When engaging those of advanced age, approach with deep respect, kindness, openness.
Expect to be enthralled, to learn.
Besides, in a flash of time — yes, 30, 40, even 60 years, is a flash of time — and it’ll be you.
Listen rather than speak.
Learn, rather than try to teach.
Wait, hold onto yourself.
Offer time for a reflective exchange.
Imagine how you’ll want to be treated in a few years — and do that.
The life experience embodied in the person before you, if you’ll take the time to hear, will astound you. But, it requires necessary time to hear and the power to resist the urge to do all the talking.
Be aware of chasing away an elderly person’s desire to engage you because you talk too much. I’ve seen Elderly People resort to silence rather than compete with the know-it-all nature that often comes with youth.
Ask questions and be willing to listen. Ask about former careers and accomplishments. Ask about love and loss and grief and recovery and you may learn more about love and commitment than you imagined. Remind yourself, as you listen, that being elderly is not a liability but an invaluable asset to adult sons and daughters and grandchildren and great grandchildren and to society at large.
Engage exactly how you will hope to be engaged a few years from now.
Behold — look closely, observe, see, acknowledge, identify — your Mother.
We all have or had one.
No matter what your memory, treasured for its overwhelming sense of love and acceptance and unconditional positive regard, or the sad antithesis of all that is good and associated with good mothers and mothering: behold your mother.
Consider your mother as you would fine and treasured art, a masterpiece and, then, give thanks.
Remember the good times.
Recall the hard times, recall the challenges you gave to your mother and the challenges your mother brought to you.
The woman you called mother brought to the unique relationship with you, experiences and heartbreaks and history of which you, as a child would know nothing.
Yet, you’d know and experience and benefit, and even suffer the impact of it all, all she is, or was.
Behold, living or dead, known or unknown, behold, appreciate your mother.
There is something wildly healthy about doing so be your mother saint or villain, victor or victim, well or unwell.
—
Emotional Wellness and Living An Authentic Life will be my topics at The Westville Bowling Club on May 9, 2024. Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za for details in the event you’d like to attend.
——-
Sunday, May 12, 2024 I shall have the privilege of delivering the Mothers Day sermon at the two morning services (7:30 and 9:15am) at Musgrave Methodist Church on the Berea.
———
Saturday 11th from 9-12 with Terry Angelos at ST. Michael’s in Umhlanga…..
Instantly, he replied, with a link to nine varieties of venomous snakes inhabiting Namibia. The communication left me with the distinct impression I’d be tripping over nesting pythons, wrestling extended families of puff-adders, fending off multiple varieties of mambas at every turn.
Ours was the only flight coming into Hosea Kutako International Airport, Windhoek, for a few hours. The immigration officials appeared rather pleased to stamp the Boeing 737-load of us in. I was more than pleased to be admitted after the 20 minute walk from the parked Airlink aircraft to the airport buildings. The African sun blazes, I tell you.
Airlink, I understand is a rather new South African carrier, an airline I have found to be friendly and efficient. It’s interesting that even on the quick domestic hauls — at least the flights I’ve enjoyed— Airlink finds it possible and profitable to serve all passengers delightfully boxed meals in recently sealed time-stamped containers each with fresh fruit and an “African dessert.” The part I most enjoy is washing it down with a traditionally served hot cup of tea – while there remains a selection of wines freely available.
Namibia, formerly South West Africa until 1990, is large, mostly desert, and Windhoek, one of the major cities is a two hour flight almost directly north South Africa’s “Mother City,” Cape Town. My immediate impression: Windhoek is as vibrant and modern as any large metropolitan city anywhere in the west, while rural Namibia is as rural as I have known on this fabulous continent.
The “Foundations of Counseling Ministries” students and facilitating staff whom I am teaching for the week make a full classroom of 20 hailing from 7 nations: Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, and Tanzania. Each student is in a different part of his or her journey towards a degree from The University of The Nations.
Next week I will be back in South Africa and in my home town. I will attend the wedding of my great niece and speak at a few public gatherings, one of which will be a live, three hour discussion with Terry Angelos, the best selling author of “White Trash” subtitled “My Year As a High Class Call Girl.” The memoir is as graphic and tough to read as it is redemptive and full of hope and joy.
If you follow my “On The Road” series of columns, you may have noticed that this time I have not written about the long flight from Newark to Cape Town or the inconveniences that come with international travel.
