For
the past several months, I’ve watched as several women I know join a
sorority none of us would have ever voluntarily joined yet actively
serve in every day. It’s a sorority of women that have, for whatever
reason, become caregivers of our husbands. Day in and day out, we live
our vows of “in sickness and in health” to the letter, taking on the
physical load and emotional toll of making sure
our husbands get through the daily battle of whatever illness has
landed on them. I promise you, none of us asked for this, but it is a
role I have come to love, even on the most difficult of days when all
you want to do is yell, “I can’t do this anymore, you either find a way
to deal with this or I’m going to curl up in a corner, go to sleep, and
fight waking up ever again.” It’s HARD. We are on the front lines of
seeing the man we love, the man we married that stood strong and proud
at the altar, the man that was once the “hunter/gatherer” for the
family, struggle to do even the simplest, most mundane of tasks, from
going to the bathroom to putting on a pair of shorts, to combing his
hair, to drying off after a shower, walking through the house, eating a
meal, or even completing a thought.
This journey of mine has
brought me face-to-face with my own mother’s journey from wife to
caregiver of my father. For all intents and purposes, theirs was a
marriage of agreement and arrangement. Two nattering old women decided
that their kids would be perfectly suited for one another. My father,
the sweetest, nicest man I’ve ever known, who wouldn’t say shit if he
had a mouth full of it, came home from the Navy to meet my mother at a
dinner the two women arranged. My mother came from an unconventional
family background, her father having been around 35 years older than her
mother, died when my mother was two, nearly three. Her mother raised
her as a widow until she met and married the town drunk and then it was
on. Her life was in constant upheaval and her mother eventually
divorced the drunk, but not before wreaking havoc in the lives of
everyone in the family and leaving three women, my grandma and her now
two daughters, my mom and her half-sister, to fend for themselves. My
mother became a dental assistant and on payday, her mother would stand
at the door with her hand outstretched and my mother had to hand over
her paycheck to her. When this dinner was arranged, my mother not only
saw handsome sailor at the table across from her, she saw her knight in
shining armor. She put him on a white steed and never allowed him to
dismount that steed. She worshipped the ground he walked on.
In June 1995, he woke up one morning, having endured a week of
agonizing headaches, and collapsed on the bed, suffering from a brain
aneurysm. He was whisked off to the hospital and then to another one,
where he was rushed into surgery by an amazing neurosurgeon. During
surgery, the main artery in his brain ruptured, causing two strokes in
the front lobe of the brain, otherwise known as the “executive lobe”,
where all decisions and impetus for doing anything come from. My sweet
dad went from a Type A “gotta get it done yesterday!” to falling asleep
in front of the television while watching endless hours of TV Land and
Cartoon Network. Upon arriving at the hospital the day of his aneurysm,
I said a simple prayer. I asked God, if you’re going to take my dad
Home, please give us the strength to go on with a life that would make
him proud. If you’re going to leave him with us, please give us the
strength to give him a life of peace, comfort, and pride.
My
mother, on the other hand, became a tightly wound ball of nerves, white
knuckling away hours in the waiting room, shredding tissues, working
herself into a hysterical mess of tears and nerves. My dad survived and
had a shunt put in eventually to rid his brain of the fluid,
encephalitis, but he was forever changed. As one doctor put it, “Your
father has had the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. His ‘get up and
go’ was taken away when he had those two strokes.” In other words, my
dad would always have the mentality of an 11 year old boy. He was
incapable of summoning the initiative it took to do anything around the
house. My uncle kept him on at the shutter shop he owned and kept my
dad employed until it became very apparent in 2006 that my father was
struggling with the simplest of tasks related to a move to a new and
larger building. He couldn’t find his way around, couldn’t remember
simple tasks. My uncle was torn at having to make the decision to let
my dad go, and he tearfully apologized to me, but he had a business to
run and he had the safety of not only my father to consider, but every
other employee as well. I completely understood and made sure he knew
that. My mother DIDN’T want to understand and made sure he knew that as
well. Theirs has been a contentious relationship for the past almost
40 years and she’s not been kind to my father’s family. This was the
nail in the familial coffin.
Two years after my father’s
brain aneurysm, my mother noticed a lump on her neck. The doctor put
her on antibiotics and the lump went away, only to reappear that
November. She went to an ENT who ran tests and in his office, explained
she had mucoepidermoid carcinoma. She had a tumor on her right saliva
gland, a very aggressive form of cancer, and surgery was needed
immediately. As if that wasn’t shock enough, what the doctor said next
blew her mind:
“Mary, this form of cancer doesn’t just show up.
It is a cancer that is kicked into gear by a traumatic event. You’ve
told me about your husband’s brain aneurysm and how the stress affected
you. I’d venture to say that it was that incident that set this all
into motion.”
In other words, my mother stressed herself into
cancer. Or as she liked to put it to other people, not jokingly, “My
husband caused my cancer.” She thought that was comical. She had a
very invasive surgery that removed nearly all of the right side of her
neck, chemo wouldn’t touch this cancer but she underwent radiation five
days a week for six weeks and is now 17 years cancer-free.
The
next several years as my father required more and more care, my mother’s
handwringing became worse and worse, her worrying became almost
uncontrollable, and we began hearing a mantra in all of her
conversations. “He doesn’t do ________ (insert anything there
pertaining to work around the house) anymore.” And then…….
“HE’S NOT THE MAN THAT I MARRIED!”
I heard those last words over and over and over during the course of
the next several years. Finally it occurred to me what was going on.
My father, her knight in shining armor on his trusty white steed, dared
to fall off that horse and was never able to get back on. For the
longest time she’d placed him so high on a pedestal that when he fell
off, her world crumbled. She’d never had to really be a “giver” in the
marriage. He was always there to take care of her and anything that
came along. One day, in one fell swoop, her man ended up needing help
and she had no clue as to how to take care of him. She was still in “I
want my husband back. He’s not the man I married!” territory. She was
eyeball deep in that fantasy and refused to see that everyone changes.
Even that man she married that she absolutely worshiped and adored, had
changed over the years in great ways, but in her mind she still saw her
sailor that swept into her life, rescuing her from that awful life with
her mother.
