Full life – Life and Lims

Non-appearance-related compliments

Our culture focuses so much on appearance that it can seem like a fact of life. For some decades now, thinness has been considered the ideal for how people should look. Lighter skin tones are still quite honestly considered a basic standard, but not skin that’s very pale: a nice “healthy” tan is desirable. Clear skin is best. Straight hair is currently “in.”

We focus so much on appearance that it can be difficult even to give someone a compliment that’s not looks-based. Take a look at your social media feed and you’ll see what I mean. Anytime someone posts a new selfie or changes their profile picture, there’s a barrage of comments all saying “you look great!” “beautiful!” “haven’t changed a bit!” That’s so common, in fact, that Facebook makes “beautiful” and “gorgeous” automatic reactions on stories. You don’t even have to type it! Just click on the words to react.

But doesn’t the ubiquity of those words ever make you want something different? Do they ever feel a little insincere? Do you want to stand out from the crowd by receiving or giving a compliment/reaction that isn’t the same as usual or that at the very least captures more of who you or someone else is than how your/their face or body looks?

It’s time to up the compliment game. First, challenge yourself to stop commenting on others’ appearances, or at least to make it just a 1 in 10 occurrence. Second, dig deep. If you are reacting to someone’s photo on Facebook or Instagram, for example, you are likely friends. You know something about them and like them (if not, you may want to consider paring down your “friends” list). What are qualities you treasure? My friends are, among them, kind, strong, courageous, faithful, wise, well-read, knowledgeable, patient, generous, loving, outgoing, thoughtful, fun, hilarious, clever, persevering and talented. And that’s just a few of their admirable qualities. They’re great parents, hard workers, experienced in all kinds of work and non-work capacities, dedicated volunteers. In short, they’re people I adore.

I like to say these kinds of things:

“I love seeing that big, friendly grin.”
“You always do such fun activities with your kids.
“The way your eyes light up makes me smile.”
“Your style is always so fabulous and reflects you so well.”
“Seeing your face reminds me how good it feels to be around you.”
“Your goodness just radiates from your face.”
“I love the twinkles in your eyes.”
“You have such great taste in clothes.”
“I’m so blessed to know you.”
“Your smile is 100 watts of happiness.”
“I admire so much how caring you are.”
“I can see that fun mischievousness I like so much reflected in this photo.”

It’s even possible to compliment people you don’t know, out in the real world. You can compliment a harried mom in the supermarket on how kind and patient she is being with her toddler. You can tell someone their scarf is gorgeous or the color of their shirt is stunning. You can compliment a stranger on their smile.

Just think how much you can lift someone’s day by taking a minute (or a few) to figure out a different way of commenting besides saying how beautiful or gorgeous or thin or young they look. Pick a compliment with staying power: it sticks because it’s different, and it sticks because it reflects something about them that is more real and long-lasting than what’s on the surface. Go and have some fun crafting your own. (Or you can use some of my ideas; it’s OK.)

Share some of yours with me, too, if you like.

Listen to people of color

I’m going to start by saying I’m white. I simply do not know of myself what it’s like to experience being in skin of color. And I’m coming to appreciate more as I get older and as more shattering events occur just how much that means: that as much as I sympathize, I really can’t empathize.

My husband is Filipino. He is a person of color, though not black. My youngest child is adopted and is black. I love them and do my best to listen to them and their experiences, but I will never be in their shoes.

I do know this: being a POC means that you will likely always stand out, or at the very least feel you stand out. I’ve had 27 years of hearing my husband share with me how it’s felt for him. He’s lived in the Bay Area, in central California, in Utah, and in Alabama with me. He felt at home in the Bay Area amongst a mixture of ethnicities. In Utah, he was an ethnic oddity among a very homogeneous group of often-blond whites. In Alabama, even I felt the awkwardness, the otherness, the aversion that could happen (the silence that fell when we stepped into a small-town cafe was palpable; we stepped out quickly). He’s had people look at him askance, he’s had people call him names based on his Asian-ness (to be straight here, he’s had both whites and blacks call him Chinese-related slurs).

Even having this experience watching him and listening to his stories, I as a white woman still cannot claim any true experience for myself. I stand on the outside.

My daughter who is black is a young teenager, coming into herself, so I don’t feel our conversations have been as extensive and deep as I would claim those I’ve had with my husband to be. I anticipate having a lot more that are insightful and helpful to me as a white person in the future.

I have always considered myself open and “not racist.” I have a multi-racial family! But here I am at age 50, and with recent events and opportunities to read a lot of excellent posts from persons of color, I think I’m making progress in my views. I can look at myself and recognize that there are times I do make some judgments. They may be fleeting and I may check myself, but I know they happen. I also know that I am in a lot of ways pretty insulated in my white world, and I rarely have to think about, let alone have my life impacted by, concerns that affect POC every single day.

