Our two male dogs have a love/hate relationship. Similar to my sons, when they were little boys, “rough play” can change on a dime to “fight club”. Years ago, I remember noticing that when my sons were playing flag football in our side yard with their friends, more time was actually spent playing “tackle football” over the interpretation of “the rules”, than any real game time. Still, even after a nasty, loud, teeth gnashing scuffle, our fur boys are always back to being friends in a matter of minutes, much like my sons and their friends were, on the sports fields.
In talking to a dog trainer/animal behaviorist about how to quell this situation with Ralphie and Trip (our male dogs), the trainer stated that with dogs living together it comes down to two things: the energy of the people of the house, and being proactive versus reactive. When the people carry a calm, decisive, in control energy about themselves, the dogs better understand the expectations of their behavior and are more likely to comply. And by noticing one of the dogs giving the other a hard stare and ending it right away, or putting a stop to frenzied play that could soon turn aggressive, this proactive behavior is much more effective, that completely losing it, by trying to stop a dog brawl in action. These two action plans have worked very well, and our household is happier for it, both the human and the canine members.
It struck me that these two rules apply not only to dog training, but to life in, general. The energy which we carry around is sensed by everyone and everything around us. I recently read that you can give yourself more confident energy if you strike the Wonder Woman pose before you do anything hard. I’ve tried it and it works. Confident energy is sensed by everyone and is responded to accordingly. (Either that or people give wide berth these days, to a strange woman in a Wonder Woman stance 😉 ) Being proactive in any situation, saves a lot of energy, resources and heartache, versus constantly putting out fires, by being reactive.
I have a sneaking suspicion that most dog training has very little to do with the dogs, and much more about training humans. The trainers just have to keep us confident by reminding us that these simple life hacks, which work to keep a happy pack at home, can also get us far in any situation in life. The trainers have to call it “dog training” in order to protect our fragile egos. Dogs aren’t “smart” enough to have overblown egos. Of course, the best reminder from my recent call with the trainer was that snacks and positive reinforcements do wonders. On that note, I think that it is time to fix myself a morning snack.
I’ve mentioned before that I am not a person who cares all that much about politics. There is already way too much political poo on the internet, in my opinion. So, I am taking a big risk here, by leaving my comfort zone of complete silence, concerning the political arena of today. This will probably be the last time that I will bring up anything in the way of American politics, so please don’t turn my Comments section into a grand stand or an argument zone. There are plenty of other forums for that, only a few clicks away.
Everyone who I know and who I care about (all reasonable and loving people), no matter where they stand on the political scale in America – red, blue or purple, is exhausted from all of the ridiculous discord and partisanship that has plagued our country for much too long. On a walk recently, my husband said to me, “What if the masses of us (a vast majority), all of the sudden declared ourselves “independent” voters, what would they do? Who could they pander to?” No one who I personally know, stands so rigidly for all of the dogma of either side. Most of us really are “independent” when it comes to various issues that affect our society and our individual families, if we are honest with ourselves.
Therefore, I have a fantasy grassroots idea/dream in which the masses of us, go to our voter registration card centers, and we change our voter registration status to “independent.” If you want to keep politicians “honest” (as honest as a politician can be), keep a little mystery in the game. Keep the politicians, and the extreme media antagonists, guessing what issues really are hot buttons for the majority of us, as a country and as individual family systems. Make them say where they really stand on issues, instead of appealing to the extremes of our current political parties. It seems like a really good way for us people to take back the power. And that’s what a democracy is, right? Democracy is meant to be a political system, made for the people, by the people. We are The People. No one in today’s political/media/lobby circus, represents the many, many people I have known and who I have loved, in my almost fifty years of being an American, so let’s bring it back to real. We Americans pride ourselves on being rugged individualists, not these cartoon versions of what the extreme sides of either party have become.
