About You
Now let’s talk about you! You’re probably right in the thick of it all. One day you woke up and you weren’t a child any more. You’ve made choices, made mistakes, made commitments, and most likely made children! You have lines on your face, and bits of you are starting to droop.
Is this your life?
When you’re young you have dreams that reach far into the future. But as a parent of young children, your dreams get a little more short-term. During these years, your fondest hope is probably of getting half an hour’s break and having a good lie down. A wild fantasy would be reading the newspaper right through or getting to bed with enough energy to make love to the stranger that is your partner. Before you know it, you’ve got teenagers and all the mental challenges they bring. If you’re not careful, life can be what happens to you while you’re too busy to make other plans.
Today, as you’re reading this, your family life may be going really well. Or you may be going through a difficult patch. If it’s the latter, this is hardly surprising: family life is tough and we get very little help. We do not have a tradition in our culture for making marriage work, only for making it endure, which is not the same thing. The saying, ‘You make your bed and lie in it’ was very big in the mid-twentieth century – hardly an introduction to the craft of love. Its companion saying ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ was not much of a guide to parenting either!
Because of the poor quality teaching that we get in human relationships, many people find family life to be a disheartening part of their lives. Researchers have found that many people feel more in control and successful at work than at home. Instead of being a harbour of comfort and security, home can be the place where you feel least successful.
PRACTICAL STEP 1: ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SUCCESS
If you have been feeling overwhelmed or like a failure at family living then it is time you let yourself off the hook. Before we start to talk about how to make things better, it is vitally important that you recognize how much you are actually succeeding. If you and your kids are alive, and have most of your arms and legs, if no-one is dead or in prison (or even if they are) then you have done millions of things right.
Without discounting the mistakes which you may have made, it’s still a fact that you have related, communicated, given and received love, and generally succeeded well beyond your conscious knowledge. One day, this will be evident to you.
We are all pioneers, hacking our way through the wilderness of millennial family living where no generation has gone before. In the past, family relationships were often simply an appearance one kept up. People did not expect intimacy or authentic communication. Rules and clichés governed most interactions. Before World War II, marriage was often something that people endured. From the sixties onwards, everything suddenly was reversed. Marriage became a disposable item, to throw away if it didn’t work. Now as we enter the twenty-first century we may become the first generation on a wide scale with the knowledge and skills to make relationships work.
You and your family are part of this breakthrough struggle. Everyone around you is having the same experience. Moreover, nothing you do is wasted. You don’t ‘fail’ if a marriage ends, or a kid gets into trouble. Sometimes these things have to be gone through to get where you are going. As long as you keep going, learning and adapting, you can no more fail or go backwards in life than a tree can ungrow.
If you feel unhappy, guilty, miserable or stuck at a particular time, don’t just ignore this feeling. But do realize that you feel bad because part of you knows that something more is possible. Pay attention to yearnings, regrets and frustrations because they are all signs of the life force in you, and will actually motivate you to keep you moving on to something better, which you know is there.
A loving life or a lonely life?
An elderly woman we know has lived in a nursing home for many years. Her conversations centre mostly on her own discomforts, her irritations with her fellow inmates. Her life doesn’t seem to mean much beyond just waiting. Perhaps living in a nursing home has made her like this. Or perhaps she always was rather self-focused. It is sad, and a bit depressing, to visit her.
When our kids were little they once took their most precious possession – a pet baby wombat – to show this old lady. ‘Everest’ the wombat (don’t ask!) was wrapped in a blanket, in a shopping basket, and perhaps we should have explained more loudly just what was in the package as we sat it on the old lady’s knee! At the sight of a furry creature among the folds of the blanket she shrieked and almost threw it across the room. She doesn’t much like furry things.
Whatever adventures and passions this old lady once had are now not easy to reach. Her relatives will grieve her passing, but not a lot. They seem to be waiting for the relief of hearing that she has died. This is one kind of old age, one kind of life. Can you imagine what it might be like to grow old like this: out of touch, grouchy, self-obsessed and shut away from life?
It doesn’t have to be like this. The bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom, tells about an old man, a college teacher, who is dying from a slowly paralysing disease. This old man was so loving and interesting and had built up so many dear friendships, that even though he could barely move or even breathe properly, his house was crowded with people, full of love, and he was ‘teaching’ to the very last – about life and how to live it. Perhaps you know someone just like this, who as they get older seem to get more full of life; not pushed to the edges. You delight in their company whenever you get the chance.
So it seems there are two ways through life. And when you get old it will become very clear which path you have taken. If you choose to make time for love in your life, then love will come back to you when you are old and in need of it. If you focus in on yourself and your own wants and needs, then you had better save lots of money, ‘cos no-one is going to care for you much unless you pay them!
The three big questions
These days no-one really expects, when they die, to rise up above the clouds, queue up at some rhinestone encrusted gates and get a quick resume from a bearded guy in a sheet! But in the second half of life, you do start to ask the big questions, like ‘How did I do?’ It’s a good question, and it gets more urgent over time. In the last hours and seconds of your life, these three questions will be centre stage in your thoughts:
1. Do my children still love me, or even like me?
2. Did my partner (or partners) love me, and do they still?
And lastly, the most important of all,
3. Do I love (or even like) myself?
In the end it will be the answers to these questions that will mean you die in joy, or in desolation. The time to do something about these questions is NOW.
The ingredients of a life well lived
Life can be so busy that you never get to look at the big picture. One way to take back some control is by listing the major dimensions of your life and giving them a check-over.
These dimensions might look something like this:
Marriage/partnership
Parenthood
Self-care and self-expression
Community involvement
Friendships
Meaningful work
These are the six pillars of human life, but you don’t need all six of them. You can survive on one. Any two can be quite good fun for a while. You probably need three to be really alive. If you have all six, you’re probably overdoing it, and should