Grief & Growing Around It

I am part of a recovery group where our weekly topic is grief. My baby who died years ago was a major experiences with grief. Sending Pedro away for treatment for his anxiety and depression was another.

What is grief, exactly? It is sorrow and sadness and loss. My most recent epiphany is grief is how we feel when something big and important to us ending. It could be the end of a person's life, like Ada's, my stillborn daughter. It could be the end of a job, or the end of an important relationship. When the Boy left, it was the end of him living at home for the time being. It was the end of having him around the house.

When Ada died, I felt like most people do when a loved one dies: my entire mind, body and soul was filled with sorrow and loss. Her death was end of her life, but also the dream of what her life could have been. It was the death of potential.

There is a common metaphor for grief, that it is like a balloon in our hearts and minds that expands when we experience loss, making everything else seem smaller. When the grief subsides, other parts of our lives resume their normal sizes. 

I heard a new idea -- grief stays the same size, but we grow around it. We can grow stronger and taller, and healthier if we so choose. I like this idea better. It doesn't mean with need to rush through or wish our grief to be smaller. Grief it what it is, and we grow around it.

My Daughter Dropped Out of her Honors College...and I Couldn't be Prouder

I got a call last week from Claire-Adele telling me she didn't want to complete honor's thesis this spring. She had a dozen reasons, but the most important one:

"I don't get excited about it. I just don't want to. I am not applying to get PhD, so I don't really need to do a thesis."

When kids are little, they are forced to do a ton a crap that they need to do "because" without any valid reason why they need to, like doing homework in kindergarten. Is that homework of coloring the apple red going to make them smarter? Help them advance in life? Probably not. Is it going to teach them some discipline? Maybe. But mostly they have to do homework in kindergarten because their teacher told them to, and they are supposed to listen to their teachers.

In other cases, they have to do things to contribute to their home, their tribe. We ask them to set the dinner table because we need forks and plates out if we all want to eat. 

Do kids have any free will in most of this stuff? Do they have a lot of choices? 

Not really. Kids are forced to slog along in the world because a bunch of adult humans made up a bunch of rules and things they have to do in order to be "successful" people. Do they ever get a chance to do what they want, to exercise free will? Not often while they are living on their parents dime. 

Claire-Adele is smart and ambitious and works hard, all of which is fine. Most kids like her are good at following orders. I heard a friend today talk about her people-pleasing and how corporations love people-pleaser who put the well-being of others way ahead of their own wants and needs.

At the tender age of twenty-one, Claire-Adele has figured out free will. She has figured out how to make decisions that will impact her own life, happiness, goals and well being. She is making a trade-off where she sees the value of graduating early instead of getting honors. Instead of working on her thesis this fall, she will be a research assistant for a professor in the business school. She will save her parents a semester of tuition. She will get a job, and then maybe apply to law school.

This is her life, not anybody else's. This isn't about her being lazy and copping out of an assignment. She is dedicated and works hard at whatever she sets her mind to. More important than her work ethic is figuring out how she wants to spend her time, what is important to her, and where her passions lie.

She is doing just that. 

I couldn't be prouder.

Control or Love: Pick One

I've been thinking about love versus control lately.

My guess is that this is the root of many parenting and relationship problems. I think of the types of kids in treatment whose parents want to dictate their children's every move. It can be in work relationships, too. Think of the micromanager or the screaming boss. By control, I don't mean self-control or self-drive, that type of thing. Control is not to be confused with leadership, either. 

People can be controlling or they can be loving. People can have control in a relationship or that can love. They cannot have both. Very often people who are controlling think they are loving, when in fact, they are not.

Controlling someone says: I don't trust you to be who you are. 

Loving someone says: I trust you to be who you are, and I trust myself to be myself. We have respect for each other.

Controlling someone says: I am afraid you will mess it up or make a mistake.

Loving someone says: Mistakes are part of being human. Mistakes are okay.