One day, not long after Mike and I married, while
we were staying with my parents until he found a job, my mother went
into one of her hand-wringing “he’s not the man that I married!” fits
when Mike had had enough.
“Mary, knock it off. You have two options
here. One, you can go out there and sit with your husband and thank
God Almighty that he survived a horrific aneurysm and strokes and even
if it’s just keeping him company while he falls asleep to Cartoon
Network, you have a husband that is ALIVE and so what if you have to
take care of him and his needs—he’s alive. That’s choice one. Or, two,
you could be going out to the cemetery to where Ed and Nadine are
buried (my paternal grandparents) and visit your husband while he’s
pushing up daisies. So he’s not the man you married. YOU’RE not the
woman he married either. Everyone changes. NO ONE stays the same once
they’re married. People change, lives change. You’re stuck in November
1963 at the altar where he rescued you. Now, grow up and go be the
wife he needs and not the whining shrew he’s now able to tune out
because he has the brain of an 11 year old boy.”
That’s my
husband. Cutting right through the bullshit to the real truth. And she
didn’t like it one teeny bit. But it was all true.
The night
that I sat in the waiting room waiting to hear if my husband was going
to live or die, I made a promise to God and myself. I would NOT become
my mother. If this was the life that had been planned for us all along,
then I would live that life to the best of my ability. I’d live a life
that would honor my husband. Most of all, I would live a life that
would NOT resemble the life my mother lived, one of fear, one of nagging
and controlling.
I can only speak for myself, but I can
honestly say my husband is not the same man I married. Happily. The
man I found in 2001 was angry. He was resentful of women in his past.
Quick to be angry, slow to think before he spoke. Of course, being a
woman, my first thought was, “I love him—I’ll change him!” I can’t
remember how I found the book but one day I managed to get my hands on
The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Omartian, a book that changed my
entire life.
Surprise--my husband wasn’t the problem. I was.
Reading the book I learned to change MYSELF from within, I learned to
quit standing in God’s way—how else could he do his work if I was
standing in between he and Mike? I learned to PRAY for my husband.
Then one day, I asked God to do something that is very, very powerful. I
asked Him to show me Mike through His eyes. What I saw amazed me. I
saw a grown man with the heart of a little boy. I saw a man that made
his own life by working hard, telling himself his abusive childhood
didn’t matter, that wanted desperately to be loved and love someone
completely and wholly in return. I saw a man that was willing to change
many things about him for the right woman and I saw that I was that
woman, but I had to exhibit the qualities of a woman he would trust with
what he was willing to change. Becoming a caregiver to your husband is
an act of complete submission to the Lord so you are able to exhibit
His goodness and kindness to your husband and those watching. As He
submitted to the humility of washing the feet of the disciples, we
submit to His will and metaphorically, and sometimes not to
metaphorically, wash the feet of our husband.
Lately, several
women I’ve either known for years, or have come to know through
Facebook, or other forums on the net, have stood at the same door I
stood at two years ago. They’ve stood at the door that, once they
walked through, would lead them into a life where they’d see their
spouse, their husband, the love of their life, suffer through accidents
and illnesses. Some were minor, several were very serious. These
women, one by one, have become caregivers to the person they loved the
most after God Himself. Together, in this sorority, we have slipped
hospital gowns on our husbands, we have walked them down a hospital
hall, rolling IV towers alongside us. We’ve waited in hospital waiting
rooms with total strangers, longing anxiously to see the familiar face
of a surgeon and hoping to hear only the best news, but many times
digesting the worst. We’ve sterilized the house to welcome home our
sick spouse, held their heads while they vomited, pull them off the
toilet, clean them up after they’ve used the toilet, held a urinal while
they leaned on us for support. We have administered medicine, changed
bandages, and arranged follow-up doctor appointments. Some of us have
taken stitches out at home, wrapped wounds, washed blood spattered
clothes and bed sheets. We have held their hands while they cried, and
held our own heads while we cried, silently in the bathroom with the
shower running to drown out the sound of sobs. We have crunched numbers
and asked how we would make it, and some of us have looked up to the
heavens to offer thanks for the gift card or check that arrived in the
mail totally and completely unexpectedly. We wake up living our vows,
we move through the day living our vows, and we go to bed living our
vows. This is a role we take seriously, that of a caregiver. Our loved
ones didn’t ask to be sick and truth be told, we would take their
illness in a nanosecond to take the pain and fear away from them. Women
are MUCH stronger than people think and I have discovered that men
aren’t as strong as they like to let on. If your spouse becomes sick
and you must assume the role of caregiver, please don’t look at it as a
burden. It is a joy to show your love for your spouse when he or she
runs headlong into illness. It is exhausting, frustrating, expensive,
painful, confusing, and maddening, but it also a JOY. In the words of
Jesus, "The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one
of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'
Matthew 25:40.
I will never know His true reasons for my
father’s aneurysm, or why it happened, but watching all of that unfold
was the blueprint I needed to see in order to avoid doing to my husband
what my mother did to hers. Our parents’ behavior many times influences
OUR behavior in situations. I was given the opportunity to right the
emotional ship I’d seen in my own family, and to serve my spouse with
dignity and love and not belittling him or whining about what was and
why couldn’t it also be again. My husband has been forever changed, but
then again, so have I.
To my sisters that have entered the
service of being a caregiver, you are in good company, for there are so
many more of you than you’re aware of. Your heart is filled to the
overflowing with love for a spouse that repeated the same vows to you
that you repeated to him. Your care is worth more than diamonds to the
one that loves you and depends on you. You’re tired, I know, but each
day begins with fresh new mercies. Your fears overwhelm you and drive
you to tears, but remember, "Come to me, all you who are weary and
burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28. You take time to
shed your tears after your loved one is put to bed and the tears bring
relief. Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Rules of the Road
1. Your boobs are not crumb catchers. Eating that Taco Bell taco with cheese and lettuce falling in between the ladies really is incredibly appetite killing.
2. The light turns green, that means go. It doesn't mean rearranging the items on the passenger seat in a fit of OCD until the light is 10 seconds away from changing to yellow. Get a move on.
3. Every car has a suspension and unless you drive a horse-drawn wagon, I know you can go faster than 1 mph into the parking lot. Why the hell can you not pull into a parking lot faster than a glacier moving down a mountain?
