Renew, Refresh, Revitalize

YAY! for the folks in my hometown for looking around & realizing, "Yikes!  Where's our community??"  And three cheers for the Appreciative Inquiry process, a way to start looking at the dynamics we cherish & new ones that could be introduced; it helps open the way for so many initiatives to come tumbling into our consciousness & be expressed into life.  

Personally, I lack the patience necessary for a process like Appreciative Inquiry.  Give me a ball & let me run with it, show me a need & let me start filling it.  Different strokes for different folks - together, they form a picture, a collage of community-oriented activities directed at helping keep my little hometown a strong community.  

Mom liked to quote Bruce Glenn, speaking of our faith - "The first generation had inspiration. The second generation had loyalty.  What will our (meaning his & Mom's) generation be remembered for?"

Dean Glenn's comment gets me wondering about today's conglomerate of generations of Bryn Athynites.  What will we be remembered for, when it comes to nurturing our community?  

Sensing all the focused energies currently considering Who are we?,  What do we want to express?,  How do we want to be experienced?, perhaps it will be "renewed, refreshed, revitalized."  

Facing Patriarchy

For all of my life, I considered my little hometown a paragon of stewardship.  How unsettling to realize that much - maybe most -  of its vaunted qualities reached back a strong patriarchal hand.  

Much of what my family & neighbors experienced as a rich community experience WAS wonderful, but it was handed to us.  Literally.  We were encouraged to be generous & kind, but there wasn't an urgent need to put our shoulder to the wheel, to create community-nurturing events.  They were all around us, ready made.  

In many ways, that history provides a great jumping off point to a renaissance of rich community  experience.  We can describe how it felt doing certain things, a good starting point for figuring what we can do to achieve a similar sense of connection.  

Stewardship is the polar opposite of patriarchy.  It is easy to see the importance of stewardship, but the lure of patriarchy is hard to recognize & resist.

To me, stewardship is making opportunities available & seeing when others point to them.  It means speaking up, then stepping back, letting people embrace the opportunity or shie away from it.  That is HARD, at least for me.  Every fiber in my being wants to pursue, cajole, persuade.  That is not stewardship.  

Maybe it's not everyone's definition of the word, but for me stewardship is about helping people be themselves, whether I like it or not.  It means leaving myself open for others to help me do the same.  It is not about striving to control outcomes.  

How does a town steeped in patriarchy recognize where its positive & negative impact on our culture, how it still influences us individually & within groups, and explore ways to become a steward-based community?   Challenging, yet exciting.  It won't take leadership or the outpourings of committees & charts, but the engagement of human hearts & hands.

Staggering AH HA!

Duh duh & double duh!!  

Just hit me - when we had our counseling session, Peter said our family life was so toxic, he & Mike & Mim left home as soon as they graduated from high school.  

Did I visibly stagger backwards, realizing the truth of what he said?  Felt like it.  

Our family life was toxic.  Intensely so.  I felt it.  Still do.  

For me, Peter was one of the primary toxins!

My guess is that Peter & Mim & Kerry experience me as the primary toxin.  It's a good bet that Whitney & Reynolds, maybe even Scott experienced me as the primary toxin.

Our family was spectacularly toxic.  And we all had a part in it.  What's perhaps most interesting is that I haven't a clue how I could have been anything but toxic to them.  And vice versa.  Not personal, just utter opposites.  

Illuminating....

Ancient Patterns

Gee, I'm grateful to have written my 03/17/13 posting about my oldest brother's total disconnect to earlier events in our lives - - legions of memories wiped clean from his mind.

Got a newsy chatty letter from him this week, asking me if I would drop off the family crest - remarkably carved by Val Sigstedt from natural woods - that the Bryn Athyn church society gave Dad over forty years ago, in thanks for his volunteer work.  And he'd like to take me out to lunch ~ to Chick-Fil-A or Chucky Cheese or McDonald's.

Hmmm....

A delicate reply to write.

As I wrote in last month's posting, my surviving sibs + one seem to experience me as fingernails across a chalk board.  It is unnerving, never knowing when something I say will drive them around the bend.

Peter is an interesting fellow.  It's hard to remember a time I didn't have a sense that my existence didn't, at best, severely tax his limits.  If he is to be believed, a lifetime of memories has been wiped away.  In his recollection, he had virtually no contact with me after he was old enough to leave the house for college.  Pretty hard to come to address, let alone come to some sort of mutual understanding, past issues with a virtual amnesiac.  It's easy to understand, albeit hard to fathom - if a memory doesn't fit his present-day narrative, it never happened.  

For years, I tolerated Peter because of our relationship.  Took me until the past 10 years to fully appreciate that relationship requires two (2) people, not one wishing & hoping for the best.  I never thought I'd have an opportunity to respond in a new way to an old toxic dynamic.

