My parents have never been interested in the men I date. When I was in my 20s and single, they never asked about boyfriends, nights out or whether I received flowers on Valentine’s Day.

If I brought someone home, they looked down their noses, waiting to find something wrong. I can’t tell you why and I wish I knew, but it’s a pattern they’ve stuck throughout the past four decades.

The last time my parents took an interest in a boyfriend was Ted, the first guy I dated in college. Mom and I sat for lunch one day at their favorite local diner and she asked about what it would be like if we got married one day. I broke up with Ted, a supremely nice guy, at the end of sophomore year because I just wasn’t ready for forever.

John was next and he was my first heart-pounding love. Like magnets, we chased each other around campus and home for school breaks. For the holidays, my parents bought him a key flashlight to help him see his iced-over car lock on dark winter nights. When I wanted to invite him home for the Passover seder, they said an adamant NO.

They tried to mask their dislike as grounded in the fact that he was not Jewish - but when my brother took up with a high school sweetheart, also outside our tribe, they were enthralled. She is now my sister-in-law and probably my favorite family member - but let’s just say my parents never batted an eye over that pairing.

It came as no surprise, so many years later when I met Avy, that they were not only uninterested - they were downright opposed. This time, it was because he was Orthodox.

And when we married, they had complaints all the way down the aisle. “What do you mean no mixed dancing?” “Why are you wearing a hat over your hair?” “You’re pregnant again? Don’t you want to let Asher be the baby a while longer?” I was already pregnant, and on purpose!!!!

Nothing I did satisfied them so I did everything to try to satisfy myself. And though it took me 37 years, I finally succeeded.

So now I’m dating Dan and at the best I’ve ever been in every part of my life - and it’s the same old tune. I keep telling myself I don’t need their approval and I shouldn’t even want it. But old habits die hard.

When I changed my Facebook status to in a relationship, Dad called immediately, all chatty-happy. He called again later that same day to invite me to breakfast.

And while Mom sat beside him and they were perky and interested in every part of my life, the two times I mentioned his name, they blank-stared. Nothing. Nada.

It’s become a joke between us, this blatant dysfunction. And still I wonder - what’s behind it all? Seriously, Mom and Dad. Isn’t it time to just let the past go?

I created Your People LLC in 2007 as an innovative way to help others build their businesses. My premise was, and it remains, that if you create genuine relationships between a company and its clients, you will generate loyalty, satisfaction and in the process, a burgeoning community.

And what does that do for business? Ideally, it builds the bottom line. Because everyone knows that when you feel a fondness and an allegiance for a person or place, you return there again and again.

I read in the Winter 2010 Michigan Alumnus magazine about Welcome Wednesdays at the Alumni Center in Ann Arbor. Last fall, the University of Michigan Alumni Association started offering free bagels and coffee, Wi-Fi and big flatscreen TVs on Wednesdays starting at 8:30 a.m.

At first, 135 people showed up. Now, more than 2,000 turn up for the casual cafe gathering spot. They’re fed, they’re kept warm, they’re greeted with a friendly grin and a sincere hello - and they create a connection with this place.

Well, the Alumni Association is sure hoping that turns into a lifelong relationship.

Any relationship takes time and effort to build, and nothing good happens overnight. I cringe when a client says, “What results can you guarantee?” Because really, the answer is, “None.”

I can get them out there and I can create exposure in all sorts of mediums. Given enough time, I can build a buzz around their brand. If need be, my team can create the brand they need to make a mark.

Guarantees? There are none, you know. Life is a marathon, not a race. You need endurance to make it to the finish line. And if free bagels, coffee and Wi-Fi don’t do the trick to expand the alumni reach for the University of Michigan, then they’ll try something else. They won’t fall to pieces.

But imagine the possibilities: boy meets girl on a Welcome Wednesday, they fall in love, get married 10 years later and have a lifelong fondness for the Alumni Center in Ann Arbor. Maybe that’s where they host the wedding. Maybe they bring their kids there 20 years later.

Maybe best friends meet there. Maybe two students link up and find they have compatible skills and talents, form a business and take it to Fortune 500. You never know where an idea will lead.

