Archives for category: Family

Getting a head

July 23, 2014 //

Last week I dreamed about my kittens. (Yes, I know, despite my formative years as a “dog person”, I have become a “cat lady” in my middle age.) My kittens are litter mates, brother and sister, both with pure black coats.

In my dream, they were conjoined twins. People looked at them and remarked, “Oh, look at the cute kitties!” Then the heads of the kitties started looking in different directions and the front right and left feet did the same. The kitties looked distressed. They were not working as a team.

When I awoke from the dream, I thought, “I need to use this image in a blog post.” Yes, really I did. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I am not someone who makes fancy dream interpretations. But I do think about my dreams, especially when I think they signal distress. At the time I was having the dream, I was concerned that John and I were not parenting as a team as well as usual and that we were having trouble communicating about the logistics of our lives. I think that is probably what the dream was about.

I have been pretty stressed during the last couple of weeks. I am an energetic extrovert. Nonetheless, I don’t function well if I am pulled in a hundred directions, living a fragmented life. I am not good at perpetually switching gears. That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to pursuing a research career rather than a career as a clinician. Clinical work means switching gears between people, situations, and goals, quite frequently. When I did research, I worked on one or two projects for years at a time. But I ended up being a clinician and thank goodness, I learned how to switch gears much better than I did previously.

Right now my workdays consist of switching constantly among work, driving my daughter around, getting to my healthcare appointments. My daughter has needed to be driven to one to three locations all around Seattle, every day, starting in the middle of the day. She takes the bus when she can but there are logistics to be worked there there, too.

Yesterday, I reminded her of what time she needed to be home from school (she is volunteering each morning to help with a band program for younger kids) so that I could take her to an activity at 2:00 pm in northeast Seattle. (We live in southwest Seattle.) The original plan had been for her to take the bus downtown and then take a transfer to get to the office. However, we’d tried that the day before and she missed the bus. Since it was mid-day, there was not another bus for an hour. I cancelled my annual physical so that I could come home from work and drive her. Seattle is not an easy city in which to get around. It is long, narrow, surrounded by water, and hilly, for starters. This means that there are a rather limited number of highways and streets available to get from one place to another.

As I complain frequently, I find driving to be taxing and stressful. I am a good driver and it is not that I feel really anxious when I am driving. It’s mostly that I have to think so hard. And it’s not that figuring out bus schedules and directions is that hard, especially with the Internet. It’s hard to remember to do it and to make sure my daughter has the information she needs and understands where she is supposed to be at what time and how to get there. (This is one time when I kind of wish we’d allow her to have a smartphone, but I digress.) Riding the bus involves a surprising number of steps and also, some background knowledge that a non-driver doesn’t necessarily know. Consequently, I need to break it down in my mind and then make sure she knows things I would otherwise take for granted. For example, “You have a parade after your appointment. It is north of where you will be. Do you know what side of the street to be on to take a northbound bus?” The answer is “no”. And she does not yet know north, south, east, and west. When I was her age, I didn’t either. Then there are the fragmented questions I throw out, “Remember your bus pass!” “Remember to pack a lunch!” “Remember your phone!” “Remember your band uniform. You’re not going to have a chance to come back home before the parade!”

If you are a long reader of this blog, you will know that I live with some rather forgetful people who actually need frequent reminders, even if they are not always happy to receive them, in the moment. And by the way, it is not enabling if your child is actually getting better at remembering these things on her own, which is the case for her. But she is only up to remembering these things about 50% of the time. Think about what your daily life would be like if you were not where you were supposed to be with the what you needed, half of the time. Also, you carry your bus pass in an old eyeglass case and your money in a ring box. And this is a major improvement in organization from years past. Finally, you don’t drive. See, having a nagging mom would be annoying but handy.

About two paragraphs, I was telling you about one example day. Then I veered off course. What you don’t know if that while I’ve been writing this post, I’ve stopped and started it many times. I actually wanted to write it last week when I had the dream. Right at this moment, I am fighting the impulse to walk out and investigate the bird sounds I am hearing.

When I am switching gears too much, coordinating multiple goals, I find that it is hard to stop switching gears. I find even more goals and they aren’t priority either. Instead of being a two-headed cat, I turn into a creature with an ever changing number of heads, all on one body. There is effort to do things but none of the cohesion required to get things done in an efficient way.

The first thing that happens to me is that I start getting forgetful. Then I start making mistakes. Then I start getting anxious that I am making a lot of mistakes and I am so distracted that my level of self-awareness waxes and wanes. Then I make more mistakes. Then I start a flurry of unecessary reassurance seeking. “Are you sure you have the bus pass?” “Hey, friend, did I just treat you badly?”

There is an expression that people use referring to feeling “centered”. It is a positive thing but honestly I can’t exactly articulate what it is. But what I can tell you that at this time, I don’t feel centered or “grounded”, another common description that people use to refer to a state of balance.

I don’t feel centered. I don’t feel grounded. I feel like I have an infinite number of heads and none of them contain good working brains. Now, these are subjective feelings. In reality, I am functioning. I am carrying out my life with competence. But I feel icky in the process.

My natural inclination is to think of the happy, balanced, reasonable, bright, organized, empathetic, and energetic version of myself as “the real me” and the other times are aberrant.

