love – Page 10 – The View from a Drawbridge

Embracing Negative Emotions

“Few situations –no matter how greatly they appear to demand it – can be bettered by us going berserk.”

Codependent No More, Melody Beattie

Most of us have been taught that there are negative and positive emotions. Anger, sadness, grief and frustration are bad. Happiness, love, joy, and bemusement are good. Because of this, we are often less skilled in coping with the negative emotions. We are taught to suppress them, deny them, ignore them and fight against them.

I think we do this at our peril. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for anger, and if you are not allowed to express it in a healthy way, it can fester and build up and find its way to the surface in the form of violence or at the very least, inappropriate outbursts.

Growing up, I was plagued with migraines, and they would often be triggered by tears. My migraines would last for days and be accompanied by copious amounts of vomit and excruciating pain. Thus the family creed became: Don’t Upset Barb, She’ll Get a Migraine.

Because of that, it took decades for me to learn that it was okay to cry sometimes. It was acceptable to be upset. It wasn’t the end of the world, and it didn’t have to get blown up to epic proportions. I could be one with my tears, embrace my tears, and move on.

Someone I love has a problem with anger. When he gets angry, usually for political reasons, his fury comes out like a nuclear blast that tends to flatten everyone in his vicinity. I’m not sure why he never learned to direct his anger at the source, but it’s definitely a problem that impacts every aspect of his life, including his health and his relationships, and it breaks my heart to bear witness to it.

And then there is the fact that the vast majority of men on this planet are taught that they shouldn’t cry. Is it any wonder why they are much more prone to violence? I honestly don’t think it’s nature as much as it is nurture, or in this case, the lack thereof.

It is important, in fact imperative, to teach our children that it’s okay to feel what you feel, and express those feelings in healthy ways as they occur. If you want adults who are assertive rather than aggressive, you need to teach children how to communicate what they are feeling. Not to do so can have societal, even global implications.

(Marvin Martian has long been my favorite cartoon character, because he allows kids to have conversations about anger. I think that’s important.)

The Ultimate Interview

I will never know what my mother’s favorite color was. I’ll never know where she was when Kennedy was assassinated, or during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’ll never know if she ever considered being a model. She certainly had the looks for it. Did she know anyone affected by the 1944 big top fire that happened near her home? I will never know these things because she died when I was 26 and it never occurred to me to ask those types of questions. I also can’t remember her voice, other than one particularly bad note she used to hit when singing one particular song. (She was beautiful, but she couldn’t carry a tune.)

When someone you love is dying, you’ve obviously got a lot on your mind. But if it’s your first major loss in particular, it’s quite possible that you don’t fully comprehend, or won’t allow yourself to completely accept, the fact that this is one change that’s going to be permanent. An enormous amount of history dies every time a person does.

If I had t to do over again, I’d ask questions, and lots of them. Think of it as a final interview. I’d even record it, so I’d have her voice as well. Here are some of the questions I would have asked my mother if given the chance.

What was your dream for your life?
How many times were you in love?
What is your favorite color?
Tell me where you were and what you were doing and thinking during various major historical events in your life. (VE Day, VJ Day, Kennedy Assassination, Martin Luther King’s Assassination, etc.)
What was the best day of your life aside from the birth of children?
What was the worst day of your life?
What are you most proud of?
What were your dreams for my life?
If you had all the money in the world, what would you buy?
What is your favorite food?
What is the best trip you’ve ever taken?
What was your biggest achievement?
What was your biggest disappointment?
Describe a perfect day.
What would you change about your life?
If you could give me one piece of advice, what would it be?
What is the most important lesson you’ve ever learned?
What is your favorite joke?
What is the most fun you’ve ever had?
Who is the best friend you’ve ever had?
Tell me something about yourself that would surprise me.
Tell me about your first kiss.
Is there anything you’ve always wanted to say, but haven’t said?
What do you believe will happen when you die?
Are you proud of me?
Was there anything you always wanted to learn but never got around to learning?
Do you know how much you are loved?
What would you like people to say about you after you’re gone?