Here’s why: the teacher for the week in a parallel class offered on this Namibian rural campus, which is 840 acres of sprawling bush with a settlement of houses and classrooms sitting somewhere in the middle, arrived between 2 and 3am on Monday after a 9 hour public bus ride — think Greyhound — from a town in northern Namibia.
Bishop Leonard was up and teaching within a few hours.
I am over complaining about the inconveniences of Boeing and Airbus travel, thank you, Bishop Leonard.
It’s doing what’s good and right to the best of your awareness, as limited as your awareness may be, for the greatest number of people possible in your immediate circle of influence, including those whom you don’t know and even those who may have rejected you or may even hate you.
It’s gathering your strength and harvesting your latent patience and shopping at your store of inner kindness when others test you your many daily contexts, and then being strong and patient and kind even if it feels like you’re surrounded by people who don’t appear to think very much, and, if they do, their thinking appears limited to considering only what pertains to themselves alone.
It’s paying for someone’s groceries or petrol (gas) or electricity, but it’s also stopping to consider why it is that you are able to and trying to understand what circumstances have placed the recipients of your generosity in such vulnerable, often humiliating situations, that they need your help and thinking these things through without resorting to low-hanging stereotypes like “I’ve worked hard and ‘they’ have not.”
It’s seeing people’s faces, acknowledging their unique stories, accepting that all people want to be seen, heard and included, even if their day-to-day behavior suggests volumes of evidence to the contrary.
A few years back my sons and I attended a Birth Mother’s Day Dinner with about 19 brave birth moms, women who’d chosen to place their babies for adoption.
They lit candles.
Some held treasured ear-marked photographs.
There was talk about their love and support of all moms everywhere who have made the powerful choice of adoption.
All were deeply contemplative – for a few, memories from hard choices made 50-plus years ago were revisited.
A few women remained silent, holding tightly to affirmed, supported anonymity.
Mothers who have chosen adoption for their babies are often ignored on Mothers Day.
And, how their hearts must surely ache.
May 12, 2024, several nations, including South Africa, will celebrate Mothers Day and an unseen army of brave women will quietly witness other families rightfully celebrating Mothers Day and find no place at the tables with the children whom they generously offered to families eager to love their babies.
I admit, my awareness of birth mothers is acute.
These women, often shamed, labeled as irresponsible, hard, or uncaring, have radically shifted my life. Each of my boys’ mothers fought untold difficulties – unknown to me – while carrying her child to full term, in full knowledge other options existed.
Despite abandonment, derision from family members, financial difficulties, and who knows what other pressures, each delivered a beautiful baby and made the hard choice to forever enrich my life by allowing me, a single man, to adopt her infant son.
I know you are not forgotten – not on Mothers Day weekend or any other day.
You are so deeply etched into their individual psyches and into our family experience that you are regularly part of our awareness and conversation.
So deep is their desire for you, so deep is the urge for a mother that my boys sometimes called me “mom”.
I have never stopped them. I let it go because I think I know what it’s about.
It’s a primal urge.
It expresses a heartfelt longing.
To stop them, when each was learning to talk, seemed unwise, as if I were stopping something deep, powerful within each.
“Mama” or “mom” and even “mother” seemed to come as easily as rolling over, as cooing, as first steps, and as all those things that come with early development – and so I let it go.
It was as if “mother” and all forms of Her names were buried within each boy to emerge and be attached to the nearest, warmest person no matter what his or her gender.
Yes, the woman waiting your table at your Mothers Day lunch, the teacher whom your child adores, the woman co-worker who goes silent for no identifiable reason or who appears to be sometimes lost in another world when the conversation turns to babies or showers or Mother’s Day, just may be a member of that unseen army of birth-mothers. She may be one of the gracious, brave women who have made Mother’s Day complete for countless women around the world and given a man like me the unique pleasure of sometimes being called “mom.”
I ache for the millions of women whose Mothers Day is tainted with shame, loneliness, disconnection, for having made the tough choice for adoption.
If that’s you or almost you, and are in KZN, and your adoption was recent or decades ago, I have an invitation for you.
Please join me for lunch or an early dinner on May 11, 2024 – yes, the day before Mothers Day is referred to as Birth Mothers Day.
Come alone or bring a friend. I shall speak briefly, simply to thank you and honor your bravery.
Expenses for your lunch will be fully covered – I have already received several financial gifts to cover costs.
The venue will be beautiful and private and safe —- details are unfolding.
Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za so we can get you — and a friend — onto the list and get details to you as they unfold.
Generous readers, restaurateurs, sponsors, gift bag creators, please email Shirley you’d like to pay for a meal or sponsor a table or assist in any manner.