I am becoming increasingly, aware, however of how unreasonable this belief really is. I am always me. Who else would I be? The person who gets irritable with her husband because she is overwhelmed and fragmented? That’s me. The person who asked her husband to take care of a responsibility this morning because she was exhausted, even though she’s been irritable with him? That’s me. The real me is not that perfect and it is unhealthy for me to maintain a vision of myself as needing to meet that standard in order to be “real”.

The person who is feeling a little more grounded and centered after having sorted through her thoughts and feelings while writing this post?

That’s me, too.

I have goals in my life. Some day, my life will end. But my life, itself, is not a goal or an end point.

My life is an experience, with lines of continuity as well as flux.

What else would it be?

Tags identity, Marriage, mindfulness, Parenting, stress management

Categories Breast cancer, Family, Feelings, Marriage, Mindfulness, Parenting

Beautiful

July 19, 2014 //

One of the recent activities on Facebook has been for women to post five photos of themselves in which they feel beautiful. It is framed as a challenge.

I think it is good for women to recognize their beauty as we so often do not appreciate it in ourselves.

But what is beauty, anyway?

I didn’t feel beautiful for the majority of my life. There were moments, of course, during which I did.

But what is beauty, anyway?

Is it aesthetics?

What are aesthetics, anyway?

Well, most people agree on a certain set of guidelines for determining who and what is “good looking”. Looking healthy has something to do with it. Looking youthful has something to do with it. Looking fertile has something to do with it. Looking just enough out of the ordinary to be striking but not too much as to look alien, has something to do with it. Tradition has something to do with it. Looking non-threatening has something to do with it.

We could say that human aesthetics don’t really matter. But is that really true? Look at Michelangelo’s David. Look at Boticelli’s Venus. One only has to look at two pieces of art to realize that there are aspects of the human form that are aesthetically superior to others, at least as aesthetics are subjectively defined. Plus, if we are to say that aesthetics in the human form do not exist, then it is fair to argue that aesthetics in other forms, also do not exist like in trees, mountains, or other natural forms.

Beauty, though, is not the same as aesthetics. It can include aesthetics but it can also go beyond the visual. Beauty has meaning as well as looks. Beauty is also not the same as “pretty” for the same reason.

Beauty has meaning and the meaning is usually related to a virtue, like love. Love of people, including ourselves, love of animals, love of nature, love, couched in marvel of the best aspects of our planet Earth.

Love is always beautiful but it is not always pretty. Conversely, what and who are aesthetically pleasing, are not always beautiful.

Now, coming back to the Facebook challenge. It was to post photos of when one FELT beautiful. I have never felt beautiful when I was unhappy. It wasn’t that I necessarily felt ugly, though at times that was true, it was just that the unhappy feelings predominated.

The times I have felt the most beautiful, are mostly times that I also looked pretty. It was like the aesthetic aspects were the icing on the cake. But I’ve felt beautiful without the icing. Here is an example:

Here she is, Miss America!

Do I look pretty in this photo? No, I don’t and I’m not going to go over the reasons for that. But I felt beautiful. That photo was taken by me last September. I had been walking six days a week for nearly a year. It was pouring down rain that day. I didn’t want to go for a walk. But I did it and it was actually really fun. I felt beautiful because I had taken care of myself and not just survived my walk but thrived in it. This felt like a triumph of my body and mind that had been through so much through my cancer treatment and reconstruction. I felt strong and there are few things that feel more beautiful than feeling strong and capable in one’s own body after a cancer diagnosis.

But there have been times in my life when I felt beautiful and looked pretty. I have written about a number of those times in my blog, times that have been captured on film. A photo of my kissing my newborn girl on the cheek while she smiles blissfully. The photo I shared recently that my husband took during a lovely evening out. Those were times, incidentally, when I was totally in the moment with a person whom I love.

My aesthetic beauty will continue to fade. I would be lying if I said that this is 100% okay with me. But it’s still okay. I have a lot of beauty in my life. I have a lot of meaning in my life. I have a lot of love and I hope you do, too.

Tags aesthetics, beauty, love, women and beauty

Categories Family, Feelings, Flora and Fauna

Thinking tall

July 18, 2014 //

My husband is out of town this weekend. He left this morning. I came home from driving my daughter around town this evening. The kitties were hungry. I couldn’t find their food. It wasn’t where I had left it earlier today when I last fed them.

They were pestering me for food. I knew that we were not out of kitten food, having bought a large bag of it just last weekend. I spent about ten minutes looking all around my kitchen, in the cupboards, on the counter, and on the small tables that are there. Then I thought, “John must have moved it. John is a very tall person.”

I lifted my head up to the plane of my husband’s vision, where he sees and where he can easily reach in our kitchen. There it was, the kitten food. It was set on a high cupboard above the microwave. I got out a stool to stand on so I could reach it to take it down.

Perspective taking is an important part of marriage. It is not just putting oneself in the life situation of another. Perspective taking requires thinking and feeling like another, as if you were that other person, with that other person’s life view, attitudes, capabilities, likes, wishes, strengths, weaknesses, and feelings.

My husband is a very tall person. I am tall for a woman but much shorter than he. My experience of our kitchen, what I can see and what I can reach, is much different than his, just because of a basic difference between the two of us. It doesn’t matter that the kitchen is the same. We are NOT the same.

