Month: May 2015

Can’t Think Of A Title

               

Have you ever seen the commercial for Shriners Hospital when the little girl is asked what is love and she sweetly giggles and has a cute little smile and says a little bit embarrassed “I got nothing.”  
Well this week I’m kind of in the same predicament. I’ve got nothing. I’ve been home a week now and all I’ve been doing is cleaning, supervising sheet rock installation, dealing with plumbers, leaking washing machine hoses and selecting flooring for the damage that was done this winter to my home by frozen water pipes. That’s just inside. Outside I had acres of leaves from last fall to be cleaned up. What happened to the good old days when you could set your pile of leaves on fire after the kids had fun jumping into them? Should I admit to loving the smell of burning leaves in the fall? Life used to be so much easier and so much more fun before ticks and the thinning ozone layer.
This week my Creative Center is being smothered by the realities around me. No wonder for centuries artists and musicians have needed patrons to create so that they would be free from worldly tasks. Mozart and Rembrandt wouldn’t even be in our vocabulary had they been forced to work at McDonalds to pay the rent instead of being able to create without fear of being kicked out of their flat.
I have always thought too much outside static short circuits creative energy and right now I am on overload without much sleep. All of a sudden Sophie, who usually sleeps at our feet, has decided to be a bed hog dog and pushes herself between our pillows so that my husband and I have about 5 inches to go before we wind up on the floor. She’s like a sack of potatoes in a coma when I try to get her to move. My daughter Alison told me to let her know I am the master because dogs do well when you tell them what they need to do. Well, obviously not this Lhasa. 
So please forgive me this week friends. I’ve got nothing.
http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7XmY/shriners-hospitals-for-children-what-is-love
Copyright by Sandra Hart 2015. All rights reserved.

Facebook – Today’s Diary

As a young girl each Christmas I would find  a new diary with its own lock and small key in my stocking. This is how girls of my era would secretly put their most intimate thoughts at the end of each day, that lock assuring none of our nibby siblings could peek into our treasured observations and dreams.  It was a way of unloading our thoughts, hurts, wishes, joys and disappointments within the privacy of our bedrooms.  In retrospect a very healthy method of emotional release for most of us young girls trying to cope with our lives while growing up and facing life as it was opening to us. We could bare our most secret thoughts and desires without outside judgement. 

My faithful diary postings subconsciously were the beginning of my love for writing and putting my thoughts and feelings into words, never thinking that someday I would be sharing those feelings with anyone other than myself and my diary.  

Well I grew up and had a life. A life that was interesting, unexpected and one that I eventually would feel compelled to share beyond my diary and onto the printed page, then through blogging and eventually, Heaven Help Me, Facebook.
Initially, my teenage grandson friended me, but quickly ‘de-friended’ me when he realized I could see everything that he was posting with his friends on Facebook.  Undeterred, I marched on connecting with family and friends I hadn’t seen in years and joyfully making new friendships with those who entered my life through my blogging.  
Facebook has become my ‘life over 50’ diary.  My life is no longer a series of cursive pages. It is now filled with finger typing and 🙂 faces and anything but private revelations.  As addicted as I was as a young girl to my diary with its lock and key, keeping the world out of my thoughts, I am now addicted to Facebook without emotional locks and sharing my open life on a daily basis with those that matter to me, my Facebook Friends and Family.
Funny how life turns out isn’t it?
PS. My grandson at 21 has just ‘re-friended’ me.
Copyright Sandra Hart 2015. All Rights Reserved.

