Graduation means we stay together after all

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being yourself, fear, graduation, Jane Butler

The day after my son’s fantastic graduation party in New York I was a little beside myself. Really now, it’s a big deal to graduate a kid from college these days. One major life hurdle is cleared!

But oddly I felt out of sorts the next day.

When I was ten and then twelve and then fourteen I watched my three older siblings go off to college and never return. My eldest brother got involved in a cult and failed out of school and then roamed nomadically for a while. Then my oldest sister went to school and we rarely saw her again because she didn’t come home and Mom and Dad didn’t take us to visit. My next sister went to college too but in no time decided to stick out her thumb and hitchhike across country to as far away as she could get. It had become every man for himself, and I remember thinking someone should have warned me that families cease to exist once the kids go off to college. I actually thought this was normal!

Our nuclear family, which I see clearly now, was not too solid to begin with, broke apart and never regained its footing as an entity. We just didn’t have the strength as a family to hold ourselves together. So as each member left, ostensibly for college, the family got smaller and weaker and I grieved more.

So the day after my son’s graduation from college last week I had a sense of fear that this is what really happens, and that my son would flee from us now that he is capable of being financially independent. I had great fears that I have served my purpose, as my mother did, and that my role is over. That’s what my mother taught me, I suppose. Thankfully, seeing that idea in print helps me recognize its absurdity, but it’s hard to ignore the feelings that are right there threatening such nonsense as real. I’ve worked hard to have the family I do today, fighting against so much of what my mother taught me. But under it all these outlandish ideas spring up to threaten my happiness today and I swat them down and say, “See, we have a new life different from the one in your head. Stop it. Embrace your world as it is now.”

Celebrate. Enjoy.

I know our family will stay together and remain an entity because we’ve worked to create that life, but it’s still a scary idea for me to send my kid off into the world and hope he comes back to see me. I told him all this and asked him to show me his love more loudly so I could hear it well and shut down this fear in my head, and he said he’d be glad to.

Why asking for what you want works

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being yourself, dreams coming true, fear, Jane Butler

About thirty parents were standing around the softball fields with rakes and shovels yesterday morning, poised to groom the fields after a winter of abuse, to help our girls have a place to play ball this spring. The turnout was great and everyone was in the spirit to be outside and help one another get the job done. There was one big problem however and that was that we had only one wheelbarrow. So one load of dirt at a time was being hauled from the parking lot all the way out to the infield. Six or eight people with rakes would attack it and level it in moments and then they and the other twenty or so folks would stand around waiting for another load to show up. It would take all day to get the job done at this rate and it was apparent that we should have brought more wheelbarrows.

It seemed like an easy enough problem to solve though, since the field is surrounded by a neighborhood. Wearing my dirt-covered work gloves, in my dirty jeans and with windblown hair, I knocked on doors. The first lady I got was in curlers and an old-fashioned duster and seemed flustered that someone was outside the door. But when I told her we were cleaning up the fields behind her house and that we were short some wheelbarrows she gladly offered hers. I should have targeted folks with better wheelbarrows though because hers actually had holes in it, and although we used it we were afraid we’d break it. That sent me to some more houses and I found Louis answering his door. He was so glad to help he got out his pump and inflated the flat tire on his. When I came running across the field with a second quite functional wheelbarrow the folks standing at the dirt pile cheered.

Before long I’d secured another even larger wheelbarrow along with another set of hands in the owner of that one. All told we had three extra wheelbarrows, and suddenly the job was going by at a rate three times faster.

People I found at home that morning couldn’t wait to help a crowd of folks cleaning up the park they lived next to. When they heard we were picking up garbage and grooming the fields they were delighted to help.

Everyone wants to be a hero and by asking neighbors to loan us their tools, admitting we had many hands but had neglected to come prepared, these folks were eager to jump in and save the day. I mean it. Every person I asked either agreed to loan us their wheelbarrow, or if they didn’t have one suggested a neighbor who did.

My crowd of parents thought I was the hero. But the truth is all I did was ask.