4. Parking space lines are not SUGGESTIONS. Those lines mean "park in between me and that line over THERE". If you're going to park over a line, then I'm going to park exactly where I'm SUPPOSED TO and I'll take a cell phone picture of your ineptitude so when you write me a nasty note or think you'll teach me a lesson by slamming your car door into mine, I'll have photos of your license plate AND your idea of parking captured on film for the police.
5. If you are walking through a crosswalk, it's not mandatory to move like you have a purpose but it is APPRECIATED that you move like you have a purpose in life. If you want to move like a slug I will pour slug bait on you so I can watch you shrivel up and die in place and then see where that gets you.
6. If you want to pull up next to me with your windows down and generously blasting NeYo from the speakers, I really appreciate your thoughtfulness but I'll be thoughtful right back at ya by blasting Rush Limbaugh out MY speakers at equally as loud a volume, if not louder. Homey can play games with the radio that will leave you wishing you were as creative.
7. Buckle your kids in. If you're a visual kind of gal, let's go to the produce department where I'll drop a watermelon from oh, about seven feet off the ground and then we can both stand there and take in the sight of a melon busted to smithereens and imagine that's your child's head on the pavement. You doosh.
8. If there is a six foot gap between me and the car in front of me don't you dare try to squeeze in front of me. I LOVE to screw with people that think they're entitled to because I'm in a big fossil fuel guzzling behemoth and they're in a pussified little electric car. My cat snores louder than your car. That's not a car. That's a cat with an engine.
9. I have Tourettes. Really I do. Drive past me with an Obama sticker on your car, or an SEIU sticker on your car and see which finger of mine suddenly pops up in a fit of Tourettes. Don't take it personally, though. I really don't have much control over it.
10. If you don't mind me doing a mime interpretation of the entire movie of Steel Magnolias while driving at 65 mph, using both hands, then I don't mind if you finish dressing and commence to applying your makeup at 65 mph, using both of YOUR hands. Ready......go!
2. The light turns green, that means go. It doesn't mean rearranging the items on the passenger seat in a fit of OCD until the light is 10 seconds away from changing to yellow. Get a move on.
3. Every car has a suspension and unless you drive a horse-drawn wagon, I know you can go faster than 1 mph into the parking lot. Why the hell can you not pull into a parking lot faster than a glacier moving down a mountain?
4. Parking space lines are not SUGGESTIONS. Those lines mean "park in between me and that line over THERE". If you're going to park over a line, then I'm going to park exactly where I'm SUPPOSED TO and I'll take a cell phone picture of your ineptitude so when you write me a nasty note or think you'll teach me a lesson by slamming your car door into mine, I'll have photos of your license plate AND your idea of parking captured on film for the police.
5. If you are walking through a crosswalk, it's not mandatory to move like you have a purpose but it is APPRECIATED that you move like you have a purpose in life. If you want to move like a slug I will pour slug bait on you so I can watch you shrivel up and die in place and then see where that gets you.
6. If you want to pull up next to me with your windows down and generously blasting NeYo from the speakers, I really appreciate your thoughtfulness but I'll be thoughtful right back at ya by blasting Rush Limbaugh out MY speakers at equally as loud a volume, if not louder. Homey can play games with the radio that will leave you wishing you were as creative.
7. Buckle your kids in. If you're a visual kind of gal, let's go to the produce department where I'll drop a watermelon from oh, about seven feet off the ground and then we can both stand there and take in the sight of a melon busted to smithereens and imagine that's your child's head on the pavement. You doosh.
8. If there is a six foot gap between me and the car in front of me don't you dare try to squeeze in front of me. I LOVE to screw with people that think they're entitled to because I'm in a big fossil fuel guzzling behemoth and they're in a pussified little electric car. My cat snores louder than your car. That's not a car. That's a cat with an engine.
9. I have Tourettes. Really I do. Drive past me with an Obama sticker on your car, or an SEIU sticker on your car and see which finger of mine suddenly pops up in a fit of Tourettes. Don't take it personally, though. I really don't have much control over it.
10. If you don't mind me doing a mime interpretation of the entire movie of Steel Magnolias while driving at 65 mph, using both hands, then I don't mind if you finish dressing and commence to applying your makeup at 65 mph, using both of YOUR hands. Ready......go!
Friday, May 9, 2014
Say it isn't so!!!
The
house was quiet. I was sitting at the kitchen table working on an
order. The cats were asleep. The dogs were asleep. Alison was doing
what Alison does best: be Alison.
And then, out of nowhere, a cacophony of screaming, ranting, railing, SWEARING, shrieking, gnashing of teeth, Old Testament tearing of clothes, ripping of material, cursing dead relatives three generations back, frothing at the mouth, snot bubbles bursting out of his nose, eyes bulging, carotid artery about to geyser out his ears. I dropped my pen and ran through the house, deathly afraid of what I'd find when I got to the bedroom. Had he died? Had someone tried to break into the bedroom window and encountered the sad end of their life? I came to the doorway, gulped air to calm my pounding lungs, brushed the hair out of my eyes, grabbed the doorway to keep from swaying......
"Honey! What's wrong........."
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, mouth open, words flying out that I don't even know how to SPELL, finger pointing to the television......and then I saw it.
Fox was playing a clip of Obama talking.
And then, out of nowhere, a cacophony of screaming, ranting, railing, SWEARING, shrieking, gnashing of teeth, Old Testament tearing of clothes, ripping of material, cursing dead relatives three generations back, frothing at the mouth, snot bubbles bursting out of his nose, eyes bulging, carotid artery about to geyser out his ears. I dropped my pen and ran through the house, deathly afraid of what I'd find when I got to the bedroom. Had he died? Had someone tried to break into the bedroom window and encountered the sad end of their life? I came to the doorway, gulped air to calm my pounding lungs, brushed the hair out of my eyes, grabbed the doorway to keep from swaying......
"Honey! What's wrong........."
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, mouth open, words flying out that I don't even know how to SPELL, finger pointing to the television......and then I saw it.
Fox was playing a clip of Obama talking.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
A Woman's Guide to Auto Repair (or How To Work With A Man In The Garage)
Done.
