I Am Utterly Hopeless with This Female Friendship Bonding Thing


Two friends

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I have never had many female friends. A handful at a time is about all I have ever been able to manage and I am not someone who carries friendships over from situation to situation or age to age. My high school and college friends don’t outnumber my fingers combined, and my workplace friendship have rarely bled over into my real life. The number of friend friends I have made as an adult is smaller than the number of friends I’ve carried from my school days when making friends was easier just given the sheer number of opportunities.

Oh, there are many women I am friendly with. I am easy peasy in casual situations. That wasn’t always so. I had to work hard to learn the small talk game and seem completely at ease among people I don’t know. My introvert self still quakes and cringes in new situations or when numbers rise. It is easily overwhelmed, but I have learned to force inner calm or to ignore the urge to cower. And it only took me not quite 50 years to do it.

I will always be more comfortable in the virtual realm. Thank the gods for social media outlets, really. The confidence I have acquired sallying forth into the boundless and ethereal place known as the Internet bulked up my introvert, who took her initial lessons in cultivating a bold exterior over the many years spent as a public school teacher.

But, for all that, I am still hopeless when it comes to making friends with members of my gender.

It’s not that I don’t try. My attempts are sincere. The results go either way but when they go south, it’s usually with spectacular effect.

Take yesterday.

The danger in trying to establish bonds with the mothers of the players on Dee’s soccer team is that our common focal point is a competitive sport. My upbringing  and my latent alpha girl tendencies prevent me from viewing sports as “fun” unless winning is involved. Partly it is a Catholic school girl thing and partly it’s my Dad’s fault.

As a young man, my father played farm league ball. He was a catcher and one of the first games he schooled DNOS and I in was catch and then Pickle In The Middle before progressing to batting grounds and pop flys to us with the occasional straight for your face to hone our skills. Because he worked 50 to 60 hours a week in a meat-packing plant, he didn’t have time for either of us to whine or dog it when he coached us, and he expected us to practice on our own as well. Practice made good players better. Inherent ability would only take us so far and practice would take us the rest of the way.

This is not how girls are coached, generally speaking. Not when I was growing up back in the 70’s nor when I was coaching in the 90’s nor now. Girls are babied and told that it’s all about “fun” and “trying” and “team spirit”.

Dad was more like Yoda. There is no try. And the “fun” of competition was about busting your hump at 110% for the win. Team spirit? That was a much a given as sportsmanship.

So though I acknowledge Dee’s efforts, I don’t sing sunshine up her bum when she dogs it or quits. I praise the outstanding rather than the givens and I point out those things that need work. Because she swears that soccer is the game for her and she wants to someday play on club teams – I treat her ambition with respect and provide realistic feedback or kicks in the backside – depending.

I am also not someone who thinks that rearranging my life around hers is just what parents do. I will not cart about a child who doesn’t try or work to improve. Her social life is not a big priority. In fact, the idea that children have social lives is too perplexing for me to even spend much thought on.

For all of the above, I am not the mom in the locker room spooning out sugar and I have garnered more than a few disapproving looks as a result.

And it probably isn’t going to win me any playdates at Starbucks either.

But Coach’s Wife took my inept attempts at “chatter” personally.

“You have such a way with pointing out the obvious,” Rob said.

And the trouble with the obvious is that it’s usually a proverbial elephant which no one cares to acknowledge. In yesterday’s case, our soccer association board really, really wants our kids to be competitive at a tourney level, but not much is provided by way of making this happen. The U10 Girls get a measly 1 hour of pitch time a week to practice, and the team is too large to give the girls much playing time during their once a week game. There are no camps or clinics scheduled at all during the season, and no camps during the summer.

To top it off, the board bemoans lack of parent volunteers but doesn’t make meetings accessible with their usual slotting of them in the evenings during the work/school week and doesn’t make much use at all of even the simplest of social media to engage parents and kids.