That’s just a simple example of a difference in physical stature and how that impacts our perception of the kitchen in our home, as well as what consequences that has on our kitten food storing behaviors.

Intimate relationships can be extremely complex. There are many differences between people in a relationship and mind reading is not yet possible. And honestly, I think that mind-reading abilities would make healthy relationships even less possible. I have some pretty dumb thoughts and feelings on a regular basis. I don’t want people knowing about them! Further, sometimes, my thoughts and feelings are not completely expressed, they are disorganized and incomplete. I don’t want to communicate them until I have time to process them.

John and I are currently working extra hard to communicate better with each other. We are also trying to understand one another better. This is a time of transition for us. My level of functioning has been in flux for over two years now due to my cancer, it’s treatment, and my physical and emotional recovery. My husband is dealing with his own issues, some of it related to my cancer. We both navigate the shifting tides that are our teen daughter’s unpredictable ups and downs.

The logistics of our lives in the past two weeks have been particularly challenging. We are getting better at working things out. Right now, I no longer feel like I’m jugging water, as I was a few days ago. We are talking and listening. I am working hard to focus on what I can do as a wife and my own responsibilities instead of focusing so much on how I think my husband should be behaving differently.

I am working on thinking tall.

Tags Breast Cancer, empathy, marital conflict, marital roles, Marriage, Parenting, perspective taking

Categories Breast cancer, Family, Marriage

Like juggling water

July 15, 2014 //

There’s a vaudeville theater in my neighborhood, Kenyon Hall. It’s about two blocks from where I live, located in an old house. They have an antique Wurlitzer organ, which is occasionally played as live accompaniment to old silent films. They used to sell root beer floats for a dollar each on these movie nights.

We haven’t been there in a long time. There was a change in ownership and the types of entertainment offered there has narrowed. About ten years ago we went there with friends along with our daughter for a comedy juggling act, Brothers from Different Mothers. They were very funny and excellent jugglers. I laughed a lot.

Now, when I laugh, I do so loudly and with my whole body. Kenyon Hall is a small venue with no stage. We were sitting in the front row because we’d arrived early and wanted to make sure that we could see. I was quite noticeable and also conveniently close to the two performers.

I’d not seen them perform before so I didn’t know that they used audience members in their act. When it came time for that part of the show, I was promptly asked to go up front with them. I can’t remember everything that they had me do. But I remember being a very good sport about the whole thing.

But one part of the performance actually got a bit stressful. I was to grab one of the balls from one of the guys while he was still juggling. PERFORMANCE PRESSURE. I missed 2-3 times and I noticed that the juggler was holding the ball for increasingly longer times in order to make it easier for me to grab from him. I knew that there was only so long he could do this before having to attend to the other balls in the air. I also knew that if I didn’t get it soon, the act would drag. I mean, a woman hyena-laughing while trying to grab a juggling ball gets old after a few failures. Each time I tried to memorize the timing and rhythm of the balls in the air. On the next attempt, I got it, much to my relief. I had not spoiled the joke with ball dropping ineptitude.

I know it is cliche to compare one’s life to juggling balls. We all try to keep the balls in the air. However, when we parent, we are also trying to do a hand off balls or take balls from another, all in order to make sure no one’s load is burdensome. And we do it while each of us is juggling a full set of balls.

When my husband and I have an established and coordinated routine, this can go pretty smoothly. We know what to expect, can plan for it, and we’ve handled it before.

Then there are the times when the unexpected happens or we have to learn a new routine. At these times, it can feel like juggling water. I feel all of the responsibilities but can’t put my hands around them. What’s worse, I can’t tell which responsibilities are mine and which ones are John’s. They just splash to the ground, undone, and making a huge, undifferentiated mess. “Who’s water is this?” “And who stepped in it with muddy shoes?” “Who’s going to clean it up?” “What happened to the mop?”

I have been more irritable lately. I initially attributed it to the heat as well as my hatred of driving through downtown Seattle, something I am doing at least once per day right now in order to get my daughter to activities. All of these things do contribute to my mood.

Today, I woke up feeling sad and it took awhile to shake it. I realized that part of the reason is that each day is a different set of logistics and responsibilities. Our daughter’s schedule is different, every day. My schedule is different, every day. And not only am I taking my paperwork on the road, John and I have to figure out who is doing what, every day, almost from scratch. This means we have to remember to talk to each other about logistics and texts and phone calls from each other need to be exchanged. As a couple, this is not our strong suit. I over-communicate and my husband doesn’t communicate enough. It makes both of us a source of aggravation to the other.

Our daughter has two more years of high school. She will likely be driving in a year or two. There are some wonderful things that come out of spending time with her in the car. Yesterday, she told me what a fun time she’d had talking with me on the way to and from her activity.My husband and I have more evening time together during the summer, just the two of us.

Those are opportunities I can grab and hang onto.

Tags Logistics of family life, Marriage, parental coordination, Parenting, parenting a teen, stress

Categories Family, Marriage, Parenting

Mind me!!!!!!

July 9, 2014 //

One of the gifts of mindfulness has been perceiving sensations have gone unnoticed if I did not regularly force myself to slow down and notice. Those are its gentle gifts. The tiny intricate flowers. The refreshing morning breezes. The lovely and varied bird calls. The delicious and subtle flavors of carefully prepared meals.