If I Am Important, You Are Important

If I Am Important Then You Are Important
“I just don’t know …… my grandkids get me, but I can’t understand my son.  He just doesn’t get it.”
And so went the conversation I had about a year ago with a good friend of mine who is about my age and is also a grandmother. She only has one child, a grown man now, a doctor, and somehow he still wants her to be the mother and grandmother of his imagination, even though his mother-in-law, the other grandma, is young enough to to be her daughter. He just can’t accept her flamboyant bangles and bright red lipstick and allow her to be the human being with a kind and giving heart she has always been throughout his life; he evidently never really saw, appreciated, nor thought about his mother as a person until he became successful in his head and had children of his own. 
She told me she feels he sometimes shuts the good things in his life from her, the grandma with the panache and red lipstick his children love. The woman who constantly gave to him, asking little if anything in return now has her nose pressed against the window of his life from the outside while others are welcome to enjoy the good life my friend helped him achieve as a young man.
My final thought to her was that maybe that’s the problem. Maybe  she should have asked for more from her son along the way instead of just always giving.  Perhaps she has perpetuated a relationship of one-sided giving that will be hard to change. I certainly hope not. 
As usual in most of my blogs this conversation has stayed with me and recently started my brain thinking in-depth more about being a mother and grandmother, whether it is a different relationship with daughters than it is with sons, what it means today and what it means to me. Mother’s Day has just passed and it kind of fits in right now. 
I am fortunate to have two daughters and a son, so I have experiences with mother/daughter and with the mother/son relationships.  I can’t speak for other parent/ child relationships, I only know mine.  In my experience each has been different and evolved into opposites in adulthood. 
I’m trying to think that when I was raising my children if I actually demanded as much from my son as I did my daughters. I know they all had to do chores on Saturday. The girls would vacuum, clean their rooms and help with the house chores, but honestly, I don’t ever remember asking my son to do anything around the house. except try to pick up his clothes up off the floor.  (As a matter-of-fact I was reminded recently by one of my daughters about the picture we took of my son sitting on top of a pile of clothes – a mountain – in his room.) 
 So in my friend’s case, I am finally realizing, I, too, am guilty of treating my son differently. Boys go off and leave their mothers, girls stay.
An old proverb states, “A son is a son until he takes a wife. A daughter is a daughter for all of her life.” Knowing this, is that why we sometimes don’t demand for fear of breaking that bond too soon? 
 I always made my daughters accountable and never minced words with advice when I thought necessary. I never questioned it would weaken our bond or make them love me less. But for some reason I never did the same with my son. Is that normal? 
Our best mother’s dream for our sons is to be able to have him find his soulmate that will love him and share his life’s ups and downs long after we are gone, so why did I tiptoe so much until that moment? 
“Mothers who are ‘important’ convey two main messages to their sons: If I am important then you are important; and I am important so I am worthy of your kindness, which I will affirm,” she said.

“This second message, which is often dramatically overlooked in the child development literature, is perhaps the most important ingredient to helping children develop into wonderful adults,” said Dr. Stone Fish.

Mothers can serve as good models of how to treat a woman with respect, according to Dr. Coleman, a psychologist in private practice in San Francisco specializing in family and parenting issues.

“However, mothers who can comfortably learn to set limits with their sons and act in a healthy self-interested way produce sons who are better friends and partners to women,” explained Dr. Coleman, who is also on the training faculty of the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group and has served on the clinical faculties of The University of California at San Francisco/Mt. Zion Crisis Clinic and The Wright Institute Graduate School of Psychology.  

I have often said to my children that being a mother is the best job I have ever had in my life and if I had a ‘do over’ In hindsight I could have done better.  I know without a doubt am so privileged that ‘part of the way, you were to walk with me.’**

