It takes an incredible amount of trust and vulnerability to let people see our personal warts—the blemishes we develop over a lifetime as a result of bad choices, actions that are inconsistent with our value systems, embarrassments, self-imposed pain as well as hurt inflected by the people closest to us. Taking off masks and allowing our most authentic selves to be seen takes courage, but it also takes a reciprocal trust you can’t share with a casual friend.

I’m blessed to have several kick-ass friends in my life. They are the people who will offer a supportive shoulder, hug me when I’m down and humor my mental-stew muddling. These are also the same people who call me out when I’m making bad choices, when I’m not being the best me I can be—basically they are the people who have no problem telling me very directly when I’m being an idiot. These are the people I need in my life even more than I need a cheerleader or sympathetic ear.

It’s not easy when my kick-ass friends kick my ass. In fact it hurts. I have to breathe deeply, open my mind and not fall into a pit of defensiveness. I have to listen and remember constructive criticism comes from an intentional place of well-meaning, of love and support. Relinquishing enough self-control and being openly vulnerable with someone else, letting down my guard, is always my most challenging personal struggle.

A few days ago one of my kick-ass friends confronted me about why I was no longer writing creatively. I threw out a litany of reasons, excuses really, all of which he basically brushed aside and instead of buying into my pity party, he pelted me between the eyes with several “remember whens” of different times in my life when I faced adversity and won, and then he challenged me—always a sure-fire way to tap my pride and get me to take action. He challenged me to write something, anything, by sundown today. “I don’t care what you write,” he said. “I don’t even care if it’s one line just to say you’re alive, but it needs to be something because you’re floundering, you’ve lost some of your confidence and you’re letting fear dictate what you do. That’s not who you are.”

I have about an hour left before sundown.

What about you—do you have friends you trust enough to let you know when you’re being an idiot? Are you a kick-ass friend to someone else, or do you shrink from the responsibility of giving pivotal, honest feedback when you know your friend is not being honest with herself?

From his website…”My name is Matt Pipkin, I’m 26 years old, and I just started talking a couple years ago about the fact that I was molested when I was five. I kept it secret all that time because I thought it was my fault and was terrified and ashamed to tell anyone. I started counseling last year and that former fear and weight has become my driving force. I’m doing this for others who are walking in similar shoes – and I’m doing this for the five-year old me who went through this.”

So much of what we read and hear about child sexual abuse is horrifying. It’s easy to turn away. This, though, is tremendously inspiring and we can help spread a positive message. You can donate to his fund raising campaign and/or post  the campaign link to your Facebook page, tweet it, blog it, etc.,  and encourage others to do the same.

It seems we more often hear about women making great initiatives in this arena and it’s equally inspiring to see men taking the lead…1 in 6 boys are sexually abused before they’re 18. Our society offers up such intense stigma it can create even greater barriers for boys to come forward and seek help. Let’s make that change.

I have a son (who adores airplanes) and I have a healthy fear related to keeping his world free from abuse. However, if he were to be abused (and it hurts to even write that) I wish for him the courage and support to heal. I’d do everything possible to help him regain his personal power, to abolish shame−to help his spirit take flight. I wish for a society where stigma is banished and where survivors are embraced with warmth and understanding, compassion and love. I believe we can work toward creating that society.

What a gift to see this young man continue to take back his personal power and perhaps if we participate in helping his campaign gain viral momentum, we can also make a positive difference while helping someone’s dream soar.

You can also read more here and you can “Like” his Facebook page here

Thanks so much

Tricia

As he’s matured there have been moments when I wanted him to respond with his own, “I love you, too.”  I’ve realized though it’s not the affirmation of his love for me that tucks me in at night; it really is the fact that he knows he is loved… I know, Mommy.  And his refusal to play the game makes the moments dazzling when, in the  middle of the day, for no apparent reason, he’ll throw his arms around me and say, “Mommy, I love you!”

During the last year I’ve spent too much time thinking about the meaning of love and the different types of love.  I’m guilty of the requisite volley when someone makes a declaration and I’ve chuckled at my husband when he’s proclaimed at the end of a telephone conversation that he loves me, too…when I hadn’t yet said the first part. We’re so used to ending calls with testaments of emotion, we don’t even hear them anymore.

I wonder what would happen if instead of parroting the sentiment with family and friends, I simply started saying, I know.

Is the goal of telling someone you love him or her a reciprocal reaction, or is your intent to provide a stand-alone gift that you bequeath freely and without expectation?

