February 2019 - Adulting: Second- Half

Astropophobia

My husband and I react quite differently to family situations that are emotionally charged. These situations typically hit me hard, like a tornado. I instantly feel every emotion involved surrounding the situation, and then some. I have outbursts. I cry. I scream. I laugh hysterically. I create instant, miles-long “to do” lists to try to bring back order and control to the current state of chaotic affairs. In short, everything relating to the situation, whether it is good or bad, or a mix of both, hits me all at once, and turbulently.

My husband, on the other hand, almost freezes. It’s like he sees the storm clouds coming, puts his hand up in the air and says, “Not yet.” While I am in my tirade, he is in the calm before the storm. It is at this point that I am usually screaming at him, “Don’t you care?!? Is this even affecting you?!? Aren’t you going to do something?!?”

Once we get through a particular family crisis, or even a family joy that we are dealing with, my tornado has long past. I’m back to my happy-go-lucky self. But it is different for my husband. His emotional storms don’t come in turbulent, violent cone clouds. His emotional storms are more like lingering, gray, heavy rain clouds than stay overhead and dampen his mood for a while. And this is usually the point where I am saying to him, “Get over it already, grumpy! See the bright side!”

Recently, we were dealing with yet another big change in our “in the major process of the emptying of the nest” family. My husband calmly stated to me, “I promise not to get upset with your outbursts, tears, and emotional surprises. I promise to understand where they are coming from, if you promise not to get upset with my moodiness and crankiness. Please understand where it is coming from.”

Damn. It took us almost a quarter of a century to articulate and to do our storm preparedness, in our relationship. Still, the sheepish smile of familiarity I felt inside when my husband said this and the joy of living with someone who “gets me” and trusts me “to get him”, has made all of the time and effort and energy of it all, all worth it. It makes the storms easier to weather. And the sunshine, all the sweeter.

“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” – Henry Kissinger

Ugly Ducklings and Brown Pandas

“The comeback is always greater than the setback.” -u.fo Twitter

When my eldest son was a little boy, he found the story of The Ugly Duckling to be so upsetting. He’d want to skip right past the depressing childhood (“ducklinghood”??) of the poor little guy to the part where the young “ugly duckling” became the majestic, beautiful, elegant swan that was more fabulous than all of the other ducks in the pond. I was reminded of this memory when I recently read about Qizai, the only known brown panda in the world.

Supposedly, Qizai, the brown panda, was abandoned by his mother when he was only two months old and he was horribly bullied by the other pandas when he was a cub. Now, even though other brown pandas have been spotted in the past, Qizai is so rare that he is considered to be the only known brown panda alive and he is one of China’s national treasures. Qizai has all of the bamboo he could ever want to eat, his own special enclosure and a keeper devoted only to him. China has even found him a special mate so that they can study the genetics of his offspring. Despite his initial hardships, Qizai lives the life other pandas could only dream about. The best part of the story is that Qizai’s nature and demeanor has always been uniquely sweet and that has never changed.

I was only in my twenties when I would read to my son the story of The Ugly Duckling, but even then, I had enough life experience under my belt, to experience first hand that if you hold on and keep the faith, fortunes always change. I wanted to reassure him of that, but usually the best reassurances come from our own actual experiences. That’s the hard part of parenting. You want to take all of the “licks” for your kids, but if you do that, you don’t let them experience how sweet the rewards can be, after being knocked down a time or two. You rob them of some of the greatest validations in life – resiliency and the redemption that comes from that resiliency.

“It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula

Cast the First Stone

The other day I was getting a pedicure. There was a woman, sitting next to me, getting a pedicure, as well. She was speaking very loudly on her cell phone to someone who was obviously not getting their fair share of speaking time. This woman barely took a breath, as she barked forcefully into her phone for everyone in the whole salon to be privy to her conversation, whether we wanted to be or not. I became an eavesdropper by involuntary default.

The basis of this woman’s one-sided conversation, more like a spotlighted soliloquy, was all about how enlightened she was and how she hoped the rest of the world would get on board and move on up the scale of enlightenment, with her. The woman referenced Dr. Phil a lot. She then started complaining about a friend who didn’t give her enough “likes” on Facebook and the shining moment came when she stopped mid-sentence to shout at the technician, who was doing her pedicure, to stop rubbing her feet so hard. If this is “enlightenment”, the world really is in trouble.