It is easy to be mindful when life is slow. The hard part is slowing down.

Some situations demand that I be mindful. They are not gentle at all.

Almost every morning between 4 am and 6 am, both of our kittens jump on top of me in bed and demand my affection. They do this only to me as their designated fur-free mom.

About one second after they land on me, they are already purring. It is anticipatory purring. Basie touches my nose with his nose, REPEATEDLY. Then he starts licking my eyelids. I start petting him for about a half a minute, at which time he starts biting my hands and the rings on my fingers. Then I put my arms under the covers because biting turns into playful scratching and what I call “rabbit footing”, which is when cats grab you with their front claws and start scratching you furiously with their back claws. Rabbits do this when they are picked up by the scruff of their necks, at least ours did when I was a kid, and they were not pets.

Basie continues to try to bite me through the covers and if he is being really persistent, he crawls under the covers. Meanwhile, Leeloo is feeling left out. She is the gentler of the two but she is very affectionate. If my hands are under the covers, she climbs right under my neck on my clavicle. If I don’t start petting her right away, she will try to move EVEN higher. She also likes to groom me affectionately by licking the insides of my ears.

It is hard to be mindful of the gift of affection when I am busy doing something else, in this case SLEEPING. At these times, it can actually be annoying. But the kitties charm me nonetheless. They have tiny brains and I cannot ascribe negative intentions to their behavior. They are just babies and adorable ones, at that. I kick Basie off of the bed when he won’t stop being rough. I keep their little kitty nails trimmed. Their nails are less needle like and they are learning not to bite so hard.

Right after the kitties decided to leave the bed and run around the house, John turned over, put his around me, and nuzzled into the side of my neck. He will sleep like that for a long time. I was trying to go back to sleep. I typically have a hard time falling asleep with a lot of weight on me and I get overheated easily, too. Consequently, I usually say, “Get your arm off of me, please.” (I know I am very romantic. It is a miracle that the man still makes attempts at spooning after all of these years.)

Today, I thought, “It’s really nice that John is being so sweet to me. I’m going to try to enjoy this.” So I did and had a lovely snuggle for several minutes. Then I was really hot and asked him to move, which he did.

My usual response is to anticipate that there is going to be a problem and “nip it in the bud”. I realize that I miss a lot of affection that way. Why not instead be mindful and enjoy the part that is enjoyable instead of working so hard to avoid a minor discomfort?

There are times I need to slow down my thoughts. I need to be mindful of thoughts like, “Oh, how sweet” and not race right to “Oh, John’s arm is so heavy!”

I’ve been REALLY busy lately. Summers can get that way fast because I do a lot of driving to get my daughter to daily summer activities. At her age, she typically has to be somewhere in the middle of my work day. It’s a lot of shifting gears for me and cramming my work into small bursts. It also means extending my work day so that there’s a hole in the middle for transportation. She is now able to navigate public transportation but has trouble with making connections if there is a transfer. Further, the buses run only occasionally during mid-day. She can’t always take the bus and we don’t really like the idea of her wandering around for hours so I try to drive her as much as I can manage. Today there are three places that she needs to be, all in different parts of town. It’s a paperwork day for me and I am doing it at different coffee shops around town while I wait for her.

Needless to say, we’ve been spending a lot of time in the car together. My teen daughter doesn’t talk to me as much as she did when she was younger but when she does, it’s usually while I am driving her some where, often in heavy traffic.

I love talking to her but I must say that sometimes it takes a great deal of concentration I don’t have because there are subjects about which I know little that she loves to talk about. And she loves to ask questions about them, too. For example:

The Girl: “Mom, what is your favorite episode of Dr. Who with the 10th doctor?”
Me (crossing several lanes of traffic on a Friday during rush hour): “I’m sorry, honey. I’m trying to concentrate on driving. These conversations often make me feel like my head is going to explode.”

It may be that my mind is not up to the detailed nerd girl conversations while driving in Seattle traffic. I have to concentrate a lot to drive. I have a poor sense of direction and I am easily distracted. I am intimidated by aggressive drivers.

Maybe I will try a little harder today to be engaged with my daughter while we are in the car and see what happens. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to talk to her. She knows that I would like to talk more frequently and I think it is confusing to her that when she tries, I am sometimes not receptive.

It may be too hard to do but I will try it. The fact that it could get too hard is not a good enough reason to try.

Sometimes opportunity knocks softly. At other times, it licks you on the eye.

Often the kitties just love/bother each other.

Tags Family, Marriage, mindfulness, Parenting

Categories Family, Marriage, Mindfulness

Chances are

July 5, 2014 //

I was driving a rental car with my daughter in the back seat; she did not yet weigh enough to sit in the front. She was 12 years old and on spring break from middle school. We had just been hiking at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument in New Mexico. It was just the two of us; one of the mother-daughter trips we used to do together.

I entered in our next destination into the GPS and started following the directions. I got an instruction to turn onto a gravel road. I thought to myself, “Hmm, this doesn’t seem right.” I re-checked the GPS and then took the turn onto a well maintained but gravel road.

I still felt nervous. Gravel roads are not main thoroughfares. I was out in the wilderness. But I also thought, “Wilderness. I am from the Great Northwest. I have lots of wilderness experience.”

