Friendship isn’t easy on a good day

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being yourself, change, dreams coming true, express feelings, fear, forgiveness, friends, friendship, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, passion, relationship, teacher, trust, words, writing

 

5 Things I Want to Tell My White Friends

Having close contact with young people, like my three grown children, has helped me take steps to educate myself about systemic racism in America. With their current interest in the injustices around us, I have been inspired to also learn. Robin DeAngelo’s White Fragility taught me much, opening my eyes to issues that have been right in front of me my entire life but to which I have been blind. Movies like Selma, Fruitvale Station, Do the Right Thing, I’m Not Your Negro, Who’s Streets, 13th, and Malcolm X, gripped me and illustrated themes that drive home what I have learned recently by listening better.

I am trying to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem and so I welcome articles like this one above that focuses on cross-racial friendship. It’s a heartfelt and generous letter from author, Christine Pride, to her white friends.

Sisters

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being yourself, change, dreams coming true, express feelings, forgiveness, friends, friendship, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, love, play, relationship, security, trust

 

To all my acquired sisters (and brothers) out there: I love you and appreciate all that you bring to my life!

But my background is unusual, and a little fraught, and so the idea of having carried a sister with me from that difficult past into today, to help interpret what was and what is now, would be terribly sweet.

A scene like this picture above always makes me take pause. It is two sisters. Before the pandemic, I used to see them often and just like this, eagerly engaging in whatever it is they have to share, obviously friends. They report, lest I be confused, that as sisters things are not categorically smooth all the time.

I do love romanticizing the idea of two women who have know each other their whole lives. Partners in life who have seen it all. A trusted friend who knows what others do not and can engage in the lifted eyebrow communication reserved for so few in our lives.

My own sisters and I took different paths, primarily characterized by flight. One ran away physically, and the other, although she did move a thousand miles from home, fled by engaging with everyone through that effective distancer, anger. I haven’t gone as far away on the map, but my world is profoundly different than the one I shared once with them.

I’ve always thought it would be fun to have a sister. But it’s kind of too late now. One is gone at the hands of breast cancer and the other has herself hidden far away. There was so much threat in our lives we learned not to trust anyone, even each other. Real communication, like sharing our feelings about anything as it seems these two sisters above have been doing for a lifetime, that’s off the table.

Too bad, too. I was always up for it.

Introduction to Meathead Therapy

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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.

 

 

Forgiveness despite the failures between us

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forgiveness, relationship

Yesterday at the Quaker Meeting when the messages centered on forgiveness I found myself standing to say this.

The experience I have had with forgiveness has been so satisfying. I have been able to look past the pain and actually come to appreciate the people who hurt me. I was able to see them for what they could bring to my life rather than what they took from it despite the failure between us. The people I am talking about are my parents. They really made some profound mistakes. I have a sister who ran away and a brother who joined a cult.

Despite this I know that the life my parents provided for us was significantly better than the lives they had themselves. My mother was an orphan. She didn’t have a lot of anything in life yet she provided for her family much more than she ever had.

I have talked about psychotherapy in here before so you know that I have found in it, success, especially using the Socratic method of asking questions to find insight. I understand that what happened between us is over, and from that I was able to create a new way of being with my parents. A new life. It was a greatly reduced one, but it was possible to relate to them in a new way that included understanding what they were able to contribute and that I could enjoy them. It was much less than I wanted, but it was a happy success to be able to forgive my mother and father and to make new experiences that included appreciating them despite the failures between us.

I feel lucky to have had this experience since ironically my mother taught me to hold grudges and to categorize those people that hurt us as bad. It is not like that. We all are the same, all capable of making serious mistakes in life, and all capable of doing great good. It was not quick or easy to come to this forgiveness, but in the long run it was profound in changing the quality of my life.

Am I grown up yet?

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being yourself, change, express feelings, forgiveness, goals, inspire, joy, parents, psychotherapy, relationship

On 60 Minutes this evening Steven Spielberg said that the worst thing that happened to him in his life was his voluntary falling out with his father. The best thing that happened to him in his life was his eventual reconciliation with his father.

