Tag Archive for: parenting

Love Conquers All

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I don’t know how the Dalai Lama does it. Except maybe he was never the parent of a teenager. Because when the explosion happens, like a fiery plume from the Deepwater Horizon, up from the depths, burning through water to spray into the sky and rain down, it’s hard to respond with love instead of panic. As the person under fire, I’d like to curl into a ball, tuck my head and limbs underneath me, and slink off to safety. As the parent, I know the thing to do is stay calm, dig deep into the recesses of my brain for parenting strategy, and endure the onslaught as I try to slow it down.

At the end of the talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama, “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?” The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know ” Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back…but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”

My war is inside. Not only because I want to fight back, to dispute each thrust (even those that come out of nowhere – from the left and the right when my focus is straight ahead) with an equally adept parry, but because I am her mother. Because while my own wounds are stinging, I hurt for her, for the wound that is the source of all of this, the one thing she won’t let me see.  The one thing I don’t have an answer to because she keeps it so well hidden.  And because I know fighting back won’t change a thing. My head wants to delve in and examine, understand why she is so upset. My heart knows that the only way to fight fire is with water, the only way to fight hatred and fear is with love.

As the insults and hurtful words rain down, I struggle to stay in my heart. I wish that the sheer volume of my love was enough to spill over and fill her up. I want my boundless affection to swallow her anger and fear, consume it and move on like The Blob, spreading love like so much blue slime, neutralizing the pain. I want her to find the part of her that simply can’t accept my love and touch it, probe it, examine it. I want her to push into it even as it hurts and discover that it holds no sway anymore. I want her to discard it like the decoy it is and turn to me with open arms.

As the fireballs fly, it is increasingly difficult to stay open and radiate love. Every instinct I have pushes me to close down, pull in and fling well-aimed water balloons, or at least put up a shield. Eventually fatigue creeps up and I remember to listen to my heart. No matter how much it hurts, the only way out is love. I’m trusting the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King, Jr. I’m going on blind faith, here, that if I just refuse to fight back and repeat myself, eventually the message will get through. I love you. I love you. I love you. No matter what.

I’ll Be a Better Mother Tomorrow

Time is my friend, and my children’s friend.   The other night when I came up to tell Lola goodnight I was in a hurry. Bubba had been traveling a lot lately and we had some catching up to do on our couch-snuggling, Breaking Bad routine.  He was waiting downstairs and I was hoping for a smooch on Lola’s forehead, a tug of the covers to snug her in and a quick exit. She asked me to give her a meditation. I whined.

Dude, it’s late. You should have thought of that before you goofed off for 15 minutes instead of brushing your teeth and getting your pajamas on.
I want to go down and hang out with Dad. He’s waiting. 
You know that if you want a meditation, you have to be in bed before 9….


Saturday night when I made the trek to Eve’s room to tell her goodnight she stuck out her tongue for me. She has been fighting a chest cold for nearly two weeks now, no fever but congestion and a wet cough that she swears doesn’t hurt. “It’s just annoying.”  She has been sidelined from her cross-country team and is anxious to feel better, so every night I plug in the humidifier and all day long I pump her full of homeopathic remedies and probiotics and hot tea.  But now something is going on with her tongue.

It’s thrush, I tell her.
An overgrowth of yeast. Your immune system is wiped out from this virus and it can’t compete with the yeast.


She panicked. Ran to her laptop while I set up the humidifier for the night and shooed the cat out of her bathroom and looked up thrush online. She immediately jumped to the part where it talks about spreading to your esophagus in some cases, requiring an endoscopy or x-ray to diagnose. Eve has health-anxiety that I suppose relates to how sick Bubba was when she was little – always in the hospital for something or other – and she nearly always jumps into the deep end of worst-case scenario when she doesn’t feel well.

“What if I have to go to the hospital? I don’t want a tube down my throat! I can’t miss a ton of school and this is horrible!”

I rolled my eyes.

Seriously? You will be fine. I’ll do some research tonight and figure out how to handle it. We’ll tackle it tomorrow. You’re not going to need an endoscopy. Good night.


In both instances I felt guilty within five minutes.
In both instances the issue was my own inability to distance myself from the discomfort of my children.