The Civil Rights Movement was one of protests, peaceful and not, of upheaval. It changed our society. But I think that change was more on the macro level: laws were put into place that made people truly more equal legally. Decades later, however, there is still obviously a lot more progress that needs to be made, and it’s not necessarily on a level that requires major laws to be passed; it’s on a level of better awareness and changing some institutional behaviors and attitudes. Women for years have been harassed and assaulted and have endured (or spoken up and been ignored or shut down or harassed further). The #MeToo movement encouraged millions of women to speak up and share just how common and entrenched sexual harassment is, and I think it made a tremendous difference. #BlackLivesMatter has been around for a few years, but with the events of the past weeks, it is gaining traction throughout a greater portion of society. I hope that it will truly open up a tremendous information highway on which POC can and will share their own stories of how they regularly experience being treated differently or have been harassed or feared for their lives or feared for the loved ones’ lives or feared incarceration, etc. How they feel less than or other day in and day out.

I have read every story friends have shared on Facebook recently, from the professor who was detained by two white officers because they said he matched the description of a thief to a woman who fears for her husband’s safety whenever he goes out to the father who feels safer going on walks with his children than when he goes out alone in his very own neighborhood. I hope to read many, many, many more. I hope all of us will.

I admit I used to think in response to hearing about Black Lives Matter, “Well, ALL lives matter.” Now I get it. White lives matter, of course. They have for centuries. We haven’t had to fight for basic rights as blacks have. I love the metaphor I’ve seen a few people use that comes from the Bible. Jesus taught about the shepherd who left his 99 sheep to go out to find the 1 missing. Finding that one missing sheep doesn’t make those remaining 99 any less important or valuable or equal; it simply means that one sheep is in trouble. People of color are in trouble and have been for decades, for much longer. Can’t we as the 99 give a little space in our hearts to allow that Black Lives Matter is focusing on helping and saving that 1 sheep?

I fervently hope that this moment really is the one where whites give room to save those sheep. Listening to their stories is just a first step. Those stories will lead us then to the place where we can better know how to lock arms with them and step out and demand change as it is needed in various places in society.

On the power of fear

Fear is a powerful and primal emotion. It’s useful immediately but does more damage than good if allowed to continue for more than a short time. I’ve noted it’s done a lot of damage in individuals and our society in this time of pandemic.

We were right to be afraid, in certain amounts, of the novel coronavirus. When it first emerged on the scene, we only knew it was killing and infecting many in China (and since it was China, which isn’t exactly known for free speech and dissemination of accurate information, that rightly made it a possibility that the few facts we supposedly knew could be completely wrong either direction), and it was spreading. Scientists knew very little about how it acted, how it spread, how severe it was, what the death and infection rates were. Our governments decided to take the drastic step of ordering individuals to shelter in place and closing down much of normal life. At the time, that seemed a safe bet — for two or four weeks, as we took a little time to get hospitals better prepared and figure out how to make better policy decisions after that short full shutdown.

After a few months of shutdown and some devastating consequences in countless areas of individual and communal life, fear is still running rampant. However, now our scientists know more. There are more data and facts available. Studies are underway; some have already concluded and yielded useful information that can guide policy and sound reasoning as we await even more important data and conclusions. At this point, fear levels in people are all over the map. Some are so afraid that they won’t leave their homes even after 10 weeks or more of shutdowns. In some areas of the country, this fear is more understandable than in others. Some people don’t believe the virus is at all serious and have no fear at all of going about normal life. And then there are plenty of levels of fear in between, leading to various reactions and decisions about how to live life, how to interact in society in any way.

I can say this: Those who still experience the highest levels of fear tie it to virtue, and that leads to judgment of all those who don’t share the same levels of fear. I witnessed a woman in a level of authority in our school system talk at a meeting (on Zoom/YouTube) share how she has seen great fear in the eyes of some constituents. And I could see in her face that because of that deep fear she saw that their opinions (naturally and without doubt; it should be accepted as FACT) should carry the most weight (compared to any other constituents who had varying opinions along a spectrum) as others in authority discussed how to make decisions pertaining to thousands of students (and their families).

Some people’s fear (it really is debatable whether it’s rational or irrational or anywhere in between) shut down the reasoned opinions and concerns of a whole other group of people. And that itself makes me a bit afraid. Because if we automatically give the most credence to those who have the most fear, fear will rule. Emotion will win out every single time. Emotions should be validated, considered, weighed. But reason, with emotions kept in check and tamed to some degree, should be considered and weighed more. If we let fear rule, it becomes the highest virtue, a moral imperative, and that is an outcome of this pandemic that will be far more dangerous than the illness itself.

Humans gonna be humans

I’ve thought a lot recently about human nature. How it relates to our behaviors in this pandemic/shutdown and how it relates to other important worldwide issues, like trying to clean up the planet. This is just me, but I really think that our leaders don’t NEARLY often enough take into consideration how humans tend to behave and react. And that can vary culture to culture on some issues, and be the same relating to others.