I loved seeing how eager people were to help out, and I loved seeing how easy it was to make that happen. My colleagues marveled at this simple task of asking for what we wanted, but by admitting we were ill-prepared yet determined to get the job done folks saw an opportunity to be heroes. Who wouldn’t take that?

The thing I learned yesterday morning is that you just have to ask for what you want because good will begets good will.

Kids who lie

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being yourself, fear, Jane Butler, words

When I was younger I remember making up things. Exaggerating. Pretending to know things I did not know. And spouting off about things, digging a hole for myself I sometimes could not get out of. I see now, clearly, that that was my insecurity speaking. I was afraid of the truth of the matter. That I didn’t know something. Or that I would look stupid. Or that I  was worthless as a person. No, really. My childhood ears were filled with words from authorities around me that implied and outright told me that I was full of crap. And that was before I started making up things. Making up things was a way to try to stem the tide of the ever increasing idea that maybe they were right, I didn’t know anything. I was stupid.

Making up things, lying, exaggerating, whether you are a kid or an adult, is a way of hiding. Of hiding behind ideas and words and attitudes that feel safer than the real ones. Admitting you don’t know something is tough because in the wrong company we run the risk of being made fun of.

Admitting who we really are, and encouraging our children to do the same, is a gift because we cannot move ahead in life, or grow as people, if we hide behind made up ideas and silly postures.  Kids need permission to not know. We all do. No one can have all the answers all the time.  Telling kids they are stupid, or bullying them inspires a reaction like the one I had…to try desperately to seem to know it all.

Toddlers need to say hello

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fear, Jane Butler, parents

When my kids were little we called it a ‘proper hello’. We also had a ‘proper goodbye’. They had parts. Like looking the person right in the eye and deliberately addressing them. It was not formal, but it was deliberate. It showed intention. We insisted on it so our kids got in the habit of requiring themselves to acknowledge other people.

Lots of kids today are not held to any such standard. I used to say hello to a little boy I saw every morning, but his mom never insisted he say hello back. She rolled her eyes and said, “Kids,” but she did not insist. This boy’s parents did not seem to have high expectations of him in that regard, and I’ll guess in any regard as it turns out. He was allowed to let his fears drive his behavior. It’s hard to say hello to grown-ups.

He’s a teenager now and he’s failing school, not interested in much of anything. He’s soft and slow and unengaged. Nothing much matters to him, it seems.

I cannot help but wonder if being expected to say hello figures in. Shouldn’t he hold himself to some kind of standard in life? Maybe not being required to say hello is indicative of a life of not being required to rise to enough challenges. To face down enough fears. If we don’t hold our children to higher standards, they will not hold themselves to higher standards either.

Who knows? Whenever I see children allowed to disobey their parent’s requests to be polite and their parents allow them to indulge those fears, I wonder if we aren’t creating the kind of loneliness and lack of connection, the apathy, that seems to be growing in our culture.

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.

Teenage daughter helps me find my confidence

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challenge, fear, high ropes course, Jane Butler

Occasionally I have an absurd lack of confidence in my ability to write anything meaningful here and so I have failed to post recently. Many apologies to my loyal readers. I say absurd because just last week I located plenty of confidence and strapped on the harness and helmet and for a couple of hours conquered a high ropes course with my 16-year old daughter. It isn’t writing, but confidence is required.

I had no idea what a high ropes course was until I climbed the first tree, stood on the tiny wooden platform about twenty feet high and saw that I was expected to walk across an abyss on widely placed swaying boards suspended from cables over to another tree, possibly higher yet, across the way, just over there, WAY over there. What?? Yeah, and from there there were even crazier ‘elements’ to challenge me, such as a leather saddle I was to haul over to myself then launch off upon from another platform so I might sail through the woods on my faux horse. And then, too soon, try hoisting myself up a wood and rope ladder hanging from a broad limb that looked so easy until I realized the rungs were as big around as railroad ties, and that the intervals between them were so great that I had to haul myself up onto each before being able to reach the next, all while swinging around the forest like a monkey. My heart was pounding after that, and I considered panic once I saw the zip line that required me to take a literal leap of faith towards the next tree. Thankfully I gathered my courage and dumped it all into the ride.