I felt Lola’s stress acutely that night when she asked for a meditation and it was hard for me to be with her and hold space for it right then.   I was feeling my own stress and, ironically, the meditation would have done wonders for both of us, but I reverted back to the “suck it up” school of parenting I know so well (it having been modeled by my own parents) and walked out.

Eve’s anxiety ratcheted up my own on Saturday. Not that I truly believed she was seriously ill, but to see my usually-confident and capable daughter so worried threw me off.  I used the sarcasm my father was so famous for to make her feel small and shut her up.

In both cases, the next morning brought clarity.

When Lola asks me to be present with her, to help her ground herself, the best thing I can do is reinforce that. Instead of shaming her for seeking help or telling her to do it alone, I need to embrace the opportunity to teach her that this is a powerful thing to do for herself. Never again will I dismiss her request for a meditation before bedtime.

When Eve reacts so powerfully to something I say, I need to acknowledge her feelings instead of making fun of them.  I ought to have said, “I know you’re worried right now and I understand that. Is there anything I can do to help ease your fears?”

I am so sorry that I treated my girls like this and I know I’ve done it many times before.  I can only hope that from now on, I take a moment to remember what that night of sleep brought to me in terms of understanding how to support my children when they are asking for help, even if it doesn’t seem like a convenient time for me.

Post-Traumatic Processing

One of my favorite words is “friable.” It is a word I learned when I was working as a surgical assistant and it made an enormous impression on me for two reasons. First, it was accompanied by a visual cue. Second, it sounded to me like what it meant.

friable – adj. easily crumbled or reduced to powder; crumbly

Tumors or masses that were easy to remove from the surrounding tissue were either fluid-filled cysts or other dense collections of cells. But occasionally we would encounter a mass that, when you grabbed it with the forceps to hold it away from the surrounding tissue – to cut it away – little pieces would break off in the tips over and over again. It wasn’t that it was tightly adhered to its location in the body, but that it was fragile and easily broken and it was often challenging to be sure that we removed all of the mass because you couldn’t get it out all in one piece.

Today I feel friable. Not fragile, like glass that will shatter if dropped, but friable, as though if I am pulled on, small fragments will begin to fall off. It is the aftermath of how I felt yesterday which I am not sure there is a word for.

Yesterday afternoon for a few hours I felt very clear. If I were a fiction writer, a novelist who writes about space travel or psychological thrillers, I could use how I felt to form a compelling scene. It is that feeling you don’t get often that immediately follows the diversion of a major catastrophe. Similar to the adrenaline rush you get after narrowly missing another car on the road or barely righting your bicycle when you skid on a patch of wet gravel, but more profound. It is the calm after the initial heart palpitations in which you have a sort of tunnel vision, a clear, calm certainty that you have just done something very important, something that very definitively prevented a horrible set of events from being put into motion. A floating sort of feeling in which the parts of your life that are trivial literally fall away and you are left with a clarity that brings into focus every scent in the air, the dappled color of the leaves on every tree in your path, and each inhale and exhale that fills your cells with oxygen.

Yesterday as the dog and I walked through the neighborhood, I reveled in that feeling. In fact, I bathed in it. I had no other feelings. I harbored no anger toward the person whose heinous actions I prevented. I retained none of the abject fear I had possessed mere hours before, sobbing ugly, ugly tears at what we might have lost. I felt only clarity. I was yet hours from feeling gratitude for the way things worked out, and even farther from today when I simply feel friable.

As I have busied myself in the hours after the girls left for school, making phone calls and paying bills and baking blueberry muffins for the week’s breakfasts, I have felt competent and calm with an underlying sense of this crumbling, a sort of detached knowledge that if I am put under any kind of pressure, I may fall to bits.

*I know this is cryptic, but because of the particulars of the story and those involved, I do not feel at liberty to share the details. I did, however, feel the desperate need to share how it made me feel, if only to write the words down and get them out of my head.

The Lancet, Worldwide Rape Prevalence, and Raising Confident Children

There is a certain false sense of security that comes with having my daughters in an all-girls middle school. There is a modicum of relief that washes over me when I hear other parents talking about the flirtatious interactions and attractions, both clandestine and overt, that their children experience daily, hourly, continuously.  My girls get to go to school and not have to endure ‘accidental’ jostling or groping from the boy whose locker is adjacent to theirs. They are not awash in titillating situations between or during classes.

