Family - Is it worth it?

You have to admit, that more often than not having family is stressful and not gratifying. How many movies do we watch and studies do we read that talk about family support and how important it is, but as a family do we really act that way? What does it all mean?

When I was younger I used to think that my family was very dysfunctional. Eventually, I achieved the belief that my family was equally as dysfunctional as everyone else's. Unfortunately, it has gotten even worse lately, deaths, disputes about money and possessions. I remember being little and wanting to run away from it all, just walk down the street to somewhere unknown. These days, Paris sounds good. At least I've matured and evolved in some way, even if other members of my family have not.

So, although I feel very positively about my husband and son, I take what I like and leave the rest, meaning forget about the rest of them. There is nothing positive going on there, just a drain emotionally and physically. A relief found in letting them all go, and releasing them to the universe, but not mine.

Dog as Baby

How do we all treat our pets - like children. Sometimes substitute children for those who don't have any, or even don't want any. We no longer name our dogs Spot or Ginger, now when I go to the dog park I hear people names, Lynn, Zach, Brooklyn, Dakota.

So, even though I have children, I always talk about my dog as a big, 30-lb, furry, scruffy baby, a love hound. She acts rather like a toddler, always trying to get my attention and love. Annoyed when I pay too much attention to my husband or son. I am definitely not allowed to talk on the telephone or pay attention to other dogs with out a hound intervention.

She is very active, and sometimes quite bored. Going to the park on Sundays, and the farmer's market on Saturdays, and a walk every day is just not enough. I remember the days when my son was little and I was happy to drop him off at day care on Mondays after a long weekend of trying to come up with enough activities to wear him out while still getting done everything I needed to do over the weekend. I was paying for it, but at least he was worn out by the action at day care.

Now, with the dog, she is rather the same. If she is bored and not tired enough, she wakes me up in the middle of the night to go outside in her fenced area, do her business more from boredom than need, get a piece of treat, like a baby who wants an extra bottle because it is restless and can't sleep.

She takes her treat, and happily goes back to the bedroom and goes to sleep, while I struggle to sleep again, and wake up exhausted. The dog is too cute to be mad at, just like a sleeping child, on its back with the legs in the air, content and safe in its bed and in its home, with its family.

It truly is a dog's life.

In sickness and in health

When we get married do we really consider that part of the traditional vows. We hear those words so often in tv shows and movies. But what does it all really mean.

As I watched my father die this year and my parents marital difficulties, they were certainly together in health, but not in sickness. Whatever problems existed before his illness were just magnified 100-fold with each day he was ill.

So now that my husband is ill, not severely, but certainly with a long-term debilitating illness, there is no question in my mind that I will take care of him and do for him everything I did for my father and more. It is easy to love someone when they are vibrant and healthy and they can take care of you. But when someone is ill and needy, not to mention difficult, grouchy, and scared, it is that much harder to love through it all.

Climate Change Doubters

In the dog park on Sunday speaking with someone young and fairly intelligent who admitted to me that he doesn't really believe in global warming. He believes that the earth is getting warmer and humans merely speeding up a natural process.

It got me thinking, what would the earth be like without humans. Would it be heating up if we took us all out of the equation?

Animals would not be knocking down trees, deforesting the earth, destroying the ozone layer with fluorocarbons, laying down black asphalt, polluting the ocean, burning oil to keep warm and drive our cars and so on? How is it possible that we are not affecting the earth in every way.

It is logic, pure and simple logic.

Teenage eating machines

Well, I've heard about it and read about it but I am now finally experiencing the amazing 14 year old teenage male eating (and growing) machine.

It is a truly insane thing to experience and watch, a child growing literally sometimes overnight, be it a shoe-size or other clothes, while eating huge quantities of food, three donuts, five pancakes, ice cream, pasta, bottles of milk, lemonade, gatorade, cookies, candy, macaroni and cheese, fruit, and who knows what else. A child who can literally eat you out of house and home. I see the future and it will include a food bill escalating by about $50 per week this school year.

