Generational Poverty

Currently there is lots of public furor regarding "illegal immigrants" coming to America, taking jobs away from Americans, and costing the US taxpayers by utilizing services paid for by our tax dollars. What I see are folks who come here risking everything, including death, just to get here. Once here, they take whatever job is available. Typically these jobs are physically exhausting, dangerous, and low paying. There is no “40-hour work week”. Most newly immigrated people work 80 hours a week. They live 8 - 10 or more people in a small space so they can pay the bills. They aren't eligible for food stamps, childcare our housing subsidies, welfare or Medicaid. They work hard, earn money, spend money, save money, and send money to their families in Mexico. They take turns caring for the children. They don't come here knowing English in most cases, but they are acquiring English skills faster than any other immigrant group in the history of America. Most use a false social security number, so they are paying taxes into the US treasury, but often don't know they can, or are afraid to file taxes and receive a tax refund even though they likely qualify for one because of their low income.

The focus on undocumented workers reminds me of the focus some years ago on the abuse of children by their nannies. We have a near epidemic of children dieing in car accidents because they aren’t properly restrained. This tragic reality is true for children of all races and ethnicities and from all socioeconomic strata. Yet a few years ago, our media and our private conversations focused on a relatively small number of children who are at risk of being abused by private nannies hired to care for them.

It seems to me that we are again focusing on the wrong issue. Within our own citizenry, families are poor and getting poorer. Poverty is very expensive and far reaching. Poverty is a major risk factor for so many other issues such as child abuse and neglect, risk of school failure, early sexual behaviors, teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol dependency, domestic violence, gang involvement, teen suicide and homicide, juvenile criminal behavior, adult criminal behavior and on and on and on. The money required to address these latent effects is astronomical.

In America we have an underclass of people who speak English, have a social security number, are able-bodied and as intellectually capable as their Mexican counterparts, who live in public housing or receive housing subsidies, food stamps, Medicaid, welfare, WIC and who visit food pantries and get help from churches and nonprofits to pay their power bills, medical and prescription co-pays, get help with heating costs, and help at Christmas for their children. These folks can't get a job because if they do their subsidies will be cut. They can't make enough money working jobs they qualify for to pay the bills and provide medical insurance for their children.

So these American families maintain their lives on welfare. Parents unknowingly teach their children how to survive in poverty rather than how to have educational and employment success. Perhaps these parents have no idea how to help their children succeed, or don't believe that such a path is possible for their family. They are surrounded by others who live similar lives, so they have no role models they can relate to who might guide them to a different kind of life. They never developed a work ethic and they don't see a way out.

Please understand. There are many families who find themselves in need of temporary assistance from entitlement benefits. I am not asserting that entitlement benefits or the people who use them are inherently bad. In fact, the benefits are vital life preservers for families who aren’t able to sustain themselves any other way. (By the way, Social Security and Medicare are also an “entitlement benefits,” so it is important not to fall victim to the belief that only certain types of people use entitlements.)

But our economy and our laws and the businesses in our communities must be designed to work WITH entitlement benefits so that each supports the other and people are able to work their way off of welfare. As the system exists, most of us would not choose to risk losing our children’s insurance, our housing, and food for our entire family just so that we can say we go to work every day. First, going to work every day must begin to translate into being able to provide for your family.

There has always been a segment of our society that isn’t able to succeed educationally. But historically, these members of society could go to work at a factory, learn a skill and do that skill over and over for 40 years until they could retire. Or they could join and retire from the military. In today’s world, the factories are largely absent and the qualifications for joining the military have become more stringent. The service industry is about the only employment available for those who aren't able to finish high school, or those who may be functionally illiterate.

But the service industry still behaves as if it employs high school kids ~ not heads of households. Service industries are making record-breaking profits and employing ever growing numbers of people, indicating they are profiting from the employment and underpayment of our most vulnerable working folks. Service industries must provide health care ~ or the US government must. Laws have to change so that minimum wage lifts a person working 40 hours a week out of poverty. If our nation’s laws don’t increase the minimum wage, then service industries such as fast food restaurant chains and big retailers should be required to pay a much higher minimum wage. This approach is now being used in cities such as Chicago, though the practice is being challenged in court.

