Enablers

 

At some point in life we need to stop and ask ourselves are the people around us really our friends, or simply enablers.

Most of us surround ourselves with people we enjoy being around, but then the question becomes why do we enjoy them

Do they think like us? Do they get together with us and the two of us decide what we want to do or accomplish? Do they make us feel good? Why do they make us feel good?

Sometimes it is for all the right reasons and sometimes it is for all the wrong ones. If our friends are simply yes men that brings up a whole different set of issues, but if they are enablers there is nothing much more destructive.

Friends who run in and solve all your problems for you, friends who make all your decisions for you, friends who help you avoid growing and thinking are like acid on a lump of meat. They destroy all the possibilities of who you could be, should be, can be. 

Eventually even the simplest decisions become stressful for you. You can't handle your own finances. You don't even know what you really like. You become one of those nodding novelties that simply sit there being moved around by other people.

These are not your friends. As horrible as this may sound, these people do not really have your best interests at heart. You make them feel good. You make them feel smart and powerful and competent and they make you what? 

Dependent on them.

I've got style Babe!

 

My sister is making the big move from house to retirement apartment, so furniture and style has been much on my mind lately.

My house, while bringing up a family was what I always called Early American Attic. Most of our furniture came from my grandmother's huge Victorian attic, or my mother-in-law's antique laden house.

My sister has always preferred Mid Century Goodwill. She loves a Deal! Her house is literally wall to wall furniture bought at an amazing price from some thrift store. Sometimes it has been hard to tell if we are in her living room or a church basement where they are expecting a huge crowd for an AA meeting.

Her friend, on the other hand, prefers Trash to Table, or perhaps Curb to room.. She loves driving around in a pickup and going through people's discarded stuff, which she then takes to either her house or one of her friends where they use it, scratches, dents etc. Pure and unadulterated.

Don't misunderstand. These people have money, they just like to spend it on second hand clothes that they call vintage. Everything else is something they do themselves and, unfortunately, you can tell. It is a sort of misguided snobbery, sometimes mistaken for moderate hoarding or rickety repairs. Their closets and basements are wall to wall clothes and their garage and bathrooms are creatively pieced together.

Right now I'm in my Moroccan Modern stage, thanks to a beautiful lamp I treated myself to and my motley collection of art, but everyone seems to have a style and very few of them fit on television shows for the rich and the beautiful.

How these styles come into being is anyone's guess, but they seem to suit their owners.

Prayers and mantras and . . .

 

Divine.

Like so many other things it is just a word that someone, somewhere, decided to use to describe something pertaining to godly things, or something exceptionally good. 

That doesn't mean any of those things are true or actually exist as such.

We are such primitive people. We believe that we must capitalize certain things or we will insult some distant being who resides over our lives like a father figure.

We make up rituals that might really help us if we believe in them, but are only the ladder our pysche's use to reach different parts of our own minds.

I believe there is a sort of magic in the world, but only so far as understanding we just don't know how these things work yet. 

Belief is a huge part of making these things work. Somehow we have to tap into the "magic" of our mind and body. I've had enough personal strange experiences to know there is a lot we don't know yet.

So if mantras or prayers or rituals help achieve these magical results - use them! 

Responsibility for him

 

It is probably not at all unusual to ask oneself if they are the fault of another's aberrant behavior. 

Parents take on the blame for their children all the time, but husbands and wives tend to go the other way when they divorce. They are more likely to try and blame the other one for their problems.

The truth is probably as variable as the number of people doing it.

I have always looked back on my marriage and wondered.

Was I really the reason he gained weight? Did I force him to go out looking for whatever he felt was missing in our relationship? Did I not try to make him as much a part of raising our children as I was?

First of all, in my defense, I will say he treated his second wife of twenty some years exactly the same way he treated me and she worshiped the ground he walked on for a very long time, but why was he, or is he, so self destructive?

One of my sons and I have talked about this endlessly. 

My ex was a very smart man who got straight A's many times in college, but he could lose his coat on a cold blustery day without a thought. I wonder if he is on the spectrum? When I first met him he was charming and funny and seemed both well read and sophisticated. He could be thoughtful and empathetic at times, but over time all this changed.