For me, this is all about learning and growing. I feel that even though the experiences I had as a child left me forever sorry my parent’s were not more capable, because they certainly failed me in significant ways, after a lot of work in psychotherapy questioning myself about what happened and why, I was able to accept my parents along with their shortcomings. We had a limited time here together, and so the idea of fleeing from Mom and Dad, or being angry at them, or trying to get something from them they could not possibly deliver, was a losing idea. I needed to change my way of seeing things, and recognize that I have the ability to change the way I feel. I faced painful feelings before I got there, though. Eventually I could see my parents with compassion and accept and forgive the things that happened.

Change is possible.

When your spouse isn’t who you want anymore

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change, control, dreams coming true, express feelings, forgiveness, goals, inspire, joy, love, marriage, relationship

So here’s the thing: if you love your spouse you do not tell other people, even in jest, how awful they are or how miserable they make you or what lazy SOBs they are. If you love your spouse you save that kind of idea to discuss directly with him in a constructive kind of way. And then when that doesn’t yield the desired results of turning your spouse into the person you were dreaming of it is time to consider the possibility that you yourself may need to change you. I am not saying there are no creepy spouses out there, but giving you the benefit of the doubt, you probably married a great person.

If you change you you might find you have an inordinate amount of power in getting what you want. There are limits of course, but expecting your spouse to magically be who you thought they were going to be isn’t realistic or rational or fair. Your spouse is who he is because in part he’s just spent years hanging around you!

So next time you hear yourself saying out loud that your better half is a creep consider turning YOURSELF into the fantastically thoughtful, loving, generous, you name it, spouse you yourself would like, as a model for the other guy, and then just sit back and see what wonderful things happen.

Thanks for not expunging me from the record

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being yourself, change, forgiveness, friendship, goals, inspire, mother-in-law, relationship

What I love about my mother-in-law is that, unlike my own mother, she agreed to participate in my life. Even though we didn’t see eye to eye on many things, and even though I wouldn’t let her control my life like she wanted to, we still respected each other and carried on as friends ever since I was nineteen. She came to my Thanksgiving dinners, and she came to my kids’ parties. She had presents for the kids and little notes of thoughtfulness for me. She showed me what it is to have a family around you, and a community that loves you, and how to have a place in the world that keeps you going every day. She contributed so much to her city and to her neighborhood and to her building and to her family, and she did it all by making everyone laugh. Even when she was degrading people it was funny. I never saw her literally mad, but her anger showed in cutting jokes and social slights. It’s okay to say. She was a woman with a lot of guts in so many ways.

I admire my mother-in-law because here at the end of her life it is easy for any of us who knew her to say, she loved her life and enjoyed her life. Anything about her you didn’t like is okay because she’s a person, a human, with flaws that may have hit you the wrong way sometimes, but overall, if you are keeping score, she did more for the team than most of us ever will.

I love her because she didn’t run away when she realized I was different. Maybe she couldn’t since I am married to her son, but there are relatives that have been expunged from the record so I suppose she always held that option. She didn’t want to. She wanted to be able to say her family was a happy one, so she made sure it was.

One of her last days in the hospital she told us that all the nurses were complimenting her on her large and happy family all around her. I told her she should be proud of that.

Her answer, “It wasn’t easy.”

My underwear ironed and folded just for me

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being yourself, blabbermouth, confrontation, dirty underwear, express feelings, forgiveness, friendship, inspire, mother-in-law, parents, relationship, trust

My Aunt Gretchen, whom I adored because late in life she got the idea to change her ways for the better, was forever calling and asking me questions. Once she asked me how I came to have such a good relationship with my mother-in-law because she herself had two daughters-in-law, and she was finding it challenging.