But, like I said, this is a false sense of security. Because the fact is, both of my girls identify as heterosexual at this point and both are attracted to boys – both the celebrity variety and those they know peripherally.  And while they may not see boys on a daily basis at school, they know boys and interact with boys over text and Skype and email and Facebook and I have recently begun wondering how these non-personal encounters will ultimately affect their comfort level with boys in the actual flesh.  This, of course, leads me to wonder how boys and girls learn to communicate with each other in general (and not on a sibling-level which is vastly different than both friend and partner interactions).  Should we be talking to our kids about how they present themselves, talk about themselves, assert themselves in person with someone they might be physically attracted to?  I think so.

Yesterday The Lancet published a study they conducted on the prevalence of rape, specifically, “Prevalence of and factors associated with non-partner rape perpetration: findings from the UN Multi-country Cross-sectional Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific.” (Yeah, I know – it’s a mouthful.)  I was blown away by what they found.  If you wish to examine the study and attendant findings, it is here. If not, I will attempt to accurately paraphrase the portions that shocked me to the core.

First of all, in surveying these men, ages 18-49, they did not use the word “rape.” Rather, they described circumstances that are most definitely qualified as rape and asked whether the men had engaged in any of these actions. One example was to ask whether the respondent had ever “forced a woman who was not your wife or girlfriend at the time to have sex” or “had sex with a woman who was too drunk or drugged to indicate whether she wanted it.” The numbers were staggeringly high.

In New Guinea, more than 26% of men self-reported having raped (by the above definitions) at least one woman. This ranged down to the lowest percentage of men (2.6%) in rural Bangladesh, but the numbers on repeated or multiple incidents was frightening as well.  There were no countries in this study where the sample did not contain at least one percent of respondents who had raped multiple women.  The table of results is here and includes data on men raping other men.

In nearly every country, 50% of the perpetrators committed their first rape prior to the age of 19, China being the exception.  My heart stopped when I saw that statistic.

This from the study itself: “All men who had raped were asked if they agreed or disagreed (on a four-point Likert scale) with a set of statements about why they did it. The statements expressed sexual entitlement (or the belief that if a man wants sex he has a right to have it, irrespective of the woman’s views: “I wanted her”, “I wanted to have sex”, or “I wanted to show I could do it”); entertainment seeking (“I wanted to have fun” or “I was bored”); anger or punishment (“I wanted to punish her” or “I was angry with her”); and drinking (“I had been drinking”).

And this, folks, is why I think it is vitally important that we talk to our children about the way they interact with the opposite sex. I will grant that this study did not take place in the United States and there were some correlations with violent conflicts (civil wars) and men’s attitudes towards women (a similar study in South Africa shows that nearly 28% of men admit to multiple rapes of non-partner women), but I wonder how much different the answers might be in our country.  When interactions of a personal nature are increasingly less personal (sexting, Skype ‘sex,’ etc.), how can we truly appreciate physical cues and tone of voice? When girls are objectified by the media (think: “Toddlers and Tiaras,” “Dance Moms,” any magazine advertisement for clothing or perfume or accessories in your local hair salon) and boys absorb those messages whether or not they mean to, how do we learn to talk to each other about ourselves in an authentic, meaningful way? How do we begin to have honest conversations about who we really are and how we deserve to be treated?

I don’t claim to have the answers, but I am certainly going to begin encouraging my girls to find ways to be in casual social situations with boys where they can practice simply being who they are. I imagine it will be an education for them as well as the boys they are around and I can only hope it will build their confidence to the point where they look beyond stereotypes of what a boy ‘ought’ to be like to the person inside as well as letting their true personalities emerge.

God help me.

This Might Not Be a Bad Thing…

I cry differently as an adult. I mostly cry about the same kinds of things, but there seems to be an odd threshold for actual tears falling now that there wasn’t when I was younger.

