Living-Deliberately.com

I was thinking today of how heroic it is when someone loves another based on what makes the reciever feel loved, rather than just how the giver likes to love.

More than the “martyr” giver, who is generous and giving because of the reward they feel when they do, there is the self-less giver, the one who finds out what the other needs to feel loved and then seeks to meet it.

Yesterday my dad was out in my car…and along the way he decided to change my wiper blades, have my transmission fluid adjusted, and called to see what kind of latte he’d like me to bring home. Little kindnesses that took my breath away really….we are in the midst of a very stressful time, with lots of waves and emotions and wounds that need healing. To say he’s our “steady” is putting it mildly. In a family made up mostly of women, he finds the love language of each, and learns to speak it.

It’s the determined learning that speaks the loudest to me. In getting to know someone, we may clash. We may not understand or know how to relate. It certainly can be difficult when trying to live in community with others. Listening, and thus really *hearing*, is critical, but I’d wager gets skipped most of the time. (That another of his motto’s is “don’t skip a step” seems not unrelated). So he listens and watches and waits for the right moment….sometimes it’s a free detail thrown into a contracted deal. Sometimes it’s a hug and listening to the vent (rather than engaging point by point or by handing out ill timed advice). Sometimes it’s in fixing something that has been broken or by inventing a new gadget to make life easier.

Humans don’t always feel like giving so I don’t imagine that real self-less type givers always *feel* like doing this.  (I say, ‘imagine’ because even though I’m a mother, and mothers famously give, I honestly wonder how much of what I do is truly self-less). It’s a challenge to give in a way that requires effort or learning outside of one’s comfort zone. I think we are partly selfish for survival…children aren’t exactly self-less, and once wounded, it’s difficult to make oneself not self-protect. Giving requires openness.

And that’s why I think real giving is heroic. The giver has to be willing to be hurt. Rejected. Has to care more about meeting the other’s need, even if that means absence or uncomfortable listening or pain. Somewhere in there is keeping the big picture in mind rather than getting caught in a moment and communicating trust and commitment that surpasses imperfection.

Some women get moody. Others, bitchy. And still others, weepy. I myself get apprehensive. It’s a trait about myself that I hate…seems to me it would be much easier to bloat, or snip everyone’s head off, or attack the chocolate aisle in the store. Mainly, I think it would be easier because these are all more predictible and conventional. Instead? I need hugs. Reassurance. And not many know what to do with that. In fact, many, in my experience, find it downright annoying.
Not expecting anyone, especially men, to be mind readers, I’m in the practice of giving a sort of announcement to those immediately around me when I get like this. One line, “I don’t feel good”, or “I feel quiet today”. What it means is this: I want to go curl up in a bed with a blanket and be loved on. In the event that that can’t happen (and when can it ever?!) I will crawl into myself for a day of quiet. I will not make decisions on this day. I will not analyze relationships; all of that is very dangerous territory when one wants to be comforted and reached for and finds life uncooperative. I will go about my day, get my work done, go through the motions and wait for it to pass with as little language as possible. This is a day for kissing sentimental photos and grieving broken momentos. It’s Uber-reflective. (yes, LOL, even I gag at the thought of this much sentimentality…I don’t like this about myself, remember?)

I’m learning to accept this for what it is. In the context of life, people will always let you down. Today, I even let myself down. Here where I am now, I feel great pressure upon my chest, not because of my wonderful family but because of the state we are in and it’s sleepy, ancient landscape. The one exception to that is the ocean and it was where I headed today with my babes. I needed the constancy and vastness of it all. The deep aqua and green, the cresting waves. I love the ocean in all of it’s moods, stormy and churning grey days included. Today it glistened with white sunshine and lake-like waves. Hmmm…part of the word, “glisten” is “listen” and I think the ocean did that as well. I was quiet and yet felt heard. What a marvel.

I wonder if women didn’t make investments, relationship choices, or major decisions on days when their hormones soar, how different (if at all) the world would look? I have one friend who’s husband encourages her to clear her calendar for a few days every month to take it easy during that time. He helps with the kids and allows for a little TLC via hugs, baths, and dinner brought in. I admit to being green with envy sometimes about that! Overall, this aspect of our lives is just one more thing to navigate and live with to the best of our ability. To the good of those around us, it behooves us to figure it out I suppose. There are days though, when I’d like to just find a communal rock and sleep it off.

“My friend just had a miscarriage….what do I say?”

“My friend’s child just died and I don’t know how to help her.”

“My friends are getting divorced and I don’t want to choose sides…how can I be there for them?”

Tough questions indeed. I’ve been the friend in question for all of them and have also had friends go through the same things. It’s hard to know “what to say”….until you realize the truth: there is nothing that can be said that really does what you want it to, which is to make the pain go away and make everything better. Words will never be enough when the crisis is that large.

