Category: Personal Growth

Hi all,

I just read the following – it’s really good.

———————

“Watch out! You nearly broad sided that car!” My father yelled at me. “Can’t you do anything right?” Those words hurt worse than blows.

I turned my head toward the elderly man in the seat beside me, daring me to challenge him. A lump rose in my throat as I averted my eyes. I wasn’t prepared for another battle. “I saw the car Dad, please don’t yell at me when I’m driving.”

My voice was measured and steady, sounding far calmer than I really felt.

Dad glared at me, then turned away and settled back. At home I left Dad in front of the television and went outside to collect my thoughts. Dark, heavy clouds hung in the air with a promise of rain. The rumble of distant thunder seemed to echo my inner turmoil.

What could I do about him?

Dad had been a lumberjack in Washington and Oregon. He had enjoyed being outdoors and had reveled in pitting his strength against the forces of nature. He had entered grueling lumberjack competitions, and had placed often. The shelves in his house were filled with trophies that attested to his prowess.

The years marched on relentlessly. The first time he couldn’t lift a heavy log, he joked about it; but later that same day I saw him outside alone, straining to lift it. He became irritable whenever anyone teased him about his advancing age, or when he couldn’t do something he had done as a younger man.

Four days after his sixty-seventh birthday, he had a heart attack. An ambulance sped him to the hospital while a paramedic administered CPR to keep blood and oxygen flowing. At the hospital, Dad was rushed into an operating room. He was lucky; he survived.

But something inside Dad died. His zest for life was gone. He obstinately refused to follow doctor’s orders. Suggestions and offers of help were turned aside with sarcasm and insults. The number of visitors thinned, then finally stopped altogether. Dad was left alone.

My husband, Dick, and I asked Dad to come live with us on our small farm. We hoped the fresh air and rustic atmosphere would help him adjust. Within a week after he moved in, I regretted the invitation. It seemed nothing was satisfactory. He criticized everything I did. I became frustrated and moody. Soon I was taking my pent-up anger out on Dick. We began to bicker and argue. Alarmed, Dick sought out our pastor and explained the situation.

The clergyman set up weekly counseling appointments for us. At the close of each session he prayed, asking God to soothe Dad’s troubled mind. But the months wore on and God was silent. Something had to be done and it was up to me to do it.

The next day I sat down with the phone book and methodically called each of the mental health clinics listed in the Yellow Pages. I explained my problem to each of the sympathetic voices that answered. In vain just when I was giving up hope, one of the voices suddenly exclaimed, “I just read something that might help you! Let me go get the article.” I listened as she read she article describing a remarkable study done at a nursing home.

All of the patients were under treatment for chronic depression. Yet their attitudes had improved dramatically when they were given responsibility for a dog.

I drove to the animal shelter that afternoon. After I filled out a questionnaire, a uniformed officer led me to the kennels. The odor of disinfectant stung my nostrils as I moved down the row of pens. Each contained five to seven dogs. Long-haired dogs, curly-haired dogs,black dogs, spotted dogs-all jumped up, trying to reach me. I studied each one but rejected one after the other for various reasons, too big, too small, too much hair.

As I neared the last pen a dog in the shadows of the far corner struggled to his feet, walked to the front of the run and satdown.It was a pointer, one of the dog world’s aristocrats. But this was a caricature of the breed. Years had etched his face and muzzle with shades of gray. His hipbones jutted out in lopsided triangles. But it was his eyes that caught and held my attention. Calm and clear, they beheld me unwaveringly.

I pointed to the dog. “Can you tell me about him?” The officer looked, and then shook his head in puzzlement. “He’s a funny one. Appeared out of nowhere and sat in front of the gate. We brought him in, figuring someone would be right down to claim him, that was two weeks ago and we’ve heard nothing. His time is up tomorrow. He gestured helplessly.

As the words sank in I turned to the man in horror. “You mean you’re going to kill him?”

“Ma’am,” he said gently, “that’s our policy. We don’t have room for every unclaimed dog.”