Take litter or the use of plastic bags and straws: California has legislated the use of bags and straws, but I don’t think it’s had any real effect on how much plastic is in the environment. There are a certain percentage of people who are going to litter and not bother to take an item to a trash can that may be only 5 feet away. (I see this ALL THE TIME. I’ve witnessed people just setting down a half-full 7-Eleven cup in a parking spot as they back out and leave rather than walk it 5 feet to a garbage can.) They certainly won’t be bothered to recycle. They’re going to be the ones to keep buying (for one use) the thicker “reusable” plastic bags, which must be reused quite a few times to make them worth using that much more plastic for one bag, thus generating more plastic into our environment. Then there are others of us who always separate our trash from recycling items, always throw away our litter in trash cans, always walk our grocery carts to the designated spots. (And even people who try to do what they can environment-wise too often just forget to carry around reusable bags, whether they’re cloth or plastic.)

Then there’s this pandemic. There are people who don’t think it’s serious at all and maybe even are deniers, and there are people who absolutely will not go out for fear of getting sick and/or spreading it to someone who’s high-risk, and there are all kinds of reactions/behaviors in between those two ends of the spectrum. For my part, I know COVID-19 is serious. It has infected many and has killed many. Here at its “beginning” across the world these past 6 months or so, it likely has killed more than the flu (I don’t know if we’re really going to know precise, entirely accurate numbers for another year, really, so I’m just spitballing this). Since it’s new, scientists and world leaders alike have been just trying to establish the facts about it, which takes time, and data — data that comes from more infections and deaths, unfortunately. They’ve had to make changes periodically about approaches to fighting it, treating it, locking down towns and states, countries, etc. We’ve been told different information over the course of the past few months, and while some of this information comes from some questionable sources (most of which I’ll personally label misinformation), enough comes from respected specialists. And enough of these differing conclusions (conclusions by experts drawn from facts, or data that’s the best they have at certain points in time) are reported on in reputable news media that we can’t just say people in the general public who may question or have differing opinions about necessary actions from what our leaders are telling us are on the fringe in some way.

Take me: I’m well-educated and very well-read, and I keep up (lately, almost too much for my own mental health) with the news from reputable local and national media. I’d say I’m a moderate/conservative on the political/social spectrum. And I have concluded after 9 weeks (in California) of sheltering in place that the results of this extreme action (which may have been warranted for 4 weeks, let’s say) have become far more damaging than the pandemic itself. And while opening up may lead to more deaths than we might have if we stayed sheltered in place with the same closures (which in certain respects we really can’t be sure will be the result, because of various factors at this stage of the pandemic), I think it needs to happen. And I’ve observed that our government leaders simply aren’t taking into account that many human beings are being affected. Very, very seriously. And probably most of these human beings (let’s just say aside from those in the NYC area) don’t personally know very many people who have even had the virus, let alone been seriously ill from it or died (I live in a decent-size city and have friends still in a number of locations around the U.S. and only know a few people who have had COVID). That may come across sounding like they (or I) lack empathy, but it’s simply what’s going to happen. If this were wartime — many have compared today’s situation to World War II (a false and unhelpful comparison anyway, which begs a different post) — or we were seeing hundreds of people we know in our communities die from this, we would be really motivated to stay home and do every big and small thing possible to keep the virus from spreading. But that’s not happening.

These human beings are also making comparisons about all kinds of issues that may be necessary on a legal level (and let’s face it, our society has been changed thoroughly and irrevocably by lawsuits, far too many of which have been frivolous) but that don’t seem to just “make sense” to most people who aren’t lawyers or politicians. It’s hard not to ask a lot of questions about policies or common situations being logical or rational when you’ve lost a job or know a lot of people who are in perilous economic straits, or whose senior kids are missing out on important milestones and are really disappointed, or whose kids are all at home and truly aren’t getting a “distance” education (for lots of reasons). Or who are not able to visit beloved family members in the hospital, or who need medical care for “non-emergent” concerns but can’t get it, or who are suicidal or at least dealing with far more difficult mental health conditions than when life was going about “normally.” When large retailers are open, rightly so, so people can get the necessities, but small businesses that could supply some of those same things can’t be open, especially after 9 weeks of shutdown, it doesn’t make sense logically anymore (it’s rationally a lot safer in a small business, where the foot traffic is a lot less and staff can easily clean in between customers, for example). Human beings are going to question. We’re going to ask “Why?” a whole lot. And when we don’t get reasonable answers, we’re going to agitate. We’re going to get mighty annoyed about being stuck at home (let alone rightfully scared about loss of income and inability to pay bills or getting that medical care, etc.) when it logically doesn’t seem compelling enough to do so anymore.

Politicians throwing breadcrumbs of tiny changes aren’t going to fix that. School systems not acknowledging people’s fair and reasonable concerns and questions are going to find themselves the subjects of a backlash.