Fixing my screw up took MUCH less time than the original fix but it is
done. Here are my top ten observations titled A Woman's Guide to Auto
Repair (or How To Work With A Man In The Garage):
10. Men talk to themselves ALL the time working on a car. You do NOT need to respond to every word from a man when he's working on a car. Shut up and learn when he's just talking out thoughts. They figuratively vomit a stream of thought but it has a purpose.
9. Ninety percent of their questions are rhetorical. Just take my word, you do NOT have every answer and you are NOT the automotive authority that needs to answer their questions.
8. Learn your measurements. You can fire off your bust size but try to find a 11/16 12 point 3/8 drive deep socket. Yeah, your boobs are MUCH easier, aren't they?
7. Do NOT come out to the garage and begin cleaning up or organizing his tools when he's working. Sure fire way to catch a socket up alongside your head.
6. When he's under a 7,000 lb. 3/4 ton 4x4 that isn't the time to begin your mindless prattling about your girlfriend and her fight with the boyfriend. He's not listening.
5. So he has 10 cans of Brake Kleen in various stages of being filled. Is it any skin off your butt if he does? Have you seen your bathroom counter and how many hair products you have strewn around? Go in the house and shut up.
4. If his car is his "baby" and you're jealous that's your problem. Who does he give a pickle tickle to? That's right, you. Now, if you find him giving a pickle tickle to the car, then you might want to rethink those monogrammed towels in the bathroom. Just sayin'.
3. Silence is golden. Mike's uncle turns a five gallon bucket upside down and sits down to think when he's got to fix something. Mike has a custom made stool for the same thing. If he's out there thinking quietly, turn around, don't say a word, and disappear. He may look like he's doing nothing but I promise, you don't want to crawl inside his mind right now. You'll come out black and blue with the ideas flying around.
2. If you are going to crawl under the car and work with him be prepared to not recognize yourself when you are finished. Grease doesn't discriminiate.
and 1. Thank God if your man can fix a car. Beats the hell out of paying someone else big money to fix it, so drop to your knees and thank God for that gift.
10. Men talk to themselves ALL the time working on a car. You do NOT need to respond to every word from a man when he's working on a car. Shut up and learn when he's just talking out thoughts. They figuratively vomit a stream of thought but it has a purpose.
9. Ninety percent of their questions are rhetorical. Just take my word, you do NOT have every answer and you are NOT the automotive authority that needs to answer their questions.
8. Learn your measurements. You can fire off your bust size but try to find a 11/16 12 point 3/8 drive deep socket. Yeah, your boobs are MUCH easier, aren't they?
7. Do NOT come out to the garage and begin cleaning up or organizing his tools when he's working. Sure fire way to catch a socket up alongside your head.
6. When he's under a 7,000 lb. 3/4 ton 4x4 that isn't the time to begin your mindless prattling about your girlfriend and her fight with the boyfriend. He's not listening.
5. So he has 10 cans of Brake Kleen in various stages of being filled. Is it any skin off your butt if he does? Have you seen your bathroom counter and how many hair products you have strewn around? Go in the house and shut up.
4. If his car is his "baby" and you're jealous that's your problem. Who does he give a pickle tickle to? That's right, you. Now, if you find him giving a pickle tickle to the car, then you might want to rethink those monogrammed towels in the bathroom. Just sayin'.
3. Silence is golden. Mike's uncle turns a five gallon bucket upside down and sits down to think when he's got to fix something. Mike has a custom made stool for the same thing. If he's out there thinking quietly, turn around, don't say a word, and disappear. He may look like he's doing nothing but I promise, you don't want to crawl inside his mind right now. You'll come out black and blue with the ideas flying around.
2. If you are going to crawl under the car and work with him be prepared to not recognize yourself when you are finished. Grease doesn't discriminiate.
and 1. Thank God if your man can fix a car. Beats the hell out of paying someone else big money to fix it, so drop to your knees and thank God for that gift.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
You Hear Me But You Don't Listen
The last six months that Mike hasn't been going to the hospital for wound care have been, I think, the hardest of the entire 20 months since nec/fac descended upon us on August 1, 2012. Not having someplace to go twice a week has meant there's nothing to distract him, nothing to take the place of nothing but time to sit and think. Think about how he got here. Think about his first marriage and the magnificent trainwreck it was. Think about his perceived failures in life, his regrets. Think about how he views himself. Think about his failures as a husband and a father. Thinking about.......thinking. He's had a lot of time to think.
With that all that time to think has come the inevitable butt kicking of oneself that usually goes with self-reflection. Coulda woulda shoulda. The quickest way to spiral down into self-hatred is to employ those three phrases.
My husband had a childhood best left to movies on Lifetime. It was a horrendous childhood. He was born to a 16 year old mother that didn't want him but was made to keep him by her mother. Every chance she got to inflict some form of hatred on her son, she did. She made sure he knew just how little he was wanted and how much she hated him. It didn't matter WHAT she hated him for, only that she HATED him. For her, that was enough. From the time he was five or six, he learned to just paste a smile on his face and swallow whatever was bothering him, whatever he was thinking about. It didn't matter if he was aching inside or angry or fearful. He just swallowed it. He learned to function on a level that most humans can't understand. Inside, he was chaos. Outside, he was cucumber cool. Inside, he was molten lava. Outside, he was mellow.
The past several months he's begun having serious problems with acid in his stomach. All the down time he's had since his twice a week trips to Salem Hospital were finished has given him nothing but time to think. And the bubbling vat of acid that is his stomach started to cause serious problems with his health. Tonight, that all came to a head, and in the process, I learned something very, very important.
I learned to communicate with my husband.
We sat down at the kitchen table, and I was wanting to know why? Why all of a sudden did he seem to have problems with stomach acid? He shared with me the coping mechanisms he learned as a child, putting on the smiling face, all the while he was a bubbling pot of pain and chaos on the inside.
"We fight all the time. It kills me to fight with you."
We fight all the time? Fight? I wasn't aware we fought all the time. We certainly have our tense discussions and from time to time, I can be quite the sarcastic, snide witch and he can be a real peach of a jerk, but that was just being, well, us. Fortunately, those alter egos don't appear very often but we are human and we have been under enormous amounts of stress and we aren't perfect. I won't mince words--we can be real assholes when we want to.
