Tag: relationships

Foul

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“Forget injuries. Never forget kindnesses.” – Confucius

This week I got the opportunity to fill in as a lunchtime playground monitor at my daughter’s school. When the kindergartners were out, one of them ran up and said there was a boy that was hurt where they were playing soccer. He was surrounded by a group of interested and supportive onlookers and as I knelt to examine his sore side, I heard:

Boy #1: I don’t think that was a red card. [I assumed they were talking about the foul system in soccer.]

Boy #2: Might not have even been a yellow card.

Boy #3: I was just trying to kick the ball.

Our injured kindergartner was sore but nothing serious and the boys provided a very nice escort to the door so that he could go to the office for some ice. I think they all earned an award for good sportsmanship.

That’s what struck me overall about the kerfuffles I stepped in to help on. Noel thought Clara ignored her. Greyson thought Connor attacked him. David thought Julian yelled in his ear. Maybe it’s because I was thinking about apologies this week, but in all the cases when I got the parties together to talk, the kids weren’t defensive and it made it so easy to talk through. There are so many things kids do well – although maybe kicking the ball and only the ball isn’t one of them!

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Flow of Life

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“Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.” – Yogi Bhajan

In 2014, I had worked up the nerve to have a child on my own. I’d chosen a fertility clinic, gone through all the screening and work-up process so by November 6th, I was sitting at my desk signing the last document I needed to begin the invitro fertilization process. I clearly remember that moment at my desk with my beloved dog at my feet thinking wondrously, “Life is about to change.”

Then the next day I got a call from my mom that my dad had died in a bicycling accident in Tucson. Sh!t! That wasn’t how life was supposed to change.

Seven years later I think through all the changes, big and small:

I have a beautiful baby girl.

My gorgeous dog dies.

My mom moves to be only 1.5 miles from me.

I miscarry a baby.

I get pregnant again and have a beautiful baby boy.

The pandemic happens.

My daughter turns 5 and goes to Kindergarten.

Kindergarten is virtual.

My son learns to walk.

And it goes on and on. Perhaps it’s because my kids change so quickly that’s making me learn to just enjoy the flow. One minute they have a habit that’s irritating me – like playing with water at the kitchen sink and getting it all over the floor and the next they’ve moved on and can now zip their own coats.

Yesterday I got a delightful message from someone I went to high school with offering me and my family free accommodations in Colorado for 4 nights in April. Yay – what a fun surprise. And it was also my dad’s birthday so he was close to my thoughts and I missed him.

The longer I go on, the more I realize that this is the flow of life – we go up and over some things and under others. It’s when I try to grab on to some branch to cling on and stay in one place that I suffer most. The more I work at my spiritual depth and faith, the easier it becomes to stay centered in the flow and live it all with openness and curiosity.

What a ride!

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Outer View

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“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell

I sent this picture to my mom. She wrote back that it looked like something that could be on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. I laughed because I snapped it to capture one sweet moment that was somewhat unusual in the typical the after-dinner chaos.

Life always looks easier from the outside, doesn’t it?

I think of a picture I took of a friend at a beach on a school field trip (back a few years ago when we could do those). She was sitting on a log with her two children nestled in her arms and I texted the picture to her adding that she looked like the quintessential mom. Her reality was probably that she was struggling to keep her children warm on a cold June day and to feed them without dropping anything into the sand.

Which is right? The inner view or the outer view?

The more I meditate, the more that I’ve come to believe that the outer view holds great promise. When meditation helps me drop the dialogue in my head that is always taking me out of the moment by planning for the next thing I need to do or recovering from the last thing that went wrong, I can see the outer view. Like in the case of the picture, I was still recalibrating after getting my kids to stop vying for a turn on the piano and also calculating how long til we started our bedtime routines.

It seems like there is a healthy and an unhealthy way to think of the outer view of our lives. The unhealthy way is to work hard to make everything appear in a certain way and then use other people’s perceptions to check to see if we are meeting up.

The healthy way is to get a glimpse every once in a while of what a trusted person sees in order to be reminded of what is so delightful about this moment.

So here’s a moment of my picture perfect life. There are other moments that aren’t as sweet but I bet when I look back on this time, this is how I’ll remember it.

Not Love Actually

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“Don’t be afraid of the solitude that comes from raising your standards.” – Ebonee Davis

Driving in the car the other day with Miss O, I checked in with her on her playground crush. This was the young man, Will, that I wrote about in the COVID crush post, who lines up on an adjacent heart, 6-feet-apart on the playground to go into a different 1st grade classroom.

When he initially told her that he had a crush on her back in October, Miss O said she had one on him too. But when I checked back in the other day, she told me,  “the interest had gone away.”