As I have said, I rarely dip my toes into politics, but for someone else who loves these grass roots kinds of movements, I put the idea out there. Let’s all change our voter registrations to “independent” and bring things back to balanced and centered. Let’s stop looking at other citizens as labelled cartoon versions of themselves, and let’s find a way to work together again, for the betterment of our beautiful, resourceful, inspiring country, for which so many brave, courageous people have lost their lives, in order to preserve America’s vision of hope and abundance. We are The People. Let’s remind them all of that fact.
My friend said that recently she woke up in the morning and looked at her bedding and decided that her comforter was getting worn and that she needed a new one. So, when she started looking at her phone, almost immediately all of these ads for comforters started popping up, no matter what she was looking at, on her browser. My friend is half-jokingly convinced that Google/Facebook/Twitter’s algorithms have gotten so good, that they are reading our minds.
Now, I personally think that Google/Facebook/Twitter are just copying, in rudimental fashion, the algorithm that the Universe/God has always had in place, since eternity. It never fails that if I need to hear a message, loud and clear, that message or that lesson pops up in my daily life all of the time, whether it be in books, on my computer, from talking with a friend or family member, or even just walking about in nature, when thoughts and ideas, seemingly “out of nowhere”, pop into my mind. The message that has been pinging lately in my heart, is to remember that we are always aiming for “progression, not perfection” in everything that we do.
Once someone asked me if I was a perfectionist and I scoffed. Ha! “Have you seen my clutter filled desk, or my stuffed closet?” I remember thinking. “Have you read any of my spelling-error-filled, confusing texts?” I am a rather impatient person who likes to get things done quickly, which doesn’t leave much time and consideration for perfection. However, when I thought more about the question, I thought that perhaps it is not so much what we do, that screams “perfectionist”, as it is, how we speak to ourselves about our actions. Do I beat myself up for my messy desk and closet and sloppy texts? Do I think I should live up to someone else’s standards that aren’t really mine? Do I stay away from trying new things for fear of “failing” at these endeavors? Do I judge myself so harshly that it steals a lot of the joy out of anything that I do? When something goes wrong, do I flog myself mercilessly about a mistake?
The quote above is my daughter’s favorite. It is her algorithm to herself. She pastes and writes this quote everywhere – in her room, in her tennis bag, on her artwork and on her social media. I love that this particular Dali quote speaks to her, so strongly. It helps my daughter to feel fearless with everything that she tries and everything that she enjoys. This quote reminds my daughter to remember how far she has come in her studies, in her athletics, in her friendships, in her artwork and probably every facet of her life, instead of berating herself for not being perfect. When we aim for progress versus perfection, in all of our endeavors, this allows for mistakes. And as we all know, mistakes in life are as inevitable, as perfection is impossible.
A friend sent this meme to a text chat that we were having yesterday. We mothers were lamenting how hard it is for us, when our “remote kids” (grown and/or away at school) are going through stresses and we can’t be there to “fix” everything. We all laughed and related to the meme. I related to the meme so much that I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon thinking about it. When my friend sent the meme, I immediately texted back, “I think that’s what my family can’t stand the most about me.”
A few years ago, one of my sons angrily stated that I held all of my kids “on a leash.” That statement stung. (Obviously, it stung, as I am still remembering it and writing about it now.) I was floored by his statement. I was flabbergasted. I was so completely angry and incredulous and insulted. Was he kidding?!? A leash?!? I was the mother who went out of her way to give her kids privacy. I never opened doors without permission to enter. I never went through their things on snooping missions. Unlike many of their friends’ parents, I never tracked their whereabouts on my phone. I wanted to raise confident, independent, adventurous and autonomous children. I was the one who championed studying abroad, and I made the appointments for them to get their drivers’ licenses, as soon as legally possible. My mantra had always been to trust my children, until I couldn’t, and I stuck with that mantra valiantly, for the most part. I really never understood what my son meant completely with his “leash accusation”. I think we dropped the whole argument back then, and we moved on. Yesterday, though, I had an “aha” moment.
