Category Archives: AGING, RELATIONSHIPS, SANDWICH GENERATION

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A Sacred Time For Old Grief and Good Memories

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Kim Abbot   (Frank Kimball, Jr)  -Oct 1, 1943 –March 12, 1982

Today is the 30th anniversary of my first husband’s death in a horrible fire. Some of you already know our story, but others don’t.   He was very disabled by Multiple Sclerosis  and I was unable to get him out of the house.  I did get our then-four-year-old out and safely to a neighbor’s home. We had three children at the time, but thankfully, the older two were in school (I adopted a fourth as a single parent years later).  Kim’s death followed the loss of my brother, my father and my twenty-four year old nephew, only four months before.  We also lost most of our belongings, and our home was badly damaged by the fire, necessitating our moving around until we found a longer-term rental. We were without our home for about a year.

Naturally, we were all terribly bereaved. We had a lot of help over the years and I suffered from PTSD connected to anything about fires.  Thankfully, it is now very mild, but still present.  It was a pretty awful time for me and for my kids, the eldest of whom was nearly fourteen.   It was many years before I was able to call to mind and enjoy the memories of happier times that Kim and I had shared.  We had met as college students and during our early marriage, lived in San Francisco, which we loved, and then moved to CT where Kim had mostly grown up.

Over time, we processed our grief and the knife-like sharpness diminished, returning occasionally and unexpectedly, with a vengeance, but less often as the years passed.  Still there were triggers.

Most years, March 12th was a very difficult day for me.  I followed the cues of my kids, encouraging them to talk about their father and their feelings as the anniversary approached, but tried not burden them with my own feelings.  That is not to say that I didn’t express them, but was careful not to make the kids feel they needed to take care of me.  Finally (and I can’t pinpoint the exact time)  there were more silent tears than visible ones, as normal workday duties called and distracted me a bit.  March 12 was naturally noted and felt, but not dwelt upon.

Yesterday on Facebook, I posted that this 30th anniversary was coming up today.  I got a variety of kind and helpful responses.  My colleague, Deah Curry, PhD, coach and therapist, http://thenohypementor.com/ and

www.facebook.com/CreativeAlternativesCoach

www.facebook.com/NoHypeMentor   commented that such anniversaries are both bittersweet and sacred.  As usual, Deah made me think.  I had always acknowledged that it was an emotionally hard day. The bittersweet aspect was apparent in that I was/am proud of all I have come through and of my strong survival skills.  I am able now to remember Kim with smiles and to evoke the positive feelings that come when I think about the old days with him, and about our family experiences.  There are still tears sometimes, but I no longer view the past and our life together only through a veil of tears. I had just not thought much about the sacred aspects of such a milestone as the 30th anniversary of his death.

There are various cultural beliefs and practices around how to honor dead loved ones and ancestors.  Many cultures believe that deceased family members have the ability to look after, and to influence the well-being and fortune of their relatives. The belief is that the family never dies or ends. Family is something that exists in perpetuity.  Such cultures create rituals to ensure that the dead view the living in a positive manner and they honor their dead in this way, both as their filial duty, and in order to ask for special assistance and intercession.

I like that idea.  I can hear the disdain and see the smirks of  some very rational and intellectual people I know, but I don’t much care.  My family is undergoing a period of stress for a variety of reasons, and there are several of us with health issues right now. I find it comforting and fitting to think about Kim’s spirit as somehow being able to watch over us.  I imagine a lot of folks feel that way.

I wasn’t able to find any really unique and special way to commemorate Kim’s  life and death, but I did get up extra early today to have some time alone to reflect. Each year on this anniversary and those of the others of my family of origin, I light a memorial candle and say a prayer that comes from the religion of my background.  Some of the observant people in my family would be upset, I am sure, since Kim wasn’t of the same religion and because I have personalized and modified this prayer.  This morning, I sat and listened to the silence that is unusual here.  My older daughter is staying with us temporarily and my younger one lives here with her pre-schooler. I am remarried and my husband, Art, had the day off.  I deliberately woke before anyone else.   I brewed a cup of tea and as it steeped, I permitted the luxury of steeping myself in memories of Kim.  I wondered, too, what he might be like as a senior citizen, no doubt with grey or white hair and beard.  I thought about some of our adventures together. I thought about what a joyful and exuberant person he was before his illness and how passionate he was about life.  I thought about his dreams and his enormous intellectual curiosity.  I remembered the music he loved and could visualize him, listening to it with his whole spirit, whether Vivaldi, Bach, the Beatles or rock.  My very special quiet time was brief, but I enjoyed it and felt that I had indeed created a sacred time and space in which to think about Kim, whose life ended when he was thirty-eight years old.

