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

Show Business

Show up for yourself – these are the words written in an article by my favorite blog writer, Glennon Melton of www.momastery.com (so worth checking out!) It’s rather ironic timing as I have been trying to find my muse for writing a new article.  Glennon was on vacation and I was not feeling passionate about any particular subject, and low and behold, her first full article after her vacation inspires me.  So, she is the Scarlett Johansen to my Woody Allen; except I don’t really believe I am Woody Allen.

Show up for yourself; how do you do that?? I mean, how does a mother of two little ones living in a foreign country on maternity leave do that? How does someone in today’s society really do that?  With all the quotes I see posted by my friends on Facebook lately, I noticed the predominant theme is about change – to change us for the better.  But if we aren’t showing up for ourselves, how do we know that we do need to change; what do we need to change; why do we need to change?

I think we all have our own triangle representing three versions, of ourselves; three persons, if you will.  The first is the person we think we should be – configured by our tastes and desires which are influenced by friends, family, media, etc.  The second is the person that lies beneath like a pearl in an oyster:  beautiful, rare, and filled with glorious gifts that either we are in denial of their existence or we are too scared of exposure for criticism.  Then the third is the person who does the breathing in and out every day; the conductor of our daily lives and perhaps of the lives of other people around us.  So, when we show up for ourselves, which self are we showing up for truly? 

We seem to be a world caught up in the constant improvement of who we are.  If we are not the look, weight, status or profession that mainstream finds desirable then we are given all kinds of information and ways to change that.  My friend, an English teacher, and I were discussing the word unique lately and how it cannot be improved upon with a superlative, because it is a superlative.  There cannot be something more unique, because unique is already at its prime.  Just like something cannot be more perfect.  Yet, there are those who would have us believe that there is something as more perfect.  We are told there is a more perfect version of ourselves, but truly there is not! We are the perfect version and we are in our prime.  We do not need to improve ourselves! Maybe showing up for the self that is only acceptable to other people is not really showing up for us.  How can doing superficial changes to please anyone other than us be best? 

The person who is doing the daily run of our lives must be far too busy to show up for one more appointment. As a woman and mother, I find that I am very low in my line of thinking when I am running around during the day taking care of my house, husband and children.  I think it becomes instinctive to bump your place in line when you become a parent.  While I can once or twice a week work actively to give myself priority for five minutes for a cup of quiet coffee and reading, or go for a long bike ride with my little one in her bike seat, it does become a challenge to actively show up for myself completely.  I mean, hey, I do well to remember if I brushed my teeth or washed the conditioner out of my hair, when I have time to shower.

So this leaves us with the person we hold within.  The part of us that holds all the gifts we have to offer.  The gifts we have been talked out of revealing to the world out of fear that they won’t measure up, will be rejected, laughed at, jeered or, even worse, fail miserably.  Perhaps we have gifts we aren’t even aware of – like a buried treasure.  I think there was a singer a few years back on Britain’s Got Talent that just one day tried to sing and turned out he had a voice rivaling Pavarotti.  While I would LOVE to sing opera, I doubt that is my hidden gift.  But I do believe that I, maybe like you, must have something that is unique and special that will make the world a better place.  Hell, at least it will make us better people. 

Show up for yourself - we have to do this now! There will be a time when we are no longer on the earth and we cannot wait until then to show up for what mattered most to our souls and spirits.  We owe it to ourselves – our innermost, unique, one-of-a-kind selves.  How do we show up for ourselves?  We try, as hard as we possibly can, to take time to think about US – nobody else – but only US.  We think long and hard about what our heart and child-version of us within really wants for US.  I will not think that if I looked like Catherine Zeta-Jones, had Oprah’s fortunes, and had every label of expensive merchandise to wear, drive and live in I would be the best version of myself.  I will work to be the truest version of me that I can be so that I am the best version of a person for myself and, by extension, my family and friends.

The world can beat us down into submission, where the materialistic self is born.  As children we had dreams and aspirations that were limitless.  Let’s revisit these because they lie within our beauty hidden within.  Let’s show up for ourselves – and make the tapestry of the world a far less monotone masterpiece.

What I Know....