Some of these questions will be harder to ask than others. But if you don’t ask them, you will never have the answers. And believe me, there’s nothing worse than that.

My beautiful mother at age 15.

My Father Figure

On this, my 200^th blog entry, which happens to fall on Father’s Day, I think it’s only appropriate that I write about someone whom I loved very, very much.

His name was Ram Verma, and he was the closest thing to a father figure I ever had. I met him when I worked at the health department here in Jacksonville, Florida. He was the physician in charge of the tuberculosis clinic. A more caring and compassionate man you will never meet. In fact, he came from Burma by way of India because he wanted his children to have the freedom to choose the paths their lives would take (a right that the people of Myanmar, formerly Burma, do not have to this day) but even so, he often shed tears for the TB patients he had to leave behind when he came to this country.

He was one of those people with such a deep sense of inner calm that you could feel your blood pressure lower just by being in his presence. I wanted to learn from him. He was a true guru. We would often eat together and I would listen closely to everything he had to say. One day I said to him that I didn’t know what to call him. Dr. Verma seemed too formal. Ram seemed too familiar. I was honored when he told me I could call him Bapu, “father” in Hindi. I had never had anyone to call father before. His love was unconditional and his support and acceptance of me was unfailing.

Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to call him Bapu for very long. On my last visit to his home I was in a great deal of pain. I had strained my neck and couldn’t turn my head. I apologized but had to take my leave. He practically begged me to stay, but I just wanted to go home, take something for the pain, and try to sleep. Looking back, he knew. On some level he knew. That’s why he didn’t want me to leave. A week or so later he passed away. His wonderful, loving, generous heart, which he gave to the world without hesitation, had turned on him in the end.

Upon hearing the news I fell apart. I felt not only the loss of the man, but the loss of my future with him. Since every single moment with him was a gift, I was grateful for having known him, but utterly bereft because I could have learned from him for a lifetime. I wish I had pictures of him, but I see him in my heart and it makes me smile.

I went to his funeral, and when we got to the cemetery I didn’t realize we would be watching his body go into the crematory, typical Hindu that he was. I watched the smoke rise and become one with the air and I knew he was in a better place. We never spoke much about our spiritual beliefs, but if he believed in reincarnation I am sure he is an extremely enlightened being now. But drawing from my own tradition I comfort myself with the fact that I will see him again one day, and I will be forever grateful that for an all too brief period in my life, I finally knew what it was like to have a father.

Happy Father’s Day. Appreciate what you have. It’s precious.

Lying Down with Dogs

Here’s another one of my theories.

There are two types of dog owners: those who allow their dogs to sleep in their beds and those who do not. Well, technically, that part is a fact. But here comes the theory part: you can tell a lot about a person by which of these two groups he or she falls into.

Bed people (and in the interests of full disclosure, I am one of these) are nurturing, and tend to be more interested in love and affection than they are in strict cleanliness and control. Floor people are more regimented. Their bed linens tend to match and are not to be disturbed. If you are the type to iron your underwear, you’re a floor person, no doubt about it.

And because, as the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together, if you’re a bed person, your friends tend to be bed people, too. Bed people find floor people to be anal retentive, and floor people think bed people are sloppy and inefficient.

Floor people make excellent administrators. Without them, the trains would not run on time, and our medical files would be lost forever. Bed people, on the other hand, tend to be more creative and artistic. They make the world colorful and entertaining.

Bed people stop and smell the roses. Floor people plant the roses. Floor people save for retirement. Bed people live for the moment. Floor people tuck in their shirts. Bed people resent that they even have to wear them.

There is a place in this world for both groups of people. And I’m delighted to say that they both love and care for their dogs. The world would be completely unrecognizable without both groups. It’s as if there’s this canine yin yang thing happening, and it makes the world go ‘round.

