There's Something I Have To Tell You

It often amazes me how crucial life lessons are more likely to come from wretched events than from delightful moments.  Take, for example, a sensitive 1997 conversation I initiated with a key person in my life ~ ~ one I totally & completely gummed up, but yielded lessons that guide me to this day. 

Background:  There was a very sensitive topic involving money ~ one of the most touchy of all subjects under the face of the sun ~ and family.  Mega powder keg combination!  And I did what, it turns out, most people do.  I brought it up entirely in the wrong way, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.  sigh….

Afterward, clueless as to how it had all had fallen to pieces, I did what I’ve always done in that sort of situation – research what I could have, should have done differently.  Maybe I would have had the same result ~ an uproar that reverberates to this day –  had I known then what I know now, but at least I would have the comfort of knowing it had been approached with due delicacy & keener empathy. 

So, what did I learn?

Surprise!

To my surprise, I discovered that apparently a shocking number of people do exactly what I did – bring up intensely sensitive topics unannounced, at precisely the worst possible, most typically at a party or other social event.   Totally relate to that – brought it up, out of the blue, during a party.

Why do a stunning number of totally well-intentioned people bring topics they’d rather avoid altogether up in utterly inappropriate settings?  It’s simple – the other person, the one you’re terrified of upsetting but you feel needs to hear your message, is unable to get upset. 

Not that we think that outright.  We don’t say to ourselves, “I’ll bring this up at so & so’s birthday party because he won’t be able to go through the roof or attempt to box my ears.”  But deep down, it seems to be what we are subconsciously thinking.

Wrong Time, Wrong Place

Mom & Dad were masters of delivering shocking news or asking massively delicate questions in ham-fisted, poorly timed, inappropriate settings.   They became so well known for it, my oldest brother, Peter, said he got to the point where he dreaded a dinner invitation from them, wondering what was going to come up. 

Frankly, there are some subjects that should never come up.  Peter & Pam certainly should have reconsidered inviting his teen-aged baby sister (me) out to Pittsburgh to help them with a move, during which – at dinner in a Shadyside restaurant, over chocolate cream pie – Pam informed her adoring sister-in-law, that she was compelled to inform me of my latent lesbianism, which (as she explained) might go undetected in cloistered Bryn Athyn but would be picked up by predatory others when I went away to college. 

Yeah, that’s the sort of thing you want to bring up over dessert. 

Am, to this, day proud that I kept my composure and calmly asked a couple questions.  Pam, what drew you to this interesting conclusion?  It was the only explanation she could come up with for why I didn’t date & hung out at the girls’ dorm. (In my high school, guys were notoriously bad about asking girls out AND everyone hung out at Glenn Hall).  Peter, what do you think? He agreed with Pam (the rat), 

Praise be, I was comfortable enough in my own skin (even at 17) to realize they were both crackers.   

Naturally, Dad & Mom compounded the situation by postponing their (naturally outraged) response, instead scheduling a dinner date at one of Peter & Pam’s favorite restaurants, with nary a mention of the incident or their reaction. 

Would Have, Should Have

I do not bring this up to pillory Peter & Pam & my parents, but because it turns out that what they did was what most people would have done.  Almost 25 years later, I did much the same in my communication debacle.

So, all that aside, what have I learned over the past 15+ years about better ways to bring up tough subjects without going into a nose dive?

The most important first thing to consider – is this sensitive situation genuinely  worth lifting up into an open issue?   Is there a potential positive outcome to talking about it, or would it just make you feel better?  One way to figure this out is to talk it over FIRST with a neutral person capable of a subjective viewpoint.  Friends are usually not a good choice, as they’re already rooting for you.  Over the years, I’ve sought insights from ministers & counselors, authors & online experts. 

With the $$ issue back in 1997, I turned to Mom & Mim, who were surprised I’d thought twice about it – bringing it up seemed to them like common sense, especially as it involved someone sniped quite a lot about the family tendency to kept their heads in the sand rather than deal with uncomfortable issues.  Still uncertain, I forged ahead.

Which brings up a second key point – pay attention to your own instincts.  If others give the go to bring up a delicate subject, but something deep inside keeps saying, “I don’t know….”, pay attention to that inner voice.  I thought mine was just trying to duck out of a possibly difficult moment.  No – it knew better.

