Whatever became of...

  

After all those leading roles in every play during high school,is it any wonder that my sister went on to get a Bachelor of Fine Art in theater and is now a professional actor and Drama Teacher (both at a high school and at her own school for actors-  link here to see her school  http://njactors.org/faculty.html)

My brother's growth got un-stunted after my family moved to St. Charles and he got to have a real bedroom.  He is now 6'5" and is the band teacher/director at Camdenton High School at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri.  

If you have read my blog, you will know, that after a (very brief) attempt to major in Music at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, Mo, I ended up becoming a Psychotherapist.  I actually have a double major in Music and psychology-but now I only use my music degree to write myself mnemonic devices.  

So how did those two end up in the arts and I end up in Social Work? 

Remember the great nurture  versus nature question?  Well this is where is plays out.

I am a big believer in attachment theory.  John Bowlby postulated (Invented?  Came up with?) attachment theory watching chimps or apes or something.  He noticed that the little chimps/apes/monkeys sought the grown-ups in order to avoid being some lion's lunch and to be fed, bathed and kept free of vermin.  He also noticed that the baby primates were choosing their own mother over the other adults.  I don't know about you, but one monkey looks pretty much the same as another monkey to me.  And, lo and behold, the Mama monkeys could discern their own babies, too!

Bowlby also noticed that the babies didn't just seek out their own personal parent money when danger was present or they needed a snack or to have nits picked off their back.  The monkeys went to their moms for a hug after a fight with their monkey friends or they got a monkey boo-boo after falling out of a tree or something.  The monkeys wanted cuddles as much as they wanted bananas!

From monkeys to humans, observation and research proved that people needed someone to attach to as well.  You must have heard about the importance of bonding with your baby.  Bonding is how you feel about that small wrinkled amorphous blob of a person that just emerged from your body.  Bonding is one sided.  The small amorphous pointed headed creature suddenly turns into the cutest smartest funniest being who ever walked the earth and everyone must see this most incredible baby you created. (No really!  They must!  You have the stacks of pictures and videos and Facebook pages and websites just to prove that no other baby even comes close...)  That's bonding,  It's pretty one-sided.

Attachment goes both ways.  Bonding is what makes you want to nurture you amazing creation.  Attachment makes your amazing creation think you are pretty great, too.  Attachment creates the type of nurturing you get.

I could go on all day about attachment theory and what happens to screw it up and how other researchers found differing types of attachment etc.  But What I really want t say is that being attached creates good nurture and nurture brings out our nature.

I don't think the argument of nurture being more important than nature (or vice versa) is stated correctly.  I think nurture allows us to reach our own natural potential for intelligence, talent, drive ability to choose and ability to love and be loved.

In my most amazing family, we were allowed to become our nature and chose our path accordingly.

Enough for today.  Tune in next time for more on attachment and less boring stuff, as well.

Just a word about aging

The other day, I was getting new glasses at Costco (best deal in town, BTW).  David Bowie's Let's Dance was playing in the background.  The (very) young adult women helping me pick out my glasses looked at me and said, "I can't think of this singer.  It's driving me crazy". She didn't know David Bowie!!??  I realizes that David Bowie is no longer a household name and his groundbreaking androgyny is no longer relevant or shocking.  She couldn't recall his name just like I may wonder who sings Rock Around the Clock or I Left my Heart in Sam Fransciso...

My God, I saw David Bowie in concert (The Glass Spider tour for all the other aging hipsters out there).  I was back stage at a Heart Concert.  I had hip clothes like Esprit and Hang Ten and said thing like "Way Cool" and read the Preppie Handbook.  I had a light up Goose lamp before the old ladies started dressing them in costumes for the holidays.  I know who Divine and John Waters are.  I saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show and threw toast and did the Time Warp, Dammit!  I am a hip person....Who happens to be 51 and walks with a limp and wears Women's sized clothing from the Talbots outlet and drinks Metamucil every day and...