Another factor which may be the most difficult challenge is instilling in people who have little or no work experience and who have been left out of the educational and economic landscape of our society, a burning desire ~ an internal mechanism ~ that makes it uncomfortable to have to receive entitlement benefits and that makes working the most attractive option for sustaining family and self.

This is challenging in part because these folks aren't likely to trust people who they feel are judging them or who just don't get it. And they are often times struggling with physical and/or mental health problems, substance abuse, have very limited literacy, no reliable transportation, and no deeply embedded work ethic that will sustain them through challenges on the job such as difficult work environments, bosses they don't like, and co-workers who might treat them poorly.

But it is basic to individual success that a shift occur in the minds and hearts of all able-bodied, able-minded people so that they see a better future, want a better future, and are willing to work hard for it. And when they do work hard, they need to see their lives improve.

We are challenged as a community to find a way to help ~ without judgment ~ those who need our help. We are obligated as a society to ensure that people in our communities don’t go hungry, have equal opportunities to acquire the tools necessary to excel and prosper in our economy, and to find creative ways to lift up those who have only known poverty.

If we were to expend the financial, emotional, and creative resources we are currently using on the immigration debate to find permanent solutions to lifting up our own economic underclass, we could surely be successful.

Fake It 'Till You Break It

Like most people, there are things I have a wonderful internal motivation for, like eating, sleeping, seeing beauty in small things, pulling weeds, and watching nature. And, like most people, my internal motivation is very weak in other areas. Many of the things I am NOT motivated to do are pretty important.

Like cleaning house. I am actually related to people who have a clean and organized house ALL THE TIME, and some of them even have children. I'm pretty good about it now, but when I was a teenager and living as an adult, there was no one to make me clean my room, and the whole house was my responsibility. So, I psyched myself into doing what must be done by pretending I was cleaning house for someone else. Sometimes it was for a family whose mother was unable to clean the house, and her small children suffered from the nasty conditions of their home. As I cleaned, I had a mental conversation with others about the situation, and how I was helping this family, especially the children, have a better life by cleaning their home.

When I began college, I had an 11-week-old baby. So all four years were very difficult in many ways. But I met the challenge and did relatively well. I did REALLY well in classes. I did REALLY well as a mother (even as a housekeeper). But when it came time to stop whirring around at 100 mph taking care of EVERYTHING, I had terrible trouble allowing myself drift off to sleep. Everything I hadn't finished, every upcoming test or paper, every lingering bill that I couldn't pay because we had so little money kept running through my mind as I closed my eyes seeking restful, restorative sleep.

Once again, "pretending" as I thought of it, came to my rescue. I laid in my bed with my eyes closed and imagined that I was unable to interact, only hear as the authoritative male voice of a doctor said to my loved ones, "She's exhausted. She must rest. She is unable to keep going like this. It has taken a heavy toll. How long? Well, that depends. Right now, she must be allowed to sleep." Then I would hear the doctor tell me he was going to give me something in my IV that would make me go to sleep. I would fall asleep almost immediately after those comforting words, and with the "permission" I had been given to let others take over, because I couldn't do it any longer.

This happened over and over, night after night. It was before I knew anything about the mind-body connection or creative visualization. It was before I knew that I could create the reality I wanted or needed in my life by practicing it over and over in my mind. I didn't know that our brain doesn't know the difference between a real experience and one that is imaginary. I didn't know that my brain created synapses based on how many times areas of the brain were triggered, that every time I practiced something, real or imaginary, my brain was mapping it, and making it hardwired.

I should have had a clue about this when, every time my mother would come visit me, I immediately came down with a terrible cold or flu or some other illness that took me out of commission for 3 days. Someone was there to share the very heavy load. Someone else could cook the food, clean the house, care for the baby. After my 3-day illness, I was back to my old self, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound.

