Tag Archives: family

Why Not?

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Inner peace is elusive the more we try to control others. True contentedness results from relinquishing control over other people’s thoughts and behaviors.

That’s what I’m in the process of learning. Am I half way? Who the hell knows. All I know is I will never arrive at the Total Acceptance train station.

When Lynn was diagnosed with Multiple Systems Atrophy and the symptoms started taking over our lives, I had unusual clarity about what I wanted to provide her in whatever time was left. I said to her, “I want this final chapter of your life to be as calm and comfortable as possible.”

As it has turned out, what I wanted was totally irrelevant. Her thought process was completely different, saying through her actions, “I want to ignore this diabolical disease to the best of my ability and maintain as much normalcy for as long as possible.”

Which makes caring for her so much more difficult. She’s always been uber-considerate and kind to a fault. Now though, her preternatural consideration is getting squelched by widespread atrophy. The lack of dopamine in her brain is wreaking havoc on her body and mind. I have to remind myself she’s not making a difficult situation more difficult on purpose. It’s brain chemistry.

A few examples. Six months ago or so, after dinner, I was able to say to her, “I’m going upstairs to read in the bath. I’ll be back down in one hour. Sit tight until then.” One fall night while I was decompressing in hot water, the bathroom door slowly opened. “What the hell!” No one else was home. Lynn entered on all fours. She had wheeled herself to the base of the stairs, gotten out of her wheelchair, and crawled up the stairs and across the t.v. room into the bathroom. Because she “wanted to see what the upstairs looked like now”. It wasn’t pretty getting her back downstairs.

A couple of nights ago, she appeared in my peripheral vision as I was watching basketball in the office. “WHAT are you doing?!” “Crawling.” “Why?!” “Why not?”

“Why not” is her philosophy.

Yes, you’re right, her stubborn resistance to the disease’s progression is better than giving up on life, but man oh man, I wish I could get her to accept the ways her body is failing her. At least a little bit.

But I can’t. And the more I accept that she gets to decide how to live out her final chapter, the better for both of us.

Who are you trying to control? How? When will you throw in the towel? The sooner, the better.

 

It’s My Parents’ Fault

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Suffice to say, my personal life has gotten significantly more difficult of late. Obviously, this isn’t the time or place for any details. Just know, as your humble blogger, I am “compartmentalizing” these days.

The GalPal wants me to find a therapist to help make things less difficult. I know lots of people who are benefitting from therapy, and intellectually I am definitely pro-therapy, but when push comes to shove, I am Resistant to seek the help of a mental health counselor myself.

Not only am I pro-therapy, I believe our well-being depends largely on the quality of our closest interpersonal relationships, and those relationships depend largely on our willingness to be vulnerable about our inner lives.

The gender stereotype that males think and talk almost exclusively about tangible objects—whether news, weather, or sports, okay maybe cars too—doesn’t apply to me. I’m always thinking about deeper things than just how bad UCLA men’s basketball is this year.* What to do with the nearly constant deeper inner dialogue, that is the question.

Two imperfect answers spring to mind. The first was modeled by a friend a week ago when he asked if we could talk. He suggested a bike ride, and despite the frigid temps, of course I was in. Looping FishTrap Loop shoulder to shoulder, I initiated, “So, what’s up?” “It’s a long story,” he started, but really it wasn’t. It was a very good talk/ride and I’d like to think he felt better afterwards.

What’s imperfect about that? With occasional exceptions like the one just described, my closest friends, being of the male persuasion, aren’t as adept as women at talking about their feelings. As a result, it’s rare for a male friend to genuinely ask, “So, what’s up?” Could I take more initiative with my friends in digging deeper into “real” life? Fo sho.

In theory, writing could be a helpful outlet too. That is, if I could figure out the endlessly convoluted privacy concerns of those nearest and dearest to me. Which I can’t. And before you suggest it, journaling ain’t the answer, because that’s just a more visible form of the inner dialogue.

So, given those limitations, why not just “do” therapy? Asked differently, what the hell is wrong with me, that I’m so resistant to “professional” help?

I’ve been mulling that around and around.

What I’ve concluded is that the Good Wife doesn’t fully appreciate just how much I am a product of my parents’ “too extreme for their own good” intense independence. Both my mom and my dad grew up without much, during the Depression, in eastern Montana. When my dad died, his obituary was in the New York Times. Individually and together, they developed resilient, “grin and bare it” approaches to life that worked for them.

Mostly. Better for my dad than my mom who would have benefitted greatly from therapy after my dad’s death, from which she never really recovered.

Again though, that knowledge of how helpful therapy can be is overridden by my parents’ modeling which was rooted in the brutal conditions of eastern Montana in the 1930’s. Suffering was synonymous with living. You just endure it, in whatever form it takes.

Asking me to just dial up a therapist feels like asking me to break from my past and my people, to defy my DNA. Despite all the decades, I am still of eastern Montana, still of Don Byrnes, still of Carol Byrnes, still of believing that I must grin and bare it mostly alone.

