Boundaries

Sometimes I know what I want to write about, but I don't know where to start.  This is one of those times.

I belong to a Facebook group that is for people who all belonged to an organization that is now gone.  Mostly, the posts are pictures from the past, or notices that someone has been recognized for their achievements in the organization, or notices that a former member has died.

There are also memories shared, and for the most part, they are pleasant memories.

This week, a woman shared an unpleasant memory.  Her parents had been volunteers with the organization.  The organization was for people up to the age of 21.  At an event, one of the members of the organization hit her dad in the face with a pie.

Two things struck me.  One, that a thoughtless act almost forty years ago still bothers her enough to write about it.  The second was more subtle, and will take a longer explanation.

The person who hit the dad with the pie owned up that it had been him.  He said that while he was working with the volunteer he had told him that when he least expected it, there would be a pie in the face.  There is no indication that the volunteer told the culprit that he would be very upset if that happened.

The volunteer got very angry when it happened, chased the culprit, and never accepted his apology.  Their relationship was never repaired.

This could all have been avoided by the volunteer defining his boundaries.  When the culprit joked about hitting the volunteer in the face with a pie, the volunteer could have said, "If you do that, I'll be angry, hurt and embarrassed, and it will permanently damage our relationship."  Once that was said, then if the culprit decided to still do it, he would have known the consequences.  From his words explaining his actions, (and from knowing him for most of my life)  he never would have done it if he had realized the harm it would cause.

Nobody knows where your boundaries are if you don't tell them.  Everyone's boundaries are in a different place, and vary widely from one social group to another.  People who you know well and love often can get away with far more than casual acquaintances.

Maybe setting boundaries seems so natural to me because my dad was a master.  I remember one time that a friend of my brother's asked my dad if he could borrow some money.  My dad asked the guy if he thought of my dad as a friend.  The answer was, "Sure, Mr. Marion, I think of you as my friend."  To which my dad replied, "If you want to be my friend, don't ever ask me to borrow money".

That was one of my dad's boundaries.  It is important to note that I don't have to agree that your boundaries are appropriate, and you don't have to agree that my boundaries are appropriate.  But once anyone communicates their boundaries, and the consequences for not respecting those boundaries, the right thing to do is to respect the boundary.   Knowing if you don't what it will cost you.

I think it is so sad that someone is carrying the weight of a hurtful memory for so many years when it seems like such an avoidable situation.

No matter where you are in life, think about how much good you can do by establishing boundaries for behaviors or actions that will irreparably damage a relationship.  While it might be uncomfortable, you truly do have the power to prevent a lifetime of hurt.

Pushing the Limit

I had an experience yesterday that I want to share with you all.

My husband and I had gone out to eat dinner at one of our favorite restaurants.  I love the place, but they are not what you would call kid friendly.  The menu is upscale, and predominantly seafood. 

Now I know some kids love oysters and grilled fish and salmon tacos, but not most kids.

When we were eating our meal a party of five came in.  It was obviously grandparents, parents, and one little girl that looked to be somewhere in the six to eight year old range.  The little girl was crying.  Not loud obnoxious crying, but tears streaking down her face, and hiccups, and scrubbing her eyes with her fists to try to stop.

It broke my heart.  The mommy was very stern, and the daddy angry, and my heart hurt for the little girl.  She had that look that kids get when they have played hard all day and then get scrubbed to go out.  Her hair was wet, stylish, but wet.  I pictured a long day in the pool perhaps.

That poor baby was too tired for an out to dinner event at a place without a kid's menu.  She was doing her best, but appeared overwhelmed.

I'm not trying to parent shame or grandparent shame, but I wish we all did better at recognizing when our kids have had enough stimulation and need a quiet evening at home.

And that got me to thinking, it is not just kids that can be at the 'enough' point.

At one point in our marriage, my husband and I got into a pattern of going out to eat on Friday nights.  Everything was good for a while, but as our jobs got bigger and more demanding, the Friday night dinners inevitably ended in an argument.

