The Woo-Woo Sisters’ Wee Book of Wisdom: Just Some Little Life Essentials I Wish I Had Known When

By Cynthia Ann Drew Barnes PhD

Tired of living your life by the rules you didn’t make, based on how people you’ve never met say you should live your life, or by standards someone else has set? In The Woo-Woo Sisters’ Wee Book of Wisdom: Just Some Little Life Essentials I Wish I Had Known When, Cynthia Drew Barnes, PhD, writes heartfelt messages to you: about who you really are and can become, about the life you were meant to live, about the men you love or hope to love, and about why you’re really here on planet earth. Woo-woo sisters, this book will help you liberate yourselves from your own fears and from other people’s expectations. Read this powerful book. Risk being just who you are and embrace all who you were truly meant to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796082678

Cynthia Ann Drew Barnes PhD

Cynthia Ann Drew Barnes, PhD is a mother and shamaness of the woo-woo sisters’ clan. Born and reared in Chicago, Illinois, where she found herself living again several years ago after many years living in faraway places, she has been blessed with opportunities to do many things in her life. She is now not just working on doing a great deal but also of being more of the person she was sent to planet earth to be. She has a fine son, who has been the greatest gift of her life. He continues to find and define himself and will ultimately be a greater gift to the planet than he has already been. Dr. Barnes has spent much of her career as an educator, someone who works tirelessly to draw out of others that which they do not yet know they have inside them. For those of you who care, Cynthia has a BA in psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an MAT (teaching) from Northwestern University, an MA from Fielding Graduate University in organization development, and a PhD from Fielding Graduate University in human and organizational systems. She has spent her years as a bringer—not a taker—to this party of life and has many family, friends, and colleagues whom she loves and who love her.

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Copyright © 2020 by Cynthia Barnes.

Library of Congress Control Number:        2018901365

ISBN:                    Hardcover                             978-1-7960-8269-2

                             Softcover                               978-1-7960-8268-5

                            eBook                                      978-1-7960-8267-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 01/13/2020

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Lesson 1 Live Your Life in Alignment with the Creator’s Purpose

Lesson 2 Take Charge of Your Own Happiness

Lesson 3 First, Be the Love You Seek

Lesson 4 Understand the Missing Leg Theory and Other Things about Men

Lesson 5 Life Is a Feast to Be Shared, Not a Race to Be Won

Lesson 6 Realize that Tombstones Have No Job Titles

Lesson 7 Never Forget Where You Came From; You Might Just Have to Go Back

Lesson 8 Make Happiness Deposits in the Bank of Life Well Before You Need to Make Withdrawals

Lesson 9 Practice the Seven Common Graces

Lesson 10 When You Find You, Love May Find You Too

Epilogue

This book is dedicated

to Woo-Woo Sisters everywhere.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Creator who made this book, and all things, possible.

Thanks, too, to the many gifts, masquerading as trials and tribulations, that have finally given me the courage to use the voice God gifted me with.

And sincere thanks go to the many bridges and angels who helped me across. You know who you are.

Prologue

Twenty years ago, if anyone had ever told me that I’d be approaching middle age unemployed, living back home with my parents, and separated from my husband of more than thirty years, I would have told them they were totally insane.

Now on many days, I think I’m the one who’s crazy. I thought I did all the right things. I followed all the rules—you know, the ones written in that ethereal tome How to Be the Perfect Little Girl Who Grows Up to Be the Quintessential Woman. That rule book that no one can actually put her finger on and that no one has actually ever seen. The one that we cast our lives according to, yet have never read. The one that, quite frankly, now that I’m in the throes of midlife opportunity and can think much more clearly, does not even exist.

Nonetheless, I’d tried desperately to fashion my life according to those ethereal rules. And I’d fooled most of the people who know me into thinking I’d been quite successful at just that.

Just about everyone who knew me thought I had a blissful marriage—you know, the one you read about in fairy tales.

