Filed under: Uncategorized
This summer I spent time with elderly relatives in Wisconsin and saw the vivid difference between those who harbor bitterness and anger and those who gratefully greet each day, those who fear change and those who greet it openly. My friend, Ellen Butkus, Executive Director of Senior Connections in Evanston IL has years of experience in being in relationship with people as they age. In the Senior Connections newletter, Ellen shared the poem below, written by Sam Ullman.
Youth
Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind.
It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees;
It is matter of will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of emotions;
It is the freshness of the deep springs of life.
Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity,
Of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
This often exists in an adult of sixty more than a child of twenty.
Nobody grows old merely by a number of years.
We grow old by deserting our ideals.
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.
Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what’s next.
In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station.
So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from people and from the infinite, so long are you young.
Samuel Ullman (1840-1924)
Ullman lived in Natchez Mississippi and Birmingham Alabama, where as a white businessman and lay rabbi he devoted his life to securing educational benefits for black children, similar to those provided for white children.
Published in Healthy at 100 by John Robbins
I feel it is our responsibility to be sending messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage to those wireless stations.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Homecoming 1974
This is one of my husband’s favorite pictures. It’s a picture of me, kissing a school mascot, Bucky Badger. He’s dressed in his traditional red and white striped sweater. There’s a cheerleader behind me, wearing a striped red and white sweater. Behind her is the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, standing at attention in their red and white jackets over black trousers. An older gentleman stands on the left, in a red suit jacket. He wears a red ribbon that says PRESIDENT on it in gold letters. I’m wearing a green suit with a big white chrysanthemum corsage. I’m holding a silver trophy. A grandstand filled with thousands of fans in red and white gear is in the background. It is half time for the University of Wisconsin 1974 Homecoming game against Michigan State.
*
That picture is now almost 35 years old. It is filled with so many stories, so many lessons that have nothing to do with that silver trophy. I’m grateful for that moment, for what it meant to me then and what it says to me now. It reminds me to be humble. I was confident I knew what I was doing then and I can tell you confidently now that I was oblivious to things that were obvious to others. At the time, none of it seemed very important and while people have tried to make it important, it still is just what it was, a girl in a green suit standing on the 50 yard line at half time during a football game when everyone else was in red and white.
*
I don’t care much for football. I rarely went to the games as a student. The Wisconsin team wasn’t much during those years. Students spent most of the game drinking, a past time I didn’t support. During a game, the campus was quiet and peaceful and I used the time to study. Eventually though, I joined a sorority and dated a cheerleader, had a crush on one of the football players, and was recommended as a candidate for the homecoming court the fall of my senior year.
*
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a big school, 40, 000 students. It’s described as a square mile of liberalism in the middle of reality. It’s a school of free spirits, free thinkers, ‘Wisconsin nice’ kids from small towns, rich in a tradition of cheese and beer. Students find resources to learn about anything they want to learn. Agriculture is big, engineering, medicine, nursing, journalism, education, chemistry, history, art history, whatever you want to study, is possible there. Whatever you are interested in, somebody else interested in the very same thing.
*
Homecoming, however, was a pretty small deal, officially. The business of selecting a homecoming court and a queen was interesting to a very few students. One of the fraternities, Alpha Gamma Rho, (AGR) ran the whole thing, mostly because nobody else cared about the official festivities. The AGRs loved the tradition of homecoming, they loved being in control and it was a good way to meet women. So they filled up the committee of five with themselves and a few ‘independents’ and ran the event every year.
*
Fraternities and student organizations recommended women to be on the homecoming court. A friend, Terry Bush, recommended me to his fraternity, SAE, as a candidate. His ‘brothers’ were not impressed with his recommendation and asked someone else. The AGRS nominated me. I knew everybody at the AGR fraternity. I was a “little sister” there; I was there for dinner once a week with several other young women from other sororities, so these young men could practice civil behavior around women. I was flattered and thought they were very sweet. Eventually, five young women were chosen for the Homecoming Court by the committee and I was one of them. The plan was for us to attend several city and alumni functions with committee members. After two weeks of that, the committee would vote and announce the queen at the concert the night before the homecoming game.
*
My wardrobe of blue jeans and corduroys was not suitable for that schedule of events. I called my mother and asked to buy a few things to wear. I walked down State St., the retail district nearest the campus and bought a pair of cranberry plaid trousers with a turtleneck sweater, a cranberry knit sweater and skirt and a green pantsuit with a peach flowered blouse. For the concert, the big event when the queen was announced, I decided to wear the bridesmaid dress from a wedding I’d been in 6 months earlier. Unusual, it was a brilliant purple blue and magenta with long sleeves, a high collar and a full bias skirt. It was, in my mind, just the thing. It fit me and it was ready to go. I even had the shoes.
