Under Their Wings (eBook)

Patty Lou Hawks (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
Made for Success Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-61339-874-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Under Their Wings is an inspiring guidebook for an ideal mother-daughter relationship. Loaded with helpful guidance to structure girl’s character development, this book walks through growing pains and provides the inspiration to live a courageous life. The author is one of Girl Scout’s most successful troop leaders and shares her secrets for mentoring her girls.

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Take an epic journey based on the true-life story of a Girl Scout troop leader and her daughter. As one of the Girl Scouts' most successful troop leaders, the author guides you through inspirational life stories about an amazing group of young women. She lends meaning to real character development, shares how growing pains can create powerful learning moments, and how this group of girls found true purpose while having fun.The story begins with the author who is reluctantly drafted into troop leadership, surrounded by the demands of a busy family life and career. But as her work begins, the author finds joy and fulfillment by leading her girls through wild adventures and real-life struggles.The nostalgic stories are interwoven with girl escapades, rites of passage, and learning about life with a purpose through their eyes, staged in a small beach town on the island of Oahu.Take a heartwarming journey and see where this adventure leads you.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

WHY ME?

 

I WAS STANDING AT the back of my daughter’s school cafeteria for an evening meeting, listening to a redhead, freckle-faced woman reverberating into a microphone, and trying to ascertain what she was saying. Echoes of screaming children bounced off the walls, drowning out the poor sound of the PA system. My daughter, Heather, was at a craft table not more than a few feet away from me.

I was more captivated by the art projects and watched endearingly as my little half pint maneuvered the huge bottle of glue that went way beyond her kindergarten years. Her tiny little hands worked intently on the task, focusing like a cat watching for prey. The white liquid seemed to flow onto the paper synchronized with her tongue sliding in and out between the two missing front teeth. She had me at, “Look mommy at what I can do!”

“Don’t buy it,” murmured the woman standing at attention to my right, cupping her hand around one side of her mouth, obviously directing the comment for my ears only. I spun around quickly to see if I knew the face that matched the voice. She was a petite-framed woman with an athletic build, coming up to my shoulder at about 5’2” with a dark brown, Dorothy Hamel haircut that matched her playful brown eyes, yet I still drew a blank.

Turning to get a better view, I responded, “Pardon?” Leaving a question mark hanging in the air, with a squinty-eyed expression that said what did you just say?

Grinning like the Cheshire cat, she giggled while emerging her hand in a familiar greeting, “Hi, I’m Sally.” With a firm grip and a quick shake, we both burst into laughter about the opening introductions. She continued without much hesitation, “Be very careful here, they are trying to pull you in.”

“Pull me in?” I repeated, still leaving a question mark hanging mid-sentence.

She looked around our immediate vicinity, leaned in just a bit closer, and lowered her voice, “I’m just saying, they are looking to recruit troop leaders here tonight, and that’s how they do it,” pointing towards the busy craft tables. She continued with her advanced knowledge, warning me, “Just don’t volunteer for anything, or once they find out what your weaknesses are, they’ll have you working full-time for slave labor.” We both burst into laughter about the exaggerated implications, this time with an unspoken understanding of being pulled in by a mother’s heart strings.

Then she motioned towards her older daughter, Megan, who was assisting the younger girls with art projects, and said, “I’ve been here before, and they can pull you in.” Chuckling again at her candor, we settled into a more serious conversation about our own scouting experiences as children, reminiscing about the fun we most certainly had, and ultimately agreeing about the usefulness of our shared experiences.

We wrapped the conversation with laments about how it was different for mothers to become leaders back in the day. After all, when we were children, our mothers stayed home full-time, while most of the moms in our generation were out of the house working full-time careers. After opening this door of life in the conversation, I chimed in a bit more, elaborating about the dynamics of my overly busy family life and inflamed work schedule. “I have four children at home, volunteer at my church, serve on the school board, help with the Boy Scouts, and manage a hairstyling business, while my husband travels for work.” I reassured her I would not be stepping up to the plate to volunteer for any new positions tonight or any other night.

She merely laughed at my attempts for solidarity, folding her arms across her chest and turning towards the oration at the front of the room. We both giggled on cue as she tilted her head sideways supporting her opening sentiments while we turned to listen to the closing platform, “I’m just saying, don’t volunteer for anything. A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G, I tell you.”

With a newly formed union and kinship from the back of the room, I found it much easier to slip out a side door without as much as signing up to be a snack helper, only to be confronted on the way to the car by my favorite little midget friend with her art piece and irresistible toothless smile. I’d almost forgotten she was the reason I was attending this meeting in the first place.