We talked about it, and realized we were both out of energy, and patience, and understanding after a demanding work week.  We started staying home on Friday nights, and stopped arguing.

I remember when I was little, and my Dad would play with us kids.  My Mom would always say, "George, you are getting them too excited and someone is going to end up crying,"  and my Dad would laugh and keep playing, and then one of us would get too excited and end up crying.  And then there were hugs and kisses, and usually some time on Daddy's lap while he sang to you until you were happy again.  I wish that all parents could hug and sing their kids better when over stimulated.

Emotions are difficult things.  The more years of practice you have, the more likely it is you will have better emotional control, but it never gets easy.  And the more demands on your energy, the harder it is to control your emotions.

I wish that the world was more accepting of people simply saying, "I'm all tapped out, I can't go anymore." 

I wish we were all more comfortable saying, "I need some quiet time.  I have no more capacity for socialization".

I wish all children were held and comforted when they cry, and taught that it is okay to say , "I need some quiet time".

The only way we will ever live in a kinder, gentler world is if we all learn to be kinder and gentler with each other, starting with ourselves.

Did I just run out of things to say?

I am kind of embarrassed by how much my blog postings have decreased.  In 2015, the year I started this blog, I posted 126 entries.  In 2016, I posted 125.  In 2017, 54, and 7 so far in 2018.

I also feel guilty about my lack of posts.  The world needs more positivity and light.  I haven't been really good at finding that light.  The reason I feel guilty is that I haven't forced myself to look for the light either.

It is America's Got Talent season again.  I love that show.  And I love the stories of courage and hope it brings along with trained trick-performing cats, and magicians, and acrobats, and dancers, and singers.  The variety of talent is awesome, and the stories can be heartwarming and uplifting.

I noticed something very hopeful as I watched last night's episode.  There were two comedians whose comedy was of the mean variety.  They were not laughed at, and didn't make it through.

That made me very happy.  Not that those people were disappointed, but that the people in the audience were not entertained by meanness, and the panel of judges weren't either.

Maybe, just maybe we are reaching a tipping point.  Maybe, just maybe, people like me who have been silent are finally ready to start talking again about kindness, and inclusion and love.

We all fall into patterns, and let's face it, humans tend to go with the flow, with the path of least resistance.  When the dialogue turns mean, it doesn't go there all at once. There is a raised eyebrow, a snarky comment, a disparaging remark. And that becomes the new normal.  So the ratio of nice to not nice keeps inching to a terrible place.  We have reached a terrible place.

I don't know how people who I always thought were nice people can support people who are mean.  I heard a commentator on the radio yesterday opine that as long as people are doing well financially, they don't care about the character or actions of the entities that they think have created their favorable economic condition.  He is probably right - and that is just so sad.

I honestly can say I would rather be poor and hungry than be mean, or to support meanness.  I have been poor and hungry, and it didn't make me mean, in fact, I shared the scraps I had with anyone who needed them. 

I like the fact that I am financially comfortable, but it doesn't mean as much to me as trying to be a good person does.

And I truly believe if we all try to be good, and throw our support behind people who try to be good, that it makes the world a better place.

I need to find a way to address the meanness I see online without being mean myself.  I need to find a way to ask a question, or make a comment that redirects, knowing full well I may be redirecting the anger and meanness in my direction.

So no, I didn't run out of things to say.  I just felt crushed by the reality of day to day life in the United States of America.  I was tongue tied by the base level of much of the discourse I see and hear.  I was muted by the voices in my head that said why bother.

I have to bother.  We need all the voices for kindness, love and inclusion we can find.  So what if I sound like I'm repeating myself.

That has never stopped the mean people from repeating themselves.  I'm not going to let it stop me anymore either.

One Step Closer

I submitted two manuscripts to the US Copyright Office this morning, one for my novella, and one for my novel, another step closer to publication.

When I was working on Kindle Direct Publishing yesterday, one of the most important steps in publishing successfully is a book description.  It is harder than I thought it would be.

