Fire And Ice

All couples have "fires". They can flare up suddenly sometimes and things are said that are incendiary. Emotions are high. These sorts of fights are dangerous and sometimes what is said hardens into concrete and cracks a good relationship asunder. Other times, when the heat cools, regret and common sense enter, and arguments may be considered more objectively. It would be  good if this were always the case, but life isn't perfect. When the matter of discussion does arrive after a set to, the ashes have to be sorted through to find salvageable reasons to keep the relationship going. Or not. This is the crucial moment when parties have to give and receive so that matters can be solved and spirits calmed. Even if the discussion leads to a decision to part, both people have had their say and can move on without hidden issues that might fester and cause pain later. First come the rules for reviewing. These are taking turns, not interrupting, calling names or blaming and the last, negotiating a resolution.  Sounds easy. It isn't. Taking turns is worst. To sit quietly and listen to someone tell you what they feel about what you did and it being not at all what you thought, is hard. But wait. You will have your turn. Also to focus  on reporting your own feelings and not bringing in blame is tough. Here's where the give and take come in. The give is allowing someone to express their side freely. The take isn't much different. It means that you must take part of the responsibility when they report. Often times, in fact most of the time, there is a reason why someone else does what he/she does, good or bad, and you are, in some way, even a small one, part of it. (We are not speaking of abuse but only average quarrels in relationships. In abuse, there is only one side, and an unfair one.) After each listening to the other, each  states how they feel the issue should be solved. Again taking turns. Together, a solution has to be hammered out and agreed to.  Listening is the key. This is the negotiating period. You may have to make a compromise and not have matters all your way.  In the end, if you can do this, you will come out a winner. Best of all you may save your relationship while learning more about the true reasons why you entered it in the first place.

Fear of Truth

Most of us have a fear of truth. Not the little truths. They're easy to cope with, but the big ones that suddenly reveal something that had never entered your mind.  This kind of truth shocks and stuns and causes a lot of collateral damage. You know the kind. How do you get over this sort of truth? It takes courage that has to be fostered and nourished and grown. What constitutes this harmful kind of truth? It can be that you are fired from your job. Maybe your marriage is over.  Perhaps you found out a mortal illness is now in your life. Or your best friend has betrayed you. Those will do for a start. So how do you get past this? There seems no other answer than Time. No wonder Time is portrayed as a very old man with a long white beard and a worn and weary look on his face. The initial shock of learning the truth causes numbness at the beginning. It's a staring-into-space kind of reaction initially. Then comes the anger, next, sadness and finally, the realization that the clock ticks on and relentless Time stops for no one. He plods on with you dragging at his ankles. Letting go is too hard but being dragged isn't easy either. At some point, you have to let go and find your own way. That's when things can turn either negative or positive. Your choice. Others can't do this for you. Reality being what it is, there is little sympathy and the empathy crowd won't touch it either - unless gowned and gloved. What you are left with is yourself. You will have to get to know that reflection in the mirror and if you are a planner, now is the time.  You can walk along with Time but in your own way. Assess your state and soothe your wounds with a plan.  It should be about you only because it began with you. Revenge will complicate matters and give you added problems to work out. What are you going to do to turn something bad into something "okay". I didn't say good or perfect. Doesn't work that way. Perfection is seldom born out of disaster no matter what Pollyanna says. Make small steps at first to be easy on yourself. Maybe it is just taking a Time Out somewhere nice: a bench in the park, a cafe cappuccino or playing the piano. Start at the shallow end and work your way out. Before you know it, don't look back, you'll be swimming!

Widow World - Alone/Lonely

There is a difference between being lonely and being alone. Most widows suffer from aloneness and not always loneliness. When you've lived cheek to jowl with someone a good part of your life, day in and day out, the worst feeling is aloneness. No one can fix that. Your kids, your friends, your workmates cannot cure aloneness. The person with whom you shared almost every moment both awake and asleep, is not there any more. It isn't like breaking up or divorce where you might have contact with the missing individual perhaps. Nothing is going to bring your former partner back. It is another learning experience of the many widows endure. This kind of aloneness is not fillable with a band aid patch like joining a group or immersing oneself into an activity. Aloneness is like a deep, painful wound that does eventually, after a certain period of time, heal and while the scar remains, the pain will subside. At first, every time you come through your front door and stop yourself from calling out "I'm home", aloneness descends. And then comes the time when you suddenly realize you did come through the door and forgot to think about the "I'm home" and you have hung up your coat and put on your slippers and found yourself by yourself without pain. You have arrived. You find you can move about your space more easily and that you have discovered your own ways of doing things. When you assess how far you have come in your new life, you begin to feel a sense of being in a new place, yours alone. This is your home and you are the you that stands alone and does it rather well, you think.  If you have come to that state,  "a long way baby",  you may congratulate yourself. You have coped, you have returned to the woman you lost - in a nice way -  a long time ago.

