emails to myself

(dreaming in my red smash book)

Last night, I was in the midst of working on a blog post for Chickadee Road after everyone else was long asleep and my daughter Ellie Jane started coughing in that way you do when you have a chest cold. After a few moments passed and it was clear she needed me, I went into her room and gathered her in my arms to rock her for a while. She kept coughing, so I suggested that we go into the bathroom and run the shower because the steam would make her feel better. 

We took her blanket and her favorite big Mickey stuffed animal and into the bathroom we went. With just a small light on so it was mostly dark, we cocooned in there with the shower running until water ran down the walls and she stopped coughing.

As we sat there and I could feel the steam expanding my lungs too, memories of doing this as a child tapped at the edges of the moment. After Ellie went back to sleep, I headed back out to my spot on the couch to finish working in what had become the middle of the night. I closed my eyes for a moment to recenter. A mama running her own business working in the minutes she can catch here and there. A little girl experiencing her first chest cold and how different my life is now that a little one relies on me to "make it better" and know what to do. Memories of my own bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia as a child and how the coughing would hurt my whole body. 

And then I thought about my mom and those moments tucked in next to her in the little bathroom in that home on Garland Circle. The shower running and filling up every space with steam. I wanted to capture the whirling thoughts and opened an email and wrote, "This moment: Feeling thankful for the hours my mother sat with me in the bathroom until I stopped coughing as the shower steam ran trails of water down the walls. Did this with Ellie Jane tonight and I wish I could hug my mother's younger self and say, "One day she will have a child and she will know."

I emailed this note to myself with the subject "this moment november 12."

So often thoughts like this come to me in the quiet in between spaces where I am shifting from one role to the next, and my mind feels so full of stuff that they sometimes get lost. Last night, as those words arrived, I wasn't sure where I wanted them to land. I might want to send them in a little note to my mom or record this memory in Project Life or even write a poem about it all. And today, I'm so glad I gave those words a place to stay contained, so I could read them again this morning. I think I might start sending more emails to myself when this happens, using the subject "this moment" so I can easily find them.

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I shared this story with my newsletter subscribers earlier this week and felt moved to share it here with you today. To receive notes like this one about my real stories about self-care, sign up for (almost) my weekly newsletter.