I kept driving, even though I knew that it was a one lane road. That was the total number of lanes. One. There were no turn around spots. At first I was concerned that we would encounter another car traveling the opposite direction. What would we do then? And then upon driving a number of miles and not seeing a single other vehicle or person, I started having different concerns.

The road led up gradually but persistently in elevation. I was driving through high elevation pine woods. The street was so narrow, it was like walking on a path in the forest. There were rock formations in the distance. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

As we got higher, the quality of the road started to decline. It was rutted and bumpy. It all happened really gradually. Then I saw it. It was a place to turn around. Now, if I had started driving at this spot, I would have immediately turned around and driven back to where we came from. I would have seen the situation for what it was. It was a dangerous place to drive. It was a place that required a four wheel drive and even then would have been difficult.

But I am a person of momentum and I was anxious. Usually I am quite risk adverse when it comes to physical safety. But I was not only anxious about the drive. I was anxious about my relationship with my daughter. She was shifting to preferring my husband to me. Dad was cool. Mom was not.

So a reason I kept driving was because I didn’t want to be an overly uptight mom anymore. I decided to take a chance. We got stuck when I drove over a boulder in the “road”.

It was noon. I had water and a first aid kit, which I put into a bag along with my GPS (from which I had recorded the GPS coordinates for the rental car) and my cell phone, the latter of which was low on battery power.

I was externally calm. I was doing the best acting job that I could. I told my daughter that we would walk back to the gas station we had passed prior to going up the gravel road. I had located the name and address of the gas station on my GPS. It was hot. I knew it was a long walk. I was wearing hiking shoes but my daughter was wearing Converse low tops. I was on the edge mentally and emotionally. I was barely keeping it together. I kept having fears that we would be attacked or raped and no one would be able to help us. I knew that I had made a horrible error in parenting. I didn’t know how we were going to get the rental car back.

Knowing if I also had to contend with a cranky tween, I would totally lose my composure, I told my daughter, “We need to walk about 10 miles. I’m sorry I got us into this situation. If you do the walk without complaining, I’ll give you $50.”

Suffice to say it was the best money I’ve ever spent. Along the walk, I intermittently checked for cell phone reception. When I found it, I called 911. However, the reception was spotty and the calls were lost when I shifted my weight. Further, dispatchers from different jurisdictions answered each time, because we were lost in an area close to border between two counties as well as close to tribal lands. After many attempts, I gave multiple dispatchers the GPS coordinates for the car, the address for our destination, the name of the road I was on (you know it’s bad when the 911 people can’t find the road on their maps), and our current location. I also knew that texts would be sent as soon as I walked into areas with cell coverage. I texted my husband our location and instructions to call 911.

We finally found our way to the beginning of the gravel road. I recorded the GPS coordinates and took a photo of some distinguishing features at the entrance to the road since there were no street signs. Just as we were starting to walk on asphalt, a car filled with a family of sight see-ers stops to ASK US DIRECTIONS about the gravel road. I explained our situation and they kindly offered us a ride to the gas station. We got to the gas station and I asked to use their phone since I was still out of cell phone reception. I informed 911 of our location. Then I dug enough change out of my purse to get my daughter and I something cold to drink.

About 10 minutes later, I saw two police cars pull into the parking lot, one from the county sheriff’s office and the other from the city of Santa Fe. I walked out and the sheriff looked annoyed. And he was. None of the information that I’d communicated to the 911 dispatcher had been communicated to him. Stealing my mom’s catchphrase for embarrassing situations I said, “Whatever you are thinking, it is probably true.”

He said, “We’ve been looking all over for you along with the Santa Fe and the tribal police. We were just going to send out a search helicopter.”

I communicated a great self-awareness of my major judgement error along with my multiple attempts to communicate my location to the 911 dispatchers. (Meanwhile, my stomach was lurching as I was thinking about how much money a helicopter search would have cost the fine tax payers of New Mexico.)

He settled down and turned out to be super nice. He actually even pulled the rental car and got it facing the right direction. It took a lot of skillful maneuvering. Then he followed us until he was sure that we made it out of the wilderness okay.

I called my husband that night when my daughter was out of earshot. He had not received my texts. I told him what I had done. Then I started bawling. “I’m so sorry. I made a horrible and dangerous parenting decision. I am so sorry.” At times like these, my husband knows exactly what to say.

Was it true that I was an uptight mom?

Yes.

Was it true that I needed to take more chances in my life?

Yes.

Was trying to be a cool mom a good reason to keep driving?

No, absolutely not.

The problem was, and I was mindful of this as I reflected on the incident, was that being so careful in my life, I did not know when to heed my own anxious feelings and when to move past them. And this was a situation that sneaked up on me gradually.

Some fears are rational, some are not. When I’m afraid of everything, I don’t know the difference.

I’ve come a long way since that drive and so has my daughter. I accepted the fact that I was not cool to her about one second after we got stuck; I have never turned back. Mom’s are not supposed to be cool. I have learned to face many fears, both rational and irrational. I will face many more.

In the meantime, I am staying clear of gravel roads.

Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

This is the nice part of the road.

