Family Tradition Reconsidered

December 2, 2014 · 2 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

Every Thanksgiving when I was a kid, my father made fruit salad. The ingredients were McIntosh apples cut with the peel still on, big red grapes neatly halved, mini marshmallows, and a half-pint of whipped cream. I thought it was great and always scarfed down lots of it.

After I grew up and moved away, I made the same fruit salad because I associated it so strongly with the holiday. There was a problem, though. My husband didn’t care for it, and neither did our children. We had Thanksgiving dinner at his parents’ house every year, and I would always bring a big bowl of fruit salad, which only a few people would eat.

This year I didn’t make it because my husband said he’d like to bring sugar cookies instead. He went to the supermarket and picked out a bag of easy sugar cookie mix that needed only an egg and a stick of margarine. The cookies got baked very quickly on Thanksgiving afternoon, I didn’t have to do anything, we brought them to dinner on a festive red plastic plate, and everybody ate them happily.
 

Sugar cookie mix, eggs, and a stick of margarine. 

I hadn’t realized until now that when I always made the fruit salad as part of my holiday routine, even though my husband and kids were not interested in it, I was depriving them of the opportunity to create different family traditions they’d enjoy more. If they had baked sugar cookies every year, then we would all have pleasant memories of our sugar cookie tradition.

Routines can be helpful when they genuinely serve our needs, but they only get in the way when we let many years pass without reflecting on whether they fit our current circumstances. Rather than putting things in the category of cherished traditions just because we haven’t changed them, we should take time to consider whether we really cherish them or whether we’re only doing them by rote.

We should also keep in mind that even if we like them, we’re not obligated to do them exactly the same way. If I want to eat fruit salad during the holiday season, I can make it for myself one December weekend. I might find that I enjoy it more, giving myself a bit of comforting holiday cheer to brighten up a dark evening in between Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations. It’s all about being flexible in how we look at things!

Creative Improvisation

August 12, 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

Sometimes my husband, who is a software developer, says that he doesn’t think of himself as creative. But I beg to differ—there is a lot of creativity involved in building things that didn’t exist before, no matter what their genre. Software programs and DIY home projects can be just as creative as novels or artwork.

Over the weekend he set up this blog so it can be followed (yay!) in WordPress. That wasn’t just a simple matter of installing a plugin. Although WordPress provides follow capability and other features for self-hosted blogs, they’re all in a big bloated package called Jetpack, which wouldn’t run properly until my husband wrote additional code to turn off some unnecessary and incompatible stuff. There were also style sheet issues he had to fix. It looks like everything is working well now (if you happen to spot any glitches, please let me know).

Another weekend project was a dog gate to keep our daughter’s new puppy in the kitchen. The puppy will be moving to Cleveland with her, but that’s not for another three weeks, and we’d rather not have to clean up surprises on the carpet in the meanwhile. My husband built the gate out of PVC pipe, two strips of plastic lattice, some pieces of wood at the bottom, and plastic feet to make it slide easily without scuffing the linoleum.
 

DIY dog gate in my kitchen. 

And here’s a photo of the pooch—she’s four months old, a mix of a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and a Bichon Frise. She has learned how to sit on command, but still needs some work when it comes to housebreaking.
 

Puppy sitting in the kitchen, looking up at the camera. 

She’s a cute little thing, and very affectionate too—she loves being around people.

Moments of Grace

August 6, 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

Among the hot fashion fads of 1969 was a lacquered wooden purse with assorted bright and colorful decorations, which always included a shiny penny on top. My mom had one, and I coveted it with a passion, especially the tiny Ace of Hearts next to the penny. I wasn’t really all that interested in carrying a purse to kindergarten—but oh, did I want a deck of miniature cards! I must have driven my mom to distraction with my begging. But of course, in those days searching for odd little items was a lot harder than it is now. My mom did look for them, but Christmas came and went without any miniature cards in my stocking.

The mysterious ways of Providence brought me a deck of tiny cards in January, neatly enclosed in a plastic capsule from a bubble-gum machine. They even looked like the card on my mom’s purse. I was thrilled! Of course, my sister and I promptly lost half the deck while pretending that our dolls were playing card games; but it was great fun while it lasted.