*
I did not however have a date. I didn’t have a boyfriend and although Terry repeatedly recommended himself for the role, I decided to ask someone else I knew, Michael Minahan. He’d done this before, escorting my friend, Tracy Bush Arndt, when she was on the homecoming court two years earlier. They were a beautiful romantic couple but she broke his heart and married someone else (my dress was from being in her wedding). Michael was older, out of school, working and I could count on him to get me where I needed to be that weekend. When I asked him, there was a pause and then he said, ‘You know, I took Tracy to homecoming the year she was on the court.” I said, ‘That’s why I’m asking you. You’ll know exactly what to do because you’ve done this all before.’ There was another pause and then he said yes and then we figured out all the times and dates for everything and I was greatly relieved.
Events ramped up. There were luncheons and cocktail receptions, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, alumni gatherings. The previous summer, I’d worked as an intern for a lobbying organization. I’d learned to ‘work a room,’ talking to every person there for just long enough to make them feel included and recognized. I was good at this. The Thursday night before the game, a couple thousand students came to the pep rally. We stood on the library steps with the band, Bucky Badger, klieg lights blazing, cheering with students as they headed toward the regular Thursday night agenda, the bars.
*
Michael was an engineer, working for a firm some distance from campus. The logistics for him to get home from work, change, borrow a car, and pick me up, were tight. He asked his boss for permission to leave work early and I can now imagine the smirks in the office as he left. With my parents, we quickly visited hospitality suites the other girls’ parents were hosting. Mom and Dad joined friends for dinner and arrived at the fieldhouse just as the chairman of the homecoming committee called out my name and handed me a bouquet of roses. Standing in the aisle, they watched me take the microphone and welcome the crowd.
In the pictures from that night, I am on the stage, on the arm of one of the committee members, (who all look scruffy, in need of sleep, haircuts and decent suits) in my wild blue purple magenta dress. The other women are wearing lowcut black evening gowns. I look like I’m on fire with an electric flame, juggling the roses and gripping that microphone. I later learned that my speech about the ‘value of homecoming, the meeting of students and alums, the excitement of a football game and expectation of a good time,’ caught the homecoming committee and the evening’s master of ceremonies off guard. ‘We’ve never had anybody ever say anything before,’ Arlie Mucks, the executive director of the alumni association, remarked in amazement as we left the stage.
*
I walked out into the audience to find Michael in the front row. A handsome young man, he stood as I approached and kissed me. My sorority sisters reportedly all swooned as they watched. They called back to the sorority house to announce I had won and the house, full of girls home on a Friday night without anything to do, went beserk. When I got back to the house that night, they had all waited up for me and had managed to wake up a florist and insist that something appropriate be created to welcome me home. Bucky Badger on a miniature football field with chrysanthemums was handed to me as I walked in the door. A red T-shirt that said ‘Homecoming Queen 1971’ (earned by Betsy Helminiak’s older sister, Nancy) had been altered with a piece of tape to say ‘1974.’ I still have it. My roommate, Nan, left a big sign on my bed, “Good job, Roomie!”
Very late that night, Tracy called. I told her about wearing the bridesmaid dress from her wedding, how perfectly Michael took care of me, how he reminded me he had been her escort two years before and how grateful I was to him. She said her husband remarked that Michael had all the luck. I don’t think Michael would agree. His homecoming date was wearing the bridesmaid dress from the wedding of the woman he loved. Maybe I was thoughtful enough not to tell him that.
On Saturday, for the game, I put on my one remaining outfit, the green pantsuit. A halftime, I was down on the 50 -yard line with the exhausted homecoming committee and the rest of the court. The president of the alumni association, the vice president of research for Campbell Soup, handed me the trophy and promised to send a box of Godiva Chocolates. There were lots of pictures. We all went back to the stands and the Badgers lost the game.
*
It was the next day before I realized I should have been wearing red. On Sunday, after it was all over, Mrs. Helminak was at the sorority house for brunch. She smiled at me and remarked that she remembered shopping with her daughter Nancy for a red suit when Nancy was on homecoming court.
Red suit. In that moment, I understood how easy it is to be totally wrong about something and not have the slightest idea that you are in error. I thought of my mother graciously granting me funds to buy extra clothes and me picking that green suit because I thought it would work for job interviews I’d face in the spring. Badger Red had not entered my fashion que. Later I heard that radio announcers commented during the half time event that the University of Wisconsin homecoming queen was wearing green, the colors of Michigan State. I didn’t know Michigan State colors. It appeared I didn’t know Wisconsin colors either. The concept that anybody would notice what I was wearing had not been in my thoughts.
