My embarrassing Presbyterian showdown

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being yourself, change, control, differences, express feelings, fear, forgiveness, higher power, inspire, Presbyterian Church, Quaker Meeting, shun, words

It feels as if I will be saying goodbye to my dear old friend, my church, today. Literally my religion is going somewhere else. While I have been spending the greater number of Sundays attending the Quaker Meeting in town, my still frequently-important-to-me but former Presbyterian church in town, is having a crisis. Today we vote on whether we should break from our roots and become aligned with the evangelists sect or not. If the vote is to become more evangelical, then many people, myself included, will move on. Our local society of friends, the Presbyterians of years collected, will disband in part because we disagree on how to best praise God, and who is allowed to do what in our midst.

Now across the street at the Quaker Meeting this would never happen. Quakers allow change, we are tolerant of differences, and we expect us all to share critical similarities simply because we are all humans engaged in the struggle of life the best we can. Our dissimilarities are appreciated for how they bring new awareness to one another, and ironically, the Quakers no longer shun those who are different.

So, I will step into the Presbyterian showdown this morning and cast my vote that we not disband because we disagree, but my expectations are low that any of this matters. To praise God, to love life, we have to accept what God has given us, and that is people who are different but fundamentally quite the same.

Too bad loving myself wasn’t easier

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being yourself, Betty White, change, Charlie Brown, Debbie Reynolds, dreams coming true, express feelings, forgiveness, goals, honoring God, inspire, joy, love, parents, relationship, security, Sunday School, trust

I was aware as I was growing up that I was supposed to be learning to love myself because it came up at Sunday School all the time. You were supposed to love yourself first and then you’d be able to love others, and in both those ways you’d be honoring God. But I did not know how to make any of this happen. I know that must sound astounding, but loving others, and certainly loving self were not very clear concepts around our house. For one thing, there were a lot of people on Mom’s ‘black list’ and Dad was always suffering nitwits and imbeciles. There was little talk of how great anybody anywhere was except for Mom’s friends on TV, you know, people like Betty White and Debbie Reynolds. And no one ever said the word ‘love’ unless it was in a sentence such as, “Did you know that Lucy is in love with Charlie Brown?” Besides all this I was always doing things that were stupid. The whole thing was a lost cause on me.

Here I am decades later and I have made great strides in the direction of loving others. I can see now there are plenty of fantastic lovable people that I am thrilled to be around. I love loads of folks. As far as loving myself goes, I have improved greatly there, too, in that I can frequently forgive myself for being human.

But just outright, ‘I am fantastic, flaws and all’, wouldn’t that be a great thing to teach a kid?

Hope this is a present I gave my children.

Really bad naive mistakes my parents made

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being yourself, change, dreams coming true, express feelings, forgiveness, inspire, parents, relationship, teacher, trust

Maybe it looks so easy you might think it just happens automatically. And maybe it does, normally. But the happy relationships between siblings totally alluded our family. My parents were so handicapped as parents that they actually nurtured a distrust amongst us, and then naively saddled us with each other as legal and business partners with shared inherited properties that we cannot possibly manage together today. It probably all seemed so simple and logical to them at the time, but to me, today, I see some of their mistakes.

It was quite commonplace, for instance, to hear my parents complain about one of their children to the others, as in, “Your sister is so stingy,” with nary (isn’t that a great word?) a thought to the contrary, at least that was shared in an effort to balance things, or that showed understanding of the process of maturation. To my way of thinking the said stinginess was a typical childlike way to be that required some teaching by the parents to help her grow to adulthood with some compassionate behaviors. It seems to me that because their children were not fully developed as adults upon birth, my parents were quite disappointed and blamed us all for our shortcomings, and let others know it.

Let me tell you, this is a mistake.

Much better to accept your kids for what they are, immature, teachable, as yet undeveloped adults eager to grow and learn and become who they are, with your kind and loving help.

If you do not know how to be a decent parent, go to the professionals and get help. It might sound difficult, but overall, the life you lead yourself and your children into will be so much more fun.

Is there anyone out there besides just me?

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being yourself, change, fear, forgiveness, inspire, mother, parents, relationship, trust

I am finding it hard to make posts right now because I had foot surgery and have been lying around on the couch for eight days, recovering by taking pain pills, uninspired to write except today anyway, about annoying issues with my family of origin.

I have to remind myself that with kids, and adults alike, we must pick our battles. I feel like all of the parenting debacles my own parents visited on my brothers and sisters and myself follow us around still, even though our parents are gone. If mom and dad had any idea the trail of destruction they would leave I have to imagine they would have tried harder to have more awareness of what they were doing. Of the power of their actions for generations hence.

