Archives for July 2018

Savannah

July 26, 2018 by admin 1 Comment

When I think of Savannah, I can’t help but smile. I actually don’t know her very well, but she has helped me see my relationships with younger women like her in a vastly different light. This change in perspective is very healing to me.

When I try to tell her what she means to me, I don’t have the words. There is too much to say. I can sometimes only convey wordless gratitude. Today I can take all the time and say all the words I need.

Here’s where I stood before I met Savannah.

My relationships with young women (girls, actually) started when I was a young man. As I’ve explained often on this blog, I was painfully shy and withdrawn as a boy. This posed a problem when I reached adolescence. I didn’t know how to carry on conversations with the girls I was attracted to.

Worse, my own self-worth was wrapped up in what these girls thought of me. And my assumption is that they found me disgusting. This was my distorted reality.

I didn’t attend school dances or my prom. I didn’t know any girls I would have the courage to ask, and the thought of having to hold up my end of an evening-long conversation terrified me.

I became infatuated with a girl my senior year in high school. She didn’t return my affections.

I became infatuated with a girl my sophomore year in college. She didn’t return my affections.

I took these failed relationships very personally. They left me devastated, lonely, and probably clinically depressed.

The story does have a happy ending: My senior year in college, I met my Jamie. She saw me, liked what she saw, and decided that she would be my exclusive girlfriend. Jamie showed me that my own opinion of myself was false. Jamie fills me with gratitude, even more so than does Savannah. But that’s a topic for a different letter.

Old wounds cut deep, and scars sometimes hurt. It took a lot of time to heal from the shame I felt as an adolescent. (Definition of shame: The intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are deeply flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.)

Savannah helped me heal from this shame. But before I get to that, there’s one more thing.

I’ve facilitated personal growth workshops for 15 years. In the early years, we would draw a lot of students from nearby colleges. I enjoyed working with these young adults, and I sometimes would be seen as a father figure by these young men and women.

There was one workshop in Portland where this was particularly true. On Saturday night the presenting team got together for a process called “Significant Moments.” Here’s how the process works: Every person on the team takes a turn and shares a moment during the workshop where we most significantly lived our purpose in life. It is not a time to be humble. It is a time to claim the impact we made in other peoples’ lives.

I shared my moment: I felt that this particular workshop, more than any other, I was seen as a father figure for a number of young people. No less than three young women actually approached me and told me this.

The next day, I was talking with the leader of the program, a person I looked up to and saw as my mentor. I shared again how special I felt to be seen in this light.

He replied that others had mentioned how I was relating in a “fatherly” way to young women. His demeanor was one of concern. His message was this: People are concerned about the way you’re relating to young women.

I was blindsided by his words. When I shared my significant moment, I felt no hint of impropriety or shame. His disapproval took something innocent and beautiful and turned it into something ugly and disgusting.

The insinuation was bullshit, pure and simple. Everything I did was completely appropriate. But the criticism touched that scar of shame and sent me spiraling into it. I bought into the bullshit.

For years afterward, I was oh-so-careful to never even have the appearance of any sort of inappropriate behavior with young women. I checked my motives with every interaction and usually pulled back from any sort of relationship intimacy with them.

Erring on the side of caution kept me from feeling shame. But it also kept me from giving to young women in a way that I was absolutely comfortable giving to other people. It did not heal my shame, it perpetuated it.

Now let’s talk about Savannah.

I met Savannah while facilitating the workshop in Chattanooga. She attended the workshop and then volunteered to be part of the presenting team. Savannah is outgoing and vivacious. Unlike me, she is unafraid to show open affection toward others. I admire her for this.

Savannah cares deeply about others. I see this in the workshop room. She is often moved to tears. This brings out the best in us old-timers who sometimes take the miracles we see for granted. It reminds us how we felt when we first had the privilege of doing this work.

I’ll need the rest of this letter to describe what is—to me—her greatest gift.

I was in another Significant Moments process with the team. I decided to open up a bit and be vulnerable. So I shared two feelings about myself. The first is that I felt comfortable in the fact that I was respected. The second was that I felt insecure about the fact that I was loved.

From that moment on, Savannah made it her mission to remind me that I was truly loved, by her and by the rest of the team. She didn’t hesitate to show her affection toward me.

Here’s an example. By the end of each workshop in Chattanooga, I was exhausted and just wanted to get on the road and be home with Jamie. After each workshop officially ended, we brought in pizza and everybody socialized. I had absolutely zero energy left for socialization, something I find challenging even in the best of situations.