Widow Aware - Learning Survival

There is a learning curve for new widows and it is one that heads upward, not down. If you are like me, you will have depended on your husband to do many things that have now landed in your lap. These matters are not choices, they are must-dos. You can hie off into a corner and weep about it and cry out for help but you will be happier if you try to do them yourself. I recall a co-worker whose mother was calling him constantly to come over and help her. "Help" is a misnomer. She wanted him to do it: call the roofer,  the mechanic,  the plumber. She pleaded that she didn't know how to ask. Frankly, I don't think she made a single attempt and each time that her kindly son went running off to "help" her, his mother prevented herself from learning. A wise son would have had her do the task while he stood in the cheering section. As it was, he found himself, a man with a wife and three of his own children, spending a good part of every weekend, working for his "helpless" mother. They ended up building a house for her next door. And guess who built it?  Of course, there are tasks that require a man but these days of electronics and communications networks, women can do most everything a man can if they put their minds to it. You, the widow, will make mistakes and feel frustrated but eventually you will  drive the city, do the finances, fill out the tax forms and learn how to get estimates. Each time you are successful, you are a winner. This doesn't mean you have to trade in your feminism but it does mean that you will become much happier being independent than standing around wringing your hands watching someone else doing the job that should be yours. I find that women are far more resourceful in their ways of doing things than men. Often a man insists he needs a specific tool to do a repair or it can't be done at all, while a woman looks around and improvises and finds a quicker way to accomplish the task. The result may not look as ideal at first, but it will improve with time and practice. I found screwdrivers mystifying, for example, but then I remembered that young boys have them put in their hands early in their lives by fathers in the workshop while girls are helping mom do the laundry. Most of the time, boys had all of their lives to learn  but you are just starting. Don't give away your man's tools. Keep them, you'll need them. Get a good all round handyman book. How do you caulk a shower or repair a leaky tap? What is needed to unclog a drain or fix a toilet tank that won't stop running? If you must hire, get recommendations and estimates. Select the best tradesman and not who is the "nicest".
When work is necessary, "nice" is not key. Get a price and make sure it includes everything. Taking the car in for service checks, ask beforehand if what they say must be done is necessary and why. Get a price. Then check that with someone who knows about these things before you have the work done. When it is finished, make sure it's satisfactory and if not, don't pay until it is. You will find some very "nice" people out there who see widows as golden geese. One doesn't want to become cynical but now you run the show, so run it right. It's a matter of survival.

Not Really Alone -Widow Paper Work

The paper work required after a death is not fun. It can't all be done on-line or by phone. Some of it needs to happen in an office where you may have to stand in line and then slap down one of your many certified death certificates (and get one or two more than you think you need) to complete your business. Few government offices are private. For some interesting reason, banks and other like places in which you do "private" business, think that the cute little dividers created of plywood between clients are sound-proof ! Amazingly blind concept. But, you develop a kind of armor and somehow get through the legalities. It's best to take along a friend or if they can stop telling you "what you should do is", a relative. (Sometimes relatives want to help too much and here you are trying to become your new independent self and they are, "for you own good", offering their "helpful" input. What they often do not realize is that too much help is worse than none at all.) You forge on and save your weeping breaks for when you have time. It all sounds perfectly awful to those who haven't had to do it, but the truth is always a tad ugly. The good part is that each time you get past one of these legal steps, you become stronger and more able to continue growing into your own self. Remember that woman you once were before marriage, the one with all of her spirit of accomplishment and hope? Of course, you can put everything into a lawyer's hands and pay for it, but the majority of people these days, prefer to learn how to DIY. You learn more. I found that most people behind business counters were more than helpful and patient. And speaking of time, take it. Allow yourself quiet periods not to grieve, but to look at how well you are doing and to enjoy your time with yourself, knowing that you are climbing over the hardest thing you have ever done in your lifetime and how proud your husband, in your "other life", would be of you. Way to go, girl!

When You're A Widow- Take Charge

For the next while, this blog will be about "when" you are a widow. Not "if" but "when". Most of us women, will be widows because nature provided that we, the stronger of a couple, will last longer because we are the half that will be able to handle it best. Widowers don't fare as well. They are more dependent upon having a woman "do" for them while we women whether we are career women or not, are copers. We cope with bearing and caring for children while taking most of the burden of running the household, plus a job or career, in most cases. And while you may run screaming around that it isn't so, that your spouse does equal time, that honestly isn't the way I see it happening. But I must admit there are some widowers out there who do take on the role of everywoman, so listen in guys if you are one of them. First there is a death and if you think you can hie off to some corner to weep all day long, the answer is no. There is just too much to do and it begins with day one of your widowhood. Whether you have  family that hovers over you, you are the person who must make the decisions about what to do with "the body". It comes down to the hard facts just like that term, "the body". Your man, the one who took care of you all those years and headed up the household for the most part or was your hand-in-hand partner is no longer there and the buck stops at you. Those are the facts. Reality sets in very quickly. There are papers to sign and send off. The dining table soon becomes the repository for all the paper work that must be done within a time frame. The memorial service or funeral are your decision along with that of your family but my advice is to grab hold of the reins right off. Take the advice "under consideration" and do it your way. You are the principal, not your kids or other relatives. It is your time, your grief and your responsibility. It is also a time when emotions run high and here you are the one most affected but it is your ability to hold it together that will carry all the others through. Let's hope that your close ones will respect your way of doing things because you are the one who will have to live with the results while they go on with their own lives when the dust settles. No pun intended.  Some women fall apart and that's okay, too, but when the tears stop for awhile, there is work to be done and it is your work. The tax department, the pension committee, the insurance companies, the land titles office, the credit card companies and on and on, all demand their due. If you have  a good funeral plan, the folks working there will help you with a kit they sell for a price that is worth every cent. They know what is required because they are the professionals, the experts. Make sure you can trust them, of course. So there is lesson one. Take charge, even if you have never done so previously. It is hard but not impossible. Millions of women have been right where you are. You are not alone.