The scenery for the long walk. The sheriff informed me that we walked through cougar habitat. Yikes! I am more afraid of cougars than any other wild animal I’ve encountered, including alligators and bear.

Tags coping with anxiety, Decision-making, irrational and rational fears, making dumb parenting decisions, New Mexico, Parenting, risk-taking

Categories Family, Flora and Fauna, Parenting

Entitlement

June 30, 2014 //

Feeling “entitled” is considered a “bad” thing typically. Sometimes, I feel entitled.

I feel entitled to expecting commitments to be kept. I’m not talking about big things, people. I’m talking about when people promise to do the dishes.

And with my teen daughter, I always PREFER to be treated with respect. But I don’t always feel entitled to respect. I am a child/adolescent psychologist, after all. I know what teens can be like.

And I don’t mean that most of the time, I just let things go. Teens are still to be held accountable for their behavior, despite the fact that the disrespect can be normative. Just because it’s normal doesn’t mean that they just get to do whatever they want to do.

Feeling “entitled” is a whole different ballgame. As a parent, I rarely feel entitled. But every once in awhile I do.

My teen daughter recently returned from a camp for which I paid. She LOVED it. I was so glad that she LOVED it.

But she has been internally rolling her eyes for the last few days. She’s been rude in the way that “good kids” can be.

Today I told her, “Please speak to me more respectfully.”

She explained that her manner of speaking was the way that she addresses her peers.

Without getting into the whole, “I am not your peer, I am your mother” debate, I responded, “That may be but when you see your friends, you hug them and look happy to see them. You don’t do that with with me so it’s not the same.”

I heard a couple of rounds of, “I love you Mom, very much” until she left for her evening activities.

I try really hard not to use guilt to motivate my child. But sometimes she needs feedback. She needs to know that I have feelings.

The vast majority of the time, she is able to get her brain out of her “peer cave” and into a more complicated world, the world in which both adults and children have feelings, that can be hurt.

Tags Family, mindfulness, Parenting, teaching empathy

Categories Family, Mindfulness, Parenting

What cannot be returned

June 14, 2014 //

Today is Fathers’ Day. Giving my dad a gift is often tricky whether it is Fathers’ Day, his birthday, Christmas, Arbor Day, or Just Because I Love You Day. Unless I cook him dinner. That’s a gift he always loves as long as I don’t include mushrooms or zucchini or make anything too spicy.

But I can’t always cook for my dad for special occasions. Sometimes, I try to buy him something. When I was in college I used to describe my dad as “The man who has nothing and wants nothing.” It was an exaggeration and a joke to describe the difficulty of buying my dad anything! My brothers tell me about their gift giving challenges with Dad, as well. Sometimes we discuss our strategies for selecting a gift. I have settled on getting non-returnable items. This MOSTLY works.

You see my dad has a habit of refusing gifts because they are “too expensive”, “I only want a card”, and “I just want to spend time with my family.” And he is being sincere that he would be happy with a card, a phone call, and/or spending time together.

However, there are gifts Dad will accept and he looks kind of happy to get them. So, gift-giving with my dad is a bit like playing a slot machine. Sometimes the payoff is big.

My dad gave a lot to us and that is one of the reasons we like to give him gifts. One of the gifts my dad gave to me was his love of taking photography. When I was a young girl, I remember that Dad decided that he needed a hobby. He chose photography. Dad purchased a good quality Nikon camera and built a darkroom in the house. I spent lots of time with him, at first watching him build counter tops and cabinets, and then later, I watched him develop film and make prints using his color enlarger. I remember how he worked to find the right balance of magenta, yellow, and cyan. I remember how used a piece of cardboard for dodging an area of an image to increase contrast.

Dad’s favorite subjects were nature. My parents love to be outdoors. My father has had many cameras and has been taking digital photographs for many years. I can’t imagine how many photos he has taken in the past 40 years, not to mention all of the old family photos he has copied and preserved.

I used to take a lot of photos. Some of them were good. Then I stopped. Then I started again with the camera on my smart phone. This gave me enough of a boost to buy a decent camera again, nothing too expensive, but a nice camera that takes nice photos.

I can never return to my dad what he gave to me in my life.

But I can give him the gift of my photography. And Dad, you can’t return this gift.

So there.

Happy Fathers’ Day. I love you, Dad.

Tags Family, Fathers' Day, gift giving, nature photography

Categories Family, Integrative Health

My houseplant had kittens

June 4, 2014 //

I grew up with many animals. We raised pigeons and rabbits. My brothers competed in shows with the pigeons and to make a long storOny short, we ate the rabbits, much to my younger brother’s and my dismay. We had MANY cats. Although I did not grow up on a farm, most of our cats were like farm cats. Some of our cats were outright feral. We had a feral cat we called, “Mama” and I remember many times working to tame her kittens. They would hide in the wood pile and my brother and I would coax them out with a yarn tied to a stick. Many times, we were successful. Nonetheless, we had many cats who would hiss and scratch if we got near them. It is very easy for cats to revert back to the wild when they live in the woods. Our kitties lived outdoors, whether they were feral or tame. We had a large metal pan out in the yard next to our barn for feeding. When it was feeding time, I would pick up the bag of “Little Friskies” walk to the front steps of the house and shake it. At the sound of the food bag, cats would come running from all directions and would form a single file line, walking out to the food pan.