After graduate school, I found myself under a doctor's care (several doctors, actually). But the medical community was befuddled. They could find no physiological reason why I would wake up in the morning feeling good, and full of energy. But by the time I finished my shower and dried my hair, I felt as though I had lead pumping through my veins. I would drag myself to the bed and sleep, hard, drooling, long dream sleep for the entire day. Sometimes I could manage to get up to make my daughter, now in middle school, something for dinner, check in with her about her day, then it was back to bed. I slept 20 hours a day for a year.

If it hadn't been for my child's father who paid the bills, learned how to cook, learned how to be a single parent, and who was endlessly patient, I don't know what would have happened. I remember many times when we would try to go out to dinner. Nothing fancy, Steak N Shake, maybe. By the time the waitress got our order, I was feeling really heavy and I knew I wouldn't make it through the meal. By the time the food got to the table, I was laying in the back seat of the car, sound asleep. I didn't hurt anywhere. I was just "uber" sleepy all the time, and would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I had created reality from the fantasy I used to help me go to sleep every night.

Of course, it was more complicated than all of that. I tried to find out why my body was responding the way it was responding. What mechanism was in place that caused such exhaustion? I saw a couple of acupuncturists who both said that we have energy that we operate from daily, and which is recouped when we have restful sleep every day. We also have an additional store of energy that we sometimes need in emergencies, when we have to get through a crisis. This store of energy is there for times of need, and not what we are supposed to operate from. They told me that I had burned through my "everyday energy" and I then began using my "reserve energy" until it was depleted.

I felt tremendously better after each treatment, but by the time I came back for my next treatment, I was depleted again. Finally, the acupuncturist asked me what I was doing when I left his office. "I clean my house, take walks, prepare meals, hang out with my daughter, driver her around, etc." He instructed me that from now on, when I leave his office feeling better, I am to go home and lay on the couch. He said that he is trying to build up my "emergency" energy stores, then he can work on the "everyday" energy stores. He said that every time I come in, he has to start all over again because I have used up all the benefit of the acupuncture.

So, I began learning how to pace myself. I'm still not great at it. But I am careful about getting a good night's sleep, eating healthy food most of the time, gentle exercise, doing work that is meaningful but that doesn't cause a depletion of my emotional energy, and spending time with people and activities that "fill me up" rather than drain me.

I am about to enter into a new stage in life. I am looking hard for a new career that uses more of my talents, and brings me more joy than my previous career. The work I have been doing for many years is the most important work I will ever do as a Child Protective Services social worker. But it is a job I could not do indefinitely without it taking a massive toll on my spirit. I have done good work, but need to move on now.

My daughter has graduated from high school and and entered college. Ihave finally come home to the mountainous town I love where I lived for 20 years before moving to be closer to my daughter's father during my "sleeping sickness." I'm awake now.

Knowing the power of the mind, you bet I'm picturing myself in the kind of career I want, in the house I want to live in with the mountains in the background, fruit trees, a grassy knoll, a large vegetable garden, and many flower beds bursting with flowers. I envision myself hiking with friends, having dinner with friends, going contra dancing on Thursday nights, joining a writer's club, writing and being published, going to Mexico to scuba dive, visiting a friend in Juno, and family in Great Brittan. I hope to harness my synapses to get me where ever I want to go, but I'm very careful now what I ask for!

Children's Needs

As a social worker who sees many children from a variety of different family situations, one thing that stands out is how difficult it is for young children to emotionally remain children in our society. Parents often tell me that their child loves video games, that TV or games are the only things that seem to entertain their children. Some parents have the TV on all the time, background noise that they don't filter for their children. Their children watch daytime "talk shows" that show adults yelling, fighting, and telling about the odd realities of their lives, the lies they have told, the many people they have had sex with, or whatever else has made them "interesting" enough to be on these shows.

Other parents structure their lives around adult activities, their children exposed to adult situations on a frequent or continual basis. They have lives filled with visiting adult friends, spending the night at one house, then another as the adults party and enjoy their relationships with each other. These parents seem to feel that, as long as their child has something or someone to play with, the child is "happy." Later, when the child is older and begins to have problems with peer relationships, teachers, and parents, the parents don't seem to understand that it was this instability and severe lack of what young children need that contributed to their child's chaotic and sometimes dangerous, belligerant and defiant behaviors.