Despite my best and highest intentions, I realize that I do sometimes keep my entire family “on a leash.” The leash is never physical. The leash is never about whereabouts, or rites of passages. It’s more about happiness and comfort and security and control. It occurred to me yesterday, though truly unintentionally, I sometimes keep my family on a tight “emotional leash”.
For some backdrop to my point, I would like to talk about codependency. “Codependent” is a term that was first used to describe a spouse or a close family member of an addict. A codependent gets themselves so wrapped up in the addict’s life, keeping up appearances and responsibilities that really should be the addict’s duties, that they lose themselves in the process. A codependent’s happiness and security is only felt when they are keeping the addict’s life on track. If the addict is happy and behaving appropriately, then the codependent is happy. But trying to control an addict, and the consequences of addiction in an addict’s life, is a lot to deal with, and codependents often end up exhausted and depleted. Codependents often get extremely frustrated and resentful of their addicts, because they believe that everything that they are doing for their addict, often goes unreciprocated and unappreciated. The codependent has this idea that if they take care of the addict’s life, then it follows that the addict will “owe them” and return the favors and help to meet the codependent’s needs (whose needs tend to be mostly for security and control), but of course, that rarely, if ever, happens. Security and control do not blend well with addiction. Even more crazy, when an addict sometimes does do the hard work and heals their addiction, and then takes responsibility for their own life back, a codependent’s life typically falls apart. The codependent has made it such a total part of their own identity to keep the addict together, that they have completely lost focus on their own self (and sometimes their own mental and physical health) in the process. And whose really to blame in this scenario? Many people would say “look what that terrible addict did to that poor person”, and many times codependents do get a martyr status, but at what cost? Who gave their life away in this toxic system? The addict gives their life away to their substance or habit of choice. The codependent gives their life away to the addict. In the end, it is often the case that the codependent finds himself or herself to be equally as sick as the addict. The codependent is addicted to fixing the addict’s life, at the expense of working on their own lives, and growing their own interests and fostering their own health and well-being. And that is why they say that addiction is a “family problem.”
Now, thankfully, none of my children are addicts. The above explanation is the severest form of codependency, which I have used to drive my point. Codependency is a trait that a lot of us women have a tendency to veer into (even without the problem of addiction), particularly those of us who are mothers. There’s a whole spectrum of codependency and there is a whole spectrum of caring. Those of us women who have made raising our families, our highest callings and our highest purposes in life, often lose ourselves in the process, without even realizing it. That was never our intention. It’s just that we get so ingrained in our family members’ individual lives, that we forget about our own individual interests, and our own needs and our own well-being. We feel happy when everything is going well for our family members, and we feel devastated when it’s not. Now, some people would say, “Well, that’s just love and there is nothing greater than a mother’s love.” And that is true to a point. Of course, it hurts to see a family member struggling. Of course, it is exciting to see the people, whom we love with all of our hearts, triumph. However, when our own emotional states are so intertwined with the states of other people’s lives, to the point that we are losing sleep, taking on responsibilities that aren’t ours to take, making our loved ones feel incompetent because we step in all of the time and take over the wheel, and in the meantime, find very little of meaning or have very little focus on our own individual lives, that’s when we’ve crossed into unhealthy codependency. That is when we start holding emotional leashes. That’s where the term “helicopter parent” comes into play. When we make others feel responsible for our happiness, mostly because we have made ourselves responsible for their “happiness” (as we have defined it), this is an unhealthy equation that does not bode well for close, authentic relationships. We are not independent or interdependent in these types of relationships. Instead we are dependent on each other, and thus “codependent.” When others feel they have to be a certain way, or feel a certain way, or act a certain way, in order to keep our equilibrium okay, this system is bound to fail. It isn’t real. It makes everyone on edge. It has become a family system based on false security and a desperate need for control.