But to be  fair, it’s not just the board. A significant number of parents aren’t interested in extra practices or even the once a week practice.

In our neck of Alberta, the winter sport of choice involves ice – hockey or Ringette. Both are bloodthirsty competitions which parent and child alike take to like followers of Attila. The less aggressive gravitate towards soccer.

When we arrived at Servus Place in St. Albert for today’s game, the other coach greeted me with news that Coach’s Wife wouldn’t be attending because of yesterday’s conversation with me. She was miffed.

“But it’s okay,” I was told. “She only sits and texts anyway.”

Which she does. but that puts her into good company because I have witnessed many a parent thumbing it on the sidelines.

I was tempted to apologize for my faux pas to her husband today as he and I chatted about tomorrow’s competition in the locker room after today’s game. He’s an easy-going guy and in retrospect, his frozen smile yesterday as his wife and I conversed, makes much more sense. But I let it go. She could have fed me a heads up about her being on the board and I would have changed the subject. It was a bit underhanded to withhold that and then git snarky about it later.

On the bright side, some of the other mom’s are giving it a go to engage with me despite my awkwardness with it. Perhaps they feel a bit sorry for Dee? Whatever the case, I am working hard at curbing my blunter edges though – admittedly – this is a Herculean task.

 

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Whitney Houston


Didn't We Almost Have It All

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She turned up dead on my Facebook feed Saturday night, and I can’t say I was surprised or even sad in a nostalgic kind of way. In one of those prescient ways that irony sometimes presents to us, I had just been thinking about her earlier in the day.

XM Radio is hosting another of its freebie weeks in hopes of luring back costumers who feel them once they realize how limited their playlists are, and as I was taking Dee and her little friend to soccer practice, one of Houston’s earlier hits warbled at me. It was a song I was fond of back in its day but it has aged poorly. The lyrics were thin to begin with and I always felt that the song ended a bit off-balance in poetic terms. It occurred to me – again –  that despite her obvious talent, Houston had no ear for lyrics – what made them memorable and enduring. In fact, aside from her cover of the Dolly Parton tune, I Will Always Love You, which she performed for the film, The BodyGuard, I’d be hard put to name any song of hers that really doesn’t date itself.

Most of her hits came in the 80’s, a piss poor decade for music overall. Stack up enduring melodies from that decade against any of the others, and I’d bet the list is short by comparison. It launched, after all, the “me” generation and the consuming something-for-nothing, life’s-a -party attitudes that have landed us where we are now really.

Not that Houston is to blame for any of that. She was as much a victim of coming of age in the early 80’s as any of the rest of us. The pastels, Reganomics, Gordon Gekko, MTV superficiality tainted us all to one degree or another. Her shallow contributions doesn’t damn her anymore than it does the rest of us.

If anything about her death has touched me at all, it is the fact that we are the same age, born in the same year. Forty-eight is awfully young to drop dead though by all accounts she drowned in her tub after falling asleep. Xanax, liquor and a nice hot tub are probably not the best  combination. That she takes Xanax at all makes her one of my peers. You can’t swing a cat without hitting the Xanax dependent among women in the United States anymore. It’s more of a go-to than anti-depressants it seems. That it’s an oversold, horribly addictive drug goes without saying. Most of the mood altering concoctions peddled by the family physcians in the States are dispensed without proper physcological assessments but that’s the way Big Pharma likes it.

Big Pharma, another thing the 80’s gave us that it wisely doesn’t brag about.

A Facebook writer friend noted on her status update that she’d spent the evening listening to Houston’s songs and crying and didn’t know why. She wasn’t that big of a fan. But I pointed out that Houston is a cultural marker. Her music, more than she herself, is part of the soundtrack of a time when many of us were growing up or trying to pretend that now we were grown up. Her death is a stark reminder that those days are long gone and though we fool ourselves most of the time into believing that we are not older but better, the truth is that we are truly grown and more than a bit adult now. Not in danger of somewhat carelessly drowning ourselves in our tubs, but certainly not impervious to time.