Closing note.
I know this is a tough invitation, Birth Mom.
But, you have already demonstrated your strength.
Join me, please.
[if you’re in the USA and want to give, all gifts are tax deductible— contact me and I’ll guide you through the easy process of giving to OpenHand International, a 501C3 corporation]
Soon several nations, including South Africa, will celebrate Mothers Day.
In affluent areas restaurants will have table reservations for several generations of mothers. In modest settings a bowl of flowers may be arranged for mom.
As a dad to adopted sons I ache for the millions of women (and who sometimes sit silent at the same tables) whose Mothers Day is tainted with shame, loneliness, disconnection, for having made the tough choice for adoption.
Many women have expressed Mothers Day is not for them, that it’s among the most painful days they endure.
If that’s you or almost you, and are in KZN, and your adoption was recent or decades ago, I have an invitation for you:
Please join me for lunch or an early dinner on May 11, 2024. Come alone of bring a friend. Expenses for your lunch will be fully covered. The venue will be beautiful and private and safe —- details still unfolding.
Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za so we can get you — and a friend — onto the list and get details to you as they unfold.
Happy Birth Mothers Day, brave woman.
Generous readers, restaurateurs, sponsors, gift bag creators, please email Shirley you’d like to pay for a meal or sponsor a table or assist in any manner.
When receiving texts — except texts of a purely perfunctory nature — do you read between, behind the lines?
We offer affirming eye contact during face-to-face conversations.
Timing, tone, cadence, clarify meaning in voice calls.
Are we listening to texts?
You may engage with the person who responds to texts as if anxiously awaiting, even aching for human contact. Prior knowledge may inform your understanding of your quick-to-reply friend.
I find it helpful, early in any text exchange, to declare my level of availability. I am unlikely to ignore a verbal approach and I try to acknowledge texts.
Apparent indifference can be cruel.
Respond in kind: words for words, sentences for sentences, emojis for emojis. One who composes a paragraph deserves a like-response. A thumbs up emoji or hand clapping butterflies may come off as dismissive when a friend just spilled his guts.
Grammar rules and sound spelling seem widely ignored with texting. While pedantic perfectionism may reek pretentiousness, effort reveals respect.
Avoid alarm —- can’t wait to tell you something terribly important to you and your future when we meet next month — is hardly fair.
Read between and behind the lines.
Friends might be telling you something of crucial importance (to them) and selected you to be their audience.
Arrived in the USA late last evening from Malaysia.
It’s enjoying face-to-face conversations, really listening to each other, responding, asking relevant, respectful questions. It’s encouraging people to talk about things they find interesting, important.
It’s sharing, refusing to dominate or set the agenda for every conversation.
Meals with friends, unhurried times, occasions when talk leads to laughter and may also lead to tears simply (and profoundly) because shared history is being re-lived.
Pain – revisited.
It’s simple meals that transform into events because hearts are healed even though a shared meal was the only intention.
It’s welcoming others, people known and unknown. It’s genuine openness, radical hospitality. It’s wild generosity. It’s sincere interest expressed.
It’s the simple things.
And, no cell-phones are required or necessary.
————
Two personal matters:
I will be in KZN from May 5 to May 15, 2024. Best selling author Terry Angelos (WHITE TRASH) and I will host a public seminar. During my visit I will, at your invitation, meet with groups, schools, churches, businesses, and individuals. Please contact Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za to find out more about the Angelos/Smith event or schedule events with me.
This column appeared first in The Mercury on March 20, 2001 and has been published every weekday for 23 years. Thank you for your readership.
What kind of week will you have? What kind of person will you be this week? Ask these questions and most will say they don’t know or reveal a Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) attitude.
It is possible to plan.
Here’s my five-point plan for this week:
I will do something every day that is an act of self-care and self-love. It is impossible to love others without also loving myself.
I will occupy the driver’s seat of my life. Abdication of this adult role to others – except under extreme circumstances – is the definition of selfishness.
Within the framework of my predetermined values and boundaries and my callings, I will be a highly cooperative person, a team-player, an encourager.
I will listen without waiting to speak knowing that every person has a voice worth hearing and something to teach me.
I will commit at least one specific act of unexpected generosity, one that costs me time and/or treasure, each day. This is to train my seeing, thinking and responding to others so that generosity becomes an ingrained way of life for me.
I’d love to see what you are planning for your week. Email me your 5 or 3 or 7 point plan.
difficultrelationships.com 