• Speaking as a Parent

    Johanna Jr on Motherhood

    October 19, 2016

    The chronicles of motherhood chapter 5,489
    Lessons Learned

    I was shaken to the core the other day sitting at Y-not waiting on a cappuccino and some gelato with the boys…

    Jaxsun my oldest son grabbed a peppermint and a toothpick as we walked in the restaurant as he usually does when we go there on our dates for dessert. No big deal. Right? WRONG!

    As we’re sitting there talking. I’m on the inside of the booth across from Jax with Cai next to me I look up and Jax is holding his throat gasps and says “I’m choking HELP ME mom” may the lord strike me dead I flew out of that booth with a fierceness sending my youngest son flying across the restaurant in panic to assist my first born!
    I frantically looked for water I pushed on his chest a little I got up screamed for water as the crazy person I was I came back to Jax after I ran and got his drink! He drank it and threw up the lodged peppermint onto the table!!

    The 45 seconds this potential nightmare was occurring a million thoughts raced through my brain! I felt the most immense feelings of helplessness as I watch in agony my son scared and suffering! Looking at me for salvation! I should snap my fingers and fix it! Make this potential nightmare Magically go away! The words ” HELP ME MOM” burn my soul! I realized the peppermint was lodged it scared him and it hurt him & he thought he was choking. He was not but:

    What if he had actually inhaled it and I had to perform CPR. What If there wasn’t medical students sitting at the table next to me? What if we were alone at home and all he had was me??? I should know what to do! I should be all he needs in those moments!

    I thought I knew the basics of CPR but in that very moment I realized I was not 100% confident on what to do! Before I realized it was lodged I was thinking about how to perform CPR… What if things were different he did inhale it and in that time of me thinking and not acting it was too late!

    I’m not being morbid I’m being realistic! I can not control everything! I know that! I can’t control my sons actions or their decisions when they’re not with me… I can instill the morals they’ll need to make them! So they can protective themselves when I’m not there..

    I can however control myself! I take pride in being a strong parental figure to look up to for my sons! One of the many reasons the gym is important to me! I stabilize my mental and emotional self all the while physically getting stronger in case of a zombie apocalypse!

    Feeling helpless as a mother with the extension of your heart and soul walking around in human forms will never go away!
    One of my sons getting hurt or possibly worse over something I should know and be able to control is unacceptable!!! I’m taking this soul shaking event as a blessing and a lesson learned! I am beside myself in great appreciation to have the opportunity to say “what if!” With that being said….
    I’ll be taking a CPR class this Saturday!!

    On another note:
    Cai And Jax quickly forgot the scariest life event mommy has ever had the displeasure of experiencing as they sat next to me ate and enjoyed their gelatos laughing as I grasped them tightly holding back tears trying to drink my cappuccino while my hand shook the contents out of my mug attempting to makes it’s way to my face…. 😳

    Read More
  • World Affairs

    How We Think About Beauty

    October 1, 2016

    The Aquarium

    As I stood there watching the octopus, I had to think about beauty.  This creature was wrinkled, red, beige and fluidly graceful in movement.  It appeared to have no bone structure and the eyes were strangely macabre.  Yet, in every way, the creature was beautiful.  I tried to understand why, in the animal world, the standard for beauty is very different than it is for humans.  In the human world, we want beauty to look exactly a certain way.

    When we are watching the fish in the aquarium, we do not care what size, nor what color and shape the sea creatures are.  What’s more, the creatures do not care.  I am wishing that humans could feel that way about each other:  no matter what, your color, nor your shape matters, you are beautiful.

    Read More
  • Love and Relationships,  Speaking as a Parent

    Being Loved Changes Everything

    September 17, 2016

    Being loved changes everything.  Yet, it’s one of those things you know after you don’t know.   What I mean by that, is that if you are loved and then live with an absence of love, you realize how important being loved is.

    Being loved means that everything that you do and say is different.  You walk taller, you talk easier, you give more freely.  This change in you, changes what people see in you.  When people see your smiles, your confidence, your comfort, they like you more and spend more time around you.  This can affect everything: getting a job, getting a client and getting a promotion.  This can affect whether people cooperate with you or do not.  Cooperation may seem small within an incident, but over time, it can change the way you live your life.