But there is a third group of dog owners that I haven’t mentioned, which I call scum people. Dogs are social animals that live for nothing but approval, but this group will chain their dogs up all alone in the back yard, rain or shine, winter or summer. They let them howl all night long, and feed them Rob Roy dog food, which has absolutely no nutritional value, because it’s cheap. The more extreme members of this crowd own puppy mills or are into dog fighting. Their dogs tend to flinch when a hand is extended toward them, because their experience with hands has been harsh and painful. This group of people, as far as I’m concerned, is the scum of the earth and shouldn’t be allowed the privilege of owning a pet. I suppose there is some biological need for scum in this world, but for the life of me, I’ve yet to find it.

I much prefer bed people and floor people.

(Image credit: myhoundhaven.org)

Location, Location, Location

The first time I fell in love I was 19 and in Europe for the first time. Everything was exotic and new and delicious and exciting. We held hands and made out and explored that world and each other, and everything was magical. So magical, in fact, that the rest of my life has paled by comparison. How can you possibly compete with being in love in Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam?

The second time I was in love was in the virtual world called Second Life. In that amazing place the moon is always full, your house is always waterfront, everyone dances well and dresses well and is always young and gorgeous, and you can be in Morocco one minute and in the hanging gardens of Babylon the next. But you can ask anyone who has spent any time in Second Life and they will assure you that the feelings are real. The connections are real.

This time around I’m in love in Jacksonville, Florida, a city I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to get away from for the past 30 years. It’s not an exotic love. It’s not a gorgeous love. It’s a more realistic one, and perhaps that’s why the relationship is more rocky, more roller coaster-y, more uncertain, but priceless nonetheless.

What would love be like while dodging bullets in Compton, or on the crowded streets of Bangladesh, or starving in a slum in Rio de Janeiro? How much of love is strictly a function of location? I wonder.

(Image credit: shesoverseas.com)

Only the Best Dogs Need Apply

I’ve had many dogs in my lifetime, and somehow I always manage to have the best dogs in the entire world. It kind of makes me feel sorry for the rest of you, having to settle for seconds like you do. My dogs are always wonderful, fabulous, the most excellent creatures on the face of the earth. They’ve come in all shapes and sizes, and each has had his or her own temperament and personality and quirks, but each one has always been unsurpassed in the dog world. I’m just lucky, I guess.

I don’t know how I manage to pull this off. I mean, what are the odds? But it’s true. I think there are a few things that have improved my chances. First of all, every single dog I’ve ever had has come from rescue. I think rescue dogs inherently appreciate their living situation, because they’ve gotten a taste of how nasty, brutish and short their lives could have been otherwise. They have had a chance to realize that the most important thing is to be loved. They have their priorities straight. Also, the vast majority of them have been mixed breeds, so they tend to be healthier and hardier than a pure bred with a hopelessly tangled family tree. There have been a few exceptions, but even those were rescues.

I’ve never been one to go to a breeder. There are enough dogs in the world who need a good home without my asking someone to create another one for me. And besides, I believe in destiny. Whenever I have looked for a dog, I’ve gone to rescue with a general idea of what I’m looking for, and then I get there and lock eyes with a certain dog, and BANG! The dog I am meant to have crashes right into my heart, and gives me a look as if to say, “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting.” And that dog has never even been close to what I expected to come home with.

And that’s just fine with me.

Charley

Karenin

Mocha

Devo and Blue

“I Love You” Too Much

The general wisdom is that you can never tell someone you love them too many times. And I subscribed to that philosophy for years until I got a boyfriend who also bought into it–in the extreme. Dude must have told me he loved me 95 times a day, to the point it became irritating. Obnoxious. Kind of stalker-ish and desperate, if you want to know the truth. I used to tell him that, while I appreciated the sentiment, when I heard it with such (annoying) frequency, it lost its specialness. In one ear and out the other, apparently. It became like eating carrot cake, which I normally enjoy, but this was about 4 slices an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 freakin’ days a week.

