Great writing should not put you to sleep!

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control, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, security, teacher, words, writing

My sister’s cats sleeping together!

I recently learned of a podcast that is pretty funny and useful for settling down. It is called Sleep With Me  (https://www.sleepwithmepodcast.com/.) There are hundreds of episodes and it is designed to help people fall asleep by telling really boring stories. These are “bedtime stories to help grown ups fall asleep in the deep dark night.”

The one I listened to was called “Baked Beans: The Adventures of Mr. Triangle and Isosceles.” A town of math-appreciating people will see a show that they must pay for with cans of baked beans, but there is trouble when it is realized that the wagon scheduled to carry all the cans of baked beans cannot stand the load. This story, told by a man who drolls on and on, often stumbling around for words and deftly emphasizing little parts of speech that make you stop and question what you just heard, breaks all the rules of writing by never getting to the point, using mindless dialogue, reiterating points and leaning on cliches.

The other one I heard was called something like “20 Steps to Self-Skin Care” and the first ten minutes were devoted to applying one’s fingertips to the face very deliberately and specifically in order to execute a light massage he called “running through Strawberry Fields.” It’s hilarious and relaxing and soporific.

I am planning on sharing this with the students in the Creative Writing class come Fall because it really drives home the idea that good writing should not put one to sleep.

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Believing in yourself is half the battle

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being yourself, change, control, dreams coming true, express feelings, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, natural talent, play, teacher, trust

I’ve heard that creative people are creative in multiple ways and so we should not be surprised to find that Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan also paint pictures. But when you are struggling to be the artist you imagine yourself to be, like me, writing a memoir and telling a story I very much want to share, finding that I have hidden talents is confirmational.

In cleaning out an old trunk in the spare bedroom I came upon this drawing I made when I was sixteen. I’d forgotten that I once believed myself capable of such creations because honestly, right now, I can barely play Pictionary. But possibly if I renewed that notion that I can draw and I put my mind to it, I might win a few rounds.

This sketch is the result of the one drawing class I had in high school, with Robin Burkhardt, who insisted it was about taking the time and seeing clearly. And voila, she was kind of correct! This Bonwit Teller department store ad is a direct mimic of one I saw in the newspaper at the time. The coloring-outside-the-lines I allow occasionally suggests a little artsyness!

Believing in yourself is half the battle.

 

Too bad I’ll be published in the New York Times soon

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being yourself, control, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, security, writing

One of these days shortly I’ll be showing up in the New York Times in a story about bank scams. Yes, I made some mistakes and landed at the local branch of my bank looking for help getting my account resecured. It was my son’s money that was taken and when he tweeted about it, a New York Times reporter, Stacy Cowley, who likes to write about Wells Fargo, contacted us and did an interview. Should show up in the financial section soon.

Turns out I’m on the cutting edge of scams relating to the latest banking feature, Zelle. It’s supposed to make it easy to move money out of your account, a bit like venmo or paypal, and I can tell you for sure, it was easy.

After failing to log into my bank account one day because I kept putting in the wrong password I got an email indicating the online access had been shut down due to too many false tries. If you want to reinstate your account click here and log in again, it said. I did that and thought nothing of it since I obviously was the one who had tried the multiple erroneous passwords. In my defense, I was trying to talk and enter my super-secure-confusing-and-difficult-to-remember password at the same time.

This alone was not enough to get me in trouble since there is a two step process to sending money through Zelle. The next day I got seven calls (!) from the same 800 number, all of which I ignored. It continued to the point, though, that we felt compelled to do a google search. That indicated it was my bank’s fraud detection unit so I answered. A wire transfer was supposedly in progress and we could intercept it by blah blah blah. I was texted, from the fraudster via my account and the Zelle function, a code number which I gave them. That was the second mistake. Then he siphoned off dollars as we spoke, but promised to reinstate my account with new credentials he’d fedex in 24 hours.