    There is no way to earn love, you will be loved or not.  Love has a life of its own.  Parents fall instantly and ridiculously in love with their offspring.  You may meet someone who spontaneously inspires love in you.  You will love your parents – like it or not.  You will not always love good people.  Your love will not always be rewarded or reciprocated.  In many instances, love happens to us, we don’t know what happened and suddenly the love is there, engulfing and enfolding us.

    Being loved gives us strength when we doubt, gives us confidence when we fear.  No matter what happens to us, if we know that we are loved, love gives us strength to endure, to survive, to thrive.  How many times did I tell myself while living alone in a far-away city “I must stay safe, my mother would be unhappy if I was hurt”?

    You may not be able to earn love, but being loving is the best way to find yourself loved by another.  For some reason, loving others, draws love to you.  When you decide to love, it flips a switch in your perception of the other.  Suddenly, the spoiled behavior becomes understandable; the angry behavior is obviously hurt and not meanness.

    This is why being loved is so wonderful, because you know in your soul that whatever you do, no matter how harsh and ugly you may be, the love remains steadfast and clear and true.

    Read More
  • Personal Growth,  Speaking as a Parent,  Womens Issues

    Is Obesity the Latest Moral Failing?

    September 13, 2016

    We have treated addiction as a moral failing since drunks started drinking centuries ago.  “There must be something wrong with him, he wasn’t raised right…”

    Those who could not or would not stop imbibing were thought to be degenerates, not deserving of social care and concern.  In recent years addiction medicine has been able to pull us away from this paradigm into a broader understanding of how people become addicts and lose control of their lives.  Science tells us that it is not a moral failing, but rather a complex combination of nature and nurture.  There is DNA involved in addiction, as well as brain chemistry which reacts to primal pleasure sensations, seeking rewards by repeating behavior.

    Addiction is not an easy illness to understand and this challenge has made it into a medical “stepchild” no one really wants to claim ownership and the illness keeps worsening.  Addiction is now claiming lives in the thousands, daily, who overdose on opiates and heroin.  At least society now sees a glimmer of reality by calling out the profit hungry behavior of big pharma and physicians who over-prescribe.  We begin to see that addiction does not thrive in a vacuum, it thrives by virtue of hundreds of factors: social, medical, economic, individual and by the infinite possibilities in the strands of our DNA.  Blaming an addict for using substances, doesn’t produce any good results and yet our society has done it over and over again.

    Obesity is our latest moral failing in America, and like addiction it does not earn the appropriate attention for resolution.  I read a billboard yesterday that was advertising liposuction, the billboard said “Get Your Sexy Back!”  The assumption is: Of course you can’t be sexy if you are fat and of course, if you are a woman, you must be sexy.  All through my youth there was a part of me that admired the woman who was not sexy and therefore did not have to glamorize her self.  This woman was not being watched or looked at and had long since decided on a lifestyle with different demands.  I deeply admired this kind of woman.

    But the point is, that people are being denigrated and disparaged because they are overweight.  Many will righteously criticize the obese making statements like: “fatty, stop feeding your face and you are a tub of lard.”  Public Health appears to be much more concerned for the overweight than the addicted, which has been helpful for the overweight.  Public Health brings a validity to this condition.  All forms of healthy recognition can be appreciated, as long as the public understands that attacking those who suffer from addiction or obesity does not make for better public health.

    What really needs to be said is this: People are not bad because they are obese, just as they are not bad because of addiction.  It doesn’t help anyone to denigrate those who struggle with their behavior.  There are no easy prescriptions for recovery and our culture does not support the discipline of sobriety, nor the task of healthy eating.  Just the opposite, our society is concerned with selling booze and hamburgers to anyone with a dollar.

    While our society spins relentlessly to the music of a dollar bill, in the meantime, our part of change is to be kind, kind to everyone, everywhere and at all times.  

    This means that we don’t blame, denigrate and demoralize anyone for any reason.  Obesity is not a moral failing and neither is addiction.

    Read More
  • Management,  Personal Growth

    The Definition of Game Playing: and What Some Call “Head Games”

    August 18, 2016

    The Definition of Game Playing: and What Some Call “Head Games”

    I can only conjecture why people ‘play games’, I don’t understand it and I can’t identify with it.  I don’t remember ever playing head games.

    According to Wikipedia it is “Psychological one-upmanship” and this definition surely describes what I see.