A young child needs predictability in her life. She is beginning to hone in on people and things and to have a sense of connection with them. She needs to know the routine: dinner with the people I live with, bath, reading time, and bed time. She needs to sleep in the same bed most of the time. Not 51% of the time, but 90% of the time.

She needs to know that the people around her are safe, and they have good boundaries. She won’t know these things if they are present, but she will learn them quickly if they are not present.

She needs to be around adults who are sober, whose behavior is consistent, and kind. This is how she will find and connect to sober and kind people in her lifetime, and this is the behavior she will model throughout her life. If she becomes comfortable with people who are kind sometimes, too close so that she is made to feel uncomfortable sometimes, gruff or angry with people around them sometimes, and absent for periods of time because he or she is angry or high or “needs space,” she will develop an insecurity about people that will last well beyond her childhood.

She needs a parent (preferably two parents) who are constantly checking her environment to ensure that she is safe, that she isn’t being exposed to foul language, inappropriate media such as adult programming or music that is full of negative images, anger, lust, and sex. Her young brain is not equipped to handle adult situations or concepts. They become a source of anxiety until she develops the ability to block them out completely. I have had so many parents tell me that their kids love watching adult horror movies such as the “Chuckie” series, and they say their kids aren’t disturbed by what they see. In reality, the children have had (and may still have) terrible nightmares about the movies and the images of terror, bloody violence, and death. But the human mind becomes numb, and the child begins to act out the scary parts so that she is protected in some sense. She becomes the monster in her play, rather than the victim because that would be too horrible to experience, even in play. This is how children’s behaviors are impacted by inappropriate media. They act out and attempt to become what they are afraid of to ward off the terrible possibility that what they saw can happen to them.

Children have the same response to being victims of sex crimes by either adults or other children. Once a child has had a sexual encounter, that victim child frequently tries to act out what has happened to them on younger children. When they are successful, they are no longer a victim, but a perpetrator. Being a victim is emotionally much more difficult for a mind to deal with than being a non-victim. Children don’t see that what they are doing is attempting to stop feeling hurt. And their actions with other children don’t really make things better. They just change the dynamics into something more easily tolerated.

On Daughters and Letting Go

When you were very little, I used to have to wait until Saturday morning cartoons were on to clean your room and to get rid of things that you had collected over the course of weeks. This was especially true around the time of your birthday or Christmas when you would get many new things and we didn’t have room for the tired or broken toys and the things you had outgrown or become disinterested in. However, it also applied to sticks and rocks you had found, leaves, feathers, colored strips of paper, random pieces of puzzles we no longer owned. You always hated to give or throw anything away.

I had tried to do this job with you, telling you about children who had nothing, and who would really appreciate the things you didn’t play with anymore, or things you had never played with because they didn’t hold interest for you. But though you liked the idea of giving something to another child that would bring them joy, the actual act of giving away things that belonged to you was not something you were able to do.

Luckily, for many reasons, this desire to hold onto personal belongings didn’t come from a place of not having enough. Somehow, all your life, we both managed to have enough. And it didn’t come from a place of not wanting to share. You were always very generous with your self, your time, your love, your ideas, your comic sensibilities, your theatrical appeal, your words and pictures and anything of you that you could share with others.

But something about letting go of, or giving away something that “belonged to you” really hurt you deeply inside, and it still hurts you today.

So, while you watched cartoons, I would clean your room. I would pick out things that you hadn’t played with for weeks or longer, things that were broken, stuffed toys that hadn’t slept with you in a very long time, and things that never seemed to inspire your creativity enough for you to bring them down and give them character. Placing these things in dark plastic bags, it felt like I was an executioner in some ways. I was choosing the things that no longer made the cut. Some things I thought were marvelous, but you didn’t. Some things held memories of you because they had once been among your favorite toys. So putting them away was bitter sweet. After the deed was done, I took the bags to the basement, a place you were not allowed to go.

