It surprises me, now that my sons are adults, what catches my attention abou them and makes me burst with pride. They’re not the things I anticipated when they were young boys. I think I was falsely oriented around things of a more grandiose nature.
I enjoy watching them engage with other adults and how they do so with ease, respect, kindness and humility.
They know how to say “thank you,” and when to say “thank you.” This, in my opinion, is one of the most important skills a human can have. I meet men twice their ages who have apparently not acquired this skill.
They are naturally respectful of the elderly. They hold back at doors and open doors. They’re eager to give a seat to someone who needs it. They’re on the lookout for how they serve, how they can help. This is more impressive to me than a lot of other things I thought I’d find impressive.
They do not hold back if they want me to know something, want to ask me something, or request a favor. I love the fact that they’re open about their needs and their wants, but they’re quite willing to hear yes as they are to hear no. No is tough for me, but I am learning.
My sons live in different cities from each other yet it appears they’re almost daily in contact with each other. That they are friends with each other means the world to me.
Who are you? You don’t matter. I don’t care one way or the other. Your life, your existence means nothing. Get out of my way.
While such sentiments are usually unspoken they drive behavior.
Sometimes, mine.
Headlines? I don’t read them. Who wants bad news? What goes on Gaza and Israel and South Sudan and Ukrain and Russia and wherever else on the planet is too far removed for me to care, too complicated for me to understand. Let’s watch something feel good. What’s on Netflix?
The shooting on the street leaving a young man dead and his body in the street is an inconvenience. I am going to be late for work. The congested traffic gets more attention than the death of a young man and the pain his family must now face.
Indifference. Zero empathy. No room for cross-over human care. What’s that?
Perhaps it has always been this way.
I think not.
This is surely sin at its finest? The acceptance of the idea that I can be indifferent (unaffected, untouched, devoid of empathy) to the suffering of others.
As long as it does not inconvenience me, I don’t care.
Lead yourself, first. Lead yourself, only. Everything else will fall into place and grow.
Regard leadership for what it is. It is a function, something the leader does. Know what it is not: a place of power or status. The “leader” who seeks power or status will take himself/herself and the organization (church, hospital, school, political party, soccer team) nowhere worth going.
Authentic Leaders develop leaders without even trying. The authenticity is so novel and attractive others find it compelling and will naturally want to follow and learn.
Authentic Leaders give away, delegate, spread opportunities so others may grow without fear of being outdone by those to whom they delegate.
Authentic Leaders have a set of pre-decided principles and values that are in place before they are needed.
Authentic Leaders are constantly engaged in doing their homework and self work and family work because they know all sectors and compartments of life spin off and influence and drive each other. A leader can fake it for only so long until the parts of his or her life that are “out of integrity” will come crashing and cashing in.
Authentic Leaders are focussed on strength and freedom, not on anxiety and weaknesses (of self and others).
Authentic Leaders select their emotions, choose their responses, and are in charge of their reactions. Those who are not are a danger to themselves, their families, and to the organizations which they claim to lead.
“I am in my early thirties and my parents’ only child from my biological mom and dad. My dad left my mom and fathered three sons with three women. Those boys are 25, 21, and 18. My mom has three sons, now 24, 22, and 16, by two men. The first two are from the same dad (not my dad). I am a ‘big’ sister to six brothers. I live away but I go ‘home’ to my mom and dad and I know all the boys. They all live near each other but are not as familiar with the brothers from ‘another mother and father.’ I feel responsible for my brothers. How can I be a good sister in such a complicated set-up?”
Your question reveals the beautiful truth of invisible loyalties. Loyalties run deep in families and can escape reason. You can be a great “big” sister by being responsible to your brothers, not for them. They are indeed not your responsibility but you probably can build unique sets of relationships with each of them. A text and a call here and there. Birthday cards. Inexpensive gifts. Reach out to them not as a group but as individuals. Seek friendship at their pace. These efforts they will treasure and remember.
I devised a list of how to participate in the healing of men and women who have been hurt:
Be willing to listen, even if what is being said is what you’d prefer to not hear. Try not to re-engineer (re-frame, recast) what you have heard so it is more fitting with what you’d really like to hear.
Resist understandable attempts to short-circuit growth by trying to ease necessary pain, by offering false affirmations, and by accepting empty excuses for irresponsible behavior. Pain is a very good motivator for change. Resist the urge to remove it when it appears to be helpful.
Offer your presence, not your answers. “I am with you” is more helpful than “let me help you fix it.”
Welcome silence. There are ways to communicate that do not include words. Resist the understandable urge to chase healing and learning away with the incessant use of words and stories.
Avoid minimizing (“it’s not so bad!”) or rationalizing (“What else did you expect?”) or normalizing (“Anyone would have done that!”) the issues that resulted in pain. Do not rob necessary pain of its usefulness.
Promote “future thinking.” Ask questions focused on future wellness and success.
Try to avoid searching for the genesis (the cause) of what has led to pain. Where something comes from is not nearly as important living your way out of it.
I’ve taken a hit. A foodborne disease picked up somewhere en route from Madagascar to Cape Town completely knocked me out.
But now, I am in recovery.
I clearly had no idea of exactly what was hitting me but all the while I felt I was living inside a weird game of Survival and a complex IQ test, all this with beautiful Table Mountain just outside my 12th floor hotel window.
