There was still a void.  I would talk about it with friends and family, yet the suggestions were superficial offerings that didn’t resonate with my heart.  I spent years leaping into new friendships and new opportunities, looking for the adventure, only to wind up still feeling the emptiness.

One day on the way to a funeral for my best friend’s mom (which had been the culmination of a 3-month period of losing loved ones), I heard a song playing on the radio and it sparked an undeniable throbbing in my heart.  It seemed to be passionately driven and not recognizable.  Something shifted in me that day and my awareness seemed to have taken on a new height.  Not really knowing what it was that appeared to be igniting within me, I began to pray. My daily grind included silence and an inner request for God to help me find the way.  I found myself in simple moments of a daydreaming addiction searching for my own fire.

In the years of silence that followed, my intuition was adamant I needed a change.  I was frightened and found myself withdrawing from life.  I was becoming quieter when the moment would call for otherwise.  I would quickly choose to ignite the negative instead of seeing through my own rose colored glasses.  I felt the weight, the difference and found myself crying alone.   My inner sadness left me in the dark.

In a flash of a finger snap, I landed in a web of fear, isolation and panic.  I had one son in a wildly motivated tantrum of unlawful activity and his own version of fun.  I had another son physically needing adjustments to his hip and ankles with biweekly therapy appointments.  At the same time, my father in law showed up sick and deathly ill only to be placed in hospital beds for 5 months. In the midst of this storm and exhausted tears, I finally heard the loud and loving guidance of my gut, my inner knowing snorting demands.  For the first time, I was more than willing to take a risk.

I stumbled upon a quote by Anais Nin –

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

In the blink of an eye and the loving throb of my own heart, I got up and walked away from a career in education of 23 years with no plans.  While that movement felt extremely freeing, it didn’t fulfill the yearning entirely. Once again, I find myself searching for the next gig in an effort to fill the void.  Life was not providing the answers I was wanting. And, again, the stillness led me to a knowing that God had other plans.

Completely unaware, I found myself juggling through my daily habits of kid activities, volunteer meetings, new networking opportunities, new learning experiences and reading everything I could looking for a solution to my unanswered heart – What’s next? What was I supposed to be doing? And even…Who am I?

Summer ended and the kids went back to school.  I found myself completely lost and unable to move.  On one particular day that seemed monumental compared to all of the others, I landed on the couch staring blankly at my yard of over-grown grass and solid trees, tears of uncharted territory streaming down my face, and an uncontrollable shaking that came from not knowing.  What seemed like a forever moment turned out to be a few minutes.  In those few painful moments of release, I knew, in my heart, I was breaking open.

Coming Home: A Love Story is my story of love. It is not about finding love.  It is about awakening to the love that was always within me.  It is a story of a mom who journeys back to take a look back at how she arrived to a place where she was so appreciative of her life and yet filled with a yearning for something more. It is a story of being lost and distracted and finding her way back home. Home is a loving-ness within oneself, the wholeness of who one is, and the safest place to breathe and live fully. Coming Home is my journey to awaken the truth of who I am.

I wrote it for me. I wrote it for us – us moms who find ourselves in all the greatness of motherhood and all the discernment of a desire for more purpose, more love and more joy. Knowing who we are is joy. It is the pureness of love that we once had upon our birthday.

Knowing who we are is the essence of life.  It provides the completeness within one’s circle of life.

We are each filled with light and love.  That is who we are. Each of us knowing who we are is how we give back and honor the oneness of the human race.

We, as women and as moms, have a duty to be the example of being our most authentic self. It starts with knowing who we are. Without that knowing, nothing else that truly matters is achievable. We, as women and as moms, will find ourselves unconscious and unaware of our own limiting habits of self-sabotage. We, as women and as moms, must be the change. We must get beyond our habitual nature of outward beauty as a means of defining our truest. We must put an end to outward projection of fear, competition and negative emotions. We must find better ways to define us rather than how another performs or behaves. We must awaken the truth and honor who we are.

Coming Home: A Love Story is a coming out story of hurt, pain, the uncomfortable, and the unknown.  It is a call to action for surrender, trust, connection and a responsibility to be who we are. It is a call to action to be kind and gentle with who we are and each other.  It is a call to action to be one, show up as one, and act in solidarity of US-ness – the dignity for all of us filled with faith, hope and love. It is a call to action to rise up, as parents, heal our own pain, and connect with our children as leaders, as teachers and as students. It is a call to action to live every part of our human lives from the heart, a pure place of love, and move beyond fear (or at least recognize when you are in fear and move quickly to a more loving place).

Glennon Doyle recently wrote about her own past ‘love story’ and she sums it up so raw and real –

“And then one day it all makes sense.  Every bit of it. And you can finally see your past as one long, blessed road leading you home. And you understand that every bit of it was necessary and that every bit of it was holy.”

That’s it!!!  Every aspect of our lives – the daily moments, the undesirable moments, the fantabulous moments, the good, the bad, and the ugly – is holy, is all about learning, is all about loving more deeply who we are and who others are.

I dare you, journey inward!  You will not regret it!! Go home to who you are and find your blissed-out life!!!