When cartoons were over, you would marvel at how clean and organized your room was. You thanked me and seemed to want to spend more time there now that you knew what you had and it was a pleasant environment. Very rarely did you miss anything I removed from your room. I kept the bags for six months and if you didn’t mention any of the items, they were given to other children who loved them, I’m sure.

Now you are going through your belongings and making hard decisions. You are deciding to change your life, to move into adulthood, and you need more mobility and fewer “things”. As you decide what to keep and what to part with, you are struggling against that same pain that made you want to keep every book, every toy, and every piece of clothing you had ever owned. But you are almost an adult now, and pragmatism has taken over a bit more, so you can do this on your own.

But the pain of letting things go that are “of you” has been transferred to me now.

I’ve had a lot of practice letting people go. I suppose the first person I remember letting go of was a favorite 2nd grade teacher who left us half way through the year to have her baby and to be a stay at home mom. I remember her in stark relief. She had black hair, and freckles. I remember thinking that was a strange combination. I had blonde hair that was trying to turn red. My freckles seemed to come with the hair, even though I wished them away nearly every day. My teacher used blush to pink her cheeks. She was very fair skinned and her red cheeks stood out. She was tall and slender. She was kind, warm, and she liked me. This really surprised me. My first grade teacher, my first teacher (we didn’t have kindergarten back then) clearly, openly disliked me. I never understood why. I couldn’t make her happy. This new teacher, I could never make unhappy. I remember the day she told us she was leaving. It was the day before she would never return again. I don’t remember if I cried or not. I just remember feeling this crushed, empty place of personal hurt and the sense that nothing would ever be the same again. Mrs. Rathburn was replaced the following day by a very nice woman who I don’t remember much about at all.

I know I told you about having a substitute music teacher in the third grade who played the guitar. I had never watched anyone play guitar before. He played and sang a song that he had written and I was amazed. I raised my hand and asked if he had put that song on the radio. He laughed and said that just yesterday he had done that. He picked up the sheet music he had been reading from. He said, “I was at home and I took my song and put it right on the radio.” He put the pages he was holding on the chair next to him to show us his joke.

I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar, too. So after class, I offered to help him stack chairs. I asked him if he would be my teacher. He said he didn’t teach guitar anymore. I told him I would pay him, though I knew I couldn’t. He asked if I even owned a guitar. I told him I didn’t. I hadn’t thought about that detail. I told him I could play his if he would let me. I bugged him until he must have thought I would never begin my walk home from school if he didn’t agree. Finally, he said that I could borrow one of his guitars and we would give it a try. But he let me know that if he saw that I wasn’t practicing, he wasn’t going to waste his time or mine by continuing.

I remember practicing while my mom cleaned the house. “Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, smiling right into my heart. But now where are my beautiful brown eyes? Why must we be so far apart?” My mother would say, “Play that again” over and over as though it were her favorite four lines of music in the world. He told me he was pleased with my progress. Once, a boy with an electric guitar came in for a lesson after me. He was older than me and didn’t seem to want to be there. I was SO proud when the teacher said to the boy, in front of me, that if he would practice as much as I practiced, he would be a good guitar player some day!

One day I came home from playing outside. My mother told me that Mr. Hargrove had called to say that he was moving. He was coming by to pick up the guitar. He was coming that day. I was crushed. I hadn’t realized that I loved him, and I loved the guitar he had lent to me. And I loved the attention he gave me when I had my lesson. And I loved who I felt like I was when I was with him. And I loved listening to him play the piece the way I was supposed to eventually be able to make it sound. And I was losing all of those things and that person that I loved that day, with no warning.

I put on my bathing suit and I went to the neighborhood pool. From the pool you could see the cars turn onto our cul-de-sac. I jumped in the water and held myself up on the side of the pool, watching the cars turn onto our road. I didn’t know which one was his, or if I even saw him when he came to get his guitar. But I stayed until the pool closed. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. I felt silly for being so sad about losing him. And I was angry at him for taking that stupid job somewhere else and leaving me. But mostly, I was just broken hearted. So, I made sure that it was as late as possible before I went home.