So, now, I struggle to figure out how much I care about any of our disputes and whether there is enough between us to try to preserve our flimsy relationships, our invisible-to-the-average-citizen relationships. My mother was an orphan so the idea of relationships eluded her her whole life. And Dad and his two sisters rejected each other so thoroughly they modeled clearly for their collective offspring just how to do it. It would be nice to think we didn’t have to encourage the promotion of these destructive shortcomings, but it is challenging to figure out how to get us all, or even any two of us, on the same page with such a notion.

I am game, but to ears of the others I believe I speak an entirely foreign language.

Hit in the head with plastic toys

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being yourself, change, express feelings, forgiveness, higher power, inspire, joy, mother, parents, play, relationship, words

Today is a day of celebration at my house. The great good news is that my teenagers are snarky when I ask them to help around the house. Yippee! The fantastic news in this is that apparently they are developing normally, and as is fitting for their station in life, rebelling against their parents and being inconsiderate of those around them. Hallelujah!

This reminds me of the trying times when they were little, and in particular when Andrew was little. My puppet, Moses, and he was a praying mantis, would pop up just when my patience had been tried a bit too far, and announce that it was time for prayer (that’s all Moses EVER wanted to do!). As soon as I put him on my hand and posed him in a posture of gracious prayer my words said the most helpful and amazing things. “Dear God, thank you dearly for this boy and his fantastic energy,” Moses prayed while Andrew and I bowed our heads. “Let the throwing of a plastic hammer at mommy’s head be a sign to us all that he is destined to use his energies well. That he is bound to do good in this world with this ability to fling things through the air, and in particular at objects at which he aims. Thank you God, for being the one to whom you entrusted this young soul, filled with abandon and passion and goodness. Amen.”

And with that I would feel more capable of carrying on, kindly, grateful for my dear friend, the praying mantis puppet, Moses.

Defending Mom

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forgiveness, joy, parents, relationship

As I prepare for a memorial to my Aunt Gretchen making room in a garden she started for us, to add a Paperbark Maple tree in her memory, I am pondering the ways of being a mother. She was a mother to me later in my life. My mother did her job early in my life, doing the things mothers do even when it was difficult for her. Thinking about Gretchen has me recalling the tribute I paid to my mother when she died. Even though she failed me significantly, she also succeeded in important ways I appreciate. Below are the words I said at her memorial service shortly after she died five and a half years ago.