As soon as I hung up, a gentleman from the bank’s real fraud detection center called, but there was no way to recognize him as real. He was not as friendly, or as easy to talk to as the kindly fellow who had just bilked me, mostly because he wouldn’t even give me his name or the reason for his call, except to say he thought my account was under attack. Same as the first guy. He gave me some unlikely information that sounded suspect about how to be in touch with the fraud detection unit (call between 4:30am and 6:00pm Pacific Standard Time even though we live in the east and I was already on the phone with them right?, for instance), but he did urge me to go into the bank right away. It was unclear whether either of these calls was legit or not. Even the banker was confused once we explained it to her.

Three hours later and after speaking to a Wells Fargo representative at the fraud detection unit I could barely understand due to his accent, and who would not discuss certain elements with me because they had to do with my son’s account (which I have full access to), and after mistakes he made were corrected, we felt secure again. The bad guys sure were easier to deal with, though!

In the end, the bank returned our money in just days.

I want to be in the New York Times but I was thinking it would be for a book review or some other literary accomplishment some day. For now, I am going to bask in the glory of this tangential event and the happy ending Wells Fargo was able to secure.

Just south of F# is a whole new way of seeing things

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control, fear, Jane Butler, piano lessons, teacher

One of last week’s piano lessons was unusual in that light bulbs went off in MY head. My little friend did not like the idea that I cover her hands with a book as she tried to play a piece, pushing my book away and pulling it up to look under it. She did everything she could to thwart my efforts to encourage playing while reading the music rather than looking back and forth between music and keys. It got to the point where I was ready to give up because it was getting a little physical for a piano lesson, and she said outright it was too hard. She really believed it. It was just something she COULD NOT do.

So in my usual way we wrote that in the lesson book,”This is too hard to do” with an arrow pointing towards the name and page number of the piece. She agreed wholeheartedly this was indeed too hard to do.

I told her that I did not see it as too hard for her. She does hard stuff all the time, and this was just one of those things. I am confident you can do this, I told her. She did not like this plan at all.  This is a student that is cautious. She checks everything before she begins. I urge her on, saying, let’s go, no more stalling, do it. She wants to readjust her seat, crack her knuckles, give heavy sighs and mention the weather, coming up with all manner of distraction rather than try the difficult task.

Ho hum. Get on with it. Eventually it occurred to me that fear was driving her actions or should I say, inaction, and I decided to break it down to its component parts to demystify the project. I think she feared making mistakes and hitting the wrong keys if she couldn’t look down and be sure of what she was doing.

I showed her how she could feel, with her fingers alone, where on the keyboard there are three black notes in a row. We practiced both looking at three notes in a row and looking away and feeling three black notes in a row. I showed her how just south of one of the black notes, F#, is the F we’d be needing for the song in question. She was delighted to see that she could do it. So we tempted fate and I had her wave her hands in the air and swing them around behind her, close her eyes, look here and look there, and then close her eyes again and then place her hands on the F. With no problem at all, there it was, under her fingers where she needed it to be, without any looking at all. F!

Next thing you know, playing the song with a book over her hands made not a difference. Now that she knew where F was without looking, and how the other notes related to those, because we of course walked through a conversation about that, she was golden. All the fear seem to drift away.

I was not that clear on how my little friend felt about all this until her father walked in at the end of the lesson. She called out for him to be awed by her ability to close her eyes and miraculously locate F on the keyboard and she grandly demonstrated this new ability. He had no idea what this meant or why it mattered but he applauded her success and celebrated in her great achievement.

Phew! I told him, even if he doesn’t understand, he should know for sure that he got his money’s worth today.

The rule of three

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change, control, Jane Butler

When our boys were teens they were in an after school music program whose leader used to say that kids don’t know what they cannot do until you tell them. In other words, if the grownups stay out of it the kids will just keep going, unaware that what they are doing may be unusually hard. Our kids learned difficult music at that program, and both our boys suddenly wanted to sing on stage in front of crowds that included there parents! They were teenage boys, for Pete’s sake, and this is what they wanted to do?