Time ravaged Whitney. Mostly with her assistance. But time is no friend to women in America. Look no farther than poor and to be pitied Demi Moore, who recently checked her anorexic, drug addled (wanna bet she’s got a bit of a Xanax problem herself?) self into rehab after she recently collapsed from being overly artifically stimulated. Or Heather Locklear? Remember her from Dynasty or her short skirt/long jacket days on Melrose Place? She tired to commit suidcide not long ago.

What do these women have in common? Growing old while female in the United States, a country that doesn’t like women much anyway and certainly has no use for those pretty ones who can’t retain some of their youth.

Look at Madonna. She’s 54. Can you imagine the pressure? Only if you are a women. Fifty-four and having to be twenty-five forever. If I didn’t know she was a devout yogi, I’d suspect Xanax use here too.

It’s hard to be surprised about Whitney Houston, however. A cocaine addict turned prescription drug abusing alcoholic isn’t the American dream but it’s probably not far off a lot of people of a certain age’s truths anymore. And that’s sad.

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Dating While Widowed: Gotta Love Feedback


Engraving showing a recently widowed Hindu wom...

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Everyone’s a critic. Usually  harsh and certainly agenda minded. And mostly in the moment with just the barest idea of the big picture because critics generally seize on one post (that they didn’t read very well because apparently it’s hard to see though the colour red).

On a follow-up post to one I wrote about widowed who play the widow card while dating, I received a scathing take that was part personal venting and part assumption that perhaps I was some non-widowed person spouting off on things about which I knew nothing.

A very grouchy rebuttal that got quite a viewing on Facebook where someone had linked it for the private flaming fun of others no doubt, but given the confusion it provoked and because I am not one to just sit at the keyboard and be spanked by someone who is labouring under more than a few misconceptions, it bears a reposting all its own.

Annie,

I can appreciate your point of view but I compleltely disagree with you. I do like Dan’s comment very much and I think he/she (A little confused by gender as the name is Dan but mentions late husband) hit the nail on the head.

Okay, I had to chuckle. Sorry. I appreciate your pov but you are an idiot? And Dan is a gay man – just to clarify – who wrote a beautiful blog on grieving and moving on. You should check it out.

I read your bio and I see no qualifications for conseling or psychology or any credentials whatsover. So this is just opinion. The sampling, as you mention is not appropriate. Think about this. Who would even read this and comment? Those you view this the same way. The happy couples who made this work wouldn’t even bother to google it. You know why? Because there is no playbook for this. We are all unique.

In the widowosphere, there are only those who have “been there” possibly “done that” and I am fairly certain that I referred to the post you objected to as “advice”. My “sampling” as you call it includes widowed of both genders and those who date and/or are married to widowed and that includes widowed remarried to widowed, which includes me and my husband. I also have bothered to read the latest research by George Bonanno and not just steep myself in anecdote or the rather shoddy pseudo-science of Kubler-Ross on which much of widow/grief culture is based. But, you are correct in that I have no formal trainingg – no more than just about everyone else who claims to be “helping” widowed or those who date them.

One thing more, however, I don’t claim to be helping. I am just writing what I have observed over the last six years. Take it. Leave it. But don’t whine at me about it. I make the assumption (optimistically to be sure) that anyone who reads my blog is brighter than a tree stump and can think for his/herself and filter the little bit of information I share through their own experiences and common sense (the latter of which my husband keeps trying to tell me isn’t all that common).

You need to take responsibility for your posts and the harm it may do. There is already ALOT of misinformation on this subject written by well meaning individuals, even widowers. But they do what everyone does with this issue. They bring their own playbook and act like it is THE playbook. Sorry, but neither you nor Abel Keogh know nothing of me or my journey.