The other day a dear friend wrote “What are the facts, and what am I assuming?” On the last page of every O Magazine publication is Oprah’s article “What do I know for sure?” Ironically, I received my recent issue in the mail on the same day as I read my friend’s Facebook status.  This caused an interesting ping-pong tournament in my head. 

We have constitutions and other documents for our countries, we have laws written, maps drawn, we know the alphabets and numbers – but outside of that, what do we really know?  This is when the answer came to me – it depends on what your source of wisdom is.  For some people, their hearts, souls, spirits and faith are their source of what is true in the world.  For others, it is the absolutes in numbers, laws, and science.  Maybe we aren’t one or the other, but shades of both.  It is in these sources that we are given confidence and certainty that lead us to what we know.

In assuming we trust and have faith in uncertainties and unknowns – we have hope in things where perhaps there is no source of knowledge or proof.  I think this where faith comes in most.  I suppose there are people where what they know and what they assume are based on the same source.  I was not sure where I was on the spectrum.  So, I sat down and wrote what I believe I know and what I assume. 

Here is what I know:

§  God loves everyone

§  Gravity usually wins

§  Evil does breed more evil

§  Cancer does not care about your age or status

§  People are impressionable and sensitive

§  I never knew or understood love until I met my husband

§  I never understood pure joy until I had my children

§  My children are more beautiful and precious than I ever thought humanly possible

§  It is ok to check that your baby is breathing when he/she is asleep.

§  You never understand your mother until you are a mother yourself

§  Working 80-90 hours per week for your job will never prepare you for motherhood

§  Working 80-90 hours per week because it is necessary to get work done and because it is expected is the pure definition of insanity

§  If anyone in your life is toxic, cut them loose

§  Hockey players can be the best brother-figure a girl could ask for

§  A friend who will drive a U-Haul truck across the country and help unload your furniture is a friend worth keeping

§  The test of marriage potential in your partner is how you are together on a road trip

§  If all you want is a job title but are unwilling to do the work, then you don’t deserve the job and you are probably not following the right path.

§  You should be active in fitness – it allows you to have a relationship with your body and understand it better.

§  Taking walks with your husband helps keep the communication open.

§  Microwaves really aren’t necessary

§  If you find a quick fix to a serious problem, then you probably have not solved the problem

§  There is such a thing as reading too many books or seeing too many movies – keep in touch with reality

§  Nature is more beautiful than material possessions

§  Have the courage to do something you desire without seeking approval

§  If it rains, things get wet 

 I am assuming that:

§  The weather reporters and market analysts have the forecast correct – at least for the current day

§  My money is safe in the banks

§  Other people in Germany understand my broken German

§  The love I put out is given back

After writing all of this down, I realize that I know more than I thought.  I had to look deep within my heart and mind, but the knowledge was there. 

Maybe the answer to what we know and assume is only within ourselves and cannot be duplicated or carbon copied to another person.  I am never 100% certain of anything outside of my husband and children, so I will continue to seek for what I know and what I assume and the wisdom to know the difference.

The Wizard of Moms

Growing up I loved to read any book that took me into new worlds.  My favorite book, and movie, was “The Wizard of Oz”.   I found the story magical and captivating.  I must have read the book fifty times and seen the movie over one hundred times.  Like many girls, I wanted to be Dorothy with the ruby slippers and sing and dance with the munchkins. Now, as a mother, I wish I could be one of Dorothy’s travel companions on her journey to see the Wizard: The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.   I like to imagine that now the Wizard would be servicing mothers in helping them with what they need in order to be a good mom. 

Upon making it to the Emerald City, I would need to decide on asking for a brain, a heart or for courage.  Pregnancy made me go into a parallel stupidity universe that I have yet to emerge.  I remember when I was pregnant with my firstborn and getting off the bus to go to the flat my husband and I had at the time.  I stood there for a long time looking at the buildings and totally not remembering where we lived.  Fortunately, a neighbor walked by so I followed him.  I knew he knew where he was going.  Nowadays I do well to remember if I brushed my teeth, what day of the week it is, or if I washed the shampoo out of my hair.  Yes, a brain would come in handy.  However, being a bit brainless has made me rather humorous to my children.  They revel in my ditsy, Jim Carrey-like faces or my spontaneous disco moments.  I think a mother is reversed perhaps not into stupidity, but into a more child-like mind.  So, maybe my brain is better left out of my head for a few more years.