I have always been fairly emotionally sensitive, crying when I perceive that someone I love is hurting or finding myself so deeply embedded in a book or movie that a fictional tragedy sends me reeling.  I have also always been a frustrated-crier. That is to say, if I ever feel completely misunderstood or disregarded or unfairly shut-down, the anger that rises in me does so in a liquid form rather than a vaporous trail of words I probably ought not to utter.  I am one of those women who cries when her boss yells at her or when anyone in authority calls me out, especially if it is unjustified.  I have hated that quality for most of my life, all the while knowing that it has special powers over some males of the species (in my younger years, I was pulled over for speeding/taillights out/changing lanes without signaling a few times and always, the tears tumbled over each other to cascade down my cheeks — I have never ever had a ticket, only warnings).

As an adult, though, it seems that something has changed. Either my older-woman body is producing less liquid or my eyes have sunk deeper into my lower lids. Despite continuing to have very strong feelings about a variety of things, I seem less able to cry actual tears than I used to be.

Today, as we headed to the mall to shop for back-to-school clothes (admittedly one of the activities I despise the most, so I may have been a tad bit predisposed to negative energy), Eve said something mean to Lola. Instantly, I felt my chin begin to dimple and my eyes moisten behind my driving glasses.  I quietly pointed out that Lola’s feelings were quite likely to be very bruised by that comment and asked Eve to consider her sister’s reaction before opening her mouth. In the uncomfortable silence that followed, my emotions continued to build as Eve’s words echoed in my head and I imagined just how painful and shocking it must have been for Lola to hear them.  I half-wanted Eve to glance over and see a tear rolling down my cheek, if only because it may have made my point for me, but not one drop crested the edge. I blinked. My eyelashes glistened, but still no tears fell.

When my cat, Marley, died I was heartbroken. She was my first real pet as an adult.  This tiny, charcoal grey bundle of silky, purring fur that slept on my lap, shared my pillow with me, and loved everyone she met.  She lived for 13 years and when the Emergency Vet called to tell me she died peacefully in her sleep I was stunned.  I couldn’t cry for the longest time. A lump inhabited my throat, my face screwed up in that hideous way that prompts you to cover it with both hands, and my chin quivered, but no tears fell.  I alternately held my breath and gasped and buried my head in Bubba’s shoulder in true, physical grief, but it took forever for the tears to form and release.  Once they did, it was a torrent of warm, salty emotional relief, but it took forever.

I never did cry actual tears today, although my eyes did well up for a bit. Eve didn’t notice, or if she did hear my occasional sniffles and put two and two together, she didn’t let on.  The emotion passed and we ended up having an okay time shopping together, the three of us. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t start crying and risk sparking a “whole thing” as Eve says, but it does make me wonder just when I stopped being able to create a flood of tears so that my ‘crying’ has morphed into more of a sad-face-making endeavor than a sloppy mess.

Having Too Much Fun to Blog

Whoops! It’s summertime and I have summer brain which, for me, means a lot less writing and a lot more hanging out with Eve and Lola. I like to say that I work on writing about 2/3 time during the school year and 1/4 of the time in the summer. This summer in Seattle has been particularly lovely weather-wise, and the girls and I have had a ball taking advantage of the city’s attractive parks and water everywhere.

I realized, though, that my last post was fairly gloomy and I thought I’d better update my status lest you think I’m moping over here.  Au contraire – Eve went off to a week long sleepaway camp last weekend and Bubba left for a conference on the East Coast on Monday (yup, sucks to be him), so it’s just been Lola and me this week and it has rocked. Monday we decided to blow out of town, hopped a ferry with the dog and took off to wherever we wanted.  At one point, after the biggest damn ice cream I’d ever seen, we veered off the road and found a mostly deserted beach full of driftwood and a clean public restroom.  We walked the shoreline finding dead jellyfish that Lola picked up with sticks and flung back out into the sea, discovering enormous clam shells full of barnacles and throwing sticks for the dog to fetch in the surf. When we finally settled down on some driftwood and Lola started creating art out of sticks and stones and sand, she looked up,

“Mom? When do we have to leave the beach?”

“Whenever we want. We have no agenda, love. Eat when we’re hungry. Drive when we want to find a new place to hang out, sleep when we’re tired. That’s all. Just us and whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it.”

Oh, the look on her face.
Simply glorious.