That said, there is plenty of WRONG things to be said. For instance, when a child dies, do NOT say to the parent any of the following, “God needed another rose for his garden”, or “This will all work together for good,” or, “She’s in a better place.” To the grieving parent, the best place for their child is in their arms, babies aren’t flowers in a garden, and things working for the best may be true but it’s unfathomable in that place.

Miscarriage is tough…grief is certainly present but there’s less visibility, less rite and ritual in the leaving. No funeral or graveside and often, not even a physical change in the body to mark the passage of time. The intangibility plays it’s own part in the loss.

And divorce? Well it’s also a kind of death. To outsiders, who don’t know what really went on behind closed doors, it’s a shock and the temptation seems to be to try to “make sense” of something that just simply doesn’t have enough information provided to add up. It’s an exercise in futility. Friends who’ve been friends with both people may feel hesitant to get involved in any way out of fear of choosing the “wrong” side and without more information, can’t make a choice for themselves. The result is the same for all three scenarios: many times, not knowing how best to react, they simply just don’t act, falling away and out of sight.

Having been there/done that, I know first hand that this is not what anyone wants. It’s a hard place to be in to want desperately to reach out but feel paralyzed by fear of doing the wrong thing.

One of my best friends has navigated this with more grace and love than anyone I’ve known. Once upon a time my baby died and she was at the gathering after the funeral. I tended to cling to friends who were there who’d also lost children, feeling a comraderie with them that was a safe place to be. But worlds are bigger than that and I knew (as did those around me) that my entire support network could not be only those who’d exprerienced it themselves.

My friend who’d lost one child through stillbirth and had another have a nearly fatal heart defect with long hospitalizations gave my best friend this advice, “go to her, don’t wait for her to come to you.” There was more to it than that of course, but in those words came a freedom and security that could almost be touched. In the Land of Grieving, it takes all one has to get up in the morning, to put one foot in front of the other, to care about physical appearance at all, to feed one’s self, etc. There is no energy to make phone calls. There is a mountain of guilt for having already relied on others for support and not wanting to add to it. I could have quite easily stayed in my little hole of a house and not seen the light of day for months, and I almost did. But my friend made the first move over and over again, when I was too weak to reciprocate. She called to check on me. She let me talk about my daughter when I wanted to, not brushing over it as if it didn’t happen or getting uneasy if I brought it up. We did normal things together again gradually. She didn’t get offended if I didn’t call back or rush to ask her about her own life every time we spoke.

It was love in action. She’s doing it again in my current loss, as are other friends. Listening, giving advice when I’m in unfamiliar territory, and hanging out when I need some neutral time. There are also the Silent Ones…the ones who don’t know what to say and feel bad about it. They may be praying from afar, not knowing what else to do. That’s okay…in fact, it’s more than okay because I really do need the prayers! Some of those silent ones will never speak to me again because so much time will have passed they will feel embarrassed, and I, not knowing where they stand, will not press them into a situation of discomfort if I can help it. It happens and I think it’s just part of life.

But if you want to be more than silent when a loved one faces a crisis, here is my advice:

• if all you can do is pray, send a note saying as much. It matters to know who’s been heard from and who has not. And know that there is little “score keeping” going on…that kind of drama just takes too much energy. It’s just nice to know where others are on something.
• keep an eye out for little practical needs that can be addressed….sometimes the best love is a silent deed.
• listen. Don’t tense up if the speaker delves into a place of pain. Your discomfort on hearing it is nothing in comparison to theirs having to live it.
• understand they may not be able to reach out in return for awhile. Or, conversely, maybe they will and it will be therapuetic for them to do so….let them. A Return To The Normal can be a ravishing hunger at times.
• in the case of miscarriage, or some other less visible loss, offer a token that IS visible. For instance, I used to buy stained glass butterflies to give to the mom on her baby’s due date, or shortly after the miscarriage.

My mom has this saying on her wall, “Character is not found on the cloudless day of comfort, but in the crucible of crisis.” I find the same is true of friendship, though some waters are harder to navigate than others.

Head lice….the mere name can get yer scalp twitchin ‘eh? Well, I’ve learned a thing or two about this pestilence and it’s rare that I hear anyone say anything that is actually Helpful about what it’s REALLY like to get rid of them. And there’s TONS of stuff online about lice so why is it so hard?

Because the lice of today are “resistant“. That means the OTC remedies have been so overused the bugs have learned how to survive them.