In the end, each of us is responsible for our own happiness. It’s not even possible to make anyone else feel anything. We each make our own feelings, and our own responses to, and boundaries around, things that happen outside of us. We each are responsible for our own lives, our own boundaries, and own satisfactions. No one deserves an emotional leash. Every adult in a healthy family deserves to be “free range.” We deserve to meet each other in our beautiful, familial meadows, sharing individual and shared adventures, without feeling a responsibility for anyone else’s responses, emotional states, or perspectives of these experiences in life. As much as caretaking is important in motherhood, so is modeling a healthy way of being. It is interesting to me that a meme that at first made me laugh at myself knowingly, made me introspect as much as it did, and seriously so. It made me reflect on life lessons that I thought I had already learned and mastered. Ha! (the story of my life) The meme made me want to get my proverbial scissors out, and to cut some leashes, for the betterment of my family and also, for the betterment of myself. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. And now, only love, authenticity and abiding faith remains.
I live in Florida and my friend sent me this meme. Only we Floridians are allowed to share it. Happy Autumn, friends!!! Fall is so many people’s favorite season. The cooler (but not too cold) weather, the beautiful changing leaves (in most parts of the country), the comfy sweaters and sweatshirts, getting back to a little more structure, the pumpkin breads, and pumpkin lattes, and pumpkin pies and pumpkin cookies, basically the pumpkin everythings, wearing boots again, Halloween and Thanksgiving, football, the crispness in the air and the coziness of blankets . . . . . Fall/Autumn (I wonder which name she prefers?), no matter what you want to call this season, it is nothing short of sublime.
It’s not lost on me that I am in the autumn ripeness of my own life. Will I one day look back on my own life and say to myself, “The autumn season of my life was definitely my favorite.”? I don’t know. I do feel a deep richness in this stage of my life, like no other. I have shed a lot of things that no longer serve me, much like a tree sheds its leaves, and yet I still feel rooted and solid. I am experiencing the bounty of everything which I have worked towards creating in life. My family has grown up nicely and still remains quite close at heart. My relationships have matured and deepened. My writing fulfills my need for purpose. My spirituality feels naturally a part of my every day experience, like never before. I wonder if with each season, we get closer to God? Perhaps it is in that little sliver of eternity, within the holy meridian that divides winter from the start of spring – perhaps that is when we are One with God completely? Is this perhaps, what is meant by the circle of life? That’s what I like about this autumnal time in my life. I have the time and the energy and the physical health, in order to be able to ponder these ideas and many other things. Autumn gives us time to pause and to ponder. What a beautiful, glorious, colorful gift!!
+ I hate songs that have police sirens featured in them. They always catch me off guard. A song came on the radio the other day with a police siren, and I desperately looked for a place to pull off of the road, convinced that a high speed chase was happening, despite the fact I was waiting in line at a bank’s ATM.
+I love the Fresh Market’s almond pillow cookies. The almond filling in the cookies tastes exactly like the way sweet almond oil smells. That’s a rare feat. Very few things smell and taste exactly the same. I can’t find the words to describe it, but it is amazing. I think sweet almond oil is one of the most alluring and beautiful smells ever created. I have purchased almond scented shampoos before, only for one reason, the shampoo’s lovely scent. Still, when you think of eating almond shampoo, that sounds absolutely gross, but yet these cookies taste divine, and their taste is totally idiosyncratic with the smell of sweet almond oil. Try them, and tell me that I am not right about this.
+We have been picking up a lot of take-out food lately. I have started taking pictures of the crazy long car lines which I have waited in, in order to get our food. My husband says that waiting in long car lines for take-out at restaurants, has become the new waiting in line for an available table.
And a couple of good quotes by other people:
“People who don’t enjoy food, it’s like I don’t want to work with them or be friends with them.” – John Turturro
“I usually play characters who smoke and drink box wines.” – Allison Janney
“Whenever I need to decompress now, I take my dogs for a walk. They are truly the ultimate therapy.” – Tory Burch
That’s all for a Monday. Keep looking up, better days are coming!!!
