Mary LoVerde wasn't a bad mother. She was horrible. LoVerde came home after a long day at the office, flopped in a chair, punched the message button on the answering machine and heard the baby sitter for her then 5-year-old son Nicholas say he was humiliated because he was the only child among 20 in his preschool class without a Halloween costume and he cried and clung to her leg and wanted to go home.

"I felt I was the worst parent on the planet," LoVerde told hundreds of participants Saturday at the first Wyoming Women's Expo at the Casper Events Center.

The Denver-area woman juggled a career, husband, three children, an elderly mother-in-law.

But that day, her Supermom cape fell off in mid-flight.

"I vowed I would never let my life get out of balance," LoVerde said.

So LoVerde, a nurse practitioner and head of the hypertension research department at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, applied her research skills to the common strategies suggested for a successful life.

She had managed, organized, delegated, prioritized, simplified and had the to-do lists to prove it.

They could work, but she found that for every one hour she saved through efficiency, another 10 hours of demands were in hot pursuit, she said.

Instead of abstract management techniques, she looked to relationships and enjoy feeling good about them, she said. "When you can't keep up, connect."

LoVerde's quest for finding balance came down to three words: "Connection creates balance."

She's written several books with strategies for people to apply that phrase including "Stop Screaming at the Microwave: How to Connect your Disconnected Life"; "Touching Tomorrow"; and "I Used to Have a Handle on Life But It Broke." She takes her message on the road 50 times a year in speaking engagements, and has appeared on several national television shows including four stints on Oprah.

Before her talk, LoVerde said she didn't actually scream at a microwave oven, but found herself telling it to hurry up.

During her talk, she elicited audience comments so people could begin learning how to connect.

People spoke about their passions - politics, colors, beauty, teaching - and how they fostered connections with others.

Work is a passion, too, but LoVerde said she's seen the darker side of that.

While working in an emergency room, a man suffering from a heart attack arrived and LoVerde's and his eyes locked, but not about his condition, she said.

"He wanted a cell phone to call a client," LoVerde said.

This dying patient wasn't even connected with his own body, she said.

LoVerde asked about rituals and audience members responded with their methods - watching a special television show, prayer, and preparations for sporting events - that help them focus themselves.

She encouraged the audience to connect with their elders through video- or audio-taped interviews and through "memory jars" with personal notes about events in their lives, she said. "I know that our elders need to know their lives had meaning, and I also know that we intuitively know that what shapes their lives shapes ours."

Romance, too, offers a way to connect although not just in the traditional sense, LoVerde said.

Romance means beauty, order, lace, china, perfume, art, literature, language and the finer things that enhance life, she said.

"We don't want to die, and what we've got left behind are a stack of to-do lists that have all been crossed out," LoVerde said.

After her talk, she signed books and asked her listeners what they learned.

Ruth Ann Baures said she'll quit trying to do so much and wants to do more for her elderly friends such as making videotapes of their lives.

In the long run, children don't remember the efforts made to create perfect holiday occasions as much as they remember the talks with their loved ones, Baures said. "Connecting with what you're passionate about makes you who you are."

Reporter Tom Morton can be reached at (307) 266-0592, or at Tom.Morton@casperstartribune.net.