Just remember kids, someday,when you are feeling pretty good about yourself, you will hear Vampire Weekend and Nine Inch nails on the oldies station and the new groups will have names like Nintendo Cloud Burst or Knex the Dots because that is what the kids in the bands played with as small children. And the groups you think of as cutting edge or just edgy in general  will be quaint and old fashioned.

One of the guys I dated used to make fun of old people sometimes.  I told him that it was rude and he just laughed and said, It's okay.  Somebody will make fun of you, too, someday.  Well, that someday is now.

I was at the Goodwill (The GW, as my sister-in-law calls it and don't laugh.  I have gotten at least 5 cashmere sweaters and a leather backpack purse there!).  There were two barely-out-of-their teen girls at the counter.  One looked at the other and said HDA and laughed!  HDA?!  I used to work in retail at cool stores in Kansas City!  I know what HDA is!  Hairdo Alert!  It's code for "Check out this chick's terrible hair!"! (We also used to page Mrs. McGillicutty to the front when someone really bizarre came in).  These girls were making fun of my hair!  Granted, I had just come from a hectic Play Therapy session and the girls were throwing glitter and playing hairstylist on me.  So I was probably not displaying the best grooming.  But, really?!!


But here's a good thing about aging.  I really didn't care so much what they thought..  I was happy to have been able to use Play Therapy with those girls  they needed an outlet and they needed an adult who was not judgmental and who did not yell at them for making a mess.  The girls behind the counter didn't know my back story and I didn't really care.

Have you ever heard the 16-36-66 rule?  It says:  At 16, you worry about what everyone else is thinking about you.  At 36, you don't care what everyone else is thinking about you and at 66, you realize that no one was ever thinking about you at all!  If I follow that rule, HDA could have stood for Hard Drink After work or Help do accounting after this, or Hot Damn All Done for today.  Who knows...

Aging and living in an old body has its difficulties, of course, but when all is said and done, I do prefer it to the alternative!

New year

Yesterday was my birthday, so it makes sense that my personal new year starts today.  My New Years resolution is to write everyday and post at least once a week. Most resolutions start off with enthusiasm and determination, but by February, the treadmill has become a tread-nil and the jumbo bag of chips is taking up space in the grocery cart once again.

I actually have made at least two resolutions that stuck around.  I actually do go "workout" at least 4 times a week and I did write a "poem" about Sarge the dog  every day for year.  I use the terms "workout " and "poem" loosely, because, arguably, my workouts are not all that...workout-y and the Sarge poem were really just rhyming phrases.  But I did write one of them every day for a year.  You try it and see how you do after a couple of weeks and then tell me they are not really poems!

I have writing topics in my head, but I over-think stuff and get stuck.  I try to get too pedantic and critical.of my erudition and start to use words like "pedantic" and "erudition" instead of just writing my thoughts.  So expect my posts to be a little disjointed and tangential sometimes.  Otherwise, they start to sound as if I am writing reports for juvenile court (a task I have done frequently) and I start to write run-on sentences and use terms like "tangential"...

Now that I have gotten myself back to the correct frame of mind for my blog-style, here is what I have been thinking about lately:

There are some pressing questions the world has long debated. You know, stuff like the chicken or the egg; is there really a God, (or if you are a dyslexic existentialist, is there really a Dog); when do you actually use a semi-colon in a sentence; and my personal favorite, which way does the toilet paper roll hang?   Over the top or down the back?  (The correct answer is over the top, for Dog's sake).

My other personal favorite pressing question is  Nature or Nurture.  According to Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places or Arnold Swartzanegger and Danny DeVito in Twins, nurture wins out. I thought this way myself for a long time. I wonder if every naive psychology student thinks they have it all figured out.  I had the nurture v nature discussion once with my Great Uncle Al.  Uncle Al was the youngest of ten  He was a psychiatrist when every other sibling was a minister or a minister's wife.  He used to say that he become a psychiatrist in order to take care of all those crazy minister!  When I told him my thoughts on nurture trumping nature, he just laughed and said, "Just wait". He was that kind of guy  Very droll and thoughtful.  Miss him...