"The other day when the subject of my car came up, you yelled at me and said you hated the car and wanted nothing to do with it. You don't know how badly stuff like that affects me."
"You're just being overly sensitive about that!" I replied. "You've always been that way when it comes to your car. That's why I call it 'The Other Woman'."
"You HEAR me, but you don't LISTEN. When you say things like you hate my car and don't want anything to do with it, I hear my mother. I hear my mother saying, 'No, I don't want to go to your stupid basketball game, you worthless piece of shit! I don't give a rat's ass about you and your stupid game!' When you put down my car you're putting ME down just like she did. You don't know how much those words hurt me inside and then I start internalizing everything and my stomach going and......do you see now?"
Yes. Most ashamedly, I see now.
I was crushed that my poorly chosen words had caused such pain to the man I love so much. NOW I see how much my opinion means. He has such talent in his hands and his heart for things like muscle cars, and in a few words, I was crushing that spirit of craftsmanship that he was so proud of. I'd crushed his dreams of having a beautiful car that he created with his own hands. I'd crushed the heart of the little boy that sought approval and love from his mother, only to hear disdain, scorn, ridicule, criticism, hatred, and eventually, pain inflicted with whatever she could lay her hands on.
I do not begin to understand a man and his car. It's expensive, time-consuming.........expensive--you see the pattern emerging? I don't get it. I'm not made to get it. He looks at it and sees a masterpiece. I look at it and see dollar bills. But it's important to him and he doesn't want to hear criticism or scorn about something that means that much to him anymore than I want criticism or scorn about some calligraphy project I'm working on, or a crochet project, or something I've slaved all afternoon over for dinner.
Tonight, coming up on 12 years since I married him, I learned all over again how to communicate with my husband. Once I learned the difference between the words coming out of my mouth and the words that entered his ears, and how those words affected him, in the midst of tears as he's telling me, as he's opening up his heart once again so that I can peer inside the soul of a little boy all those years ago hearing hatred coming from the woman that was supposed to love him, I found myself loving him even more, if that were possible. Even after all this time, even at the age of almost 49, I'm still learning. I'm learning to hold in my hands so tenderly, the heart of a 50 year old man that needs gentle words from the woman he loves. He may be a giant of a man, but he's still got the heart of that little boy and this time, I won't be throwing words of venom at him. I need to stop and think about what I'm saying before the words leave my mouth. A lesson many, MANY women need, and should, learn.
Proverbs 18:20-22: 20 With the fruit of a man's mouth his stomach will be satisfied; He will be satisfied with the product of his lips. 21 Death and life are in the power of the tongue, And those who love it will eat its fruit. 22 He who finds a wife finds a good thing And obtains favor from the LORD.…
With that all that time to think has come the inevitable butt kicking of oneself that usually goes with self-reflection. Coulda woulda shoulda. The quickest way to spiral down into self-hatred is to employ those three phrases.
My husband had a childhood best left to movies on Lifetime. It was a horrendous childhood. He was born to a 16 year old mother that didn't want him but was made to keep him by her mother. Every chance she got to inflict some form of hatred on her son, she did. She made sure he knew just how little he was wanted and how much she hated him. It didn't matter WHAT she hated him for, only that she HATED him. For her, that was enough. From the time he was five or six, he learned to just paste a smile on his face and swallow whatever was bothering him, whatever he was thinking about. It didn't matter if he was aching inside or angry or fearful. He just swallowed it. He learned to function on a level that most humans can't understand. Inside, he was chaos. Outside, he was cucumber cool. Inside, he was molten lava. Outside, he was mellow.
The past several months he's begun having serious problems with acid in his stomach. All the down time he's had since his twice a week trips to Salem Hospital were finished has given him nothing but time to think. And the bubbling vat of acid that is his stomach started to cause serious problems with his health. Tonight, that all came to a head, and in the process, I learned something very, very important.
I learned to communicate with my husband.
We sat down at the kitchen table, and I was wanting to know why? Why all of a sudden did he seem to have problems with stomach acid? He shared with me the coping mechanisms he learned as a child, putting on the smiling face, all the while he was a bubbling pot of pain and chaos on the inside.
"We fight all the time. It kills me to fight with you."
We fight all the time? Fight? I wasn't aware we fought all the time. We certainly have our tense discussions and from time to time, I can be quite the sarcastic, snide witch and he can be a real peach of a jerk, but that was just being, well, us. Fortunately, those alter egos don't appear very often but we are human and we have been under enormous amounts of stress and we aren't perfect. I won't mince words--we can be real assholes when we want to.
"The other day when the subject of my car came up, you yelled at me and said you hated the car and wanted nothing to do with it. You don't know how badly stuff like that affects me."
"You're just being overly sensitive about that!" I replied. "You've always been that way when it comes to your car. That's why I call it 'The Other Woman'."
"You HEAR me, but you don't LISTEN. When you say things like you hate my car and don't want anything to do with it, I hear my mother. I hear my mother saying, 'No, I don't want to go to your stupid basketball game, you worthless piece of shit! I don't give a rat's ass about you and your stupid game!' When you put down my car you're putting ME down just like she did. You don't know how much those words hurt me inside and then I start internalizing everything and my stomach going and......do you see now?"
Yes. Most ashamedly, I see now.
I was crushed that my poorly chosen words had caused such pain to the man I love so much. NOW I see how much my opinion means. He has such talent in his hands and his heart for things like muscle cars, and in a few words, I was crushing that spirit of craftsmanship that he was so proud of. I'd crushed his dreams of having a beautiful car that he created with his own hands. I'd crushed the heart of the little boy that sought approval and love from his mother, only to hear disdain, scorn, ridicule, criticism, hatred, and eventually, pain inflicted with whatever she could lay her hands on.
I do not begin to understand a man and his car. It's expensive, time-consuming.........expensive--you see the pattern emerging? I don't get it. I'm not made to get it. He looks at it and sees a masterpiece. I look at it and see dollar bills. But it's important to him and he doesn't want to hear criticism or scorn about something that means that much to him anymore than I want criticism or scorn about some calligraphy project I'm working on, or a crochet project, or something I've slaved all afternoon over for dinner.