I looked at the pointer again. The calm brown eyes awaited my decision. “I’ll take him,” I said.

I drove home with the dog on the front seat beside me. When I reached the house I honked the horn twice. I was helping my prize out of the car when Dad shuffled onto the front porch.

“Ta-da! Look what I got for you, Dad!” I said excitedly.

Dad looked, and then wrinkled his face in disgust. “If I had wanted a dog I would have gotten one. And I would have picked out a better specimen than that bag of bones. Keep it! I don’t want it.” Dad waved his arm scornfully and turned back toward the house.

Anger rose inside me. It squeezed together my throat muscles and pounded into my temples.

“You’d better get used to him, Dad. He’s staying!” Dad ignored me. “Did you hear me, Dad?” I screamed those words as Dad whirled angrily, his hands clenched at his sides, his eyes narrowed and blazing with hate.

We stood glaring at each other like duelists, when suddenly the pointer pulled free from my grasp. He wobbled toward my dad and sat down in front of him. Then slowly, carefully, he raised his paw. Dad’s lower jaw trembled as he stared at the uplifted paw Confusion replaced the anger in his eyes. The pointer waited patiently, then Dad was on his knees hugging the animal.

It was the beginning of a warm and intimate friendship. Dad named the pointer Cheyenne. Together he and Cheyenne explored the community.They spent long hours walking down dusty lanes. They spent reflective moments on the banks of streams, angling for tasty trout. They even started to attend Sunday services together, Dad sitting in a pew and Cheyenne lying quietly at his feet.

Dad and Cheyenne were inseparable throughout the next three years.Dad’s bitterness faded, and he and Cheyenne made many friends. Then late one night I was startled to feel Cheyenne’s cold nose burrowing through our bed covers. He had never before come into our bedroom at night. I woke Dick, put on my robe and ran into my father’s room. Dad lay in his bed, his face serene. But his spirit had left quietly sometime during the night.

Two days later my shock and grief deepened when I discovered Cheyenne lying dead beside Dad’s bed. I wrapped his still form in the rag rug he had slept on. As Dick and I buried him near a favorite fishing hole, I silently thanked the dog for the help he had given me in restoring Dad’s peace of mind. The morning of Dad’s funeral dawned overcast and dreary. This day looks like the way I feel, I thought, as I walked down the aisle to the pews reserved for family. I was surprised to see the many friends Dad and Cheyenne had made filling the church. The pastor began his eulogy. It was a tribute to both Dad and the dog who had changed his life. And then the pastor turned to Hebrews 13:2. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers.””I’ve often thanked God for sending that angel,” he said.

For me, the past dropped into place, completing a puzzle that I had not seen before: The sympathetic voice that had just read the right article…Cheyenne’s unexpected appearance at the animal shelter. His calm acceptance and complete devotion to my father and the proximity of their deaths, and suddenly I understood, I knew that God had answered my prayers after all.

Life is too short for drama & petty things, so laugh hard, love truly and forgive quickly Live While You Are Alive. Tell the people you love that you love them, at every opportunity. Forgive now those who made you cry. You might not get a second time.

Enjoy,

Barbara

ps – some great friendship gifts!

Morning,

Check out what I recently read:

… Children are frightened by clown-themed decor in hospitals, a survey suggests. How did the smiley circus entertainers become a horror staple?

Anyone who has read Stephen King’s It would probably never choose to decorate a children’s ward with clowns.

And it probably comes as no surprise to horror fans that a University of Sheffield study of 250 children for a report on hospital design suggests the children find clown motifs “frightening and unknowable”. ….

…

But he believes children’s fear may be less to do with clowns per se and more to do with being unsettled by something as unusual-seeming as a clown.

“People are typically frightened by things which are wrong in some way, wrong in a disturbingly unfamiliar way,” Prof Salkovskis says.

“It is almost certainly not a reaction to clowns, but we are sensitive to things which are extraordinary, particularly sensitive when we are young. My three-year-old was terrified by Peter Rabbit at a B&Q. Peter Rabbit is six inches high, not seven feet high.”