“We the People” are going to ask questions and get mighty upset when we don’t get real-people, human-being answers to those questions. When our leaders speak and act in legalese or politician-ese, rather than acting like fellow human beings and replying, “Look, we get what you’re saying. If I didn’t have this experience or viewpoint or training or this legal constraint of X, Y, Z, I’d feel the same way. I kind of do. But A and B have to be done for these reasons. However, your observations are reasonable, and we can do C and D.”

We the People want our leaders to remember they are People too. We want them to speak to us as such and to involve us “regular folks” in decision-making in certain things — and there are probably more of those things that we can be involved in than they may think. Because as things are going, if this impossible state of non-living continues for much longer (it’s already unsustainable), it’s going to get ugly. For the sake of our civilization, it’s time to acknowledge that there is a lot more going on for most of the population that’s extremely serious and merits help and change.

As we “open back up”, and until there’s a viable vaccine that can help get our country and world back to a semblance of normal life (I really don’t think there’s going to be a “cure”), humans are still going to be humans. There are going to be people who don’t make any adjustments, who may come across as jerks, having learned nothing after this lengthy period of quarantine. That’s human beings for ya. But there are going to be plenty of people who will do what they can to be respectful and cautious, to do better about hand-washing or other hygiene, who will keep their distance, who may wear a mask, who will use particular caution about not being in contact with individuals who are at the most risk. It’s time we allow that to happen.

News media, social media and facts in the time of coronavirus

I’m going to share my take on information/misinformation/freedom of speech and press as a journalist. This is just my take, with my opinions uniquely my own, created by my whole set of personal circumstances but heavily informed by my training and long years of editing/writing experience in the news field (this includes me having to teach and train and work with younger and less experienced writers who were still learning to really appropriately acquire information through research and interviews and then correctly interpret and analyze it and then synthesize it for readers in a way that is clear, informative/understandable to most readers, and accurate).

First, I am generally unlikely to watch a YouTube video that is popular and going around Facebook but that has already been marked as problematic by what I consider to be trusted sources. Almost all the time, the people who created/are the “specialists” in the videos are just one person. They are not drawing on the expertise of multiple experts (the more experts who have studied a particular issue that can weigh in on the topic with generally similar advice or information, the better; that’s science. Science is coming up with hypotheses, testing those through rigorous experiments/studies, and then publishing results and having those peer-reviewed. These videos with a single so-called “expert” do not have that weight of science to back them up.

Another problem that comes up with these videos is that the “experts” have already been shown to be extremists with no evidence to back up their claims or their past claims have been debunked time and time again by scholars in the field who do have the weight of science behind them. No, I’m not going to watch a video made by an extreme anti-vaxxer. I do not agree with those who are anti-vaccination in general and who think that children should not be vaccinated for standard diseases that have in the past wiped out millions and millions. The science does not support anti-vaxxers, and I will not waste time watching a video made by one of them.

Last little point: If I already can see I’m very unlikely to be interested in the videos, I’m not going to click and thereby contribute to these people’s paydays (yes, this is just one reason it’s not “going to hurt anything” if you check some things out that you may initially already be a bit skeptical about).

To those who are saying their freedom of speech is being taken away/violated when these videos are removed from certain platforms, I say: Freedom of speech means the government cannot infringe on what you say. Even that, however, has some limitations: not all speech is protected, such as threats, child pornography, plagiarism and defamation. Private individuals and entities may, however, choose to limit your speech. Facebook and YouTube can do what they please in limiting what we share or post. That doesn’t mean that either won’t face consequences for limiting too much, such as if enough of us customers raise a ruckus about it and it makes a difference to their bottom line; it also doesn’t mean the government won’t look into some of these entities’ practices and establish some laws/rules about how these entities must move forward.

But for the moment, if FB or YouTube is removing a video time after time, those entities have reasons for doing so, and those are outlined under their terms and conditions. Facebook, for example, after being investigated by the government (various times about various concerns), has supposedly set out to do better by its users in terms of what information it allows to be disseminated quickly on its platform. It’s set up fact checks to pop up in response to certain popular videos or articles that keep getting shared that have been debunked thoroughly by reputable sources. It’s also reserved the right to remove some. It’s theoretically trying to at least provide some real news so that FB users who hop on quickly to look at their feeds don’t see something shared and hop off FB without at least having a chance to see the “other side” or the facts. I welcome seeing this kind of give-and-take, so at least some of the information that’s been vetted by professionals is quickly available. I also do try to do due diligence myself when I see something that just seems a bit fishy by searching Google for some related information, ideally multiple news articles from trusted media.