We stayed for three hours, soaking up the sunshine, playing with the dog and only leaving when our stomachs started to rumble.  About ten miles down the road we found a hotel with a pool that accepted dogs, checked in and had a lovely dinner looking out at a marina full of great blue herons and beautiful sailboats.  Lola swam to her heart’s content at 9:30 that night and we woke up the next morning happy and rested.  We rented a kayak, paddled through glass-smooth waters with seals poking their heads up to greet us every few feet, spied bright orange and purple sea stars just beneath us and watched herons dive for their breakfast.  When we got hot and tired, we headed back to hang out with the dog some more.

I could bore you with the rest of the details, but let’s just say that even though we’re home now, we are still taking advantage of our ‘us’ time by doing whatever we want whenever we want to.

It rocks.

Chain Letters and Concrete Thinking

Lola got her first chain letter (email) yesterday.

They were so much more work when I was her age.  I remember getting the intricately folded sheet of notebook paper slipped into my palm or underneath my textbook on my desk during class, excusing myself to the restroom to open it up, and feeling my heart sink.

I distinctly recall sitting in the bathroom stall contemplating my next steps. Once entrusted with the note, smeary with pencil lead and softened in the creases, I now had to choose 10 or 15 others to pass the message on to…OR ELSE.

Sometimes I was promised magical outcomes upon successfully forwarding the note – the boy I had a crush on would walk me home from school or my most fervent wish would come true – but more often there were dire threats should I fail to identify enough friends to pass it to.

The difficulty was embedded in the intricate social structure that existed for a girl in the fourth or fifth grade.  There were a multitude of ‘best friends,’ many of whom the note had already passed through. Choosing the wrong girls meant that I would either hurt someone’s feelings or look like an unsophisticated fool.  Not passing it along was not an option.  Boys didn’t count, even if they were my friends, because they would never keep the chain going. You had to pick people that would perpetuate the note, and you couldn’t give it to anyone who wasn’t cool or skip over girls in the established hierarchy.  I was somewhere near the middle of the pack, which made it hard because I was never the one to start the chain.

Inevitably, on the evening that I received the note, I would settle down on my Hollie Hobby bedspread with ten fresh sheets of notebook paper to hand-copy the message. By the time I was done, the callous on my middle finger would be throbbing and red, complete with pencil-imprint in the center, and my heart would beat along in desperation that I had chosen the “right ten.”  Finding a clandestine way to pass the notes at school the next day posed nowhere near the danger that not passing it did.  I didn’t want to die in my sleep, for goodness’ sake!

For all of that, though, I never faced the fear that Lola experienced when she opened the email from a trusted friend last night before bed.  Lola’s unique perspective on the world is often quite literal. She has difficulty sussing out nuances when it comes to threats or promises and discerning whether or not they are real, and while I am fairly certain that she didn’t truly believe some horrible fate would befall her before morning if she didn’t quickly choose five friends to forward the email to, she definitely felt some sense of foreboding.  It made for a very difficult bedtime routine.  Following a candid discussion of what chain mail is (complete with the admonition that it’s more of a scam to get people to pass on viruses or phish their email inbox than anything social like it was in my childhood), we went through two rounds of cheesecloth and a meditation before she would even consider laying down.  It was another hour and a lot of cuddling before she was able to get out of her own head enough to feel safe and fall asleep.  This morning, we’re crafting an email to her friends to ask them to please not pass those emails on to her and I am struck by how much more work it was for my generation to hand-write each and every note we were passing on. We had to put in a lot more sweat for our terror!

How A Random Stranger Helped Me Examine How Much I Trust Myself

A few days ago our neighbors had a tree service come take out an enormous tree on the sidewalk near their property. The trunk was probably five feet in diameter and I don’t even want to hazard a guess as to how tall it was.  I think it was some kind of maple, rough-barked and stolid, standing on the corner like some kind of massive pin that held the block in place to the earth.

As I walked past yesterday, before they had come to haul away the chunks of debris, I could see the center of the trunk eroded like so much sawdust and thought to myself, Aahh, it was dying. That’s why they took it out. I don’t know about your city, but our city doesn’t take too kindly to removing established trees, especially those considered ‘exceptional’ examples of their species – ones that are large specimens that have been in the ground for decades.  We like our greenery here in the Pacific NW and God help you if you want to embark on a construction project that might necessitate the removal of a tree on your property. The neighbors will stage protests and tie neon ribbons around the trunk, write letters to the city planning office and plead the case for this poor, defenseless tree like they wouldn’t for a human on death row.  The fines for removing a tree without a permit are based on the assessment of ‘fair market value’ for the particular tree, and can run to tens of thousands of dollars.