Now I get what he meant and I think we are set up for our potential by nature, and nurture helps us to reach that potential,  I think that very good nurture can ameliorate bad nature, but I think that very good nature doesn't stand a snowball's chance against terrible nurture.  But mostly I think that nature wins out in the end.

Since this started off as a blog about having MS, I can safely say that nature can sometimes kick you butt, but I as a psychotherapist, I know that nurture, and specifically connections and attachments can go a log way in managing what nature hands you.

Tomorrow I will write more about my own family and seeing nature being created though nurture, but for today, I hace net my resolution goal and I feel proud!

The year of Sarge

Sarge turned out to be a great dog after the poo incident. He is quirky and docile and affectionate.  His positive sides are many, but he is, in a good dog way, a bad dog.  He used to be a champion runner. An open front door was an invitation to explore the sights and smells of the world .  I once chased him down at a neighbor's barbeque.  Another time, Eli and the Peapod grocery delivery guy chased him around the block. They returned, throwing up their hand in defeat, thinking he was lost, while I watched Sarge chasing behind them!  We got him an ID chip after that.

Sarge settled into the household.  He slept at the foot of Eli's bed and spent the rest of the time on the couch or in the crate.  Dogs can, apparently, sleep 20 hours a day, which Sarge did.  But in those four houses of wakefulness, he was a joyful, sausage shaped log-of-fur and activity.  He chewed up every toys we gave him, dug for grubs in the yard, and begged for table scraps. Eli did get to be kid of the week and Sarge was kind of well behaved at the school for a few minutes.

Then the darnedest thing started happening.  After the first rhyme about poo, I started to hear rhymes about everything Sarge related.  I wrote down two more little rhymes, the three and four, and pretty soon I had about sixteen little verses with no signs of slowing.  I figured Sarge was a dog rhyme channeling genius, so I got him his own Facebook page and started posting.  Since I already had so many rhymes and there seemed to be no end, I started posting one of Sarges poems every day.

At first it was fun and pretty easy to write in Sarges voice.  Eli asked me how long I planned to post Sarge's poems.  "I dunno..for a year?"  I replied.  He said "You won't be able to do that!  Just do one a week." Challenge!   "I'll show you!"  I thought.  Oh my...

After the first two months, thing started to be a tad harder.  There are only so many interesting thing to write about a dog.  Here is a sampling of a few of the originals:

I'm Sarge the dog.
 I frequently whine.
 I whine at your feet while you are trying to dine.
 I look at your food and think "isn't that mine?" 
I wrinkle my forehead and look like I'm cryin'. 
(I know I look cute, there is no denyin'. )
 Sometimes you feed me. Sometimes you decline. 
But that's intermittent reinforcement so you blame ME for tryin'!

I’m Sarge, the dog.

I like to sleep.

I sleep in blankets in a heap. 

When I’m asleep in my blanket heap,

Sometimes a fart from me will creep.

And when it does, it will make you weep! 

I’m Sarge the dog.

I like my boys.

They feed me things and buy me toys.

My mom’s a bore.

She makes no noise, and licking her brings her no joys.

So if you had to make a choice,

Don’t you think you choose the boys?

So think of that ties 365 (It was leap year!)

I got stuck many times.  There are rhymes specific to day.  fourth of July , Eli's birthday, Christmas. There were a few guest spot.  Sarge wrote poems about other people's pets a few times.  He wrote two about the Cardinal's winning the world series.  He experimented with different formats-haiku, limericks.  I ended up buying two rhyming dictionaries. (I think there is a poem about that).  

Despite the writer's blocks and some technical difficulties, I made it through the whole year!  I am sure that there are not very many pets that can boast that they have an entire year of poetry devoted to them.  As great as Sarge is, and as much as I enjoyed the challenge,  I will never ever do that again!