The first time we had lice was three years ago. It was late summer; “back to school” had just started for the public schoolers and my kids had public schooled playmates. I’d never seen a bug for real on my own before; I had lice once as a kid… my mom washed my hair with some stinky RID, combed my hair with a tiny comb, and the ordeal was over. I was at our homeschooling convention and I looked down at my then-baby’s head whilst he slept in the stroller. Brown lice bugs really stand out on a little red-headed kid! I packed him up, left the seminar that had just started, went to the drugstore and bought RID and washed his hair. My mom looked me over (massivly thick red hair is hard to search let me tell ya) and we washed my hair too. I got the other kids home, told the friend who was sitting them, and got everyone washed. I stripped beds, washed stuffed animals, and vacuumed carpets. I assumed we were done.

I was wrong.

What followed was over FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS of trying to get rid of lice. We tried every single OTC remedy. We bought new hairbrushes, pillows and bedding. I threw away all the stuffed animals except for their “lovies”. We treated our car. We treated our house.

“They” will say this isn’t necessary. Wash hair. pic the nits. change the sheets and wash in hot water. “They” will not tell you that in some kids’ hair it’s nigh impossible to get every nit manually picked. “They” will not tell you that the bugs are resistant to all the OTC remedies.

I finally called our doctor. He called in Ovide.

Now let me tell you….Ovide is seriously nasty toxic stuff. It stinks and will give you a headache. You will have every hesitation on using it upon reading the nasty possible side effects. But the endless itching of your head will drive you to try. The utter fatigue at having to face the top-to-bottom housecleaning you’ve done AGAIN inspite of the many reminders out there that lice aren’t about cleanliness or not will make you try just about anything. Our first bottle cost $100 and we needed two of them for a family of our size.

Two months after finding the first bug, we were finally free.

The next year we had just moved to Tennessee. “Back to school” time came and guess what? So did lice. We had no medical insurnace. I wanted to try a few new “natural” remedies I’d found online that were cheaper.

Mayonaise? Doesn’t work.

Olive and Citrus Oil? Don’t work.

Blow drying your hair every day? Doesn’t work.

Manually picking? Helps but won’t guarantee you didn’t miss a few. And all it takes is a few.

Cutting hair short? Helps with the above but won’t guarantee anything either. And boy howdy do I ever get suspect of short hair cuts in the fall…..

Hair gel every day? YMMV. Didn’t have any effect on us except to cause scalp drying, which made things itchier.

All of the products sold at Walmart, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Eckerd, What-Drug-Store-Have-You….DON’T WORK.

Sweet smelling organic remedies that promise not to be toxic? The lice will thank you for giving them a sweet-smelling home and decide to build an addition for their next hundred kids.

And so…this year “back to school” time came. Teachers, it’s my understanding, no longer send home notes with students warning parents “Head lice has been discovered…please treat your child accordingly” (which practice, ironically, is what likely caused the resistance in the first place). And homeschoolers ain’t talkin’. What’s true: A) You Got ‘Em SOMEWHERE and B:) It doesn’t matter where; no one is gonna say and you still have to deal. And I can tell you: “they” say lice can’t live off a body for long, leading one to beleive that head-to-head contact is the only way to get it. I think that hooey. “They” also tell you to clean everything in sight, replace or soak hairbrushes and hairbands (even if you haven’t used them lately), and my kids NEVER go head-to-head and get away with it. I say: lice are livin’ longer than you think and they travel farther than you know.

I found the first bug on one child, while it was still a glassy newborn. I called in for Ovide from our pediatrician and had the issue dealt with within 24 hrs. It cost $10 bucks…insurance now covers it. It’s likely that in a few years Ovide will also no longer work. Such is the toxic world we live within. But hopefully my kids will be beyond the ages that likely pick the critters up. If that sounds selfish, spend a few months scratchin’ your head, feeling ostraciszed and helpless, and then get back to me.

I’ve heard there’s another rx that changes your blood so the bugs won’t like to eat it and leave. I think that scares me more than Ovide. And here’s a “haa haa”: September is “national lice prevention month”. Gee….I wonder why.

On Making Changes:

Do One Thing. If I take something big and break it down into steps, and then choose ONE thing to do in the direction of the whole, I will have started the journey to the change.

On Giving:

It is hard living on a tight budget when one has a generous heart…one constantly feels they have nothing to give. The solution: gardening. Grow food and there will be an abundance to give.

The prayer says, “Give us this day our daily bread…..”

Not: our daily cake.

Not: everything we want.

I wonder if it’s shows God’s sense of irony that the next line is:

“and forgive us our debts….”

On perspective:

When something awful, or seemingly awful happens, it feels as if the world will stop turning. That the sun will never rise again. Like life is ending.

It doesn’t though. Tomorrow always comes. Saying this out loud during a “crisis”, large or small,  makes the “awful” seem less dire.

On Housekeeping:

To go as fast as I can. Think about other things and move quickly and it will be less of a temptation to procrastinate. Added benefit: it becomes a work out.