Perhaps THE most important point – pick the right time & place.  Not at a party.  The best approach is to let the person know you have something important to discuss, then set up a time & place to do just that.  Do not, whatever you do, get sucked into talking about it before the set time & place.  No matter what they say or how plaintively they cajole, just say, “I’ll tell you about it then.” 

Sensitive discussions are never easy.  It is human nature to avoid them as much as possible.  Sometimes, we end up delaying them due to factors outside of our control.  Sometimes, it’s due to avoidance.  Some discussions should never happen - period.  Mine, the one I totally gummed up, was an important one that went terribly wrong due to my bungling – wrong time, wrong place, wrong way.

No Easy Answers

I wish that I could give good advice on how to bring up difficult topics, how to had a tough conversation about a sensitive subject.  If attempts to bring up powder keg topics have blown up in your face, there’s help out yonder.  Check out the internet, look for books like Charles Foster’s  There’s Something I Have to Tell You – how to communicate difficult news in tough situations,” talk to personal communications counselor.  Do it now, before another potentially explosive situation comes up. 

And remember – if there are times you have to bring up tough topics with others, there are times they have to do the same with you.  Be willing to listen & discuss, realize that feeling might get heated but that doesn’t mean they need to explode, don’t fly off at the handle or turn it into an opportunity to unload a lifetime of unacknowledged slights & injuries.  And be willing, if it doesn’t go well, to let the other person off the hook.  

If you can do that, you deserve 5 gold stars for a core life lesson learned!

Bit by Bit

Have nailed my breath work for five days in a row - a mega achievement!  Taking a well-earned bow...

Life is so deliciously exciting.  Just discovered someone who develops science workshops for seniors (in groups) - and she lives in Media, "everyone's hometown"!!  Just a hop, skip, and 60 minutes from here!

Bit by bit, it's come together.  My thanks to my friends, to John for displaying the same endless patience that the Universe has shown, and the same constant inspiration & wise words.
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Gotta Go

Jeremy's sermon today was based on a passage from Spiritual Experiences (aka Spiritual Diary).  In discussing it with a friend who's about as steeped in the Writings as anyone on the planet, I learned that the majority of today's G.C. clergy believes that ANYTHING Swedenborg wrote is considered divinely inspired.  Including the Spiritual Diary and Earths & the Universe.  

Earths & the Universe?  Seriously??

Am so outta there. It's time.  

There are many beautiful teachings in the Writings which are part & parcel of my faith, but they are increasingly being supplanted by such heresies as believing in reincarnation and it's impossible that the 2nd part of Conjugial Love could even be remotely divinely inspired.  

Time to bid farewell to spiritual allies who walk a road I left long whiles ago.  Am off to find ones that actually walk the same road I do.    

Thank you, Jeremy, for making it so much easier.

Frosted

Mending Wall  Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, 
And spills the upper boulders in the sun; 
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 
The work of hunters is another thing: 
I have come after them and made repair 
Where they have left not one stone on a stone, 
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, 
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, 
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 
But at spring mending-time we find them there. 
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; 
And on a day we meet to walk the line 
And set the wall between us once again. 
We keep the wall between us as we go. 
To each the boulders that have fallen to each. 
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls 
We have to use a spell to make them balance: 
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" 
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 
Oh, just another kind of out-door game, 
One on a side. It comes to little more: 
There where it is we do not need the wall: 
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
My apple trees will never get across 
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." 
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder 
If I could put a notion in his head: 
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it 
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offence. 
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him, 
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather 
He said it for himself. I see him there 
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top 
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 
He moves in darkness as it seems to me, 
Not of woods only and the shade of trees. 
He will not go behind his father's saying, 
And he likes having thought of it so well 
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors" 

For shame - I can't recall for the life of me what Miss Vera (or was it Miss Lyris?  I think it was Miss Vera, but not sure) taught about this poem.  I do know that at 61, I thought it endorsed the idea of boundaries as making life easier to manage.

Gee, was I wrong.  The last six lines really got to me - the image of the neighbor moving in darkness, unable to move past his father's (and probably grandfather's & great-grandfather's) adage, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Maybe one of the farm's originally had livestock.  In that case, good fences definitely would make good neighbors (no one wants a cow wandering into your crops or munching down your garden).  But the writer has an orchard & the neighbor grows pine trees.

The juxtaposition of the practical, dour neighbor & the whimsical writer delights me now way more than it did when I was a high school sophomore (probably completely missed it back then).  "My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him,"only to be answered with "Good fences make good neighbors." 