Many years later, my sister remembered how much I had liked the wooden purse, and she bought a similar one as a gift for me. This one has no miniature card on top, and of course the 1969 penny is no longer bright and shiny; but otherwise it’s much the same. I keep it in a corner of my study as a decoration and smile whenever I look at it.
 

Wooden purse with stickers and 1969 penny. 

As children, we don’t stop to reflect on the little miraculous events in our everyday lives. We’re much too busy playing; and life seems magical anyway, so why shouldn’t the things we want just pop out of a bubble-gum machine? But after we grow up and develop task-oriented adult minds, our sense of everyday wonder doesn’t come as naturally as it once did. We may not even notice the moments of grace in our daily lives unless we carefully cultivate habits of appreciation and gratitude.

And when we do, we’re likely to start discovering unexpected blessings everywhere.

Marriage: Some Assembly Required

October 28, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Even in a time of tremendous cultural flux, when many of the historical reasons for marriage have become outdated, there are still people getting married. One might wonder why, given the advantages of staying single in today’s world. Children are very expensive, unlike in the past when they worked on their parents’ farm. Having a family restricts the career opportunities available to modern parents, both because of the time involved in caring for children and because of the expectation that a responsible parent should bring home a steady paycheck, rather than being free to take chances and follow passions when building a career. Marriage has economic pitfalls even for childless couples, who may not want to pursue promising job opportunities in other cities because it would be hard for the tag-along spouse to find a good position. And there’s always the risk of divorce, which can be messy both emotionally and financially, even when a couple has no children.

Some people simply dismiss the whole idea of marriage as an antiquated relic of primitive times, which continues to exist only because traditional society has conditioned us to want it. But I think those who opt for marriage often do so based on the perception that it is a promise of stability in a rapidly changing world. Even when we don’t feel confident about navigating the huge cultural shifts going on around us, marriage (if all goes well) gives us a constant, predictable home environment. The family unit becomes a micro-culture with its own comforting traditions and rituals.

I recently had a dream that dealt with these themes. Although dream interpretation based on cultural archetypes mostly fell out of fashion along with psychoanalysis a few decades ago, it can sometimes prove interesting. In this particular dream, I was assembling a four-poster bed by putting on the posts. After that, I was on a dock at the river, putting oars in a boat (a double scull) that my husband and I had rowed over the summer.

In dream interpretation, the number four can represent symmetry and stability. Both pairs of oars must be rowed in a synchronized motion to make forward progress along a river, which is a symbol often interpreted to mean the river of life. Losing one’s grip on the oar handles, or bumping an oar into a submerged log or other hazard, can easily cause a scull to tip over—it’s a very narrow boat that needs the oars for balance.

When not in use, oars are stored separately from the boat. They must be put into the oarlocks each time the boat is rowed, and the rowers must carefully check to make sure the oars are fastened securely. This can be seen as an assembly process, much as the four-poster bed in my dream had to be assembled. Both a double scull and a bed are places where a couple would be. So I would interpret the dream as referring to the stability provided by marriage, which requires careful assembly.

Of course, not everyone looks upon marriage as a source of stability. Some take a very different view and consider marriage a luxury reserved for those who already are financially stable. Even though today’s families are much smaller than in the past and women usually work outside the home, raising children in the modern world can be very costly. With so much uncertainty in the global economy, some young adults feel that they should wait until they have well-established careers and substantial savings before they even consider marriage. Depending on the extent of their financial anxiety, they may never reach a point where they feel comfortable with it.

There’s no disputing the fact that it is stressful to get married and start a family while living paycheck to paycheck. But it’s important to keep things in perspective, rather than letting financial anxiety take over one’s life to the extent that everything seems too much of a risk. Way back when our ancestors were raising their families in tiny villages, they had very few material possessions, and their lives were far more perilous than ours. Children often died in infancy, women often died in childbirth, and men often died in war. Still, our ancestors did their best to cope with whatever happened to come their way. Because nothing in their society ever seemed to change much, they didn’t have our worries about living in an unstable world.