**To My Children – Sandra Hart

©Sandra Hart 2015. all Rights Reserved

SoulCycling Grandma

Today’s spinning grandmothers has nothing to do with spindles and wool. They say today’s 60’s is the new 40’s.  We are healthier, more nutritionally informed and educated about the mind/ health relationship to longevity. We have the advantage of advanced medical care and preventative medicine. Statistics show that normal life expectancy for the Millennials may be into the early 100’s.  Great news, yes?
Maybe for some, but along with this focus on youth and the ability to stay physically fit longer into the ‘grandma years’ is the slowly eroding Norman Rockwell’s image of Grandma and Grandpa. Perhaps a sad farewell and a bitter pill for those who want Grandma to still be round and cuddly and let’s face it – comfortably ‘old-looking’ like most of our real Grandmas looked in the 1940’s.
My 1940’s grandmother was a bit overweight, wore neatly ironed house dresses and her gray hair in a bun on top of her head. She was warm and snugly and wore an apron when she cooked. Grandma looked like all of the other grandma’s I knew as a child.  But the sad reality is that my grandmother also died in her late 50’s of angina from her fatty cooking and hard work slaving over the stove and caring for her ten children.  I would say, honestly, not so great for snugly Grandmas in those days.
The 1940’s WW II women and soon to be grandmothers of the 1960’s were emancipating themselves. No one would  ever have accused my mother or her sisters of slipping into the gray ‘grandmother background’ as their mother’s generation did.   Mother looked like all of the other women in the 1950’s who were still homemakers, but younger looking, interested in homemaking, but just as interested in fashion and looking good. The 1960’s grandmothers were slowly inching their way out of the stereotypical image of grandmas past.  They, like most grandmothers of their era, loved their husband, children and grandchildren first, but keeping up with fashion and beauty trends came a close second.  And a job outside of the home to keep busy after her children were emancipated was not frowned upon either. (As a matter of fact I owe my career to my mother.) Grandmothers were beginning to not live in the shadows of ‘old age’ and were still having a life in their second chapters.  
The Millennial Grandmother. This is where within the timeframe you and  I jump in, and I am a little confused about my role as both mother and grandmother post childrearing, too. Not confused at my overwhelming love and undying support for my children and grandchildren, but confused about who they might expect me to be.  I am not my mother. I am not my grandmother and maybe I may not be like the average over-fifty woman. I am me. As a woman I want to be honored as relevant and accepted for who I am, warts and all, and appreciated for what I have contributed to their lives. We are all trying our best by trial and error. 
Women of my generation, for the first time, are more free to be ourselves, always evolving perhaps, but not forced to be put in boxes with labels. We are women first. We don’t have to be ‘old’ in our thoughts or actions.  We mothers all have always had needs and wants stored on the back shelf while our energies were dedicated to focusing on getting everyone out of the nest equipped with the greatest survival kit we could put together. But those personal needs and dreams of ours never died while sleeping. Our grandmothers and mothers may have dared to dream a life of their own, but few could live those dreams beyond their jobs as mother and caretaker of those she loved most.
Perhaps the label ‘Mother’ is so strong that our children grow up not knowing who we really are after we take off our ‘Mom’ hats and we each begin our own lives. News flash children of ours. We are the same person we have always been.  The same people who wiped your bum and kissed your scrapes when you fell down. The same people who cheered at your football and basketball games and dance concerts. We haven’t changed. But you have, and by doing so, sometimes you expect us to still be wearing the ‘Mom’ hat and not allowing us to be free to be who we always have been before you and I were introduced. 
Every birthday I am reminded that my diary only has so many pages left and how much the conflict of my and my husband’s needs and my desire to spend as much time as possible with my children and grandchildren is a reality.  In this age of family diaspora, the juggling act never ceases it seems. I am sure we are no different than most. 
In the end, I am so grateful to be living in this time – in the NOW, because my generation of women, mothers and grandmothers, as I noted before are usually younger physically and mentally than our chronological ages. Due to this wonderful phenomena of being able to live a full life after raising our children,  I believe we are sometimes a shock to our children.
 Well, mothers unite this Mothers Day. We should have a message for our children.  They are going to have to get over it, because our grandchildren are cool with it and most of us well over fifty don’t want to be other than who we are and comfortable in our own skin. 
As long as we can have ‘forever careers’ if we want-or not, go to Vidal Sassoon, wear MAC lipstick, do yoga, SoulCycle, Tweet, text, WordPress, Instagram and have Facebook friends, humor us.  We mothers and grandmothers are in this life on your side for the long haul and are just being the women we have always been hidden under the ‘Mom’ hat. Could it be you were too busy living your own lives that you just didn’t take the time to see?  
©Sandra Hart 2015. All Rights Reserved.