In Other Words

The main matter of words is to communicate. While usage rules  make language meanings clearer, they don't necessarily need to be followed slavishly in order to get a message across.  There was a time when spelling was phonetic, thus however people heard a word, they wrote it down and no one worried whether it was the same way that anyone else did it or not. There must have been some confusion because scholars came along eventually and said, we have to apply rules, if for nothing else, safety. They didn't want a grocery list to be interpreted as a beheading. Thus came out a tome that insisted we all spell and use words the same way to be correct. Teachers of language and writing, finally had something solid to follow, and follow it they did. Remember the Spelling Tests of yore? Words of the week were dictated and went onto long strips of foolscap (interesting word in itself), neatly numbered down the side and what the teacher called out, you wrote next to the appropriate number. While this might seem ungainly, it worked pretty well since you studied the same old words five days each week to prepare for Friday's test. It seemed that writing out the word five or six times was the thing to do. Of course, we had to put them into sentences at some point. Then came the rules of usage or Grammar.  These were usually generated through Work Books in which you filled in blanks with the appropriate part of speech that was supplied on the top line.  Punctuation was supposed to assist one to make expression clearer. It took me a long time to determine the comma, the colon and the semi-colon and exactly where they should be placed and when, but the period was a cinch. Even today the best scientists or engineers are not necessarily great spellers. Then again, some of the worst folks are excellent writers. The bottom line is ideas and how to get them into someone else's head. Those who use sign language seem to have the best grip on that. Their whole body performs the task exquisitely while their mouths get into it as well. You have the idea and with dramatic expression to boot: something the written word doesn't always convey.

That Teacher Stuff

Nouns are words that name people, places and things while adjectives do the job of describing and telling how the former may appear. It is easy to remember, but sometimes there is a mix-up or just simple carelessness or ignorance and people use the name as a place. And that's okay if we are speaking of the vernacular that most of us use everyday. But that doesn't make language right. When you say, I am going to the doctor's, what you really mean is that you are going to the doctor's office or clinic and there, you will see the doctor. Doctor is a noun. The doctor is not a place, he/she is a person. The other word "doctor's" refers to a place and is an adjective describing where the doctor has his/her offices. The two are not the same. One is a person and the other is a place.Then there is the ever present misuse of don't and doesn't and so on and on. These kinds of usage often cause the corrected to become defensive and rant that pedantry is used while the corrector, pleads that while that may be so, it doesn't change the language. Some folks are more particular than others and that's okay either way. Becoming offended at being corrected or imagining that you are being corrected is another thing. Teachers hear this all the time even when they are not correcting someone, their own correct usage is fodder for the one who is in error and embarrassed, charges pedantry or worse. If you know someone well and want to help them correct their mistakes, you might tell them privately but even there, in my experience, you tread on dangerous ground. The safest tactic is to let them go on sounding blissfully ignorant while biting your lip! Ouch.

Extinction vs Distinction

Being unique can be dangerous. Schools of aquatic creatures know this. Swimming madly in their watery "balls" of fin and flipper, they hope not to meet the teeth of their predators by being part of a synonymous crowd, we call safety-in-numbers. But being a singularly identifiable member within, like a red herring, invites only trouble. The uniform came along to effect the business of keeping a low target profile in the military. No one stands out other than those at the top of that hierarchy. Destroying ones individualism is the first lesson on the first day of joining any "club". One for all and all for one - if you can find it. More and more are we subject to becoming non-unique. Keeping up with the Joneses, the must-have generation fetish of wearing labels inside out, ditto development structures with  rules of occupation for-your-own-good, uniforms of any kind, gang life, educationally  "brain" enhanced babies, no-stuff "clean" designer decor, professional terminology, business behavioral workshops, franchised stores, gymns with occupied rows of treadmills : the jump-on-the-bandwagon list goes on endlessly to prove that we are all mere small fish opting more and more to swim in big circles so that we don't "stand out" and have to explain ourselves as individuals.  Blend in, is the advice. Street people with their free wheeling baskets and carts of strange belongings and their choice of sleeping outside "the box",  are, alas, the last of the originals.