Unlike our ancestors, we can’t reasonably expect to lead simple and unchanging lives. Some degree of anxiety about the unknown is inevitable. We deal with it by seeking stability in our relationships, our finances, our daily habits and rituals, and whatever else we may feel gives us more control over our environment. Choices that work well for some people, such as marriage, are not necessarily going to suit others. And with all the options available in today’s society, it may take some time to discover what works and what doesn’t. In any event, when pursuing our goals, I believe it’s helpful to keep in mind both that we have more personal power than we may realize and that, as we go through life, some assembly is required.

Falling Birthrates Won’t Make Humans Extinct

January 21, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Sometimes I see articles discussing how far the birthrate has fallen in many countries and pointing out that this is a worldwide trend. Families are much smaller than they were in the past, and many young adults are opting not to have children at all. The authors often make dire predictions as to what will happen if this trend continues for another millennium or so, leaving a tiny human population on the brink of extinction.

There aren’t enough reasons to want children in today’s society, they say. In past generations, large families had economic value because children worked on the family farm. As they grew older, they took care of their aging parents, who might otherwise be left destitute upon becoming unable to work. But nowadays, a child is just an expensive, time-consuming luxury item. Even in countries where the government provides good child care and pays generous stipends to parents, birthrates remain low. Simply put, modern-day humans have many other things they’d rather be doing than raising families.

While I agree with the short-term prediction that the world’s population will soon reach its peak and then begin falling, I don’t see this as a cause for alarm. As I see it, the resulting labor shortage and high salaries will be very good for wage-earners. Raising a family on one parent’s salary, while the other parent stays home with the children, will be an affordable choice. Lost career opportunities won’t be as much of a concern because the average lifespan will continue to increase. A parent who stays home raising a large family until age 50 might reasonably expect to have a productive career until age 100, or perhaps even longer. Employment discrimination will be much less of a problem because of the labor shortage. Because the young adults of the future will not have to face today’s social and economic constraints with regard to families, their choices may turn out to be very different from what we’re seeing now.

When I wrote this post, my main purpose wasn’t to reassure worried readers that humans are not heading toward extinction. Nor am I suggesting that all children would be better off with a parent who does not work outside the home. Rather, this post is meant to illustrate how current trends often become absurd when they’re extrapolated out too far. We lack a sufficient frame of reference to predict what will happen in the long term because our baseline assumptions soon become outdated. Thus, although a calm, well-reasoned focus on solving present-day problems may not get as much attention as shrieking about a coming apocalypse, the former approach generally results in wiser policy decisions.

Putting Words to Expectations

March 28, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

It’s often said that marriage takes a lot of work. My husband and I have been married since 1988, and in many ways we find it easy to get along with each other. We have similar views about many things, such as relationships, society, responsibility, money, and raising children (although we’re mostly finished with the latter, now that our kids are away at college). Our household division of labor works well for us. We enjoy each other’s company and do a lot of things together; our kids’ friends have commented on how cute they think we are when we wear matching clothes. We still have the stuffed animals that we exchanged when we were dating, as well as many other sentimental items.

Even so, we’ve really had to work on understanding the differences in how we communicate. Most of my thinking is in text mode, and I usually take words at their face value. Nonverbal signals such as a cheerful voice register in my mind only as general indicators; they don’t trump the actual content of the words. If there appears to be a mismatch between the words and the nonverbals, I ask for clarification. My husband has a very different way of processing conversation; he relies much more on external cues and often responds to nonverbal impressions rather than to the actual words. As a result, we sometimes end up having muddled and frustrating conversations where we don’t realize that we are not talking about the same thing.

Another cause of confusion is sorting out what questions don’t call for literal answers. Let’s say that my husband asks me in a grumpy tone why I didn’t do something that he usually expects me to do, such as bringing in the mail. That doesn’t really mean he wants an explanation of why it wasn’t done. He just wants to be cheerfully reassured that I’ll take care of it. And to complicate things further, he’s not inflexible about who does the task; he is not in fact demanding that I should always be the one to do it. If I send a text message asking him to bring in the mail when he gets home from work because the weather has turned yucky, he is perfectly happy to stop his car at the mailbox so that I won’t have to walk along an icy driveway. What bugs him isn’t the chore itself; it’s the disruption of his routine when he gets home, sits down at the desk expecting to read the mail, and only then finds out that it’s not there.

