THIS JUST IN!!!

When Happiness Doesn't Help

Author Barbara Ehrenreich says Americans cannot simply wish themselves into better conditions.
Not to be show offy or anything, but I already knew that. I could have gone on that radio show and told the rest of the world that it isn't a whole lot of help to a person suffering with a serious disease or other life changing circumstance to hear people tell us that all we need is a "more positive attitude."

Sometimes life just sucks and finally somebody said it on the radio (well, okay, so it was NPR) and just maybe all you lucky folks out there who used last year's sick days to go Christmas shopping for your big happy family will finally understand that for some of us life isn't so easy. Some of us struggle for what you take for granted - health, happiness, the warm embrace of your family. What's worse, some of us struggle fruitlessly.

I'll keep my crappy attitude, thank you very much. When life stops throwing lemons at me I'll stop puckering and smile a little more.

And, for those of you who didn't need any convincing, listen to the podcast anyway - during the show they arrive at some very interesting points about our society's tendency to stifle criticism and the socio-political ramifications of that...

Maybe the funniest thing...

...is my continued failure to properly use this internet thing. I'll try again to add a link...

sheep herding entertainment video

did it work?

Something funny, for a change

http://video.telegraph.co.uk/services/player/bcpid1137883380?bctid=17075685001

This video, of some incredibly clever Scotsmen and their sheep, made me laugh this morning -- a morning during which I have not felt especially inclined to laugh.

My heart is broken.

Ted Kennedy was the embodiment of everything that was once good about Massachusetts. He was honorable in his public life, committed to serving his community, and devoted to his family. He valued his own privacy and the privacy of others, all others. He did not judge people, only their actions as related to their jobs. Even then he held his tongue, or dealt with matters privately, until something egregious came to fore and he felt the necessity of calling out the wrong publicly.

On the senate floor Kennedy fought tirelessly for what he thought was right, without stooping to personal attacks, lies, or trickery. He was resolute and unapologetic. He meant what he said and he said what he meant, to quote another Massachusetts icon. At the end of the day, though, when the work was done, some of his best friends were his biggest adversaries. Orrin Hatch, someone with whom he seldom agreed politically, was his closest friend on the senate floor. Kennedy could separate politics from his personal life. Personally opposed to abortion, he still fought to retain a woman's right to make her own decision based on her own faith and her own intellect. He was not so self-agrandized as to believe that he knew all the answers.

He was patient, willing to fight for years to make baby steps toward his goals if he could not get there with a giant leap. And his goals were things he thought were right and just for all Americans, not any single segment, not for himself. One of his rarest qualities among his contemporaries was his astute understanding of the necessity of compromise in negotiation. This enabled him to work effectively with both democrats, republicans, and foreign dignitaries, and to be beloved and respected by his colleagues and his constituents.

A New Englander first and foremost, he was a humble man, never insisting on the limelight regardless of how comfortable he was under it. In spite of his seniority, Kennedy did not even put his own name first on the bills he was party to, preferring to give that honor to the ones who felt such things were important. He was not in the senate to promote himself. He was there to serve. And serve he did, fighting for those our forefathers sought to protect -- the poor, the tired, the huddled masses.

He opposed war, but honored those who served, attending every service for every Massachusetts soldier, whether it was held locally or at Arlington Cemetery in Washington.

In his private life he was as reserved as the press would allow him to be. Deeply faithful personally, he kept that part of his life to himself, as is customary here in New England. Kennedy's faith was his faith, and as strongly as he believed in it and relied upon it in his own life, he allowed others to abide by their own higher powers in the ways they saw fit.

By all accounts he was warm, personable, and funny, possessing the typical Boston self-deprecating wit. He took his job seriously, but did not take himself too seriously. Not only could he always take a joke, but he could take down a colleague every St. Patrick's Day at the traditional roast.

Above all else he was strong, a modern-day Goliath, and at the same time a prototypical New England pragmatist. He dealt with life's ups and downs with dignity and honor. He was not a whiner or a quitter, but neither could he be bothered making lemonade with the lemons life threw at him. He was not afraid to confront his demons, be they internal or external. A gentile New Englander accepts things graciously, dispenses with them as he will, then moves along with things.

And, like the rest of us, Ted Kennedy was deeply flawed. Unlike the rest of us, he compensated for his failings. He made restitution (un-owed) for failings in his private life with tireless service in his public life. He did what the rest of us aspire to – he gave more to this nation in his life than he took from it.

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I have lived in Massachusetts my whole life. I would not want to live any place else. But for the past 20 years I've been watching a gradual erosion of our core values, the things that have made us who we are, or who we were, service, humility, and decency. We used to have respect for those around us regardless of their circumstances, as well as respect for those who preceded us, and for the things they left behind. We welcomed new comers for the contributions they would make, and valued those parts of our parochialism that allowed ethnic groups to keep a little bit of their heritage while sharing it with the rest of us.

