Happiness is not

 

Negative people often do not even realize who they are, but they are a drain on those around them.

I have tried every way I know to redirect a negative person's conversation without any real success.

They believe they are just sharing information, but all that information centers around sad, bad, or even cruel things. Their friends all have problems with family using them or ignoring them. They focus on the one child they say they want protection from. Their pets all have quirks that they find funny but annoying, only not annoying enough to take the time to change. 

They are constantly having minor problems with their car. They don't know how to use many of their car's amenities. They don't know how to use their own phones or computers and don't really want to learn.They think people don't send them the same photos and texts other folks get because they really don't know how to use their electronic devices.

They hyper-focus on things and want to share how vigilant they are by shampooing their carpets all the time or counting the bugs in their vacuum cleaner dirt.

No matter what they are asked, they will find a way to turn it into a negative reply of some sort and if you point this out they become angry and accuse you of thinking they are dumb.

It is a losing proposition that upsets me unnecessarily. I have tried to think just let them be who they are, but they have a way of wriggling it around to where they seem to need a response from me - just one that enables them or else.

I find myself angry, frustrated and my blood pressure soars to the point that I am actually ill sometimes.

I know you think I should just ignore these people. Avoid them. Keep them at arm's length, but that is very difficult when it is a close family member. Any and all family gatherings must include this person. They are not avoidable.

And they are not going to change. In some strange perverted way this life style makes them happy.

The right way

 

There is a time while we are children that the adults in our lives rule! We believe they know. They really know! And so we love them and honor them and try to emulate them in every way. We believe this is the right way. The best way. Maybe even the only way.

Growing into young adulthood we branch out, go off to school, or move away to live among other people and most of us gradually discover that other people often have other beliefs and they are as adamant about them being right as we are ours.

But over time we grow. We discover other ways of being and some of those are just as good or better than those things we grew up with. And sometimes we discover that the things we took for granted as normal were not so normal, or even so good.

Not everyone comes to these decisions or has these thoughts. There are people who never really grow up. They just continue to parrot the ways and words of their families as gospel. Some people discover their families were not as odd as they might have felt they were and some people find that the things their parents or families did were not always as good and kind as they believed.

These discoveries can create mental blocks, or even anger, but they are learning situations and important in our growth as whole human beings.

We can forgive our families for many things. Most of the time they were truly doing the best they knew how even if it hurt and most of the time they would be crushed to know that they hurt us the way they did.

It creates a strange dichotomy of feelings. Love and anger, resentment and nostalgia. It is the road to wisdom when we realize we can accept these things for what they were and move on along our own road to try and do better.

It is true, I am what I am. But it is also true that I have the power to be stronger, wiser, kinder, more open to learning and understanding. If I am still trying to do everything Mom's way when I am an adult I have failed to mature into myself.

Live

 

I think women in my generation especially used to get caught up in the idea of who we were.

Maybe because we were sort of the first generation of television children. Kids who knew what day and time it was by which program they were watching was on the air.

Instead of relying on the fairy tales and folk tales from books, we saw soap operas and westerns. Lots of westerns! The women often standing in the background with their hands over their mouths in horror as the men battled it out with their fists. Heaven forbid one of those women pick up a chair and lob the bad guy over the head. They were bystanders. Watchers. People to be protected and honored. Judged on their beauty and money and clothing, but not much else.

So when these women grew up they seemed to either follow suit and put themselves in that make believe role of being pampered and protected, or they did an about face and became rude and crude in order to make their point. Both of course were extremes and neither one was enough for a whole life.

I see women now who spent their youth slaving day and night thinking that was the noble and only way to live. And I see women who are aging primadonnas trying to recapture a youth they should have outgrown fifty years ago. They seem confused and sometimes almost frantic as they realize something is missing, but they just don't know what.

Then there are the women, I was going to say lucky, but I don't think they really were lucky, I think they were realistic, who stopped trying to live somebody else's life, or emulate an idea that only existed on film. They got out there and did things! They were the ones who found fulfillment in jobs, art, sports, mothering, whatever seemed important to them. 

They made mistakes. All human beings do, but they lived and they were willing, wanting and able to accept responsibility for who they were and what they did.

I admire these women.

Independence is the ultimate gift

I know a family who considers helping people a Christian trait they are proud of, but what they really do is enable people

They do it with the best of intentions, but the truth of the matter is that what they do makes them feel better than the people they supposedly help.

The old adage that if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime applies to everything in life.

If you wait on someone hand and foot, encourage them to ask you for help with anything and everything, you are turning them into eternally needy people.

I have always believed that the best gift we can give anyone is to teach them to think, to solve problems, to figure out how to do what they think they cannot do.

It is usually easier to just do it yourself, but that is truly unkind. There will come a time when you are not there to do for them and what will they do then? 

Teaching someone to be self sufficient is not abandoning them. It is a careful way of nurturing that encourages self sufficiency, increases self worth, makes people feel stronger and therefore more confident and content.

But if someone has spent a lifetime enabling or being enabled that can be tough. It requires real love to put up with the tantrums, the self pity and the destructive actions of people who don't want to learn or grow. Whether it is out of laziness, or fear, or some disability, relying on other people to get through life does not feel good, because there is always the niggling knowledge that this help may not always be there.

Being an enabler doesn't make people love you. In the end it is just the opposite. It teaches them to use you and not respect you.

Teaching people how to solve their own problems is a much better way of showing love. It requires patience, repetition, and intelligent redirection. It is laying a path through the forest, not carrying someone on your back.

Who are we

 

Over the years I have noticed that people in my generation often value themselves by who their relatives are, where they live, what kind of car they drive and how much money they have.

I once did this too. I was raised to do this. 

But the difference between me and some of the people my age is that I knew early on that something was off. I wasn't sure why, but I knew it felt wrong. We followed all the rules and there were rules for everything! How to sit. How to talk. How to set a proper table, make a proper bed, cultivate the correct friends, even how to laugh. It was all about presentation. How we looked to those around us and the world. 

We were taught this was the price for being who we were, somehow superior to many others. It created a generation of people out to please everyone else (who was worthy of being pleased that is.) Noblesse oblige took care of the rest of those poor souls around us who couldn't help being born who they were. 

Thank goodness for the sixties! The hippie generation had its ups and downs, but it taught me that there was more to life than the facades and faces we donned every morning before we went out in the world. It was one of those things my dad tried to teach me. There are extremes at both ends, but the middle is generally a better place to be.

I wanted to change. 

It took years of reading and therapy and meeting people and trying things out to learn that passive aggressive is really a terrible form of aggression used by people who are angry and afraid to show it for one reason or another. I discovered there was nothing wrong with stating my needs or wants, but that no one else was obligated to take care of them.  I discovered that simply being born a lion didn't mean I had to, or even had the right to, eat everything I could catch and devour.

I discovered that for every idea there were probably ten others that were different in some way, but they could all be valid in some ways too. And, sadly, I learned that all those rules I had learned were the very most basic lessons for being a human being. Each one had its uses, but not one was sacrosanct.

I can still enjoy setting a fancy table. Sometimes I like to dress up. Eating good food that I enjoy is still wonderful, but it's just that now I don't think everyone who does it differently is wrong. I don't long for the good ole days. They were sometimes awful too and I don't idolize people anymore either. 

I do have a hard time understanding people who refuse to grow and change. To me that is like collecting dead wood. All it's good for is the fire and as beautiful as a fire can be in some moments, it is so destructive left unbridled. 

Who we are is a product of who we were and we are artists creating an unending masterpiece if we choose to be.