I asked what happened. She explained he started hanging around another kid, a kid she thinks is a bully because he yells “SORRY” when he apologizes. And she changed her attitude because the playground supervisor, Mr. C, is handing out awards for being good in line and Will is always messing around.

She stopped finding him attractive because she doesn’t like his friends and he wasn’t a good influence?? My job as a parent is done…. 😊

(featured photo from Pexels)

Twenty-Five Words or Less

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“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” – Harriet Tubman

I was intrigued by a question in one of my meditation books, Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner. “If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?”

I came up with two versions.

Life is a never-ending raffle. Curiosity buys you tickets. Love enables you to turn them in. And, most importantly — you have to be present to win.

OR

Thank you. You have shown up, laughed with me, made me think, kept me company when it was dark. But that’s not why I love you. I love you because you are amazing.

What would you say?

Why Wine?

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“Longer-term consistency trumps short-term intensity.” – Bruce Lee

I can still remember being at an 8th grade party when a boy from school, Corey, came up to me and told me he had a crush on me. He had been drinking and was acting all goofy. Because none of the rest of us were drinking (or ever had), it was my friend that took me aside to explain that alcohol made people reveal their true feelings.

Which is something that I hadn’t updated until I recently heard a Super Soul Sunday with Oprah and Malcom Gladwell. In the podcast, there were discussing his book Talking to Strangers and revealed “Many of those who study alcohol no longer consider it an agent of disinhibition. Instead they think of it as an agent of myopia.”

According to this Psychology Today article, myopia in the context of alcohol means short-sightedness. It means we lose perspective, our ability to place our actions in the context of anything other than the current moment and consider the long-term consequences.

Which explains my recent response when a friend came over to dinner and asked if I wanted a glass of red wine. I said, “No, it makes me a crappy parent.” It makes me feel tired. This is surprising because I love red wine and used to drink copious amounts of it. But now, it not only means I will not sleep well but it also creates an impatience in me that feels uncomfortable.

Putting this feeling together with the research, I think I rely a great deal on perspective to be an understanding and supportive parent. I need the long view to energize me. When I see my kids’ actions in the context of learning the overall lessons in life, I feel an expansiveness to give them room to grow. When I’m feeling myopic, I am feel hemmed in by the mess and chaos of now.

Corey and I never talked about his crush once he sobered up. While I felt that giddy attention for the night he said it, the light of day squashed it. It’s a little like how I feel about wine now – I like the idea of it far more than I like the actual experience of it. It seems that perspective, in love and in parenting, is a very good thing.

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Feelings Expert

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“The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.” – Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

The other day my daughter, Miss O, came home from school upset because she had a little kerfuffle with a fellow 1st grader at school. He kicked down the wall of wood chips she and her friends were building and when she went to talk to him about it, he started talking before she could get the words out. This is the conversation she reported to me.

Miss O: “You can’t take the words out of my mouth.”

Boy: “Yes, I can.”

Miss O: “Er…I’m going to talk to my mom about this. She’s an expert on feelings. I’ll tell you what she says tomorrow.”

I’m amused by the title she’s given me. I remember reading Brain Rules for Baby by University of Washington professor John Medina when she was a baby. It said that to help our kids manage their big emotions, we had to model naming our emotions, even the less desirable ones. I clearly thought “no thank you” to that but I guess I must have made some inroads countering my own resistance and stoic modeling from my childhood.

But more than that, I find my daughter’s story to be so relatable. Communication is hard isn’t it? Especially in those tight moments when you are disappointed or angry and the words, if they come, get muddled.

Last week I was listening to a 10 Percent Happier episode titled How Not to Ruin Your Relationships with Drs John and Julie Gottman and they were talking about situations where we are overwhelmed by emotion. In that case, we are flooded and there’s no point in continuing to talk. They recommended walking away, doing something completely different until we can return to the conversation.

Which is what Miss O did. We talked through not calling any names or labeling the other person and instead just stating what she felt and needed like being able to finish her sentence. When I asked her if she’d said any of that to the boy the next day she said, “Nah, it wasn’t that big of deal.”

It reminded me – learning to talk is one thing and learning to communicate is a whole other thing. One that takes a lifetime to work on. But I’m inspired by the quote at the top of this post from Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, “The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Do We Have to Be Nice to Alexa?

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“Hem your blessings with thankfulness so that they don’t unravel.” – unknown

I was in the kitchen making dinner last night when I overheard my mom talking to the Amazon Echo device we have in the other room. It’s the device we have plugged in that is connected to the Internet so that the kids can request music for their endless dance parties (I know it does a lot more than that but that’s what we primarily use it for). Because the Echo doesn’t quite understand my son’s two-year-old voice yet, my mom was requesting a song for him, “Alexa, play Baby Shark, please.”