Getting myself to the airport, checking in the vehicle, bidding my sister farewell as she set off for Johannesburg; ordering a wheelchair service to negotiate the vastness of the three airports awaiting me, I set off on a challenging journey home.
I did my absolute best not to lose my sense of humor or my sense of hope, often identified and described by others as foolish.
I found it hilarious in the local hospital when the young men and woman were doing all they could to protect my privacy, cover my body, maintain my integrity, honor my humanity.
I was seeking none of that.
I was seeking replenishment of the necessary, sustenance and nutrition and hydration my body was most desiring and demanding.
Something profoundly healthy happened in the middle of the first night when both my sons and their girlfriends arrived from near and afar be in the ward with me to spend most of the night, feeding me through an invisible lifeline of loyalty and love.
We were very sorry to read that you were not well. We wish you a complete recovery.
My husband and I are faithful readers of your column in the Natal Mercury. We have found your words so relevant, enjoyable and often exactly what we needed to hear. We have learned so much from your wisdom and experience.
If I remember correctly you grew up in the north of Durban and we remember your talk at the Durban Jewish Club, many moons ago under the auspices of the UJW. You were on the stage with your 2 sons.
May the Lord grant you many more healthy and fruitful years to continue writing and thus giving us pleasure.
I suppose the real regret of not really knowing her began to emerge when I was a teen-ager, but it became most compelling, predictably, when I had to disperse her ashes. For what I am sure were good reasons, none of which I can now recall, and despite being the youngest of three with a father still living, the task of sprinkling her remains was assigned, perhaps by default, to me. I did it alone one warm and sunny morning, having told no one what I was about to do.
The crematorium had called twice to say mother’s ashes were ready before I picked her up, then, instead of scattering the ashes immediately, I took them home and placed them under my bed. It was months before I retrieved them for the priest-like act of dispersal, even though she had told me exactly where and how and when she wanted it done. On the day I chose, I placed her on the car seat next to me – the car boot did not seem right – and made my way to the Japanese Gardens. Her name in gothic print caught my eye and at every glance, I felt the need to make conversation like strangers on a bus may feel but I resisted, not knowing how or where to begin.
According to her repeated wishes, I made my way toward a public garden I knew she loved. As I prepared to cross the wooden bridges into the carefully manicured gardens, holding the box uneasily away from my body, all of what I had not done as a son tumbled through my mind in the uneasy and disjointed style of a rather crass home movie.
I walked the carefully tended lawns holding her at arm’s length, tripping over my guilt. Persisting to a place I considered more beautiful than any other, from some distant universe, relayed through the sky, reflecting off the ocean to the surrounding trees, moving through my body and securing me to the earth, I heard Mother affirm my choice of rolling deep green landscape and I held the box to my chest and stood alone against the moment, this final act, a sense of wonder, an acknowledgement of deep regret.
I waited.
I was ready to spread the ashes.
Seated on my haunches, I rented the box open, peered at the gravel, white and coarse, and I placed my fingers knuckle deep, feeling the dry chalk and dust. I felt again the talcum powder she so liberally used in the sweet-smelling, steamy bathroom of fogged mirrors and slippery floors, wet with scattered, twisted towels. I saw again the powder’s trace from the bathroom to her bedroom to the tranquil gardens that surrounded me, and I knew again the scented smell, strong and lingering all through the house of my early years. Her sandy remains powdered my hands, falling easily through my fingers to the grass around my feet and to the beds of colorful flowers. The ashes fell into the colors of the tropical flowers and became part of the robust flesh, touched then, with new and delicate shading. Her dust colored the dirt between the rows of saplings, lending it a sallow complexion. Remains blew and landed, leaving a trail of white against the sturdy, solid green of the African buffalo grass.
When the dust had settled, I tipped the drab empty box, her full name declared loudly in a gothic font on one side, into a refuse bin I saw attached to a nearby tree and broke into a steady run, weaving my way past crowds of playing children, adults chatting on picnic blankets, all oblivious of my morbid but accomplished, task.
I cried all the way home. My chest heaved. My body rocked. When my throat clogged with phlegm, I stopped the car at a familiar clearing in a sugarcane field to vomit. Bent double, I got out and, as if from the center of the Earth, spewed a lifetime of missing the mark.
Then I turned from the pungent odor, shut the car door and made my way home.
I have treid to capture the essence of what I heard a woman say about her mother. I think I have covered all the points and, althoug using my own words, capatured the tone of love and expressed admiration as she talked on hre mother…
My mother (in her 80s) is one of the most active women of her age I have ever known or heard about. It is quite wonderful how she keeps in contact with her family all over the world and remembers everything important. She forgets ‘little things’ here an there but no more or less than people half her age. I hsve never known anyone to be so forgiving and trusting and it is not that she has had an easy life. She has outlived two husbands and two or her 5 sons and daughters and three grandchildren. There has been so much change in the world during her lifetime but she has never been ‘stuck’ in the past or afraid of change. Mother follows sports, gives to charites, visits her friends and knows her neighbors. She hss never lost ber sense of humour – especially when it comes to the retirement home where she lives. Mother is not critical of the young and never gives the impression that the ‘old days’ were better than today.
difficultrelationships.com 