We women so easily forget how hard the women older than us, and in the generations before us, had to work to get women the deserved respect, equalities, and opportunities that should have always been rightfully ours.
“Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.’ But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.” – Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” – Abigail Adams, in a letter to her father John Adams, in 1776
Isn’t that a beautiful thing, to stand up for something that will make a better tomorrow for people like you, even knowing that you may never see the fruits of your own labor? What if we looked at every single one of our own individual actions as our own personal gifts to the people of the future? What would we do differently? What would we do more?
Every once in a while, old blog posts of mine trend on my view stats, seemingly out of nowhere. This blog post from February 13, 2019, has been viewed often in the last couple of weeks, so I suppose it has words that bear repeating. Please find that blog post entitled Fragile Like a Bomb, here:
Friends, I’ve admittedly been a little fragile this past week. It has been a tough week for a lot of reasons. But don’t you ever worry about me. I am fragile like a bomb.
Happy Friday!! I am so happy that today is Friday. So, so happy and relieved, I am. New readers, on Fridays, I stay at the shallow end of the pool. I don’t go deep on most Fridays. Fridays are “Favorite Things Friday” here at Adulting – Second Half. On Fridays, I list three favorite things, songs, websites, beauty products, etc. that make my material life fun. I strongly encourage you to share your favorites in my Comments section and please check out previous Friday posts for more of my favorites. Here are my favorites for today:
MDLIVE – I have a great general physician, but last Sunday, I was at the end of my rope with a lingering cough (don’t worry, I have tested negative for Covid), which has lasted for over a month. So, I got an appointment with a doctor, spoke to a doctor, got a prescription for antibiotics sent to my pharmacy, picked up my prescription and started taking my medicine, on a SUNDAY, all in a time span less than two hours. The doctor was very kind, empathetic and professional and MDLIVE accepts some insurance coverage. I would use this service again in a heartbeat, but I hope that I don’t have to for a while. I hope that you don’t need to utilize MDLIVE either, but keep it in your back pocket, just in case.
StriVectin Powerlift Instant Tightening Mask – I love StriVectin products. I have used their neck cream for a while now. However, this “Tighten and Lift” mask is my new favorite product from their line. The stress of all of this 2020 mess has been showing on my face, and this is the first product that I have ever used that I saw an immediate difference. If you need a lift, literally, try this product. Of course, there are no miracle anti-aging products that mimic a real facelift, but this product definitely helps fill in the lines, a little bit. It’s a picker upper in a tube and worth the price!
SWAD Coriander Chutney – I have been on a ramen soup kick these days. I start with the ramen and then I get creative by doctoring it up with leftovers, and salad about to wilt, and random single helpings of meat from the back of the freezer, and topping the hot, steamy soup with some crunchy cheese toast. Anyway, to give the soup some flavor and kick, I add a teaspoon of this delicacy to my concoctions and it makes all of the difference. If you are one that likes spice and tang, you must purchase a jar of this chutney. It is one of my go-to ingredients for a lot of my cooking. I purchase my jars of this wonderful flavor, on Amazon.
Enjoy the weekend, friends! Thank you, always, for coming by!!!
I sent this meme recently to some of my family and friends. My middle son and I found it to be hilarious. My middle son said that eating candy corn is like eating candle wax. I’d honestly eat the candle wax first. Most of the responses to the meme that I got back were along the lines of, “Ha! Yes! Nobody likes candy corn.”
Well, it turns out that my daughter and a few of my friends DO like candy corn . . . quite a bit. They took offense. It seems to me that candy corn falls into the “you either LOVE it or HATE it” category. There is no in-between. You either love or hate broccoli, brussels sprouts, cilantro, sardines, mushrooms and . . . . candy corn.
On a food note, while moping in my bed yesterday, I received a phone call from a sweet young lady from Nordstrom Department Store. She wanted to know when I was going to pick up my package.
