My mom is 77 years old and has been a very positive example to me. She has imparted to me a positive attitude, an empathy, an appreciation of the little things in life, an endless capacity to love and a strong day to day intention for longevity. In case you do not know I am a vegetarian, I have a lot of healthy rituals that I do every day from praying, to stretching, to walking, to flossing.
I am so grateful to have her in my life as a friend, confidant, a mirror that I can ventilate and explore my own dreams as well as frustrations. She lives about 90 minutes away and do not see her as often as I would like but we speak almost daily and there is no unfinished business between us. We have expressed in both writing and orally how we feel about each other and continue to share the ongoing love and mutual respect.
I am writing about my mom because this morning I called her and I admit sometimes I am not always bright eyed and bushy tailed when I speak to her. I do not feel I have to be “on” with her. However, I felt badly this morning that I did not give her positive energy and after speaking to her early this morning, called her again. I said to her that I know that I have so much to be thankful for and just want to be an inspiration for her and apologized for not uplifting her. Well, she gave me a piece of her mind and heart on all the ways I inspire her and just helped me embrace for myself. I do make a difference and that is what I want to do. Sure, when I write blog posts, speak to the wedding and stationery industry about their businesses, I hope that some of the information I share may help their business and that may be attributed to my knowledge and perhaps in the long run it could come back to me financially. However, in my heart most of all I want to make a difference.
Also, while I have your eyes for some personal stuff, I had my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah January 16th and while it was elegant and yes we had a stunning invitation, we worked together as a family to give our guests memories that money could not buy. We poked fun at ourselves with a parody that I wrote called the VonJap family based on the music from “The Sound of Music” and we sang it for our guests. My kids are talented but my wife and I couldn’t carry a tune but we put ourselves out there and we also surprised our guests with short footage in our photo montage of my daughter actually being born. The craziest thing we did was a reality video we showed that was just outrageous and crazy and poked fun at some of our friends and family as well as ourselves. Here is a link to that.
This is what we do for a living, might as ramp it up for own party…