Hope For the Holidays

In the United States in 2018 many of us have grown up with ideas about holidays that we don't even question. Yes, you do make plans for certain days that require reservations or drive time or rental cars or pick-ups from the airport or innumerable grocery store visits. Certain food is eaten, or at least put on the table, with a certain amount of fancy china or a big table at a Chinese restaurant (it's amazing how many families I know who do the Chinese food thing). You will see certain people and put up with them a certain amount. A certain budget is set and a certain percentage of it is abided by. A certain range of calories will be consumed (and a certain amount of alcohol) and a predictable amount of sleep will be lost. Receipts will be saved. Items will be regifted. Festivities will be looked forward to in some definable amount and at some point, a regular activity and feeding schedule will again be longed for.  There are some things that are inevitable around the holidays. People will make too much food and somehow will still run out of things. There will be discussions of who will be the Christmas Elf or where is that one Hanukkah gift; I'm sure I put it on this shelf after I wrapped it..? The things that drive us crazy in the moment they are occurring are somehow the things about which we reminisce most fondly in July when we are telling someone about our usual holidays. How you have to have two kinds of cranberry sauce. How having a vegetarian now throws Mom, who's cooked the same turkey for 60 years, into a spin. How Santa is no longer a thing (this I find repugnant and hard to understand). How we do/don't go to church/temple/feast/soup kitchen. How we do/don't watch the parade/football/dog show. And we remember, anticipate, and describe our usual holiday experiences with a certain amount of laughter, exasperation, or derision. In fact, while you are reading this I wonder if you are picturing in your mind some of these things from your own life. And no matter how you feel about them, I ask you to imagine for a moment that you've lost them. That somehow these holiday traditions and images no longer exist. That you lived a life with none of the usuals. That you had nothing in particular to expect in terms of the holiday season because you had never had a consistent holiday experience.

Okay, now hold that thought. Put it aside for a moment.

Among all the ideas and pictures we each hold internally about the holidays is another one with which almost everyone is familiar: stress. It might be a tight budget or far-flung family. It might be a packed calendar. It might be a change in circumstances like a divorce or death. It might be the holidays-only proximity of those difficult family members who can't seem to conform their behavior to the standards of peacekeeping the rest of the family accepts. It might be loneliness. In the end we all have felt some measure of stress about and around the holidays and we can probably readily identify the source of it. More than any one of these, mediators most often see holiday-related issues that have to do with families and how they get along in terms of expectations, planning, and participating in holiday activities. The holidays seem to exacerbate whatever family issues exist the rest of the year. Often we are in the presence of people from whom we are usually at a comfortable distance, and we have to negotiate not only our relationships with them but our relationships in the context of dearly-held (or secretly dreaded) traditions and norms. 

As a mediator, I recognize the particular flavor of family conflict that simmers like a stew during the holidays. It has its own tang of disappointment, a tangible texture of projection, and a pungent odor of blame. We want the holidays to be happy, relaxed, and full of warmth. Not many of us don't have a Norman Rockwell- or Rankin Bass-like fantasy of what a holiday celebration should be, and most of us have at least some skepticism that it will ever come true. People give up their fantasies reluctantly, no matter how many times they've been proven unlikely. There is a certain number of us who, at New Years every year, wonder why we succumbed to the dream again. We swear we will never wish that holiday wish ever again. But by Halloween we are making plans all over again, with either optimistic enthusiasm or jaded dread, which we might cynically call realism.

Why do we do this to ourselves? What is this fantasy of joyful family gatherings based on? Are we all just Hallmark marketing victims? Have we really just swallowed a sour soup of materialism, Christmas specials, and pseudo-religious tag lines that has brainwashed us into thinking that the holidays are somehow different than the rest of the year for families? That the people who hurt our feelings or eat all the pie or have no idea how to buy gifts from January through October will magically become considerate, generous, or astute from Thanksgiving to New Years? What is this amalgam of insanity? Why can't the people we want the most to be tolerable just behave how we think they should? Why can't they meet our expectations? Come on, it's the holidays!

Remember that thought you were holding from earlier? OK, back to that. Imagine, for instance, an upcoming Thanksgiving about which you have either no expectations or wide-open ones. 