I thought I might try the book descriptions out on my blog readers to ask for feedback.  Here is the novella description:

Imagine a trio of five year old matchmakers determined to see everyone as happy as their mommy and daddy (Rosadel and Clancy) and their Grandma Harriet and Grandpa George.

These are the Marshall triplets; Lou, Rosie and Grace.

Imagine a town in Southeast Louisiana, where the community is strong, and life revolves around family, friends and faith.

This is Bayou Beni.

Come sit a spell and visit as life in Bayou Beni gets more interesting with the arrival of Jessie Tate.  Will the triplets succeed in making a match for Jessie?

Here are my current thoughts for the novel.

The Marshall triplets have livened things up again.  They found a box on the Holy Redeemer playground with a momma cat and six kittens.  They decided to put the cat and kittens in the nativity scene.  It wasn't their best idea.

Come on back to Bayou Beni as Rosadel and Clancy struggle to teach the girls impulse control, and the girls embark on their next matchmaking adventure.

Cassidy Bourgeois is relieved to have a foster family for an abandoned cat and her kittens, but will she get more than she bargained for interacting with the Marshall clan?

I know these are very rough drafts and need work.  I think they are both too short.  I don't know how fast or slow the copyright office moves, but I know I have at least as much time as it will take for me to format the books for paperback editions.

Please blog readers, any and all feedback is appreciated.

Thanks!

Hate is not a mental illness

I'm still not blogging as much as I want to be, but I am doing better with my writing, and expect to publish my novels with Kindle Direct Publishing before the end of April.  Exciting stuff.

This particular entry has been percolating since the Parkland shooting on February 14.  I am sick and tired of people talking about mental illness when it involves mass shootings. 

I don't think these mass shooters are mentally ill.  I think they have embraced hate to such an extent that they are evil.  Not sick.  Not redeemable.  Evil.

My religious side rejects my previous paragraph.  My spiritual side demands that anyone can choose to embrace the light, embrace the good, and be redeemed.

My pragmatic side says no.

Mental illness shouldn't even be a term.  Illness covers it.  Whether you have a brain, or a heart, or a respiratory system, or an endocrine system, or a digestive system that is working in such a way that your quality of life is negatively impacted, that system or organ should be treated so that you can enjoy a good quality of life.  The very term mental illness carries a connotation that is offensive.  So let's just stop using it.

I completely understand that gun violence and depression have a correlation.  I understand that gun violence and inappropriate anger management have a correlation.  I understand that gun violence and hopelessness have a correlation.

To fix the gun violence problem in America, we have to find an answer to how to provide appropriate health care to every person in America.  Without creating a financial burden that in and of itself will provide a correlation with gun violence.

But we have to stop with making excuses of any kind for mass shooters. 

They are hateful.  They have embraced hate of the other, whoever they perceive the other to be.  Now that we have caught a couple, and not had them die in the act of cowardice that took multiple lives, we are able to study them, and find they have no remorse.  If anything, they are only sorry they didn't get the chance to kill more people.

So let's stop pretending it is anything other than what it is.  Some people have been raised to be full of anger and hate.  Some people gravitate towards anger and hate, and seek out like minded people.

It doesn't really matter how they got there.  Whether it is nature or nurture, some people choose hate.  They choose anger.  They choose violence.

These are not the same as people who in desperation take a gun and kill themselves or their loved ones.  They are not the same as people who accidentally shoot a family member showing them a new weapon.  They are not the same people whose children shoot each other because a weapon was inappropriately stored or secured.  They are not the people who discharge a weapon in self-defense.

We need to stop pretending that gun violence in America is one problem that will have one solution.  It is a multi-faceted problem that will take a complex solution set.

That is why the Centers for Disease Control need to study gun violence and its outcomes, both injury and illness.  Once we have the data, we can start to parse it, and find out the subsets of gun violence, and seek to understand the chains of cause and effect that can be interrupted to stop this plague in America.