We did not call attention to ourselves, especially not to our finances or property, and we had little patience with those who did. Nobody was judged for the clothes they wore or the car they drove. That is less and less true now, as I notice every time I try to park my little car between the hulking SUV's and Hummers. In my childhood the fancy cars that some were lucky enough to have were reserved for church and holidays. Likewise were the fancy clothes and high heeled shoes. It was ill-mannered to brag -- to wave your good fortune under other people's noses. While we still do not judge each other by our clothing, homes, or possessions – the showing off and bragging has become commonplace. Still, we have nothing on California,… but it worries me that this erosion has been accelerating exponentially in the past ten years.

All the things that made New England such a magnificent place to live, the overwhelming respect for the spirit of those long gone - the bridges and the monuments, the hallowed grounds. The reverence for the trees, the frogs, and the birds. The undying love of the forests, the meadows, and the beauty of it all and then the quiet friendliness and tacit acceptance. The honesty, the integrity, and the freedom all those qualities have given us are too valuable to imagine life without. I'm afraid that the loss of Senator Kennedy will let loose the levys, and it will all wash away.

Rest in peace, Mr. Kennedy. May your God bless you. I can only hope that there's a power high enough to bless Massachusetts and this nation you served so well and save it from what it will do to itself without you.

KIDS

I hadn't meant to get into the kids thing so soon. This was supposed to be a blog about me, after all, but it's hard to find myself among all the extranea of my life and it's even harder to tease out which parts of my life are really mine and which fall more appropriately into the category of their lives. They don't like it when I talk about them. Kids are nothing if not hypocrites, and that's true from their conception right up to my grave. I kissed my life goodbye when Kelly was born in July of 1987, and if I'd had the slightest clue of how much I was about to sacrifice then I would have put a little more passion into it. Kelly as only a few days old when I saw the life I used to have vanish in front of my face and by then it was too late to mourn the life I was leaving behind. A quick peck on the cheek and I was running headlong into the storm, looking past the clouds for the rainbows.

I'm only just now coming to understand that while I looked for my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow I left more than my old life behind in the storm. I lost myself, too.

That being said, I should launch into a bold statement affirming my own self and my own life separate from my childrens' lives, but every single time I try to do that one of them grabs me by the throat (it's always the same one, btw) and insists that I focus on them again. My oldest child, the problem child, is 22. She was born screaming so loudly somebody came from another room to shut the door, and she still hasn't shut up. She's been screaming at me over the phone for the last three years since she ran away from her college assignment mid-semester of sophomore year, without so much as a post card to her father and I to let us in on her "decision," leaving us stuck paying tuition so that she could fail all her classes and ruin any hope she had of getting into any other school, and then stuck with a whole lot of trouble after she allied herself with a self-described drug dealer and hitman for the Mexican Mafia who drained her bank account then stole her car, leaving her on a street corner in Indiana with ten cents in her pocket and the clothes on her back.

Thanks to the excellent (really!) social services in Ohio, especially as compared to Massachusetts, she was able to call somebody else to arrange for her to go to a domestic violence shelter where she ranted and raved and fought and swore at everybody, finally earning herself the label I'd been trying to pin on her since she was ten years old -- mentally ill.

Ironically, she resents me terribly for the testing I arranged (a simple evaluation at school - she wouldn't comply with anything else), the doctors I took her to see (she takes enormous pride in the ways she manipulated them so I looked like an incompetent parent), or the medications (1/2 teaspoon of liquid prozac...) that I "forced" her to take (I never once even watched her take it...). She's medicated now and she complains that it's expensive - but if she'd listened to me when I explained and explained and explained why those tests and those doctors and those medications were important instead of spending her energy and her intellect trying to prove that she didn't need them, then she might not even need the heavy duty stuff she's on now. and, furthermore, that she may have been eligible for SSI disability payments at age 18 which would have simplified her life in so many ways. If nothing else, she'd be eligible for medicaid instead of having to rely on her Walmart insurance policy, which doesn't cover mental health, and the thinning patience of Ohio's cash-strapped social services. But you can't tell her that - she doesn't even recognize the connection between the two things.

It wasn't just about the label, because she really did have something different, and it was something frighteningly familiar. I'd been fascinated by autism since I was an adolescent in the 70's when they first started talking about it. I think maybe I saw myself somewhere in that bubble or maybe I had a premonition that Kelly was coming into my life. I continued studying the condition when I was seeking my Masters degree at Wheelock (early childhood education, because I had always wanted to be a teacher. Always.) Today many of us recognize that children who can explain the composition of an atom at age two are not geniuses to be celebrated, but train wrecks waiting to happen. But nobody understood that 10 or 15 years ago and, as long as my kid wasn't causing any trouble at school or doing poorly in her classes, what did it matter that she had no friends or that her arms were sliced to ribbons? I knew what Aspergers Syndrome was years before it became the most sought after diagnosis in the A/B school district (where everybody is simultaneously gifted and in need of special services...) I made it easy for them - I told them what to look for and where to find it, but budgets are tight and one more kid in the SPED system might bring about the end of free coffee in the administration building, so they ignored what they could. Kelly was easy to ignore, at least for everybody but me. She would never let me ignore her and there was no end to her manipulations. I would forever be tangled in her web.

