In the Way

The picture above is a custom here in Germany when couples get married.  My neighbor and his boyfriend are getting married tomorrow, though the law here would state something along the lines of “being legally recognized as a same sex union”. Since 2001, homosexual couples have had most of the legal rights as heterosexual couples.  As of 2009, they have had all the legal rights.  The terminology is a bit different but this appeased the Christians here as the word marriage was not used in the law.  I think the United States could learn from this.

When I think about love, I think of all the pain and beauty it encompasses.  I have loved and lost many times in my life.  I had a marriage end that crushed my soul into pieces.  It took years to rebuild myself and the right person to trust with my heart.  I looked and looked for love.  I tried blind dates, fix ups, and even online dating.  I did everything I could to rebuild my heart and soul and to learn what love was to me, so that I would recognize it in someone else.  The moment I met my husband, I felt a vacuum force pulling me towards him that I had never felt in my life.  His heart pulled my heart to his like a magnet.  My heart told me, I could love him and trust him with my fragile, bruised heart forever.

Love is so very hard to find, to grow, to trust and build.  Who am I to tell anyone that they cannot love the person who fits their heart?  What God tells me, my heart and soul, is private.  What He tells me is not what He tells others.  I have to keep my head down to hear my heart – what it tells me about my life. It is a daily path that I have to take and one I cannot keep if I focus on everyone else’s path.  What other people do in their lives, with their hearts and souls are private.  It is not my business to stand in their way.

I love the movie “Under the Tuscan Sun”.  In this movie, the lead character is a woman trying to rebuild her life after a heart breaking divorce.  She finds love in a new house that she renovates, in new friends in Italy, in the birth of a friend’s baby and she finds hope that love will once again find her.  Mostly it is a movie about finding love in places we forget to look (like Germany, in my case)  J I am lucky, I found my Tuscan sun the day I met my husband.  Who am I to stand in the way of someone else finding theirs? 

A heart is not gay or straight.  A heart loves fiercely and passionately.  A heart loves with all its might, power and brightness that it can muster.  Giving a heart to another person is so very scary.  It does not come easily and it is the most vulnerable place we can be as we hope our hearts will be loved in return.  Who am I to stand in the way of other people’s hearts?  Who am I to stand in the way of love when it is so very hard to find in the first place?  Maybe we should just all get out of everyone else's way.

We Gather Together

The other day I was cleaning after cooking Shepards Pie for dinner and broke my casserole dish.  This was not just any dish, but my favorite dish.  Murphy’s Law, and my mother, always said that you never break things you hate to use. 

My mother gave me this dish ten years ago for my first Thanksgiving away from my family and I was cooking a meal for my friends for the first time.  Fortunately for them, I had ordered my turkey precooked, so there was no chance of that dish going wrong.  I love to cook, but the thought of taking on a Turkey is right up there with reaching the summit of Everest.  This casserole dish, however, was used for something I could master:  my green bean casserole.  I had bought Stove Top Stuffing, which is always a success, and had no trouble making sweet potatoes with marshmallows.  As my friends gathered around the very small table in the kitchen of my house, we were grateful we had each other to share our holiday as we were all away from our families.

As I looked at my broken dish, I was brought back to my mom’s kitchen the night before Thanksgiving. This was always a busy time in our house and I loved to watch my mom work.  I would help her lay out the slices of bread so they could get stale overnight, making them perfect for her homemade stuffing.  I would watch as she washed the Turkey and prepped it to be roasted in the very early morning.  I was mesmerized by all the vegetables she would chop, all the things she would remember us needing for the all the food she would cook. We would set the tables: one for the adults and one for the kids.  My favorite part was when she would make the dessert.  No, this was not pumpkin or pecan pie.  This was what we call “Purple Stuff”.  This is a raspberry and blackberry Jell-o mixed with grape juice and crushed pineapple served with a cream cheese whipped cream on top.  My mom was, and still is, a master at the Thanksgiving meal.

There was a family that would join us, which we now consider our family.  Their mom and mine had worked together when we first moved to Texas.  They knew we had no family nearby and had invited us over to their house for Thanksgiving, and then we reciprocated with inviting them for Christmas.  The next year started our tradition of my parents hosting Thanksgiving.  The first year it was only three of them, their younger son had not yet been born.  Years later, it would be their younger son who would name my mom’s Jell-O-o dessert “Purple Stuff”.  Sometimes my uncle and cousins would come out to join us.  I always loved seeing them and catching up on our lives.