I think he would be pleased about how I grew up, since in some ways, I hadn’t truly done that before his death. I wish he could have been there to see the kids grow up, as well, and to meet his only granddaughter.

I don’t live in the past.  The past has contributed to who I am now in a way that can’t be denied.

There is an Islamic saying that you tell  someone you meet who has just lost a loved one, “”May you be alive and may God’s blessings be on him or her who is deceased.”  While I would never, in a million years, want to relive what we went through thirty years ago today, I am glad to be alive and glad I created a sacred time and space today to send these wishes for blessings to Kim’s spirit.

Parenting Is A Bit Like A Taffy Pull

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Have you ever been to an old-fashioned taffy pull?  Probably not, since people don’t do that much nowadays but my family was once invited to one years ago.  It was a lot of fun, but lately when I think about taffy being pulled every which way, I think about parenting my adult kids.

As you wrap up this first day of the work week, I hope you are reviewing your past weekend and that you have some nice memories of good times and/or  pure relaxation.  I hope you are saying to yourself,  ”What an amazing weekend I had!”    Mine  didn’t quite  turn out as I had hoped and planned.  It seems that life usually has its own ideas and we must roll with the punches.

I had expected to catch up on writing , reading, grocery shopping and a few phone calls.  My husband, a cardiology R.N., had to work all weekend, so it felt like a great time to play catch-up on things that have eluded me, including some craved-for quiet time for myself.

A man named Orlando Aloysius Battista, once said, “The best inheritance a parent can give his children is a few minutes of his time each day.”  I always thought so when my kids were growing up.  There were certainly days when I would have preferred to immerse myself in projects and creative pursuits that were beckoning to me. but I truly believed at that stage of my life, that my kids’ needs came first.  I felt that the time I spent with my children was an investment in their futures and that we were making memories for that future.    I still enjoy seeing my kids, but my perspective is different now.  I consider my personal time to be precious and spending it on myself feels like an investment in me. . I have already invested heavily in my four kids and even though I love them , I believe it is high time that I “diversify”

Inevitably though, when I look forward to a stretch of time to luxuriate in quiet and bask in the joy of choosing to do whatever I wish, one of my kids ends up needing something.  It’s not as though I jump at every whimper, but it does feel like crises have a way of occurring in bunches and as my mother once told me, “You never stop being a mother”, so it is difficult to ignore a cry for help when it feels sincere.  We do raise our kids with the hope that they will become self-sufficient adults and some of mine are, or some of mine are some of the time anyway.

As long as everything is going smoothly, or they perceive that it is, they seem to manage.  Mom is then an invisible commodity to them. The story changes when something explodes (figuratively) at the job, when unexpected bills come pouring in, or when a little one is ill and there is no babysitter.  My adult kids are pretty spread out in age.  They are all very different and their needs, lifestyles and priorities are pretty disparate.  When things are going smoothly, they don’t seem to need my support. That is understandable.  In fact, they usually don’t want my opinion or involvement at all.  Most of the time that doesn’t phase me as I am a  busy person and I prefer not to offer advice that I am pretty certain is going to be ignored anyway.  That is not to say I don’t often have some strong opinions, but they do tend to act as though I am a relic from the Ice Age.   I normally  try to keep my opinions to myself, though this does take self-control and I am not always successful in doing so.

The weekend is over now and the crises have passed, for the moment.  I never did catch up on the tasks I wanted to. I never got to take that long soak in the bathtub with a glass of wine nearby and a book that has been beckoning to me from the shelf in the living room. I didn’t really get more than a few minutes to myself, to be honest.  I am making plans for the next stretch of time that will be available for me to indulge in some solitude and self-focus, because I know how important it is and that I must never give up on this.

I remember that taffy pull so many years ago.  I can still hear the  giggles of the children and our warnings not to touch everything with their sticky hands.  There were six or seven kids there and at first they were pretty wild and loud.  We parents thought that perhaps the activity in which we were engaged was a mistake and that the children were too young.  I remember how the taffy was a big messy blob  when we began to work on it and how it gradually took shape . Finally we all settled down happily to cocoa, cookies and our finished product–the taffy, which was enjoyed by all.