News media are an important part of our democratic republic and are protected right after free speech, and they do perform a vital role in our country. We need to be able to trust that someone is looking into the facts. (That’s another note for another day, but let’s just say for now the “mainstream media” are still the best source we have to look to for the “truthiest” facts. 😉 )

Social media is pretty dangerous when it comes to “facts” because everyone is on the same level. Anyone can say anything on social media. It’s not backed by science, it’s not the opinion of more than one person, it’s not vetted by anyone trained in anything (let’s just say the “average user” here). And any comment, anything you say, will be out there in seconds. Social media, in this case, are the opposite of news media: any news story takes time. It takes time for a trained journalist to track down the facts, to research, to interview experts. It takes time to put the story together. It takes training to know how to sift through that information gained through research and find what’s at the heart of it, the facts/truth as well as they can be found at that time. It takes a good eye and ear and experience that becomes almost a sixth sense (an earned one) of knowing what’s truth and what’s hooey or even just half-truth.

That being said, you have every right to watch any video you want, wherever it is on the scale of facts or expert insight or science. You have every right to demand that a platform not take down what you want it to keep up. You have a right to gather information any way you see fit. This is such a fascinating beauty of our democracy: you can do what you want most of the time, whether it’s great for you and others or is ill-advised, and anywhere on a spectrum of truth/falsehood. You are very welcome to research any topic you want more information about, whether it starts on Facebook with someone linking to an article or YouTube video, or you go to pretty much anywhere on the internet. You are free to do so in our free country! Go USA!

I may at times watch some videos or read some articles or links to blogs because I think they bring up some important points that maybe we haven’t considered or that haven’t been explored enough in the media yet, and I know a lot of my friends have been watching various videos now for that very reason; I support you as you have mentioned this. There may be some considerations we need to think about that just haven’t been discussed enough in “mainstream media.” And I will draw my own conclusions from what I read/watch according to my own life experience and journalism training. My opinions will be similar to others’ and be something plenty of others disagree with. I’m pretty much moderate-to-conservative politically and socially, and a lot of what I conclude will likely align with my views on that kind of scale. Sometimes not.

The novel coronavirus is sometimes exacerbating our political and social views and exposing how many people just don’t trust the media anymore, which I consider pretty sad, in part because I know that most journalists are still doing the best they can to deliver news in the way it’s supposed to be delivered, and in part because television cable channels have distorted what “the media” look like (the endless hours of very wide spans of opinions and heated arguments on cable news have, in my opinion, sullied the important profession of news delivery, making many people in general just have a sour taste in their mouths when they think “news”). And the most important reason I’m sad about that lack of trust is precisely because our great free country needs a functioning media more than it ever has, and ironically, those who are most vocal about the Bill of Rights and other amendments tend to forget that the press is in that set of amendments for vital reasons.

I do get it, though. Our political parties and leaders have become divided by a huge chasm, and we the people are getting sick of it. Most of us want to see our politicians do what we voted them in to do, to work together, to hammer out solutions to problems, to enact laws, that will benefit all of us in some way because they have been crafted by consensus, collaboration, compromise, and even (gasp!) selflessness. And our media have to report on what’s happening. That’s what’s happening, folks. And in a time that’s uncertain and even the experts tend to be sharing information that comes from a lot of different angles, with plenty of differing conclusions and even statistics, we’re going to turn to information that just makes the most sense to us.

Days and weeks matter in this time of COVID-19. A lot can change in understanding of the virus, in reactions and actions, in policies, in the science, because it’s so new, and in science, more time and more data equals better and more accurate conclusions (and consensus with peer review). The media is reporting on all that, too.

In short, we’re confused, we’re exhausted, we’re strung out, we’re frustrated. We sometimes don’t know exactly whom to trust. Eventually, things will change in this time of novel coronavirus. But I hope that our leaders, the media, and we the people will learn from this experience, because all of us can do better, in either a small degree or larger degree (yes, I’m looking at you especially, politicians). We can be a little smarter about what we share and what we say when we share it. Some healthy skepticism is good, and even some healthy trust is good.

5 ways to make the holidays more meaningful

The holidays can bring such joy — families gather together to share specially prepared meals, exchange gifts, and savor the particular magic that seems to permeate the air. Frosty windowpanes frame displays of trees and candles whose lights dance about merrily. The cold makes noses jauntily pink, and hot cocoa and spiced cider warm everyone back up. The scents of cinnamon and pine waft through the air.

Of course, that’s the ideal, what sparkles in our memories of favorite holidays. It’s also possible, with busy lives and the demands of work, kids’ last days of school before the winter break, and just trying to get ready for the expectations of what the holidays should be — grocery shopping, endless treks to the mall to get the toys and gadgets on the kids’ wish lists, getting lights strung around the house — to lose sight of the true meaning of the holidays.

Here are a few ideas for ways to bring back that wonderful feeling that can be the hallmark of this special time of year.

Get ideas from Grandma.

Ask an older member of your family, such as a grandmother or great-uncle, to share a tradition from his or her childhood and incorporate that this year. Grandma may tell you how when she was little she put her shoes outside the front door to have them filled with goodies from Santa Claus, instead of in a stocking next to the fireplace. This might work particularly well if you don’t have a fireplace and the children worry how Santa can get to their stockings without one!