Our Thanksgiving Day tradition would be for them to come over around noon so we could eat before the Dallas Cowboys played.  Growing up in Dallas, this was an essential part of our festivities.  My mom’s turkey would always be the perfect amount of juicy and tender.  Along with the turkey, we would have my mom’s stuffing, dinner rolls, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole, and broccoli cheese rice casserole.  (Are you hungry now?) J After our big meal, the dads would watch The Game, and nap a bit throughout, and the moms and kids would head out to see a movie.  Afterwards we would come back home, heat up leftovers and make turkey sandwiches followed by pie.

I believe our first Thanksgiving together had to be around 1979 or 1980 (I’m sure someone in my family will correct me on this).  We must have had 20-25 Thanksgiving meals together. Now all of us kids are grown with families and our parents are now grandparents.  Our lives have gone in all different kinds of directions, but our hearts always come back to the memories of our holidays together.  Living overseas, people always ask me if I am homesick at Christmas.  But, truthfully, I am homesick at Thanksgiving, as no country in Europe celebrates it. I miss the hugs as we said hello and good-bye, the liveliness of conversations around the table, and the really good food. I am so very thankful for all the work my mother did making Thanksgiving so special to all of us, and for all the work she did to make it something we could count on.  This year I will attempt to make my very first whole turkey and attempt to make it a holiday for my family here in Germany.  I hope I can pull it off at least half as well as my mother could.

My wish for all of you, as you gather together, is that the memories you are making are etched in your hearts so that you will have fondness to look back upon.  For those who are separated from their loved ones, whether due to distance or heaven, I hope your hearts are filled with times shared around the Thanksgiving table.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

A Different Kind of Day

On July 18, 2007 I stood in the lobby of the 14^th floor of the Chrysler Center in New York City where my firm held offices.  It was five o’clock and I was leaving early.  Usually if I left work at five, it was at five in the morning.  However, the partner I was working for insisted that I leave after having submitted a huge project.  So I was standing there with my tote bag filled with my laptop and high heels and was wearing my comfortable flip flops to make my commute home.   I was trying to decide if I should take the elevator that just opened and others were stepping onto, or if I should go to the restroom instead of waiting until I was in my apartment all the way in the Financial District.  My sister always has said to never miss an opportunity to go to the restroom, because you never know when you get another chance, so the restroom won the debate.  As I was washing my hands, I heard a large amount of commotion in the hallways.  It sounded a bit like fits of laughter, so I thought someone had pulled a prank – a rather common occurrence amongst my colleagues.  I came out to see what the ruckus was regarding when my friend Sandra grabbed my hand and said, “Come, we have to evacuate!” and she pulled me into the stairwell.  I really did not have time to consider anything so I took off my flip flops and proceeded down the stairs along with hoards of others coming from their respective floors. I had no idea what had happened and so I asked.  A stranger said, “There was a bomb explosion at the top of the Chrysler”.  It was a chaotic stampede but really quiet.  It was if everyone felt they were running towards doom rather than escaping it.  The sounds we heard were like a loud, metal groan and I had heard this described before by survivors of the World Trade Centers. 

I took out my cell phone to call my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time and was all the way in Germany, where he is from.  It was two o’clock in the morning there, so he had to wake up to my somewhat panicked voice asking him to put on the news and tell me what was going on in New York.  I felt surely there had to be reports already and that maybe his information could help us plan what to do once we came out of the building.  He said nothing was on the news, but that European news was a bit late on U.S. happenings.  So I told him that I was not sure, that some people were saying it was a bomb, and that I loved him and I hoped I would see him again.  Yes, it sounds a bit melodramatic now, but when you are evacuating a building in New York because someone tells you that a bomb went off, your mind just goes there. I called my parents next to ask if there was anything on the news and as they were looking on the TV, our phones lost connections.  My friend Melinda could not get back to her husband.  We all lost our cell services.  Again, our minds went there.

As we ran and ran, we started to get a bit delirious.  We were only running down 14 floors, but the doors were numbered in an odd fashion.  We came to door 4 of floor 6 and one lady thought that meant we were at floor 46 and she said, “We’re running the wrong way! We have to turn around and go the other way!” She truly thought we had to run up the stairs to exit.  A friend of hers had to slap her to calm her down and two men helped her down the stairs as she cried hysterically saying she wanted to see her son.  We could all tell that her mind went there.