Love and affection from the people in my life washed over me and the green suit faded into the background. It was replaced with amazement that others thought this was a big deal. My brother said my high school history teacher announced to his classes that my being homecoming queen for the University of Wisconsin proved that exceptional and wonderful things could happen for kids who attended that high school. This is true, only my hope is that the things that happen to my fellow high school alumni are more amazing and exceptional than being a homecoming queen. My parents’ friends wrote to me with congratulations. Old boyfriends reappeared. Terry Bush, the young man who had been prescient in recommending me first, fell out of love with me and in love with my roommate, Nan, and eventually married her. ( They have four beautiful children and Terry has forgiven me for neglecting to ask him to be my date that weekend.)
The week after homecoming, I walked over to the alumni offices to pick up the trophy, now engraved with my name. Arlie Mucks again expressed his wonderment that I was beautiful AND could talk. I like to think his comments would be less acceptable today. My AGR friends told me the committee members voted for me because, simply, I was always there, helping. Whenever they looked around at the work to be done, I was doing it. For a bunch of young men who had gotten into this to meet women, this seemed a remarkably mature outcome.
Michael and I continued to see each other until he moved to Europe in the spring. After he left, I focused on getting a job after graduation, sending out hundreds of resumes to employers who were not the least bit impressed that I’d been the homecoming queen at a Big Ten school. Even the alumni association president politely accepted my resume but was not able to help. Two months after graduation, I started working for a technical school in my hometown, driving to work with my mom every day, producing radio shows about consumer issues.
*
In 1976, I joined Oscar Mayer & Co. , moving back to Madison, and in 1978, the company transferred me to Cincinnati, OH. Arlie Mucks appeared in Cincinnati for a UW alumni event and introduced me to another young Badger, Signe Ostby, saying, “You’ll like her; she’s beautiful and she can talk, too!” We would have found each other anyway; we were the only alumni there less than 72 years old. Signe offered to introduce me to someone she worked with at Procter and Gamble, but the young man she thought I should meet was not interested. He didn’t need any blind dates, he said. But as the story goes, Signe then employed the exceptional marketing talent for which she is well known and mentioned that the woman she wanted him to meet had been the homecoming queen at the University of Wisconsin, Mark decided he was interested. “Hmmm, that’s a big school, isn’t it?” he reports saying whenever he tells this story of how we met.
Eventually, when Mark saw the picture, he was puzzled by the green suit, too. He knew, just looking at the picture, I should have been wearing red. But we were already married by then. This is why we are good together. He understands and notices all that stuff that slips by me when I’m thinking about something else. Today, he has that picture on his iPhone. He thinks it’s the story of a girl chosen from thousands. I know it’s a picture of a girl who was learning life’s lessons; show up, do the work, and pay attention to the dress code.
Filed under: Family Values
This summer, I visited friends who are mothers of teenage sons. The refrains I heard were similar:
‘He’s just not showing any initiative.’
‘He needs to find something to be passionate about.’
‘If he doesn’t buckle down, he’s not going to get anywhere.’
The boys are 14, 15, 16 years old, skinny, awkward, sleepy, with that dazed look as they head out the door. If you haven’t seen them for a few months, you are struck by the physical changes in their appearance, faces are angular, shoulders and chests are broader, legs and arms are long with muscle definition. These boys are growing up. In earlier times and other cultures, they would be entering rituals to cross the threshold into manhood.
I remember this, the sense of responsibility I felt, searching for how to focus my teenage sons, how to get those long limbs moving, how to point their brains toward something worthwhile, something that would excite them, attract them, move them.
New Learning
Here’s what I’ve learned about teenage boy brains that I wish I knew 10 years ago. Boy brains, at age 14, 15, 16 do not process things like initiative or planning or consequences. Their brains are skilled at learning HOW to do things, but the very part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that processes WHY you should do something, is quiet and still, still in development.
Neuroscientists, including Dr. Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging, child psychiatry branch, National Institute of Mental Health, are documenting how differently our brains develop than what we thought. Previously, we thought brains were ‘done’ at about age 12, because they stop growing in size. Now we know that development continues into our 20′s and affects the kind of thinking we are able to do.
Generally about 18 months behind girls in cortex development and maturation, teenage boys learn HOW to drive a car easily, but don’t think about WHY to obey the speed limit. They can figure out HOW to get alcohol or drugs, but don’t consider WHY that might be dangerous. The part of the brain that manages planning and judgment, the prefrontal cortex, lags behind, catching up about age 21 and finishing maturation perhaps by age 25.