It’s no fun when I lose track of where I’ve left my confidence. After all, when I have hold of it, I can accomplish so much. I had no doubt at all as I traveled along the course ever higher and ever tougher that I was strong enough and able-bodied enough, capable of managing whatever they threw at me. I have lived a bit already, seen plenty, so this stuff is nothing when I measure it against what life can toss my way. Maybe I just needed an obvious challenge, a dare, a reason to strap on the gear and see if I still had my guts and my will.

Seems I do.

Maybe the purpose is to just keep trying

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being yourself, fear, Jane Butler, psychotherapy, relationship, writing

It is a crazy long and slow process of getting myself out of the cloistered existence I am so good at living. I have lots of excuses for staying hidden away, but psychotherapy has been my way out.

So of course you’ll understand that even though it may sound terrible to you, I gladly went to a group therapy weekend last year. A whole weekend of working out issues, with the help of strangers.

I spent my time that weekend trying to figure out why I wrote what I think is a very good book and have not tried very hard to get it published. We talked at length about what was holding me back from taking the next steps since I clearly care about this project and have worked hard to make it as good as I can. The large underlying problem is that secrets were the mainstay of my childhood so telling anything that might be secret to the world feels wrong. But an entire memoir seems pretty deliberate doesn’t it? I kept telling myself that sharing my ideas was somehow going to hurt people including myself and so I couldn’t possibly publish my book. Also there was the problem that the people who’d read it so far knew me and therefore their rave reviews were probably because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, or liked it because they knew me personally. So people I was meeting for the first time that weekend agreed to read it to help dispel some of those fears.

I shipped three copies out into the mail to people I’d just met. And then yesterday, months later, a package arrived back to me. It was the manuscript and these words, I finished your book… I cried at the end and I can’t remember crying at a book before. I was so touched by the continual effort you extended to connect with your family and the love you did and did not share. Guess I’m being selfish applying your experience to my own life but I have been at a point where it’s been easier not to connect with certain family members than to risk continually coming away hurt and crying! But you have planted the idea that perhaps the purpose of life is to keep trying.”

Planting seeds of hope for building or rebuilding relationships is exactly what I wanted to do and I thank this reader I barely know for spelling it out, and sharing it so I can see better why I am so engaged in this labor of love, and that I AM able to convey this important message.

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.

We all must be plucked from the raging waters sometimes

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fear, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, play, security, swimming, trust

Yesterday I kicked off my sandals and jumped into my swimming pool with all my clothes on. That’s right. Everything in my world suddenly disappeared except for the little girl slowly going under, and I do not remember thinking about anything except getting her out. Phew!
My four-year old visitor, my friend’s granddaughter, seemed unfazed by my rescue, but me and the two other adults there, and I’m counting in that my recently certified lifeguarding sixteen-year old daughter, all had to catch our collective breath and debrief a moment. Blondie coughed and sputtered, choked and was a little shaken, but generally fine after her dead weight imitation. Her seven-year old brother had given her a little shove and in she went with no apparent swim reflexes. When I looked over she was sinking, quickly filling with water, first her mouth, then her nose, her eyes, her little blond head all going under. In defense of the adults, I want to say we did have a life jacket on her but she took it off because she is four and she can do everything herself already.
Afterward, although a little timid about it, this girl got back in the pool without so much as a wimper. Big brother had to sit out the rest of the swim time, but she was praised for her bravery and encouraged to continue playing near the pool. After all, we’d just shown her that we were there, watching. She could not have been under the water more than three seconds, and her grandmother was kicking off her sandals when I splashed in, and my daughter was on her way as well. This little girl was informed that she is safe and in good hands even in a dangerous situation.

Life is full of danger, but we all must carry on despite that. Having trusted strength nearby, for all of us, is the way to navigate the waters of fear. Someone has to hold your hand, scoop you out, explain it all, or whatever you need, in order to keep going even when life gets tricky.

It was news to me when I figured this out, but now I see it clearly. We must always surround ourselves with those who care and who lift us up when we don’t even know we need it.