After many painful flights of running, we finally started to see light as people had opened the emergency exit door, which was beeping painfully.  I was not prepared for what I saw next.  Across the street from where we came out was a very large black building.  It was no longer visible as a cloud of smoke stood in front of it.  We thought it must have collapsed.  The clouds of smoke that poured out were large and kept pouring out.  It was a very familiar site.  I watched a cab driver get out of his car and just run.  A woman got out of her car, grabbed her baby from the back seat and ran – leaving her car behind.  We all started to run.  People were dropping their belongings and shoes and anything else that might anchor them.  I put my heels back on because I could run better than in flip flops.  We ran for five blocks until it seemed that the smoke was far enough away and not that visible.  We could see smoke at the top of the Chrysler and we thought a bomb must have gone off there too.

How long it took for us to meet up with other colleagues of ours is really not certain.  Some of us still had no cell service, but some blackberries could email and some could send text messages.  We all found each other in front of a Vietnamese grocery store where our colleague J.J. had finally heard the details of what had happened.  It was not a bomb, the building had not collapsed, and the top of the Chrysler was still intact.  It had been raining most of the day and rain always causes troubles with the steam pipe system in the city by causing breaks in the pipes or even explosions.  (The pipe that broke by my building that morning resulted in, yet, another cold shower). Normally a steam pipe explosion won’t create this much damage.  However, one steam pipe exploded in an intersection and hit some electrical components for the subways and intersection, so the steam had extreme temperatures to propel clouds of smoke up the 77 stories of the Chrysler.  There was a poor man in a pickup truck in the intersection at the time and the explosion had swallowed his entire truck into the underground.  Thankfully, he survived.  What we did not know at the time was that only 18 people were injured and one person had died of a heart attack from the shock of the explosion.  The damage to the surrounding buildings would put offices out of work for months and some of the subway stops would not be permitted in Grand Central Station until damages were repaired. 

We had to walk as taking a taxi, bus or subway seemed impossible.  We walked for 50 blocks, at least.  I was grateful I had my comfortable flip flops, as I know my girlfriends were aching in their heels.  One of them was daring enough to go barefoot in the city streets to relieve the pain.  Most of my colleagues lived in Jersey, so we walked to Port Authority and across the bridge until we found a restaurant in which we could collapse, drink margaritas and calm ourselves from the perceived reality into the actual reality of what we had experienced.  Looking back, I am thankful I followed my sister’s advice as I would have been on the awaiting elevator and leaving the building at the exact point of where the explosion took place.  Only God knows what fate I would have been dealt in that scenario. 

Later that night, I took a cab back to the Financial District.  The police were still not counting out terrorism as a culprit, so I had to show identification and proof of where I lived.  Ironically, I lived a half block from Ground Zero.  If the Trade Centers had remained standing, they would have been visible from my apartment’s living room window.  I did not know what else to do but cry.  I cried for feeling like a fool and for feeling terrorized when there was no need to have been.  I cried because without even trying or executing a plan, the terrorists pulled on the hearts and fears of New York City. I cried because all of our minds went there.

As we come to the eleventh year of the day that will live in infamy, the day when thousands of people’s lives changed forever in New York, Washington D.C. and Harrisburg. I want to ask all of us to try to strengthen our will and minds, and to not allow this day to become an Achilles’ heel.  Let’s remember the lives of the people that were lost that day, but let’s also allow the terrorism to lie with the rubble of the Trade Centers.  Let’s not allow the terrorism to live or to even be remembered anymore.   Even further, let’s not terrorize ourselves anymore.  Let’s make today a different kind of day.

A Chick's Shoes

You cannot avoid hearing about the controversy involving Chick-fil-A and the gay community these days.  I normally would avoid something this combative, but this is one situation in which I cannot avoid saying something.  What I would like to do here is show some perspective from both sides.  I believe this has been the proverbial making a mountain out of a molehill in some regards but unfortunately, there is a mountain in the room and the gay and Christian communities need to climb it.

First, let’s take a look at Chick-fil-A. This is a very successful fast food chain that has kept no secrets about their Christianity. I have admired their tenacity to adhere to their Christian moral code in being closed on Sundays in a strong capitalistic country – which I took as an indication that following God was more important to them than profits. It is probably this code they follow that gives them the confidence to support anti-gay marriage organizations and politicians, as well as making comments in interviews. 

On July 16, COO of Chick-fil-A (CFA) Dan Cathy was interviewed by The Baptist Press on his views about family.  This is what his response was: 

“We are very much supportive of the family – the Biblical definition of the family unit.  We are a family-owned business and we are married to our first wives.  We give God thanks for that.”

If you knew nothing of Cathy and CFA before this, you might not read that much into this.  But the gay community knew about the company’s past support against them having rights to marry, so this seemingly benign comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  From a legal standpoint, Cathy and the CFA Company have done nothing illegal.  However, when someone owns a company that has that much influence and is considered an unofficial spokesperson for the Christians and Republican conservatives, then Cathy should have considered making such comments could offend the gay rights activists.  He should have known that being in the public eye, he has to consider his ability to spark and ignite a fire on what is one of the most sensitive issues being debated in America today.

