Before you continue reading this post you may want to go to your kitchen and retrieve a spoon in case you want to test out the following theory yourself.

This is me and my mom, I wanted you to see what she looks like because I am about to talk about her.

I hope that you found this Mother’s Day to be wonderful and special. I don’t normally talk about my parents or siblings too often but since it was Mother’s Day today I did want to share a story from 8 years ago about this time of year about my mom. At the time I was recovering from quite easily the hardest thing I’ve gone through in my life. I don’t want to bore you with the details but it was a relationship that ended and when it was over there wasn’t much of myself left. It’s funny how going through difficult trials can either make you stronger and more confident in yourself and your beliefs or they can crush you until you literally feel like nothing. Unfortunately for me, this particular experience had crushed me. Looking back I can see that after it ended I was aimlessly stumbling through my life without any clue of who I was, what I wanted out of life and myself and to be honest I hadn’t processed what I had just been through entirely. I had no stability or reasonable thought process. I just kind of went along with things without regard to whether they were good or bad choices or if they would help me or hurt me.  You could say I was an empty shell just bumping into things with no direction or purpose. Enter inspired mom. During this time I had moved back in with my parents briefly and my mom was able to recognize that I really needed some direction. I was just about to take a long road trip with a friend and my mom had the prompting to write me a letter (not something normally done between the two of us) and she gave it to me to read during the long drive. It was an incredibly long and elaborate and straight up profound letter that was 8 pages front and back full of wisdom and insight that was written all for me. I only want to share one small part of what she said because to this day it remains to be one of the strongest reminders and influence upon my life. In the letter my mom used a spoon as an analogy.  To sum it up she said that if I were to face a spoon towards myself then everything in the reflection of the spoon would be upside down and confusing but that if I turned the spoon away from me and towards others everything would be right side up and more clear. She wrote that what I focus on in life has the same effect on my life’s reflection. In short, if I am focused inward and only think of myself then things will start to feel upside down and all wrong but that if I turn my focus on others and their needs I will be able to see things the right way and understand life more clearly.  I don’t think my mom told me this story necessarily because I was acting selfish or focused on myself because I really didn’t have a focus at all and not having a direction in life can be more scary than being  selfish. The point that she was trying to get at is that I was lost and that if I wanted to find myself I needed to get lost in the service of others. The absolute ironic part of the whole story (and I swear I am not making this up),  my friend and I stopped at the Grand Canyon on our road trip to check out these shacks with vendors peddling handmade stuff and there was a table with a bunch of handmade rings and there was a ring made from an old spoon shining in all its glory practically screaming my name. This was before Etsy or anything of the sort so I had never seen anything like it and that fact that it was made from a real spoon from the 1900′s BLEW my mind.  I felt as if that was God putting the exclamation mark at the end of everything my mom had just written me and I knew I would need to keep the ring and wear it often as a reminder. I keep the letter in one of my journals  so it’s there for me to pull out whenever I forget who I am or where I am going. I was able to pull myself out of my shell and build myself from scratch again because of the things written in my mom’s letter. I never would have thought I would be able to overcome that difficult trial and not only did I overcome it, I also learned to love myself again and gained more confidence and faith than I ever had before. I still wear this spoon ring and it still reminds to pay attention to what I am focusing on. I doubt my mom will ever know just how brilliant that letter was and now hopefully it will inspire some of you as well. I have spoon rings I found [HERE] on Etsy I plan to give to each of my girls when they are older and I hope it will remain a tradition in my family. Sorry for such a long post. It’s just a tender part of my heart I wanted to share with all of you. XOXO!