How would you feel if your spouse, child, sister or friend simply said, I know.

Every now and then I go through periods of time where I’m discontent, incredibly hyper, and I start to drive myself a little more insane. I love my life and family but let’s admit it — Suburbia can become a tad monotonous. For someone who thought she’d go prematurely gray from herculean efforts to  save the whole darn world, or who at least seriously thought of a career reporting on the human condition around the globe, being married with two dogs, a fenced-in backyard in a sea of McMansions and obsessing about my child’s education isn’t quite how I pictured grown-up life. My last hold out is a death-grip refusal to get a minivan, even if it would be more practical.

Lately I’ve been fantasizing about jumping out of planes over a jungle, backpacking through China with my 5-year-old or volunteering in a refuge camp for a year. Sure I could make one or all of these little fantasies a reality, but I won’t. I’ve come to appreciate the security and stability my husband and I have created; the ebb and flow of daily life and apparently I’m too much of a chicken anyway. Still though, the seed for discontent lives inside my mind and seems to bloom at least once a year.

Thankfully my husband is also a discontent soul…full of wanderlust and a knack for dreaming. He’s not threatened when I start to let my mind wander or talk about needing an adrenalin rush. He gets it. He feels it too and rather than question my commitment to the life we’ve built, he makes suggestions or plays along until my mind and heart settle again and my state of hyperactivity subsides.

Just the other night while I was bouncing off the kitchen walls and he was trying to focus on creating an amazing chicken curry I said, “Kim, I’m going nuts. I need to do something crazy.”

He looked up from the steam of coconut milk and garlic with a naughty grin lifting the corners of his lips. “Oh really,” he said. “I thought you were planning a skydiving adventure with friends but if that’s not going to work out, I have an idea.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Do tell!”

“I think you should take a lover.”

“That’s a fantastic idea. You won’t mind?”

“Not at all. Just make sure it’s a woman and you bring her home to share!”

Um, yea, he apparently has been dreaming a bit too.

I just started reading, for the third or fourth time, Deborah Tannen’s book, That’s Not What I Meant. How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships. Communication fascinates me and the first time I read Tannen’s book it was assigned as part of a college sociology class. I remember feeling captivated, enlightened and nodding my head in affirmation through each passage and chapter.

Every time I’ve read the book I’ve taken away something different, something relevant to whatever is going on in my professional or personal life at the time. Monday I started reading it again for two reasons…I have a new client who’s conversational style is much different than my own and I want to build the relationship. Second, I find myself struggling with a new awareness in my marriage.

You already know there’s a significant age difference between my husband and I. Other people most likely have given our 27-year number gap more thought than I have over the 14+ years we’ve been together, but recently I’ve begun to contemplate, to become aware in ways I never anticipated. I want to talk about how I feel and what I think, after all…I’m a woman and therefore hard-wired to make sense of my world through conversation. It’s a difficult conversation to have with friends, with my husband, with myself.

I think most of us first become aware of people we love aging with our parents. We expect parents to go through certain life stages and different realities long before we do. We anticipate our parents will require different circumstances, care and understanding while we’re still young enough to provide certain comforts. We don’t learn in the natural course of events to anticipate those same changes in our spouse long before we’re experiencing them ourselves.

I remember when Kim and I first got together, he clearly explained numerous times that, “Tricia, one day I’ll be an old man and you’ll still be a fairly young woman. It’s not fair for me to ask that of you.” Of course I reassured him and said it was my choice to make, it was my future too and that I understood what I was signing up for. He believed me. I believed me. I was 23.

Given the opportunity again today, even with the growing awareness I have of how different our realities will eventually become, I’d make the decision all over again to stay with him. I don’t have any sense of regret or remorse, and I certainly have no intention or desire to bail so let’s put that on the table just in case you’re wondering where I’m headed with this conversation. What I do need is to find a new kind of peace with this growing sense of mortality and the small age-related changes I’m observing that with time will become more pronounced.

Finding that peace is where my struggle begins, and it’s where differences in conversational style become acute and cumbersome. Broaching the subject with my husband is delicate. Regardless of the words I use, he HEARS what he told me all those years ago… that one day he’d be aging while I was still young, and he feels guilty for having anticipated it, yet still moving forward with the relationship. That guilt creates a filter through which my words need grease and meaning becomes much more subjective than I intend. When he responds, I’m also filtering his words through that previous conversation and the guilt I have for even bringing this up since after all…we discussed this before we committed to each other. What right do I have to bring this up now. And I know he can’t help but wonder if I say it out loud, does that mean I’m going to abandon him simply because he’s experiencing things he has no control over…he’s progressing through life just as he should and what right do I have to acknowledge the observations? It makes everyone uncomfortable.