For more understanding about this, read “What Makes Teens Tick,” Time, May 2004 by Claudia Wallis, Kristina Dell, with reporting by Alice Park/New York. Here’s the link: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=977&scid=
The article summarizes brain research by Dr. Jay Giedd, Paul Thompson, Andrew Lee, Kiralee Hayashi and Arthur Toga, UCLA Lab of Neuro Imaging; Nitin Gogtay and Judy Rapoport, child psychiatry branch, National Institute of Mental Health. These neuroscientists are looking at brain activity through functional MRIs, photographing brain activity. Every parent should be learning about what these scientists are learning
.
Many of us vividly remember episodes of horror, learning what our teenage sons had been doing and asking (actually, shrieking) ‘What were you thinking?’ The boys’ response would be, ‘I don’t know.’ Now I understand that they literally didn’t know WHY they courted that obviously bad idea. It wasn’t obvious to them. It was something they figured out HOW to do and so they did it.
As these young men reach their twenties, their brains continue to develop and the part of the brain that can process WHY comes online. Boys who flipped coins to make decisions about where to travel, now make plans, reservations, consider costs, consequences, choices. Things look dangerous to them that would once have looked exciting. All the self management skills you are hoping for your son, will appear, just a few years later than you expected.
As the mother of a teenage son, your job is to explain the WHY until his own prefrontal cortex kicks in. Use a low calm voice. Make eye contact. Be brief. You get 60 seconds to make your point. Be patient. Pick your battles. Nagging about a messy room, a haircut, or baggy pants, should not take priority over WHY to obey the speed limit and avoid drinking and driving.
Distractions: Sex and Growth
There are a few other things causing your son’s apparent lack of attention to things you think are crucial. My husband comments that ’boys get mugged by their hormones.’ It is hard for mothers/women to get a good sense of how overwhelming sexual feelings are for teenage boys. Maybe now that I experience hot flashes, I have a better sense for the irrational hormonal response that overcomes you when you least expect it, want it or can deal with it: the physical change that you think everyone can see, the need to do something, strip off clothes, leave the room, the inability to concentrate or hear what anybody is saying to you. Maybe now I have some sense of how teenage boys feel when something female walks by.
Mothers get mixed up in this, because most of us are unaware of what we compete with. The most helpful clue I got was when someone explained to me boys believe their mothers can read their minds and believe their mothers will see their sexual thoughts, too. Just when you start talking with your son about how he needs to ‘buckle down’, some cleavage walks by or shows up on a billboard or is conjured up by a song on the radio. While you are talking, he’s dealing with 1) cleavage and 2) how to act as if nothing is happening even though his entire body is focused on cleavage, 3) all the while convinced that you know exactly what he is thinking about and 4) how embarrassing for your MOTHER know you are obsessed with sex. Your son might like to ‘buckle down,’ too, but right now he’s dealing with this other phenomenon and he’ll get back to you when he can.
These boys are tired and hungry from growing. Lack of interest in a plan may be because their bodies are hard at work, building and rebuilding bone structure, muscle, at an exhausting pace. Food is more interesting to them than sex and has the same demand on their consciousness. Their growth can cause clumsiness, an unconscious need to relearn how to move. From month to month, their arms and legs are noticeably longer, requiring different balance and coordination. Imagine constantly reorganizing how you walk, dress, open a door, go down the stairs, navigate in a crowd, seeing a changing face in the mirror each morning, with erupting skin, and caring deeply about how all that looks to the opposite sex.
To cover all this confusion and change, teenage boys develop skill in appearing aloof, disinterested, bored. The shields are up lest you see how great the struggle really is. What looks like a teenager doing nothing, is actually a warrior regrouping energies and emotions. Your challenge is to wait for the moments when the shields go down, hunger is sated, hormones are lulled, and that boy’s body is rested and awake. Cook something. Bake something.
Lasting Influence
As a mother, rest easy in knowing you are present in your son’s heart and soul. As girls and daughters, we underestimate our influence when we aren’t talking. The boy is studiously ignoring you but you are in his consciousness. Ask the grown men in your life to describe their mothers and you will be stunned at the intenseness of their feelings about a woman they have not lived with in decades. Think about what kind of presence you want to be. Do you want to be a nagging voice echoing in the distance? Do you want to be an anxious spirit threatening doom? Will you be a tedious scorecard of unfinished to do lists?
I would like my sons to think of me as their Number One Advocate. I know they actually think of me as someone who ruled their lives imperiously, worried incessantly, and significantly embarrassed them at some key moment, insisted on vegetables at every meal and decided where we went on vacation. I’m trying very hard to change that!
