May I Have Your Attention Please?

I remember driving my car to my last exam before fall break in 1999.  I was hoping to arrive early to cover my notes and calm myself before class started.  I was listening to the radio when I changed stations and heard people talking and crying.  It was a replay of people giving interviews the night before after they had witnessed the tragedy in Fort Worth, Texas at Wedgwood Baptist Church.  A lone gunman had entered the sanctuary and had started shooting and killed and injured many people.  My heart stopped.  My ex-boyfriend and his friends were playing in a band that performed there that night.  I drove as quickly as I could to my school so I could call someone, anyone, to find out if they were alive, injured, or worse – dead.  I was so relieved to find out that the entire band had survived uninjured. Unfortunately, their spirits would remember this day forever.

Many years later, I was working in a firm and went into the lunch room to get some coffee.  Everyone was glued to the TV sets as the news casted the horrifying scene of another lone gunman at Virginia Tech.  I had lived and worked in DC and knew many people who graduated from there.  I hoped that none of them had family members there.  I later learned that a colleague from my DC office was the parent to a child who was in the building (yes, I can call a college student a child when a gunman is involved).  Fortunately, the child was one of only two people who survived.  Unfortunately, the nightmares of what was witnessed would stay forever.  I also remember the news stations airing the video the gunman had made after an episode of American Idol.  I had no idea they were showing it and caught a second of it before crying so hard I literally got sick.  The evil was too much for me to bear.

I do not understand these situations.  Now, hearing about what happened in Aurora, Colorado, my head and heart are put into a fetal position of misunderstanding of the world in which we live.   If you cannot go to church, school or even a movie without being in danger – then where can you go? How does someone do something like this?  I know there is evil in the world.  But, we cling to our spiritual guidance counselors, Bibles, Torah, Buddha, God, Jesus, Ashram, Temple, etc – so we can try to be at peace and hope we never face the same fate.  We hope that we are protected from that kind of evil, as well as committing that kind of evil.

I imagine that the gunman doesn’t wake up one day and decide to do this.  Somewhere along their life a seed of evil is planted.  Then it is nourished, watered, given sun and all that it needs to grow and spawn more evil in the heart and brain of the person.  We can venture guesses as to what nourishes and breeds evil.  We may say it’s the TV, newspapers and magazines feeling the need to inform us of these gunmen but slowly they desensitize our brains to the travesty.  Or perhaps we think it’s from playing video games where shooting a 
computerized gun at a cartoon allows them to feel no emotion or empathy to the point that 
when in front of a real person with a family and future, they have no problem shooting.   Conceivably there is the notion that some of them want the glory and fame of being notorious – because there is no such thing as bad fame to them.

I heard a quote on a TV show the other day that stated “guns are meant to kill.  If you don’t 
want to kill someone, don’t use a gun”.  I know there are very responsible people out there 
who are educated on guns and teach their families well on using them.  Unfortunately, not 
everyone is taught this – so perchance some of these gunmen were not taught about treating guns with respect and the understanding of all the devastation they can inflict.

Maybe these gunmen were loners in school.  They were avoided by the girls because they 
made the girls uncomfortable.  Possibly they were bullied by the boys.  Teachers did not call 
on them and perhaps found their comments or essays rather odd.  As they grew up, they had little to no friends.  I cannot even imagine what their families were like.  But, maybe if they 
had someone offer some attention, things would have been different?

There are often debates about guns’ existence.  This is not a political debate about this.  Some believe in gun control and some don’t.  But either way you believe, you may join me in appreciating something Tom Selleck said many years ago.  I am paraphrasing here but the point was this:  "Guns were more accessible 40 years ago.  If people wanted to commit suicide, they did in their homes.  Today, if someone is suicidal, they sit at home, nurse their grievance, develop a rage, and then take 20 innocent lives with them. There is something changing in our culture."

There is something changing in our culture around the world.  This is not a problem only in 
America.  So, here is one solution I want to put out there.  We need to pay more attention,
folks.  My mother always says that if she had her life to live over again, the one thing she 
would change would be to pay more attention.  So, let’s pay more attention now.  Not only 
will we look for the loneliest kids who may be crying out for help, but we will be honest with ourselves as well.  We will look inwards at our own families, at our children, and make sure 
we are giving value to all emotions our kids are trying to communicate to us.