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 

What I was walling in or walling out, 

And to whom I was like to give offence. 

Because he knows that, Something there is that doesn't love a wall,  That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun;  And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 

Even he is displeased with the damage done to a wall by hunters, who tear away stones to get at their prey.  But nature?  My guess is the narrator would just as soon let Mother Nature have her way tearing down the offending fence.  But there he is, walking the fence with his neighbor, fixing what has been tumbled down (be it by nature or hunters or elves).

I looked up Mending Wall to use in a posting on boundaries.  Instead, I am left with a totally different ponder than the one I had on sitting down.

There are times when boundaries are required.  Yet, circumstances change, and so to should the boundaries.  Let them tumble if no harm can be done.  Let nature give them the old heave ho.  But most times we continue rebuilding those walls because it's what we've always done, even when the use has long ago evaporated.  

At 61, I appreciate the walls that helped me figure out the whys, wherefores & what nots of my jumbled life.  Without them, I could never have gotten to where I am at this wondrous point in time.  

But the need is no longer there.  

Nature's now free to let loose its will, swelling up & displacing stones that once demarked where others ended & I began, tumbling down, opening up a space where two can pass comfortably together.  

Shock & Awe

Over one short week, I've ceased to feel invested in the current discussion on women in the priesthood.  I believe that those in favor of a more balanced ministry face, at least on the pastoral level at this moment in time, insurmountable disadvantages.

I arrived at last Tuesday's class full of admiration for Jeremy, for his courage in bringing the topic out into the light of day.  As the class began, admiration turned to shock.  He opened the class by talking about - even miming - a minister who tells a child that it is wrong to lie, although the minister himself has lied & will lie again.  He explained that the angels of the celestial heavens & the people of the Most Ancient Church avoid discussion of doctrine because such discourse causes dissent & discord (as I was taught, such a topic would never had occurred to them, as they were in universal agreement).  He explained that he believes The Spiritual Diary is divinely inspired revelation (apparently, there is no consensus among G.C. ministers as to what is & isn't divinely inspired, which was news to me).

Nothing prepared me for the shock I felt when Jeremy explained, in response to a Facebook posting of mine, that his comment re: celestial angels & people of the MAC was made in jest, was simply tongue in cheek.  

In giving a doctrinal class, which we had every reason to believe he took seriously, he made a doctrinal reference in jest?   Really?  

Let's see - ministers lie to children, my pastor is basing his resistance to women in the priesthood based on a book that may or may not be divinely inspired (depending on which G.C. minister you talk to), and a crucial comment he made about the delicacy of having the conversation at all is shrugged off as having been tongue in cheek.  

How can there be reasonable discussion under such assumptions & circumstances?  

Even though I am shocked on one hand, I am awed on another by the determination of so many people to have a genuine discussion.  Am not sure why they are having it in the General Church. If only they would take their different view, their new understanding, and walk toward the east, to the sunrise, not along the old road west.  

Allies that claim to speak in jest when what's needed most is inspired priestly understanding & guidance are not allies this worthy endeavor needs.  

Allies

Jean Houston, in her book Manual for the Peacemaker, an Iroquois legend to heal self & society, notes that the Peacemaker's journey illustrates the essential of recognizing who our allies are - and who they are not.  

We far too often waste time & energies on striving to develop alliances with people we think will support our journey, our goals, when in reality they might not have a clue where we're headed, while true allies might come from directions we never imagined.

I never gave a thought to that before, to opening my eyes to the people I feel should be my allies, not seeing that they aren't or that they are the wrong allies.    We might have tied our future to our past, dragging us back rather than moving us forward.  

The best way to gain an ally?  Open up the opportunity, then let others decide.  And don't attach meaning to whether they come on board, step back, or don't even notice.  Move on.  You will be the richer for the offer, whatever they decide.

Parallel Parking (a repost)

Parallel Parking - originally posted on sneezing chickens 01/31/13

A friend wrote on Facebook the other day about giving her younger daughter one last lesson in parallel parking (I assume before that milestone-passing driver’s test).  In addition to smiling with delight at how much she was enjoying this as a special event, not an arduous duty, I smiled in memory of my own parallel parking lessons.

Unlike every other person I knew, I did NOT learn how to drive at age 16.  No idea why I missed out on having Chief Ryan teach me how to drive – we were immensely blessed in my hometown to have a chief of police who did such amazing things – but miss out I did. 