Only a few of the cats were what I would really call “pets. Of the first three cats we had, George and Fred (who turned out female) were friendly. Tom, who was a large orange tabby, who lived up to his name, got into lots of fights with other cats. He was big with incredibly sharp claws. Tom was an ornery cat and we stayed clear of him. One of my favorite cats was Delilah, a black cat. She was friendly and delightfully odd. Delilah walked with her tail crooked. When she ran, her backside shifted from right to left.

The last cat I remember growing up was a tiny stray kitten I found in the barn when I was a teen. He was a black long-haired cat with smokey accents to his fur. He was so young that he did not yet know how to clean himself. So I gave him baths. He was the only one of our cats who was ever allowed into the house. I can’t remember his name but he was a really sweet cat who we had for a long time. My husband even remembers him. My main pet growing up was a dog, Britt. She was the sweetest thing. Britt let us dress her in clothes; she loved any kind of positive attention. She lived 15 years and died on my wedding day.

John and I lived in rented apartments and houses for the first several years of our marriage. We also moved around a lot, living in four different states between 1990 to 1999. Life was stressful and complicated. John has always wanted to have a dog. Dogs require a lot of attention and are pretty dependent. I love them but I did not want the responsibility. He asked about cats and I also said, “no”. I did not want to have one more living creature to pick up after. In other words, I am pretty much no fun.

Right after our daughter’s third birthday, we visited some of my in-laws in Eastern Washington. This is the part of the state that is sparsely populated, technically desert, hot in the summer, and cold in the winter. My in-laws lived in an area where many unwanted cats were dumped. This time, there was an adorable adolescent stray male cat hanging around my father-in-law and his wife’s house. This cat acted like a dog. He was a beautiful gray tabby with white feet. He had amber greenish eyes.

By the time John and I went to bed, I said, “Can we take him home?” You will perhaps not be surprised to know that even a person like me who can be no fun about the prospect of having a pet in concept, is a total softy when it comes to an adorable stray kitten who is likely to be eaten by coyotes without an indoor home.

We took him home and our daughter named him, “Ollie”. He was a wonderfully healthy cat for three years and then he had some kind of anxiety break (hey, even the vet agreed with me) and acted like he had PTSD. Ollie was aggressive to anyone who didn’t live at the house. Also, he sprayed in the house constantly despite the fact that he’d been neutered and many measures we took to help that cat relax including giving the cat Prozac! (It helped some.)

Some people took our cat’s issues personally and a supposed “cat person” actually rather angrily suggested that we get rid of him after he’d hissed and swiped at her. (For the record, I’d repeatedly told her to stay away from our cat until I could put him in the bedroom. She thought she had special powers and would actually corner him in the kitchen, when he’d jumped up on the bill paying table. People, if a cat is twitching its tail and laying its ears back, take notice. If it gets up high, it is trying to make itself larger. It is scared and threatened. Don’t corner scared animals, especially when someone is telling you right then, “You are getting too close. Please back away from the cat.”) My response to her was, “We don’t kick out family members for having mental illness.” And that’s truly how I feel about it. I may drag my feet about having an animal live with us but a big part of this is because I take the responsibility very seriously. Once you are part of our family, you are part of our family. The end.

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a long time know that Ollie died about a year ago. He had metastatic cancer. John had been begging me for years to let him be an outdoor cat but I was afraid of him being run over by a car or killed by racoons or coyotes. I finally relented when it was clear that he had very limited time left. And he so loved to lie out in the sun on the deck. As I wrote last year, literally right after John and I were discussing what date in the upcoming week to have him euthanized, I saw him across the street. I saw him crossing in front of a car in my worried mind’s eye a few seconds before it actually happened in slow motion. It was surreal the way our beloved cat died.

It took time to be ready for new pets after having lost Ollie. My husband took the longest. And then we were all ready. Our teen daughter asked us to pick out a new kitten. She was upset the last time she visited an animal shelter. I don’t blame her, really. They are difficult places. She was away on a band trip last weekend so John and I visited a cat rescue place near our house.

John had been trying to convince me to get two kittens instead of one. But since, I am no fun, I had told him, “No way.” But I had started to do some reading and it looked like getting a pair of kittens was a good idea for their own feline happiness. Also, the cat rescue place would only adopt pairs of cats, for this reason. So I said, “Let’s get two kittens.” But I also made him promise not to try to make them into outdoor cats. He agreed and said that he thought young kittens would be fine being indoor cats. Ollie was 6-9 months old and had already gotten used to being outdoors.

Last Saturday, we brought home two 8 week old kittens, a brother and a sister. Our daughter is thrilled. They are bringing lots of new energy into the house, to say the least. She named them Leeloo, after Milla Jovovich’s character in The Fifth Element, and Basie, after Count Basie. These are perfect names from a teen who loves science fiction and jazz.

I love this photo and when I show it to people I like to say, “Look, my houseplant had kittens!”

Categories Family

Match Day

May 24, 2014 //

One of the requirements for my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology was completing a one year long internship at one of many sites around the country. The application process is a very stressful rite of passage for students. I often say, “You can have time or money but not both.” Well, in grad school, most of us had neither. But we managed to fill out internship applications and travel for interviews to the sites that were most promising. I remember traveling from North Carolina to Oklahoma City, Seattle, Chicago, and Gainesville, Florida.