Shake the family tree.

This free land of ours is a melting pot of many countries with their own unique practices surrounding the holidays. Your family may be a mixture of Russian, British and Norwegian, for example. Look up Christmas traditions that are common in Norway, perhaps, and pick one or two to incorporate this year in your celebrations. Christmas Eve dinner there usually features pork or lamb ribs or even cod, according to visitnorway.com, followed by the opening of gifts waiting under the tree. Get a recipe for Norwegian-style ribs and try that as a main course, and do the same for the traditional cookies — goro, krumkaker or berlinekrans.

Plan to volunteer or give back somehow as a family.

Depending on your family’s size and the ages of your children, it may be easy to find some way to give back to your community in some way or it may be a bit more challenging. Little ones won’t have a long attention span or may not be old enough to help out at homeless shelters or places that provide free meals, for instance. But anyone can find some way to serve others. Donating cans or boxes of nonperishable food items is a simple option; children can help Mom pick out vegetables they like and want to share with others. Take a box or bag full to your local food pantry. A more one-on-one way to brighten someone’s day is to visit a nursing home. Share your talents, such as music, or just sit and visit and ask an older person about his or her life. Ask him or her about long-ago traditions or holiday memories, even.

Re-emphasize your faith.

light Our holidays are based on religious events, after all. Find a way to focus more on “what it really is all about.” Make an advent calendar that takes the whole month of December leading up to Christmas Day to remember miracles Christ performed. I’ve been enjoying the LDS Church’s #lighttheworld initiative this month so far, which gives an idea of something to do service-wise every day of the month leading up to the 25th, based on what Jesus did in his life.

Gift a memory.

It can sometimes be difficult to find just the right gift for a loved one. This year, try “throwing it back” by finding an item that reflects a favorite toy or experience the recipient had as a child. Children of the ‘80s had Atari game systems; try giving him a classic video game set in the form of an app. Maybe your grandma misses the beautiful farmhouse she grew up in; give her a framed photo of it or an ornament that harks back to it. Or try a charm for a bracelet or necklace. Have some fun!

Purple pain

With my teen years firmly set in the ’80s, Prince was firmly set in my musical consciousness. His songs were fun, catchy, danceable and clear indicators of his genius.

But his music and persona have become part of the fabric of my family’s life, as it’s turned out, so his death today comes as a shock.

My husband, who has fantastic taste in a variety of music, and dance skills to match, has a large stack of Prince’s CDs. And in the early days of our acquaintance (in a church congregation at college, surprisingly enough), his lip-sync and dance performance of “When Doves Cry,” complete with eyeliner, purple jacket and white ruffled blouse, for a talent show gave me the notion that he was something special. Maybe that’s why I said yes when he asked me out a month later.

228122_10150184386647400_5199462_n Five years ago, when our oldest was a teen, it was announced that Prince was adding a last-minute concert in Fresno, near us. As soon as tickets were available, I pounced. I bought them for me and my husband and my teen. And we partied like it was 1999 (only it was 2011).

Just last year, when that oldest daughter got married, we knew we had to have a special father-daughter dance at the reception. It would be something that reflected US. We deliberated, brainstormed, and came up with something perfect. And it included Prince, naturally. I thought it was awesome.

The Prince is dead. Long live the Prince.

Taking care of myself? Tougher than tough

My last blog post was about my goal to take better care of my health, with a multi-pronged approach. I did well for a few weeks. And then I didn’t.

The catalyst for getting completely foiled, at least for the past month, was my grandmother’s death. It was expected; she was 99, and my family and I had had a good visit with her a few months before, as we knew she was declining after a long and full life. But the day she died, I got drained, emotionally and physically, and I just had to step out of the Atkins diet that seems to work for me, at least scale-wise.

Since then, I’ve wanted to get back into focusing on my eating and doing all the other things necessary to take better care of my whole self. How well have I done? Crappy. That’s what.

Here’s the deal: I’m a mom. I have a husband and four daughters, and they are all in vital stages of their lives. Parenting them now is in a way more demanding than it was when they were little; then it was mainly sleep deprivation and not being able to catch much alone time. Life was just a lot simpler then. Now, there’s so much more of a mental game to it than just being the taxi driver. I’m there. I’m on call. I’m helping figure out all kinds of important things for the next week, the next month, the next year: their LIVES. Even my oldest, who is married and “on her own,” still needs me, and I am still there for her whenever I can be. Even more, our relationship has a new dynamic and dimension, one we’re still trying to adjust to, I think, almost a year on.

Add to my momhood my personal leaning toward taking care of other people all the time, and my own self gets left in the dust. This past month or so has been a pressure-cooker, a meat-grinder, of calendaring and coordinating activities and appointments; responsibilities, obligations, big questions, long to-do lists, and hardly having a moment to breathe and just think about myself. Granted, I know from sad experience (over and over and over again) that is a recipe for disaster, but after all these years, I’m still trying to figure out how to cut the recipe in half or something.