I do have times when I feel that I am being tugged and pulled every which way and that my life resembles more of a sticky, crazy mess than I had anticipated it would at this stage of the game.  I am working on it though.and several times a week, I ask myself, “How would you like your life to look and to feel? What steps, Iris, are you taking, to bring your vision into greater alignment with your reality, without sacrificing your deeply held values of being there for those who are important to you?” (Yes, I talk to myself sometimes!)

It’s all about balance and self-care. These have become buzz words but there is a reason and we need to pay attention to them. I hope you will make it a point to think about that when you feel yourself being pulled in too many directions.

Is There An App for Decluttering Your Life?

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      I wish there were an app to simplify and make less painful, the cleaning out of all the clutter (and crap) that accumulates in our homes over the years. Some of the clutter has real meaning for us, which  makes it a formidable task to take care of, but I wonder more and more these days about the benefits of having so much “stuff”.

      I wish there were a way to just hit delete and to have some cyber-genie make the decisions and do all the work, sifting and sorting through the possessions that are beginning to bog me down, that call forth memories of wonderful and terrible times. It would be terrific to simply move my delete finger  without brain involvement and not have to make tough decisions that may not be immediately necessary, but that will be one day, if history repeats itself as it tends to do.

     I helped my mother “downsize” four times. She and my father moved from the house where I (mostly) grew up in Brooklyn, NY, to an apartment in Sheepshead Bay, and then after my father’s death, to senior housing in the CT town where I live.  It didn’t seem possible to compress her life and history any more than had already been done by the great figurative trash compacter of aging, but when she  moved into a nursing home for the final nine months of her life, I agonized over the allocation of what was left.  

     I certainly am not saying that my mother’s life amounted to a trash heap of junk. Each and every piece of furniture, doily, dish towel, figurine, dog-eared photo, ugly lampshade, card, letter, book, and dish was a treasure to her. Each represented a life in which I truly had a bit part, a walk-on, really, in comparision to the years lived before I blinked into the sunlight one day at Brooklyn Doctor’s Hospital.  I am not saying that I was not important in her life. Naturally I was, but so many others were too. She had a life of thirty-five years before I made it into the world.  I did not live inside of her head either.  I could not possibly have understood her unique memories and the attachments she had to her own things. Even when we share certain memories with another person, the ways in which those memories become recorded in our brains and etched on our hearts have to do with how we personally perceive life.  

     The items that triggered some type of memory for me and had meaning in my own version of our family experience, I held onto. Some things I foisted off on anyone in the family who had even the slightest interest, and they also chose what was useful to them.  The rest I gave away or even discarded, with no small measure of sadness.

     Years later (yesterday was the eleventh anniversary of my mother’s death) my husband and I went through a similar experience with my mother-in-law. We conducted what almost amounted to an archeological dig though her house in Pennsylvania. She was definitely a horder, so there was a lot to go through.  In her attic, we even found pay stubs from her very first job.  We unearthed an abundance of school papers and drawings done by her two adult sons.  There were personal items that should have been discarded forty years earlier (believe me, you don’t want details). We found toys, old religious artifacts belonging to her parents, more photos of few people we recognized, and furniture that was her mother’s, but was too beat up to have much monetary value.  We discovered bags and boxes of clothing that had traveled the roads of weight gain, weight loss and renewed weight gain. There were unopened cartons of things ordered from catalogues, tucked away and never used, as her life became more and more isolated.

     We helped Bernice move to an apartment in a senior complex. She lived there for about four years and when she became less and less able to function on her own, we moved her two floors down to an  assisted living unit in the same complex in Chester, PA.   After a little more than a year there, her health and mental status further declined, so we once again downsized.  We circulated her worldy goods among those who wanted them, sold some and moved a few meaningful items into her small, cozy room at an assisted living facility  for those with dementia, near our home in CT.  My husband claimed the objects that meant something to him. We also ended up with a few pieces of furniture that were too new to discard and that nobody else had room for.