And if you don’t try it, it’ll go nowhere.

Have I told you that I believe in signs? If I haven’t, then I’ve done a disservice to all the many readers of my blog because yes, I have always believed in signs, and I do not in any way believe in coincidences.

But this blog will not go there - another will, I promise. (Perhaps after I see Rebecca Rosen on Monday at Rock Financial.)

This blog is about finding love. And yes, I am coming out - I’ve found it.

Two years after deciding to get divorced, a year and a half of living alone and LOVING it, after launching the most productive, most inspiring, easiest and most soothing time of my life … I found love.

Now, I must say, I’ve found it twice. First, with myself and with the quiet. If you don’t love the silent moments with no one around, if you can’t get on a plane by yourself and not hide behind People magazine and your iPod, and without someone to meet you at the gate on the other end, then you may not find love with another. Just my opinion.

When I told my mother that I was thinking of filing for divorce, I added, “Because then I can find the love I’ve always wanted.”

Leave it to Mom to splash cold water on my face. “Well don’t get divorced thinking you’re just going to get remarried right away,” she said.

I sulked. I pouted. I figured my parents, even at this age, just don’t understand me!

But actually, she was 100% right. (Mom, I hope you hear this!)

It took a while after that conversation before it hit me smack in the face: I would rather be alone for the rest of my life than remain in a miserable marriage. So I pulled the plug. And I ventured out onto the waves, cascading in the sun, drinking in the air like I’d never breathed before.

It was a fun first summer and then the fall came and boy was I busy. My business grew, I dabbled in dating, and a whole host of married men made passes at me. (What is that about?)

One year turned into two. I spent my first birthday after the divorce alone and without my kids, but I ate foie gras at an old Victorian house-turned-restaurant in the Willamette Valley and I loved every minute. The second birthday since the divorce, my best friend was here, with her kids, and mine, and other friends streamed in and we barbecued steaks and made a salad that I’ll never forget. We drank Amarone until the evening cooled.

Every day is like a birthday when you’re living the life you choose. It’s the moments that carry meaning, like little birds with food in their beaks for their young. (By the way, yesterday a bird flew right into the side window on my car. What the ?)

And so I didn’t see it coming when Dan popped up online. And instead of doing what I always did - email a lot, maybe give my number and then we’ll see - I said, “Let’s meet.” Now.

It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s simmering with excitement. I haven’t changed my relationship status on Facebook, but I’m telling you here: I’ve found something fantastic with an amazing man.

That’s all you get for now. Stay tuned for more. When he reads this, I bet he’ll be kicking his heels. And later, we’ll laugh like we always do because life is better when you’re happy.

Last night was fitful and rife with dreams. I was looking for an apartment to live in and my aunt and my mother were guiding me away from a complex that was 30 years old. But the newest buildings were put up in the last four years, I insisted. No matter. They pointed out the precarious staircases where I’d tramp up and down alone in the dark night. And the buildings were by the water and an industrial park and just very echo-y and desolate.

I was alone. Where were my children? And this past week, Shaya’s been complaining that he hates school, that he is bored. Today, his teacher told me he’s been so angry this past week. My 3-year-old is angry, and I can’t sleep. In the bed, he was next to me, arrived there sometime late in the night, but still I couldn’t sleep. He was sound as a whistle.

There is nervous energy all around me today. I am interviewing Rebecca Rosen - am I nervous? Is there trepidation? She’s just a person, even though she speaks to Spirit for a living. Hell, I speak to Spirit, too, just not as well nor as frequently as she does.

On Friday, my ex-husband barraged me with accusations that I am not raising my children with Jewish values because we eat non-kosher food and drive on Saturday. He pointed his scrutiny wand at my family, saying they’re not Jewish enough. He yelled at our 7-year-old when he insisted he will marry for love and only love - religion be damned.

Is he beyond scrutiny? When did Spirituality and Heaven and God and Goodness become obscured by dogma and rules and stern fingers, judgmental gazes? It’s all I’ve ever known religion to be, even when I was trying to see the goodness in the strictures.

But surely, at the beginning, at the SOURCE, there was goodness and integrity and true connection with higher knowledge.

