Month: July 2015 (Page 2 of 3)

Arm Wrestling Fear & Making Memories (A Re-Do)

Much love and conversation gathered around yesterday’s post on making memories, not money. Thanks. And while I believe my words to be true, I’m also wrestling with another feeling. I would compare it to a doctor who diagnosed you with pneumonia and even said it might be life threatening and sent you home with instructions but withheld the fact that the pneumonia would be much easier to beat if your body wasn’t dealing with AIDS.*

You see, pointing to consumerism was my easy way out. When I sat down to write, to shake out those thoughts and feelings, I held up the first shiny thing for all to see. I didn’t dig deep enough. When I finally did, the gem required a bit of polishing. My goal in this space is primarily to give honest writing. Yesterday wasn’t untruthful; it simply wasn’t the whole story.

So what is sitting wrong with me when it comes to contemporary memory making? If you’re a modern parent, it has to do with our hands. Take a look at them. Notice the knuckles. For most of us, they’re a tad white. On the other side, we might even find metaphorical blisters from hanging on too tight.

Did you catch that in Inside Out? When we dip into the mind of the adult characters, who was in charge? Who shined most brightly? Which feeling did the others turn to when things got crazy? Anger. Fear. Even Disgust was as large as Joy. I don’t think Pixar was being mean, I think they were being honest.

Being a parent is a hard gig. We love so much. When it comes to raising little humans, so there is so much room for fear. Sometimes, rightful fear. We should fear toddlers alone by the water. And by the road. And in the car. (Clearly, toddlers anywhere is a justifiable cause for fear.) Yet I say, it’s not fear itself that is the problem – it’s what we do with the fear.

When Pixar invites me to write the sequel – in which Riley goes into puberty and a new emotion, Humiliation, shows up – I would portray the parents trying to entertain Fear by having him arm wrestle with Sense of Control. Sense of Control cannot actually touch the motherboard. She just occupies time and energy with all the other emotions by challenging them to arm wrestling competitions.

It happens from the moment we find out that a little peanut is growing inside of us – we arm wrestle with fear by avoiding a turkey sandwich. When the little one arrives and we have to drive him home from the hospital and we want to put a laser force field around the car to warn everyone on I-270 to stay the F*&^ away, my brand new baby is in here! so we pacify ourselves with the fact that we did our research on the safest car seats possible and we bought the one with the highest ratings, the most expensive model, but our “baby’s safety is worth it.”

Or we get stuck in the Food Vortex. We simply want our children to grow up healthy and give them long lives without fibromyalgia. This is a good and noble cause. I will support you in avoiding the HFCS and GMOs and anything else we cannot pronounce. But can we call a spade a spade? We’re not just “giving our children a healthy start” – we’re arm wrestling fear.

So now that I’ve told you about the life-altering disease, let’s get back to the current state of pneumonia and how our generation sets out to Make Memories. We venture out and pay the $74.95 because we fear we’re not living a good enough life. We want to Make All the Memories because we want to send our children away with something – anything! – that will bring happiness later on. That same sense of happiness we were given. But our mothers forgot to write down how they did it and because there were no blogs in 1982 we’re stuck reading all the car seat reviews on our own. (This, and the fact that they didn’t use car seats.)

I’m going to hypothesize here and reserve the right to edit it later. Our parents were clueless about the dangers of the world and parenting in general. Thus, the lack of car seats. And setting us up for an addiction to Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. But in their obliviousness, they were free from the fear of doing it wrong. They were free to worry less about giving their children All of the Memories and instead focused on things like having a good life, being a good friend and staying in love. At least, it seems that’s what happened with my parents. And grandparents. And for that matter, most of the adults in my life while I was growing up.

When I scan through my list of memories from yesterday – and the ones pointed out by others later – my grandparents didn’t sit down and play endless rounds of Skip-Bo because they wanted to give me a happy childhood. They loved playing the game. They did things they loved and invited us along with them.

In the end, we cannot manufacture happy memories for our children. We simply can’t. We could wake up every day with the intention of Going and Making a Memory (instead of buying one) but ultimately it’s up to some unknown brain cell god if the magical moment we’ve tried to conjure will actually lock down into long term.

The one thing we can do is give our children joy-driven parents. We are the only ones who can do that for my kids. I will never be able to create a Magical Childhood. But with fear silenced, I can be free to realize I don’t have to. This world is magical enough without me at the helm. There’s a Creator who’s much better at that job.