It made me think of manners and respect. I suspect that my 82-year-old mom’s manners are so engrained she doesn’t have to think whether or not she’ll say “please” any more, even when talking to a device. And I tend to say “please” as well when talking to Alexa because I appreciate anyone (or anything) that responds to my requests.

But is it an empty gesture when talking to an Artificial Intelligence device?

It reminds me of training a dog. To give commands, you have to be in control of yourself enough to be clear. In addition, the whole process teaches as much to the trainer as the trainee as you figure out what works and what doesn’t. And finally, there’s a loyalty built when you work together.

Besides, I think modeling respect for everything in our world for my kids builds a good foundation of choosing respect more often than not. Respect for the people that designed it, respect for the shared intelligence it delivers and respect for all the songs we can access through it. Given all that, I think Alexa deserves a please and a thank you!

(featured photo from Pexels)

Seeds of Faith

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“Believing is all a child does for a living.” – Kurtis Lamkin

The other day my 6-year-old daughter called for me. When I came into the room, she was holding her little brother because he’d tripped and fallen. When I took him from her and started checking for injuries, she huffed off.

When all was calm, I checked in with my daughter. She said that I loved her brother more than her. I told her how much I appreciated how independent and helpful she was. Then I listed all the ways we show our love and the privileges she gets because she is older. She nodded and said, “ At his age, you can see the love he gets better.”

Something more than the obvious sibling rivalry and jealousy struck me about that statement. After I sat with it some time, I’ve found such a precious seed of faith in that statement. Like if we could all trace back the roots of what we believe to the essential moments where we start to believe in what we can’t see we’d find seeds from moments like my daughter expressed. Faith in others, faith in love, faith in the Divine,

It’s as if I’ve been privy to watch her operate from within her God spot for all the years until now. She’s been operating from the natural trust that came with being so fresh from the Source. And now I’m witnessing her growth and awareness start to cover that over so that instead of operating without thought from her Seat of Unconscious, as I believe Jung would call it, my daughter is feeling out the ground on the other side.

While this leaves me with a sense of loss, I recognize it as a natural moving forward. Most of us cannot stay in a life free of ambition and embarrassment, fear and worry. We move away from that spot of grace that can bring so much peace and then have to work our way back, again and again.

But it strikes me that as she moves in and out of that unencumbered spot, the awareness is a gift of its own. It makes me conscious of my own God spot as well as hers and allows me to recognize when I need to help water and nurture her seed of faith — and my own.

The analogy of a tree that grows deep roots resonates with me. For my kids to stretch tall in their beliefs, their roots need to grow deep down. And I need to have faith that they will have faith.

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Threshold to Love

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“The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost

I’ve been divorced for 10 years and a single parent now for 6 and a half years. I’ve written about the reason I didn’t have kids when I was married and instead chose to do it on my own. Since I went into this phase of my life choosing to be single, I think it’s largely exceeded my expectations. Although there are tough moments, it’s been incredibly joyful for most of the time and I’m grateful for all the people around me that provide encouragement and support.

I’ve always thought that I would circle back around to dating at some point. This pandemic has shown me again and again that my optimism makes me a terrible prognosticator but I still believe I will end up with the love of my love.

The problem is that at a base level I don’t believe that adding a man to my life will improve it. Intellectually I know this to be a result of having a crappy husband the first time around. I don’t think his infidelities hang me up much. The fear is more based on the give/take of our relationship. As my gentle father put it when I finally got divorced, “he loved to BE loved.” Perhaps we were just mismatched but I could never make him feel loved or secure enough, and I exhausted myself trying.

So, I have this threshold between me and my future that I need to cross. It is returning to the belief that I held before I was married that romantic relationships can be life-giving and refreshing. That belief is one that I embody in all my other relationships but have taken a step back from when it comes to love. And as much time as I spend analyzing it, writing about it, knowing it, it is just dancing in front of the door without stepping a toe over.

It is one reason that my breath was taken away when I read this quote by Henri Nouwen’s, “The future depends on how you remember your past.” I know it isn’t just me that needs to do the work of genuine risk to face the thresholds installed by the pain of the past. As the Robert Frost quote at the top of this post says, the only way out is through.

So I take a deep breath in and thank my ex-husband for preparing me to love these two children. They at many times need as much care as he did but show great promise of growing out of it. And then I breathe out the fear of a relationship that only withdraws from me and never gives. When I do this over and over, I prepare myself to walk through that doorway into the possibility of love once again.

(featured photo from Pexels)