For better, or more likely, for worse.

*thank goodness for the women

Dear Taylor

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Dammit, I can’t take it any more. A few months ago the word on the street was Austin Reaves. Now it’s Travis Kelce.

Gerl, if you’re really interested in a long-term stable relationship, you gotta quit with the professional athletes, actors, and musicians.

Repeat after me, no public figures.

You need to find yourself a librarian who makes time for his grandmother on Sunday afternoons.

Granted, settling down with a normie may not be great for your art, but there are always trade-offs in life. If you want a family, find yourself a nice librarian and do your best to keep it on the down-low.

You’re welcome.

Ron

A Balm For My Cynicism

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If I could press “rewind” and stop the tape of my life halfway through 1990 when the Good Wife and I were leaving the International Community School in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to begin my Ph.D. program at the University of Denver, we may have taken second international teaching gigs somewhere else in the world. And then a third. And then a fourth. And then a fifth just like some of my Addis Ababa teaching friends did.

If I was younger and there was more demand for C-list bloggers, I’d move to Canada. Or some other less violent, less divided country. Where the quality of life is noticeably better.

To which the deluded “Greatest Country on Earth” people reply, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

I concede, pessimism is a downer, but I think of it more as realism. The “Greatest Country” contingent is living in the past, unwilling or unable to rationally assess the numerous ways our quality of life is declining.

And yet there’s at least one thing that gives me genuine hope for a decent future. Loving parenting of small children.

I see it most often in the YMCA locker room. Sometimes at Vic’s (Wildwood) Pizza. I’m constantly seeking it out because I can’t get enough of it. It’s damn near the only balm that does anything for my chronic cynicism.

Since it’s the male locker room, it’s almost always dads, sometimes granddad’s. Sometimes white dads, often dads of different ethnicities. Sometimes middle class dads, other times working class dads. Most of the time I can’t see the father and children because we’re in different rows, so I just eavesdrop. Nothing soothes my soul like listening to a dad talk to his two, three, four year-old daughter or son as if they’re just small adults. Respecting their intelligence, knowing they will rise to the level of their expectations.

Often, that respect is coupled with a beautiful mix of patience, gentleness, and kindness, a trifecta that gives me confidence that those kids will be more than alright, and that collectively, we will too. I have no doubt the same thing is playing out in the women’s locker room.

What if we collapsed all pressing public policy questions down to this one: How can we make it easier for parents to love their children unconditionally? How can we design policies that make YMCA membership feasible for everyone so that children can take swim lessons, and families can swim together, and older kids can play team sports?

At the same time, let’s acknowledge the endless forms family life takes. No form is better than another. The only thing that matters is loving parenting. Parenting marked by respect, patience, gentleness, kindness. I suspect, if we get the parenting of young children right, like so many of my fellow YMCA members do, we’ll be alright.

La Ultima Guide To Increasing Visits Home

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Once they fly the coop, most parents miss their adult children. And so they look forward to their occasional visits home. Often however, their visits aren’t as frequent as the parents would like. Thus, a fool-proof way to increase visits home.

Step 1. Have a charming personality.

Step 2. Keep it supe-light. Don’t ask about their love lives, job searches, or anything that might require them to reveal an inner thought. If at a loss of what to talk about, there’s always the weather and Lizzo.

Step 3. Pay for the plane tickets.

Step 4. For Christmas, get them generous gift certificates to their favorite hometown coffee shop (Ember) and/or book store (Browsers) that they love visiting almost as much as the homefront.

Step 5. If they get out of bed in time, make them morning lattes.

Step 6. Buy cinnamon bread and cinnamon rolls at Wagners and make french toast for breakfast.* Add in turkey bacon and eggs.

Step 7. Don’t sweat the small things. . . half the dishes disappearing from the kitchen, the other half dirty in and around the sink, the loud t.v. at night . . . you get the drift.

Step 8. Go to whatever movie they want, even Little Women.

Step 9. Have a charming personality.

Follow these nine steps and they’ll be home again before you know it.

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*thanks to Dan, Dan, The Transpo Man for the french toast “recipe”

What Everyone Needs

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A sense of purpose. Of being needed.

That’s what my mom struggled with the last several years of her life. Her family that had needed her for a long time, was grown and gone. Her husband, who had needed her and provided companionship for even longer, was gone too. Be especially kind to older, single people.

Teaching has always been fulfilling in large part because it has provided me with a clear sense of purpose. Administrative work I’ve learned, not as much. Having done more administrative work the last few years, I confess that I’m in a work funk, probably the result of a less tangible sense of purpose.

That’s why I did something I almost never do, saved a student’s end-of-class “thank you” from mid-December. Despite telling her in a follow up message, I don’t think she had any idea how moved I was by it.

Hello Dr. Byrnes,
Here is my final paper. I have thoroughly enjoyed your class and am very sad it is over. This class was one I could consistently look forward to every week. It was one where I could wake up on a Tuesday or Thursday morning and say, “I GET to go to Writing 101 today!’ This class greatly increased my knowledge, view and perspective of the world. It challenged my beliefs and opened my thinking to accept new ideas. Thank you for leading so diligently and kindly as you did. I count it an honor and blessing to have taken this class. Thank you.