The cruelest part of mothering is the fact that we are the bad cop.  We are the enforcers of rules and discipline and have to be the instigators of many sad tears on our children’s precious faces.  I think our hearts go along with our brains and take a leave of absence.  I think if my heart were any more present than it already is, I would fail miserably at instilling the parameters and boundaries my children need because I would cave every time I would see their little angelic mouths start to frown. 

Courage is defined by John Wayne as “being scared to death but saddling up anyway”.  That is what being a mother truly is - a terrifying role, but one you have to take on daily whether you are ready or not.  Courage is what I would ask the Wizard to grant for me.  I am constantly looking for the courage to do what is best for my kids.  It’s amazing how quickly you can see the mistakes you make as a parent.  I often wish for a time machine so I can go back and get a ‘do over’ on many situations where I did not have the courage to do what my instincts told me.  There are so many voices of advice coming at you when you have children and you start to doubt yourself and lean more on these outside voices.  The problem turns into the voices drowning out your own voice.  I want the courage to follow my own voice. 

I also wish for the courage to allow my children to grow into themselves, being individuals, rather than any mold I may think they need to fit into.  I hope they always feel safe to express themselves and encouraged to be anything they want to become.  I hope I never discourage their creativity or ambitions.  I pray that my voice never drowns their instincts.  I hope I can push them when needed and pull back when necessary.  I will need strength to have conversations that are awkward but essential in their well being and safety.  I wish for resolve to move from aviator to navigator as they grow up and become self-sufficient. 

My hands will need to be brave to let go and let them fall down – both figuratively and literally. My arms will need the strength to let them go from our home to wherever their pursuits may take them.  My tongue will need audacity as I say what needs to be said, and to stay silent when it is not my business anymore.  My heart will need the nerve to allow them to fall in love and have families of their own. Most of all, my head will need to be strong as I move from being the president of the family’s child raising business into retirement.

As the Wizard of Moms grants me my wish for courage and I click my heels together three times to return home, I carry my medal of courage with me.  I hope that I keep it near me every day as I jump into the saddle of motherhood – not for my sake, but for my children.  This is my promise to them that I hope and pray my brain and heart never forget.

The Civil War

I have travelled a bit and have had the pleasure of good conversations with interesting people along the way.  Years ago, I was at the end of a very long overseas flight and was finally on a connection from Chicago to Dallas.  I was fortunate enough to be in first class, which I have only had the pleasure of a few times in my life.  There was a seemingly nice family sitting across the aisle from me.  The mother and father were doting on their four year old boy, who, at the time, was sitting quietly as we awaited our take off.  The father and I took up a discussion on some topic, I forget now, but then it quickly turned to their son and how advanced he was and what schools he was attending to assure he remained advanced and gifted.  The mother stated that he was learning Japanese and French and had just started violin lessons.  It was apparent to me that impressing a stranger with their feats in parenting was extremely important to them.  As the flight went on, the food cart came out, as did the little devil within their boy – as it always does with little boys.  He saw that there was chocolate milk and became rather vocal, with extreme volume, that he also wanted chocolate milk.  The mother was shocked, stating that he has never had chocolate.  In that moment, it was more important to her to state she had not given her son chocolate, than it was to calm him down.  The flight attendant was waiting on the people two rows ahead of us, but due to this boy’s outburst, the attendant leaned over the cart and handed the father a carton of the coveted chocolate milk.  When the meal cart came along, the parents chose the fish plate for their gifted son.  As you can imagine, he was just as vocal in his protest of the fish and green beans with rice.  He jumped up in his chair and started hitting the head of the man in front of him and then threw the plate down on the floor, causing it to throw the contents on the other passengers, and loudly demanded McDonald’s.  The mother, again more worried what others thought of her parenting skills rather than apologizing, went on to say he had never had McDonald's and she did not know where this was coming from.  Now, you and I know that there is not a four year old on the planet that would ask for something out of having no experience with it.  What we also can ascertain from this story, is that teaching this boy advanced languages and skills was taking precedence over simple skills in civility.

