More birds

Stupid Cooper's Hawk came, scared all my little friends AND one of them freaked out so badly that she flew into the window. A window to which I have attached the "do not fly into the window" clings. Natural selection, bah! I encouraged the hawk to move on, but the little ones are not back yet. Probably at a bird funeral.

Crazy bird lady

I bought two new bird feeders to add to the variety of flight friends I have at our front window. I have a third addition (total of five) in mind as well. I also purchased squirrel corn. And put out some black oil sunflower seeds for the chipmunks. I have spent hours sitting at the window with with my laptop while I visit What Birdand Cornell Bird ID site. It is nerdy, and I don't care.

I am not an expert. I do not know their calls. I do not know their migratory patterns. I don't know the mating rituals. I barely know what they eat. I cannot identify them in flight.

If one is sitting 10 feet away from me, I am not going to offer its name unless I am sure of its general family. Yes, I get my finches mixed up. There are many of them with red markings, and I sometimes confuse them. I love my many varieties of chickadee, mostly because I am juvenile and like to say "titmouse".


I won't argue with you about what it is, because it is not that important to me. I will wonder why it is so important to you.

The space in front of you

When a relationship is over, there is a space that is created that another person used to fill. The space is physical, emotional and in time. It can feel daunting and wild to recognize it.

I used to have a phone call around 9 AM most mornings during which I would clean my kitchen or a bathroom or fold laundry. It was lovely, and I miss it. I still have to clean my kitchen, but I left that space open for a while intentionally. This was something I had learned from a million years ago.

When someone leaves your life in whatever way it happens, their physical non-presence is disorienting. If you have ever had a pet die, how long did it take for you to stop looking for it? You expected to see it greet you at the door or a shadow would make you think it was coming around the corner like it had every single day you were together. When you exist in a space that used to be occupied by more people, you can feel the distance between you and inanimate objects more keenly. You understand how large or small a room truly is.

Whatever emotional space that person held is even messier. The grief, the fear, the pain not only usurp the places where you once felt tender and loving, they leak into other emotional spheres as well. What used to confound me, and probably still does to a lesser extent, is how you can feel so much so strongly and still feel incredibly empty. I have mentioned my broken engagement here before. I was overwhelmed by the loss, but I distinctly remember feeling a hole in my chest.

The absence of someone also creates a huge space in your time. No more phone calls, no more hanging out and chatting, no more after-work plans, nothing to DO. When the engagement ended, I lost a golf partner, 5-night-a-week dining out companion, someone to stay up way too late talking to, poker pal, lunch-break-check-in-caller POOF. gone. That was the immediate loss. I also had to look past that to see that nothing in my life's script was the same. Everything that I thought I knew: wedding, vacations, house, babies, back to work, retirement; all of those things were gone and the time and space stretched out beyond anything I could begin to see in the first few weeks.

I rarely mention this, but my husband was married for quite a while to someone else. When he came home and found her and her belongings gone, he gave himself a year and a day before he would date anyone else. He gave himself time to fill the the immediate and long-term space in the way he was choosing. He did not feel he had to rush out and fill every moment, though I can argue that with him all day. I think he spent a lot of time in activities to avoid an empty house, which is not a bad motivation. He started mountain biking. He began martial arts, which he had wanted to do since childhood. While these things did not replace her, they occupied his time in ways that helped fill the space physically, emotionally and with his time.

After my break up, I looked at my options and decided to get a masters degree. It met all my needs at that time.

What concerns me is seeing people who are quick to fill that emptiness instead of just being with it and looking at it. I did not run to the CD cabinet to find a way to fill the silence while I cleared the breakfast dishes and unloaded the dishwasher. I worked with the absence until I found something that could never replace those conversations, but still makes what I feel is good use of my time.

That open space gives one both isolation and freedom, but focusing too hard on one or the other makes it difficult to move from that place of staring down a part of your life that is now missing. Sit in isolation, and you loose the chance to fill that space thoughtfully and carefully. Relish the freedom, and you run the risk of filling the space with the trivial or harmful. Both of those opportunities can bring guilt. "I feel bad that I am using my time more wisely and that I am sitting here wallowing." "I feel bad that I am enjoying this loss a little too much." Mostly those two pieces sit together, on top of each other. There is a point where the 'shoulds' become 'coulds' and that is when you know you can act from a place of having been true to yourself. You had the space, you looked at it carefully and filled it passionately.