The honor and blessing was all mine.

Like my student, take a few minutes today to tell someone how they enrich your life in small or large ways. Remind them they are needed and that their life has purpose.

The Simplest Way to Change the World

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Form a family. Of any sort, biological or otherwise. Eat dinner together nightly. Repeat.

In that spirit, here’s a paragraph to ponder from the reading journal of one of my January-term students*:

“Since both my parents had careers in the Air Force, my family was run in a military manner with strict rules, many activities, and time management. We had timers to regulate our homework, play, and exercise. Our family vacations were notoriously un-relaxing, with us often traversing 6 different cities in two weeks or cycling the entire coast of a country. However, one area in which we were a “slow” family is related to dinner. My mom very strictly required that we have a sit-down family meal together at 6:00 P.M. every night, at which we were expected to try every food item on the table, chat about our days. Skipping or arriving late to dinner was unacceptable, as was leaving the table before 7:00 P.M. My brothers and I rotated through chores of setting the table, helping cook the meal, and loading the dishwasher. I thought this was normal until I found that none of my college friends had routine family dinners growing up. Though I resented this forced family interaction time, it became the stabilizing force in my life, a chance to wind down and reconnect with my family. Is this family priority outdated, unrealistic, and a little ridiculous?”

The “stabilizing force in my life”.

Social scientific research on the effects of family dinners is eye-opening. How can something so simple have so many positive correlations? From “The Importance of Eating Together” in the Atlantic:

“. . . children who do eat dinner with their parents five or more days a week have less trouble with drugs and alcohol, eat healthier, show better academic performance, and report being closer with their parents than children who eat dinner with their parents less often, according to a study conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.”

Consider the flip side, the negative consequences of families who do not eat together with any regularity:

“There are two big reasons for. . . negative effects associated with not eating meals together: the first is simply that when we eat out—especially at the inexpensive fast food and take-out places that most children go to when not eating with their family—we tend not to eat very healthy things. As Michael Pollan wrote in his most recent book, Cooked, meals eaten outside of the home are almost uniformly less healthy than homemade foods, generally having higher fat, salt, and caloric content.

The other reason is that eating alone can be alienating. The dinner table can act as a unifier, a place of community. Sharing a meal is an excuse to catch up and talk, one of the few times where people are happy to put aside their work and take time out of their day.”

Why don’t we eat dinner together more? Have we convinced ourselves we lack the time or are we unaware of the positive effects?

The more we follow the lead of my student’s mother, the better the world and we will be.

*shared by permission

Blessed Light

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Living in the Upper Lefthand Corner of the United States requires a tradeoff that is difficult at times. You must endure dampness and darkness for eight months of the year in exchange for four months of supernatural light and unparalleled beauty. Right now we’re in the sweet spot of the four months meaning there’s no other place on the planet I’d rather be.

During this morning’s run in Priest Point Park I was intermittently blanketed by the sun’s brilliant radiance as I moved steadily through the forest. Shirtless and sweaty at 7a,  I was profoundly appreciative of July. More so than I ever would be if it wasn’t for the damp and dark runs during the eight contrasting months. The contrast is key.

Mid-day, on Mount Rainier with family, the sun ricocheted off the snow surrounding Snow Lake.

Tonight, transfixed by the fading sun on the western horizon, I will sit on the deck eating popcorn and drinking a recovery beer with family. Sunset is at 9:08p.m., but it won’t get dark until 9:45-10p.m. Must store as much Vitamin D as possible.

As a visitor you probably wouldn’t get it, you’d probably say, “Yeah sure, the weather, the trees, the water, they’re all nice, but really, no need to get all worked up about it.” To which I’d say, “I’m selling it short. I can’t do justice to the blessed light that gives me an unspeakable joy and sustains me through the dark.” At which point you’d just slowly back away not knowing what to make of me. Which I would understand and not hold against you. At all.

Addendum: For those keeping score at home, the “find the spelling errors in the initial draft” scorecard currently reads, Cal Lutheran 1, St. Olaf 1, Carleton 0.

 

 

 

Choosing to Be Different

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A bright, personable, caring young woman in my writing seminar this fall said she had absolutely no interest in marriage because her parents had failed so miserably at it.

I felt no need to sell marriage, but her passionate rejection of it reminded me of how we often generalize from our experiences way too much.

Then I read this blog post, The In-Between Process, by an exceptional alumnae of my writing seminar. And this sentence jumped off the page, “I get to choose to be different, and I will be.”

As sociologists remind us, the vast majority of time we follow pretty damn closely in our parent(s)’ footsteps. As we see in her friend’s kitchen, some though do manage to “be different” by seeking alternative family mentors and friends.

Those of us fortunate to enjoy happy and healthy families should never take them for granted. Instead, we should look for opportunities to love and support those mired in troubled, dysfunctional families.