Controlling can be horrible, like beating someone who disagrees or misbehaves, be it a spouse or child. It can be a deranged and screaming co-worker or boss.

Controlling can look nice when it really isn't. I can be doubting, undermining, questioning, worrying that the other person will fail or make them look bad.

Love is faith in the other person, and believing they are okay the way they are. 

Controlling and loving most often materialize in our lives when there is conflict. Do we insist on getting our way at the expense of the other person's humanity? Or, do we disagree and have faith that it will be okay if the world doesn't go our way? That we can love someone and disagree with them, that the two are not mutually exclusive?

Likewise, when people are controlled, they don't feel loved. They might feel small, insignificant or unimportant, as if they only exist to make the other person happy. Their own happiness is immaterial compared to the controller's happiness.

Brunch = Two meal day, & the Sugar Hangover

I love brunch. It is my favorite meal of the week and I wish I had it every day. In the summer, my kids ate brunch a lot as they slept in til eleven on days they didn't work. I went to brunch yesterday with a friend around 10:30 Saturday morning. What is so awesome about it?

First, I love big breakfast foods. I love eggs and bacon and hash browns and toast all on one plate. 

Second, it is twofer: two meals for the price of one. When I eat brunch, I only have two meals in the day: brunch and dinner. Yesterday was a weird day, though. I had brunch, but then for an afternoon snack I had Cupcake Royale's awesome red velvet ice cream where they take red velvet cake and mix it in vanilla ice cream. (It is not as perfect as blueberry pie at Salt and Straw, but still good.) I hung out of a friend Saturday night and we drank gin and tonics while she made cookies while I watched and then we played "Go Fish." I ate one raw cookie and two cooked ones.

If I really looked at my diet yesterday, I ate a total of three meals one of them was dessert. As I write this, I feel like a preschooler writing about my dream meal plan. 

Today, though, I am super tired. I only had one G&T, so I don't think that is causing my sleepiness. Maybe the sugar is trying to kill me with a sugar hangover.

Need Another Good Cry?

The Broadway musical Come from Away is on Apple TV. 

I've had the good fortune to have seen this three times on stage -- once in Seattle before it went to New York, on Broadway and then again in Seattle.

I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats.

Seriously. This is an amazing show.

It takes place in Newfoundland, Canada on September 11, 2001 when 200 international flights were diverted and ordered to land in the tiny town of Gander. Gander used to be a refueling spot for transatlantic flights before the planes could carry enough fuel to get across the ocean. The story is what happened to the town and the people that landed there during a week of deep uncertainty and fear.

My next door neighbors in Ravenna were coming home from Paris when their plane landed in Gander on 9/11. They were two of seven thousand people people who "came from away."

Where was I when I heard of the first plane crash? I was in St. Louis, Missouri. Claire-Adele was just a year old. I was watching the news, waiting for the weather forecast for the day. I called my mom when the second plane hit. In the afternoon, I had to turn off the news so I took Claire-Adele to the zoo with my friend Kari and her son Jackson. It was so quiet. No planes overhead. No cars in the street. No one at the zoo.

I am not sure how to close this. "Happy 9/11" seems horribly and terribly wrong.

Perhaps, "Remember."

Need a Good Cry?

There is a brilliant article in The Atlantic about a family whose son died on 9/11. It is a story about grief. I listened to it while eating lunch. So powerful.

WHAT BOBBY MCILVAINE LEFT BEHIND

Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

By Jennifer Senior

From the article:

Early on, the McIlvaines spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that you’re all at the top of a mountain, she told them, but you all have broken bones, so you can’t help each other. You each have to find your own way down.

It was a helpful metaphor, one that may have saved the McIlvaines’ marriage. But when I mentioned it to Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at UC Irvine who’s spent a lifetime studying the effects of sudden, traumatic loss, she immediately spotted a problem with it: “That suggests everyone will make it down,” she told me. “Some people never get down the mountain at all.”

Is "Ted Lasso" in a Twelve-Step Program?