Elizabeth Schar
August 20, 2008
Filed under: The Best Half of Our Lives
Long ago there was a spreadsheet software program called Lotus. It made doing projects involving many numerical calculations remarkably easy. I became quite proficient with it while doing multi million dollar budget planning for the Marketing Department at Walt Disney World in the mid 1990′s. It gave us the ability to look at options, to provide managers and management instant feedback on how decisions they could make would affect the whole.
Lotus lost out on the spreadsheet software game and was replaced by Excel, the Microsoft product. I never learned Excel as well as Lotus. My carefully managed and manipulated Lotus files were tossed and recreated in Excel by somebody else. Today, nobody even mentions Lotus. I figured Excel out but it will never be the factor in my life that Lotus was.
Three months ago, our household switched to Macintosh computers. After 20 years of PCs, resisting the Apple way, my husband, Mark, marched us down to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, and I came home with a MacBook. (He had to wait for his new machine as they were all out of the model he wanted.)
Just as leaving Lotus behind involved some aggressive ‘streamlining’ on my part, so did the move to Apple. My 2200 contacts were somehow compromised. Probably due to a macro downloaded to niggle how contact names appeared, files swelled to 3500 and developed crossover data that would have been disastrous except that the corrupted data was so funny and clearly not life threatening. The glitch jumbled phone numbers and emails and transferred the name of a business, restaurant or chocolate shop to any contact that didn’t have a title or business listed. It was as if the macro was handing out career advice, dinner invitations or had become a gourmet eating club. Any contact without an address was given mine as if we should all show up there together for a gathering of kindred souls.
The Apple Store Genius Bar person took care of the mad macro, but the damage to my contact filewas permanent. I had to clean up the mess, a 2 day process. When I finished going through every single contact, deciding whether to keep, toss or fix, 1300 entries were left. Besides eliminating the corrupted files, I deleted contacts I’d kept because ‘you never know when you will need them’, the roofers and plumbers for every house I’d ever lived in, former colleagues I never hear from, former babysitters, committee members from boards on which I no longer serve, cleaning ladies who’ve retired, acquaintances who send a printed card at Christmas, car dealer service managers for cars I no longer own, school principals, counselors, tutors, coaches and PTA presidents who have nothing to do with my now fully adult children, and vets for pets who died.
As I went through each entry, deciding whether to keep or toss, I came to a new place in thinking about all these people I’d known at some time in the past. I’d kept track of everybody because I could. It was so easy to enter them into the database just in case I might need to contact them in the future. This jump to a new platform caused me to keep just what I need, the people who are active in my life or I’m present in theirs.
This process of streamlining through change is never comfortable. We only do it when forced. The disruption, the need to make the keep/toss decisions, the reevaluation of what is important, the liklihood that there is stuff we will never do again, is all hard. Cleaning up my contact list was nothing compared to the cleaning out attics, basements, closets, drawers, files and garages forced by movement from one lifestage to the next. What was once important is no longer and we move on to thinking about ourselves and how we spend our time very differently. This is where the value is. We can now think about ourselves very differently.
Except about chocolate. I did keep every single entry in my files about chocolate.
Filed under: Family Values
I found Family Value resources today. After I finished yesterday’s post, “Family Values, What are They?” I looked for what is available to help parents parent. Our political parties are speaking about family values but they aren’t saying anything helpful. What could be helpful? What could help parents teach children to become independent, self directed and willing to contribute to the larger community in which they live?
A friend, with a professional background in promoting healthy families, Dr. Laurie Barrett, Palo Alto, CA, offered some suggestions. Within moments, I was scrolling through a wealth of resources designed to help parents parent well.
First, go to www.CYFERnet.org. This stands for Children Youth and Families Education and Research Network. Its tagline accurate describes what you will find, “Practical Research Based Information from the Nation’s Leading Universities.” These are easy to read, research based, usable guidelines, workable suggestions for raising children to become satisfied, self sufficient adults who want to be part of the community. Information is provided by age group, development stage, issue, in materials for use by individuals, groups, professionals. This site is funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services, and provides materials developed from research being done at universities throughout the country. Yes! Your tax dollars at work, providing exactly the information and guidance parents can use to be a family that succeeds.
When you have finished there, go to www.brightfutures.org. This site is provided by Georgetown University and was created through the collaboration of thousands of health care professionals committed to helping children and families achieve good health and education. Here are the resources that will help parents understand their child’s development, know what to expect and when to ask for help. Georgetown University is a private university. This work is done through generous gifts from people and organizations who believe in this important work.
This is my new approach. When I hear political organizations speaking about threats to our nation’s family values, I’ll suggest they spend their time promoting resources like these. These materials can help a family create value and protect their greatest resource, themselves.