So I usually gave hugs to several key people, grabbed a couple of slices of pizza to go, and kind of sneaked away. I never felt good about this. It felt like I “belonged” all weekend, and then suddenly the room turned into a place where I felt uncomfortable and awkward, where I perhaps didn’t even belong.

During one of those wistful departing moments, I paused for a second to survey the room before walking away. Suddenly I heard a voice from across the room call my name. It was Savannah.

And suddenly I was surrounded by a group of young women who enthusiastically wanted their hugs before I left. Savannah was the instigator. She had recruited them from the table where she was sitting.

I was loved. I belonged. I felt it strongly, in a way I never had before. Significantly, it came from the hugs of a group of young women. When it was Savannah’s turn, she said simply, “I love you.”

The words astonished me. I couldn’t have been so vulnerable as to say those words to her. My shame would have told me they might be seen as inappropriate. Yet here she was, showing me once again that my shame was bullshit. This simple act says more about Savannah’s qualities than anything I could describe about her.

Savannah taught me that I do have something to offer young women. I spent too many years pulling back, afraid of having any sort of relationship intimacy whatsoever with younger women. I was stuck in shame-based fear. Because I went overboard to make sure nobody could accuse me of being inappropriate, I made the opposite mistake of closing myself off. I cheated both others and myself out of my gift of vulnerability and connection.

I have something to offer everybody—young and old, male and female. A young woman’s sense of intimacy toward me will look different than a more mature woman or a man—as a type of father-daughter relationship (increasingly close to grandfather-granddaughter!) When I am emotionally clean, I can embrace this particular kind of intimacy. When I stand in my worthiness, I can accept the affection of young women and be affectionate in return.

Savannah, with your help I can finally embrace my worthiness. It’s taken merely 36 years for me to free myself from self-admonishment and shame.

Perhaps Savannah has even inspired me to be more openly affectionate with others, which is no mean feat for me! Recently I went to a week-long retreat in Tennessee. I hit it off with a guy in my small group. He was outgoing and friendly, and I didn’t have to try hard to be friends with him. Toward the end, we talked about how we appreciated each other’s friendship over the week. I suddenly blurted out “I love you.”

Now, I’ve said “I love you” to men in the past, but they were well-established relationships. I didn’t even mean to say it! I wouldn’t have said it if I had a split-second to think about it. It was an awkward moment for both of us, but it jump-started a relationship that continued after the retreat.

Savannah, was this your doing?

Cindy

July 15, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

I am tempted to call Cindy a kindred spirit. But upon reflection, we really aren’t. And that’s the beauty of it.

I met Cindy as a fellow attendee of the most extensive personal growth experience I’ve ever attended. It consisted four “retreats” spanning nine months. The entire experience covered 22 days. It was called a leadership program, though many in our group would end up disputing that.

I can’t say much about the retreats because they are covered by a confidentiality agreement. So I’ll just say that participants were encouraged to open up to others in ways that fractured the group. I opened up too, which placed me in a position where some others in the group feared or judged me. It also made it impossible for me to stay neutral in what felt like a dysfunctional family dynamic. One quarter of our group dropped out before the final retreat.

Emotionally, I went to the place I usually went when under severe judgment: extreme shame. Cindy provided me with crucial support when I needed it badly. She stuck with me and listened with compassion to the pain caused by others’ judgment and exclusion. By doing so, she risked her own standing within the group.

Cindy was—still is—a trail blazer. She saw where the group could go; what it might be. And she started to clear a trail for it. (That sounds like a leadership quality to me.) Problem was, nobody was following her. It was very political. There was a lot of backbiting and eventually outright hostility. By the end of the program, many in the group had turned against her.

After the retreats were over, Cindy and I continued to speak on the phone, usually about once per month. We scheduled it to make sure there was always a “next” talk. We still do, seven years later.

We like to do “deep dives” and talk about topics that have meaning for our whole lives rather than simply catching up with surface events. When we start a conversation with, “How are you?” it is a question to be taken seriously. She’s on a list of maybe six friends I can tell just about anything to. That’s because I know she will not judge me, and I will not judge her.

We are both life coaches. We take our “coach” hats off during our phone conversations, but we still get the benefit of each other’s training and insight. We know how to listen and refrain from advice unless it is welcome.

So here’s why Cindy is not a kindred spirit: We are very different. This is particularly apparent when it comes to our views on politics or spirituality. People with my views and people with her views are often seen on the news yelling at each other across a police line.

What’s our secret? Do we avoid those topics, in order to keep the peace? No. Do we enjoy the spirit of debate and shake hands when it’s over? No. Do we change each other’s minds? Sometimes, but not fundamentally.