But as I strolled past this one, I thought I could plainly see why they had removed it.  Until a man and his dog came around the corner and stopped short. Thin and grey-headed, the bearded man in his Seattle-uniform of khakis and work boots and olive green vest led his dog up to the remains to check it out.  I was still about half a block away and watched them circle the pile of limbs and trunk sections, the dog marking each piece in that special dog-way.  As I neared, I prepared to meet the man’s eye and smile a greeting, but he looked at me and shook his head with a mixture of disgust and sadness. He was clearly unhappy that this tree had been cut down.

I immediately checked my thoughts about the tree removal.  Maybe my assessment had been wrong – maybe what I saw of the inside of the tree didn’t represent disease or a good enough reason to cut it down. Had these people been wrong to do this?  

Fortunately, I was able to recognize this pattern of thinking for what it was. Namely, my tendency to assume that my reaction is the wrong one upon encountering someone else who feels very differently than me. Especially when that someone is a stranger, older than me, and male.

As children, we begin forming our opinions by mirroring or imitating our parents. As we move into adolescence, we slowly start to individuate, often by reacting to situations in the opposite way of our parents, but this generally lasts only for a few years as we try out different personalities in order to better determine who we are.  Generally, as we become adults we settle in to some middle ground where we are able to exercise more critical thinking and assess our own reactions and opinions with some degree of realism.  Hopefully, this comes about thanks to parents or other influential adults in our lives who have taken the time (and patience) to guide us through our teenage years as we react to things more based on emotion and erroneous assumptions than clear logical thinking. (That said, if you haven’t read Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, you should check it out because he reveals how much of our “rational” decision-making is actually based on emotion and gut-feelings and how important that is).

I spent much of my adolescence straddling the line between adult responsibilities and desperately wanting to rebel but fearful of the consequences.  I often felt as though I was faking it as I worked hard to convince the adults in authority around me that I was capable of taking care of myself both physically and emotionally so that I could be left alone. On the inside, I was terrified of being ‘found out’ for the chickenshit that I really felt like.  That set me up for a deep mistrust of my own opinions and anytime I encountered an older person who seemed like they might have it all together, I fell all over myself to defer to their ideas of right and wrong.  It took years to begin to put stock in my own thought processes and values and, sometimes when I least expect it, my tendency to doubt my own beliefs sneaks up on me.

Fortunately, it’s not important whether or not I think the tree removal was justified, but it sparked a valuable inner exploration of how often I discount my own knowledge without thinking simply because someone else appears to think differently.

It Isn’t Like Herding Cats

We have a pretty major construction project going on at our house right now.  Well, I hope the construction part starts to happen pretty soon, because so far it’s mostly been destruction, but I’m holding out hope.

There are two components to the project – one outdoor and one in the basement – that requires some fairly delicate fine-tuning and cooperation between the two sets of laborers.  Here are a few things I’ve learned in the last four weeks:

1.  Each separate entity has their own set of quirks around how they like to work, when they like to work, and what their particular set of responsibilities entails.
2.  It is my job to facilitate constructive collaboration between these two entities.
3.  This is not like herding cats.

Herding cats is a phrase I generally like and have used often, but it conjures up discrete individuals with their own ideas and agendas who simply don’t care about anyone else’s silly little life. Unless it affects when they eat.  That is important to cats.  This task is much more like herding labrador retrievers.  The head of each crew is answering to me, loyal to me (the check-writer), and concerned with my needs, like a sweet puppy dog who needs my approval. That part is great.  However, they circle around each other, wary and sniffing and a little territorial and it is my job to keep the tails wagging and not get peed on.  That is more difficult.

Both jobs are big and will take months to complete. Both are fairly intrusive to my life (ahh, the perks of working from home?), and the two jobs dovetail in multiple areas which means that if one crew takes a little longer to accomplish something (or their subcontractor simply doesn’t show up for work one day without notice), it affects everyone else.  The tension that ensues is no big deal unless I don’t nip it in the bud.  There has been some almost-middle-school drama wherein a seemingly casual conversation quickly turns into a not-very-thinly-veiled accusation against the other crew for “passing the buck” or “screwing up” and it is all I can do not to crack up.  Thus far, I have been able to deal with these jabs the same way I do with Eve and Lola, by giving more details and explaining how such a thing might have come to pass. That said, I’m fairly certain that I have the power to tip the scales simply by appearing to side with one or the other and starting a full-scale war for my admiration.