My job is to live a good life and invite my children to sit beside me. My job is to love JJ so much and so obviously that my kids want to someday get married. My job is to be a devoted sister and sister-in-law so that my kids will want to have those kinds of siblings (and, hopefully when full cognition is a go, be those kinds of siblings). My job is to be the kind of daughter that will inspire my kids to live in close relationship with their parents. My job is to be the kind of employee and employer that will make my kids believe that work is a privilege and a joy, not a punishment. My job is to be the kind of student of life that will encourage my kids to follow the curiosity and ask the questions that spurs creativity. My job is to live in awe of God so my children want to live lives that include Him.

In short, I don’t need to create a magical world, one that shields my children from the horrors of this world. I don’t need to Make Memories to block out the bad stuff.  I simply need to point out the beauty of the things right beside them, the things we all believe make living this life so worth it.

We don’t need to make memories and we don’t need to fear a life that isn’t good enough because life is beautiful and memorable on its own if you see it for what it is.

So, may you – may we – silence fear. May we stop “making” memories and instead enjoy the beauty that life already has to offer.

 

 

*In the world of bad simile, cancer gets the headlines. But too many people I love already hate cancer. I’m an equal-opportunity writer when it comes to using shitty diseases. If anyone out there keeps a running list of ailments that slowly destroys your body, feel free to share and I’ll add to my list.

The memory making machine

Of growing up at home, I remember:

  • Playing dolls in the living room while my mother worked (the shop was basically the front porch at that time). I set my doll on top of the kerosene heater and it went up in flames. She put out the fire. The doll went into the trash.
  • Hours spent playing outside, just my sister and I. We climbed the huge farm gas tanks behind the barn. The little one was there first, a silver tank. We pretended it was a horse and named it Silver. Then this HUGE one arrived (I believe for diesel). It was also silver, but that name was taken, so the the mammoth “horse” was named Goldie. These two horses lived just yonder of Kitty Peak, a small pile of dirt where one of our barn cats birthed her kittens.
  • Convincing our friend Katie that Gummie Bears lived in our front tree.
  • Spending entire weekends on the couch, reading.

Of family vacations, I remember:

  • The long drives and finishing my homework for a week in the car on the way down.
  • The time my mom forgot her purse under the bench at the bus stop in Pigeon Forge and my dad sprinted back to the hotel to find it.
  • Spending lunchtime each day in Puerta Vallarta watching the time share salesman attempt another deal. We said it was better than our usual The Young & The Restless lunchtime show.
  • Every time we left the country, someone thought my sister and I were twins. Even despite the hair color, height, eye color and general face dissimilarities…. twins?
  • Learning to ski in Cumberland. Don said I couldn’t get back in the boat until I got up on skis. I got up the next time. (I subsequently got bored of the boat pulling me around and spent the follow up trips to Cumberland curled up in the front of the boat with a book. That’s my idea of vacation.)

Of time with my grandparents, I remember:

  • Grandma letting us pick out 3 kinds of cereal for our 3 day stay.
  • Riding to the lake and fighting about who got to ride “on the hump” while we listened to the Oldsmobile song on repeat. (Which was in a tape player, so it was the old rewind, stop, listen, rewind some more, stop, listen, rewind, stop, To Far!, Fast Forward, Oh Just Stop Here, method.)
  • When Rebecca put on some of grandma’s make-up and it was burning her face and we had to go to the neighbor, Jenny’s house to find grandma so she could tell us to wash it off with Pond’s.
  • Playing Hide the Thimble.
  • Grandma Cella’s homemade waffles. (I’m noticing a trend around the breakfast food theme of my memories here…)
  • Going camping and playing on the playground. I fell through the huge hole in the middle where you climb up and down and it knocked the wind out of me. I cried. A lot. I think this is why I hate camping.

These are a sampling of my memories, what comes to mind first. There are more, of course, but I don’t want to bore you with the non-poignant parts of my 35 years on this earth. For some reason, (we can probably blame Inside Out, though this has been brewing for some time) I’ve been pondering the ways in which memories are made. It’s probably because the past month has been spent doing one of two things: moving or vacationing.

I appreciate our culture’s sentiment at wanting to value the time with people we love over material things. A quick scan of Pinterest will give you all the wall hangings (our generation’s version of the cross-stitched pillow) with sayings about making memories, not money. I say to this, Cheers! I’m in wholehearted agreement.