The first time I stayed at my mother-in-law-to-be’s house, young and naive as I was, I got the message loud and clear that she was in charge. I was startled as I entered my guest bedroom one day, because there on the top of my suitcase I discovered all my underwear (that is, all of my formerly dirty underwear) washed, dried, ironed, and folded! Someone, clearly the iron-loving fiend I later learned my mother-in-law to be, had gone through my bag looking for my unmentionables. She loved standing at the board so much it had apparently gotten to the point of her rooting around visitors’ bags looking for things to straighten out with an iron. That wasn’t it exactly, so I said my bit with her but I don’t think it registered.

Several years later, after my boyfriend and I were married, I confronted her more clearly on a different kind of social faux pas. She’d shared with others things I’d explicitly told her in confidence, and I didn’t appreciate it. The confrontation didn’t go that well in that she accused me of calling her a ‘blabbermouth’. When I pointed out that that was her idea things really went south. Eventually we were both crying, me sitting on the floor looking up at her, exasperated that I’d gotten into such a tangle with my mother-in-law yet defending my position that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I remember telling her I truly loved her and I wished she’d take that into consideration. In the long run she must have decided I was not someone she could control or bully and she gave up trying. We got along fine after that because we seemed to have a healthy respect for one another from that point on.

So I told all this to Aunt Gretchen in case it might help.

Guilty conscience

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absolution, being yourself, Christmas cookies, crimes, forgiveness, joy, mother, mother-in-law, relationship

Maybe I should have told on myself at the time. Okay, besides the marshmallow debacle, one of my worst crimes against my mother-in-law still nags at me as she lay in hospital hanging on to life right now, and I actually consider finally owning up and apologizing.

It was Christmas and Mama served a tray of homemade cookies to my husband, my kids and myself. Afterward she had me put away the leftovers in tins she kept in her back bedroom. In an apartment you do that kind of thing, use the back bedroom as a pantry at Christmas. Unknown to her, this was a treasure trove discovery for me and I could not sleep at night knowing cookies were across the hall. I went to the cookie jar so often after that that I nearly cleaned her out. When she and I glanced in together to make a new tray a few days later, it was shocking how few cookies were left in the cans. Shocking even to me.

She never really confronted me on it but there were veiled comments that fed my guilty conscience for years. Kind of wish she’d asked or accused me at the time, because I didn’t have sense enough to just fess up and seek absolution right away. No, the secret festered and now I wonder if it isn’t a little too late to apologize.

Dang sugar addiction.

The marshmallow debacle

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being yourself, dogs, dreams coming true, forgiveness, joy, marshmallows, mother-in-law, relationship

We were all relaxing on the couches and chairs in my mother-in-law’s apartment one night, after a lovely dinner out, when my pup came prancing by with something white in her mouth. Slightly alarmed, since my mother-in-law is not a fan of our dog and clearly something was amiss, I quietly followed my pup to the back and watched as she buried a giant marshmallow under a pillow on the bed in the guest bedroom.

They make giant marshmallows, you know. And Mama the Great, as she likes to be called, had bought a bag of these exciting sweets to share with our family. But the further I investigated the more distressed I became, because under every single pillow in the apartment there was stashed a giant marshmallow. And based on the gooey messes I was finding, some had been vigorously stashed. Apparently while we’d been out to dinner our pup had jumped onto the dining room table, opened the bag, pulled out a white ‘bone’ that needed burying and set off in search of a locale. By my count, she repeated this quite serious task about fifteen times. Mama said she found more after we left…

Somehow it came to be that my doggie was allowed at my mother-in-law’s apartment in the first place, despite Mama the Great’s dislike of such filthy beasts. Our dog even got to sit on the sofa! We secretly let her sleep in bed with us when we visited there, and this with my mother-in-law in the spare bedroom and us in her bed. Now that I look back at it, we had it coming that our pup would be banished, just for us daring to be so bold!

But the truth is, Penny was ousted, emphatically unwelcome at Mama the Great’s ever again, immediately after this the last straw, ever since referred to as, The Marshmallow Debacle.