I remember when he was little, maybe two or three years old, and one evening he wanted Cheerios and milk for dinner. He proceeded to eat three big bowls of Cheerios. So I asked him that all important question, where did it all go? How could it be in his small belly? He responded "well, mommy" (as if I was stupid), "it is in my arms and legs and fingers and toes". If only.

iPad blogging from the car

Yesterday we were driving to Boston for my reunion - 30 years which is impossible to believe. And we were stuck in traffic, crawling on route 84 east for about two hours with no reason in view, no accident, no construction, but endless traffic. So sitting the passenger seat, I was using my husband's ipad to surf, to email, and to blog. It was pretty amazing, the relative speed of it, the clarity of the screen, the intuitive nature of using it, all impressive. I may finally succumb to the iphone when the 4g arrives in two weeks.

On the drive, I began to contemplate my college years, and the speed of modern life, encapsulated in that ipad. Do we use technology to avoid life or enhance it? Probably a little of both.

Poem-MOTHER'S DAY PAST

MOTHER’S DAY PAST

ON MOTHER’S DAY

AREN’T WE SUPPOSED TO HONOR

THE PERSON WHO BIRTHED US

AND RAISED US

WITH UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

KINDNESS AND CARING

SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGEMENT

BUT WHAT DO WE DO

HOW SHOULD WE FEEL

WHEN THAT WAS ALL ABSENT

WHEN THE VOID IS STILL SO LARGE

IT COULD SWALLOW US WHOLE

IN ONE GULP

TO DROWN IN THE WELL

OF SORROW

FOR A CHILDHOOD LOST

WASTED IN NEGATIVITY

AND HOSTILITY

ANGER AND RESENTMENT

BUT INSTEAD WE CAN CHOOSE

TO FIND OTHERS TO PROVIDE

ALL THAT WAS LOST AND MISSED

TO FILL THE HOLE IN THE DONUT

AND BY BEING A BETTER PARENT

THAN WE WERE GIVEN

TO PROVIDE ALL THAT

WE NEVER GOT

AS A WAY TO HEAL

SO ON MOTHER’S DAY

WE HONOR WHO WE ARE

AND WHO WE HAVE BECOME

AND LEAVE BEHIND

THE PAST AS PASSED BY

AND FINISHED.

Evolution of fatherhood

So, I'm in Starbucks the other day, a Saturday, on line and standing for a while listening to two young men behind me on the line.

And I'm thinking how different life is today, expectations of work and life, then when I was a child pre-Title IX, pre-women's rights. When I was in elementary school, young girls were told you could be a teacher, a nurse, and/or a mommy. Doctor, lawyer, Senator, President, were not in the realm of possibility. It began to change thanks to brave tough women who worked hard for Title IX and women's rights. So, by the time I was in 7th Grade (the year Title IX was enacted) the world began to change. By 4th grade, I was even allowed to wear pants to school, but not shorts, no jeans (and this was public school). Back then children went home for lunch because the expectation was the mom's were home waiting for them. There was no breakfast or lunch program. There was no after-school program. Families could afford to live on one salary and live a solid middle-class life.

So, I am in Starbucks thinking about life, watching young families around me, and listening to these two men discuss work/life balance, childcare issues, diapers, toilet training (or as I call it house-breaking) and marveling that they are involved enough with their children's lives to even consider these issues. My father might have thought about discussing education and school in some highly academic way, but was never involved in the specifics. Toward the end of his life, he definitely got it, that the world had changed, and balancing work and real life was difficult.

He watched me as I tried to be a good, involved parent, and work a full-time job and career, and manage a marriage, and how impossible it is. That feeling that we can do it all, but some part of our lives is always unfinished, incomplete, or imperfect. For we women perfectionists, it is a difficult pill to swallow.

Where we have come since 1972 is leaps and bounds, not the slow evolution of Darwinism which takes millions of years. It has moved at modern speed like the development of mainframe computers to laptops and smartphones and ipads in 40 years.

So, although my husband grew up with a stay at home mom, my son did not. And one day I hope he will be talking with a friend (at whatever his version of Starbucks will be in 20 years) about the same issues, and hopefully finding that there is more affordable better childcare than exists now, that paid family exits and is mandatory, and that he has a wonderful partner to share it all with.