Why is it so hard for real people in this life to see that?

First begin your day by downloading Seth Godin’s free e-book here.

Then read it. If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I am a huge fan of Seth Godin and his innovative perspective on marketing and business. I push the Purple Cow whenever possible and revisit it periodically for a jump-start in my own business. It sits on my desk, behind my business check register and to the left of my computer. Suffice it to say, this book is a seminal text guiding me.

And so it was a no-brainer to download Seth’s book about What Matters Now when I found the link on ReadTheSpirit. He says:

We’re rewarded for being generous.

If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you.

If you make a difference, you also make a connection.

I’m also reading a preview copy of Rebecca Rosen’s book Spirited, which makes its debut February 2nd. She talks about finding the purpose in our lives and pursuing it. Because we’re all here to accomplish something and, as I tell my kids, to make the world a better place.

Each of us has something unique to contribute in our time on earth - if only we realized that mission and focused our light and energy in that direction, instead of spinning wheels like so many of us do.

Think about your daily life. What matters to YOU? Are you doing something of worth in your daily work? Do you make a difference in the lives of others? When you go to sleep at night, are you satisfied that you’ve done all you can possibly do to create a community of connected individuals, in love and with integrity?

Because if you answered “um…NO” to any of the above, you’d better stop in your tracks and recalibrate. Focus your energy in a new direction. The time is now and there is never enough time.

MLK Day, 2010

High atop one of the lone skyscrapers in suburban Detroit, a group of interfaith leaders convened on a gray cold day in January to brainstorm how various faith communities might work together to level the landscape. A landscape rife with separation and segregation, even all these years after the civil rights movement blazed its way through the nation.

Here in Detroit, we are still so separate. Never the two shall meet…and it cuts across various faith groups as much as intrafaith. I know well the divisions within my own Jewish world and I’ve never liked them.

But years ago, I believed that the separations between Jewish denominations was due to lack of understanding and a misguided view of how each community finds meaning.

I was wrong. One of the reasons we are all divided is that we wag our fingers and judge what the other does. And you know it’s true.

I lived for 8 years in the Orthodox world, subverting my liberal beliefs and hiding my questions about the practice of relegating women to behind-the-divider status. What, exactly, is the threat of a woman’s voice amid religious prayer? Why are men so fragile that they need protection from view and song of their feminine counterparts?

Are we not partners in this? And really, that question is not just about men and women in Orthodox observance, but it’s about Jew and Christian and Muslim and Ba’hai and all the various differences and “others” in this world of faith.

Are we not all saying the same thing - that we are not so arrogant as to believe the world starts and ends with us but that we were put here to make a  difference and to find meaning and to illuminate the path for those who are questioning?

Yes, we do the same thing, we hold the same beliefs and yet we separate ourselves out of fear and discomfort of the way the words sound in a different inflection, in a foreign language. It is, in a word, ridiculous. Think of how much more time and energy we would have if we did not pour it into anxiety and fear.

Last fall, in the sunny Saturday of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, I took my kids to the green landscape of Cranbrook. We hiked the grounds in open sun, under tall trees, beside the rippling lake. We climbed rocks, lay in the grass, ran among the gardens.

At the river in the back of the property, we sat on the bank and tore little pieces from stale bread to throw into the cascading waters as symbols of our “choices.” It’s an old ceremony known as tashlich, where the bread crumbs symbolize sins washed away in the fast-moving river.

Only for my young children, I changed the wording. “What choices would you like to make differently in the new year?” I asked them and I asked myself, and we took turns, from mother down to 3-year-old youngest, and we answered in earnest.

After, walking back among the gravel and trees, we were quieter, reflective. It was, for each of us, the most meaningful new year celebration of our lives. And our synagogue was open air, vast sky, bright sun.

There are many who would judge me for making this choice, but I relish in it - for it was the freedom of thought and a desire for meaning that propelled me to substantiate the celebration in a tactile way.

And that’s what I mean. I don’t care what others think because I’ve found my own meaning. And I’m not judging what they do either - stay in synagogue all day long, or find answers in all manner of faith groups. They’re yours for the choosing.