It's hard to do, right? That would mean a turkey day with no definably expected menu, no definite attenders, no specific location for the meal. It's a little devastating, isn't it? A formless Thanksgiving. No ideas about it at all. A blank slate. It's pretty impossible for me. The instant I add one detail, several more flood in. Just a picture of a pumpkin pie means the person who usually bakes it. Which means the partner of the person. Which means strong perfume. Which means my aunt's allergies. Which means my aunt's misery, which means my uncle's complaints. Which means my cousin's exasperation. Which means my sister's annoyance and impatience. Which means my frustration. Which means burned rolls, which means derision all around. 

You see how this goes. We know our families and their antics and habits as well as we know our own names. And unless we have reached the absolute end of our hopes and expectations and decided to take ourselves on a solo trip to a tropical resort instead of trying to Give Thanks for nothing, we really do want to have Thanksgiving (or Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa) with the people we love (whether or not we like them). Therefore, we can't help wanting peace and harmony (unless you thrive on conflict and love to cause it, in which case you are probably not a great candidate for mediation anyway). 

The truth is, you can't force so-and-so's girlfriend not to wear perfume to dinner. You can't anticipate every medical event that may or may not occur at dinner. You can't ask your uncle to keep his complaints to himself if you really do want his naturally-complaining self to be present. You can't dictate your cousin's reactions to his parents' traits. You can't tell your sister to lighten up and not judge everyone. I mean, you could do these things, but good luck with that. You CAN, however, decide not to be frustrated. You can decide your love for your family matters more, especially on one night, than pie or rolls or your own perception of everything running smoothly. You can decide that no holiday runs like a computer program, but you can enjoy it anyway. You can decide to laugh rather than get annoyed. You can decide that you are the only person over whom you have control. 

Many of us don't give much thought to what we can do to make family gatherings happier events. We give an awful lot of thought to what others can do. And when you get a whole house full of people who each thinks everyone else bears the responsibility for the happiness of the group, you have a whole house of miserable individuals. What if you had a whole house full of people who bore their own responsibility for their own feelings? Holiday or not, Tuesday or Friday, this always works out better. The best way for everyone to get along is to each be a person who gets along. Your family does not exist to make you happy. That is up to you. An entire family (we can excuse toddlers) of individuals who each monitor their own behaviors and attitudes and don't expect anyone else to do it for them will always do better at the holidays, which are stressful and non-ordinary enough without considering other people's proclivities. If we each consider our own, it may not be perfect (we are not robots), but it will be better.

Family mediation can be fun, casual, and joyful. Issues can be aired with a minimum of vulnerability and angst. A few pre-holiday season sessions can remind family members what it is they like about each other and why our families are the people we most love. Shared memories unite us if we let them. The minute we can't imagine a holiday that works with a minimum of glitches is the minute we need to stop and think about what our part in the glitches is. 

So build that picture of Thanksgiving anew in your mind. Imagine the pumpkin pie baker's girlfriend and her perfume. Imagine your reaction. Imagine your reaction to your aunt's allergies. And imagine asking your uncle what you can do to help him not worry so much about her. And imagine your peaceful, calm reaction to whatever he says. Imagine commenting to your sister how much your uncle loves your aunt. Imagine your reaction to her reply. That's all you can do. Your reaction. That's it.

And, you can bring your baker, his girlfriend, your aunt, uncle, and cousin, and your sister to mediation and have a holiday hash. Yep, get it said before the holidays. And make sure you say it's because you love them. Because you really do.

The holidays have just a good a chance of exceeding your expectations as they do of meeting or failing them. But a little preparation never hurts. And if you can't round everyone up ahead of time, come in for a strategy caucus. In the end, all you can do is you.

Grief As A Door

So, I've lost my friend. She has left. Left the building, left the parking lot, left the earth. To me, she feels lost, gone, nowhere I can see or hear. She took a year to take her leave of us, simply because she refused to go, even when there were spirits pulling and pushing her through the door. The fact is, she didn't want to go. In the end, the spirits won. We still feel, left here without her, that we lost.
I feel there is a must behind my writing today, because that's what some of us do when we've got shit to deal with. We write it down, look at it, hold it close and ruminate over it or put it where others can read it and go, oh, yeah, I get that.

My Ellie was an angel, in many ways, on the earth. She was a truly good person who only wanted others to be good. She saw the good first and anything else as a rip in someone's fabric, a hurt they weren't good at healing rather than a failing. At the same time, she had a very tiny stinger, the size of a grain of sand, but, boy, was it sharp when she needed it to be. She didn't use it to cause harm, though. She uncovered it when she could see you needed help doing the right thing. Was it a little passive aggressive? Maybe. Would she have said so, if it was? Yep, she'd be the first.