Test of compassion on the horizon

I cannot complete a Year of Compassion in good conscience without addressing the relationship in which I have made NO attempt to be kind, mend fences or seek a compassionate heart. If you have read anything here before, you know of whom I speak....the MIL.

Yep. I need to work on that one. I have no place to begin. We have no common ground. We have no specific wrong to address. The truth is that we just don't like each other that well. She has no idea how to take me and gets offended easily, which I kind of promote when I am fed up with her. I think she is closed minded, narrowly focused and too in need of validation. She thinks life is a series of events you cannot control that rip your heart out. I think life is an opportunity with some unexpected challenges.

When I separately mentioned to my mom and sister that there was one relationship that needed to be rebuilt, they both said, "I hope you mean Pat."

We will go there on Saturday, and I will propose to her that I feel she is unhappy with our relationship. I will offer her ways for us to discuss it: then and there, over email so that it is not so intense or not at all. She has said that she cannot change, and if she feels that way about this as well, I can accept it.

I see the biggest hurdle for me. It will be explaining why I have trouble giving her the benefit of the doubt without it sounding like I am enumerating all of the ways in which she has pissed me off in the last 10 years. Devin and Teresa are dead, so they are no longer an issue. But they were central to the way she treated me and treated Chris in those first seven years. There is much more damage done than undone.

"Can't you just be nice to her?" my mom asked. Um, no. If it were that simple, I would already be doing that. I can adopt a strong pro-wine policy though. It may come to that; I don't know.

The key to this is that she is going to have to stop with the unsolicited, crazy advice and personal questions. I am not interested in putting Neosporin up my nose when I have a cold. I don't feel like sharing the value of my home, the amount of my mortgage payment or how much I spend a year in food. I am not AT ALL interested in telling you my medical history, getting your advice on childrearing or hearing your thoughts on foreign policy (she thinks no one can enter Israel if they are not an Israeli citizen).

I think this can be fixed if she will learn to think before she speaks. If she doesn't, I have to assume mental illness on some level and approach it from that viewpoint.

This is not going to be easy. Part of me hopes she plays dumb and says, "No, everything is fine. There is no work to be done here." I don't need a 100% success rate to learn the lesson.

Ms. Judgy McJudgerson

Yesterday, I touched briefly on being judgmental. It seems to be a topic all its own as it relates to my Year of Compassion (hurrah).

I have a friend (Hi, TR!) with whom I have spent so many beautiful hours in intentional sacred space. We also have spent many beautiful hours in intentional goofiness, which is another reason I love her. In moments of creating dreams for ourselves, she often has said that she wishes to be less judgmental. I have to remind her, “If you don’t judge them, how can you rank them?” Her typical reply is, “You’re terrible”, said with equal parts of disgust and affection. Not everyone can pull that off.

I cannot speak for TR and how she came to her judgy place, but I certainly can tell you how I got to mine. I went to a school where being right was held above all other values. I do not recall a single lesson about being a good person. Character education certainly was not around. It was more of a “be nice or be punished” set up. However, if you were smart, you were glorified.

In first grade, we did not get grades (much to my dismay) until second semester. Our papers were marked with a star, a check or check minus. Oh, that star! It certainly set you apart from the check people. If you got all of the problems right, you got a scratch and sniff sticker (“You’re grape!” “Berry good job!”). Clearly, you were better than everyone else, and you had the sticker to prove it.

This was pretty much the entirety of my education. Be smart, be the best, be rewarded. Nothing, nothing, NOTHING is more important than being right. Don’t ever forget it. If you are right, you are special.

Who wouldn’t want to be special?

The Quakerism I was raised with was much more mainline Protestant than the Liberal Quakers on either coast. If you were right, you went to Heaven. If you were wrong, you could be forgiven, but you had to ask for it, and you had to mean it. If you were wrong and unrepentant, you were a sinner and you went to Hell. Being right…choosing the right thing, being Right with God, knowing the laws and following the path of RIGHTeousness. Again, there is nothing better than being right—you get eternal life with your Creator which is so much better than eternal burning.

In my family, we have a story. No one remembers what led up to it, but my brother said, “That’s thing main thing in this family; everyone thinks they are right all the time!” And we do. One thing I learned early was that I do not argue debate or discuss things about which I know not. This accomplishes two things: 1) You are never wrong, merely absent from a conversation. 2) You appear to be right a large percentage of the time. There are many, many topics that I will never discuss. Many people in my group of friends practice yoga. I simply listen when it comes up. I don’t know enough about it to be right, so I just listen. Legal matters? Unless I have a computer on my lap so that I can look something up, I say nothing.