Filed under: Family Values
I’ve been thinking about family values. The talk stream (I could not call it a discussion) flowing around and through the last election, continually used ‘protecting family values’ as the rational for a policy or action. What are we as voters trying to protect? What is it that families do?
The family is the basic building block of our lives. It functions economically to provide food and shelter (makes it easier to decide who is going to live where and buy the groceries). The family is how we reproduce ourselves, biologically, in a noncompetitive, legally useful manner, (Just who is your daddy?) The family fashions those children into individuals who carry our society forward – do the work, pave the roads, cook the meals, teach the children, heal the sick, manage the Internet, run the government, and open the gates at Disneyland every day.
The family, in this model, is the unit which keeps our society strong and healthy. Political parties grabbed ‘family’ as the justification for everything on their platforms to attract our votes. ‘Family’ is so interesting to us; what is more basic than keeping our society, our way of life, strong and healthy?
What defines ‘Strong and Healthy?’ Here’s a trial balloon: Strong and Healthy means that individuals learn to live successfully as individuals, and successfully within a group, the community, our society. Our American society, more than most, values individual freedom and benefits from individual contribution but we survive because we learned to live in community.
This process of learning to develop as an individual and as part of a group is called “parenting”. The adults, the grownups, are tasked, by intention and default, with training the next generation, teh children, to contribute to ‘Strong and Healthy’, to live independently, to manage for themselves, and to participate in the group, to contributes to society, who we are as a whole.
What we need are family values that help parents teach children become independent, self directed and willing to contribute to the larger community in which they live.
Child development experts can easily describe what independent, self directed children who will participate in the community will look like: These are children who are satisfied with themselves, who are learning to cope with life’s hardships. These children are learning to find meaning and satisfaction in the work they choose to do. They will have good relationships with their parents, and feel close to others who add meaning to their lives. [i]
The ‘family values’ platforms of the political parties do not include any ‘planks’ about helping parents raise children like these, independent, self directed, willing to contribute. There is not a single paragraph about how to teach a child to handle life confidently, to find meaning and satisfaction in what they do. There is no discussion of how to develop good relationships between parents and children.
There are many paragraphs about things that seem distantly related to the core issue, who can married who, decisions about pregnancy, school curriculums, wages, clean air and water, drugs and violence in schools, traditional morals. [ii] All these issues are important but they do not address our most basic need, to equip families to pass on the best of what we are. We are a people who can confidently address what our community needs, because we learned that we can, through that most basic unit of our society, the family. Let’s equip parents to create what we need to be Strong and Healthy, families that give children hope, support, confidence, satisfaction in the work they can do and an unbreakable connection to people who believe in them.
[i]Bettelheim, Bruno, “A Good Enough Parent, A Book on Child Rearing”, p.3,
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, NYNY, 1987
[ii] Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_values, 01 08 07
Other Sources:
“The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”. United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed Dec 10, 1948, Palais du Challoit, Paris, France
The U.S. Bureau of the Census has defined a family as “two or more persons related by birth, marriage, or adoption, who reside together.”
Filed under: The Best Half of Our Lives
This fall, I sat with a group of friends, just a few years older than me and listened to these adorable, loving, outstanding women seriously discuss all the means available to look younger: botox, face lifts, skin treatments, what can be done to take the years away? I was appalled. Why would any one of them submit to any kind of risk or bother to change their beautiful faces?
I speak bravely but I find my own sense of self is not in the right place. While I abhor the idea that any one of my dear friends would invest a single dollar or risk any kind of surgical cosmetic procedure to look younger, I know I long for such answers myself. In the mirror before bed at night and in the morning as I brush my teeth, I see the lines and crevices around my eyes and mouth, the saggy skin below my chin. The question I ask is how will anyone ever love me when I look so old? Compared to all the other young and attractive people around, how will I keep up?
Research by a major consumer products company made a similar finding; as they age, women want to be included. We think we need to look good, or good enough, to be included. We have lived so long, and learned so much and we still think inclusion is about how we look.
But we know, we really do know, inclusion is NOT about how we look. It’s about who we are. The closeness I feel to my friends has NOTHING to do with how they look or how I look. The closeness we feel was built on what we’ve shared, the time we spent together, our conversations, our laughter, the stuff we helped each other live through, marriage, work, children, moving, new houses, new jobs, illness, and best of all, celebrations. We certainly look our best for celebrations. We dress ourselves up and fuss over how we look, but the smiles on our faces are our best feature and it is the smiles that say who we are.
So I’m adding a new step to my routine. When I catch myself in a mirror, first, I’ll smile and then I’ll for sure remember that’s why I’m included.