Yet here I am…a woman…hard wired to make sense of my world through conversation.

Perhaps the longer a couple is together the more filters we construct, the more webs of unintended consequences we create where every carelessly strung together sentence carries a whisper of some previous conversation, a  call-to-action in our brain to read between non-existent lines. As my husband and I figure out how to talk through a new awareness, I’m quite sure I have to think twice about how my words are delivered and how they’re heard. The phrases I choose and their delivery will hurt or caress when my intent is simply to communicate my truth.

What about you dear friends. Have you recently had a difficult conversation, broached a challenging topic and found you needed to think twice about how preconceptions or internal dialogue is interfering with how your words are heard?

This place feels like the arms of an old friend you haven’t seen in far too long, but whose embrace erases all the bubbles in time and you’re exactly where you left off. I miss it here in the land of blog and I’m ready to shout from the rooftop, dance my fingers across my keyboard and check back in with all my blog friends to see what y’all have been up to the last few months.

I look forward to catching up.

XOXO

Eventually the pull to meander through multiple ideas, stories and the issues I care about will bring me back to this space, but for now I’m simply not enjoying the clicking and hopping required to be a participatory community member. I want to spend time unplugged, listening to my child giggle, and more time quietly rummaging through my mind to more fully develop the writing projects that don’t belong here.

à la prochaine,

XOXO

Tricia

He will continue to thrive and we’ll all learn to accept this milestone with grace and eagerness and remember to savor as many moments as possible; time simply slips thorough our fingers. It’s that passage of time that I was having the hardest time accepting, not the idea that my wonderful son is starting a new stage of his life adventure. Today I feel more at peace with his growth and the role I play. I still want to stop the clock, but I’m making peace with the reality that I can’t. However quickly that clock ticks and chimes, I want to help him become the very best person he can be, and to fulfill every ounce of potential he has.

We started calling Friday “Funday” because at Aaron’s school Friday afternoons are reserved for activities that are thought of as traditionally more fun. Of course I’d argue that a good book is the most fun, but hey…what do I know?

To carry the “funday’ theme forward, several months ago we started letting Aaron eat dinner in the family room. With the TV on. I know, I know, just string me up by my ears.

I’m one of those crazy obsessive people who does not allow my child to eat food anywhere except at the kitchen counter or the kitchen table, and there’s NO TV allowed during meals. I grew up participating in nightly family dinners and have incredibly fond memories of those times together. Dinner was often the only chance we had to all sit down together, have an uninterrupted conversation, touch base on what was going on in each other’s lives and explore each other’s thoughts on a variety of things.

My dad worked from 6:00 in the morning until at least 7:30 at night…SEVEN days a week. Sitting down together for dinner was incredibly important for our relationship and I’m certain I learned some of the most valuable life-lessons and values, things that still echo in my mind, from talking with my dad over mom’s shepherd pie, and I’m sure it’s not a surprise that I’ve carried the family dinner tradition into my adult life. It’s just not an option here at Chez Sanders…except on Fridays.

I actually can’t take the blame credit for initiating this little ritual. I was out of town and my husband let Aaron eat dinner in the family room on a Friday night. Our little son was so over-the-moon excited to have what he considers a huge privilege, we decided to make it a weekly routine.  Each Friday as we start making dinner, Aaron gets out a little tray and arranges a placement, napkin, silverware, dishes and even his very own little pepper shaker, and he does it all with great precision and pride. It’s fun to watch and I think this is a tradition we’ll keep. I just can’t resist those great big smiles he gives when we say it’s “Friday Funday!”

What about you? Do you have any family dinner time traditions you love?

I’m also guest posting today over at Life and Times of a WickedStepMom. Head over and say hello if you have a chance.

What is your altruistic dream? Would you feed the poor? Save the planet? Reform education? Cure cancer? Stop domestic abuse? End genocide in Africa? If there was one thing you could do and have a positive impact, and you didn’t have to worry about your current limitations related to family or career or…whatever keeps us stagnating, what would you want to accomplish? Just imagine the sky’s the limit…