As for the mass shooters?  If we can keep weapons of war and high capacity ammunition magazines out of their hands, perhaps we can limit their carnage.  How to prevent them?  I just don't know.  In the study of human history, it seems we have always had those who choose evil, who choose to do harm rather than good.

The struggle of good versus evil is the most enduring story of humanity.  It seems that certain nations and cultures manage that struggle in their populations better than America does.  Arguably, some cultures and nations have an even more apparent struggle between the two forces.

I afraid that until America gets serious about doing something about the proliferation of guns and the celebration of violence as a problem solving technique, we are going to continue going in a terrible direction.   I hope I'm wrong.

Pivotal Moments

One time after Hurricane Katrina, I was trying to explain to my mother how disorienting it was when most of your familiar landmarks disappeared all at the same time.  My mother didn't understand what I was trying to tell her.  She told me that most of the landmarks of her childhood had disappeared, and that life just did that.  I couldn't explain the difference in emotion generated when things singularly fade away over time, and when they implode in an instant.

When Katrina hit and the levees breached, many people from Biloxi, Mississippi to Southeast Louisiana had their world implode.  It is hard to tell which street is yours when there is only an occasional house or tree standing.  I remembered watching video after Hurricane Andrew hit Homestead, Florida.  People were wandering through the rubble that used to be their subdivision, and they couldn't figure out where their house used to be.

People on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi lived through that.  In Louisiana, in the lower parishes, they experienced that.  Those whose homes were closest to the levee breaches experienced that.  For the rest of us, it was going back to a house that looked normal but was a flooded mess on the inside, or going back to a house that was spared only to be surrounded by empty houses, and no services.  It was disorienting for those of us spared significant property damage or loss of loved ones, to traumatizing for those that lost all their possessions, or worse, lost a loved one.

No matter how much or how little those living in the Katrina Zone were impacted, we were all changed forever.  There is a level of security, of trust that things will be okay, of certainty in our institutions that is gone forever.

The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School experienced that devastating implosion on February 14, 2018.  A lone gunman entered their school and killed seventeen people.  Anyone choosing to watch the news can see the tremendous emotion generated by that implosion.  What they can't see is how profoundly changed that community is.

Their lives will never be the same.  They will never be the same.  I have heard many people talking about the students and their activism.  I have heard people disparage them, and denigrate them.  I have heard people applaud them and celebrate them.

I have heard people say that their innocence and their childhoods were abruptly ended and stolen from them.

What I haven't heard is an acknowledgement that not just the students and teachers and families were forever changed, but the entire community was.

As many communities have been forever changed by a school shooting.

We have natural disasters all the time that steal normalcy like Katrina did.  What we don't often have in natural disasters is a complete failure of our support institutions to protect the citizenry.  Many residents in Puerto Rico are experiencing what we did in Katrina, and will be forever changed. I had hoped that Katrina had taught lessons that would not be easily forgotten, Maria and Puerto Rico proved that hope false.

For the communities forever changed by a school shooting, there was never any hope that change had occurred.  The people of Newtown, Connecticut and Sandy Hook Elementary School have made tremendous grass roots efforts, and effected change in multiple localities, but no national change has occurred.  The community of Parkland, Florida are turning their disorientation, their anger, their fear into action.  They are hoping for change, they are demanding change.

Not everyone will agree with the changes they demand.  Anyone who has not suffered a pivotal loss will not understand the depth and power of the emotion fueling that demand.

Non-judgmental listening is the minimum we owe to that community and to every community that suffers a devastating loss like a school shooting.

And we should all be willing to think long and hard about why we would deny their demands.  Are they asking for something that will personally hurt us the way it hurts to bury a child torn apart by bullets?  Anything that would personally hurt us the way it hurts to see your friends hunted and gunned down in your school?

Are you so attached to your rights that you can no longer see that the good of society might not be served by what you want?  Have you become so attached to an ideal that compromise is not something you will consider?

In order for change to happen, compromise is necessary.  Complex solutions to problems like epic natural disasters in hard to reach locations and excessive violence in American society are not going to have single node simple solutions.

