07 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Being Yourself, Marriage, On Being Responsive, Parents, Seizing the Moment
Tags
being yourself, express feelings, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, love, marriage, mentors, natural talent, parents, passion, relationship, words, writing
My friend was recipient of a most romantic gesture. Her partner built and installed this beautiful poetry post. It is positioned right next to the sidewalk so passersby may read her poetry every time she puts up something new.
18 Wednesday Sep 2019
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being yourself, dreams coming true, express feelings, friends, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, love, marriage, relationship, writing
Jane Paffenbarger Butler – author – with the man she captured in her giant blanket
Somehow at the age of nineteen, I spotted a guy who would stay with me for the next 40 years and counting. To be fair, he spotted me and I ran the other way, and it was only because several acquaintances pointed out his obvious interest and implored me to take him seriously, that I finally noticed him as a potential partner for life. He’s been nothing but steadfast, nothing but kind, and nothing but improved with age. Thank you friends who did that.
He knew not how to plumb a bathroom when I met him. He was not a loving parent or sole breadwinner. But since then he has become all these things and more. And in addition he’s propped me up through thick and thin, he’s counseled me on what I have not known and he has encouraged me and been my advocate when I didn’t know I needed it.
His winning attributes in the beginning were that he was funny and he was kind. He made me laugh and then taught me how to do it, and now, all these years later we are still laughing together.
Believe me, I had no idea what I was doing back then, but my gut reaction to this man has served me well through the years. He hasn’t changed much really. The kind, shy, funny, smart, encouraging guy I met at nineteen is still there, it’s just that all of that has morphed and matured and come along in an even better form right up to today.
This month, in Psychology Today online I tell the story of my young husband who takes me to his Aunt Maureen’s at Christmas where I discover that everyone refers to his Uncle Dave as Meathead, thus beginning my education in humor. Take a look at “Introduction to Meathead Therapy” on the Healthy Connections blog post by Maryann Karinch.
11 Wednesday Sep 2019
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being yourself, express feelings, forgiveness, friends, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, love, marriage, parents, psychotherapy, relationship
This month I am featured in Psychology Today’s Healthy Connections blog by Maryann Karinch where she tells the story of what she calls my introduction to “meathead therapy.”
When my husband and I were young and first married we went to his Aunt Maureen and Uncle Meathead’s on Christmas Eve. Theirs was a modest gathering, but I loved it because the one thing that was not modest was the connection I saw between the people who came and went. Folks arrived at the door and each was welcomed like a king. They were offered a drink, some food, a seat, and all the time in the world, crowding onto the attic stairs when room at the table ran out.
The goal was to entertain, to tell funny stories even at each other’s expense, even as it exposed each other’s bullheadedness, ignorance or misery.
And I was spellbound.
These folks cared for each other. I’d go so far as to say they loved each other. My family didn’t sit around the kitchen table on Christmas Eve welcoming one another in with drinks and smiles and all the time in the world because of our handicap of taking life seriously and rejecting one another for our human foibles.
Since that night with Maureen and Meathead, and with my steadfast husband next to me, I have worked hard in psychotherapy and have learned about the healthy attitudes of accepting one another for who we are and learning to celebrate one another no matter how goofy we get.
I think the healthy connections we make are born of the dedicated showing up at each other’s kitchen tables no matter what the circumstance.
Check out my story in Psychology Today.
19 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Being Yourself, Marriage, On Being Responsive, Seizing the Moment, Teenagers
Tags
being yourself, dreams coming true, express feelings, friends, friendship, higher power, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, love, marriage, passion, relationship, words
Paris Opera House Ceiling
Everything about this moment was romantic. It wasn’t enough just to be back in Paris thirty-five years after we’d honeymooned there, but we were also staying at the same hotel and stopping in at Fouquet’s, the same place on the Champs-Elysee we’d stumbled onto late one night when we were newlywed where we had chocolate mousse we hadn’t ever forgotten.
No, all that wasn’t romantic enough.
My husband thought we should have a date out on the town and lined up a trip to the opulent Paris Opera Garnier. We donned our fanciest travel clothes and sat beneath the blessing of Marc Chagall’s colorful celebration of art itself.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the program that night, an homage to Jerome Robbins, harkened back to our early days. As newlyweds we often attended the New York City ballet at their outdoor summer home at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York. The staging of “Glass Pieces” in particular was so familiar that it took my breath away to know I was in Paris, France, at the Opera House, with my boyfriend who was still following me around and delighting me with his thoughtfulness and kindness and shared joy of all things artistic, that I could barely watch through the tears in my eyes.
We left that night, awed by the layered gilded building, the rainbow of Chagall’s ceiling, the drama of ballet and the deep thankfulness in our hearts for one another and for the great good fortune to be able to hold each other’s hands still and take it all in.
01 Thursday Aug 2019
Posted in Being Yourself, Marriage
Tags
being yourself, dreams coming true, express feelings, friends, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, love, marriage, parents, relationship
My card reads, “The authentic bird’s nest here represents the happy home that the bride and groom have created that will serve as the foundation for their love going forward. Mom’s love, the groom’s love for his bride, and her love for him, are sometimes expressed through baking, thus the spatula. Worn but faithful, Spot, is present at this wedding as a reminder of the security found among old friends. They joy, laughter and sense of extended family is tied up in one Wise and Otherwise playing card. The wooden photo frame made by and depicting the groom’s great-great-grandfather hints at the groom’s own creativity, a source of solution should trouble arise. And the idea, no matter how lame, of the groom’s parents as Brazilian dancers, suggests you do not have to be great at what you do together, you just have to mean it.”