Filed under: Family Values
If I Had Daughters
The good Lord did not choose to give me daughters. He blessed me with two fine sons. I’m sure it was because He knew that I could never have managed all the parts and pieces of a girl’s wardrobe. Whenever I see a girl child outfitted in matching dress, socks, shoes and hairbows, I realize just where I would have been lacking. With boys, you make sure there are clean shirts, pants and socks in the drawers and they’ll figure something out.
However, since I have been a girl all these years, I’d like to mention a few things I think young women should know as they make choices in life. These are the things I would tell my daughters if I had them:
1.) Being pretty and well-dressed is not enough. The most beautiful women in the world are not the happiest. Princess Diana, a woman of incredible beauty and attractiveness, was married to a man who did not love her. For all her loveliness, external and internal, she lacked the skills to make decisions that could protect her from harm, or lead her to help. She died, fleeing from cameras chasing her to capture how she looked.
Everyday, we learn more than we care to know about the broken relationships of Hollywood’s most beautiful women. Enviable eyes, hair, noses, bosoms, bottoms, legs, voices, skin, all combined by chance of nature and skill into packages so appealing we pay money to watch them on the screen, read about them in magazines. But this very enviable beauty seems to bring a shortage of answers on how to live an enviable life. The answers for a life of sustained love are not in beauty and fashion.
2.) Do not underestimate how easily men are sexually aroused. If you want your male colleagues to treat you like an equal, give them a chance. Cover yourself up. Don’t drive them crazy by showing off skin they shouldn’t look at or think about touching. The biological success of the human species has developed out the male’s whiplash attention to anything that appealed to him sexually. Our society is working very hard to train men away from that natural reaction, but it doesn’t go away, it just goes underground.
Some cultures enforce repressive measures for women because the men know how easily men are aroused. They seek to protect their women from other men just like themselves. Only by requiring the women to be completely hidden behind veils of cloth and walls, always accompanied, are these men comfortable that other men, whose sexual urges they know are as strong as their own, will control themselves.
If you think you can use your sexual wiles to gain an advantage over a male colleague and then be treated as an equal later, you are wrong. Once you’ve wave the green flag on “think about touching my body with your hands”, the game rules get blurred. It’s unlikely any of the players will see clearly again for a long time, if ever. History provides examples of women who gained power over men by arousing lust, but in the end, their hold over future events was temporary. Cleopatra comes to mind, who tried it twice. Both of the guys died and there she was again, alone and abandoned with armies on her doorstep. Monica Lewinski ended up with a blue dress that was more reliable than the man who was entrusted to lead the free world.
3.) Your best asset is your brain. Fill it up with stuff that matters. Read a newspaper regularly to know what is going on in the world. Consciously think about the issues that surround and affect you to figure out how you feel about them and how you want to respond. Find out what other people think, dream, hope, fear so that your point of view evolves as you gain understanding. You can think through most situations if you ask yourself to do it.
4.) Your next best asset is your heart. Fill that up with stuff that matters, too. Work at honest and caring relationships with your family. Develop friendships with people who love and respect you, people that you respect and love in return. Invest your emotions in a community that wants you to achieve your dreams and will help you get there. Develop a faith in the God who loves you and cares about you and can be a positive force in making good decisions.
5.) Take care of your body. Instead of worrying about the shape of your nose or your bustline, figure out how to feed yourself and get the exercise your body needs. Your body is the only thing you can expect to be with you all of your life. Take responsibility for your brain, your eyes, your lungs, your teeth and your sexual safety. You cannot go backwards on these things. You do not get ‘do overs’. If you need help figuring out how to manage yourself, ask for it. There are many caring adults around you, known and unknown to you now, who have answers and experience on how to replace harmful behaviors with positive ones.
6.) Vote! Every female in the country should watch the PBS documentary, “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. “ This is the story of their efforts to gain voting rights for women in this country. http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony. It was a 70 year effort from the time they first met in 1851 until women first voted in a US election in 1920. Each one of us honors their memory, dedication and labor on our behalf when we mark our ballots to participate in the government of our country.
I’m sure mothers who do have daughters tell them these same things, only in much longer conversations – through years of chatter, listening, arguments, stories, examples, looks, silences, and waiting. It’s pretty much the same with sons, with less chatter, more silence, different postures and the same kind of waiting.
Filed under: The Best Half of Our Lives
A poem written by Jenny Joseph started a phenomenon of older women wearing red hats with purple outfits. Collections of these women in red and purple attire appear in restaurants and airports, gathering and traveling together, using this defiance as a rallying cry for adventure. The poem channels deep desires to be ornery and self centered, the freedom to abandon tedious social niceties and follow any particular personal whim without concern for the consequences. “When I am an old woman, I will wear purple,” the poem begins……. The concept is prevalent enough that when you put Old and Purple into a search engine, that poem is the first thing to appear (copy listed below).