    In the work world, we have this activity called training.  Training is a way to get the job done and to get new staff up to speed quickly.  It is an extremely beneficial activity because it instills confidence and creates efficiency.  However, at some levels in the corporation, training becomes a competition, something to prove a point.  From an external observation point withholding knowledge seems ridiculous for a number of reasons:  The first reason is that often, the perpetrator believes that s/he is proving a point about another’s intelligence or lack thereof.  This is never the case, because even if it proves difficult for the new person to complete a task unaided by support, no one ever views it the way the perpetrator wishes it to be viewed.

    Sometimes this one-up-man-ship is just for self-gratification.  The person with knowledge enjoys knowing something that others do not know.  Watching others look for the information is a way to demonstrate one’s self superiority over others.

    What I find most amazing about this withholding of knowledge is that, knowledge does not prove anything about intellect at all.  Knowledge, in no way, demonstrates critical thinking skills, or reasoning abilities.  Knowledge is just knowing something and something always changes over time.  This perpetrator works hard to prove how smart she is and instead proves that her intellect is lacking.  While knowledge may be power, strength is in numbers.  Sharing knowledge is the only fool proof way to maintain knowledge.

    The other type of mind game is the one where I pretend to know it all and won’t consider that anyone else is correct.  From an external observation point, this is an extremely difficult stance to maintain.  Many, many people work hard to maintain a know-it-all stance.  From what I have seen and observed, the difficulty lies in the need to ignore information to the contrary of this belief “I know it all.”   This person will tell everyone how to do the chore, when the chore does not work out or the instructions prove incorrect, this person must find a reason that proves that their instructions were above reproach and must have been either misunderstood or perhaps not followed.  It is difficult to ignore all of the information that tells them that there was a mistake, but even more difficult is the need to convince others that their eyes deceive them.  Instead of the “customer is always right”, the mantra is that “the boss is always right”.  Or, in the absence of being the actual boss, just the person with a forceful personality.

    As for the forceful personality: when it comes to discussing things with this person, there will be no discussion.  If in fact, you do not agree with the point of view that they favor, insults will start.  The conversation becomes harsh and ugly, because this is the behavioral fallback position of the bully (think Trump).  Again, mind games, head games and one-up-man-ship are the rules of the discussion.

    I normally do not write an article about a person, it is always a conglomeration of events that keep happening that I have a need to describe.  Usually I describe to understand.  And so it is with this discussion, just a need to understand.

    Read More
  • Love and Relationships,  Speaking as a Parent

    To the Woman Complaining because of Criticism that She Doesn’t Want Children

    August 2, 2016

    Look, I know you are upset because of all of the personal questions and negative feedback.  I have always felt put-out that my lifestyle is a bit different and people don’t like different.  We all want to validate our own lifestyle and so we are full of compliments for folks who mirror our lifestyles.  When people do not mirror our own lifestyles, we want to know why and/or ask them to justify their life position.  It’s a human issue, not a particular issue in relationship to your decision not to have children.

    It’s not about that, you are personalizing a universally human condition to be right.  Let me just get you to the other side of your question: why do people want to have children?  Let’s ask the justification question from the other side.

    I’ll start with some personal stuff: I’ve never been moved more powerfully by anyone over my children.  I think it’s in the DNA, we procreate and we are sincerely in love with our creations.  It’s the kind of love that mesmerizes us and follows us and consumes us.  For years and years we are romanticized by this love and we will go to the ends of the earth to make our passion worthwhile.  We continually work for and teach our offspring.  We want them to be brilliant, beautiful ad successful.  We will invest millions in our offspring’s life to assure this success.

    Parents are, however, very clumsy.  Sometimes we do a good job and sometimes we do not.  Sometimes the DNA is just not going to work and our child may have handicaps, both seen and unseen, such as mental illness or developmental disabilities.

    I think what people are really saying to you when they question your decision to not become a parent, is this; you will never find a greater love, a greater task and a greater challenge.  You will be forced to learn all kinds of things that you have no interest in knowing, but you will learn because you have to.  You will be motivated in a way that you cannot now imagine, but once you are there you will not know how life was life without your child.  It is a giving that has no boundaries and a taking that does not end.

    If you do not have a child, you don’t get the experience.  It is possible that other experiences will be just as wonderful and just as awe inspiring and just as enduring.  Parents just want you to know that you might be missing something.

    Read More