Coffee Secret (& UPDATED CONTEST INFO BELOW)

OK, so by now, everyone is familiar with the blockbuster book, The Secret, which I have not yet read, but am a firm believer in the theory that if you will something long enough, and hard enough, and strongly enough, then you can make a difference, you can do what you believe in, you can make it happen!

This morning, case in point, is my story. It is an example of the power of believing:

It’s snowing here. It’s frigidly cold, with pelting little bullets of rain-snow that hit the skylights and clank like nickels dropping from heaven. Or quarters. You get the picture. It’s damp and dreary, and white and gray all mixed together, with no ounce of sun in the weather forecast for days.

I get Diva and Ajers off to school, drenched in the rain-snow, and I yell after them not to run because surely they will slip in this mucky crap and start crying and miss the bus, and dammit all, there is NO.WAY.IN.HELL I want to go out in this weather today. SO DON’T SLIP kids.

I spy two little squiggling earthworms wriggling for the nearest mud hole as I make my way back into the house and upstairs to crawl under the covers and await Tukey’s morning arrival, which is, we all know, one of the grandest moments of my every day!

So, he arrives, and we do our cuddle thing, where I am rolled up into a fetal ball, under the covers, trying to keep myself warm, snuggled up against his nice warm, newly-awakened body, while he’s drinking the extra-extra, chocolately chocolate milk I have waiting for him.

I get an urge.

A coffee urge.

Must have coffee.

Want a latte, maybe even a peppermint mocha, not-fat, three-pumps-peppermint, extra-hot since it’s sooo dang freezing cold. Or even a cinnamon dolce. No matter. I just have the urge for coffee.

I stare at the phone. I start thinking to myself, “Hmmm, I’m going to put that The Secret stuff to work. I am going to will one of my neighbors to call me telling me she is at Starbucks and could she please deliver me a coffee.”

I wait, I squinch my eyes together, my body still encompassed into a ball, trying to keep warm, while Curious George does his stupid monkey talk in the background.

Ring, Dammit! Ring phone.

IT DOES!

And it’s a neighbor!

But she doesn’t want to bring me coffee. I don’t think she does anyway, because she called looking to see if I knew of any magicians.

“Dammit woman! If I knew of a magician, I would ask him to magically appear with a nice nonfatsugarfreevanillalatte, no whip, extra hot! I don’t know of any magicians!”

I hang up, not completely discouraged, and begin willing the phone to ring again.

IT DOES!

And it’s also a neighbor!

My workout pal. Who tells me I sure did pick a good day to cancel going to the gym and she wonders if I had it planned out all along.

I hadn’t, but there’s no way I’m going to go work out if I can’t even get my butt out of bed to go get a coffee I am desperately trying to will into my home.

However, this neighbor KNOWS A MAGICIAN so she’s going to call my other neighbor to tell her about it. How ironic is that?

So, that’s kind of like The Secret working THROUGH me, if not FOR me. Because I willed the one woman to call me to ask me about the magician, and then the other woman called me KNOWING about the magician. The Secret is working THROUGH ME!

I still don’t have any coffee, but now, Tukey is starving cuz it’s like 10:30 a.m.

We trudge downstairs and I look at the kitchen counter.

We own a coffee maker. While I’ve never, ever used it, I’ve seen it before, and I’ve seen it with coffee in it. I’ve cleaned it many, many times. I’ve just never used it.

“Tukey, I think I might make some coffee, but I’m not sure how to do it.”

“I can show you! I watch Daddy make coffee all the time!”

Joy! Oh Joy!

But then I worry; I am not sure how much coffee to put in. What if I make it too strong? What if I don’t do it right. I start by filling the coffee pot with water from the sink.

Tukey stops me. “Mom, that’s not the way you make the coffee.”

“What?”

“You need to get the water from the refrigerator. The good water.”

Oh. My five-year-old is teaching me how to make coffee.

I proceed to fill up the pot with the proper water, I find the coffee grains, sands, nuggets, whatever you call ‘em, and I do the best I can to measure how much I think I’ll need.

“Next, you pour the water into that thing, Mom.”

My God, I knew my kid was a genius, but come on! He’s utterly brilliant!

“Turn it on,” he instructs.

I push the button. Stuff starts coming out! We jump up and down!

“We did it! We did it! We are making coffee!” We sing and dance around the kitchen.

After a while, it stops percolating, and then I pour some into a mug. Then I pour a ton of that creamer stuff, the French vanilla flavor, into my cup.

It’s still not right.

Then I put a scoopful of that “sister-friend coffee” stuff into it; you know, the kind you drink with your sister, the kind that is like magical moments coffee… what the hell is it called? General Foods International…

(I had to get up to go look at the container!)

So, I pour some of that in, then mix it all up and taste it.

It’s yummy. It’s warm. It’s good! And I’m buzzed! It’s taken me all of two minutes to type this up. I am jazzed up on coffee I made all on my own (OK, with the help of a five-year-old!).

And then I realize that The Secret is absolutely true to some extent. That if you want something bad enough in life, you have to really, really, really want it, and you have to believe that you will get it.

Now, I didn’t get my coffee in the original manner I was hoping for, but, with the belief that I would have coffee, and the belief in my ability to get things in life that I want… well, you see where I’m going with this?

If you desire something so tremendously, and you concentrate on that desire, and you believe in that desire, knowing you can get it someday, and if you can’t get it the way you originally thought you might want it, then you just have to come up with a new, original, interesting way to achieve your goals.

So, yes, I did get my coffee. And it probably tasted way better than if I had just gone to Starbucks to get one. Because I worked hard at getting the coffee. I thought outside of the coffee box!

But most importantly, I believed.

I believed in the coffee.

I believed in me and in my abilities to have that coffee, no matter what it took, no matter how hard it was to get that coffee. I willed it to happen. It happened.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

This is all an analogy for my writing, and the will and the desire and the belief that someday, if I can’t get out to Starbucks to make my dreams of writing become a reality, I will make it happen eventually. It will happen, somehow, some way, some day.

And that is because I believe.

Ah, the powers of The Secret... Which basically means, Believe In Yourself.
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UPDATE:
IT'S STILL NOT TOO LATE TO ENTER THE MANIC MOMMY VOLUME I CD CONTEST. Simply go here: (ENTER TO WIN!)and leave a comment. You do not need to have a blog to enter, just make sure you've left your name so I can announce the winners.