Tonight, coming up on 12 years since I married him, I learned all over again how to communicate with my husband. Once I learned the difference between the words coming out of my mouth and the words that entered his ears, and how those words affected him, in the midst of tears as he's telling me, as he's opening up his heart once again so that I can peer inside the soul of a little boy all those years ago hearing hatred coming from the woman that was supposed to love him, I found myself loving him even more, if that were possible. Even after all this time, even at the age of almost 49, I'm still learning. I'm learning to hold in my hands so tenderly, the heart of a 50 year old man that needs gentle words from the woman he loves. He may be a giant of a man, but he's still got the heart of that little boy and this time, I won't be throwing words of venom at him. I need to stop and think about what I'm saying before the words leave my mouth. A lesson many, MANY women need, and should, learn.
Proverbs 18:20-22: 20 With the fruit of a man's mouth his stomach will be satisfied; He will be satisfied with the product of his lips. 21 Death and life are in the power of the tongue, And those who love it will eat its fruit. 22 He who finds a wife finds a good thing And obtains favor from the LORD.…
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
The homeschool life
I do not often come out much about the fact that we homeschool because a) it's really no one's business that we do; and 2) see #1. I know, that's not nice, but sadly, it's the truth. We made the decision to homeschool our daughter while I was still pregnant with her. We felt all along very strongly that we, her parents, are more qualified to teach our child than someone that's never met her, spent years in a liberal college being spoon fed liberal agenda after liberal mindset, and ultimately would be charged with force-feeding Common Core to our daughter. It just wasn't happening.
I have an older daughter, Katherine. I homeschooled Katherine for third and fourth grades. It was while she was in kindergarten that we got that dreaded phone call back in about 1996-1997 that, well, she was exhibiting traits associated with ADD and we need to sit down with you and come up with a solution for your daughter. So, dutifully we attended a meeting with the teacher, the school counselor, the principal, and a slew of other people and it was decided that her education would be based on a little pink pill: Ritalin. Daily she had to run down to the office to be handed her little pink pill that, in the end, didn't do diddly squat for her and was the begin of her journey down the road of educational ruin.
It wasn't until I parent-helped in her classroom one day in Second Grade that I saw just how big a trainwreck this medication and mindset made our daughter. I wasn't allowed to give her one-on-one help, so we did a group setting with a bunch of the kids, and it was horrifying. Like trying to herd cats. Her desk was like nuclear winter--a disaster. She was nearing the end of her second grade year and she couldn't read, write her name, no organizational skills whatsoever, couldn't add or subtract the simplest of problems. We got her tonsils out, made the decision to pull her out of school after second grade and home school her. The day of parent-teacher conferences I informed her teacher, Mrs. Christy, that we would be homeschooling her the next year. Mrs. Christy went off-the-charts nuclear on me, and we ended up standing literally nose-to-nose yelling at each other. I was, in her opinion, not qualified to meet the educational needs of my own daughter. Like she was a shining example of educational heroics. The last day of school we ceremoniously flushed the Ritalin down the toilet and thus began the dismantling of my daughter's public school brain. By November of that year, three months into third grade, she was reading well, writing well, and had mastered long division. It was hard work but definitely worth it.
Today we homeschool Alison and we are ending Ali's fourth grade year by the time June rolls around. I have tailored homeschooling to her abilities. That's one of the wonderful things about homeschooling. You don't spend countless hours a day trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. My daughter wakes up long after the kids in the block have trudged to the bus stop in all kinds of weather. She isn't dragging a backpack and countless other items with her onto a bus. She wakes up when she's rested, we take our time getting going. School first thing in the morning doesn't work for any of us so we begin usually around 1:00 in the afternoon and finish somewhere around 4:00. Three hours? Yes, we get more done in three hours than most public school kids get done in 6-8. I don't have to spend 1/3 of the day disciplining her to get her to pay attention. We cover all the necessary subjects, yet not in traditional ways. She can spend hours out in the backyard examining everything there and then comes in and researches on the Internet the habitats of ladybugs or how slugs crawl or how vegetation grows. She loves shows on NatGeo Wild, Discovery Channel--any channel that examines anything with biology, science, animals, dinosaurs, how-it's-made, A Baby Story, The Incredible Dr. Pol, and too many more to mention. She absorbs knowledge like a sponge. She can tell me more about dinosaurs than most college paleontologist students can. Sea life? Ask her. Horses? Ask her. Animals in general? Ask her. The human body? She can find it out for you. We work on math and I've been able to help her with her problem areas. We discovered early on she's dyslexic. Mildly, but enough to cause problems from time to time. She's a very
visual learner so I invested in Hooked on Phonics. The interactive graphics and repetitive nature of the lessons had her reading in no time and today she reads at a high school level. The child is RARELY without at least one book in her hands. She's not one to sit through happily through book learning, manual after manual, page after page. It's boring and she's going to let her mind drift. So, being artistic and a self-starter, after watching me write a book, she's writing her own. She's doing the entire thing herself, drawing all the photos and typing, painstakingly, all of the story on Word on the laptop. Her english lesson will be editing the book. Crafting complete sentences, proper punctuation, proper grammer. It will be a phenomenal way to get hand-on learning for english class. Again, we structure learning so that she's learning ALL DAY LONG in everything she does, not just for a set amount of hours in a government structured school room.
Socialization? What about it? I'd rather she get her socializing at church with the other kids, or other homeschool kids through local coops or homeschool groups. They are some of the most fun, imaginative, adventurous kids you will ever meet because they aren't told how to think. They learn through DOING and seeking, not being told what to know. There's plenty of socializing. In fact, if you aren't careful, you can almost overdo it. Bullying isn't a problem because she's taught how to treat people with respect. Open the Bible and find what God says about how you treat people, then treat them just as He instructs. Success! Sex education is something we discuss bit by bit, not dumping concepts and facts on her when she's mentally unprepared to handle them. And we can teach her about it through the prism of the Bible, where sex was designed to be between a man and a woman inside the boundaries of marriage. Not on a Girls Gone Wild video that will haunt her the rest of her life, or through a gay pride parade where all forms of lewd and disgusting behavior are flaunted.
