Where's the Finish Line?

Did you ever get mad at your parents when you were a child?  I'm not just talking the standard teenage frustrations, but the pre-adolescent "Why are they say so mean to me?  They're so unfair!  I wish Tommy's parents were my Mom and Dad!  I'm going to go live with Grandma!"  I know I felt that way about my parents before I ever hit double digits.  After all, they were GROWNUPS!  If they were making me unhappy, it had to be because they wanted to.

I had an illuminating moment yesterday.  It occurred to me that when I was dealing with all that unhappiness and existential angst, my mother was 28, maybe 29 years old.  When I think about the person I was at 28 years old and how much I've grown over the years, I'm amazed.  And I realize that my mother was still growing at that age, too.

My mother was growing!  As she was an only child and I was the oldest, she was doing a lot of seat-of-the-pants learning about parenting.  But she was also learning about life herself.  And if she made some mistakes along the way in her parenting, I'm sure that she didn't do it intentionally -- she just needed to grow a little more.

The same could be said about the head-to-head battles we had in my teenage years.  The world of the late 60s/early 70s was nothing like she had ever experienced in her own life before.  How could she help me navigate a world that was unfamiliar to her?  How could she give me anything other than what she had learned, even if it didn't quite match the world I was living in, the people I was encountering?

A lot of us grow up with resentments about what our parents did and didn't do for us; some of it serious, some of it imagined.  Therapists are buying second houses on peoples' working through the hurts and misinformation they received from their parents, and I suspect most of those people believe, deep down inside, that it was done to them intentionally.  The truth is, that our parents were growing -- at least we hope they were.

We all know people who stopped growing when they were 20 or 34 or 42.  They stopped being introspective; they lost the desire to know more or be more.  But after I left home my mom went to work full time.  She learned to use a computer.  She travelled the world.  She painted a picture, a real picture suitable for framing.  For me to be angry about who she was (or who I thought she was on one day in our lives) is just plain silly.

Now, let this be said.  My mom and I have a good relationship.  We have certain subjects we don't go to, but we talk a lot about our lives, honestly and openly.  There was never any physical or emotional abuse in our home.  Did she make mistakes?  From my point of view, yes.    Do we love each other?  Yes. Did I make mistakes as a parent?  Dear Lord, yes.

I can only hope that my children will one day realize that I was learning as I went along, that some lessons I learned earlier and easier than others.  I can only hope that they will forgive me and be grateful that I gave them an example that being an adult human being is an on-going process.  You may enter adulthood, but if you are lucky, you don't reach the finish line until you draw your last breath.

Living Fearlessly

You know that closet that holds all your nightmares?  The one you have to make sure is closed when you go to bed at night so that the monsters and witches don't come out to get you? Mine is overpopulated.

I'm afraid of suspension bridges.  I just don't trust them not to fall down when I'm on them.  I once sat on a suspension bridge in a traffic jam, at night, in the rain, and every time a semi went past in the opposite direction the bridge would flex and bounce.  I nearly hyperventilated.  I don't mind regular, pier bridges, as long as I'm on them and not under them.  I hate sitting at a traffic light or being in a traffic jam stuck under an over pass, because something in my primitive brain tells me that a chunk of concrete is going to fall off and come through the roof of my car and kill me.  The lower level of a two level suspension bridge like the Oakland Bay Bridge or the  George Washington?  Forget about it.

I'm not afraid of snakes -- I've even held a boa constrictor.  But worms? Eeeeeeeeuuuuuwwww....

I'm afraid people won't like me.  I'm afraid of failing.  I'm afraid of cancer.  I'm afraid for my kids (who are adults).  I'm afraid that the food I eat is contaminated with unnatural ingredients or by poor production methods.  I'm afraid a certain presidential candidate will be elected and we will become a totalitarian state.

I lay these out before you because I'm certain that at least one of the things that frighten me will make you laugh, if not all of them.  How could she be afraid of that?  The fact that I recognize that they are silly helps me function around the fear (remember the spell for getting rid of what frightens you most in Harry Potter?), but it doesn't free me from it.  I can drive on suspension bridges, but it requires a brief routine of mental and emotional preparation AND I confess I superstitiously roll down the window when I drive over one.  No matter what the weather.  No, I don't think that will prevent it from collapsing, but that way if it DOES fall, I won't be trapped in the car underwater until the car pressurizes and I can escape.  Just saying.  When I was young (five or six years old) I was afraid of cannibal head hunters.  How they were going to get under my bed in suburban New Jersey was not the issue.  That they might be there was.  I avoided them by checking all the windows and doors before I went to bed, to make sure they were locked,  and making sure that closet door was closed. 

We live in a culture that promotes fear.  All advertising is aimed at making us afraid of something and then providing us with a product that will "protect" us or even "save" us.  The "best" advertising gets you in your most primitive brain area, the one that is focused only on survival - even if the product being sold is obviously not required for survival. 

My goal for the coming year is to live fearlessly, but I'm not sure that that is humanly possible. So here's my plan.  I am going to do my best to catch myself when I'm making gut-level decisions or when I find myself procrastinating and ask, "What frightens me here?  Why?"  There are some things we should be afraid of, but many of the fears that we allow to control our day to day lives are as silly as cannibal head hunters in New Jersey.  And the sacred writings that I try to follow tell me that love is the antidote to fear.  It is not easy to act in love towards those people and things that evoke fear in you.  But I'm fairly sure that many of the things and people we fear are because of cultural advertising and that it's based on someone else's fears which, if exposed, would make us laugh.

I think the key for me is not to live fearlessly, but to live lovingly, to let love take the place of my fear.  It seems to me I've heard that somewhere...