It got to the point where I’d hear “I lo…” and I’d think, “whatever.” Then one day, after a series of events that made me lose all respect for him, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason I didn’t like to hear him say that he loved me was that deep down I didn’t love him. What’s more, I realized he didn’t know what love was. He thought it was all rooms full of roses and women who wear lace and big picture hats covered in flowers, and homemade valentines delivered with a soundtrack of violins. He didn’t love me, because he didn’t know how. And that was the beginning of the end.

Now when I think of him, I kind of feel sorry for the guy. I hope he finds someone who is so love starved that she is willing to be force fed and will beg for more, kind of like one of those geese with a foie gras destiny.

Meanwhile, my philosophy has changed. Now I think that you can never make someone feel too loved. But don’t always rely on words. Take action, even when things aren’t pretty. Because talk is cheap.

Will You Marry Me?

Marriage and I have a fragile relationship at best. At 19 I was told by someone I was in love with that I was “not the kind you marry.” That was cruel enough, but what was worse is that he would not elaborate, and that gave me infinite ways to interpret that statement. In fact, here I am at 48, and I never did marry. Saying that his comment was the reason is according it way too much weight, though. In actual fact, there have been a few occasions when I’ve wanted to be married. But apparently the men in question were not on the same page. And there have been times when I’ve been proposed to, but not by anyone I wanted to marry. So there you go.

Do I feel that I have been worse off for being perpetually single, a spinster, an old maid? Not at all. I’ve seen very few examples of happy marriages, and a whole host of examples of married people who are living lives of quiet desperation. If I’m to be miserable and lonely (which I am not, most of the time), I’d much rather do it on my own, calling my own shots, crying into my own flavor of ice cream.

After all, marriage as an institution came about when the average life expectancy was not even 40 years old. You can get along with the devil himself for 10, maybe 15 years, can’t you? But when it stretches out for decades…then it becomes more like a life sentence. That has very limited appeal for me.

So part of me is kind of bemused by this battle for marriage equality. It seems to me that a great deal of fuss is being made over the ability to enter into an institution which, frankly, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I really don’t see the point of marriage in this day and age unless you have children and are therefore trying to provide them with a certain level of legal protection.

But do I think everyone should have the right to make their own mistakes? Definitely. Absolutely. No doubt about it. And that’s really what this battle is about, isn’t it? Fundamentally, every human being on this planet should have the right to be able to do what every other human being has a right to do. And therefore, by extension, I think that any person who willingly wishes to enter into a marriage contract should be allowed to do so. (Marriage against one’s will, or due to unbearable cultural pressure, or when so young that you can’t really make an informed decision is a topic for another blog entry entirely.)

This is not the 1600s, when only men who owned land could vote. This is not 1840, when slavery was considered acceptable. I’d like to think we’ve evolved beyond a time when we considered one group of people inferior to another. When viewed that way, the situation seems ridiculous at best. Why on earth would anyone want to hold on to an antiquated belief system that insists on making people comply to a completely random hierarchy, a set of boxes, and expect people to say in “their place” and shut up, and behave? Insanity.

And the main reason for all of this hubbub? Religion. Don’t get me wrong. I think having a spiritual standard that helps you to hold to a moral code is a good thing. But I also think that whatever divine power you subscribe to must surely expect you to use your common sense. I’ll use the Bible as an example only because it’s the book used in my particular culture. Here goes:

Have you ever played the game telephone? You whisper a sentence into your neighbor’s ear, and he then passes it on to the next person, and so on and so on, until at the end when you hear that message, it has changed so dramatically that you can barely recognize it? That’s the Bible in a nutshell. After having been passed through Aramaic, Coptic, and Greek, as well as the various historical contexts that it went through during those various translations, much of its original meaning has been lost. And then when you consider the many controversies over what books to include in the bible and what books to leave out, who knows what the original “story” was meant to be? I’m not saying that there isn’t value in the text that we know today. I’m just saying that we must use our common sense when interpreting it. Anyone who thinks that it can be taken literally when it has been changed so dramatically over time, and when the readers of today are so different than the writers of yesterday that they might as well be from different planets, has no sense of history whatsoever.