We married in 1970 when many things were changing. There was the movie, Bill, Carol, Ted and Alice. Many couples tried out open marriages and sleeping with each other's spouses. We did not, but I think that might have been the beginning of some of my ex's thoughts.

I think he confused sex and sexual practices with love. They can be, but on their own, they are not love. Love requires more than that initial rush of hormones and excitement. It requires work and really wanting the other person to find as much satisfaction in their life as you do yours. It then becomes a satisfying relationship built on history, trust, faith in each other and true, long lasting, love.

In both his marriages, my ex was great for two years, then he went looking for something I think he equated with real love. Maybe because his parents made it clear they almost put him up for adoption when he was born. They already had a sixteen year old Perfect son. They were in their mid and late forties. They were products of the Great Depression and had old world values that were strict and unyielding. My ex learned to be quiet and stay out of the way and they encouraged that. I think they loved him very much in their own way, but not in a way he could feel or understand in his world. 

He has spent the rest of his life trying to find love and acceptance and even maybe fame in ways he saw in the movies.

Real life doesn't work that way. 

You can buy sex. You can buy companionship. You can buy fancy homes and a fancy lifestyle, but you can't buy love, or respect. Yet he keeps trying these things instead of looking for something else. Something real.

After a while the casual flirting of a young man turns many older men into parodies of themselves. They make fools of themselves trying to be cute with waitresses. They make themselves look loutish in their attempts to impress beautiful or young women. They lose themselves completely to an idea that was never real to begin with.

It's the old trying too hard thing, so I no longer believe I am the cause of all his problems. He still has them and now he has them all by himself. He doesn't know how to talk to people, not even his own children. He stumbles around alternately trying to impress and looking pitifully sad and alone. The impression he wanted our family to have was that he was sophisticated and above us all. We bored him. We were undeserving.

That is a trap that turned around and ensnared him.

I saw him at our daughter's wedding and I was surprised that I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing! Here was a man whose face I knew, who had not changed the way he thought or acted at all, but was like meeting the man next door. I wasn't angry, or infatuated or any of the things I think he thought might be possible. I just simply felt nothing except sometimes I felt like laughing when the first words out of his mouth were insulting and he didn't even mean them to be. And the second words were an attempt to see if he could make a play for my sister. I wasn't threatened. I was just surprised how ridiculous it all seemed.

The best thing about all of this is that I no longer feel any responsibility for who he is at all.

Teamaker 2

 

Long long ago, I moved into the first house my husband and I had bought and at six in the morning someone knocked on our patio door. It was our neighbor and she came bearing a homemade coffee cake! Our backyards were adjacent to each other so she saw our lights on and knew we were up.

I used to babysit for her kids while we were trying to start a family of our own and when we adopted our first son, she loaned us her baby crib to use.

I've known this woman over fifty years now.

We've had our ups and downs, but she is my oldest friend and longest friendship. I nicknamed her Teamaker when I first started writing this blog and she still uses it as her email moniker.

Thank goodness, because she does not use any other social media and I have given up snail mail except for my homemade birthday cards, so this is our only means of keeping in touch.

Truth or lies

People all have their own ways of dealing with life. Some are careless. Some are carefree. Some just don't care.

We can pick and choose our friends, but family is a different story. Seventy five years of family ties are truly the ties that bind.

We learn to live with the people around us.

We know who exaggerates, who makes up excuses and who lies.

We know, but that does not mean we are comfortable with it.

Eventually people begin to age and their characteristics become bolder, more prominent, less carefully concealed.

So how do you know when someone is beginning to suffer from dementia and when they are just becoming poorer liars, because most people caught in a lie become flustered and confused.

There are passive aggressive people who want to be people pleasers, so they run around telling everyone what they think they want to hear.  They lie about things they are doing and make up excuses that make no sense when trying to validate a poor decision. I can't reason with these people because when I am talking they are not listening. They are trying to think up reasons why they are in the right.

 It doesn't matter why they are doing what they do. In the end they all just make me feel sad and a little depressed, because I know it is not the truth.