To this day, there are few feelings that I enjoy as much as being right. Happiness is never having to say, “I told you so” because it is so obvious that I told you so.

So much for the Year of Compassion (hurrah). Not judging, or at least correcting myself when I judge has been as byproduct of this year. I did not set out to put an end to my judging. Why would I? That would eliminate my feeling right and special, which I enjoy.

This should be the part where I get all Nicholas Sparks on you and realize that there is something better than feeling special….feeling love and unity with my fellow humans. Seriously? It is a Year of Compassion, folks, not a brain transplant.

However, I will say that being able to say, “It is not about me” helps cut down on the judging tremendously. I start to put on my superiority ….I am not sure what fictional garment works best here. I was thinking vest, but I dunno. Hat? I will go with cape. I put on my superiority cape, and I pause to realize, “This is not about me. Lady, if you want to feed your kids fude, go for it! It is not about me. Blessings to you.” When I say it enough (crappy food mom and I intersect in each aisle), I start to really want blessings for her. And for her kids, because eating that load of crap she serves them, they will need it.

See how I am conquering it in small parts? It is still very much a work in progress.

I started the year trading my behind-the-wheel curses for yelling, “Blessings to you!” Will found this to be hilarious. The blessings were delivered with the same tone and venom as my negativity, but I believed if I kept it up, I would start to believe it. I have. Overtime, my voice has softened. I try to believe that they would not be jerks if it were not important. I understand that in times of great lateness I have been the jerk and could have used a little forgiveness. When I call out “Blessings to you”, I mean it about 90% of the time.

We all judge. It makes us feel better about ourselves. It tells us that at least there is one poor soul out there doing worse than I am. Some days, I am the poor soul that serves to give someone else’s spirits a lift by doing something less right (not wrong…can’t be wrong) than he or she is. If I can continue to focus on the truth, which is that it is not about me, I can reduce my need to right and thereby special, and I can greatly reduce the judging. I am not sure what that accomplishes in the aggregate other than it is one branch on the tree of compassion.

Year of Compassion continues

In the Quaker tradition, the congregation sits in silence with the belief that the Spirit will “speak to your condition”. If you are still and keep quiet, that which is on your heart will be heard. Yesterday, the Reverend Amy Kindred (isn’t that the best name for a UU minister EVER?) visited our church and did, in fact, address some of my issues.

She spoke on the book, The Four Agreements. It is a Native American story that tells of four rules for creating a peaceful world. I don’t remember the last two; the second was so directly related to my Year of Compassion on my work on forgiveness that I glossed over the last 10 minutes.

The first agreement is: Be impeccable in your word. I don’t have an issue with this 99% of the time. Having been raised Quaker and its all-truth-all-the-time core, I do not mess with untruth. It makes one untrustworthy, and I don’t have time to go back and cover up lies all the time.

The second agreement is: Don’t take it personally. She gave wonderful examples to illustrate how we often take things personally, and how when we don’t, we are probably seeing the world more accurately. This idea strikes at the heart of Year of Compassion and issues of forgiveness.

I want to start with the person who has committed an injurious act. It is not about the injured person. What is happening with the person who acted outside of right relations? Why were they so caught up in themselves, their own pain, their own need to be special that they brought conflict? Becky Bailey notes in Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline that anger is born of fear. If you are angry, you actually fear something.

An exercise that I do with Will to diffuse his drama is to take his fear to the meta conclusion. “You are angry because I told you to clean your room, why?” “Because I don’t want to.” “What are you afraid will happen if you clean your room? That you won’t have Legos all over the floor? That you will be able to find a book when you want it? You’re right, that sucks.” He is much easier to deal with when I use humor. It usually comes down to his being afraid that he will not have time to play with his friends and being afraid that he is going to bossed around and not have control of his own schedule. Both are things we can address and fix.

Let’s look at this from the injured party. In Reverend Kindred’s example, someone breaks a lunch date, you think, “She must not want to see me THAT badly.” Something probably has come up; it is not about you. Someone doesn’t say “hi” as she passes your desk at work. “She doesn’t like me.” Again, it is probably not about you. Sometimes the injury is more direct, and someone hurts your deeply. While it does of course hurt, it probably was not about YOU. You were probably collateral damage.

