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Wisdom: Our Legacy to our Children


I was hoping that when Alicia spelled out the rules to her recent game of blog topic tag – being that there were to be no general tagging of all readers and that you needed to tag people by name – that I would easily avoid this topic. I never get tagged by name. I am not a inner circle person. I just read blogs and comment as the spirit moves me and blissfully avoid much in the process. But, Marsha – you rebel child you – tagged all her readers and thus I was caught.

The topic came from The Daily MEME which is a blog for bloggers who need ideas or topics or just about anything blog. I checked the site out and though I haven’t used anything there myself, I am going to recommend it to at my next writer’s group meeting because there are a few people who have expressed interest in blogging and several others who are old-school journal keepers and might find it useful.

Since Marsha broke the rules to begin with I am going to venture further out onto the limb and change the structure of the topic a bit. There were all sorts of lists to be considered and filled in. What do you want your children to know before they grown up? What do you want them to know about you? Etc. Etc. as the King would say to Anna. It was too daunting and seemed a bit redundant. So here is my version.

Things I want my Daughter and Step-daughters to know
before they are middle-aged women Like Me.

1) You are beautiful. Believe it. Live it. Ignore styles and trends and beauty advice of all kinds unless it concerns skin care (because you are all fair and need to take care in that respect). Too tall, too thin, too short, too fat? Only if you think so and thinking so and agonizing over anything that you have no control over is a waste of time and will cause wrinkles. Happy people accept themselves physically and only seek to change aspects of themselves for themselves alone.
2) Establish good credit early and never be without a credit card in your own name alone. Women are sadly screwed when they marry and join their finances with their mates. Be wary to not let your credit history as a single person in your own right disappear because you will have a devil of a time re-establishing it.
3) A good education is one of the most important things you will ever give yourselves. Don’t throw away educational opportunities and never let financing be the reason you don’t pursue advanced schooling (college, university, graduate school). Your dad and I may not be keen on funding a backpacking trips across Europe, but we would not say “no” out of hand to the idea of you furthering your education.
4) Be inflexible when it comes to your value system. Don’t compromise it to be liked or loved.
5) Don’t expect love to fix you but don’t walk away from the opportunity just because the package it arrives in doesn’t match your imagination.
6) Be honest, but not in a mean way if you can help it (and on occasion you can’t.)
7) Know that I love you even when you are making me crazy, or I disagree with your choices.
8) See as much of the world as you have an opportunity to when you are young.
9) Don’t marry before you are thirty. Give yourself a chance to get over all the Disney princess notions (Katy) of love. Love is wonderful but it isn’t a fairy tale.
10) Remember that the glass is really half-full (or just poorly designed as your dad would say).
11) Be fair.
12) Don’t prejudge but remember that leopards can’t/don’t change their spots.
13) Be a good friend but not a doormat.
14) Finally, when I am very old and can’t see well enough to notice, please pluck the stray hairs that are growing on my chin. (I had to add this because my mother made me promise the same thing.)

Probably not the greatest or most comprehension list ever. It’s not even profound in any sense, but I have come to realize in all the years I have taught, and in the few I have parented, that kids by and large grow up to be who you raised them to be even when you take into account their own particular personalities.

Family


Just when it seems we have enough familial dysfunction, we marry, inviting a whole new set of relatives onto the playing field.

With Will I was embarrassed at first about the state of what made up my immediate family. He assured me that I had nothing to worry about and after I met his family I would understand why. And I did. My family looked like the Waltons next to his and as I got to know them I realized that the relative normality of my family in comparison to his was a selling point for him.

Rob’s visiting sister reminds me of a cross between my own youngest sister and my late husband’s mother because like them, she needs the mess that is her life. The chaos. The uncertainty. The failure. The isolation. It feeds some basic need. Like them too, she is a turn on the dime type emotionally. So though I was prepared for the worst, we got pleasant and conversational last evening when Rob brought her home. Her. Not the kids. They were at the Super 8 over near the gym where I work out. It seems they were in need of “real” food to eat and unrestricted cable television access. I am guessing here but a day on foot probably didn’t go over well and the hotel was some kind of material “I’m sorry” but that would just be a guess based on my years as a public school teacher. I worked with a lot of families similar to theirs.

She was gone bright and early today and will be staying at the hotel tonight too. We have plans to meet them for dinner out (never high on my list of things to do anymore because of the whole not being able to eat much that is on the menu thing) and then they will take off back to Regina on Saturday morning.