I am pretty sure that no one was harmed in the writing of this blog, but I will say that there are a lot of women, and a few men out there, who have been harmed by the widowed they date because the widowsphere –  in the form of message boards and blogs and invites to retreats/camps/conventions –  spouts off like it has a playbook. Widowed without real-time resources, and who are very vulnerable in the first little while, pick up more than a few erroneous messages and act upon them as though they were gospel, but I am sure you’ve made the rounds and chastised the others too, right? I mean, I am sure you didn’t single me out because I have a different opinion than you do about personal responsibility and the fact that as grown ups we should be setting examples for our children by teaching them that bad things happen but that doesn’t give us leave to treat others with contempt or expect them to  feel as though their feelings are less significant than our own. Or maybe you did.

You assume that widowers are manipulative who have no feelings of their own. Why should we be respectful of the new love’s feelings, when obviously they want us to “bury” ours? How is that a successful partnership? How is that building trust to be who we are?

No, I don’t make that assumption. Sorry, but you are off base. Widowed are not manipulative because they are widowed. People resort to behavior that is manipulative because that’s what they have always done in terms of relationships and being widowed just gives them another tool to use. I have been fairly consistent with my opinion on this point as anyone who reads much of my blog can tell you. Widowhood doesn’t make assholes out of people who weren’t, but if you had a tendency towards using emotional “cards” to gain the upper hand before, widow culture sadly encourages you to continue doing that. Grief is no excuse for using people or ignoring other people’s feelings in favor of your own. You are ready to date when you are ready to let go of the idea that your grief trumps ALL. If you can’t put your new partner’s wants, needs and feelings as paramount – you aren’t ready.

Oh, but what about MY needs? What about them? I have read many a story of women and men who have been patient and kind and understanding only to find out that their widowed boy/girlfriend expected that to be the norm forever. Making love under pictures of the late spouse? Their toothbrushes on the vanity? Living out of totes so the late spouse can have closet space? Come on. Really? And that’s what I am talking about here and I think you know that.

We have alot to offer and it shouldn’t come at the expense of who we are. Yes, we are alot to handle. I will give you that. We come with issues. But so do divorced people. So do abused women? Why are we so different?

Issues. We are a society that loves our issues, which is why many of us have such drama fraught relationships. Widowhood is not a couple’s activity. I don’t expect my husband to be my grief counselor. Our relationship is about us. Right now. Any baggage you drag into the mix from the past is going to clutter and ultimately obscure the new relationship. Again, you are ready to date when you ave dealt with your own past on your own and can come to a new person without needing space and breaks and time and patience.

It’s perfectly okay to tell a new person that you want to simply date. Just hang out. Have fun. You can even throw casual sex into the mix if you are ready for that. But don’t send mixed signals. Don’t lead your new partner on by saying one thing and doing another. If you are ready to explore serious, be damn serious about it and be goddamn sure. Otherwise, keep it light and make sure your words and actions match up; that way any misunderstanding is on his/her part and not yours.

And widowed are not a lot to handle. From where does this fallacy come? There is nothing special about being widowed. It’s a traumatic event to be sure but if it defines you, you are not ready to date. We should come to new relationships ready to be in the now and plan/work towards a new future. Going into the dating arena believing that you are an “issue ridden too much to handle head-case” is like a TLC reality show in the making and that’s nothing to brag about.

My adivce to anyone considering a relationship with a widow/widower is do NOT try to make us forget who we are, who we loved, and how we got here. If you truly love us, you would embrace our lost love as much as we do. Because that person, that loss, that event made us the person you supposedly love. Think about it.

I agree with you. I cringe a bit when I read about women/men who really think that a late spouse is like a photo album or yearbook that can be tucked in the back of a closet. It doesn’t work quite like that. However, a late spouse cannot be part of a new relationship. Even an emotional threesome is not going to work in the long run, and why would anyone want to make a new love feel like a second choice? Second should just be chronological, don’t you think?