And obviously it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to suppose that children in hospitals, away from home, in an unfamiliar environment and worried about their health or elements of the treatment, may be more nervous than usual….MORE…

What an interesting topic. So far, the only thing my kids have show a fear of about 6 years ago was the “ghost in the blackboard”, which was utterly decimated by taking them to said blackboard in the basement and letting them scribble/feel/turn upsidedown/etc. the school item. To this day, I have no idea how such an idea was generated. Anywhos, after that hands-on experiment, all fear for that disappeared.

I’m big on facing one’s fears. Last year I proactively chose to participate in a kendo match that gave fear a new meaning to me (probably because I had never been so petrified about being hurt before). I literally forced myself to go on, and at the aftermath, realized that hey! I survived! and even if I got pummeled up, I can always recover.

I take this attitude with me to self-defense classes, karate, etc. as well; my motto is, the more I’m forced to confront my fears, the more I’m forced out of my comfort zone, the more I’m pushed to the edge….the stronger I become.

Here are some resources I’ve found for you regarding kids’ phobias:

• Anxiety, fears and phobias
• Fighting Children’s fears
• Helping Children Stare Fear in the Face
• Children’s Fears

So now…what about you? How do you deal with your children’s fears? Do you stand by them as they confront them? Or do you let them get bigger and bigger in their minds until it incapacitates them?

Well?

It’s something about which to think,

Barbara

ps – here are some ways of dealing with phobias:

Morning,

As a parent, one of the things about which I’m always bemused is how other parents will excuse their children from excellence.

Now, I’m not talking about achieving a straight A average all the time, every time. Heck no! But I am talking about knowing what your child’s ability is…and then insisting on meeting that when push comes to shove.

For example, this morning my 6 year old showed me his math homework in which he neglected to finish the last two problems. “Mom”, whined he, “I didn’t see them!” Which, given the fact said two problems took up the entire page….is kinda sorta difficult to believe. Truth was, his desire to finish quickly and get back to the computer caused him to overlook the homework.

Now, my kids know…hand in something lousy, Mom rips it up. Luckily for him, I was folding clothing in the laundry and mulling over how I’m going to outlast the karate senseis today in boot camp…so I wasn’t really focused on being hardnosed. So I allowed him to rescue the paper before it was completely ripped, and fix up his errors.

Consequences! All kids need to know what the consequences are for poor performance. And it can’t be rigid….if a child fails because of other issues (other problems, angst, etc.), those have to be explored, validated and then dealt with.

Parenting has to be the toughest thing I’ve done in my life, period.

Yesterday we had a different challenge – my eldest daughter brought home an 84 in her Wordly Wise. Now, an 84 for my kid is like watching a black belt fail at a front kick, or a toddler fail at consuming a chocolate bar. It just doesn’t happen in my family…or it shouldn’t; English and Literature are things my family was born knowing.

So! My kid was banned from the computer for two days. Poor grades result always in computer bans (and sometimes additional housework). It’s the law in my household and when implemented, causes quite a lot of discussions.

But you know what? Once my kids get into college, they’ll have to rely upon their own abilities to deliver top-notch work. Mom won’t be there. And when they get out into the real world, they’ll have to step up to the plate and excel on their own. I’d be a lousy parent if I didn’t start that character-building at this age when it’s easy to internalize.

So….if you’re a parent, tell your kids your expectations! The final grade doesn’t matter – it’s the honest effort that’s put in at this age that counts. I’ve rewarded my kids for poor performance when I know they’ve done the very best effort they could….not everyone will excel, every time.

But you’ll have given them the tools to always deliver to the best of their abilities. And that, of course, is a very precious gift indeed.

Enjoy,

Barbara

ps – Need some homework helpers? Enjoy!

Morning,

This was from the New York Times – fascinating!!

…

It’s not just the content of our moral judgments that is often questionable, but the way we arrive at them. We like to think that when we have a conviction, there are good reasons that drove us to adopt it. That is why an older approach to moral psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral conclusions. But consider these situations, originally devised by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

• Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that – was it O.K. for them to make love?
• A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.
• A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner.

Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It’s not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren’t. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

The gap between people’s convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either…..MORE….

Fascinating, no? Let’s now take this and apply it to our children. How are you teaching morality? Heck, forget that question and answer this….is your morality “the right one”? Is it the one others respect? Is it something that, when passed down, will give your children tools to make a better life for themselves?

Well?

Here are some helpful resources that I’ve found for you:

• Morality, ethics, manners
• Copyright morality – Kids Don’t Care
• Moral development of children

So now you tell me. What do you think?

Enjoy,

Barbara

ps – Here are some useful resources for helping kids’ self esteem as well.

Morning,

I was sent this via email this morning, and can really appreciate it. Please share it around!

Just keep this in mind the next time you want to make a donut shop joke or wonder where the cops are as another driver does something you don’t like.

You wonder why he pulled you over and gave you a ticket for speeding.

He just worked an accident were people died because they were going too fast.
_________________________

You wonder why that cop was so mean.

He just got done working a case where a drunk driver killed a kid.
____________________________________________

You work for 8 hours.

He works for up to 18 hours.
_________________________

You drink hot coffee to stay awake.

The cold rain in the middle of the night keeps him awake.
__________________________

You complain of a ‘headache’, and call in sick.

He goes into work still hurt and sore from the guy he had to fight the night before.
__________________________

You drink your coffee on your way to the mall.

He spills his as he runs code to a traffic crash with kids trapped inside.
_____________ _____________

You make sure your cell phone is in your pocket before you leave the house.

He makes sure his gun is clean and fully loaded and his vest is tight.
__________________________

You talk trash about your ‘buddies’ that aren’t with you.

He watches his buddy get shot at and wounded in front of him.
__________________________

You walk down the beach, staring at all the pretty girls or the handsome men.

He walks down the highway looking for body parts from a traffic crash.
_________________________

You complain about how hot it is.

He wears fifty pounds of gear and a bullet proof vest in the middle of July and still runs around chasing drunks and addicts to keep you and your family safe.
__________________________

You go out to lunch, and complain because the restaurant got your order wrong.

He runs out before he gets his food to respond to an armed robbery.
__________________________

You get out of bed in the morning and take your time getting ready.

He gets called out of bed at 2 am after working 12 hours and has to be into work ASAP for a traffic homicide
__________________________

You go to the mall and get your hair redone.

He holds the hair of some college girl while she’s puking in the back of his patrol car.
__________________________

You’re angry because your class ran 5 minutes over.

His shift ended 4 hours ago and there’s no end in sight
__________________________

You spend the holidays with your family and friends.

He sees his for moments if he’s lucky to have that time with them at all.
__________________________

You yell and scream at the squad car that just past you because they slowed you down.

He’s in the driver seat of the squad car, going to cut somebody out of their car only to find out that they’re dead when he gets there.
__________________________

You roll your eyes when a baby cries in public.

He picks up a dead child in his arms and prays that it is crying.
__________________________

You criticize your police dept and say they’re never there quick enough.

He blasts the siren while the person in front of him refuses to move while talking on their cell phone and doing their makeup.
__________________________

You hear the jokes about fallen officers and say they should have known better.

He is a hero and runs into situations when everyone else is running away in order to make sure no one else gets hurt and loses his life doing it.

__________________________

You are asked to go to the store by your parents. You don’t.

He would take a bullet for his buddy without question.
__________________________

You sit there and judge him, saying that it’s a waste of money to have them around.

Yet as soon as you need help he is there.
___________________________

If you support your local police officers, repost this with a ‘An Officer’s Life’ and send it to your friends.

If you don’t support your police officers, well, then don’t repost. It’s not like you care any way…

Also shout out to the men and women of the Fire Departments, EMS and Dispatchers as well. Without all these divisions, public safety wouldn’t be available!!!!

Thank you to everyone involved, and may each and everyday, everyone in their career come home safely….

Enjoy,

Barbara

ps – Some police officer goodies!