For awhile, I switched to Sarge's tip of the week with a picture and life lesson, but Sarge and his channel (me) are both sort of old and tired. You can still enjoy Sarges's page and even "Like" it.  Just don't expect too much ore activity there!

I am starting in a whole new direction next post, but I hope you keep reading.  I am sure there will be more memories and pets along the way!

Here is a link to Sarge's Facebook page if you want to read the whole series (Sorry about the typos along the way!)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sarge-the-dog/249325348417598

Cat person or dog person?

All along I have always thought I was a cat person. I felt more pulled to them and I was sure that my destiny was to be a crazy cat lady someday.  But then, my kid begged for a dog.

When Eli was in third grade, his teacher had a "kid of the Week"  This was really just a couple of minutes in the morning to talk about your favorite things and share you favorite snack.  One of the thing that other kids had done, was have their parents bring in his or her pet for the class to meet.  Eli really wanted to be "Kid of the Week" and have a pet to show off.  I suggested that he could put the spider that hung out in the bathtub in a box and take that, but that was a no go, so we started to look for dogs.

There were some specifiers.  No puppies.  Cute as they are, no way was anyone in my household was  housebreaking a dog.  Secondly, it had to be fixed already.  Adopting a pre-housebroken pre-neutered dog was cheaper and easier than a do-it-yourself variety.  I really wanted a pug dog or other dog that looked as if they were running too fast too keep from smashing into into a wall face first.  Eli, however wanted a dog with an actual nose.  Also, no long hairs, no yippee barks and nothing big enough to ride on.  I highly recommend Petfinders.com.  We were able to find a dog that seemed ideal. I contacted the shelter and they invited a to a "meet and greet" event

 I honestly thought we were just going to check out some dogs and come back later to decide.  Instead, we left with Sarge.  He met the criteria.  Real nose (check), not a puppy (check), not too big (check), not too much hair (check), housebroken and neutered (check).  The only thing we didn't get,was a chance to check the sound of his bark.  Eli met Sarge and  was not going to part with this dog, whether or not he had a yippee bark. I just figured we'd have to get a dog voice box replacement or something if his bark  was too high.  Lucky for us, on the drive home, he saw another dog out of the window and we were delighted to hear him explode into a low, boofy sounding bark.  After we recovered from the ringing in our ears, we slapped a high five and finished the trip.  We were now official dog-people.

There are two things you can do to a dog to see how calm and docile it is.  You can poke your finger between the pads on it's feet, and you can grab it's lips and move it around.  Not only will Sarge (who came with that name) let you do those things, he will look bored about it, wag his tail, and roll over so you can scratch his tummy while you do them. He barks ferociously at dogs, squirrels, birds and people who walk within a foot of the house, but if an actually close encounter occurs, Sarge will wag his tail and beg for food.  He is not a good watchdog.

The doggie adoption agency told us that Sarge was crate trained and would prefer to stay locked in while we were gone for the day.  But as I was leaving him alone for the first time, I felt guilty and worried.  What if he got hungry or thirsty?  What if the crate was uncomfortable or he just wanted to stretch his short little legs? So I left him sleeping on the couch and closed the door and went to work.

I was the last out and the first home, so I was able to look around to see how he had fared out of the crate all day.  Sarge greeted me at the door ran to the master bedroom, where he sat and wagged his tail  Was he showing me something?  Was that (hideous, blue shag) carpet more comfortable for him?  Was he confused about how to get to the yard to do his business?  I looked around, but things seemed to be in order, so I breathed a sigh and waited for my husband to get home.

When he got there, I excitedly told him how well the dog did. We were happy that things were going so well. Dana went into the bedroom to change and several minutes later, he yelled out, "Hey!  If the dog did so well out of his crate, how come there's dog poop in my shoes?!!"  So that's what Sarge wanted to show me!   Later we would also discover a chewed up pencil and some other randomly shredded papers and unidentifiable destroyed piles of dog fodder.  It does not need to be said that Sarge spent his days locked i his crate after that.