Complex problems require complex solutions.  Complex solutions required reasonable dialogue.  Name calling and blaming and casting people into friend or foe caricatures impedes real dialogue.

We need to find solutions.  We need to help people after a catastrophic natural disaster.  We need to stop leading the world in school shootings and mass shootings.  We can't do that if we are shouting at each other and calling each other names and insisting that we know the only right answer.

Maybe, just maybe, we can stop trying to fit each other into neat little boxes.  Maybe, just maybe, we can stop pinning labels on each other.  Maybe, just maybe, we can finally accept that perfect answers don't exist, but trying to work towards better is a good thing.

I hope so.  Because this particular normal being permanent is too depressing to contemplate.

Life Force

Another post started a long time ago, it is time to finish.  Original post in blue font.

Spent time in New Jersey with family for a few days.  Visiting is hard now, as my Mom's Alzheimer's progresses.  This visit was especially hard, as my mother's sister has been diagnosed with lung cancer.

We spent a lot of time with her this trip.  We visited every day we were there, and took her to see Mom twice.  We also took her out to dinner one night.

She has decided to undergo radiation therapy to try to eradicate her cancer.  She will go five times a week for six weeks.  I don't know that she will survive the treatment.  She is very thin and frail, and has very limited mobility.  Her skin is very dry and thin and tears super easy.  I can't imagine that she can withstand any additional weight loss, and that is a side effect of radiation therapy.

What is not diminished in any way is her life force.  She wants to live.  She wants to make a contribution.  Her life force is strong.

And that got me to wondering (because you know I always do), why do some people have such a strong life force?

I don't want to creep anyone out, and I certainly don't have a death wish, but I don't know how hard I would fight to cling on to life.  I mean I would right now, because my quality of life is high.  But if I were in pain all the time, or if I was too weak to do the things I wanted to do, or if I knew I had a terminal illness that treatment would be inconclusively painful, I think I would be ready to let it go.

I don't know if that makes me selfish, or is just another expression of the pragmatic approach I have always tried to take to life.

Fast forward almost a year.  My aunt is doing great.  Came through the radiation, cancer in remission, has gained weight and strength.  Simply amazing.  And I'm still thinking about life force.

I finished a novel last night that brought me back to my thoughts about life force.  The title of the novel is White Rose, Black Forest, and it is historical fiction set in World War II Germany.  I highly recommend this novel, and so I don't want to give too much away.  But I will say that the life force of certain characters in the book ebbs and flows as their potential to do good is revealed to them.

And that got me to thinking about what it is that fuels our life force.  It was obvious watching my aunt battle cancer at eighty-eight that she felt she had important work yet to do, and needed to stay alive to do that work.

In the book, a sense of purpose, of the ability to right a wrong, or to make headway against evil was the important fuel to the character's life force.

I approach this same thought from many different directions and perspectives, but it appears one of the single most important things a person needs to maintain a life force is a strong sense of purpose.

And you don't have to be famous, or celebrated to change the world.  Your helping hand, your contribution, your smile, your words of encouragement, they can be the contribution needed.

When feeling like you are not doing enough, or feeling like you can't make a difference that matters, do one small thing.  Compliment someone.  Send a note to a friend.  Make a phone call.  Volunteer.  Feed your life force with purpose.

Each day's purpose can be small.  Say a prayer.  Meditate for peace.  Visit with someone.  But find purpose.

The good in the world is the compilation of thousands to millions of small acts of goodness.  You can add to the beauty with your words and your actions.

I keep getting sucked into the darkness that is so prevalent in the world right now.  Sometimes it feels like something big has to be done to make things better.

Stories of World War II can bring home how the small brave actions of ordinary people changed the course of the war.

We're not in the dramatic circumstances of World War II, but we are confronted daily with the insidious nature of prejudice, hatred and fear. 

We can take small brave actions to strengthen tolerance, and love and hope.  One small, kind word or action at a time.

And that is a purpose worth having.  And fuel for your life force.