There’s a saying that we both find instructive: “Failed expectations are the source of all conflict.” This is particularly true with regard to conversation and nonverbal signals. People often assume that their body language and use of words should be easily understandable by others. When that expectation proves false, we don’t immediately know how to go about broadening our concepts of interaction to include other styles of communication. Often what happens is not that we consciously judge the other person’s way of communicating to be wrong; rather, we don’t even comprehend the extent to which it may differ from our own.

Modern society is becoming more aware of differences in communication generally, as well as within marriages and other relationships. The bookstores are full of self-help titles that purport to explain how women can better understand men, or vice versa. Some authors focus on more specific circumstances: a marriage between an older woman and a younger man, for instance, or between people of different neurological types. These books have been criticized, often with good cause, as being full of simplistic and inaccurate stereotypes; yet they continue to sell because they help people to make sense of baffling situations, even though in superficial ways.

If I had relied on a self-help book for an explanation of what my husband thought about bringing in the mail, the book might have told me, “Men need routine!” And while that wouldn’t have been altogether wrong, it also wouldn’t have been the whole story. I might have reached the conclusion that I had to bring in the mail every day, rain or shine, to avoid any gripes about it. Then I would have felt resentful while slipping and sliding my way to the mailbox on a snowy winter afternoon, when in fact there was no need to do that. A much more useful approach was simply to talk with each other about how best to deal with the mail situation, while recognizing that we had different perspectives on it.

To understand why our expectations are not being met, it’s first necessary to examine our underlying assumptions and to acknowledge that they may be in need of revision. Self-help books can be useful in taking this first step of reframing things we find frustrating as communication issues that reflect our different perceptions, rather than as deliberately annoying or senseless behavior. But ultimately there are no shortcuts for the work that is needed to discover how a loved one communicates. While it would certainly be much easier if we could simply buy a book or attend a seminar and then comprehend everything perfectly, real life is way more complicated than that. As with learning to accommodate diversity in other social contexts, we must be willing to refrain from prejudging the other person’s experiences of the world and to seek understanding by way of respectful dialogue.

Introduction: A Place to Stand

February 14, 2012 · 25 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Welcome to my blog/story website! A little about me: I live in Vandalia, which is a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, in the United States. I have two grown children, who went away to college in other cities—both within driving distance, but far enough away to develop some independence and not hang around too much with their friends from high school. My husband and I thought that was just right. (Update, May 2014: They’ve graduated — YAY!!)

I work in the legal publishing industry and have a law degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Although I’m originally from Southern California, I came to Ohio in 1983 because I received a scholarship to law school. I met my husband while he was an engineering student at Case, and we have been together ever since.

I’ve always had an interest in how changing cultural narratives shape the development of our society, weaving together various aspects of history, law, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy, politics, religion, mythology, folklore, and the arts. On the occasions when many of these strands intersect and align, that’s where to find a place to stand with the lever to move the world.

One such change took place when the neurodiversity movement spread across the Internet several years ago. As with other civil rights advocacy efforts in the modern era, it calls for acceptance and accommodation of human differences—in particular, autism and other neurological differences. I expect that some readers will have come here from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, where I serve on the Board of Trustees, or from another site that focuses on neurodiversity and disability rights issues. My personal website may touch on these topics occasionally; however, I don’t intend it to be specifically about neurodiversity or autism politics. I’m not writing it to change anyone’s views or to promote any particular agenda.

Rather, it’s meant to reflect my impressions of life in a society that is changing more rapidly than any other in history—a society that is just beginning to discover the vast diversity it contains, to understand and feel comfortable with differences instead of suppressing them, and to draw strength from our shared stories and traditions in positive ways while navigating this complex cultural shift. I hope that my readers will find it meaningful when seen from this perspective.

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