Homeschooling works for us as a family. We are all three around each other every single day with daddy being home because of his medical problems. Not many kids get the chance to really have great relationships with mom and dad because of the long time spent away from each other during the day when parents are working and the child is in school. I will admit there are some days it's harder than others. Sometimes a break is needed. However, when Mike was going through wound care for his leg after the nec/fac, Alison was privy to a world not many kids get to see. A world of people receiving chemo and other treatments for cancer, or dealing with life-threatening medical issues. She learned empathy for her fellow man. She learned to respect people by helping them. Holding open a door, steadying a shaky patient with her hand. Being kind and quiet, not loud and obnoxious. She learned that not everyone has a rosy life, some people live a very hard life, but they need love and respect as much if not more than other people. She's learned to have a wonderful servant's heart by helping her dad. She's learning a lot about running a household and things like cooking and sewing and doing for your family and home on a budget. Hopefully, she can learn to be a Proverbs 31 woman long before I did.
She's enjoying a movie right now. Then we will will start school. Focus on math and english today, and then she can take her penmanship into her room and work on it and then read two history books on Abe Lincoln. She will finish her day with her youth group at Kids On The Rock learning about Jesus. It's all perfectly homeschooled, perfectly fit for us, perfectly fit for Alison. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
I have an older daughter, Katherine. I homeschooled Katherine for third and fourth grades. It was while she was in kindergarten that we got that dreaded phone call back in about 1996-1997 that, well, she was exhibiting traits associated with ADD and we need to sit down with you and come up with a solution for your daughter. So, dutifully we attended a meeting with the teacher, the school counselor, the principal, and a slew of other people and it was decided that her education would be based on a little pink pill: Ritalin. Daily she had to run down to the office to be handed her little pink pill that, in the end, didn't do diddly squat for her and was the begin of her journey down the road of educational ruin.
It wasn't until I parent-helped in her classroom one day in Second Grade that I saw just how big a trainwreck this medication and mindset made our daughter. I wasn't allowed to give her one-on-one help, so we did a group setting with a bunch of the kids, and it was horrifying. Like trying to herd cats. Her desk was like nuclear winter--a disaster. She was nearing the end of her second grade year and she couldn't read, write her name, no organizational skills whatsoever, couldn't add or subtract the simplest of problems. We got her tonsils out, made the decision to pull her out of school after second grade and home school her. The day of parent-teacher conferences I informed her teacher, Mrs. Christy, that we would be homeschooling her the next year. Mrs. Christy went off-the-charts nuclear on me, and we ended up standing literally nose-to-nose yelling at each other. I was, in her opinion, not qualified to meet the educational needs of my own daughter. Like she was a shining example of educational heroics. The last day of school we ceremoniously flushed the Ritalin down the toilet and thus began the dismantling of my daughter's public school brain. By November of that year, three months into third grade, she was reading well, writing well, and had mastered long division. It was hard work but definitely worth it.
Today we homeschool Alison and we are ending Ali's fourth grade year by the time June rolls around. I have tailored homeschooling to her abilities. That's one of the wonderful things about homeschooling. You don't spend countless hours a day trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. My daughter wakes up long after the kids in the block have trudged to the bus stop in all kinds of weather. She isn't dragging a backpack and countless other items with her onto a bus. She wakes up when she's rested, we take our time getting going. School first thing in the morning doesn't work for any of us so we begin usually around 1:00 in the afternoon and finish somewhere around 4:00. Three hours? Yes, we get more done in three hours than most public school kids get done in 6-8. I don't have to spend 1/3 of the day disciplining her to get her to pay attention. We cover all the necessary subjects, yet not in traditional ways. She can spend hours out in the backyard examining everything there and then comes in and researches on the Internet the habitats of ladybugs or how slugs crawl or how vegetation grows. She loves shows on NatGeo Wild, Discovery Channel--any channel that examines anything with biology, science, animals, dinosaurs, how-it's-made, A Baby Story, The Incredible Dr. Pol, and too many more to mention. She absorbs knowledge like a sponge. She can tell me more about dinosaurs than most college paleontologist students can. Sea life? Ask her. Horses? Ask her. Animals in general? Ask her. The human body? She can find it out for you. We work on math and I've been able to help her with her problem areas. We discovered early on she's dyslexic. Mildly, but enough to cause problems from time to time. She's a very
visual learner so I invested in Hooked on Phonics. The interactive graphics and repetitive nature of the lessons had her reading in no time and today she reads at a high school level. The child is RARELY without at least one book in her hands. She's not one to sit through happily through book learning, manual after manual, page after page. It's boring and she's going to let her mind drift. So, being artistic and a self-starter, after watching me write a book, she's writing her own. She's doing the entire thing herself, drawing all the photos and typing, painstakingly, all of the story on Word on the laptop. Her english lesson will be editing the book. Crafting complete sentences, proper punctuation, proper grammer. It will be a phenomenal way to get hand-on learning for english class. Again, we structure learning so that she's learning ALL DAY LONG in everything she does, not just for a set amount of hours in a government structured school room.
Socialization? What about it? I'd rather she get her socializing at church with the other kids, or other homeschool kids through local coops or homeschool groups. They are some of the most fun, imaginative, adventurous kids you will ever meet because they aren't told how to think. They learn through DOING and seeking, not being told what to know. There's plenty of socializing. In fact, if you aren't careful, you can almost overdo it. Bullying isn't a problem because she's taught how to treat people with respect. Open the Bible and find what God says about how you treat people, then treat them just as He instructs. Success! Sex education is something we discuss bit by bit, not dumping concepts and facts on her when she's mentally unprepared to handle them. And we can teach her about it through the prism of the Bible, where sex was designed to be between a man and a woman inside the boundaries of marriage. Not on a Girls Gone Wild video that will haunt her the rest of her life, or through a gay pride parade where all forms of lewd and disgusting behavior are flaunted.