When I got home, the guitar was gone. My mother said that he told her to tell me . . . something. I don’t know what his message was for me. I was hurting too badly to hear her words. I cried myself to sleep that night and felt the pain of loss for a long time.

It hadn’t healed completely when we moved to Florida the summer before my 4th grade. I lost everything that summer. I gained things, too. But I could only see what I had lost.

At 15, I stood by my grandmother as she took her last breath. She was in the hospital across from my high school. I had asked God to let me be with her when she died. I was granted that wish. When I realized she wasn’t going to take her next inhalation, I felt a panic rise inside me. I looked at my mother, and my aunt, and Nelbeth who stood there, seemingly not comprehending what was happening. Frantically, I said, “GO GET THE NURSE!”

“No,” My mother said. “Wait.” I realized then that they were waiting until she was really gone, until there was nothing to revive. I felt her spirit in the room. I knew she was looking down at me holding her hand, at her two daughters and her niece who were watching, waiting, and feeling a loss of their own. She had been battling with cancer for months, and I knew she was dying. But being there at the end, when she took her last breath was not what I expected. I felt a panic deep inside that I was never going to see life in her eyes again, that someone who had loved me had left the universe that I was in, had left me. Again.

By the time my father died when I was 19, I had experienced a different kind of loss. I believed that my future was going to be with John Ottolini. He was my first love, and all I would ever need. I envisioned us having Sunday dinner with his parents, raising our little Italian babies right there in Ormond Beach, Florida, never wanting for anything more.

No matter if you leave the person and the relationship that you love, or you are the one being left ~ it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the sense of loss. Lost dreams, lost comfort, lost love. Lost kisses and caresses and hopes in the future. Lost idealism. Lost trust. And the fear that your life will never be the same, or worse, that it will never be as good as the life you are walking away from. A part of you wants to hold tight to that person, that love, those dreams that could never be ~ to become complacent and accept it for what it is and to try to make it be enough. But usually by the time you are leaving, you have already tried that. And it doesn’t work. You can’t settle for what you have if your soul is saying you need something that this relationship doesn’t provide.

When my daddy died, I cried myself to sleep in the arms of Dean. I would awaken crying because dad visited me in my dreams. In those wonderful, horrible dreams, we both knew that he was really dead, and that we only had this dream time together. Then he would be dead again. And every time I awakened from those dreams of him, talking about the things we missed, the things he wished he had done differently, the gladness we had for the times we shared when he was in this world, when I woke up it felt just as if he had died another death and the pain was new for me again.

Eventually I felt the loss of Dean. I felt no one would ever love me like Dean had loved me, and that perhaps I wanted too much and should be able to accept what I have, who I have. Then I met your dad and I knew why OJ and Dean (and a few others) had never been right.

But I had to endure devastating loss with Jobie as well. I thought those wounds would never heal. And many of them never will. But with each great love and loss, I have learned and grown. I have carried the spirits of family members who died tragically so that they could help others to heal and to grieve. I have learned that the people who I have allowed myself to love fully have blessed my soul, and that a piece of them lives with me still.

I have experienced no greater love than the love I have enjoyed with you. This relationship wasn’t one we could try on to see if it fit and then decide not to see each other if it didn’t. This relationship was meant to be from the very beginning. I didn’t have to learn to love you, or you me. We loved each other primally, from conception. From the moment I was aware of you, I had to make decisions. From the moment I made the decision to bring you into this world and to be your mother, my love for you grew into something so strong that the loss of you might have killed me. And when you were born, you had that love for me. It grew with each day, and days turned into years, and then came the days when you needed to break up with me.

I had told myself that since you and I were so very close, that we wouldn’t really need to go through that breaking up stage. I have come to understand that the closer you are to your daughter, the harder she has to break up with you.

So, you are going through your things to sort out what to leave in your childhood and what to take with you to adulthood. I have spent years trying to prepare you to be a strong, smart, independent young woman who has the capacity to love completely and who knows that she can rely on herself to create the life she was meant for ~ and to love her community and make a family along the way. So I must have known that somewhere down the road we would reach this place. You are here, and I am not.