So don’t use the bible as your excuse for prohibiting gay marriage. Not when there are parts of the bible that advocate slavery and polygamy, and tell you not to interact with a woman who has her period, and don’t wear clothes of multiple fibers. For heaven’s sake, use your brain.

If you want to convince me that gay marriage is wrong, then come at me with a non-religious argument. Then maybe I’ll listen to you. Probably not, but maybe. In the meantime, if my nephew or my best friend, both gay, and two of the most amazing and loving and decent men I know, want to throw themselves into the utterly unpalatable institution of marriage, then I will be right there, pelting them with bird seed and crying tears of…well, who knows what they will be tears of. But more power to them.

History Repeats Itself

Here in America most of us think of the Great Depression as being something that impacted our country alone. Not so. The depression did originate in the United States after the stock market crashed in 1929, but it spread throughout the world, causing drops in personal income, tax revenue, and international trade. Unemployment went sky high. Construction came to a grinding halt in many places. Sound familiar?

In Germany, unemployment soared as American loans meant to help rebuild the country after World War I dried up. As people became more and more afraid, their political system got increasingly extreme. The German people were looking for someone to blame, and the Jews, who were so culturally different from them, became good scapegoats. “They” were not like “Us”.

Cartoons like these, demonizing the Jews, became quite common. We all know what happened from there, and most people, if they have any sense at all, are horrified and ashamed at the deterioration of humanity that resulted in the holocaust.

That could never happen again, right? Well, I came across this cartoon today.

In the present day, it’s not the Jews we are targeting with our fear. It’s the Islamics. Even people that I care about very much are saying things like “All of them are evil.” “They all want to destroy us.” And every day you see more and more news about Islamic atrocities, as if in our culture sexual abuse, kidnapping, murder, bombers, and hatred don’t exist. As if we all agree with our government 100 percent of the time, and can therefore be tarred by the same brush. As if “they” are animals that are incapable of love, humanity, integrity, intelligence and goodness like “us.”

When I hear this kind of ignorance spewing forth, I want to shake people and say “Look what you are doing! Again! Can’t you see?” When you start convincing yourself that a certain group of people is less than human, it leads to worldwide destruction. We will all lose.

We’re sliding down a slippery slope, people. I want to at least be able to say that at some point, I had the decency to say, “Stop.” But my voice doesn’t carry very far. If you stand with me, it will carry farther. Don’t let the hatred and fear that is being spoon fed to all of us override your common sense. For the sake of humanity.

Reality Based Children’s Books

The other day I watched a brief video of a Children’s book that was narrated by Samuel L Jackson. It’s called “Go the F**k to Sleep”. I don’t know what made me laugh harder: the actual book, which was surely written more for the entertainment of adults, or the fact that we have reached a point in history where we’re willing to laugh at ourselves enough to actually publish a book of this type.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y-vDYOpkoWE

This got me thinking of other children’s books that are simply crying out to be written. Here’s a few that I’ve come up with, but feel free to suggest your own in the comments section below.

Things Often DON’T End Happily Ever After. Sorry.
Glass Slippers Would Cause Fungal Infections on Your Feet
There’s a Good Chance You Won’t Become Royalty
Not Everyone is Beautiful and That’s Okay.
If You See Things Turning into Pumpkins, You Might Need Help
If You Go Around Kissing Sleeping Women, You May Appear Desperate or Do Time
The Plural of Dwarf is Dwarves
It’s Usually Not a Good Idea to Hang Out with Undomesticated Animals
The Yellow Brick Road Has Pot Holes
If Someone Gives You Magic Beans, Make Sure They’re Not from Monsanto
Jackass: The Eighth Dwarf
The Big Bad Wolf was Just Misunderstood
Humpty Dumpty Died and it Wasn’t Pretty
Goldilocks was a Burglar
Never Throw Wild Parties with Creatures 10 Times Your Size
If Someone is Creepy, Don’t Get in his Boat, Even if he Owns a Chocolate Factory
Most Problems aren’t Solved in 25 Pages
Not all Evil People are Visibly Ugly