Yet, here was his letter.  Awaiting a reply.

Being careful to stick to "I" statements, I explained that his long history of displeasure with my existence (I phrased it more diplomatically, but that is the reality), I must decline his invitation.  I have grown past being able to invest the emotional reserves necessary to be around him - it's exhausting, never knowing when something I say will seem to get under his skin & drive him around the bend.  Better to wish him well & keep our distance.  At least, it’s better for me.

Sheez, never thought I'd have the opportunity to face the issue in an active state.  A sad & sorry blessing, but was grateful to respond with clarity & love, at a distance.

It wasn't until late this afternoon that I was struck as if by a lightning bolt by the timing.  It's been four months since Whitney moved to Australia.  I might not register with Peter as a flesh & blood person, but someone who makes him feel like a brother when he needs a relationship fix - oh, yeah.  Mom could always make Peter feel the loving, devoted son; I was always at the ready to treat him as the brother he loves to be.  

Did he write because he needs a heaping helping of feeling part of a family?  I don't know - maybe yes, maybe no.  

Just know that I am past trying to puzzle it out.  Am 61 years old with limited reserves of energy.  I wish Peter all the best, but beyond - am all played out.   Ancient patterns are tiring, although I rejoice that i was able to give my response a new spin.

"The emotional brain...

...loves the status quo."

Have taken so many giant leaps forward, but seem to be right where I've always been - seeing the best path forward, yet not taking it.  Is that nuts?

No, it's normal.  Because our emotional brain - the part of our thinking with the greatest amount of clout over what we DO v. what we say we intend - loves the status quo.  

Here's a disturbing thought - my sense of status quo was forged in the heat of a family largely off-track on their own & totally off the rails when it came to me, the youngest.  I grew up in an inverted family culture - too complex to explain, too icky to want to.  Suffice it to say that what most people put first, we put last & vice versa.  Abberation was my norm, it IS the set point my emotional brain keeps trying to protect.  Gadzooks!

Over the past 39 years, I have loaded my brain with reasonable, logical, insightful ways to approach life & living, yet still I struggle more than I succeed.  Small wonder.  

Our thinking brain can expand to accept endless reams of information, to discern which bits are worth remembering & which deserve being tossed into a virtual dust bin.  It makes us paragons of an educable being.  

The same cannot be said for our emotional brain.  Just as our physical body strives mightily to maintain a set weight point, so does our emotional brain.  No matter how much we ingest in the way of forward-moving knowledge, our emotional brain will strive - often mightily - to keep us right where we are.

At this point, there's not much, if anything, I can do solo to turn wretched life patterns around.  Read all the books, nailed down the data, but am not succeeding in getting my emotions out of the way.  .  

On the one hand, it makes NO sense to me to know a best path forward & not take it.  But that's what I do.  Friends seek to placate me, saying, "Oh, that's just human nature."  Perhaps - but that doesn't make it less dumb.  At least it doesn't to me.

I've had my laptop for over a year.  Haven't used it.

Know that a tidy house will help me feel stronger.  It's as big a mess as ever.

Haven't submitted billing for a grannie client in over six weeks.  What's that about??

My 2012 "State of the Human" letter has now lapped seriously into 2013.

Am not self-flagellating.  It's just that I've gone as far as I can on my own.  Proud of all I've achieved over the past 39 years, especially over the past 11.  But the reality is that my status quo-loving emotional brain is quick, clever & cunning.  And it thinks that it is HELPING me, which gives is extra incentive to keep things the way they've always been.  I've gotten far enough by hard work to realize the work I cannot do alone.

What to do next?  And will I do it??

Remembrance

In writing a post about my oldest brother, I mentioned having to accept how wildly different his experience of family & personal life events were from mine.  It is a lack of memories that leaves me no other option but to accept it because, as I wrote, "my brother remembers what he remembers."

It seemed strange, writing that, since it gave me such deep personal pain - the worst I've ever felt - when Mom used basically the same phrase in describing Mim.  

This dates back many years.  I was around 38 or 39, married for a couple years, if that.  As I had for what felt like eons, was once again endeavoring to get the three of us - Mom, Mim, myself - together with a family counselor to figure out better ways to communicate & connect. 

For all those years, Mim had pledged "maybe someday, but not now" we'd get the help I'd long advocated.  I finally started pressing when she at last - in her 40s - had her masters, a car of her own, a car of her own, and a traditional job of her own.  Mom brought up the proposed counseling with Mim, who brushed aside Mom's assertion that she at the least owed me a sense of loyalty for all I'd done for her over the years - according to Mom, she said that, yes,  I'd offered to do things for her, but that she had never taken me up on the offer.

When Mom told me that, I was stunned - and totally unprepared for what was about to come.

I asked her the logical (to me) question, "What did you say to that?"