As hard as it has always been for you to part with acorns and play-doh fairies and little scraps of paper, it is also hard for me to part with the soul I have loved and nurtured from infancy. It is the biggest pain I will endure, surely. Because a greater pain I could not endure. I am feeling so much loss ~ mixed with so much pride. I guess I had hoped that we could become close friends and we wouldn’t ever have to be apart.

Last week I was talking to some parents in Asheville about this. Craig has a two year old. He can’t imagine parting from her. He wants her to stay 2 so he doesn’t ever have to do this part that we are doing. But he thought about his own relationship with his parents. He said, “It’s nice when you can become friends with your parents.” He thought about the analogy of “breaking up”. He said, “So, we aren’t dating anymore. But we still see each other.” And I finished. “But we’re just friends.” There was laughter among the parents and the teen in the room.

Like old lovers, we meet our children in a different place eventually, if we are lucky. We won’t ever have what we once had. I will be your first love, not your last. Maybe you can say that you learned how to love all the other people in your life because you learned how to love me first. And in the end, if we are “just friends” I will be happy to count you among the valued people in my life. My life has been so enriched by good friends, even more than it has been enriched by old lovers.

I am letting go and I will begin learning how to heal again. Unfortunately, the loss, hurt, healing stuff doesn’t get easier with practice. I feel like I did when Mrs. Rathburn left me to have her own baby.

But eventually, I hope to be able to build a different kind of relationship with you that allows you to be completely who you are, and me to be completely who I am, separate from who we represent to each other. I understand that to do that, we have to live a life apart for a time. I will so look forward to the time when you come back to me, a woman who is whole and confident, nervous and self-conscious, strong and open, wise yet loving. I will be happy to have a friendship with another woman who I can feel a closeness to that is based, not only on our history, but on who we are as individuals, as women, as people who share common bonds of many colors.

And I will love you, no matter where your path takes you.

On Compassion

I am wearing a rubber band around my left wrist at the moment. It is to remind me that my task now is to work to find compassionate ways of thinking about people that I feel very negatively about.

There are people in my life, even in my family of origin, that I feel are mean sprited, have negative agendas, who manipulate people and situations for their own gain, who do things to make vulnerable peolple look stupid so that they can appear superior, and who treat people with meanness and utter disrespect ~ especially people they profess to love.

So, I carry around very negative feelings about these people.

I am of the belief that you get what you give. I believe that the Universe, or God, or Spirit, or the Creator, or the Energy or the Source ~ whatever name is used ~ provides us with opportunities to learn. I beleive that one of the lessons we are all having to learn is compassion. I beleive that if you put out good stuff ~ you try to behave in ways that are not harmful to others, work to "be the change you want to see in the world," think thoughts that are postitive and healing, and work to see others through the lens of compassion and understanding rather than blame, that you 'attract' positive, beneficial, helpful, healing energy, people, opportunities, ideas, and health into your life.

Conversely, I beleive that if you obsess about illness and death, feel anger and frustration toward yourself and others, feel resentment about the things you dislike about your life, blame your circumstances on others, and wish hardship or worse on people you dislike, that you at the very least 'block' goodness from coming your way that was intended for you. Perhaps, you even invite negative things into your life.

Given that belief (the "Reader's Digest" version, anyway), it makes sense to me that as long as I harbor these negative feelings about people in my life, I am harming myself and perhaps reinforcing the things that I feel resentful about.

So, I decided that I need to figure out a way to 'feel' differently. The problem is that if I believe these people basically to be 'mean-spirited' and responsible for intentionally hurting others, I couldn't really figure out a way to feel positive, or at least not negative, about them without acting ~ pretending to feel something that I don't feel. And I think the Universe has very little tolerance for dishonesty!

As I was trying to figure out how to "feel differently" about those people in my life, I had a phone conversation with someone who expressed a very closed-minded perspective and essentially stated that he was dismissing another person, a relationship, a mother and her child, because he didn't like a parental decision the mother had made. I told him that was too bad, but I didn't bother debating the situation as it would be of little use.