I spent some of the afternoon today re-telling this tale to a friend after we’d taken our kids sliding, and she told me a bit about her siblings. Then her husband got up to get ready to go to his job – as he is working nights this week – and added a story or two about his own family. Perhaps the “good kids” in each family are programmed to look for each other in the wide world and form families. Social Darwinism in action? But I wouldn’t want to presume and call myself the good child. I just paid attention and learned my lessons and everyone else’s too.

The important thing tonight is that our home is now ours again and we won’t be making the extended visitor mistake again. I am not sure what it is that makes us think that people we didn’t get along with as children will make for great friends or guests when we are adults. Perhaps it is a Walton thing. We are fed images of families that love and bond no matter the differences in their natures and world views and we think that could be us. I think it works that way naturally for some as time tempers them and their memories but not for most.

It’s a Martyr Thing


It’s a bit past eight in the morning. Katy is still sleeping and I have the house to myself. If you have been following my in-law saga – now in it’s sixth day – you will remember that my sister-in-law and her teens are stranded here due to a car breakdown on New Year’s Eve day. Well, it’s a martyr thing. Last evening sis-in-law emerged from meek pity-seeking mode to reveal a more action oriented one. With it came a bit of snarkiness and the ridiculous idea that the best way for the car situation and her “imposing” issues to be solved would be to go into town with Rob this morning and have him drop her off. She and the teens (yes, she dragged them along) will spend the day on foot trying to find someone to fix their vehicle. And okay, it’s not a big town by any stretch of the imagination. You could probably walk from one end to the other in 30 minutes at a good clip. Crossing the highway to the shopping area isn’t too dangerous either. But the repair shops are not near each other and it would have been easier to have Rob drop of the keys at the OK Tire he originally towed the car to and had the owner call sis-in-law with a prognosis and estimate. Providing that he could get to it today. It’s the day after a holiday and Canadians are very serious about their holidays and time off in general. Add to that the rather severe worker shortage – skilled workers especially – and all I can envision is sis-in-law walking the length and breath of the Fort today with two recalcitrant children in tow and being basically told to come back tomorrow (or god forbid Friday). Did I mention that the sun is barely up here and it’s well below 0 celsius? With wind too.

The thing is that I have seen this. When sympathy doesn’t arrive and it becomes apparent that people expect you to do something more pro-active on your own behalf than simply bemoan your fate and play the widow card, half-baked plans like this are the result. Win. lose or draw, when they arrive back here later today they all will be cloaked heavily in the grievous air of martyr-hood, having been “forced” to spend the day tramping about on foot like poor relations because I didn’t want to spend my day playing taxi-cab. And this is what irritates me most of all. I will look like the bad person and in every re-telling of the tale, I will come out worse and worse.

I have been here before with Will’s mother. I was telling Rob last night, after I retreated to our bedroom to read and try to find Zen somewhere, that this whole affair was reminding me too much of the last month Will was in hospice two years ago. His mother had everyone tip-toeing around and letting her have her way in all things because of the sorry state of her life and overall appearance. Even I was expected to give precedence to her and it rankled. Still does. When I had eaten past my fill of being denied time alone with my husband, I asked that she not be around when I visited which only intensified the martyr act. Poor mother-in-law to have such a cruel and heartless woman for a daughter-in-law and she would being her litany of complaints against me never once hinting at the fact that our poor relationship might have been her doing. Rob reminded me that this is my house and I needn’t make myself scarce or stay out of his sister’s way to keep peace, but I reminded him that my being the wife of the dying man hadn’t made a difference two years ago either.

I have worked with kids in at-risk programs several times over the course of my teaching career. When you do this you end up doing a fair amount of counseling and my counselor friends were always telling me I should consider looking into the career full-time because I was good at it. I always shrugged the suggestions off because I am too problem-solving oriented and have only a limited amount of sympathy/empathy for those who refuse to see logic or help themselves even the tiniest bit. That, is what they told, is what made me good. Counseling is not consoling. It’s about helping people help themselves to the best of their ability. It’s not about aiding and abetting self-defeatism or feeding someone’s need to play the role of the cursed or downtrodden. I used to get in trouble on the widow board for doing the same thing. Offering solutions (and occasionally a kick in the pants) instead of tea and pity. I understand that someone fresh to a bad situation needs special consideration, but my mother-in-law was twenty some years into her widowed pity party and Rob’s sister is going on eight years herself. I don’t buy into the idea that grieving is the be-all end-all and should take as long as it takes. Both these women had/have children who they dragged/are dragging down with them. And they are not dumb. Or helpless -they just prefer that because playing the poor me thing will sucker enough people to keep them from having to do something themselves.

I might be pleasantly surprised by what walks in the door later today but the realist in me thinks I am closer to the mark with my original prediction. Let’s just hope in the meantime that the car is fixable and some mechanic has time for it today.