"What could I say?" replied Mom.  "If that's what she remembers, that's what she remembers."

Almost word for word what I wrote about Peter.  So why was it so devastating when Mom said it & seemed so logical when I wrote it about him?  

Honestly, it happened so long ago, and I was such a different person, more dewy eyed & hopeful that the hopelessly broken could be miraculously fixed ~.

I asked Mom the logical (to me) question, "What did you say to that?"  

"Well," Mom answered, "If,, that's what she remembers, that's what she remembers."  

It crushed me at the time, hearing her say that, but here it is, over 20 years later, and I've written the same thing about Peter.  "He remembers what he remembers." 

They all did.  We all do,  all of  us human beings.  We remember what we remember.  Was interested, after writing the last post, that I mentioned that my brother remembers what he remembers – can be stunned by it, but there’s no way I can change it.

That phrase  - he remember what he remembers – kept niggling at me.  Why did it seem so familiar?  Oh, right – that was, word for word, what Mom said that after Mim said she "the past is the past & the family no longer exists as a unit."  When (in her recounting to me) Mom said I at least deserved some sense of loyalty because of all I'd done for her (Mim) over the years, my sis was reported as saying, "What things?  She (me) offered, but I never took her up on them."

Stunned, I asked Mom the logical (to me) question, "What did you say to that?"  

"Well," Mom answered, "If that's what she remembers, that's what she remembers."  

It crushed me at the time, hearing her say that, but here it is, over 20 years later, and I've written the same thing about Peter.  "He remembers what he remembers." 

They all did.  We all do,  all of  us human beings.  We remember what we remember.  

Not Ever.

Didn't get a lot of sleep last night, remembering a comment my brother made eons (okay, more than five and less than ten years) ago.  It wasn't distress that kept me awake, but a strange, unfamiliar sense of the utterly inexplicable.  

Had been skimming through Colin Tipping's Radical Forgiveness  (a remarkably good book with a remarkably bad title that doesn't begin to convey what it's about). There, in the margins, was a comment Peter made during an incredibly priceless hour of joint, sibling-to-sibling counseling.   I'd asked how it happened I'd missed a family meeting where he sought to make amends to Mim & Mom for wrongs he'd done to them.  

I learned about the meeting many years after it happened, after sharing with Mom my sadness he'd never shown any remorse for any of the things he'd done.  "Oh, yes, he did," Mom answered.  "No, I hoped he would, but he never has," I replied.   "Sure, he did," she reiterated. "Remember, that meeting with Mim & Peter when he told us how sorry he was for anything he'd done that might have hurt us."  

It was clear from her voice, her attitude that Mom clearly remembered this important get-together with her oldest child.  In spite of a sinking feeling in my stomach, I went on, "Mom, close your eyes.  Relax.  Remember the meeting with Peter.  Look around.  Am I there?" 

"Oh," she said, opening her eyes wide, "You're not!"

Until that moment, it had never dawned on her to notice that I wasn't included, that his words were just directed to the two of them. Intentionally, it turned out.

Sitting with the objective facilitator, I asked about that meeting.  Had I been asked & unavailable?

Reading those words written in the margin of a book, I was suddenly back in the moment,  seeing Peter's eyes open wide with surprise, as he replied, genuinely stumped over my question, "I had done things that hurt Mim & Mom.  I never did anything that injured you."

In his memory, he had virtually no contact with me.  Ever.  As he explained to the counselor, life in our household was so awful, he spent as much time as his friend's house as he could, as did both Mike & Mim; once they graduated from high school, each lit out on their own - he went off to college, Mike joined the Navy, and Mim became a live-in nanny.  So, he couldn't have harmed me, because he wasn't in my life.

That set me back on my heels, at least momentarily.  Gathering my stunned thoughts, I replied, "Yes, you did all leave after high school.  But you all came back.  Continually!"  

One look at his face & I could see - all those frustrating (to me) returns of the natives never happened.  That spoke volumes.  His answer was far more enlightening than he could ever have imagined.

It is impossible to have a conversation with someone who simply doesn't remember what happened.  This wasn't the sort of thing that one person remembers one way & another interpreted totally differently.   

All of our family's friends knew that Mike bunked at our house when he wasn't off on his world travels, just as he worked for Dad between overseas jaunts & for several years after he married.  They knew that Mim headed home when she had time off from her jobs, whether it was up the road or in Philadelphia where she was a housemother at Girard.  They knew that Peter stayed for months at a time at 4501 Woodland Road.  

Yes, they all lit out early in their adult lives, but they all came back.  But Peter remembered none of that.  To him, he'd left & never looked back, let alone returned.

That was what kept me awake all night;  not the thought, "How could he not remember?" but about how he was almost right - it wasn't that he wasn't in my life, but that I wasn't in his.  Ever.