Have you ever felt like your life was being written and illustrated for you as you lived it?  And as you walked through your day the images around you strangely reflected your inner reality?

Over the last month, Attachment Mama has been hacked 3 times. Each evening I had some free time for personal writing and logged on, I would discover a new hack and had to spend the time to go through every single post and remove all the hackitude, change my passwords, blah-ditty-blah. Not sure who all saw it — but the last hack went beyond just inserting annoying text into all my posts and actually replaced my entire site with one page that had a scary Gothy face and the message “You’ve been hacked!”

What a weird, wired world this is where people that don’t even know you feel inspired to *$%^ with your innocent Mommy site.

Looking at this creepy face on my site and trying to breathe through it, find the humor in it (never got there) or discover the bigger message for me at hand — (has my focus on my children and how best to mother them been hacked by my 50 hour-week job?) — I went down memory lane to a chapter in my life with uglier metaphors that I can now laugh about.

It may be hard to imagine the currently health-focused me relishing a cigarette, but there was a time in my life when I found them extraordinarily enjoyable and didn’t give a hoot about long term consequences.  In fact, I loved them so much that I referred to them as my “smokey treats.”

Ahhhhhh. Blessed addiction.

The last time I smoked was the winter and spring before I moved from Boulder to Austin eight years ago. In a matter of a few months I had transitioned from well paid international PR manager at a high tech firm, marathon runner and singer for a 10-piece R&B band with charming boyfriend to unemployed (tech crash lay-offs), single (fully dumped), living alone (housemate moved to Denver) and soon-to-be band-less.

Did I turn to longer runs or yoga to work through it all? No.

Did I pound green juice to lift my spirits and strengthen my health?  Not so much.

Nah. I decided instead to pick up an old nasty habit that I had quit six years prior.

It was December, with plenty of snow on the ground. I would bundle up, go out on my back porch with my dog, and attempt to exhale life’s problems with an American Spirit while she took a dump in the yard. And then we’d both sit and stare at each other and the smoke fading into the sky while I rubbed her ears with my free hand.

Occasionally I would get inspired to pick up the dog shit in the snow and would shovel it up — often together with some snow — and toss into a trash bag I kept around the corner from the porch. I liked to dump my ash trays in there too.

Well, one morning following a sunny day when most of the snow had melted off, I sat mentally revisiting all that had gone wrong with smokey treat and coffee and heard the sound of our local garbage truck. I remembered the bag of poo sitting around the corner and rushed to grab it and add it to the trash can on the curb.

And as I grabbed the top edges of said trash bag, the snow (now water), shit and ash cocktail came pouring out all over my hands.

I really can’t tell you just how heinous this was. I think I scrubbed my hands with every soap and sanitizer in the house for 20 minutes.

Now you’re going to think I’m making up this next part for the metaphorical trifecta impact — but I promise you, I am not.

Following the manic hand wash, I sat down to call my new crush who happened to also be a smoker not happy about the habit to tell him about this craziness and how I could bottle up the shit-ash mix and we could both use it to quit. It was hands down the sure-fire aroma therapy way to quit smoking for good.

And while I was sitting on my dinky plastic patio chair talking to my friend, a bird flew by and shat on my head.

100% serious.

So that was then. I felt like my life was in the shitter and the universe reflected back my thinking.

This is now. Thankfully my commitment to health and wellness has kept me from going down the smokey treat path through this stressful year of balancing an intense job with mothering two little ones. When I forget that the universe responds to specificity — specifically the energy, the intention, and the thoughts that I project out into the world — life happens to me (or so I think) and I find myself in a pin-ball machine of response, reaction and survival. Hackitude.

When I choose to consciously express gratitude for all the blessings in my life and be very specific about the life I choose to experience every day and what I will gratefully experience in the future — new metaphors, possibilities and beautiful synchronicity unfold to reflect that reality.

Breathe. Believe. Receive.

Thanks for sticking with me with the hack sabbatical.

Is anyone still there besides my Mom?