While loading, and buckling her into the car, visions of her running in after school earlier that day flooded my memory banks, and I could still see her racing all the way home from the bus stop. She dashed into the door of my salon, located on the side of our house, waving the flyer and breathlessly bellowing, “Mommy! Mommy! We must go tonight! It’s tonight, and we have to go! My friends are going, I wanna go! Can we go?!”

Her appeals to enlist me as a troop leader lasted all the way home and well into the bedtime rituals. She had such a theatrical way of tilting her head sideways like a sad, little puppy dog and curling out her lower lip to get what she wanted, and she knew exactly how to work it. I was pretty much immune to her academy award performances by this age, but somehow, this time, it was different. How is she getting to me so easily? I thought. Or, perhaps more significantly, why is she getting to me so easily?

I couldn’t decipher these questions on my toes at the end of the day and had to press on, winding down the evening with a whole lot of lip service to get through the bedtime routine. I bounced her into bed avoiding her irresistible, saucer brown eyes, knowing they could penetrate my soul and move heaven and earth to get past all reason and logic.

However, I could not get past the little chirping sounds that were like pin pricks jabbing at my heart, “But Mommy, Mommy, pleeeeeeeze. We can’t be a Girl Scout troop if we don’t have a leader; why can’t youuuu be a leader? Pleeeeeeeeeze Momma! I wanna be a Girl Scout with my friends.”

“We will talk about this tomorrow,” I assured with hugs and kisses, tucking covers around her like a mummy and quickly retreating to the living room to lick my wounds. Sinking into my cherished, feather-down chair, I sipped my unique blend of honey and herb tea and tried letting the day pass. However, my brainwaves had another idea and were in full throttle mode without a shift mechanism to locate neutral. I closed my eyes and tried relaxing with meditation when my inner Yoda began interrupting with her own common sense opinions, “Stop trying so hard, and do.”

To no avail, guilt toiled its way back in, disturbing my peaceful state of mind. Much like a bullhorn attached to a tape recorder, I replayed my schedule and list of justifications as to why I could not take on one more task in my life. Worse yet, I couldn’t seem to stop answering these self-imposed deliberations.

Silent arguments kept churning deep within my being until they waged a full-on civil war with my core beliefs. The internal festering could no longer be ignored with questions going off like sirens in my senses, shrieking the overall prevailing thought, why won’t this just go away? You have said no before without this kind of reaction.

But the hard follow-up question that really got stuck in my craw was, what is it? What’s really bugging you about all of this?

Intuitively, I knew there was no way out except to scrutinize these thoughts in order. Nevertheless, I wasn’t particularly enthralled with delving any deeper into the abyss, where my truths and accuracies were firmly lying entrenched, dormant and quiet for now. However, the questions igniting by the milliseconds in the gray matter of my mind, like exploding popcorn, had other ideas.

With nowhere else to go, except down the rabbit hole for answers, the fifty-thousand-dollar question lit up the circuit boards, what are you so afraid of looking at? And there it was, the big white elephant sitting in the middle of the room that nobody wanted to talk about: Fear! What’s that all about?

I tried desperately to avoid looking for these answers by coming up with provisional questions like, how can I save face with my adorable, little, brown-eyed munchkin, without adding one more task to the endless list? That was the cover-up question I was willing to see or work on, with a veiled attempt to suppress the real undercurrent issues of dealing with my fears. After all, opening this door too suddenly could produce a tidal wave of emotions.

Yes, denial runs deep while using a heavy cloak to mask the spiny tentacles digging multi-layers into the psyche, in which the real issues hide. However, I stayed the course, ignoring the jabs of repudiation, and explored these feelings smoldering just beneath the surface, which lingered somewhere between guilt and anger.

Ruminating in this lonely valley for a few more minutes, my deliberations finally shifted into high gear with attitudes of resentment. Raising the even deeper questions of, resentment over what? For being in this situation in the first place? Or, was the resentment just a result of frustration for even having to make such a difficult decision?

Each reflection brought up new examinations, along with more frustration and even more questions like, are you really justified in your self-preserving “no?” and, why are you being so defensive about simply saying...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.5.2017
• Verlagsort: Seattle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Familie / Erziehung
• ISBN-10: 1-61339-874-3 / 1613398743
• ISBN-13: 978-1-61339-874-6 / 9781613398746