So I sit here again and contemplate how to take care of myself physically: eat better overall, less sugar, more fruits and vegetables (which I do really love and eat probably more of than the average person, but still)… all that jazz. Figure out how to decrease emotional eating (THAT’s a biggie). Mix up my exercise (I’ve been dedicated to working out for 25-plus years and I really enjoy it and how it makes me feel), do some more fun and different things. The pressure cooker of the past month or two is likely to be turned down a few notches for the near future. Maybe I can make some strides on me.

What I know is this: appropriate self-care can take a lifetime of practice.

Different kinds of mourning

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death — officially (he was on life support for a day or two and then “declared dead”). I think he was really gone very late on the 13th or early the 14th. His brain experienced two big hemorrhages and I’m sure it was really “over” fairly soon. I clearly remember the moment at 9 p.m. that day that I got the call he was unconscious. I know I went into shock myself: I sat down on the couch and was just stiff, cold and shaking.

I was not at all prepared for him to die. He was only 71, and he had worked ridiculously hard (we joked with him that he worked TOO hard) to keep himself healthy by eating well and exercising. I thought for sure he’d be around a good long while. The shock of that unexpected loss took a long while to shake off.

Six years later, I’m accustomed to his being gone. When I think of him, I don’t experience a painful stab in my chest as I did for a long while. Now it’s just a small pang of longing, much less painful. It hits in the same place, right in my heart, but the wound is no longer a gaping hole. It’s scabbed over, enough so that no one else even knows it’s there, I’m sure.

This year brought me another unexpected loss. I saw the loss coming, so I guess saying the loss itself was unexpected isn’t accurate: the grieving period I went through was what took me by surprise. Because who really thinks about the notion of mourning for a beloved child who has grown up and flown from the nest?

My firstborn got married, to an incredible young man who’s just about as incredible as she is. I was thrilled about the union (once I processed the notion of her being married pretty young, which I hadn’t seen coming either, but that’s another story. The very short version: she found a wonderful person, we love him, we love them, and it was right. Plans/expectations are one thing, but life always throws interesting curve balls.).

To say the period of engagement/wedding planning was stressful is almost a cliche. Very few people say their engagements were breezy and stress-free, and, yeah, it was busy and had its bumpy moments. Bringing two families together, planning, coordinating, … it can be tough. But all through it, you know you have this amazing day to look forward to. The reward’s huge. And the wedding day and reception were beautiful, sweet, poignant, fun, full of love and friends and family celebrating together. It was a wonderful memory.

I was thinking I’d need some “recovery” time afterward to wind down from the stress of preparation. It didn’t go quite as I’d hoped, because then my girls were all home from school for the summer and I had precious little time to myself. And my personality, my particular mix of needs, requires a certain amount of alone time, to just process the rest of life, to take a breath.

As it turns out, I realized a month or two ago, I was mourning all summer. But I didn’t really recognize it as such because it wasn’t as clear-cut a “grieving situation” as, say, my dad’s death, and my younger kids kept me so crazy all summer I didn’t get to really think much and just let everything go through my brain, my emotions, my self.

One day in the middle of the summer, I did have a moment where it struck me that I felt the loss of my daughter almost as a death. It was just one day, one morning. We hadn’t seen her in a week or more, hadn’t really had any quality time with her (she lives with her husband about a 45-minute drive away from us, and they live next door to his parents, so they get to be with his family all the time and we make a lot of trips up there to see her; as time has gone on, I’ve been able to decrease the number and frequency of trips a bit so it doesn’t seem like we’re there all the time). And I just said to my husband, “I feel like she’s dead. She’s gone. How strange. It feels like I feel with Dad.” It was so clearly a loss, and it hit me square in the chest, same thing. We saw her the next day, I think, and my husband and I ended up taking her and our 13-year-old to lunch at a salad place, and that one hour being our “old” selves in a familiar environment “like we used to be” before it all changed so much made that feeling go away, or at least recede into the background for a while.

Nearly five months after the wedding, I’m starting to feel a little more myself again. When you’re in mourning, you’re a reduced version of yourself, parts shuttered, shut down, the world seeming a little dimmer. I’ve felt the world brighten up again, I think, and I’m coming back into my own. I was sad for a few months. One consequence, in my arsenal of bad habits, was that I just ate. And ate. I went through quart after quart of ice cream. I must have gained 15 to 20 pounds over the summer. I was swallowing the pain. That last consequence I’m dealing with right now, and making progress: I put myself on a low-carb diet. I was just feeling physically cruddy, and I know all the sugar I was eating was making me feel even cloudier than the grief was. A week and a half in, I’m feeling clearer and physically much better. It’s a gift I’m giving myself: to take care of my body.