I started feeling very annoyed, and then I could feel myself climbing on to my judgmental pedestal. This woman was rude, inconsiderate, selfish, gossipy, out-of-touch, loud, obnoxious and not at all enlightened. I started feeling like I was the arbiter of enlightenment and I had to bite my tongue not to put her back down in her place, to her base level on the spiritual growth chart. But then, I had one of those dawning a-ha moments when I put the spotlight back onto myself. How many times had I spoken too loudly on my phone, sometimes even in close quarters like elevators and waiting rooms? How many times had I been on the phone when someone was waiting on me, telling myself that a quick “sorry” was enough to excuse my thoughtless, impersonal behavior? How many times had I dominated conversations, rudely interrupting my friends and family, because I deemed what I was saying to be so much more “enlightened and important” than what they had to say? How many times had I felt annoyed or slighted when I didn’t get someone’s approval?

This self-awareness movement that we have going on in the world right now, is tough. But the funny thing about the situation is that when I put the focus back onto myself (and the only person I actually have any ability to change), I got a different perspective about the woman in the salon and the whole experience. I actually felt sort of grateful towards her for making me get a better understanding of areas where I could improve myself and my relationships. Wow – things that make you go “Hmmmm.”

“People are quick to judge others’ faults, but never quick to point out their own.” – PictureQuotes.com

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” – Mother Theresa

“Be curious, not judgmental.” – Walt Whitman

Here She Comes

I have a passage from Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea that I include in every sympathy card that I ever send. (which by the time you are in middle age, is unfortunately too many to count). It was sent to me by a friend when my beloved grandmother died and it brought me so much comfort. I am so happy when I pass it on, and others remark of the comfort that it has brought to them. I was reminded of this passage, by a friend, this weekend, who lost both of her beloved parents many years ago. It really speaks of dying, but after leaving a loving, warm, reunion atmosphere with my dear friends and coming home to a loving family, who were so excited to see me and to hear my stories and to share their weekend experiences with me, I thought to myself that the passage really applies in life, too. How fortunate we are, that so many of us travel between loving groups of people as we journey through our experience of Life. It’s like we have comforting rest spots and safe harbors, in the arms of people who know us and love us and only want safe passage for us, as we move along our paths of purpose. Here is the passage and may it bring you comfort and realization that we are not alone in our journeys:

“I am standing upon that foreshore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says “There! She’s gone!” “Gone where?” “Gone from my sight, that’s all.” She is just as large in mast and spar and hull as ever she was when she left my side; just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of her destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at that moment when someone at my side says “There! She’s gone!” there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout “Here she comes!” And that is dying.”

And that is Life.

Short and Sweet

My eye is better. My heart is full. My friends are wonderful. My body is exhausted. My creativity is low. And I have to pack. I am going to keep this short. Adventures are particularly sweet with friends but always too short.

“We travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us” – unknown

Eye Opening

Sometimes things happens suddenly that cause everything to turn on its side and all expectations go out the window. Yesterday was one of those days. Instead of touring a cool city with some of my best friends, I ended up with a very painful corneal abrasion and my tours became to various local ERs and pharmacies. I have worn contact lenses since I was in the third grade, and yet this is the first time I ever managed to tear up by eye like it was being sandblasted. I’m okay. It sucked, but I am feeling a great deal better today than yesterday. And the experience reiterated how good and caring my friends are in my life. The experience reiterated how important it is not to take your health for granted and to feel compassion for those who are suffering. So much of life’s experiences are limited when your physical being is limited.

When you resist whatever bad is happening, like the pain that I was feeling, you feel tense, panicky, angry and raw. When you get to a level of acceptance, you feel calm, protected and able to be cared for and to rest.