My guess is that I was none too invested in the idea of getting a driver’s license, as I was pretty sure my sister would never let me get near the car.  (A suspicion, I am glad to say, she confirmed many years later, saying, “I’m glad you understood that.”) 

Dad, on the other hand, blissfully unaware of the sibling dynamics that would have doomed my driving to only the utter dregs of opportunities, was eager for me to learn.  And he would teach me.

Even at 16, I knew this was not a good idea.

Dad decided to start me out in the parking lot at the high school field house, but quickly decided against that when he realized there were a) cars parked there for the nearby swim club which  b) adults & kids walking to & from.  He quickly recalculated next-best-place & decided on the much smaller parking lot next to Pitcairn Hall. 

Strange, but true – I was fine driving, if we were on actual roadway.  It made sense to my practical mind.  I could handle it.  Learning how to drive in a small parking lot did not make sense to me, left me feeling distinctly uncomfortable. 

Which I promptly demonstrated by running the car up a curb, then slamming it back down onto the pavement. 

Dad asked me why I had stopped. 

I asked Dad, “Don’t you hear a hissing sound?” 

He got out, looked at the left front tire – on the driver’s side – looked at me in a way I can’t describe & have no desire to, then walked around to the back of the van, opened the doors, took out the jack & one of the two spare tires he always kept back there (when you use a car commercially, as my lumberman Dad did, it pays to be over cautious), lugged them around, and replaced the ruined tire.

I was aware of the people playing tennis across the road watching all this, pausing occasional to make comments to each other.  Mortified doesn’t begin to describe my feelings.

Dad finished up, put the beyond-repair tire & the jack in the back of the van – and to my total horror, got back into the car on the passenger’s side.

Hey, I was 16 – unschooled in the ways of male thinking.  Now, I get it.  If he had been intent on teaching his youngest child how to drive before, now he was fiercely determined.

“Okay,” he said in a totally calm voice, as if it made total sense, “That wasn’t something you want to do again.  Turn the engine on, let out the clutch & make a circuit around the parking lot.”

“Can’t I drive across the road, drive around the loop in front of Benade Hall?” I asked, knowing it was roadway & that it was on school property; on a Sunday afternoon, that meant no one was in danger of being hit.

Maybe he was trying to soothe my shattered, humiliated nerves or maybe he wanted to calm his own, but Dad let me drive the van across the road, around the loop & back again.  It all went off without a hitch.

Maybe he felt like my steady driving on roadway boded well for renewed lessons in the parking lot.  “Okay, now make a circuit around the parking lot,” he instructed me.

So, I did.  Although there was no cars to worry me as I drove the circuit, across the road four pairs of upperclassmen eyes were soaking it all in from the tennis court.  And they had stopped playing & were just watching.  Me.

Which is when I went up on the curb again – this time on the passenger’s side – and slammed back down on the pavement. 

I looked at Dad, Dad looked at me, and it seemed an eternity until he cocked his head to his right, listened, leaned out the window & listened more intently, opened the door & looked down.  Then got out of the van, walked around to the back, hoisted out the second spare tire & the jack & replaced the now destroyed second tire.

To this day, I do not know who the tennis players were, but I knew they had a pretty awesome story to tell, one that would keep their friends in stitches & me offering up thanks that it happened over the summer, that by the time September rolled around it would be old news. 

After that, Dad never made so much as a peep about driving lessons.  Which was fine by me.

It wasn’t until the ripe old age of 24, after I got my first job & needed to be able to get all my teaching paraphernalia to & from the elementary school,  that I finally learned how to drive.  A backpack would not suffice.

By then, Dad had been gone for a couple years.  My best friends offered to teach me.  Using their car, brave souls, since there was no way my sister, who was bequeathed his new van, was letting me near it.  Praise be, they were patient & kind & seemed to understand that I really was not eager to be doing it. 

The one thing that I remember above everything else was how Dave was a stickler for parallel parking.  There was no way he was going to have me take the driver’s test until he was absolutely, positively sure I would nail parallel parking.  How well I remember the look in his eyes when, having parked in what I thought was a perfectly acceptable fashion, he’d eye the results, give a small yet encouraging sigh, and have me try again.   

To this day, whenever I find myself in a big city faced with the option of paying $$$ parking garage fees or maneuvering my car into a tiny parking spot, I offer up thanks for having such a darn picky teacher. 

Jenn – may Marley nail the parallel parking section of her driver’s test.  

Knowing her Mom, my bet is she will!