22 Monday Jul 2019
Posted in Being Yourself, Marriage, Seizing the Moment
05 Sunday Jan 2014
Posted in Being Yourself, Marriage, Parents, Stories From My Childhood
I posted this in 2012 and thought it relevant again…
My parents taught me to not see things – to deny their existence. We were kind of like Olympic deniers. I am aware I’d been denying feeling because sometimes they burst forth inappropriately before I went to psychotherapy and figured out their proper role in my life. That was one thing. But I realized when I met my husband that I’d been denying the existence of dirt as well. I do love dirt. I was raised pretty close to the earth in a farmhouse that melded a bit with the out-of-doors, as we called it, what with critters visiting the laundry room at times, birds caught up in the attic occasionally, and constant noises in the walls. Dad came home every day in a filthy car wearing filthy clothes reeking of manure, and Mom was more of a cook than a cleaner. Dust and dirt and cobwebs were kind of accents to my mother’s decorating. My love of dirt comes honestly.
So when my husband and I moved in together I was not the cleaner – he was. I cooked, and he cleaned. The first few times he cleaned the bathroom I was shocked at how beautiful it was, and consequently at the degree to which I’d been denying dirt. That thing sparkled!
Besides being a great housekeeper, my husband is pretty good at poetry too. Here’s a pretty interesting haiku he wrote:
THE SHOWER
Empty shampoo tubes
Tiles whitened by soap scum
Who will clean the shower?
06 Friday Sep 2013
Posted in Marriage, On Being Responsive
There’s this guy who has been following me around for years. Like forty or so. Everywhere I look he’s there. And he’s friendly still, and funny, and really level-headed, just like he was back in the 1970’s when I first noticed him. I was nineteen then and I thought he was a stalker and probably a bad person for taking such an interest. But that’s just how I thought back then.
Shush….I hear him coming down the steps right now. He’s been following me around, persisting in being my friend forever. Good thing too, because what did I know as a teenager about selecting a husband? It really wasn’t on my mind. I wanted to try to get through each day and he was out there making it easier, so okay let’s get together.
Despite not really thinking the best of him at first, apparently I did know quite a bit about selecting a husband since I eventually, at the urging of a friend, gave this guy an audience. She said, “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see he likes you?” Sure, I told her, but he seemed too good to be true.
What I’ve learned is that my nineteen year-old self wasn’t too weighed down with other thoughts to risk trusting intuition, or instinct or whatever you want to call it. I didn’t let my head get too involved in convincing me he was too good to be true, trying to analyze whether responding to the guy was a good idea or not. And I am not recommending throwing caution to the wind while dating since the older we get the more complicated our lives get, but trusting our intuition should have an equal weight to trusting our intellect.
Obviously I did eventually go out with the guy and he’s been the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Just look at the wedding pictures. The photo of us exiting the church hand-in-hand shows me at my happiest, absolutely sure in the moment that I had just committed my life to someone who truly loves me.
04 Wednesday Sep 2013
Posted in Marriage
We are married thirty years as of yesterday so I took a look in my journal where I keep notes on my anniversaries of years past. I started this on our honeymoon and now update it every September.
Last year we went to see a movie called “Beasts of the Southern Wild”. It’s a movie about love. And about relationships. And about how those two things are as valid to one individual and how they experience them as they are to another. In other words, everyone gets their own chance to have these treasures. Even the very poor, as depicted in this movie, have the same strong meaningful love for one another as anyone does. Their poverty does not diminish the power of the love they share and the relationships they hold.
That is because these are God-given human emotions that are the same for all regardless of social class. Sometimes having fewer material things makes the things we do have more evident.
Staying married to the same guy thirty years is a little old-fashioned, I know, but of all the relationships I have had in my life, this, and those with my kids, are the ones that feel the most real.
18 Sunday Aug 2013
I watched my husband’s two grown nephews and his older brother all head down the stairs of the family beach house late last night, laughing, smiling, saying happy words of thanks for a fun evening, just after other families left doing the same, and I couldn’t help but think of how far I have come. Really, may I brag here a little? This same beach house is the scene of uncomfortable family gatherings, that is with my family, years ago where Mom and Dad would preside over stiff dinners and measured discussions about serious matters of importance. But never raucous good fun like we had last night. Thank you dear beach house you have fulfilled my dreams.
I can barely stand to remember this though because the difference between what this house used to offer and what it offers now is embarrassing. I was breaking six different family rules last night by having my husband’s family over for an-Ecuadorian themed evening to celebrate the return of our son from his year abroad, and to continue in the usual fashion that we do every year to celebrate being a family together, by eating, and drinking, and playing silly games, loving each other because we all know how, into the wee hours.
When my father left me in charge of the house when he died I promised myself it would be a house of fun and happiness, and cease to be a house that harbored the kind of ill feelings Mom and Dad were so unwittingly good at producing. There was a time when I had little clue how to have fun, or how to host a family gathering, or how to attract the family to gather around me and sit down for an evening to laugh and be silly and truly relax, until I met my husband’s family. Now this house echoes with the sounds of laughter and the walls flicker with shadows of smiles and joy. How lucky am I to have found a man whose family dovetailed so perfectly with my need to figure this out, and who are still here today, thirty years after I married him to keep it all going?
This is the “love altar” I created as a centerpiece for my son’s recent wedding. A number of women special in their lives were invited to make a table decoration that reflected the love they feel in their lives and particularly as it relates to either the bride or the groom. Each table had a different creation but all had a crystal as the centerpiece. After the wedding the bride and groom took home the crystals and now have a centerpiece there, of crystals, to take into their future that are charged with the love of family and friends.
He may look tired and worn but Spot would not miss his old buddy, my son’s, upcoming wedding. He’s all decked out in a custom bow tie I made him for the big day.
My Own Personal Sky 