This incident inspired me to compose a short verse:

Sarge the dog.  He eats and chews
and then he poos on Daddy's shoes.
If Sarge the dog would choose your shoes,
which would you choose?
Chews or poos?

Unfortunately for you, dear blog, I not only composed that silly couplet, I continued to find short rhyming verses about Sarge.  I think he may have channeled them to me somehow.  This led to something I'll tell you about in the next post.

You have heard all about my childhood pets.  But I have had pets as an adult, too.

My first pet was really the dorm cat.  My room mate was a fish outta water on our floor of the dorm. Most of the girls in the surrounding rooms were music majors so poor Doris was exposed to all our musical angst.  We had a great deal of worry about sol feggio exercises.  We all called it sol feg (and probably didn't know this was short for sol feggio, anyway).  Sol feggio  was singing a piece of music using the names of the notes rather than the words.  So do re me is a version of sol feg.  I think we also had to use the hand gestures associated with the note, so practicing sol feggio is a lot like sign language only with singing.  My roommate, due to being normal and all, ask us what was this Soul Fish thing we were all so worried about.  Thus, the cat's name (at least on or floor), became Soul Fish, which I actually think is a pretty good name for a cat.

Did you know that cat's can't digest milk?  Well, neither did most of the kids in the dorm so Soul Fish developed the nasty habit of having diarrhea on the students beds.  Soul Fish disappeared and although the thought is a little disconcerting, the med students had to dissect cats as part of their training. Do you suppose... Nah...

My next pet was a big, blonde, long-haired cat named Marilyn after...well, you can figure it out. I was a year ourt of college and living in a dive apartment with my roommate, Terri.  The apartment was crap, but it was two blocks off of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City which gave it a certain (small) level of class. I had a job as a "psychiatric technician" (which is a glorified babysitter for patients on the psych unit) at a suburban hospital making minimum wage and supplemented it working retail at a store in nearby Westport.

I bought Marilyn  a pink rhinestone collar and had visions of her lounging on a silk pillow and sipping (something other than milk) out of a swanky silver cat dish.  I thought she made me seem chic...except for two things.   1).  I guess it was the year of the fleas because she was covered in them.  When fleas are too numerous on an animal, they leap off, looking for some other source of food.  My feet and ankles became flea fodder and I looked like I had some rare skin disorder confined to my feet. Several batches of flea dip and multiple cans of flea powder finally got rid of them  but then #2 came up.  As a just-out-of-college trying-to-be-cool young adult, I tended to spend my limited disposable income on things like red leather gloves and tickets to see the Eurythmics rather than on adequate pet care. So Marilyn never got fixed.  A cat in heat is not pleasant.  After suffering through nightly yowling and ruined sprayed furniture (that's okay since most of it was dumpster diving stuff any way), I finally convinced a co-worker to adopt her. I don't like to think about what may have happened to her after that!

When I went to grad school in Michigan, I did not subject any pets to my infrequent presence. Although,  I tried to have some fish in a bowl for awhile.  Somehow, I got the idea that  needed to use distilled water, and Fred and Ginger (so I like old movies, what can I say) went belly up from asphyxiation.

My next pet was after I graduated and had my first real job in Danville.  I adopted a runt-of-the-litter cat.  Cats really are ideal for busy/lazy people.  They are litter trained from the start.  They don't require walks.  They eat cat food without begging for your food.  Since I was an adult (sort of) now, I did the grown-up cat parent thing and got her fixed. Hooray!

I was dating a guy from India at the time, and named her the Tamil word for cat, which is punai  (pooh-nie).  But I never really called her that , and after I broke up with the Indian guy, I regressed to calling her the very original name of Kitty.  Her named was finally The Kitty.  The was actually part of her name.

