacket.

I forgot everything: the zip-loc bag, the right amount of cash for the vending machines, quarters for a soda because when they have visitors is the only time they can get a cold can of diet coke and that’s a big treat. I remembered not to wear green. They’d already sent two people home for wearing the wrong color. One man stormed off on his Harley, livid. The other woman cried and said it was Thanksgiving weekend and she was wearing lime green, nothing like the inmates’ olive uniforms, but the guards told her she should know the rules by now and she had to leave. A three hour drive up and back all for nothing. I’d driven four hours, with a four year old, which made it seem like eight. Would they send us home too?

I’m so scared I’m sick, but when you have a child who looks to your cues, you have to hide your fears so she feels safe. I fail at this too often. I break down sometimes daily, in sobs on the bathroom floor. There are days when it feels like I may literally die from anxiety, grief, regret over what this has done to my marriage and how I am damaging my child the way I was damaged. I always said I would be the one to break the cycle, but here I am, right here on the hamster wheel and I am taking my child to visit her grandmother in jail, mad because this is not the life I imagined for my daughter or myself. Just last week at preschool drop-off I watched my daughter bound into her classroom and then brazenly announce to her classmates: “My mommy cried ALL day yesterday!”

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