My husband’s late wife, Shelley, had a role in the man he is today, but who he is today is my husband. While I can and have acknowledged her, I am not sharing him with her. Our marriage is our marriage. Our life is now. She has her place and I have mine. It’s a duality that is hard for non-widowed to understand and even some widowed don’t truly get it, but it’s a perspective that needs to be mastered if one is to be happily mated again. And the success or failure, rightly or wrongly, falls more on the shoulders of the widowed mate. Sucks to be us? I wouldn’t agree. It’s a great privilege to be allowed to love another person fully and with a whole heart. If I have learned anything about love at all from my late husband, it is this and I don’t intend that my husband now should ever feel that he is second or living in a shadow. If that were to be the case then I learned nothing.

The whole picture thing still baffles me. I have two young kids who need to remember their mom. If a woman cannot accept that, fine. She’s not the woman for me because in essence, she is rejecting me. And I am WAY too confident to be bullied into accepting a rejection of who I am.

Depending on the age of the children and the pictures, those memories are largely yours. I have a three daughters. Two are in their late twenties and have plenty of memories of their mother. Neither their Dad nor I need to keep a lit flame for them. They are old enough to do that themselves. The youngest daughter has no memories of her late dad because she was just three when he died. As far as she is concerned, her dad is my husband and my trying to foster a relationship between her and a dead man serves her no purpose. A memory can’t love her or teach her to ride a bike.  A memory doesn’t carry her in from the truck when she is tired or rub her back when she can’t fall asleep. That’s my feelings on the subject. You are welcome to do whatever you like with your own children, but I am not going to saddle my children with my grief in the guise of pretending to keep memories alive for them.

My wife IS apart of me an always will be. You seem to treat our loss like much of America treats thier marriages… as disposable. Ask yourselves this. Would you want your SO to put away pictures of their late father or mother? Why is this different? If you feel that you are a replacement, well..maybe it’s time to take a look in the mirror! More importantly, who is the one who is insecure? If you are offended by a piece of paper with an image on it, perhaps you need to look at your OWN insecurities. It’s just an image of a time in our life. Much like a high school photo.

You don’t know how I treat my loss because I choose not to wear my loss on my sleeve all that often. And I am a huge believer in marriage. Anyone who knows or even just follows me knows that.

Let’s not use the dead mother/father/child straw man argument. Apples and oranges might make a tasty glass of juice but there are different kinds of love and that’s just a fact. But people who date widowed folks are not offended by photos, however over time, they want to be loved more than the widowed person loves the photo or the urn or the bathrobe on the hook in the closet. Can you imagine how it would feel to think that the person you loved, and were intimate with, valued a photo more than they did you? To feel like you could never measure up to the urn on the mantel? To have her wedding photos staring at you every time you sat down to watch television? To be constantly excluded from family gatherings because her mother or the eldest daughter “just couldn’t handle it”? Let’s get a bit of perspective, shall we and really look at the reality of what many people who date widowed folk endure months or even years into a relationship.

Photos can rest in books or on screen savers, but frankly, my husband is more important to me than a photo of my late husband (who was the son of a young widow himself and often told me that he’d be greatly disappointed in me if I let his memory stand in the way of my living and loving again – fyi).

When you cling to a late spouse’s things or photos, you give off vibes of not being ready – usually because you aren’t. Or of perhaps simply using a new person to satisfy physical or superficial emotional needs. It’s hurtful whether you want to acknowledge it or no.

By all means, keep and display and do homage as much as you like, but don’t be surprised when that hurts someone. We are human beings with feelings. Being ready to date means being ready to handle the putting away of late love. I can’t change that reality just because it rankles you and neither can you.

I tell every woman I date this:

“I still love my late wife and I always will. She is apart of me and I will honor her if for no other sake than that of her childrens. That doesn’t mean I cannot love you just as much if not more. But If you cannot handle that, let’s just be friends.”

Okay, this is a man not understanding how women think/work thing. You say that and what a woman hears is this. “I was a great husband and someday I will be just as great a husband to you if you are just patient and understanding.”