Ellie kicked breast cancer to the ground twice, but only the first time did it stay down. The second time, she called me days after her re-diagnosis. As her friend who is also a cancer survivor, I was one of her closest repositories of all woes cancerful. She knew I wouldn't tell her how to feel about it. I was there to feel her feelings about it with her. So when we had our first lunch after her first few days of tests, she told me this story, an Ellie-in-action if ever there was one:

Her doctor sent her to the lab for blood work. When she got there, the receptionist was rude and dismissive, treating her unkindly. Worse, the phlebotomist was the same way. She jabbed Ellie's arm, and, assuming she could read between the lines as to what the tests were for, and assuming anyone with a heart would be kind to anyone being tested for cancer, or any disease, she couldn't seem to care less about Ellie's feelings and seemed resentful that she had a patient of any sort. Ellie left, her feelings hurt and already suffering mightily under the imminent terror of a cancer diagnosis.

Later in the day, when those results had been read, the doc sent her back for more lab work. This time, Ellie wisely took John, her husband, with her. Again, the receptionist and the phlebotomist acted as if she were a thorn in their sides for even showing up. Never mind that she was in there twice in one day, which anyone would know was probably not good. Didn't matter, they were rude and unkind as ever. On their way out the door, Ellie asked John, "so...did I imagine that..? Or were they...?" And he said "No. They were awful. You didn't imagine it."

Ellie turned this over in her mind the rest of the day, as she waited for the final cruel diagnosis that would dictate the quality of the remainder of her days. It kept her up that night as much as did the anticipation of the dire news. In the morning, she felt a need to address it, as a way to put it away, because, heavens, she had bigger things to deal with, but she couldn't let go of the feeling that those two lab employees had been so truly inappropriate that it suggested some kind of demon they were fighting. So, what did Ellie do?

A little middle finger, a lot of love. Can you guess? She sent them flowers. On a day when she was receiving the worst news of her life, she couldn't dismiss the pain of others. So she sent them flowers with a note that said she was so sorry for the pain they must have in their lives that would lead them to treat someone at their mercy with such a lack of it. She hoped that they would have a little more light in their lives and happier days from now on.

THAT was my Ellie. She figured anyone who behaved badly was in pain. She was a doctor, a healer (who, by the way, could have reported these women to their superiors with some authority), and she felt that need to heal so deeply that not a day went by when she didn't exercise it. She hated that these women were in so much pain that they would treat a sick person badly. But she had that little stinger too. Clearly, these people just needed a reminder.

She was usually right about these things.

I feel her nearby as I write this story. And that is what we will all do for a while, until she gets fully settled up there, and can start spending her time floating among us and injecting our hearts with her love. We will write about her and talk about her, and keep her here with us until we can stand not being able to see her face or hear her voice because we know for sure that she is always with us and not really gone. We will do this because we miss her so much. We've missed her for the last year, while she was busy kicking cancer's butt, hacking at it with all her swords, until she had no swords left. Cancer took her from us while we imagined that Ellie was a physical body. But all who knew and loved her love her still and know that she wasn't her body. She was love and light and everything that was good. So, when we are ready, she will make her presence known. And because she was SO darn stubborn ("I can do my own laundry two hours after chemo, I don't need any help"), she will make sure we know it's her in case we still happen to think that she's gone.

I miss you, my beautiful Ellie. You will live, truly, in my heart, forever.

Don't Lie. Live.

So. Much. Lying.   Lying has become normal conversation for some in our government (not so surprising) and (perhaps more alarming) in society at large. Honesty and integrity are hardly recognizable anymore. Self-service and fooling the masses into believing the things that keep you in power have become the basis for politics. Self-service is the cultural norm that trickles down from that. If it’s white or East-Coast or well-heeled people who call for fairness, equality, justice, and love, they are called elitist, overprivileged, out of touch, and selfish. If brown or poor people do the same thing, they are called race-baiters, criminals, pathetic, and ignorant. My conclusion is that by shooting any messenger, we reject the message. We don’t want love and kindness. We prefer anger, division, tribalism, and cultural war. Why? Maybe so we can sow and cement separation and division. Why? Because as long as we‘re separate, as long as we can say ‘they’ don’t belong to us, we each can maintain that we are superior to someone else. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it? 