This life is not about finger-wagging and punishment. It’s about learning, building, refining and celebrating. All of our traditions teach us this in one way or another.

Today we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who wanted to level the playing field so all could play. It’s a message for every single one of us. If only our ears are able to hear it. 

Early on a Sunday morning, and she’d had enough of sleep. And so she climbed from the warm bed into the dark and cascaded down the stairs into the quiet house to find words for her tossing in the night.

The month of betrayal had ended, or was almost finished, and a new year had begun. She was nervous to trust people now - new friends, of course, but there had been an old friend, a very long-time person whom she thought she knew in excellent character, and still the betrayal had come.

It was like the darkness all around her - even with the lights on, shadows collected in corners and there were always going to be things she didn’t see.

The year had begun in quiet and she had only two goals: peace and simplicity. The prior year had ended in tumult - like a pinball game of people and work and time and money, all wrapped up in a cyclone-swirl of chaos and disbelief.

And now. She had found love. She had located clarity on a beach in Mexico. She had finally set parameters for her thoughts and her time and she was beginning to step back from telling every story to the world.

She operated now on a need-to-know basis.

In Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking, he proclaims that all of life revolves around questions of sex and death - the book-end opposites of passion and peace, of beginning and end, of creation and destruction.

She read those words and knew them to be true. And she wondered if the rest of time was filled with attempts to cheat one or find the other?

It was an early Sunday morning and the house was still. She would rush through another day and end with the same kind of quiet. Only she hoped that by day’s end, she would have silenced the echoes in her head and quieted her mind enough to gaze into sleep.

I had but a few minutes of quiet this morning from when I awoke until the kids came streaming into my room. And in that time, I pulled up the bamboo shade above my bed and watched the sky turn from sea-blue to pink to strings of yellow-white sun and a striking day in all its brightness right outside my window.

By then, Asher had arrived, and Eliana too. She with a book for us to read, Eric Carle’s Pancakes! Pancakes! We burrowed down into the blankets and then I found Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises on TV and we watched the toreador’s waving red at a fairly tame bull while a woman with a pillbox hat cheered from the stands.

And then Shaya slinked in, finding space between his sister and his brother, and Asher was reading The Hardy Boys. And so it was a good morning, a good beginning, on a slow day in January, just after the new year.

With the beginning of a decade and the ending of fear, I am hoping for peace and simplicity in 2010. I am paring down the clutter and the poisonous people and becoming highly selective of who gets close.

In 2009, I battled with individuals who lacked character. I struggled to fit them into the fold of my path but really, they never did. There are remnants, now, spilling over into the new space but as soon as I clear the air and banish the threads of poison from my midst, the sunrise will shine brighter, the snow gleam under the sun.

There is a flower the peeks up through the sun, determined as ever to fight for its very breath amid the death of winter. The crocus is beautiful, full of color, and strong. It noses its way through the snowbanks to see the light of the sun and feel the warmth of promise on the wind.

I have long believed in the infinite possibilities of each day. I refuse to believe in betrayal, even though it abounds all around me. I am truly a glass-half-full and it is into my aching words that I pour whatever discontent or disbelief I stumble over on this knotty path of life.

But life is good. It is the one true gift and one thing I took from my days in religion was a simple morning prayer, which recognizes in the sunrise, the very miracle of each new day, of the next breath coming, of morning as a new chance to start fresh.

It’s been a while since I’ve waxed poetic or philosophical or issued an unbridled rant - so, happy new year!

I used to walk through airports, wondering where people were going, why they were in such a hurry, imagining the stories behind the faces. And the faces - I admit, I grew up on 1980s pop culture brat pack movies and I believed beauty lurked in romance. Or maybe it was the other way around.

And I spent many years looking for the happy ending, the stunning match, the confirmation that life imitates movies or perhaps it was the other way around.

So last month, I ended a tumultuous year with four solo days in Mexico with a beach so vast and soft, I could have walked clear around the earth. In the early morning sun and in the setting sun at day’s end, I walked the sand, invigorated, inspired, ignited by the crash and ebb of ocean waves, marveling every time at the way it gave its gusto slam onto the shore only to pull back in retreat.

