The gift of siblings

Family picture day, 1965. My mother wanted to have a "nice" portrait of her adorable children. We did not cooperate.

I recently read an editorial about the value of siblings and the special role they play in our lives. The author, Frank Bruni, notes how siblings are with us through the whole arc of our lives.  They know us the longest of anyone, especially as we age and experience the deaths of our parents. Siblings are there for the childhood games of midnight tag in the summer, stagecoach on the bunkbeds, and ice skating on frozen ponds. They are there for the awkward teenage years when we are too fat or too thin, our hair too frizzy or too straight, our friends too close or too distant.  Siblings are there for our marriages and divorces, our children's births and toddler years, our teenagers' misadventures.  They are there to comfort us at the loss of our grandparents and parents. 

Siblings are part of inside jokes about things like persimmon pudding and incompetent camping that nobody else will ever quite understand. They are the people who can make us laugh until we cry, who with just a word or gesture can have us convulsing on the floor.

The role of siblings has been a long neglected area of social research, I think.  There is much to be learned about the role siblings play as role models, as caregivers, as counselors. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-gift-of-siblings.html?smid=pl-share

That's okay...

Today I was at a workshop on journaling. I've kept a journal for years, but am interested in new ways of approaching my writing. What I came away with instead were three phrases:

Give yourself permission.
It's okay.
It's the process, not the product.


A friend shared this poem with me recently:

Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

-Robert Bly

I found the last lines to really hit home...maybe later I can tie all of this together....

Plants I have loved...

           

Not long ago I heard an interview with Rabbi Zalman, a sort of hippie Jewish-Buddhist guy big in death and dying circles. The Rabbi was talking about forgiveness and mentioned that often when he gives lectures on forgiveness he is asked, “What about Hitler? How can we forgive him?”  He laughed and said, "Why does everyone want to start with the big guy? Why not start small?"  And he gave examples of how we forgive small infractions often throughout the day. Start there, he argued, and work your way up. He went on to mention the message of another person (whose name I’ve forgotten) who wrote on learning to love with a similar point.  When we say we want to learn how to love, we often are talking about loving a different person with a different gender.  How can we expect to start there?  Again, he laughed, and said, "Why not start small?  Start with a plant.  Learn to love a plant first."

My grandmother was a gardener and her house and yard were filled with plants and flowers. I am not of that bent, but one of the very first things I purchased when I moved into my new apartment last summer was an African violet.  My grandmother and mother always had several and it seemed like the right plant to occupy the windowsill by my breakfast table (which is also my lunch and dinner table). When I served my stint in the dean’s office, someone mentioned that my office seemed sterile and needed a plant. I went out and bought a cyclamen with variegated leaves and pink flowers.  It bloomed for a while, and moved with me from office to office. But, when I made the last move to Lyman Hall I decided to bring it home.  It recently has started to bloom again and has joined my violet on the windowsill.  At Christmas, my friend was concerned that I wouldn’t have a tree and gave me a very small potted Norfolk pine adorned with her daughter's popsicle stick ornaments.  It still sits on my coffee table and is growing nicely with its glitter snowflakes and Santa hat decoration, oblivious to the changing seasons.

But, those stories may give an erroneous impression of my ability to love a plant.  There were several planters sent to my mother’s funeral and afterward we divided them amongst ourselves. I wanted to keep those plants as a reminder of my mother. I wanted to be able to point to them years later and say fondly, “That plant came from my mother’s funeral.”  My planter had a perilous journey back to New York, having to be overnight shipped after I left it in a hotel room on the way home.  Over time the plants faded, the cats chewed them, I lost track of which were which as they were repotted.  Now, they are gone.

 

I suppose I wasn’t good at loving in that case.  But, now I have a chance to start over with my African violet, pink cyclamen, and Norfolk pine…..

Do good work...

I heard something today that helped me put some things into perspective. I was at a workshop on "aging well." The topics were focused on how to make the second half of life more meaningful.  I wished for it to be better than it was....but, there were a few nuggets I'll share.

The first was a sentence in a section about facing mortality.  The speaker focused on the things we might want to communicate to others about how we want to die, the things we might want to do before we die, and the things we fear about death.  On one slide she had a list of several things we could accomplish before our deaths.  One of them was "Do good work towards letting go of resentments."  She went through the list quickly, not spending much time on any one item, but those words stood out "do good work."

I sometimes struggle with the somewhat contradictory admonishments to not be so hard on myself and to face up to my flaws.  I seem to vacillate between extremes, be harder on myself, be gentler on myself...what is the right balance?  Thinking about it in terms of "doing good work" helps a bit.  I can't expect perfection, can't expect I'll always get it right, but I can expect myself to "do good work."  It reflects a balance between thinking nothing is my fault and everything is my fault.