Instead, we appreciate each other for our disparate views.

For example, Cindy is a very spiritual person. I am a scientist at heart. (Actually, Cindy has a degree in engineering, so she understands science perfectly well.) Whereas I choose to be a skeptic, Cindy chooses to be more open-minded.

Yet despite my skepticism, Cindy feels comfortable sharing about her spirituality with me. She tells me stories that fascinate me! Although I don’t abandon my skepticism, I can see the effect of her spirituality on her is real, vibrant, and powerful.

I thought, “If Cindy could get this much meaning and power from her spirituality, couldn’t I be open-minded about it?” And so I have.

She keeps my skepticism from draining the color and life from my worldview. I’m still too much of a skeptic for my own good. But I value having Cindy in my life to remind me that there are important, powerful things in life that cannot be measured or classified. For example: Love.

Here’s my point: If we define each other by our beliefs, and are loyal only to those people who believe the same, then we objectify others based on the groups to which they belong. We’ve done this all along when it comes to race, gender, age, socio-economic status, etc. But until now I’ve never seen people HATE each other so much simply because of what the other believes. It is tearing us apart.

If you want to be part of the solution, start by reading this book: Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown, my very favorite author.

As for Cindy and I, we got to know each other as human beings first. That’s what the book says too: “People are hard to hate close-up. Move in.”

Cindy is such an invaluable friend because she’s so different from me, not in spite of it. She gives me her female perspective. The mere fact that she is a woman makes it easier because men don’t easily talk about feelings to other men. And because she’s different in so many other ways, I learn a lot more from her than if I was to talk to somebody just like me.

Being able to do our “deep dives” into topics with such sensitivity, acceptance, and compassion is rare. I’m not sure how many others have this opportunity. Some—maybe most—don’t want it. It can be scary to be vulnerable and cultivate intimacy.

I still admire her courage as a trail-blazer. She often interacts with the world the way she should be, whether or not the world is the way it should be. And the world sometimes tries to punish her for that.

The growth I’ve seen in her is miraculous and spectacular. Although I don’t like the word “enlightened” (because, you know, scientist stuff), I have no problem calling her the most enlightened person I know. This is because I actually see her life working better as a result of the hard work she’s done. I’m proud that she credits me with doing the small service of pointing her in the right direction from time to time.

Cindy, you are not my kindred spirit. And that has made all the difference. I will be grateful for the rest of my life.

Anna

July 12, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

Having a baby is a strange thing. We go into it thinking about a cuddly figure entirely dependent upon us for its survival. It is “ours,” something that will make our lives complete. We rarely think about the long gradual process of turning over our child’s life from ours to theirs, from it being our dream to being his or her dream.

The first time I felt the weight of this is when Anna started going to school. Suddenly she was putting her own names on her assignments, doing her own work, and creating her own permanent record. She had started becoming her own person.

Up to that point, Jamie and I were her teachers. I remember teaching her vocabulary. She was good at repeating words. I would point to the sky and say, “Moon!” She would say “Mooon!” I would say “car” or “chair” or “truck” and she would point to it and repeat it. (The “tr” in truck would come out more like an “f.”)

As I drove with her in the car seat, I would say “red light stop!” and “green light go!” and she would repeat it until she learned what it meant.

I remember her first completely original sentence. Jamie was holding her and she wanted down. So she cobbled this sentence together: “Get the baby outta here!”

Anna had a strong will, and in many ways still does. (When Anna was small, Jamie even bought a book titled The Strong-Willed Child.) She was—and is—fiercely independent. We had to hold her tightly in our arms, because as an infant if she saw something she wanted, she simply dove for it. She demanded our attention. If we put her down, she would immediately run out of the room. Then one day she actually sat and played by herself for 20 minutes. We held our breaths and rejoiced.

When Anna was born, a friend custom sewed two Raggedy Ann dolls for her. They were her “Raggys.” She loved one until the face and appendages came off. Then she did the same to the second. Jamie mended them until they became unmendable. She tried sewing a new Raggy, but Anna rejected it. We still have the two original Raggys in a shadow box hanging in the hall outside my office. One of them has a face redrawn on it and the head is sewn directly onto the legs.

When Anna was a baby, Jamie wanted her to like our cats, so she would take Anna’s hand and pet the cat. It worked. Anna grew to love our pets. She took our cat Gidgett when she left home, and now has her own menagerie of six cats, four dogs, and a horse. She would buy t-shirts with animals on them, wear them well after she outgrew them, and refuse to get rid of them. As a teen, she bred finches.