At one point, I was describing such a scene to Bubba and he remarked that, while I’m learning a lot about how boilers work and gas lines are installed, perhaps my biggest lessons in all of this will be the ones about managing people and personalities.  I agreed, but didn’t have the heart to tell him that running this household with him and two children had already given me an education in that subject.

Strike While the Iron is Hot

I was at the chiropractor’s office the other day praising the massage therapist in her office.

“It was so different than any massage I’ve ever had before. Generally, I get deep tissue work done and I feel beaten up and bruised for days afterward, but this was gentle and soothing and I nearly fell asleep more than once.”

“Mmm, hmm. She’s really good.” My chiropractor is less of a “rack’m and crack’m” and more of a manual therapist, using traction and gravity to stretch things back so that my body rights itself more often than not. That said, she won’t hesitate to manipulate my spine if it needs it and I absolutely LOVE having my neck cracked by her.

“I was toying with the idea of asking her to push a little harder, because I grew up with the ‘no pain, no gain’ ethic and I felt a little guilty that it just felt good and relaxing.  I wondered if I ought to be hurting more.”

The doctor stopped and let out a small laugh.

“You know, part of the reason she is so good is because she really listens to your tissues with her fingers. She pushes just hard enough until there is some resistance and then she works to gently increase blood flow and loosen that area up.  If there is a lot of resistance and she digs in, all she is likely to do is aggravate that area and make it more swollen and tight.”

Dramatic, theatrical pause (mine – I’m sure this only happened in my head, but sometimes just before someone says something particularly impactful to me I remember that there was a momentous second before they said it).

“There is such a thing as a ‘therapeutic window’ for everything.  If the receiver isn’t ready to receive the therapy, it won’t be helpful.”

That sentence rang in my head like church bells for days to come.

When I was struggling with depression, I had to get to a place where I was ready to hear what my therapist was saying to me.

I couldn’t possibly have forgiven my father or my molester until I was at a place in my life where that was a possibility.

I remember my high school physics teacher introducing the notion of dead space to us one day. He talked about how everything is made up of atoms and how there is a lot of space between these charged particles and they are only held together by their electrical charges (I’m simplifying greatly, so if you’re a physical scientist, don’t get upset with this rudimentary description).  We explored the notion of crystalline structures and atomic structures and chemical formulas and he blew my mind when he said I could simply pass my hand through my desktop if the atoms just all lined up correctly.  It took a long time to even begin to wrap my head around that one, and I’m not certain I have, to be completely honest.

If we just wait for the right time for things to align themselves, we can make an enormous impact by taking advantage of that window.  By learning to recognize when someone is receptive to our message we can be more certain that our input will have the intended effect.  For many years now I have wondered how many times I will have to ask my girls to do the same thing before they change their behavior.  I looked for some magical number – 1,000? 2,500? 15,000? Whatever it took, I was willing to do it so long as it resulted in my desired outcome.  But what if it isn’t a repetition but a receptivity principle?  What if I’m wasting my breath (and anger and frustration and eye-rolling) by bouncing my words off of a brick wall? What if I simply wait until I can see they are ready to hear my message and say it once?

The idea that simply talking louder or pounding my fist for emphasis or adding tears to the mix isn’t likely to change anything is a revelation.  I know inherently that my chiropractor was right.  There is a therapeutic window for everything and my window isn’t the same as anyone else’s, but if I push harder and harder in an attempt to get my agenda across, all I’m likely to do is aggravate the situation more.  I know that lecturing Eve when she’s already mad or embarrassed about something only serves to make her dig her heels in stubbornly.  I have observed that when I can hold my tongue and wait until she comes to me in contrition or asking for help, I have a much larger impact on the situation.

I can’t promise I’ll remember this principle every time I am desperate to impart some wisdom, but hopefully I can keep the image of this window in my head to prompt me to at least ask the question, “Is this person ready to hear what I want to say?”