“My mother died in her sleep and I can’t help but think she had gone to bed happy the night before. Dad had complimented her on a lovely dinner which they’d shared with my brother and his family. They had all the creature comforts they needed. And just a few weeks prior an usual joy came to my mother. The congregation of this church and the community at large showed her in very clear terms how much they respected and cared for her and my father, when they responded very generously to my request for donations to help my sister Jackie, who is suffering from breast cancer. Mom never expected people to go out of their way for her, so she was floored and delighted when the impossible happened and enough money was raised to send Jackie’s family of five to Hawaii for two weeks. She called me the day before she died to ask if Jackie and her family had gotten there, which they had.
These may seem like small joys, but they mattered a lot to my mother. Not too many people know that she was an orphan and struggled early in her life. To make a family and keep it together, feed, clothe and house the five of us all was an accomplishment for her, and my father, that was no small feat. It’s easy to take it for granted because she did it day in and day out for so long, and continued to keep a house we were all always welcome in right up until the day she died. My family had just been there the week before, and we’d seen my parents at their house in Delaware frequently in the past few months.
Until I asked Mom to explain it to me, I never felt I understood what her life was like growing up. I knew it had been hard but she was reluctant to talk about it much, so I was delighted when she agreed to let me interview her and record the facts a few years ago. We spent hours talking on the phone and in person, pouring over her scrapbooks and photo albums while she explained what happened.
My mother was born to a fifteen year old girl who although married, didn’t stay that way for long. Mom was sent to live with her father’s parents in Tennessee at the age of four. So she lived with her grandparents, who she says were very kind. It was Depression times so they didn’t have a lot, and they were even recipients of food baskets during the holidays. She stayed with them for eight years but then her grandmother had a stroke. From the ages of twelve to fifteen my mother, along with an aunt, took care of the people who were supposed to be taking care of her, her guardians, but then her grandmother died and Jerry was sent to Maryland to live with her father’s other sister, twenty-nine year old Aunt Lucille. She loved it there, and succeeded in high school even becoming valedictorian of her class. Aunt Lucille married at the age of 33, and Jerry, then 19, went off to the University of Tennessee. She soon she moved back in with her aunt and her aunt’s new husband on a farm in Maryland.
It wasn’t too long after that that tragedy struck and Aunt Lucille died in a terrible accident. My mother learned on the day of the funeral that she was not welcome to continue living in her aunt’s house and was sent packing. She was working at the local elementary school at the time and her boss, the principal there took her in. He let her stay on a cot in his attic for the next three months.
At this point in my mother’s story I said to her, “Mom, you’re making this stuff up. You slept on a cot in your boss’s attic because you had no where else to go?”
“That’s what happened,” she said.
After a while the principal got her a room with an elderly couple who lived close by to the elementary school. She took her board down the street with what my mother called a ‘grits-loving woman.’ During that time, and still secretary at the school, my mother was invited by the first grade teacher there, Rachel Paffenbarger, to come to her home for dinner to meet her son, George Paffenbarger, a student of General Agriculture at the University of Maryland. They definitely hit it off and just six months later George and Jerry got married. The actual report I got (from both of them independently), is that he was so taken with her that she told him in no uncertain terms that he would need to keep his ‘cotton pickin’ hands off of her unless they got married.
Five kids later, and a move to New York in 1961, they found themselves in a community that surrounds them still. It’s been fifty-five years since they stood in a modest church in Darnestown, Maryland to be married, my mother’s side of the church empty and Dad’s side a little fuller. And that’s where they said, ‘until death do us part.’ My Mom was a humble and unassuming woman who was grateful for the little things in life: food, clothing, shelter, her family. She taught me to cook, to sew, to play piano, to read books, to be faithful to my husband.
She didn’t like to go too far from home either. Even though she barely knew her own mother, if I wanted to talk to my mom, all I had to do was call because she was almost always at the other end of the telephone.
So I want people to know all this about my mother. She was given up by her parents at the age of four, then unintentionally abandoned by her grandparents and aunt as a teenager. She was in a boarding house when she met my father, and then they made a life together for the next fifty-five years. She made sure she gave what she never had. She made a stable home where she had never had one. She offered plentiful food which she’d not always enjoyed. She had roofs to put over heads and beds to lie down in.
And all that mattered to her. I think as she went to bed that night before she died, she had taken stock of her blessings and seen that her family was intact, that there was food in the fridge, clothes on our backs, and I know she felt the love of community. She never compromised herself. She was true to herself and she did with her life what she felt was most important: seeing that her family had what we needed. God rewarded her by letting her be one of few in this world who get to draw the card that says, “Die Peacefully in Your Sleep.”
Yes, I feel sure my mother was happy when she went to bed that night.”

Trying a little harder

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being yourself, forgiveness, friendship, inspire, relationship

My folks did lots of really good things for us kids when we were little, like impress upon us the value of doing good in the world, and in being independent and strong. But it is quite true that they also somehow failed to inspire trust between their kids, so my siblings and I unfortunately do not have strong, close relationships.

When my oldest sister, Jackie, was dying, I did an unheard of thing for our family, and I started calling her once a week to talk. At first she wasn’t sure what my angle was, why I would just for free, no strings attached, call to chat. It isn’t that we’d had some terrible issue between us, but like I said, the underlying trust one human has in another failed to get conveyed to us children from our parents. But Jackie and I got past it and she could see after a while that all I wanted was to try to connect with her before she left, and to ease her pain as much as I could from five states away. Just because I wanted to very much.

It was nice. We didn’t talk about much, but I had the goal at each call to see if I could get her to laugh. To see if we could have fun despite the fact that we’d failed in every other way to get it right between us. It was nice. We both liked the weekly phone calls. They ended eventually once her sons couldn’t get her to the phone anymore and when she didn’t make enough sense on the other end to really do it anyway. But before all that, she started to send me gifts. She seemed to forget, because of her illness, that she’d sent a Christmas gift already, so she sent another, and then another. One of them was a beautiful TUMI overnight bag.

It goes with me whenever I travel. I like to think of it as an opportunity to take with me the idea that you can change who you are and do things differently. My sister let me into her life because she was dying, and I wanted to go there because she was dying. It was a gift to us both in a way that she was so sick because it broke down walls that otherwise would still be standing. She wanted, we both wanted, for it to be different between us, but we were unaware and incapable of getting it right while we were here together, so in the eleventh hour we tried harder, and we let down our guards a little to try one more time to get it right. It worked out. And now there is the bag that I see myself itching to use at every opportunity because for me it means so much more than just a place to carry my clothes. It is a place that is a chance, a possibility, a gift in many ways, to be me, to show who I am, to share myself, to try harder, to give, to love, to want and to be, just because I want to very much.