Poem-Soaring

Soaring

Watching as I drive always

For the birds flying high above

Hawks and eagles

With swings broadly spread

Soaring and swooping

Floating on currents of air

Flying free from earth boundaries

As if above the fray

From daily weight

Holding down

While here on the ground

We humans struggle to survive

Weighed down by life’s obstacles

Preventing us from soaring

Rather than moving down the road

In heavy cars

How I wish to fly free

To soar based on instinct alone

No thought

Just air, space and light

freedom

Poem

My Father in a Box

What is left when someone dies?

Memories good and bad,

emotions of loss and sadness,

maybe even anger.

Fear of the future

stuff - possessions rife with memories

surrounding each item

some meaningless,

others important to some.

So when my father expired,

as he did not pass violently or suddenly,

but passed peacefully

inhaling and exhaling his

last breath with calm peace

and the sweet and sour smell of death.

His death was not shocking

nor was the upheaval in the aftermath.

The only shock remained in how little

was left.

A mass of memories

and help given to many others.

Kind words and thoughts

but so little, so few things.

His body went in the casket

and was lowered

into the ground on a cold

winter day while we stood

outside shivering.

And I kept wanting to cover him

with a warm blanket, imagining

him shivering and cold all

while knowing that this was just

his body.

His vibrance and life gone

and all that was left

for me were a few items

placed lovingly in a cardboard box.

Then the box placed neatly

like him, as he was always neat,

in the basement closet

where it will remain,

like his casket in the grave.

This huge presence

who pervaded my life

reduced to a box in the basement.

My father in a box.

Food notes

As my husband knows, I am obsessed with reading labels, particularly when shopping for food. I want to know what I am eating, how it is processed, so I can not buy items laced with salt and high fructose corn syrup, and chemicals I can't even pronounce. One of my personal rules, if I can't pronounce it, I can't eat it.

So, in thinking about food, isn't it odd that although we want to promote buying American with cars or clothes, but almost never with food? We want imported italian tomatoes, pasta, olive oil, swiss chocolate, french fries or toast, but do we really want American cheese - that processed tasteless mess? As American as apple pie?

The reality is that most American food is not good, it is over processed, loaded with salt and sugar, sprayed with chemicals and essentially awful.

Put side by side organic apples or cherries versus commercially process fruits and there is no comparison. But in traveling to europe there is no question that the food tastes better, unprocessed, tastier, easier to digest. So here, I don't even eat certain foods anymore, especially wheat because I can't digest it. Beef because it is so laced with antibiotics and because the cattle is fed other cattle when cows are supposed to be herbivores, our food system is a mess.

We as a culture are so divorced from the sources of our food, we just want it ready to eat and not to think about it too much. It can't last and won't last as our environment collapses around us. I guess Donald Trump will believe in climate change when it is too late.

Yellow Dog

In these days of "blue dog Democrats" people have forgotten the term, yellow dog democrats, but maybe it is time for revival.

My father, who passed away last week, was a true and proud yellow dog. Although he was financially successful, he came from nothing and never turned his back on those who were, like he, trying to achieve the American dream.

Ironically, my father was born in November 1928, the year the term "yellow dog" was born. During that presidential campaign, Al Smith, Governor of NY, ran as the democratic candidate, but was the first Catholic to do so. Senator Tom Heflin of Alabama refused to support the democratic candidate, backing instead, the republican Herbert Hoover - we know how the Hoover presidency worked out. Many in the South disagreed with Heflin's position, which evolved into the popular saying "I'd vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket."

My father was a yellow dog through and through. He despised the Democratic party's lack of organization and cohesion, but at least knew that it truly represented America, not just some narrow slice of America, economically, socially, religiously, ethnically etc .

So now we get to the Blue Dogs and Evan Bayh or we can call him "Bye". My father knew his father Birch Bayh, a yellow dog democrat. My father supported Birch Bayh for president and truly respected him. He also supported Evan, but recognized that these were, perhaps, more politically challenging times.