The above is a slightly edited compilation of several tweets I posted the other day when I was screaming inside with frustration after watching way too much news and commentary.  It has become an addictive trap these days into which I fall far too easily. I've lost many hours listening to commentators analyzing and expounding about the events we are watching march by us like acrobats in a fascinating but terrifying parade. How can this - this unrest, this world, this chaos and grief - be happening? I think many of us can agree something has been lost or is at least on the verge of becoming lost. What the something is is its own question. It's somewhere on the continuum of integrity to truth to trust to joy. If that continuum is a road, it might seem like that road is slowly being demolished by some deus ex jackhammer. It sometimes feels as if we are crawling along the side of that ravaged road, through the weeds, unsure if we are headed in the right direction. The main conundrum in this situation is that we have nothing to which to orient ourselves. There is no true north by which to set our compasses. There are a thousand norths clamoring for our attention, trying to be the strongest signal so that we will head that way, whatever it is. And maybe one of them is the true one. But we have stopped believing any of them, not totally, anyway. I'm afraid that soon we will stop believing that there even is a true one, anywhere.

I digress from my main point, though. The real reason, I'm thinking, that we don't believe anyone, or believe in anyone, anymore, is that we somehow sense that we have become a nation - or an Earth - of opportunists. There seem to be very few people doing good things just because it's right to do good things. If there are, they are the trees getting lost in the forest. We are so beset by liars, cheaters, game-players, and other factions who appear only interested in their own gain, however they've defined it, that we can't even see do-gooders and when we do, what do we do? We call them names. We say "do-gooder" like it's an insult. We call a thoughtful person who considers all sides of an issue a "fence-sitter" or a "flip-flopper" as if it's disgraceful to try to appreciate many viewpoints. We call those who value kindness and compassion in language "politically correct" because we somehow think that our right to say whatever we damn well please is more important than someone else's right to be treated respectfully. We sneer at the politician who says that a rising tide lifts all boats. Pfft. The only boat that matters is mine. 

And woe to the person who doesn't self-aggrandize or self-promote. Snowflakes that disappear.

Why? Why??? Because, as I said in my tweet, there is one thing humans are good at, and that is finding someone else to be better than. We find it more expedient to put someone down if we want to elevate ourselves. Never, ever raise someone up. Then they might be higher than us. Use words like "attack" and "condemn" rather than the more neutral and thoughtful "criticize" or "disagree." When you disagree with someone, by all means, call them a name. That will take care of them. And make you look like someone who knows everything, too. Have a temper tantrum or a smug expression. You are right, so you've earned it. And because you've conflated opinion with fact, you don't have to know anything to prove it. And you can lie as long as you can find someone to agree with you. Now you're an expert.

What are we so afraid of? Are we terrified that those upon whom we've always been able to look down - the poor, the brown, the uneducated, the queer, the conservative, the liberal - might be, after all, just as good as we are? Or better? Are we worried that all the facades we've worked so hard to build to present shiny faces to the world will be discovered as frauds? Are we afraid our walls will fall down? (A wall is good not only for keeping undesirables out but for showing them how undesirable they are). Are we watching our old ways and assumptions be replaced by new ones that work better in a changing world? Does that mean we will be replaced? Replaced by what? New things we don't understand? If we have to learn new languages or skills or cultural norms, does that mean our old ones were wrong? That we were wrong? That learning something new means good, that old means bad, and if we are old we must be bad?

It might. So we find ways to hold on to those old ways - those skills, those thoughts, those behaviors - as long as we can, because when they were relevant, we were on top. Once we change, we might be on the bottom.

I ask you, were you ever on the top? What IS the top?

Who are you better than? 

And please understand, by "you" I mean me.

I hope that soon we will discover that learning something new does not mean we were wrong when we lived the old way. That way was new once too. Once we stop being so afraid of being topped by someone else, we will stop living in fear, which breeds contempt, which breeds hate. We will stop believing in the people who tell us our fear is justified and who promise to keep us on top. (It's not, and they won't.) And we will learn again what trust is - and that it's not worship. Part of that will be listening to our love rather than our fear, and realizing that we are all happier when we are ALL happier. That's not sentimental or goody-goody. It's just a fact.

Be easy. We do - all - matter.