Perfect medicine

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forgiveness, parents, play, relationship

I was sitting at the table, nauseous and wrapped in a blanket, a lovely meal in front of us all. It was the first time in days we’d all sat down together, and I was mad, mad that they all thought I should be dragged to the table to join them despite my blaring headache. Mike said it would be best for us all. Okay already. But I was mad. I’d been dosing upstairs, glad to be alone. So there I sat with head in hand, fetal position in the chair, feeling nearly dead, but present.

The kids acted like they didn’t even notice, asking me questions about my day and engaging in our usual dinner ritual entitled, ‘Day’s Events’ (usually proclaimed in a loud ringing tone as if to the king). After hearing everyone’s activities and issues for the day, I was actually anxious and willing to announce that one of the teens at the School of Rock had called me, in an admiring way, ‘groovy.’ I wanted to report this to the family to prove I was valued in the larger world and someone I barely knew liked me. As if this was at issue. As is I needed ammunition to prove I was lovable. As if that was what my ills were about. After some discussion of my being called groovy Emmett very sincerely confirmed that Carolyn had indeed surely meant it admiringly based on the context, happily validating my claim. He was fourteen at the time, after all, and getting support like that was worth something.

Next thing I knew, I was talking through the pain, and more than someone with a Richter scale 7 headache should talk, and enjoying being there, all the while sipping the tiniest bits of water from my glass, my plate still shiny and clean, no food served to me. My nausea reminded me I was too ill to be there but my mood was tempered a bit by the fact that my husband and kids were willing to have a surly, moaning, green me over none, that is over me upstairs in my bed where I wanted to be. Kids were begging for ‘family fun’ our term for togetherness. I groaned in my head at the thought of being forced to play a game or watch a show or do anything interactive because I wanted to go back to bed. Mike was suggesting a night swim after dinner and kids were put off by my lack of enthusiasm. How about cards? A game of PIG? So it was decided. I kept saying to myself, yelling angrily in my head actually, “Can’t they see I’m miserable?”, “Why include me?”, and “I don’t want to play cards.”

It seemed apparent now, that even if I were bloated and purple with growths coming out of my face, the family would have wanted me there. It seemed apparent the kids didn’t care how miserable I was, they wanted ‘Mom’ back and were trying to locate her through sheer memory. They were pretending the happy me was sitting there despite the ill and miserable one present at the table. They were doing their best to ward off the evil spirits that had invaded their home in the shape of a massive, putrid, reeking headache engulfing their mother.

And it worked. They were loving me, collectively, so hard, it seemed the specific, technical antidote, actually listed in my personal registry of psychological ills. My headache was just a throwback to the days of when Dad used to ‘take us for a drive’ and it turned into four hours of incarceration in the family station wagon with no food or water or bathroom breaks, because we were always ‘almost home.’ This is how Dad cleared his head. My sister and I landed with massive headaches by the end that were our best efforts at controlling something in our lives.

My life had felt so out of control recently, filled with all good stuff, just too much of it, like the end of school year parties, recitals, play off games, the school play, a movie premiere, field trips, extended family gatherings and more, that a headache to force me into submission was apparently just what I needed. And the love of family despite my personal weaknesses was the perfect medicine.

My kids and husband showed me in no uncertain terms that even if I’m prone on the couch, gasping my last breaths, they will still play cards with me and laugh. And this is what I need, to revive the real me, to find the mom that has put money in the bank with them all, by playing games, reading stories for hours, listening to woes, cooking and keeping house, driving and attending, planning and doing, loving and caring.

Forgive me

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forgiveness, higher power

So on a second beautiful day at the beach I waded in the waves and thanked God for my life.  I always do that.  No one else was there because, well, it is October and no one else had the idea to go swimming.  So I felt alone with the ocean.  And it seems like God itself because it is so imposing, and possibly somehow directly connected to the higher power that is responsible for our lives.  I thank God for my life because I am capable of doing good things, and I am doing them.

Looking out at the ocean inspires me to reflect on my life and what I am doing with it, noting the good and then forgiving myself for what I don’t get right.  Maybe I am warming up for New Year’s Eve.  That’s when I actively review my year, praising myself for all the good that I did, and forgiving myself for all the goofy things that seemed so right in the moment but later, not so much.