Homeschooling works for us as a family. We are all three around each other every single day with daddy being home because of his medical problems. Not many kids get the chance to really have great relationships with mom and dad because of the long time spent away from each other during the day when parents are working and the child is in school. I will admit there are some days it's harder than others. Sometimes a break is needed. However, when Mike was going through wound care for his leg after the nec/fac, Alison was privy to a world not many kids get to see. A world of people receiving chemo and other treatments for cancer, or dealing with life-threatening medical issues. She learned empathy for her fellow man. She learned to respect people by helping them. Holding open a door, steadying a shaky patient with her hand. Being kind and quiet, not loud and obnoxious. She learned that not everyone has a rosy life, some people live a very hard life, but they need love and respect as much if not more than other people. She's learned to have a wonderful servant's heart by helping her dad. She's learning a lot about running a household and things like cooking and sewing and doing for your family and home on a budget. Hopefully, she can learn to be a Proverbs 31 woman long before I did.
She's enjoying a movie right now. Then we will will start school. Focus on math and english today, and then she can take her penmanship into her room and work on it and then read two history books on Abe Lincoln. She will finish her day with her youth group at Kids On The Rock learning about Jesus. It's all perfectly homeschooled, perfectly fit for us, perfectly fit for Alison. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Time to learn
Normally I can sit down to a keyboard and hammer out some words that
fall together beautifully. I can't seem to do that this morning.
We have had a hellish few days around this house. I won't go into details but the Lord is working on me and my fears and dragging me into accountability and dealing with my fears. Suffice it to say that stress has just about driven the three of us over the edge and yesterday Mike was literally sick from it. Body aches, couldn't lift his head off the pillow. We are being hammered right now in a HUGE way by the enemy not wanting to see our growth in the Lord and our relationship with Him. This morning we turned a corner, thankfully, and as He always does, God's loving us through it all and teaching us all lessons. I marvel at the fact that when you are willing to COMPLETELY submit yourself to Him and you are COMPLETELY willing to accept responsibility and learn from the past, He will show you things about His love for you that defy human explanation. He shows you that His love for you gives you incredible power over whatever the enemy is trying to destroy in your life. Just when I think I've earned ANOTHER MBA at life studies, He takes me to yet another life college campus.
The sweet pastor from our church, Pastor Dave, who first met Mike visiting him and praying for him in the hospital 19 months ago, has become a regular visitor at our house, reaching out to Mike. It's been a sweet relationship. He's taken a sort of mentor role to Mike, the same role that my darling uncle had before he was taken from us. Mike is careful to not look at someone like Pastor Dave as a father figure, but the sweet man blesses Mike with such peace and encouragement that it's hard not to. Mike has learned to look to God as his true Father, but realizes that men like Pastor Dave are His messengers. He's been encouraging Mike to return to the men's bible study on Wednesdays at the church. He didn't want to return until he was able to see well and was more mobile. He continued to pray that God would heal his eye completely (the healing has slowed down and the vision is cloudy). Then Pastor Dave finally broke through.
"Remember the story about Jesus being in a house surrounded by townspeople he was teaching and there was a group of men that wanted Jesus to heal their friend? They went up on the roof and lowered their friend down through the thatched roof into the room in front of Jesus. Jesus touched him and told him to pick up his mat and walk out, remember? You're trying to do YOURSELF what the man's friends did FOR HIM. You are trying to work one-on-one with God when sometimes, you have to step back and let others lower you down through the ceiling and put you in front of Jesus."
Voila. The light went on and Mike got it.
"I'm denying others their crown by not letting them lift me up in prayer to God."
Exactly.
So, today I will drive him to the church and up to the third floor we will go and I'll drop him off for men's bible study. The enemy has gone to great lengths to cloud my mind on Wednesdays and forget what day it is. Time for God to step in and get the situation handled.
You could say that the spiritual blinders have come off and we are BOTH seeing truths and the need for change. And in His most loving way, God is accomplishing just that. You just have to be willing to see it and change and when you DO, that's when you know you'll hear, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."
We have had a hellish few days around this house. I won't go into details but the Lord is working on me and my fears and dragging me into accountability and dealing with my fears. Suffice it to say that stress has just about driven the three of us over the edge and yesterday Mike was literally sick from it. Body aches, couldn't lift his head off the pillow. We are being hammered right now in a HUGE way by the enemy not wanting to see our growth in the Lord and our relationship with Him. This morning we turned a corner, thankfully, and as He always does, God's loving us through it all and teaching us all lessons. I marvel at the fact that when you are willing to COMPLETELY submit yourself to Him and you are COMPLETELY willing to accept responsibility and learn from the past, He will show you things about His love for you that defy human explanation. He shows you that His love for you gives you incredible power over whatever the enemy is trying to destroy in your life. Just when I think I've earned ANOTHER MBA at life studies, He takes me to yet another life college campus.
The sweet pastor from our church, Pastor Dave, who first met Mike visiting him and praying for him in the hospital 19 months ago, has become a regular visitor at our house, reaching out to Mike. It's been a sweet relationship. He's taken a sort of mentor role to Mike, the same role that my darling uncle had before he was taken from us. Mike is careful to not look at someone like Pastor Dave as a father figure, but the sweet man blesses Mike with such peace and encouragement that it's hard not to. Mike has learned to look to God as his true Father, but realizes that men like Pastor Dave are His messengers. He's been encouraging Mike to return to the men's bible study on Wednesdays at the church. He didn't want to return until he was able to see well and was more mobile. He continued to pray that God would heal his eye completely (the healing has slowed down and the vision is cloudy). Then Pastor Dave finally broke through.
"Remember the story about Jesus being in a house surrounded by townspeople he was teaching and there was a group of men that wanted Jesus to heal their friend? They went up on the roof and lowered their friend down through the thatched roof into the room in front of Jesus. Jesus touched him and told him to pick up his mat and walk out, remember? You're trying to do YOURSELF what the man's friends did FOR HIM. You are trying to work one-on-one with God when sometimes, you have to step back and let others lower you down through the ceiling and put you in front of Jesus."
Voila. The light went on and Mike got it.
"I'm denying others their crown by not letting them lift me up in prayer to God."
Exactly.
So, today I will drive him to the church and up to the third floor we will go and I'll drop him off for men's bible study. The enemy has gone to great lengths to cloud my mind on Wednesdays and forget what day it is. Time for God to step in and get the situation handled.
You could say that the spiritual blinders have come off and we are BOTH seeing truths and the need for change. And in His most loving way, God is accomplishing just that. You just have to be willing to see it and change and when you DO, that's when you know you'll hear, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."
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