“What package?” I asked.
“It’s soup, under your son’s name,” she replied sweetly and patiently.
“Soup?!?” I exclaimed. Right away my mind was going into, “Why in the hell did my son order soup from Nordstrom?!? That’s got to be some expensive soup. I didn’t even know that Nordstrom sold soup, but then again I haven’t been to the mall in forever.”
“It’s a SUIT, ma’am,” she said, giggling.
My son and my husband had recently purchased my son a suit for his medical school interviews. The customer service person and I got a good laugh out of our exchange. It feels good to laugh. Laughter is good medicine.
Hi friends, thank you so much for spending some time here today at Adulting – Second Half. Your time is precious and I appreciate you giving some of it here. It means a lot to me, in ways that I don’t really have the words to explain. My heart goes out to my west coast readers. Please stay safe and well, amidst these roaring fires. Prayers and love to you.
I keep a lot of paper journals and such, full of words and pictures that have held inspirational meaning and interest to me. I picked up one journal which I kept about a decade ago, which as you recall, was during the Great Recession, another stressful, precarious time for a lot of us. The physical journal itself is kind of gaudy. It is made of a dark red brocade that actually has stuffing inside of it. The cover has large plastic, brightly colored gemstones (some that have fallen off), sewn on to it. It is one of those things that you look at it, and you ask yourself, “Did I actually think this was pretty at one time? What was my mental state at the time of purchasing this?” It is one of those physical reminders to ourselves, that we are constantly in a state of change, always opening up from a new cocoon of ideas and perspectives, sometimes even on a daily basis.
On that note, my husband buys me one of those Awkward Family Photo Calendars, every year, for my stocking at Christmas. I love it. It guarantees me at least one daily laugh, but what I like best about it, is the reminder of people’s humility. The people who send their pictures into the calendar company have the ability to laugh at themselves, and that is a lovely trait in a person. Yesterday’s picture was a professional portrait of a young woman, obviously a product of the 1980s, with an enormous heavily sprayed nest of bangs, that could have managed to be its own head of hair, itself. I thought to myself, this woman is laughing at her 1980s self, along with the rest of us, but on that day, she put a lot of time and effort and money into her “look.” She felt good enough that day, about how she looked, to pay a professional photographer to take her picture. Her real beauty shines through all of that sprayed, elevated, shock of hair, because she has self reflection enough, to not take herself too seriously. She loves herself at every step of the game, and that is so refreshing. She’s beautiful.
Back to my point, despite its over-the-top physicality, the garish journal is filled on the inside with words and pictures and inspirations that have shaped my life. I even have some fortunes from fortune cookies taped in there, and cuttings from newspapers, magazines, and elementary school newsletters. When I was filling up this particular journal, I did not have writing a public blog in mind, so unfortunately I don’t have the sources of most of these wisdoms. Still, I believe all wisdom, comes from a higher source, and those of us who write stuff down, are usually just quirky little scribes and messengers. Anyway, this has just been a long way of me saying that in this flashy, showy journal, that at one time caught my eye and I must have found to be physically pleasing enough to claim it as mine, I found a quote yesterday that was cut out of magazine that explained what I have been trying to say in all of these paragraphs above, maybe even in all of these blog posts, for the last couple of years. At the very least, it describes my precious and precocious inspirational scrapbook/journal perfectly:
“I miss my mother, and I find myself walking through her house in my memory, remembering her ways and seeing beauty. Beauty, for her, was a mix of the deep and the superficial: that which gives us pleasure and that which gives us peace.” (source unknown)
Picking out and purchasing my ostentatious journal, and filling it up with words and images that have helped to mold me into the current version of me, gave me great pleasure. And the words inside of it, still give me great peace. Maybe life is meant to be just that simple, a happy mix of pleasure and peace. It’s quite possible. It’s certainly not a bad way to live.