Again and again and again. The waves would always be there, rocking in shades of blue and screaming their utterances, then whispering them, too.

The marble floors were soothing. The winter-warm breezes like kisses. Sunshine, cloud cover, fish fresh from their catch, drinks sipped in soothing utterances. I read books. I took notes on Life As I Know It and sketched out Life As I Want It To Be.

And when I came home, this is what I had gathered:

* Every person should ask herself, if I could do anything, what would it be? Then do that thing.

* Instincts are the most powerful force we have. Listen to them.

* Money ceases to matter when there is no meaning attached. And even so, money comes and money goes. Shoot for the meaning.

I once read a very thin book of Jewish scriptural thought called Thou Shalt Not Want. It explained the Talmudic perspective on income, which was basically that if you exert the exact amount of effort required for whatever your task in life is, you will be fine.

You can kill yourself to work overtime, but that doesn’t mean you’ll end up with more cash jingling in your pocket. You can shlub around and do the bare minimum, but we all know that won’t cut it either.

The whole perspective, summed up in less than 120 pages, was, do what is required of you and you’ll be taken care of. Not a sit-and-let-the-Higher-Being-provide way of looking at things. A strive-for-balance-and-you’ll-get-happiness approach to the necessity of working for a living.

In this new year, this new decade, this second-third-fourth chance at starting over and creating new beginnings, do what really matters. Only you know what that is so only you can measure your success.

And banish all those outside voices. If they don’t get you, they never will.

from The Globe and Mail, June 27, 2009: “The authentic soul of Canada is the wilderness … A Canadian is someone who knows how to have sex in a canoe… If you want to feel truly Canadian, you’ve got to get out there and learn to paddle a canoe.”

I don’t know if any of the above is true, but I do know from spending a brief week last summer in the far southwest corner of Canada, that identity is all tied up in the water and the wilderness and the vessels that can safely take you from one point to the next. I personally hate canoeing - but I have never really considered what exactly cements my identity.

Is there something symbolic, some food, some task, some color, some hobby?

Consider this, from David Grossman, “The Age of Genius,” which appeared in the New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2009:

“When I first heard about the life cycle of salmon, I felt that there was something very Jewish about it: that inner signal which suddenly resonates in the consciousness of the fish, bidding them to return to the place where they were born, the place where they were formed as a group. (There may also be something very Jewish in the urge to leave that homeland and wander all over the world - that eternal journey.)”

And later, in Saveur, in a story about Sheila Lukins, coauthor of The Silver Palate Cookbook: “Sheila’s love of cooking and her belief in its ability to enrich lives not only got her through tough situations - it was contagious.”

Food as a transmitter of identity, of experience, of relationship, of love - that’s not a novel concept but it is a true and powerful one. In feeding someone, in preparing a meal together and savoring the flavors, we are nourishing our souls.

Dana Goodyear wrote in “The Scavenger,” a New Yorker article from November 9, 2009, “Interesting cuisine often comes out of poverty…serve some actual hunger people have, rather than something they tell themselves they must have.”

It’s no secret that culture and identity are conveyed through the foods we eat. Our lifelong preferences harken back to our earliest days. Our tendencies, our proclivities, our choices - they all represent deep-seated feelings and desires, the desire to be ok, the desire to be loved, the desire to be a part of something significant.

When I was in college and in love with John, we’d banter back and forth about identity and faith. “How can you be so Jewish if you don’t know anything about it?” he challenged one day in his rented room with shaggy brown carpet. Queensryche ballads played on the stereo. His electric guitar stood at repose under the bunkbed.

But it was not an honest question. I mean it was, but there is so much more to who we are than what we know.

And the food part of this - in children’s books, the greatest punishment a parent can bestow is to send a child to bed without supper. Why? Because there is no possibility of withholding love or money or sex, all the things we as adults toy with in an effort toward control and power. Children are pure and innocent and simple - and their need to receive love, and to give it, is vast.

My children have said simple things in moments of crisis. When I’ve felt sad or angry or frustrated or self-doubting, one of them will say, “Well then why are you fill-in-the-blank, Mommy? Do something else, befriend someone else, go somewhere else.” Simple. And true.