I have been reading a book that discusses in depth about the power of validating your children’s emotions; how just one comment about understanding them can change the outcome of their behavior when they are in the middle of a meltdown.  Isn’t that how we all are?  How reassuring it is when someone else verbalizes what we think but we are too afraid to say.  How comforting it is to be able to talk out what we feel and have someone else listen to us and not force their opinions on us, but actually listen to us and express that they understand how we feel.

I truly believe that all everyone in the world wants is to be loved, to feel understood and to be accepted.  If someone grows up festering evil in their hearts and heads it could be because they feel they have no love to give or receive.  They may feel they have no value – that their emotions and thoughts make them odd, abnormal and evil.  Please, let’s all pay attention to our kids – whether our own, our children’s schoolmates, our friends’ children, or children we know from where we live.  Let’s pay attention to our neighbors, friends, colleagues and fellow world citizens.  Let's pay attention to the lone kid or adult who seems to have nobody else in their life.  We need to make this a priority every day because we do not get a chance to live our lives over to pay more attention – we have to do it now!

The Back of the Head

They say breaking up is hard to do.  I think for some, it’s rather easy.   Think about the breaking up part.  It doesn’t really take that long and it can be like a shot in the arm – it’s painful, it shoots through your blood and veins and may even leave swelling and bruises along with drawing some blood.  It’s the recovery that’s really hard.  But here’s the thing – when someone breaks up with you, at least you know they are breaking it off.  It’s hard to see a romance end as well as the potential of lifetime love and partnership.  However, if someone you considered to be your friend has ended your relationship and does not even tell you – well that is just cruel and unusual punishment. 

When a friend cuts off communication with you, your head just doesn’t go directly to “they don’t want to be friends anymore”.  At first, you worry.  You fear your friend could be ill or perhaps lost someone close to him or her.  You call, leave messages or email, because, up until then, you were always comfortable doing so.  You never get the feeling that you could be bothering your friend or sounding pathetic or desperate – this person has always been your friend, your head just doesn’t go there.  What comes next is keeping your ears open.  Maybe you have friends in common, work together or run into each other in town.  Maybe someone can tell you if something terrible happened to your friend. You are still worried; you think something must have happened because, otherwise, your friend would have called you, right?  After a while, your head starts to go there.  Did my friend break up with me?

Our friends are the family we choose.  We want to be around them, to share our lives with them and watch their lives unfold.  We support and encourage each other and help each other out as we navigate through life’s challenges.  It’s so great to have someone to share your time with – especially as you start a family and your children become friends too.  If you are really lucky, you have friends who are honest with you.  They help you grow to become the people you are capable of becoming. 

Have you ever been to a hair stylist and after they are finished, they give you a mirror so you can see the back of your head?  It’s an interesting parallel to friends.  It’s truly the one part of your body you cannot see without really looking at yourself in the mirror with another mirror in your hand.   That’s what friends do for us, if they are good friends.  They are the mirror we use to see the back of our heads.  If a friend does not want to be friends with us anymore, why can’t they tell us why?  We have invested our time into each other – be it coffee, dinner, play dates, shopping trips, what have you.  If there were no warning signs, no arguments, nothing you maliciously did to your friend – why can’t they just say what changed?  If a friend wants to break up with us, we can take it.  It’s the cowardice in not saying anything and hiding behind unreturned messages that we cannot take.  Not to mention, if your children and their children are friends, you are no longer hurting your ex-friend, but you are hurting your children’s friends as well.

Friendships change just as our lives change.  Time gets in our way and we lose touch with people we used to have tons of time in which to give.  As time slips by, we start to think an email just won’t cover our lapse.  We believe that we need to make a phone call that gives us enough time to catch up – but our lives, our families, or our jobs get in the way.  Before we know it, so much time has passed we fear our friend may feel hurt or angry and no longer wants to hear from us.  Believe me; we do want to hear from friends we lost contact with.  Why do you think Facebook – the pinnacle of friendship management – has been such a huge success?