The Kitty lasted a long time.  She moved to Chicago with me after I got married. She made it through two moves to our current house.  She made it until my son was 6 year old.  Then, she chose a day when we had company for lunch to have a heart attack and die.  If that wasn't awkward enough, My son, who had taken to calling her Creepers" because she was always creeping around, chose to hunt for her to show her, to our company,  after the death event.  I gently took him aside and said, "Eli, The Kitty was very old.  She was so old that her body couldn't live any more and she died".

I was waiting for wailing and tears.  His little face contorted for an instant before changing to questioning wonder.  He looked at me and asked,  "Can we get a fish?"

Our next pet was not a fish.  I will tell you more next time.

Grandparent memories 


When we weren't at the creek or avoiding the outhouse, we spent a lot of time at my grandparent's house.  My paternal grandfather was semi-retired to Owensville where he was a minister at St. Peter's church.  (That's right- my dad is a minister, his dad was a minister, my mom's dad was a minister, my dad's grandfather was a minister, and of my dad's nine uncles, there were eight ministers and one psychiatrist who said it was his job to take care of all those crazy ministers).

My grandparent's lived in, what else, a parsonage.  My great-grandmother (my dad's mom's mom) also lived there. She was a little scary because she was so old!   There were lot's of Victorian antiques, and some of my dad's toys, too. I wish we still had those! The room that my sister and I slept in , had an antique picture of some very stern-looking ancestors.   I thought they would come out to haunt us if we didn't behave, so for us anyway, we didn't act up at bedtime.  My brother slept in a tiny room at the top of the stairs, so the tiny bedroom curse obviously followed him there. 

This is me at my grandparent's parsonage. Loved that dog!!

The other thing that terrified me about that house, was the railroad tracks that ran behind it.  I screamed and cried every time a train came by,  and I remember wondering why everyone else did not understand that the train was going to ram into the house at any minute.  Didn't they know that we were all likely to die? 

The train of doom did not keep me from playing in the park next door to the house.  It was an old fashioned playground with a now obsolete merry-go-round and one of the metal slides that would burn your butt off in the summer.  I also remember the seesaw. My sister was standing up in the center to balance it, when lost HER balance and landed, crotch first, on the metal bar.  I think she lost her virginity that day!  Remember the stress reaction of fight/flight/freeze?  That is the one and only time I have ever had a freeze reaction.  Beth kept yelling at me to run for help, and I remember thinking that I should go, but just couldn't move.  She must have thought I lost my mind!

I loved to go to grandma and grandpas house at Christmas because we used to get a brown paper bag filled with candy. (CANDY!!) It had those chocolate cream domes and an orange, and that yummy ribbon candy.  I think it must have been some sort of law that  little country churches to give the kids that specific mix of candy in a brown paper bag at Christmas!  The only bad memory I have is when my sister puked on my doll on the trip to Owensville.

My sister got carsick almost every time we took a rode trip.  That year I really, really, really wanted a Dancerina doll for my birthday.  She was a blond doll in a pink tutu with a plastic crown on her had.  If you held her crown, she would spin around in a pirouette!  I'm sure she was not cheap, but my parents got it for my birthday.  Mind you, my birthday is December 15, so she was pretty new on Christmas.  I took her on the trip to Owensville, and Beth got sick in the car, of course.  My recollection is that she specifically leaned over on my side so she wouldn't get puke on her side.  By doing so, she puked all over my brand new Dancerina doll!  My mom and my Grandma spent most of that day cleaning her up and fixing her hair.  She still worked, but her hair was never the same.  Good thing I could console myself with chocolate cream domes and ribbon candy!

Just as an aside, I recently was in an antique store and found a Dancerina doll in the original box!  Everything in that particular part of the store was 50% off so she cost a whopping $15!  So now I have a un-puked on Dancerina doll sitting in my closet.  I promise not to take her on any road trips with my sister!