I've always found my labels comforting in a way. After growing up hearing everybody tell me what a disappointment/screw-up/stupid, lazy-assed, useless kid I was it was reassuring to discover that I was not really any of those things. Bi Polar Disorder, Sauvant syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive disorder,...music to my ears! There were names and reasons for things that were "wrong with me," and they didn't point to the very core of my being. My symptoms were not character flaws to be ridiculed and berated for. I was defective, but I came by it honestly. It was all wired into my brain at birth. Knowing that wouldn't change the way my family looked at me, but it might provide an extra layer of protection against their hurtful comments and insensitive behaviors. So it was never about the goddamned label when it came to Kelly, either. It was about finding out what was going on so we could get control of it before she left home. It was about her not having to wait until she was 40 to stop despising herself for being so inadequate. It was supposed to be about her understanding herself and learning to live in a world that has little patience for non-conformity.

And maybe, just a little bit, it was about redemption for me. Maybe I could finally feel just a little bit more worthy of being part of the Mommy pack. Maybe I could finally feel just a little bit more worthy of the space I took up on this planet. Is that so wrong?

This is a picture of my best dog, Hunter. He is, in as much as a dog can be such a thing, my soul-mate. I discovered him at a shelter 7 years ago while searching for a well-trained standard poodle. Needless to say, I was rather mentally ill at the time, mired in an acute depression which was further complicated by cognitive changes caused by multiple sclerosis -- changes of which I was unaware, but which made my life complicated and confusing. It was one of the lowest points of my life - my oldest daughter had become combative and mean, and I had begun to feel smothered by the demands of my children, my husband, and the big, unmanageable house we were living in. I was isolated and lonely - though I'd shunned the idea of a dog in the past suddenly I realized that I needed somebody to be happy to see me when I came home for a change. I needed a little bit of unconditional love, and where better to look than at a kennel? But my husband didn't want a dog - our lives were already chaotic enough. I already couldn't manage the house, the carpools, the endless and stultifying demands of motherhood. But there was a little bit of a spark inside of me, one that hadn't lit up many times in my life. I was going to put myself first and as I approached my 40th birthday it seemed only right that I didn't need anybody's permission to have a dog.

Wanting to respect my husband's wishes at least minimally, I pledged to get an older dog, one already trained and ready to be a family pet. I settled on a standard poodle. I don't remember why. And I stopped by the shelter two or three times a week just to check - maybe somebody would surrender a lovely standard poodle. I'd have to be there right away or someone else would take it.

I met lots of dogs. Most of them barked, or slobbered, or were too big, or too nippy, or just ugly. One leaped from the floor all the way up to the high ceilings in the shelter, requiring her run to have a sort of lid on it just to keep her in. I liked her, but knew that was not the kind of dog I needed.

I overlooked Hunter a few times, because he had a pink nose and I had something against pink-nosed dogs. I don't remember why. But I kept walking by his run and he'd look up at me with his sincere amber eyes as I walked past. He never barked. Finally I asked to visit with him. He was crazy. Nuts. He leaped and spun, eyes bulging, tongue out - so excited to be noticed, to be loved. I questioned, then I turned around and saw him lying calmly on the floor next to a trainer. She had stepped on his leash, giving him no choice but to lie down. He looked at me and I understood that he wanted to please. He just didn't know how. I started falling in love with that silly dog with the pink nose.

They tried to talk me out of it. Hunter was "mouthy," they said. I had kids at home. They brought out other dogs for me to see -- dogs that were "better" for my family, but they meant nothing to me. They climbed up on the seats, sniffed all around, never noticed me. I asked to see Hunter again. I practiced the trick of standing on his leash. I took him outside and walked him in the parking lot. He pulled and jerked at the leash, but once I got his attention I could ask him to sit and he would sit, clearly proud of the accomplishment. He wanted to learn and I wanted to teach him. I brought him back inside and they returned him to his run - he couldn't come home with me until the whole family had met him.

On my way out of the shelter that day I stopped one last time at Hunter's run, to tell him I'd be back. The other dogs were barking like crazy, but Hunter didn't bark. Instead he came up to the gate where I stood and sat down. He looked right up into my eyes and then he did the craziest thing I've ever seen a dog do. He sang to me. It was a prolonged whine, almost a yodel, with his head pitched upward. His song went on long enough for me to look around for a witness. I was seriously worried about my sanity. If I looked back would I see him dancing like Michigan J. Frog? Was I losing my mind, or was this dog really singing for me? I told him to wait for me - I'd be back.