“The things you take for granted, someone else is praying for.” – IAMFEARLESS.SOUL.COM

Friday, Friends and the Freakin’ Weekend

“The only trip you will regret is the one you don’t take.” – unknown

“Cheers to the freakin’ weekend.” – Rihanna

Happy Friday, readers and friends!! I am writing this from afar today. I am on a weekend trip with my best friends from college. We do this trip every year since we graduated and sometimes it feels like we are still back in school. It is such a blessing to reflect on life – life’s adventures, life’s misadventures, life’s sorrows and life’s greatest joys, with people who have known each other since the dawning of each other’s adult lives. It makes today a very special Favorite Things Friday. For new readers, I usually describe three favorite things, websites, songs, products, etc. on Fridays. Please see previous Friday posts for fun and helpful ideas. Fridays are always light, pleasant and airy here at Adulting – Second Half. But today, I am going to do it a little differently, in honor of my dear friends who knew me in my Adulting – First Half.

Here are my favorite things about being with really good friends. I hope this list will spur you on to make your own list about your friends and you will carry those warm feelings with you all of the way into a wonderful weekend.

My favorite things about being with my friends:

Feeling like you never left off. Even if you haven’t seen each other all year long, you come together so easily and happily, it’s like you just saw each other yesterday.
All of the inside jokes. Long histories make for crazy stories that never seem to lose their luster and novelty for the people who have shared funny times and hilarious memories.
The feeling of total acceptance. Your long-time friends know almost everything about you and love you anyway.
Knowing that you have a big group of gals who “have your back.” The wonderful feeling of being cared for and supported and the good feeling of being that same source of support and caring for others, in their times of need.
Making more fond memories with new shared adventures, that will add to the cache of inside jokes.
Really good insights and ideas and perspectives about situations going on in each other’s lives, that come from people who know each other well and earnestly care for one another.

I could go on and on, but I don’t like to get sappy on Fridays. Let’s just say that this wonderful group of women are treasures to me. They were a huge part of my first half of adulting and I look forward to all of the fun, joy, tenderness, reflections and wisdom that we will share as we travel together on this journey through our second halves of adulting.

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A friend is a gift you give yourself.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

Mother Nature Be Damned

I think that it is a cruel twist of fate, what Mother Nature did to us women. She made our biggest hormonal changes and fluctuations, occur simultaneously during two of our most emotionally challenging life stage changes – going to high school and during the emptying of our nests. And I wonder if Mother Nature laughs and clucks her tongue and shakes her head, at families like mine, who have women starting high school and going through empty nest syndrome at the same time. (all while being a little hormonally challenged) Mother Nature really does have high expectations of our sex.

Now, as a woman, I hate when my legitimate gripes get blamed on hormones. I’ve figured out lately, that it is not that my individual gripes are wrong and unjustified, it is just that sometimes I have a hard time keeping my response to the gripes at a proportional level. “You didn’t put your dishes into the dishwasher?!? PUT YOUR HEAD ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK NOW!!!!! AHHHH!!!”

My emotions are all over the map these days. I recently passed a local flooring store with a little sign out front that said, “Closing. Thanks for 50 great years!” I started sobbing. Now, I have never been in that particular little store and I am not in the market for flooring. The store always looked neat and cute from the outside and their mascot was a french bulldog. The flooring store owners were into Frenchies, before Frenchies became the “it” dog. I’m not sure exactly what I was sobbing about – nostalgia about a store I had never even been to nor had any plans to visit? Was I sad that I never got the chance to tell the owners that I recognized the fact that they “were Frenchie, when Frenchie wasn’t cool” and I admire that fact? Was I worried for the owners who probably sold their business for millions and were now free to travel the world? Goodness, who knows? I certainly don’t.

My daughter and I have had some interesting and challenging outbursts with each other. I was used to being the only really emotional person in my family. Now there are two of us. My husband needs a black and white striped shirt to go with his new position – referee. It is interesting to me, that all of our sons have moved out or are on the verge of moving out of our home, right at this critical time.

I have a sign in my kitchen that reads: “This too shall pass. Now would be good.” I’m kind of feeling that right now, Mother Nature. Could we move along with getting these hormones of mine (and my daughter’s while you are at it) all settled down? I think it would be best for all parties concerned. Truly. But of course, Mother Nature knows best.