     Some pieces of crystal joined the collection from my mother,  from my late sister, my grandmother and my sister’s mother-in-law. They sit, mostly gathering dust, on my dining room mantel.  A couple of times a year I  tend to them, washing them in dish liquid and trying to remember which piece belonged to whom.  The bud vases my mother collected on their travels to Europe after my father retired, are in her curio cabinet in my upstairs family room. My aunt, the baby in their family of origin, was to have been the recipient of the vases, having greatly admired them, though they aren’t worth much. She died about nine months before my mother did.  I have earrings that were my aunt’s, along with various pieces, mainly costume jewelry, that belonged to my mother and my sister. Again, little of it is worth money, but I am now the repository of all of the collective memories connected to these things.

     I have several bookcases filled with books that were primarily my  father’s  He treasured them. I have books of my mother’s too and of one uncle. There are only a couple of rooms in our house that don’t have bookshelves and all of them are full.  I have my late brother’s photo album from his days at Parris Island when he was in Boot Camp in the Marines. I have pictures he painted before he gave up his art and music and became a family man who thought (sadly) that he needed to put his talents and passions away for eternity. On our walls are awards my sister won at her job and in her volunteer work with the Jewish War Veterans. I have (tucked on a shelf in a plastic bag somewhere) a cap, one of many exactly the same, worn by my father at work, from the time he was sixteen to the time he retired.  Boxes and boxes of photos of people in old-fashioned garb are stashed in various closets.  The photos are full of faces nobody remaining in our family recognizes.  A large plastic container of vinyl records sits in a spare bedroom. They are of opera, jazz, pop, folk music and are not in good enough condition to sell,  but  I keep hanging on to them, till the day I have the heart to discard them.  I also have part of a downstairs closet filled with metal boxes of my father’s slides. I would love to find time to view them, or even better, to transfer them to disks or save them on the computer “some day”.

     Then there are the things I have left from my first husband who died in his thirties. I have a box with the tie he wore at our wedding and letters he wrote to me. Maybe my kids will want them one day, but then again, maybe they won’t. These are stashed In our very crowded attic.  I believe there is an old cricket bat of his, as well as family trinkets from his New England clan that can trace their ancestry back many generations.

     I have lived in my current house for thirty-three years now. I have done a fair amount of traveling, so naturally, I have my own “treasures” that evoke memories of those trips and the people I was fortunate enough to meet. I have photos and art from various countries, and then there are my own collections that represent my personal interests and obsessions, depending on which person you ask.  There are paintings, posters, ceramic figures, postcards, greeting cards, mugs, garlands and wall hangings portraying my family’s favorite, canine, the diehard Scottish Terrier, as well as photos of our own Scotties. There are cardboard cartons of papers, and notebooks filled with my own poetry and other writing (before the days of computer archives).

    

       Then there are the toys and books belonging to my four kids who have no place to store them. Now that my youngest and her daughter live with us, we also have boxes of Gabby’s outgrown clothes and her toys grace a few rooms in our house.

     Lest you think I am a hoarder like my mother-in-law was, I can assure you that I have a good-sized home, a bit  cluttered by some standards, but not unbearable, and not anything you might see on a TV show about people who can no longer function, due to the disastrous mess that surrounds them. Ours is a very old house, so  it lends itself easily to being filled with momentoes, rather than with simple, sleek, modern furniture and open space.

     I do like my things and can literally walk around my home and see an imaginary slide show of all of the lives that are represented by the “stuff” around me.  Sometimes looking at these things evokes smiles and sometimes some tears, but mostly I don’t have time to dwell on them because I am too busy. They get dusted periodically and then I permit myself a moment of connection with them, calling up names, faces, places and feelings.

     Now that I am at the age some consider “retirement age”, though that is not really on my agenda, it makes sense that I am beginning to wonder what will happen to the generations of possessions that surround me each day.  None of us like think about the negative aspects of aging.  Most prefer to deny our chronological advancing as much as we can and to focus on our experience and wisdom, or our fantasies that we possess them.   A few of us are  fortunate and can remain in our homes and care for ourselves, but most of us ultimately will require some help, will choose to downsize our living quarters, or will have this chosen for us, due to circumstances.

     Long ago, after we moved back into our home following a fire and the terrible tragedy of my first husband’s death in that fire, I vowed to never again take for granted my home and the things I was lucky enough to have in my life once more.  Most of what we had was destroyed or damaged in the fire.  I have never forgotten my vow to myself. Part of my routine on an almost daily basis, is to make sure I notice things in my surroundings and appreciate and take pleasure in them.