The current rage in parenting is all things French.  Pamela Druckerman’s new book “Bringing up Bébé" sheds light on the contrasting methods of parenting in France versus the U.S.  In reading this book, I found it to be quite similar to the methods in Germany.  One section, in particular, discusses what Ms. Druckerman refers to as the “four magic words”: please, thank you, hello and good-bye.  The French government runs the preschool programs and this teaching is in every curriculum across the country. She goes on to explore the importance France places on children and adults acknowledging each other with the civility of saying “Good day” when coming across each other.  Living in Germany, I have found this to also be very important.  Children will say either “good day” or “hello” when riding their bikes down the street upon seeing me taking my kids for a walk.  If you go to a doctor’s office, upon entering the waiting room, you always say “good day” and when the doctor calls you in, you say “good bye” when you exit the waiting room.  You say this to everyone you come in contact with – no matter to status or occupation. Ms. Druckerman describes that in France, this is to show the utmost respect.  The book further explains that it allows children to be acknowledged as people as well – not only teaching children to respect adults, but for adults to respect them as well.  I believe that is the root of the practice in Germany, and perhaps other countries in Europe. 

My mother often says that she believes the end of children showing civility towards adults began when they were allowed to address adults by their first names, rather than surnames.  An article titled “10 Questions on Jane Austen” was written about Jane Austen’s writings and described in detail the practice she had in always referring to the parents of her matriarchs by Mr. and Mrs., possibly because she felt writing their names would remove their power.  So perhaps our laid back approach to our children with our “Just call me Joe” attitude is lowering our ranks from general to private. The less powerful, revered, and respected we are, the less our children can treat us with manners.  Perhaps this, along with the abolition of cordial greetings of “good day”, is what has lead to our current society’s demise.

In today’s culture, parents have brought competitive parenting to a new level.  It’s not just about sports as it was when I was a kid.  Parents do everything possible to make sure that their kids are in the most prestigious and expensive schools and are enrolled in every curricular activity imaginable in order to mold the children into being a master of everything and the ideal candidate to Ivy League colleges and high paying jobs later in life.  A man I used to work for once stated that trying to be a master of everything usually yields the result of being a master of nothing.  Perhaps all this education being fed to children like spoons heaped with food, needs to be dwindled down to basics.  Sure, it’s nice to have a child who can speak many languages while playing the violin and riding a horse while playing hockey, but if a child cannot be civil, then what’s the point?

This goes beyond children behaving rudely, as they had to learn this from the adults in their environment.  Adults are taking insulting behavior to new lows, it seems.  This goes back to what I said about entitlement in my other article, “The Age of Entitlement”.  People will be rude if it serves their purpose.  It’s a lot easier to be rude to someone you cannot see, so if you are removed from acknowledging another person’s existence, then it becomes easier and easier to be uncivil to strangers.  Think about how irritated we are with people on the telephone, especially after being on hold for an inordinate amount of time.  We cannot see the customer service person, how our belligerent behavior makes their eyes well up with tears and their smile turned to a grimace.  Again, we forget that this person is, in fact, a person with a story and history and could be having a terrible day, and we have made it worse by behaving heartlessly.   However, if we would rewrite the script of our culture and make it a rule of etiquette to cordially wish everyone a good day and good bye as we come in contact with them, then maybe our heartlessness would morph into something more dignified.

A friend traveling on holiday witnessed an incident which reminded me of a similar situation I encountered when I was eight months pregnant with my firstborn. My husband and I had taken the train to attend a lunch for me and the baby downtown to my office.  Upon coming home, our train was packed and there were no seats available.  We were told to go to the first class cabin because a pregnant woman is entitled a seat anywhere.  While the train company felt this way, their passengers, unfortunately, did not.  I walked up and down the aisles looking for a seat without success.  So, my husband and I sat on the steps outside the upstairs of the first class cabin.  We were very entertained by these lively fourteen year old boys who were shocked that no one would give up their seat for me.  They even spoke loudly about their disapproval in the hopes someone would hear and feel guilty enough to give up their seat.  While nobody ever took pity on me and my eight month bump, my heart was warmed by their manners.  So I refuse to believe we cannot win the war in civility and will pay attention to my actions and especially the actions of my children.  I hope my kids grow up to be like these boys as living proof that there are still some civil children  in the world.