The women wearing red and purple exhibit an enviable joy de vivre, but I suspect greater charm will be the survival skill we will need most, rather than defiance. We will want to become ever more agreeable to be with rather than less agreeable.
The individual independence so basic to American culture and so highly prized and fought for may not serve us well as we age. Rather than insisting on our ability to care for ourselves, stay in our own homes, and growling that we are not going to be a burden to our children, we should be increasing our ability to accept help and support from the community. We should be developing our diplomatic skills, community building skills, collaboration skills, our servant skills to increase our interaction with our community rather than thinking longingly of defiant bad behavior. Recognition of our own future needs for support, physicial and emotional, could help us build a more comfortable place for ourselves now. This place will be comfortable in a way we did not expect to want. It will be comfortable in our interdependance rather than our independance.
To create this comfort, we will want to increase our value to our community, not by boasting of our past accomplishments but rather by increasing our ability to serve and care for those around us. We should be working to make ourselves more attractive to our fellow citizens so that we will continue to be invited to join others in their lives, to come over for dinner, to watch a TV show, to pick up their mail when they are gone, to share a recipe, a book, a walk, a ride to the store.
While the connectivity to others will increase our happiness, the sense of achievement we gain will benefit us as well. Claudia Senik, professor of economics at the Sorbonne, believes that the basic person finds pleasure in progress. “Our key to happiness will lie in being involved in something that is growing, going forward, pulling us along. “
Each of us needs to be involved in someone or something that needs our help. We should be inviting ourselves into the lives of those younger than us, helping them accomplish their goals, supporting their dreams, helping care for children, fix cars, find jobs, build homes, pay for schools, quietly building into relationships with them.
Each of us should be practicing our best manners; becoming increasingly delightful to be with, to assure invitations and inclusion in the lives of others. Several friends have observed that as their parents aged, the dominant personal trait became even stronger. If someone was a conservative, they became an arch conservative. If someone was impatient, they became intolerant. If someone tended to talk a lot, they evolved to talking constantly. If someone was hopeful, they continued to provide a beacon of light and hope to all around them, inspite of pain, restrictions, illness and loss of vision, hearing and strength. That’s my goal. I want to be known as a beacon of hope.
Those I see who are happiest at this later time of their lives are those who have chosen to be most charming and useful in their current communities. They let go of their own ego, needs, demands, desires and focus on the future in the lives of those they can serve. Rather than wearing the purple of defiance, these people are still extending invitations to those around them to gather and share.
One of the readers of this blog responded that the women who wear the red hats and purple dresses are creating community in gathering together, providing support, initiating adventures. I commend them and will go and do likewise. Without the hat and the purple.
A Prayer for Us as We Age (author unknown)
Provided by someone I admire and who has inspired me by their approach to this time of their lives.
Father, thou knowest that I am becoming older. Keep me from becoming talkative and possessed with the idea that I must express myself on every subject. Release me from the craving to straighten out everyone’s affairs. Keep my mind free from the recital of endless detail. Give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips when I am inclined to tell of my aches and pains: they are increasing with the years and my love to speak of them grows sweeter as time goes by. Teach me the glorious lesson that I may occasionally be wrong. Make me thoughtful but not nosey, helpful but not bossy. With my great store of wisdom and experience it does seem a pity not to share it all. But thou knowest, Lord, that I want a few friends left at the end. Amen.
HOW TO STAY YOUNG by George Carlin
1. Throw out nonessential numbers. This includes age, weight and height. Let the doctors worry about them. That is why you pay “them!”
2. Keep only cheerful friends. The grouches pull you down.
3. Keep learning. Learn more about the computer, crafts, gardening, whatever. Never let the brain idle. “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” And the devil’s name is Alzheimer’s.
4. Enjoy the simple things.
5. Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath.
6. The tears happen. Endure, grieve, and move on. The only person who is with you your entire life, you. Be ALIVE while you are alive.
7. Surround yourself with what you love, whether it’s family, pets, keepsakes, music, plants, hobbies, whatever. Your home is your refuge.
8. Cherish your health: If it is good, preserve it. If it is unstable, improve it. If it is beyond what you can improve, get help.
9 Don’t take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, even to the next county; to a foreign country but NOT to where the guilt is.
10. Tell the people you love that you love them, at every opportunity.
AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the Moments that take our breath away.
Warning
by Jenny Joseph
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit. You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple
Jenny Joseph