     In the end though, I recognize that many or most of the material acquisitions that belong to me and that belonged to multiple people before me, will end up being tossed to the four winds, or possibly at the thrift shop, or in the garbage dumpster. I am sure my adult kids and grandkids will choose to keep certain objects, but they will be faced with an even more imposing job than I faced, simply due to the fact that I have outlasted the members of my family of origin.

     I imagine that when one of my kids picks up an antique book of maps given me by a dear friend during one of my trips to India, or finds a bent and tarnished silver baby cup from one of my first husband’s ancestors, there will be some fleeting interest. I am sure that when someone comes across old love letters, or sets of leather-bound books my father purchased with great pride on time payments in the 1930′s, there may even be some animated discussion among my survivors. My suspicion  is though, based on my own experiences, that life will move forward and most of what simultaneously enriches and confines my world in the present, will be clutter that isn ‘t particularly needed or wanted, beyond a few miscellaneous treasures. This seems a reasonable forecast of the future.

    I intend to continue reminding myself to take pleasure in my surroundings and that means enjoying some of the special posessions in my midst, but it is clearly time in the life cycle to begin to at least think about who will want what and to get rid of some things.  It’s definitely time to stop acquiring a lot more.  I may give in to temptation on occasion, but I need to think twice about new purchases.  Did I really need those two  1800′s cobalt pottery pitchers made in a town where we used to live?  Do I really need another Scottish Terrier statue? I hope to still be around for a lot of years, but I am going to make a pledge to actively begin the grueling task of decluttering before too much more time has passed.

     The most important thing, I think, is to begin to “download” the events and remembrances I absolutely want to leave for posterity . There are family anecdotes, values and learning that may die with me, and these are the true gifts I want to leave for my kids and grandchildren.  I don’t believe I am a terribly materialistic sort, but in the next decade I want to focus a  lot less on the wordly goods in my little dominion and a whole lot more on decluttering.  It’s not going to be easy, but I am starting to feel the need for more visual and physical space. Clearing out some seems to help me do what is  more crucial to me than ever, which is to reflect, create and positively interact with others. It’s impossible to interact with a Chinese vase, don’t you think?

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     Speaking of clutter, one kind of “clutter” I welcome is a batch of comments, so how about taking a minute or two to comment directly on my blog at www.coachirisblogs or on on Facebook, if that is where you first accessed this.  Did you like this post at all? Did you disagree with it? Did you relate to it in any way?  Let’s hear from you, please. Subscribe to this blog if you enjoyed this post, or explore older ones. Also watch for the launch of a couple of my new web sites and take a few moments to visit one that’s up and running at  www.meetcoachiris.com .

Good Friends

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Rose Garden by Samantha DeWitt-Public Domain Photo

“Friends are the roses of life: pick them carefully and avoid the thorns.”-Unknown

     I have no idea who said the above, but  I was thinking about this recently after the departure of some dear friends who had visited and spent the night. They live about six hours away, so we hadn’t seen them in a few years. I have known them for many years and though we don’t see each other often, when we do, I am reminded of what wonderful blossoms they are in the bouquet of terrific friendships I have been fortunate to gather.

      As far as friendships go, I have been blessed with few thorns. I have numerous friends who have been a part of my life for 25, 30, 40 and even over 50 years. They may not all be people I see frequently, but we do communicate and there is one characteristic shared by the very special ones. We are able to pick up where we left off each and every time we talk or visit, it seems as though we have never been apart.

     Sometimes people get caught up in thinking about how unfair life can be, or get stuck in anger and resentment and let themselves believe that they have somehow been targeted for heartache and troubles. The truth is, there is nobody who avoids pain and heartache altogether.  It may seem like there are those who have more than their fair share, but all human beings eventually get some thorns. It would be so sad if they let the roses in their gardens turn brown and did not ever pick any magnificent flowers to enjoy and to bring a little bit of nature’s beauty into their living space.

     Remember, though, that friendships are much like flowers, in that they require some tending if they are going to blossom and give back.   You must feed your friendships or they will wither from neglect. Care about your friends as you expect them to care about you. Make the time to listen and not only to unburden your own woes. Don’t just use your time together to complain or to one-up them when you discuss your pain and troubles.