My only, then twenty-two-year-old son, who had just started another year of college, had just sent me two dozen long-stemmed red roses the previous Christmas. My fourteen-year-old dog, Toby, is the most affectionate, loving creature and is the best watchdog any person could be blessed to have.

I’ve never been arrested; heck, I’ve only had two parking tickets in my entire life. I was secretary of the trustee board at my church, where I tithed faithfully. I have more degrees than a thermometer, four to be exact, with an nth degree in life. My thirty years of work in education had earned me the privilege of, pretty much, calling my own shots when it came to my career. My phone rang constantly; friends of all ages and colors and backgrounds called me for advice. I wore all the right clothes. I drove a red convertible—a Mercedes-Benz, the best car. I had a beautifully decorated home, where I hosted lavish Easter brunches and day-after-Christmas parties for sixty or more of my closest friends. In short, by anyone’s proverbial wisdom, I had it all!

Then one day, the illusion just all fell apart. I packed up my winter clothes, my computer, and my television in my husband’s SUV; and I drove the car back to the Windy City—Chicago—the place where I grew up and doubted I’d ever live again.

It had only taken me five years to get my elderly parents to move to the wholly renovated first floor of their two-flat apartment building on Chicago’s South Side. The previous spring, when I had come to Chicago on business, I had found my parents living like two homeless people with a roof over their heads on the second floor. Porta-potty stench had snatched my breath away as soon as I opened the upstairs door. My mother was sleeping on a tablecloth (She only owned about thirty coordinated sets of sheets at the time), and the dining room floor was littered with what must have been at least a year’s worth of her discarded designer-label clothes. My father, a prostate cancer survivor—I only found out he had driven himself to and from thirty-six or so radiation treatments in 1995 because I tagged along when he told me he had an appointment with his urologist—who had just celebrated his eightieth birthday, needed follow-up surgery, which he was afraid to death to have.

The upstairs apartment made the rooms on the Ugliest Room in America contest look like rooms in palatial estates. More than fifty years’ worth of books and newspapers and clothes and dust littered every nook and cranny. Fortunately, over the summer, I had had one of the neighborhood fix-it men paint the back bedroom and clean up the bathroom after I gave my parents an ultimatum: Either you move downstairs where you can live out your lives like semicivilized people, or I’m going to call 911 right now and tell them to bring two gurneys and two sets of restraints and have both of you ‘siren-ed’ off to the nearest assisted-living facility I can find.

They ultimately moved down to the first floor. And I moved my things upstairs on the second floor, mostly in the painted bedroom. The previous summer, my husband had installed a handheld showerhead in the bathroom so that I could at least take a shower, and I squeezed my way around the kitchen and a quarter of the dining room—that’s all the space there was for me to move around in—and did the best that I could.

My husband, someone to whom I had been married for thirty years, hadn’t been able to hold a steady job for the past three years. My credit cards had been max’d out, trying to pay our son’s college tuition and his and our living expenses. I had a job that I loved, and I supplemented my income with lucrative speaking and consulting engagements that had taken me all over the world. I had many associates and even a few very dear friends. I felt blessed to be alive and totally in alignment with God’s purpose for my life.

But all that had changed. A couple of weeks earlier, I had just wanted to get under the bed and pretend I didn’t even exist anymore.

I’d been trying to write this book for a long time, and at that time—the lowest time in my life, devoid of just about everything but my faith and myself—I decided to go ahead and write it.

I don’t know whether anyone will ever read it. I don’t know whether it will make sense to anyone else. But I do know that I have lots to say to myself and to other woo-woo sisters like me—the ones who are ready to hear it.

Woo-woo sisters, you know who you are. You and I are one. Right now, you’re just like I was. You’re living your lives according to plan, not your plan but everyone else’s plan for your life. Right now, you may be working your way through the perfect MBA program at the most prestigious school. Or you may be working out at your neighborhood fitness center, trying to craft the ideal—whatever that is—body. Or you may be searching desperately for Mr. Right. Or you may be planning to paint your white picket fence