As I hung up, my immediate response was "What an idiot!" It was a knee-jerk judgement about his character based on his behavior. I had decided, or had reaffirmed, that he was a closed-minded jerk who was so self-important that he could just dismiss people from his life who didn't meet his criteria.

As soon as I uttered "What an idiot," I thought, "I just did it AGAIN! How can I think about him and what he just said to me and all that I know to be true about him in some way that doesn't add more negativity and judgement to the world? How can I see this differently?"

It was like a spark, an instant switch in my mind. Suddenly, I thought, "It's too bad that he is stuck in this place where he is unable to deal with other people's differences without kicking them out of his life. It's unfortunate that he has had a life that limits his ability to be open to others. I hope that he has some experiences that allow him to examine this and gain some new skills in relationships so that he doesn't continue to have this response."

I didn't have to pretend that his dismissal of a mother and child was OK. I wasn't excusing his behavior. But I wasn't angry anymore. I wasn't labeling him.

True, it is still a judgement. I determined that his perspective was wrong and mine is right. So, I have a ways to go. I clearly haven't arrived at enlightenment. But it was a step.

I can begin to say to myself, "It's too bad that my family members feel so insecure that they need to make others appear foolish so that they feel superior." To me this is at least better than carrying around anger for them. It is a bit of compassion and understanding. It is the beginning of forgiveness, perhaps.

Eventually I may get to a place where I can be truly non-judgmental, where I can see and hear the things that I struggle with now and have NO judgement. But at this time, that seems impossible and perhaps not even healthy. I don't think that everything is relative. I don't think that there is no good and no bad ~ only our perspective, which is neutral. I understand that "perspective is reality" and that what I think IS reality for me. What you think IS reality for you. Even if we believe different things, they are both real.

I expect to have a red mark on my wrist from snapping the rubberband with each knee-jerk judgment about the driver who cut me off, or the guy who threw the beer bottle out his window onto the sidewalk where it shattered, or a relative who says or does something mean and hurtful to another who is not able to defend themselves.

And this doesn't even begin to address the very real issues of what can be thought of as true evil: The genocide in Sudan, the torture and murdur of Iraqis, and the terrible suffering in the lives of all kinds beings everywhere we turn. I haven't figured out how to wrap my mind around that yet.

But I can feel a change already. And as my perspective changes, I will keep you posted.

The Value of Perspectives

I don't believe that all perspectives are equally valid. I don't even believe that all perspectives are necessarily helpful or valuable to moving us forward to solutions or finding common ground. I believe that some perspectives are dangerous, harmful, even damaging to our physical, emotional and spiritual health.

However, I believe that our ability to express ourselves ~ to show how we feel about ourselves and our environment is vital to our existence ~ and to our ability to move forward on our personal trajectory.

Learning to listen to how others express their perspectives; learning what other people believe and hold tightly to; learning how to discover what we believe ~ the thoughts and understandings we live with each day, make our decisions by without even knowing they exist in our psyche ~ these are the things that I believe help us to move forward. Perhaps we can move forward from our own dangerous, harmful and damaging perspectives.

I have lived many lives. I don't mean past lives and future lives not remembered. I mean I have lived many lives in this lifetime. My own perspective on many things ~ maybe MOST things, has changed over time and with experience. I watch as people I once knew as open-minded and forward-thinking begin to see things from a new, and not always progressive position. I see that things I believed in strongly at one time no longer seem important, or even real to me now. I see that things I believed were inherently evil were often times things I didn't fully understand. I see that things I think I understand take on entirely different perspectives when I learn just one new thing I hadn't considered before.

I think about the mistakes I have made in my lifetime. I think how awful it would be if everyone knew of all my mistakes. I think about how critical I can be about other people's mistakes.

I think about the people I admire, and I wonder what their mistakes have been. I wonder if my perspective of admiration would change if I were to become aware of their human foibles, their mistakes, their quirky perspectives that have surely changed over time, shaped by age and experience.

I hope to learn from my own musings here, and to learn from others who share theirs with me.

Here's to perspectives!