Internship offers were made by phone back then on “Match Day”, which started at 10:00 am Eastern Standard Time and I believe was on a day in March in 1996. Prospective interns would wait by the home phone (no cell phones back then), hoping that it would ring right at 10:00 am and that we would hear the sound of the voice of the director of the desired internship. We were allowed to say, “yes” or “no” on the spot. There was no, “I’ll think about it after I’ve considered all of my offers.”

Prior to Match Day, we had the option to send an internship site a “first choice” letter. The communication was, “If you call and offer me an internship, I will accept it.” There were a number of rules around this. Sites weren’t allowed to ask us if we were going to “first choice” them and if we “first-choiced” a site and didn’t take it, it was considered a very uncool thing to do. We were also not allowed to “first choice” more than one site.

After my visits to sites, I made a rankings list, weighing professional and personal variables. My first choice for professional reasons was the University of Florida. However, getting back to Seattle was a high priority so the University of Washington made it to the top of my list. Both sites were prestigious and offered excellent training. I sent a “first choice” letter to the University of Washington. A few days later, I received a call from the internship director there. She told me that I was a “very strong candidate” but that it was not in my best interest to give U.W. my first choice letter. She recommended that I withdraw it, which I did. This was a painful phone conversation, but even at the time I knew that it was very kind of her to let me know I was not one of their top candidates. I sent off a new “first choice” letter to the University of Florida.

Meanwhile, John and I were nervous wrecks. John was researching job markets for all of the potential cities in which we might live. Fortunately, since Gainesville was a drivable distance from where we lived, we had gone together and he’d gotten an opportunity to check out the area, which he liked a lot. The job market there was terrible for him, though.

There was nothing for us to do at that point but wait for 10:00 am on Match Day and hope that the phone would ring. I was well trained, having completed some ridiculous number of supervised clinical hours during my years at UNC. (If memory serves, I’d logged 2700 hours when the requirement was 500.) Oh, the other stressful thing was that sometimes, no one called a student. There was usually one student each year from our program who despite their excellent application and the strength of the reputation of our program, did not get an offer. Those students had the chance to go through the “clearinghouse” process and be placed in one of the leftover spots. (These days, incidentally, there are no “leftover” spots. There are more applicants than there are spots at accredited internship sites.)

Match Day came. All of the worry about where we would live, what I would do, and would I be able to work anywhere would hopefully be reduced. 10:00 am came and went. I willed the phone to ring. At 10:02, the phone range and I answered it. It was the University of Florida and they made me an offer, which I accepted. It was really quick so quick that I said, “You just made me an offer and I accepted it, right?” The director chuckled and said, “yes.” We said our goodbyes. The first one I called was my husband. He was happy. The second call was to my parents. My mom was happy. My dad was happy though said, “Florida? You are moving even FARTHER away from home.”

Exactly two years ago, I found myself waiting by the phone again. The call that I would receive would say a lot about my future. I was waiting on a call from the Swedish Cancer Institute with the results of my core biopsy, which had been performed two days before. I knew that a call would arrive at any time. As fate would have it, I was called at 10:00 am, just like Match Day. The diagnostic radiologist told me that I had an invasive ductal carcinoma tumor of approximate size of 1 cm. She said, “This is the most common breast cancer. A surgeon will call you within the hour. I’m sorry. We will take good care of you.”

The first person I called was my husband. He told me that he was taking the bus from work to be at home with me. Then I called my parents. My mom answered and I told her, “Mom, I have cancer. Mom, I am scared.” She was comforting and I was able to stop crying so that I could get information and make decisions. (Not everyone copes this way. I like to work fast and get things in place.) I called my friend, Nancy, a 12 year breast cancer survivor and psychologist who works with breast cancer patients. I got her voicemail so I left her a message. I had not even previously told her that I’d had a biopsy. Then I left a voice mail for my friend, Jennie, who had known about the biopsy. As soon as I finished my message to Jennie, Nancy called.

Nancy was reassuring and also gave me a list of surgeons who had excellent technical skills but also good people skills. Dr. Beatty was on the list. His office called while I was talking to Nancy. I got off of the phone with Nancy and picked up the call from Rhea, who was the scheduler at his office back then. I made an appointment for the next day. I was not required to accept the first surgeon who called. I could have met with another surgeon after I met with Dr. Beatty. But I immediately adored him and didn’t feel like I needed to see anyone else. Nancy, who had accompanied us to the appointment, and John agreed.

My family has been through a great deal in the last several years and not all of it was related to my cancer. If you’d asked me even as recently as five years ago, how I would cope with all of the life events that were in store for me, I would have guessed that I would go into an anxiety spin, followed by depression, and some kind of severe mental breakdown. I certainly would not have guessed that along with the anxiety, anger, and pain, I would also find more joy and peace than ever before in my life.

I feel a mixture of feelings and thoughts today. And maybe that’s part of what these “anniversaries” are about. Experiencing a year or several years’ ups and downs in the span of a few days.

I will never say, “Cancer, you have met your match.” I know that cancer can kill. But I can say that right now, I am a match for its aftermath.

Tags anxiety, cancer anniversaries, grief, psychology internship match day, stress

Categories Breast cancer, Family, Feelings