Whenever we lost a pet, Anna took it particularly hard. She would hyperventilate. She had to learn the hard way that having a pet means watching it die.

She loved watching two VCR tapes in particular: Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day; and 101 Dalmatians. Sometimes we would attend a birthday party, and after a while we’d notice that most of the children at the party were crawling around pretending to be Dalmatians.

Anna loved spending time with me. When she was young, my time with the family was limited. I was running a tax-related business, and from Thanksgiving until Valentine’s Day I practically lived at the office. Jamie would often take the kids to extended family in Mississippi for Christmas because I was too busy to go. For this reason, I believe Anna and Molly in particular craved my time and attention. Andrew was a bit too young to remember.

Like all my children, Anna is smart, and she was the most academically oriented. She always looked to achieve.

I bought a telescope and we’d look at the sky together. Molly and Andrew looked through the scope and then moved on, but Anna was fascinated. We started going to star parties together, standing out in fields in the dark looking at the sky alongside a bunch of mostly middle-aged men. I think she loved it because she got to spend time with me as much as any other reason.

Always the achiever, she went to the University of Virginia and majored in Aerospace Engineering and Astronomy. Originally she was majoring in Astrophysics rather than Astronomy. She wanted to change majors, but saw it as some sort of personal failure. She called me to talk about it, and I asked if she would ever use what she was learning in Astrophysics. She said that if she had to do Astrophysics for a living she might as well shoot herself. So I finally convinced her to change majors.

She’s sometimes prone to this kind of hyperbolic language. She often says that if she ever gets pregnant she would “throw herself down the stairs.” We don’t expect grandchildren anytime soon.

Shortly after she left for college, we were talking face-to-face, and she asked me if I was mad at her. The question took me aback. I assured her that I wasn’t the least bit angry. But I don’t know if I really took the time to truly understand where she was coming from. I’d have to guess that it was because I didn’t call her very often once she left for college, whereas Jamie would stay in touch quite often. She asked a very grown-up question and I could have used it to more vulnerably discuss our relationship.

I felt a nagging sense of shame about not keeping in touch very well with any of my children. I hope they understand that it’s difficult to for me to call just to chat. I do much better talking to people when the topic is something that really matters. They still call me when they want advice. Still, it’s kind of like saying “I love you.” Yes, my family knows I love them, and it’s still nice to hear it from me more often.

Speaking of which: I rarely told my family I loved them when my children were young. It felt excruciatingly vulnerable. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, yet I think many people know what that feels like.

After I started my personal growth journey, I started saying “I love you” to my kids. By this time, Anna was about 14. Whenever I told her I loved her, she would say “Uh-huh.” I guess it felt vulnerable to her too. After a while it became easy for both of us, as it did with Molly and Andrew.

Right about that time, it also dawned on me that I only had a few short years before Anna left home. (I had yet to ponder that I would lose all three of my children in quick succession, but that time would come!) I can remember listening to the song “Butterfly Kisses” and weeping. When my children were born, it seemed like I would have them forever. Turns out it was such a brief period.

We did the college tour thing and she fell in love with the University of Virginia. It was so far away—much farther than the schools Molly and Andrew would pick. And she didn’t know a single person there. When we dropped her off to college, it truly felt as if we were abandoning her.

Her freshman year I invited her on a ski trip and told her she could invite a friend. So she called me and asked, “Uh… can my friend be male?”

And so it is that I was the first in the family to meet Matt. Anna wasn’t sure how she felt about Matt then, but Matt knew exactly how he felt about Anna. It took a while, even after the ski trip, but eventually they started dating. Then it took a while after that before she would admit it to us.

Anna and Matt got married right after graduation. They live in Maryland now and Anna isn’t afraid to tell everyone how much she adores him.

Anna is spirited and ambitious. After being hired as a civilian for the Navy, she still took time to earn her master’s degree in engineering at the University of Maryland.

Anna knows how to dream. She has eclectic interests. For instance, she recently started knitting small stuffed animals. She loves lab work, so she now works at a lab where chemistry would be more useful than the degrees she has. Even though she’s worked in engineering for seven years, she’s seriously looking at working in a zoo. She’s also looked at creating various inventions for horse care (controlled through an app!) and has considered getting into horse nutrition. Matt wants to be an entrepreneur even more fervently, and has test-flown several ideas.

Anna is enthusiastic. She would much rather be busy than bored. When things seem “stuck” to her, she gets depressed.

Anna, I love you with all my heart. I taught you from a young age to be like me. I hope that’s more of a blessing than a curse for you. I am proud of you, and the person you have become. You are no longer ours, but your mom and I can take a little credit for the amazing person you have become.