I Am Who I Am - Learning to Love my Limitations

I got a phone call from my brother the other day.  He called me at one of those "You must read minds" times, when I really needed someone to talk to.  I was feeling upset, and had a good vent session where I told him everything I was going through, my feelings, and all the problems in my life.  Poor guy.  He's fairly ill-equipped to deal with my emotions.  I realized this before I even started talking.  I also knew that the older he gets, the more he becomes like my dad.  Although this sometimes annoys me, on the phone that day, it turned out to be exactly what I needed.

My family are not exactly the most emotionally open people in the universe.  And when somebody is, we're not quite sure how to deal with it.  On the phone, my brother mostly just made a lot of jokes and changed the subject.  At first, this was annoying, like talking to a brick wall, but the conversation soon fell into a predictable rhythm.  This kind of counselling was strangely comforting to me, probably because it was so familiar.  Soon, I was laughing and enjoying the conversation.  My family may be emotionally dense, but we are actually very funny people.

These character traits make us lots of fun at parties, but they are not always popular when it comes to very close, long term relationships.  I mean the type of relationships where people start to expect more.  I've had people try to drag the emotion out of me.  They seem to think they can "crack this egg", and get to all the ooey gooey emotions inside.  What they don't realize is that it's not an egg, it's a rock.  You would have to work pretty hard to split this open, but if you did, you would find more of the same.  Solid.  The same all the way through.  We are loyal.  We are brave.  We are dependable.  We actually love very deeply, but affection or other poetic expressions of love are not our strong suit.

When I learned that not everybody is like this, I spent a long time believing I was the screw up.  I met a lot of people who seemed more loving, more open, better able to relate to others, and often I felt this was superior to the way I was.  I thought I must be the one who grew up maladjusted.  I didn't know what they got from their family to make them so different, but whatever it was, it must have been better than what I got from mine.

I don't believe this anymore.  My life has been a journey of learning to accept myself, my past, and my limitations.  Not just accept it, but love it.  I think there is a part of ourselves that we can't change, and the only way we can grow is to embrace who we are.

A pick up truck will never be a ferrari.  No matter how much it may look longingly at ferraris and wish it could be fast and sleek and take sharp turns in the Italian country side.  It will never happen.  What it needs to do, is learn what pick up trucks are for, and do pick up truck things to the best of it's ability.  It needs to learn to love being a pick up truck.

Likewise, for those of you who don't relate to trucks, I will say that a Volkswagen van will never be anything but a Volkswagen van.  It will probably break down, need hard to find parts, spew out black smoke and refuse to start in the winter.  But no one can deny that those VW's have a certain charm about them.  Those who love them will go to great lengths to maintain them.

I have a new found appreciation for who I am, and rather than trying to change it, I am going to step into it.  I  think this might actually revolutionize my life.  I will no longer be vulnerable to accusations of "You're just like your family!"  I am.  I admit it.  My brother was not trying to show callous indifference on the phone.  In fact, it was just the opposite.  He was trying to lighten the mood, to make me feel better the only way he knew how, through sarcasm, witty comments and ridiculous jokes.  How could I expect anything else from him?  If I can love my brother, and all his limitations, then I can do the same for myself.  I may have the emotional depth of a coconut, but I am smart, entertaining and resourceful.  I may not be perfect, but I don`t have to be.  All I have to be is myself, and I am not only happy to do so, I'm pretty good at it.

Conversations with a 10 Year Old and One Rough Day!

So, my daughter turned 10 last weekend, and we had this conversation on her birthday.

She is very concerned that other kids think she is weird.  She doesn't want to draw any attention to herself because she's afraid people will think she's not normal.  I don't believe there is any such thing as normal.  We are all unique.  As we grow up, we come to appreciate others for their unique personality traits.  I used the example of a good friend of mine, Jo, who my daughter has known her whole life.  I said "Do I like Jo for all the ways that she is like everyone else?  Do I like her because she's so normal?"  When I put it this way, she could see how it is those unique personality traits that we come to love in our friends, these are what draw us to people.  All the kids her age are trying their best to try to be like everybody else, going around trying desperately to be normal, and sooner or later they're going to realize that there is no normal, and it is much cooler to just be yourself, which looks different for all of us.  It seemed like I was getting through to her.  I told her that once one person decided to stop believing in normal and just be themselves, then maybe that awareness would spread to the other kids, and they would start feeling free to be themselves as well.  This concept, I'm not sure she understood, but we both walked away feeling better.

Then today came.  I had to take my daughter to an appointment on the far side of the city.  It would take all day.  Today is day three after my miscarriage, and I am still passing blood clots and some tissue.  But such is life.  I'm not feeling too bad.  So I went into Staples first, and suddenly I felt a gush of blood.  Sure enough, there was blood everywhere, my pants were soaked, and I hadn't even brought my purse into the store.  This was the first disaster.  Feeling a bit nauseous and lightheaded, I got in my car and drove (probably not a good idea when you are loosing so much blood) to my sister's house.  No one was home.  I sat in my car outside her house, and since it was cold, I let the car run with the heat on.  Then my car started to sputter, and it dawned on me that I had meant to fuel up before leaving the NW.  Not only that, but when I looked for my wallet with my gas money in it, I discovered that I had forgotten it in Staples.  I was out of gas, and now my car wouldn't start.  Great, so now I am sitting in my car, bleeding, out of gas, with my baby sleeping in the back, and soon it will be cold.  And for those of you who don't know, I don't have a cell phone.  I pleaded to the universe to send me some help, which was all I could think of to do at the time. 

I saw a car driving towards me and thought it might be my sister coming home.  No, that car had a headlight out.  My sister would never drive around with only one headlight.  In fact, she would never find herself in this predicament at all.  No, my sister does the right thing.  She's not a space-brained mom who drives around in precarious old beaters with no cell phone, running out of gas on cold days, with her kids in the car, showing up at her sister's house unannounced with bloody pants.  In fact, it seems she hardly has any problems at all.  This, I find very frustrating.  Not that she has no problems, but that I seem to have all of them.  As I watched the one headlight car drive past me, I wondered what the hell is wrong with me, and why can't I seem to get my shit together like everybody else.

Then I remembered the conversation I had a few days ago, with a 10 year old girl concerned with being normal.  I guess that feeling affects us all to some extent.  Eventually, my sister and brother in law came and helped out my sorry ass, and I was back on the road in enough time to get my wallet back and pick up my daughter. In the end, what I hope my daughter realizes, is that her real friends and family love and accept her for who she is, including all her faults and idiosyncrasies.  Admitedly, there are some ways that I am downright weird.  :)  The biggest challenge is learning to love and accept ourselves.