Yes, that is exactly what she hears. Women NEVER take men at their word. Huge mistake. I preach against it often. But it is a fact.

They also don’t pay attention to actions. Leaving pictures up. Not changing the house much. Making sure that children don’t forget their mother to the point that no other woman will ever be accepted. Loud actions that clearly say that a man is not now and might not ever be ready to do more than just date for superficial reasons. Women? They see devotion and think that time, love and understanding will one day win over that devotion to themselves.

Beginning to understand why I write what I do?

The fact is that we can love just like anyone else, but with a different viewpoint. An older widower who is happily married used the analogy of loving your second child just as much as the first. You think you can’t, but you do. Your heart grows to hold more love and doesn’t displace the love you have.

For the record, I hate the second child analogy because the love a parent bears for a child is not the same kind of love we share with a spouse/lover. In fact, this analogy creeps me out a bit. I do agree that we are capable of loving again but love is love whether it’s the first or 12th time. If you don’t feel the same thrill and urgent need to be with someone new – do both of you a favor and step back.

I’m sorry, divorce is NOT the same as death. It just isn’t. Any comparison is futile and irresponsible. There was no decision. There wasn’t a choice. They did not leave us of their own free will nor did we leave them. Apples and oranges. Is their grief in divorce? I would assume so.But I am not arrogant enough to project my PLAYBOOK on theirs. Please have the courtesy to do the same.

I have NEVER said that divorce is the same thing as being widowed.

The guy who wrote that sounds like a spurned lover and this had nothing to dow with a widow/widower. Sour grapes. The fact that she was a widow has nothing to do with it. Yes, assholes can become widows/widowers too. But quit drawing a parallel between who they are and their loss. The woman sounds like a piece of work REGARDLESS of her marital status!

The man who wrote that was hurt. Very hurt. And though his observations rise from that hurt, I have read them over and over  in other venues to the point where much of it is almost cliché. Women take longer to be ready to date again and the widow culture falsely encourages them to look for men who are okay being second best, but widowhood doesn’t turn a genuinely nice person into a selfish drama queen and I am certain I made that point.

With all of that said I will concede some points I have learned in my journey. NOTE: These are not hard and fast rules people. I’m not as arrogant as some when it comes to this. I can only relate my own personal experience.

Um, you are just as arrogant as anyone who puts words to keys. Sorry. If we didn’t think we had something valuable to share, we wouldn’t bother. If that is arrogance then so be it.

1) Comparisons are bad, I agree. it is time to focus on where you are going with the person you are with, not where you have been. BUT, if those past experiences help your new SO understand why you feel a certain way, it should be just fine to talk about them.

Agree and sort of agree – no one wants to spend a date listening to you talk about the last person you loved regardless.

2) Wedding pics…yes, in a shared home I do not think they are appropriate. I BELIEVE the walls should be plastered with pics of you and your new love. But that doesn’t mean you cannot have pics of who you are and how you got there. Get a grip people! WOW! But I do know widows/widowers that have EVEN made those old wedding photo’s work in their new homes. How do you explain that?

Not being much for decorating my walls with anything, I don’t really get the need some have to plaster anything with photos. I have albums, physical and virtual, and no one argues against a few family shots but the wedding pics? Lovey photos? Really? Why would you do that to someone you love now? I don’t agree that we need the equivalent of a Facebook timeline on our living room wall in order for the world to know who we are – unless of course, we are so unsure of who we are that we need that visual evidence for ourselves.

For those looking to date a widow or widower. I urge you to make your own decisions and not listen to this. Advice is good, but hard and fast rules are not. We are all unique and there is no playbook for this. You will know when it’s right…and you will know when it’s wrong. Trust yourselves.

Anyone who takes advice from a blog as “hard and fast” without applying a bit of common sense is beyond anyone’s help. jmo. Bit condescending of you to think that is the case.

Peace.

Hope you find some as well.

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