I just love the idea of believing kids can do more, now. Maybe they can and maybe they cannot, but if you decide ahead of time that they cannot, you end things before they are even started.

You never know, today may be the day. After all, at some point in our lives we decide to like spinach. What day did that happen? It could have been today, or tomorrow, or in six years, but you don’t know. So on any particular day you have to at least consider trying the new thing. Maybe today is the day your baby falls asleep without a bottle first, or finally sleeps through the night. Since you never know, being the grownup means being the one who decides that today is the day we try. And when we try we have to do things the kids don’t like. Like try. That means that there may be a few sleepless nights on the way to the one where the kiddo sleeps all the way through.

My rule of three says that only after three serious attempts to get our child to take on whatever new challenge we are presenting, do we give up. Maybe after three attempts he is showing us that he is not ready for whatever I thought he could do. But three serious tries means setting a timer and deciding to sit out the tantrum, or continue to persevere when the separations yield tears. But I always challenge myself to try three times before throwing in the towel. I have learned that it is far more likely that some time after that first difficult night the child is going to reconsider his decision to scream for hours on end and just go to sleep, if you have been steadfast in your resolve. When our kids were little if we didn’t have three solid attempts, three nights in a row, I knew something else was wrong like an ear infection I missed, if my child didn’t decide it was time to lose the battle.

Kids want to be successful and they want to please us, and they want to grow. The more we challenge them to try new things and give it a go even when it seems too hard, the more they are likely to show us even more cool things they can do.

Her job is to grow and my job is to let go

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control, driving lessons, fear, Jane Butler, joy, trust

It seems I had failed to cover sufficiently the usefulness of the brake pedal in controlling the car on hills and instead we were in what felt like a free fall down our steep driveway, barreling towards the street and potential live traffic. I let out a little cry at the prospect of my life ending prematurely. I don’t normally do that during driving lessons, but I thought we were just going to do three-point turns when suddenly I was on a roller coaster.

In driving lessons with my sixteen-year old daughter I see the same dynamic between us that has been going on since she was a baby. Her job is to grow. My job is to let go. Even better if it can be with my arms in the air in the front row seat screaming bloody murder because it is so thrilling.

Every day I offer a challenge, something she thinks she is not ready for that I know she can do. Whether it is cutting with scissors when she is a toddler, or maneuvering our car through the parked vehicles of the neighborhood on off-peak hours just yesterday, it is my job to know her abilities and guide her, and not let my own fears drive our discoveries together.

Okay, so I should have gone over the brake thing more clearly, but until I am in a free fall I don’t realize what I have not yet taught. By the end of our half-hour lesson she is saying she is proud of herself and hadn’t imagined she was ready for actual road driving even though I know that passing one moving car in an isolated neighborhood barely qualifies, but live traffic it was.

My job is to let go. To see that she is capable and encourage that even though doing so means she is moving farther away from me. I try to imagine that she is actually moving closer as we forge a bond of trust. It is a powerful bond that we will both cherish because it will be stronger than any cut the scissors can make, and any road that may lead to places far away.

My marriage must be really boring

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change, control, fear, Hershey Park, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, roller coasters

Sometimes when we’re out together with our daughter like we were today at Hershey Park, my husband and I pretend we’re cast members on the The Bachelor, a junk TV show we indulge in as a family. It can be a little instructive, and, it gives us the added benefit of being able to say silly things like, “I hope you can tell I am trying to open up and be vulnerable so you can get to know me”.

So, while killing time in the long lines at the park, I imagine impressing my ‘date’ with my bravery, facing my fear of roller coasters which I feel sure I would do if we hadn’t already been married thirty years and I wanted him to think I was a real catch, just like the ladies on The Bachelor seem to do. On The Bachelor women are repelling down the sides of buildings with no more than five minutes notice for such outrageous dates, hauling out all their bravery to impress the potential life mate the producers have picked out for them. Why shouldn’t I do the same, here at Hershey Park, even though technically my husband and I are already committed to another fifty years regardless of whether we scream bloody murder together with our daughter for 90 seconds on The Great Bear today or not? Oh, it’s all rather complicated isn’t it? Just trying to distract myself since I was about to get on a scary roller coaster, something I had only done once before and that was when I was nineteen.