Thus, when I read on le web yesterday about Evan's plan to quit rather than fight, my immediate thought was wanting to discuss this with my yellow dog father. I knew that although he understood the extreme partisan ship currently in vogue in Washington, leading to governing gridlock, I also knew that my father would be as disappointed as I was that Bayh said "Bye" instead of staying and fighting the good fight. We will not win every skirmish or battle, but the key is to win the war, the war of ideas, of caring for our country and helping our people, rather than dividing and scaring them. Maybe we need to revisit the term Yellow Dog, and what the party was about in 1928, versus where it is now.

Perhaps the parallels will be apropos - the crash in 1929 under Hoover, leading to FDR's election and democratic control of congress for many years - what did the Dems get done? How did they do it? By populism, not protecting the banks and the bankers from their mistakes and fraud.

We need to get beyond the boring, divisive talking heads of CNN and FOX, and find our common ground, and move forward to rescue main street, not wall street. In 1928, yellow dogs were populists. Let's forget about the weak blue dogs and move on. Say bye to Bayh.

In memorium

I don't think I ever got the RIP part of death. Does someone really rest in peace? What happens to your mind, energy, spirit? These are the things I always have wondered about death. Having sat with my father while he peacefully expired, I can't say that I know any more of the answers but I totally understand the concept of resting in peace.

For the last fourteen months, to watch him fight every day to live, to overcome the challenges facing him after a stroke, he was not at peace. Rather, he was tortured, at the loss of his independence, no longer able to drive, or work, or dress himself, use the bathroom by himself, all the little things we all take for granted once we reach the age of 4.

Watching him as the process of death took over, as the hospice care workers tended to him and made sure he did not suffer, it was sad, but in so many ways a relief as he took he last breath and peacefully expired.

Talk to the Hand, Sarah

Watching the video of Sarah Palin, I think that I just don't get it. I don't get the fascination with her. She isn't smart. She isn't knowledgeable about anything. She offers nothing substantive. Just George W. in a skirt. Talking in platitudes about nothing.

Then we get the hand. Does she really think we're all that stupid and vapid? The oldest trick in the book to write on your hand like a child, cheating on a test? And make it that obvious? Obvious that she can't remember basic concepts and also that she knew the questions in advance so she could write the answer on her hand.

So talk to the hand grandma, no thanks, no to you, no to your shallow nothing statements that make no sense. It's even worse when you read a transcript of her statements.

Please Tina Fey, come back and do some more - talking to the hand.

A Sea of Same

Watching the President's State of the Union, I was again struck by the contrasts between the GOP and the DNC, and the GOP was just a sea of same - sameness, same people (white men), same suits (generally grey pinstripes), and same mentality rooted in the same beliefs that no longer hold true for America. The GOP does not represent the diversity of the America, the women, the children, the people of all economic levels, and most importantly religions, race, ethnicity, sexual preference etc.

To look at the sea of same - as they judged this black man who now is president, their resentment was clear. The sea of same who refused to clap, who refused to honor the office of the Presidency because this man occupies it.

In contrast, to look at the Democrats, suits of different colors, hair of all colors, suits of different colors, people of color, women, gays, jews, muslims, and so on. That is what we are in America, that is its beauty and its strength. Not sameness. Individuality and creativity. The more the GOP tries to scare us and make us all the same the more it works against them and America's best interests.

We can't be the sea of same.

The Seven Ages of Man

As a huge Shakespeare fan, I have been thinking lately about the "Seven Ages of Man" monologue in "As You Like It" and how his description of the life's arc is so accurate:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." — Jaques (Act II, Scene VII, lines 139-166)

As I visit my father every day in the assisted living facility in which he is currently residing, and I observe its residents, I am reminded of this passage. I observe how aging is so different person to person. For some their bodies go first, while their minds are still functioning. For others, the body keeps going forward, while their mind deteriorates. It is so individual, and so nuanced, and all so frightening to think that this could be me in 30 years or my husband. Who will care for us? What if our children don't or won't? What if we cannot afford the wonderful care my father is able to receive. So much to think about and consider while still living, working, raising teenagers, pay for colleges and graduate school, not saving for retirement, thinking we will never really retire not because we don't want to but because we cannot afford to.

So we can only hope that our "justice" period is long-lived, and that our second childishness period is mercifully short and painless.