In this modern age of thousands of ways to communicate and hundreds of technological devices in which to communicate, how can we ever justify leaving a friend in the mental limbo of wondering why you aren’t friends anymore?  I challenge all of us to go through our contact lists and just drop a note, an email or a voicemail to reconnect with our wayward friends.  If we know someone that we know calls us their friend, and we no longer want to call them our friend, then let’s be adults and just say so.  It can be the best departing gift we can give to our ex-friend. 

Great Unexpectations

Tonight was a typical scene for a family.  My husband is away on an overnight business trip and I am at home counting the milliseconds until the kids are in bed.  I never have a plan for what to do once they are in bed, but it usually includes watching Law & Order reruns in what is one of my few hours of the week not dictated by play dates, cooking, cleaning, shopping or activity planning for the kids.  My son was in a mood to push the envelope, as he seems to be when my husband is out of town, and was taking his time getting to the bathroom to get ready for bed.  My patience had ended by the time we got into his bed for me to read him his nighttime book.  I just wanted to finish the book and get out of the room to start my “me time”.  He was in the mood to ask every question that came to mind upon closely observing every detail of every picture in the book I was reading.  This is when it hit me, how awful and childish I was behaving.

My son is amazing to me.  He is two months shy of turning four years old.  He is very mature and well behaved so often, that I am spoiled when he acts up.  It’s like rain coming down once a month after days of beautiful weather.  I am unappreciative of the sunny days at the first sight of a raindrop.  It’s an unfair attitude for me to have.  There I am in my son’s bedroom – which is a glorious world of all things little boy – and I am treating him like a project that came in just before I was going to clock out for the day.  I forget that he is a little boy and incapable of being mature at all hours of the day.  I mean, Lord knows I am incapable of being mature at all hours of the day, so why not cut my boy some slack? 

What are my expectations of my son?  He is so flipping awesome for his age: learning to ride a bike without training wheels, able to speak German and English fluently, his recall of details and people, and his amazing ability to bake cupcakes without my help.  Why would I expect even more of this amazing creature?  Perhaps my expectations of him would be better if I would let up on the expectations I have of myself as well.

We all do this, don’t we?  We have insane expectations of ourselves to the point that we no longer consider our humanity.  We seem to feel we are super-human and can take all the demands we place upon ourselves – like a donkey going up a mountain with 20 suitcases.  When I look back on my day today, I believe I had an opportunity to lie down and actually rest.  However, at the time I thought I did not need it.  I felt energized and was not even in need of an afternoon coffee.  What I should have been able to predict is that, while, at that time I was giving the Energizer Bunny a run for its money, I should have saved my energy to be in a more grateful place for my son later on that day.

I think we all need to ease up on the job descriptions we place upon ourselves and embrace our flaws and limitations.  We seem to feel we need to have the careers, houses, money, what have you – to deem ourselves productive.  Why do we look at those 20 minutes of free time during the day and say, what else can I accomplish for the outside world rather than ask, what can I accomplish for ME? Remember me- the one who should come before everyone and everything else?

We need to give ourselves permission to ease up on the reins and allow some things in our life to go unplanned and unexpected.  If we try to constantly force our expectations into our lives, like cramming a foot into a shoe that is the wrong size, then we are putting life’s blessings into a corner where we can’t see them.   There is the possibility that I need to realize that Donna Reed cleaned a house wearing pearls and cooked enormous amounts of food all while keeping her cool because she was a fictional character.  As a mother, I need to be present for me and my family, but I cannot if I am wearing myself out trying to live up to an ideology that cannot exist except in a 1950’s TV show.

I saw this comic the other day and thought it was a perfect ideal to remember:

It is hard to keep your children alive and healthy! You have to watch for all signs of illnesses, keep them hydrated, keep their diet full of nutrition and vitamins and keep them on a routine that allows them to get all the sleep their growing minds and bodies need.  So why on earth do we need to put so many expectations on ourselves to churn out these super busy, ambitious children?  Why do we feel we need to be more as a parent than we are?  Why don’t we all pat ourselves on the back and say “Good job!” and sit back and just breath and revel in our glory.  Perhaps then, we can enjoy all the great moments in life that come in the best unplanned and unexpected packages.  Otherwise, we end up making our lives equal to that of a donkey, otherwise known as an ass.  J