There is a UU podcast, Voices of Liberal Religion, which I love love love. I think I have mentioned it here before but he says that we should not forgive our wrongdoers, we should love them. By speaking of traditional forgiveness, we put ourselves in a place of ego. We have the power and control over the situation by determining who gets our forgiveness, who is deserving, how it is meted out. We put our specialness above loving kindness. No one is so special that they should feel they have the power to demand penance for a wrong or to make someone pay for a grievance.

As UUs, we are called to believe that everyone is doing the best they can with what they have at any given moment. Reverend Kindred made the unforgettable point that sometimes our “best at the time” is not so great and leaves pain and heartache in our wake. Your best in one moment may not be your best in another. When you choose not to forgive, when you hold on to your anger, when you judge….these are not your best moments. Release them and find your better self. Rise to the moment, open your heart, let go of judgment and act from a place of true love. I am sorry for your dark places which hold you back. Please be compassionate with mine.

When I look at the people whom I have the hardest time forgiving, I do the meta fear exercise. I find it extremely hard to forgive my MIL for the way she parented and the way she treated Chris and I were Teresa and Devin were still alive. It is very hard for me to suspend my judgment and go with “She did the best she could at the time with what she had.” I grit my teeth at seeing that as someone’s “best”.
What do I fear?
I fear that she will continue to hurt Chris.
Why is that scary?
I don’t like to see him hurt.
Why is that scary?
Because when he hurts, I hurt.
Why is that scary?
Because pain is an out-of-control emotion.
Why is that scary?
Because I like to have a grip on things. Are you new here?
Is that something you can let go? Can you go back to your belief that pain and disappointment are a part of life. Light and dark. Happy and sad.
I can arrive at the point where I accept the pain as shitty, but temporary.

To bring this idea of compassion all the way around, the irony is that when we choose NOT to forgive or to love, we are perpetuating pain. When we choose not to accept the apology of someone, we need to recognize that it is a fear within us that stops us from restoring right relations among us. We are creating the same damage, either intentionally or accidentally, as was done to us. My harbored resentment for MIL hurts her. I don’t mean for it to. I do not set out to seek revenge. But I know that my frosty disposition and my withholding affection from her upset her. I am working on it.

Knowing that none if this is about you also helps you stop judging. When I see a grocery cart full of shit food, I judge. I really do. If I accept that she is doing the best she can at the time and that this is not about me, I can continue on my obsessive-label-reading way. I also make a note that my judging was not the best me either.

Sometimes, the injury is intentional and punitive. “You screwed me, and I am giving it back 10 fold.” Again, we have to assume that there is some darkness in the person who feels the need to seek revenge, administer justice and inflict on you the pain that they hold. When you are faced with this, try to have compassion in your heart for that person and believe that they are doing the best they can. It may not be the best that you would want, but in the end, it is not about you.

If you want something fun to do today, try applying this to foreign relations. It will blow your mind.

(also…I am not doing NaNoWriMo, but I am going to try to blog more this month. You have been alerted.)

All kinds of crazy

Everyone of us is crazy in someway. Or at least not crazy in a way that others find crazy. Well, someone, somewhere thinks you are somewhat crazy. Or something.

My husband's unique brand of crazy would be funny if you did not live with him. He has an unreasonable attachment to stuff. No kidding. His big fear is that I am going to throw out everything he had before we got together.

This fear is not unfounded. Specific items have been threatened. In my mind, they serve no purpose. They will never be used. They are ugly (he has some really horrible sweaters from the 80s that are still here). They are things to which I cannot imagine anyone could form an attachment, but he has.

One of those things is a TV. I hate the TV. I always have. It is HUGE. I find it obnoxious. I also find it ironic for a family that does not have cable, satellite or even an antenna. We don't do TV here. We do some Netflix. We use our computers for most of our screen time. I have not missed the TV since it died over 18 months ago. However, it has sat in our living room as a monument to.....I honestly don't know.

We have gotten by using our DVD players on the PCs or the kids will watch my tiny 20" TV that has undefinable colors that fade in and out. I have been OK with that. I told Chris from the beginning of our relationship that I don't like the message the BIG TV sends. It is not who we are. His family? Hell, yeah! His parents watch 2 hours of soap operas everyday and who knows what all evening. TV is not important to us. Even at our peak, it was an occasional use item.