Yet something about the approach is amiss. These memories we wish to make seem a bit contrived. Forced. Our culture’s general approach at Making Memories Not Money is to spend money as an attempt to buy a few memories. We go on this trip. We try that excursion. We bring home the t-shirt, the stuffed doll and the photo of us making the 9000 foot drop. And we ask the children their favorite part and it’s doing the monkey bars in the play area that looks exactly like our smallest city park.

Ask my small group, I’m all about “creating space” for the magic to happen. Slowing down, providing opportunity, the pause in the middle. If we don’t prioritize time with family and friends, these memories will probably never exist.

Creating space and buying the all-inclusive package,* however, are two different things. The problem with going into an event with the hope of Making Memories is that you’re ultimately buying a product. You fork out the $72.95 and spend the time, and now you want the memories. Remember when? And how we?

Memories aren’t made with purchases. They aren’t even created in the Big Events.  They’re not created in the rushing through of the outing, making sure to have “family day” and “date night” and hashtagging the Instagrams appropriately.**

Actual memories are formed when we’re fully present to the moment, not by the moment encompassing all attributes of perfection. The lighting doesn’t have to be right. We rarely catch it on camera. And if we ask our kids, chances are the memories will rarely involve what we think.

The only thing I remember about Disney World was my complete disappointment with Cinderella’s castle (a hallway? seriously?!) and the fact that my sister did not want to ride Space Mountain and it was a long line, so we didn’t. That’s what I took away from the Most Magical Place on Earth.

But the rest of the trip to Florida? I remember riding my grandparents’ 3-wheeled bicycles around and around the park they lived. I remember shuffle board. I remember sitting on their make-shift porch with strings of bright lights around the canopy. I remember watching Hee-Haw and Green Acres with complete confusion.

I’m not sure how do this memory-making thing right. I know my kids will make their own memories of our time, no matter what we provide. I simply hope that I don’t live under the guise that because we went to All of the Places and Did All of the Things and Bought All of the T-shirts (<- that will never happen, I’m too cheap), that their memories will be Big and Amazing and Wow.

Perhaps that’s the goal? Remembering what memories are and what they do. It’s not a competition. At the end of our life, we won’t be sitting around comparing vacation stories and passport stamps. We won’t recall itineraries of our vacations, the things planned and lived. We’ll remember the people we spent them with and how they made us feel.

 

*I just went on an all-inclusive vacation. It was delightful. This is not a statement of all expensive things are bad.
**I have done all of these things. Don’t read it as a statement of blame. They are not bad things.

What I loved about Inside Out

Rainy days are meant for this: popcorn & Pixar. With the rave reviews and promises of tears, we loaded up the van for Inside Out. I did not leave disappointed. Here’s what I loved:

1. Joy works hard. That scene where she’s stuck in forgotten memories? Oh, goodness. She’s a scrappy gal and simply won’t give up. She’s got too much love for her girl. I want that kind of Joy in my life, the unrelenting, won’t-let-go, get-it-done kind of Joy. Joy that digs deep, flies high and thinks creatively.

2. Sadness is needed. Sorry for the spoiler, but it turns out that with change, sometimes sadness is what keeps the memories alive. And when sadness begins to touch everything? Those are the parts where the blood still runs warm and the feelings are felt. Don’t fear sadness; fear numbness.

3. Anger is a tool. Hands down, the kids’ favorite part involved Anger burning a hole in the glass. Obviously Anger couldn’t get done what Joy could, but sometimes Anger lets in the other feelings. Perhaps not the best driver, but necessary companion.

4. The train of thought derails. Genius! Oh, you writers: you need to win all of the awards! Especially when those feelings of anger, fear and disgust take control, the Train of Thought stops functioning. What an incredible lesson for me as a parent, when often both myself and my kids begin acting in ways that simply don’t make sense. These emotions can’t handle the Train of Thought.

5. The real life implications. No one told me, when they mentioned how great the movie was or how I would cry, that it would be a direct parallel to my current life situation. The inciting incident of the plotline? The family moves. Seriously, friends. A warning would’ve been nice. Although my much-younger children aren’t likely to encounter the exact changes of Riley, emotions get shaken up. I walked away reminding myself to check in, to let sadness sometimes be the connection to Family Island, but most of all, never assume that a smile means Joy knows what she’s doing.

Thank you, Pixar, for yet another fabulous hour and a half of my life.

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