“It’s like my hormones are partying and getting drunk, and I get stuck with the hangover. Daily.” – someecards

Dogstagram

I know that this is going to sound crazy from a person who is willing to spill her guts on a public blog, but I’m not one for social media. You probably couldn’t pick me out of a line-up from my ancient Facebook front page photo and my kids’ pictures are so old on my Facebook page, you might think they are competition for the waiting list on competitive, hard-to-get-into preschools (three of my kids are now adults). My LinkedIn was required for a part-time job that I had, that ended almost two years ago, when they shut down their local office. I imagine my LinkedIn appears like I still work there. I don’t know. I haven’t checked. I have an Instagram for this blog. It has one post.

When I admit my iffiness about social media to people, I get a variety of responses. I think some friends and family who love their social media, take it as an insult. I think sometimes people think that I am making some kind of judgmental statement with my ambivalence. I am not. I believe everyone has their passions and that is what makes the world go round. Facebook has been a very useful way for me to get in touch with long lost friends and relatives at almost instant notice and I think that is great. About a decade ago, I was much more into posting on Facebook, but then I started getting uncomfortable with it and the amount of time that I was spending on it. I’ve always been one of those people who is much more comfortable observing. Because I’m kind of a friendly, maybe even an “out-there” personality, I think I come across as a contradiction. I’m a natural introvert, who appears to be an extrovert.

The whole “Big Brother” thing kind of stresses me out, too. I’ve got nothing to hide, but I find it disconcerting to walk into a boutique and look at my phone, and have it remind me that I have been to that particular boutique two years ago and three times previous to that. I’m a little uncomfortable being tracked and stalked by my phone and whatever forces lie behind the tracking features. The more exposure everything seems to get, the more I seem to want to dive into my own little hole, like Alice, into my own little Wonderland.

That being said, all of that has served as a preface to a wild hair I got this weekend, when I thought it would be fun to turn our dogs into Instapups. Boredom and a lack of a schedule, brings out the crazy in me. If you follow my blog, you’ve read some stories about our dogs, so you can now follow them on ralphieandjosie on Instagram, if you are so inclined. I warn you, I get bored easily and I hate feeling overexposed, so I’m not sure how long it will last, but for now, I’m having fun with it. I’m not willing to put myself or my family out there too much on public pictorial stage, but hell, I’ll throw my dogs to the dogs, so to speak. 😉 And for now, they seem all in, tails wagging.

“Don’t say anything on online that you wouldn’t want plastered on a billboard with your face on it.” – Erin Bury

But Keep the Old

“Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.” – Girl Scout song (in honor of the fact that it is Girl Scout cookie time – YAY!)

My husband and I went to a few new restaurants this weekend and they were all a bust. These were local establishments that were on our “List to Try” and since it was a relatively unscheduled three-day weekend, we were eager to give them a try. Not one of them made it on the list “To Go to Again.” It became almost a comedy of how bad it could get. I kept looking to see if there were cameras pointed in our direction, like we were on one of those Candid Camera type shows. Servers not showing up to the table and when they finally came, due to our exaggerated flagging them down, they acted like they were doing us a huge favor by writing down our orders. At one restaurant, my husband ordered a beer. It came out flat and tasted like fruit juice. He asked for a different one. It came out the same style. He finally ordered a canned beer to be on the safe side and it was full of ice. We went to brunch yesterday and my chicken fried steak basically had a cold can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup plopped unceremoniously on top of it. And this restaurant had pictures of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson on the wall, proving their visit! These establishments all had decent Yelp scores.

Do you ever feel like you are carrying some kind of strange energy that is coming with you wherever you go? By yesterday, I would have been more surprised if our brunch cafe would have turned out to be good and tasty. Sometimes I feel cursed by my need to adventure. Sometimes I feel envious of people who have the routine of going to their established favorites all of the time, whether it be restaurants, vacations, stores, etc. Maybe these people are better at owning what they like and knowing that their expectations will be met, at the places where they are loyal customers. I wish I didn’t get bored so easily. I have a huge fear of “ruts.” Maybe the price to pay for the need of novelty, is going through a lot of rocks before you find a gem. And while searching for new gems, it is probably best not to forget the special gems that you have found before and every once in a while, remember to go back to the old gems to appreciate their steadfast gleam.

“Develop the wings of loyalty and you will fly above the dooms of disappointments.” – Israelmore Ayivor