     No relationship is always perfectly balanced. The scales can and do tip in terms of the giving and receiving. This is natural. There will be periods of stress or misfortune when your friends need a good deal of  understanding and support. You may be the needy one at other times and that is ok. Those who live in isolation and who do not have compassionate ears and occasional objective advice to help them over hurdles, normally do not do as well as those who can open themselves up  to a trusted and trustworthy support system.   In fact, this tendency to shutting out the world and living in secrecy or isolation is often a recipe that leads to overwhelm, depression and self-destructive behavior. Self-reliance is a valuable and admirable quality, but “no man is an island”.

     If you have a lot of folks you call friends, but often feel alone because few of your buddies are available to you when you need to share, unburden and seek comfort,   it is time to examine your roster of buddies.  When you have contact with certain friends, do you feel drained because they are in a state of perpetual crisis, but are rarely willing or able to listen to what you want or need to speak about?   I am not suggesting abandoning friends in their times of woe or crisis, but if this is a regular pattern that has endured for a long time and you have a hard time getting a word-in edgewise, then this is probably a toxic relationship and is one you have to consider winding down or eliminating altogether.

     Friendships, like any other relationship, are dynamic organisms and they do change over time. Our focus, interests, needs and life circumstances change. Certain commonalities that brought us together with some people may have ceased to exist. Some of our acquaintances will fall by the wayside and maintaining these relationships may not be beneficial to you or to the other parties. It’s practical to acknowledge this.

     It is possible for new friends to become close and important allies with whom we can easily share and who share with us.  Sometimes people just plain click and find an incredible sense of honesty and compatability, but it does usually take time to build a foundation of confidence on which you can both rely.

     There will be a core of individuals who have shared with you the good and bad, who have been there for you and for whom you have been a faithful support and a bedrock of help, love and wisdom over time.  These are the friends to trust, to keep, to water, tend and enjoy.

      If you find something of value in this post, please do comment and please pass it on. Thank you.

When You Want to Curl Up in a Corner and Rock Away the Stress

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If you are going through some tough times and are feeling very stressed for multiple reasons, you may wake up some mornings and, try as you might, have a hard time facing a new day. You know that for you, this is generally not a feeling that lasts and what you feel does seem to be rational depression, in that there are things going on in your world that are primarily beyond your own control, but that are making you feel worried, sad and anxious. You know from past experience that you possess some tools to help you out of the hole, but with all that is going on in your life, lately it just feels more and more difficult to make a search for that figurative ladder hiding in the bushes that you can drag close and use to climb out of the deep, dark pit.

Have you had days like that? Have you ever awakened and thought to yourself, “This is the worst time I have ever gone through”?  I know I have, but then I mull it over some more  and remember (though sometimes I don’t really want to) that as bad as whatever it is feels now, I have lived  through times that were equally as bad, or even worse.  During those earlier bleak times it seemed that things would never get better and that I might never feel joy again.  I was always wrong.

I had a client once, who compared every bad occurrence or bump in her life’s road to “dead baby”. She she had been through such a horrible loss and survived it, though the pain will always be with her, but in what seemed to me at the time like a strange way of coping, she used that shock and awareness she made herself feel, to help her get through whatever difficulties were happening in the present. This was how she reminded herself that she was a strong woman. It worked for her! I am a huge advocate of doing whatever works for you, as long as others are not hurt in the process, and as long as in making your choices, you are not doing something that simply feels good for the moment, but has the potential to cause you longer term harm.

I know what it’s like to  feel as though life could not possibly throw one more horrendous thing at you. It feels like you will explode if you have to cope with anything more than is overflowing your already full bowl.  I know there are folks who believe that God only gives us what we can handle. I don’t know what I think on that score but if it’s true, He or She  must consider me a veritable rock. Sometimes I surprise myself by feeling that I am indeed a rock, albeit a wobbly one, not always on level ground, and I marvel at my ability to summon up courage and strength in times of adversity.  At other times, I just want to curl up in a  very dark corner and shut out reality, at least for a day or two. I think most of us feel that way sometimes.

Sometimes nothing we do works at reducing our stress, no matter what we try.  When our worry, anxiety and sadness prevail, it is a good idea to seek professional help.  However, when these responses are caused by real-life situations that  hit us all at once, such as being in the Sandwich Generation and worrying about serious issues our children and parents are facing, or any other combination of very real, painful, worrysome problems, there is no magic pill that is just going to make everything get better or disappear. That doesn’t  mean, though, that we can’t get some help, because we certainly can.  It disturbs me that some doctors are so quick to pull out the prescription pad and offer a chemical solution without knowing all of the facts, or even what the individual’s coping techniques are and have been historically. Remember that it is not the stress itself that causes our defenses to break down and makes us feel bad, but how we handle it.  We can definitely learn more effective methods of relaxation and can find outlets and activities that help us unwind and help us cope better. 