Chris's theory on big purchases is this: Either get the best or just enough to get by. I honestly have no comprehension of this. Because he got the best TV in 1995, we still have it and that apparently is not changing. We have his parents' truck for the week, so he has loaded the TV to take it for assessment and possible repair. I don't care if we ever have satellite again, but it would be a great TV for Wii. If we had one, which we don't. Those who know me know that I am far too cheap to consider purchasing one.

I do have a limited understanding of attachment to things, though not ugly sweaters. When Chris and I had been dating a while and I was spending most of my time at his place, every few weeks I needed to go to my apartment to see my things. I know---my own brand of crazy. That apartment was the first one where everything in it had been purchased by me. Lots of items purchased with six months same as cash. My TV, furniture, stereo, VCR, deluxe mattress...the products of a lot of overtime and careful budgeting. You know what? Most of that crap is gone. I did not shed tears or demand that we keep them. We gave things away, some things wore out, sometimes we realized we did not need two of something and it went to Goodwill. I was OK with it.

The TV from Hell will come back this week, repaired and ready for action. Have I mentioned that no one here has time for TV now that we have kids in two schools? Plus, Chris is taking a class, doing consulting, plus all the grease stuff and auto maintenance. Who does he think will use this, and what does he think we will watch?

Honestly, I have grown to enjoy the cozy of a laptop to keep me toasty while I watch my own little screen with my headphones on.

She has SNAPPED

Yes, Meara has learned to snap her fingers. To Van Halen's "Jamie's Crying" no less. It was a happy moment in the backseat.

Atheist Battles

There was an NPR story about a rift among atheists. It really toasted my cheese.

I went through my first major religious upheaval 17 years ago this fall. There have been a few minor ones that have brought me to this point. Where I am now--nontheist. I am not arrogant or smart enough to say without a doubt, "There is no higher power." There may be, but I do not personally believe that there is. That does not mean that I do not believe in religion. I am a UU in its current incarnation, through and through. I look forward to Sundays, when I join other like-minded people and we celebrate the lives that we have, our interconnectedness and our community that comes together to make the world a better place. I call it the church of logic and be nice to people. Science is celebrated, not mocked.

In getting to this place, I studied A LOT of religious traditions, and embarked on my own personal, DIY, Comparative Religions degree. Some things made sense. Most did not. Raised Quaker, with NO ritual or symbolism, the Catholic church's focus on rites was fascinating. There is a scene in Big Love where Chloe Sivigny's character is enrolling her child in a Catholic school and discussing the beliefs. Her reaction to eating the actual body of Christ was almost identical to mine. (I still don't understand the draw of eating your Savior, but whatever.) The monotheism of Judaism without the Virgin births and Resurrections was temping as well. The nontheistic branches of Quakerism probably would have been my choice had there been any congregations in the area that were accepting of that.

I have retained my original faith's meditative and pacifist ways. I like my religion to be quiet and thoughtful. I always am amused when people say they believe in God, but are not religious, while I am religious but don't believe in a supernatural entity that involves itself in our lives. Whatever gets you through the day...

It is exactly that spirit of "Whatever gets you through the day" that we all could embrace with a tone of civility and a drop of, dare I say it, compassion. While I do not necessarily respect someone's religious beliefs, I try to respect the person who holds them. There are some very basic ideas of religion that I find are just loony, from my perspective. As someone who wants to see actual facts and evidence, much of religious belief is beyond anything I can grasp. To meet my questions with the answer, "I just have faith" makes me want to jump up and down and start drawing logic diagrams. I am not someone who needs faith; I need data and the capacity to analyze it.

The other thing that I need is for people not to be assholes. Seriously. It is pointless, mean-spirited and paints your cause (whatever side you are on) with a shadow of revulsion. I hate people bashing gays in the name of God with as much passion as I hate nontheists bashing Christians for clinging to Creationism. Each side claims to be justified, but neither is.

Here is a chunk from the NPR story:

For example, Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the book God Is Not Great, told a capacity crowd at the University of Toronto, "I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right." His words were greeted with hoots of approval.

Religion is "sinister, dangerous and ridiculous," Hitchens tells NPR, because it can prompt people to fly airplanes into buildings, and it promotes ignorance. Hitchens sees no reason to sugarcoat his position.

"If I said to a Protestant or Quaker or Muslim, 'Hey, at least I respect your belief,' I would be telling a lie," Hitchens says.

Asked why he feels compelled to be so blunt, he responds: "I believe it's more honest, more brave, more courageous simply to state your own position."