So life brings grief in various ways. Death is an “obvious” vehicle for it. But we must mourn all kinds of losses. I’m reminded occasionally, with my 17-year-old, that I mourned the loss of a “normal” child when she was born because of her Down syndrome. There are days that remind me she’s not like the “typical” teen at this stage: she’s not going to be driving (not anytime soon, for sure), she can’t babysit. We have to check on her personal hygiene sometimes, and we have to remind her about appropriate behavior around other people. It’s a loss, and I am reminded more of that now because our family dynamics have changed so much since our oldest got married and moved out.

The reality is we need to be gentle with ourselves when we mourn any loss, and realize that we have to take time to grieve. We must move through it. We also need to realize that others are mourning losses as well that may not be visible to us. Be sensitive to anyone’s mourning periods of any loss. They may breeze through the period of mourning, or they may slog through. I felt “weak” somehow this whole summer because I just wasn’t myself. I felt silly because so many of my friends had children leaving the nest, whether it was for college or for church mission opportunities or some through marriage. They all seemed to be just fine. Why wasn’t I? The truth of the matter is that it didn’t matter how other people fared, when it came to my own feelings. I had to be respectful of how I felt and how I had to work through it. I hope it makes me more sensitive to others through whatever losses they’re grieving.

Life is beautiful. It is bittersweet. It is a hodgepodge of opposites: highs and lows, gains and losses. Despite the pain of grieving, I’m grateful to be on this grand adventure.

How much of life do we ‘sign up for’?

It’s difficult for me as a mother, period, and as a fellow mother of a daughter with Down syndrome, to read the words of Hallie Levine, who says she would have aborted her daughter during her pregnancy if she’d had the diagnosis then. Sure, she says now she’s grateful she didn’t, but she asserts she should have been able to and that others should be able to do so as well. Aside from all my other feelings on the subject (and I have many), I’m going to focus on one phrase she used: “I never signed up for this.”

Having heard a man whose wife is now paralyzed from the midsection down say the same thing in regards to being married, and other people in tough situations make the same remark, it strikes me that we live in a society where we really feel we should only face things we’ve agreed to. We’re so focused on freedom of choice, on contracts, on knowing so much about outcomes and possibilities, that we feel we can and do control our lives.

Assuming some equal opportunity (and that’s a topic for another blog post as well), let’s say we all get to choose the level of education we attain and what we study. We get to choose our line of work. We choose our marriage partner, if we marry. We choose how many children we have and how to raise them. We plan for and choose when to retire, and what to do in retirement.

We “sign up for” these things. We sign on the dotted line for many of them. Life is a series of contracts that we choose to accept or deny. And we’ve written escape clauses into the contracts. Many of us spend years choosing whom to marry, and when to do it, but even a few years into the contractual relationship, divorce is readily available to let us out of that signup. Pregnancy? We can avert it with birth control, we can terminate with abortion.

But how about we step back a moment and consider that life is not really within our control. It’s not just one contract after another. And when events in our era are finalized in this manner, stamped with a legal seal of approval, they often get boiled down to simple terms that don’t fully encapsulate the “real deal.”

Life is messy. It’s complicated. It involves all kinds of unpleasant surprises that we tend to think of as happening to “other people.” Even aging and death seem distant to us today, that somehow they’ll never happen to us. But they do. And the older we get, the more we experience, the more we realize that death will happen. Aging will happen. We’ll get sick, we’ll be limited in some way physically. These same things will happen to our spouses, and eventually our children.

Levine says she wouldn’t want to see someone else “forced into” her situation. But simply being alive forces us into all kinds of situations we’d rather ignore or pretend don’t exist or won’t happen to us. Choosing to get married leads us down a path in which we may very well have to care for a spouse who becomes disabled physically or loses his memory, among a host of other scary possibilities. Choosing to have children leads us down a path in which we may care for a child with a physical or intellectual disability or mental illness or any number of possibilities we never envisioned for ourselves. But those paths are real.

I don’t deny that it can be overwhelming at times to parent a child with Down syndrome. That’s just one of those “scary possibilities” I know firsthand about. I grieved for a few days when I received the results of my amniocentesis. It was an experience I didn’t count on. It was a loss, the loss of a “typical” child-rearing experience I had counted on. But life presented me this path, and I’m on it.

I don’t have any idea what other challenges lie ahead of me on life’s path, as a person, as a wife, as a mother. I won’t deny that I’ll grieve, be scared, be overwhelmed, be frustrated … any number of normal reactions. And I definitely won’t “sign up for” any of these challenges. But that’s life. And we’re all in it together. We can’t (and, yes, while many disagree with me, I heartily say “shouldn’t” when it comes to aborting in most cases) prevent these difficulties. We can learn from them, do our best to deal with them, and support each other through them. I hate to see others go through tough times, but I’ll eagerly “sign up” to lend a shoulder to cry on, a hand to help.