If you are somebody like me and have a long, cumulative history of stress and hardships (and a lot of us do) and also a history of being a perpetual caretaker, always there for others, always needed and always ready to the best of your ability to step up and help, maybe it is time to stop and take some breaths.  Maybe it’s a good time to re-think your next course of action and take stock of what tools and help you have available for yourself.  I hope you can do this before you go on depleting all of your resources so that you are not of any use to yourself, or to anyone else you care about.

We know that repeated and prolonged stress takes a terrible toll on us. We know that chronic stress can diminish our immune systems and can affect all of our bodily organs.  It can make us more vulnerable to a variety of infections and conditions.  It can zap our energy and our creativity if it has gone on for a long while, though in small doses can spur us on to change and growth.

Still, even with the best help and with the most superior tools and resources we can put into place, there will be some days when we really do want to curl up in a corner and self-soothe. Is this so awful if it is not something we do often?   Maybe we don’t need to be strong and giving all of the time? Maybe part of our journey is learning how to allow ourselves to retreat and even to lick our wounds once in a while and just shut out the world for a bit.  Maybe we need more practice in calming and comforting ourselves, rather than relying on external measures to carry us to a more healthy place.  It is considered a good thing to teach infants to self-soothe when they are anxious or irritable,because eventually they must separate emotionally and physically from their maternal figures. The  world can be an unsettling place if they don’t have the ability to calm themselves and to get a little respite from the over-stimulation of their environment.  Neglected infants engage in too-much self-soothing, because that is all they can rely on.  I don’t recommend that we retreat into behaviors like that, but a healthy amount of curling up and pulling in may be just what we need some days.

Would You LikeTo Get Carded At 65?

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The other day I got a belated birthday gift that had been ordered but hadn’t arrived in time.  My new shirt says, “It took me 65 years to look this good”.

My initial reaction was, “Why do I want to tell the whole world how old I am?”  Then I mulled it all over and decided I like the shirt and that I actually like flaunting my age.  I have been proudly claiming my senior citizen discount for a while, when and wherever I was permitted to do so before having reached my 65th milestone, so why not wear the shirt?  It’s true that most of the waitstaff and customer service providers I encounter are in their teens or barely past, so I imagine I look old to them and don’t get too many reactions one way or the other.  I do get some, though and admit that I enjoy it when I get comments of surprise that this is my age.  Once I  actually  had to pull out my driver’s license to prove that I was legitimately entitled to the senior discount. I still smile if someone tells me I don’t look my age, because I must acknowledge that I possess  a certain amount of vanity, but I know that whether or not I look young is not an accomplishment for which I can take much, if any, personal credit.  It’s mostly in the genes!

 I remember how indignant I felt many years ago because I was carded till my mid to late 30′s.   It even infuriated me at times. At age 35,  I was widowed and had been through life’s wringer.  I had lost multiple family members, had lived through years of caring for a sick husband and finally, had lost him and most of what he, my kids and I owned in a terrible fire.  I felt almost disrespected when people could not see on my face the sum of my life experiences and thought I was just a kid, not even entitled to a glass of wine in public.

One day, in a fit of annoyance, at age 36, I cut off my long braids and went for a makeover. It was the first time since my early teens that I had set foot in a beauty salon. It just wasn’t my style, but I needed a change and wanted to look more my age. I felt positive about the new look, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. I continued to get carded on the rare occasions that I got to go out and enjoy myself.

I never in a million years thought there might come a day when I would want to look younger than my chronological age.  On the other hand, I am what I am and who I am. There is absolutely no way I would want to live through the things I did in earlier decades. Life isn’t always a picnic now, but it’s the life I have. All we have with any certainty is the life we can see, feel, smell, touch and enjoy in this very moment. The past is part of the recipe that has produced the “masterpiece” that we are today. The future is unknown. Anything can happen and probably will…both good and bad.  Like everyone else, I have times when the uncertainty worries me and gets me down. Then I remember that I am a SURVIVOR and I review the trials and tribulations through which I have had to prove that to myself.