He is not simply stating his own position. He is being an ass for no good reason. I do agree with some of his point of how religion hurts societies. I get it. He is ignoring a body of evidence that also shows where faith has helped societies. Do I think religion is a huge drag on the progress of the US right now? Absolutely. I am happy to discuss why I believe that with those of faith, but I am not willing to mock them, call them stupid and act like a total bitch about it.

One of the most galling things about this is that with 40 million nontheists in the US right now, we have a chance to carve a legitimate/legitimized place for ourselves in the nation's policy and practical discussions. It IS brave to be in the US and say you are nontheist. For the first time, there is an opportunity to create an atmosphere of goodwill where we are not discounted simply because we are not believers in god(s). However, by acting as hateful, rude, arrogant shitweasels, a faction of the nontheist movement is going to ensure that we continue to be marginalized, discounted and hated.

Ironically, for many in the religious community, these militants are confirming everything that has been believed about nontheists. We have no god, and therefore no heart.

I am married to the guy who does these things

I had posted on the Bloggers Action Day for Climate Change that I was bummed about the whole thing. No political will. No financial ability for individuals. Life is a shit sandwich, nom nom nom.

That night, the spouse came home and announced that he thought he could make solar panels for about $100 a piece. I am not sure how quickly he plans to act on this little venture. I would guess in Feb. to try to prep for months when we actually have sun. The point is, it is just like him to do this. "Can't afford it? I will build it." And the crazy thing is that he does. All the time. He believes that he can fix or build anything if given enough time. I have told him that at no time will he be constructing a thermo-nuclear reactor in the crawl space. However, if he wants to put in a DIY geothermal system, I can live with that.

The spouse did go to some of the sites for the Indiana Solar Tour a few weeks ago. One of the issues where he and I part ways is energy usage. He believes that there is a big ball of energy that appears on the eastern horizon every morning and that conservation is unnecessary with that kind of energy available, renewable and free. While that is true in the macro, that does not help our little home. He met a very wealthy family on the tour that does just that. I am the energy conservationist here. I am looking into awnings to promote passive solar, concrete floors to replace the carpet in the south room and using the sun to heat M's room more efficiently. On the solar tour, he saw something that intrigued me.

I am going to try to describe this to you based on the spouse's drawing, and it will probably fall short, but I think you will get the idea. One of the homes was a tri-level structure, so the bottom living area had high, short windows. On the south side, a small pit was dug near one of the windows and filled with black rocks to absorb the heat. They had some sort of clear (plexiglass?) cover. All day, the sun would heat the rocks. At night, the owner opened the window and let all that warm air come into the house and drift to the upper levels. Brilliant. If one was not lazy, which I often am, you could leave the rocks in a wagon of some sort in the sun all day. Bring them in at night to radiate heat in rooms where you don't get good heat distribution.

Chris has all kinds of other crazy ideas, many of which involve burning wood. He will tell you in great detail why he loves wood heat. He does. A lot. In a way that I find pathological. I will not have the mess of wood heat in the house. I have enough mess, thanks. But his ideas are fairly brilliant. Maybe he can employ them in a barn someday ;-)

Blog for Climate Change Day

I am a ray of sunshine today. (Harness me and use me to cook your dinner) I am really in an ugly place on climate change. I sit here in a the computer complex at home with my coal-fired electricity connecting me to you and KNOWING that some poor mountaintop in Appalachia is being destroyed because of it. I have come to some sad conclusions.

America does not have the political will to make positive changes. The anti-intellectuals who either cannot or choose not to understand climate change are putting a plug in meaningful legislation. They are not alone. They are shored up by those who believe profit is more important than ethics. Those two groups alone can outspend and outbuy any meaningful environmental lobby.

Oh, the environmental lobby. I don't know how, but they have got to all come together and act as a single force. NRDC, Sierra Club, NWF....I am afraid if you do not band together, the message is murky, oft-repeated and oft-ignored.

I see the 10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Save the Planet articles. We run our cars on grease. We have solar water heat (fat lot of good it has done me in the last two weeks). The house is full of CFLs. My heat stays at 68; my A/C at 75. I have done all I can do at this point without adding debt, which I won't do. I hate that I don't have a PV system, a windmill and an entirely edible front yard. We just are not there yet.

The cheesy articles are right, though. I do not think our government will be able to do what needs to be done. It is going to be the committed and the few who make the "right" decisions. Unfortunately, most of us cannot afford a wind turbine or a complete solar outfit. The ones who COULD afford it seem to be the ones who are the least.