As soon as the gay rights activists voiced their anger over what Cathy stated, the CFA supporters emerged and the two groups together went into a battle, drawing sides.  The CFA side has Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee and almost every Christian stating it was Cathy’s right of free speech and they agree with him.  What seems to have gotten out of hand, in my opinion, is the governments’ involvement in refusing CFA licenses to expand into cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston.

But let’s look at the heart of this.  Most Christians are against gay marriage.  There are even some Christians who believe that being gay is a choice and that people who have chosen to be gay can be counseled to change their life’s choice.  Having grown up in a church, I learned that there is nothing that scares a Christian community more than the fear of the world in which they live turning more and more towards sin.  As the U.S. is starting to make changes by some schools not allowing prayer, groups trying to take the word God out of the Pledge of Allegiance and other historical lyrics – some Christians are feeling abandoned by their country.  In the media, it’s OK for athletes and musicians to recognize God, but it is not OK for a Christian to voice an opinion that appears to be anti-Democrat.  The Christian community’s hands are tied in trying to have affirmation and support to be who they want to be.  Some have become more and more vocal against any group of people who they feel represent the sin they do not want in their world.  I believe this has created a large amount of hostility in the Christian community.

Here is where my concern lies:  Christians are creating the world they want to live without realizing they are limiting God.  If a Christian is truly strong in their walk with God, a sinful environment should not matter.  If they feel they are in a world of sin, they should cling to God to keep themselves close to Him and His path and not get caught up in pointing fingers at others.  The God I learned about in church would say to “love the sinner, hate the sin” but I am seeing many Christians hating the sinner in both this situation and in others.  This hypocrisy is what is making being a Christian and fighting for gay rights mutually exclusive.

On the flip side, the gay community has been privy to violence, hatred and intolerance that mirrors what African-Americans endured during segregation.  For a person to believe they were born gay, to want to live their life authentically and then to have a large majority telling them they are not normal and are sinners has to be the loneliest feeling in the world.  There is a lot of reason for a gay person to have pent up anger and hostility.

 I was victim to verbal abuse when I was a kid, so I refuse to pick on anyone­; I cannot and will not declare hatred towards anyone trying to be who they feel they are.  The God and church I grew up with have taught me to love everyone.  I cannot get so caught up in evaluating whether another person is living “sinfully” because I am trying to be sure I am not.  I am trying to help my children to know God and themselves so that they will feel accepted and loved and hopefully so they can express the same to others, regardless of religion or sexual orientation.

I know why CFA angered and hurt the gay community.  It is just as much their right to express their offense as it is Cathy’s right to express his views.  Freedom of speech has to be extended to all Americans, even if we don’t like what is stated.  I think the governments in Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston see what CFA is doing as being against the protected class of “sexual orientation” and that they would have had the same response to license refusal if CFA made a sexist or racial comment or shown support to sexist or racial groups.  Whether this is the issue is for the courts, judges and juries to decide.

At the core of the gay community are people struggling with sexual identity.  A person who believes he or she is gay has to endure heartbreaking loneliness and fear.  They feel no one will accept them and they have seen the violence against some gay people and I imagine they are afraid. 

At the core of the Christian community are people struggling with their spiritual identity. They are trying to sort out why they believe what they believe.  DC Talk, a famous Christian music group, once wrote a part of a song that stated:

“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.  This is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

I don’t think this applies only to atheists, but to anyone struggling with God and spirituality and may be put off from seeing Christianity as a loving relationship with God if God’s representatives keep a lifestyle that is comprised of calling others sinners, using hateful comments or simply making others feel inferior.  If there is someone struggling with trying to find Christians to look up to, to give them an example of God’s love – then they may feel like an outcast and unwelcome if they are seeing actions that lead them to believe God’s love is conditional.  For those who need someone to cling to in this world of hate and sin, how lonely and scared a person must feel in the midst of how some Christians are behaving.

What I believe we really have here are two groups that have more in common than they realize.  Both feel lonely, misunderstood, abnormal, unaccepted, full of frustration, anger and resentment – and living in a world where their governments do not always support their ways of life.  If you live in America today, you have to resolve to be respectful of others who are different.  You do not have to accept, understand, or adopt these differences, but you need to learn to respect them.  You need to learn to see all people as children of God (or whatever deity in which you believe).  As you go on through this media fueled controversy, try to rise above it – show love – and put on the shoes of the other side and show compassion – just as God would.

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