My new favorite television streaming show is Ted Lasso on Apple TV. It is my favorite show since Schitt's Creek. 

For those of you who haven't seen it, Ted is an American Division II college football coach who is asked to coach an English Premier League team. Ted is a mensch--a nice guy. Rebecca acquired the AFC Richmond through a divorce, and she wants to sink the team to spite her ex-husband. The show is both funny and endearing. I've only watched Season 1 so far. I am saving Season 2.

As I have been watching, I feel like this show is indirectly about a twelve-step program, where the themes and content are similar to those groups recovering from addiction. Ted and company hang out in pubs and drink a lot of beer, which is not necessarily in keeping with the Alcoholics Anonymous principles. Nevertheless, the show feels like recovery.

Some of you may be asking, what are twelve-step programs? For the easiest definition, I went to Wikipedia: they are "mutual aid organizations for the purpose of recovery from substance addictions, behavioral addictions and compulsions." While more than two hundred programs use twelve steps, Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon were the first two.

Back to Ted Lasso. [Spoiler Alert: I won't tell you how Season 1 ends, but there might be a few spoilers in here.]

1. "What's your name?" Ted asks Nate the Kit Manager (the equivalent to the equipment manager for an American football or baseball team) in the first episode. The first thing that happens in a twelve step meeting (in person) is group goes around the circle and everyone says their first name. This is the first time anyone from the team has asked Nate his name.
2. "I appreciate you." Ted is full of gratitude and expresses it freely. Gratitude is a major theme in recovery programs. I find gratitude to be a natural upper. For one of my birthdays, I spent two weeks thinking of why I appreciated everyone in my life and I wrote it all done. It was the best two weeks.
3. "That's stinkin' thinkin'" Ted tells someone on the team. This is a classic line from AA for when people use bad logic to justify bad behavior or feel sorry for themselves.
4. Fellowship: Most twelve Step programs call other members "fellows" where they share their struggles with each other. In Episode 8, Ted is recovering from an emotional bender in Episode 7. What does he do? He calls upon Coach Beard, Nate and Higgins to talk about his feelings. They form a group called the Diamond Dogs. The Diamond Dogs are a mini-fellowship where the guys can talk about their feelings.
5. Tradition 1: "Our common welfare comes first; personal progress for the greatest number depends upon unity." The show isn't just about Ted's growth. The show has an ensemble cast and many of the characters experience their own arc and growth, not just Ted.
6. Step 8: "Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all." Episode 9 is called "All Apologies." Rebecca realizes the harm she has done to Ted and Higgins, and she apologizes.
7. Step 9: "Continued to personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it." In Episode 9, Ted has to bench his team captain and aging star. Initially, Ted wants to keep Roy in even though he has been playing poorly. Coach Beard and Nate disagree. They think Roy will hurt the team's chances of winning. Ted concedes. He also reflects Tradition 1 in this moment, that the common welfare comes first instead of the welfare of one player. Likewise, in Episode 5, Ted has to pull a selfish and self-absorbed star player who is hurting the team.

Pumpkin!

This morning, I watered the plants on my balcony and I found this:

I am growing an urban pumpkin. This is the best things ever. Yay!

This spring, Jack brought over some compost from the house and I boosted the soil for all of my container pots on my patio and balcony. In the mix were pumpkin seeds from pumpkins I composted years ago. When the volunteer pumpkin vines started showing up, I didn't hack them back. I could have treated them like weeds that were invading my cultivated pots. Jack used to tease me that I never pruned any of my plants. "You think all growth is good growth," he said years ago when my ficus tree collection took over our apartment in Chicago.

I didn't pull the scrappy and unkempt pumpkin vines, and now I have a baby pumpkin. I wonder how big it will get. Maybe I will find a few more. Will my baby pumpkin have brothers and sisters? I hope so. 

The green circle is where I found the pumpkin.

Here are other pumpkin vines on the patio. Will there be more pumpkins this fall?