We have found the virus, and the virus is us.

Walk more.
Plant your own food.
Hang your laundry to dry.
Change your lightbulbs already!
Don't eat commercial meat.
Put on a sweater.

It won't be enough, but it will be something.

Hoping for failure, drama and mental illness

Oh, MIL. You continue to give with your special brand of dysfunction and crazy.

Will started school yesterday. It was great. He loved it. He complained about journaling, but if he had not, I would have taken him back and demanded my REAL child. He did earn an incident report (on the first day! overachiever!) when his fingers got smashed in the door. One of the first things he asked me...."Did you know I get to check the work of the first graders?" I did.

MIL had called a few weeks ago to ask Will about his first day. I told her that we did not have official notification, and that he probably would not start until closer to October. Call back when he actually goes. I was wrong about the start date, but still, she was confused. On the upside, that prepared me for the fact that she was going to call yesterday.

Post-school was not great for Will. He did not sleep much the night before, which was to be expected. EVERYTHING was new. That is a lot for my Spirited Child to take in a seven-hour period. Plus, that is along time for best behavior when one is being bombarded with information and cannot take a break from it. Even a break at school would have been something new. So he was a wreck when he got home.

I got the same high-drama, bitchfest about homework as I did about seatwork. It was Oscar worthy. He finally got it done, settled down and read his Lego mag. After dinner, he was much better, went to play with the neighbors and that is when she called.

I told her he would call her when he got home. Then we moved into the bedtime routine, and by the time I remembered, it was too far into the process to make adjustments.

I emailed her and said that he was kind of a mess afterschool, so we were sticking to our home routines and I would have him call her afterschool today before the homework drama began. This is the response:

Maybe Will will tell me what's bothering him. It's quite an adjustment to go back to school. I'm sure he's apprehensive after the last time. I'll see if I can get him to talk more. The first week is always the worst for a child.
Particularly when they've been home most of the time. All of our children have to go out into the world sometime though, and I wish Will a good adjustment.

God, Anna! Lighten up! It's not that bad. She is trying to be helpful! Sheesh.

You would be right to think that, and I will get to the compassion part later. In the meantime, I am going to bitch.

I don't know what she means about "the last time". The last time was preschool. He was not going to earn any behavior awards there, but it was not traumatic for him.

We don't need Will to talk more, open up or tell us what is bothering him. There has never been a moment when he did not. We always know exactly what is bothering him, the source of the bother, the way he feels ABOUT his feelings, how it impacts him now and in the future and what should be done to fix it. If this were actually about Will, it would be wonderful and grandmotherly. The problem is that it is about HER.

As I have written here before, she lives to be needed. She takes in strays (people, not dogs), counsels unsuspecting waitresses and imparts half-truths in doctor's offices all over Southern Indiana. She wants to find the problem and be the savior that solves it. She wants to be the one who got Will to confess that he has been doing weed in the restroom at school, that he has a goat fetish or that one of the kids called him a poopy diaper baby. She WANTS there to be more than the average adjustment period for a highstrung kid so that there is drama.

The other stuff is just vapid platitudes. She and I have debated many times about how you have to "let children go out in the world". We run a free range house here. Will goes out into the world. I have worked very hard to give him the tools he needs to have freedoms. Two of her kids went out into the world and found drugs, dangerous sex, abuse, criminality and death. Does she really think she should be giving parenting lectures on letting kids go? When we have talked about kids breaking the law, she says, "Every family goes through that time when they pick their kids up at the police station." Umm, no, they don't.

Now can you see that this was not an offer to help; it is chance for her to uncover some sort of underlying torment in my child. She actually hopes to find something horrible.

Compassion point: Hurting people hurt people. Her life was a shit sandwich from day one. Crappy parents, pawned off on relatives as child labor, crazy mom. She has not had any type of counseling that was not court-ordered. She does not know what healthy minds look like, and if something goes wrong with my kids, then in her mind, she is not a bad mom. These things just happen to everyone. However, that does not give her the right to get all dime store therapist with my family.

Chris told me to let it go (is he new here?). I did not. I replied with:

What is bothering him is no mystery. Will is not one to hide what is upsetting him and why. He is very open with his feelings, both good and bad. I don't think there is anything to uncover here, but I will have him call when he gets home.

Stop wishing ill on my kids so that you will have something to fret over!!!!