By the end of the day we’d forgotten all about The Bachelor, after we spilled the beans to our daughter on the outcome of the alleged ‘Rose Ceremony’ (I got a rose!), and we’d happily ridden on four roller coasters. In the end, despite my fears, I even kind of liked them. A little. Maybe.

More than that though, we’d all had a really fun day.

Kids have no idea how hard this is…

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control, express feelings, fear, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, parents

I just got a call from a friend of mine asking me for advice on a sticky situation with her ten year-old son. She told me the details and we talked about different ways it might have gone. It was an issue at school and about her chance to teach him the idea of standing up for himself. But it didn’t go exactly as planned and no one felt good when it was over.

I told her my opinion and she was grateful for my advice both on what she might do next time, but also on what she can still do this time. But really, I don’t have all the answers. My way is not the right way, and her way, although unsatisfying was not the wrong way. After talking, she wished she’d done it differently and called it a bad parenting moment. To me, it is part of the process. I give her credit for calling and asking for ideas, for bouncing her experience off of someone with older kids, someone whose had more time to see things play out over time.

But I told her that my way is only one way, and she might ask around for other people’s opinions, collect ideas and see where all the voices converge because you really have to come up with your own way. Not only that, I told her, take a look at what when on today and recognize that even though it felt like the wrong things happened, some percentage of what happened you have to be glad of. You cared and you tried. You attempted to help your son and you took action that was intended to change a bad situation. These are good things, and they show a caring parent trying her best to assist her child.

Hallelujah for all of that.

Why kids are our best friends

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being yourself, control, fear, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, piano, piano lessons, teacher, words

My little piano girl heard me say she should play the G scale with two hands and she immediately said, “I can only do one hand.”
“That’s funny”, I tell her, “because you were doing two hands just fine last week, so let’s just check, try it with two hands.”
“I can only do one hand,” she tells me.
“I heard”, I tell her, “but let’s just check and try it with two hands.” So she tries it with two hands and of course it is more than just fine. “Didn’t you just say you could only play it with one hand? And didn’t you just play it with two hands?”
“Yeeeees”, she admits.
When we open the lesson book and look at the latest assignment she says, “Bleck.”
“Bleck?” I ask.
“Yeah”, she says, “bleck.”
To make a long story short she of course played that one just fine too and I reminded her of her proclamation ahead of time, and that it didn’t really fit.
On the next page I see her check herself before she says anything. I ask, “Would you like to say something really negative and then we can cross it out after you play the piece real well, or would you like to say something positive.”
“I don’t want to say anything negative.”
I just wish there was someone following me around reminding me every time I attempt to sabotage myself or sell myself short, because it is surely as frequently as this little girl. Dang.

Sometimes you have to give to yourself that which you most want from others

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being yourself, control, dreams coming true, express feelings, friends, higher power, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, love, trust

Is it wrong of me to have American Idol singers playing on continuous loop while I am home paying bills and cooking and writing a book? Is it wrong of me to want to find connection with others through a screen or a speaker?

Sometimes I feel that I have been left out of the circuit that binds others together and I cannot figure out where humanity has gone.

So it turns out that every one of these singers is telling me the same thing: I need to be my own best friend. I need to love myself. I need to accept that I am on a path in life that is alone. No amount of trying to get others to be with me, to understand me, to explain themselves to me, will do. No amount of trying to connect in a way that cannot be, will do. I have to walk alone and be alone until I connect. And until that happens I have to trust myself and love myself and be myself, alone.

And in all the moments I am next to someone who is right there with me, hallelujah for that moment. Otherwise, I am loving me because that is who I have for sure.

No matter how many times I reinvent the wheel, rediscover that I must love myself best because no one else can do it for me, I seem to have to learn it all over again. It is a long road, this life, I am in.