A Delightful Captivity

The past few days I’ve been in captivity. Being the hybrid product of a Mediterranean upbringing and southern life, I can’t drive on snow or ice; even if the main roads are by now fairly passable, my subdivision is still frozen stiff, and the kids and I are stuck at home until the big thaw.

When I first looked at the weather forecast a couple of days ago, the outlook was a dark shade of gray graduating to pitch black – temperatures rising barely above freezing during the day, and down in the teens at night were going to ensure snow on the ground for a while. For once in my life I thought that hibernation sounded mighty good.

Today is day five of my captivity in the prison I share with a few other inmates – my kids and my pets – and I can only say one thing about it all…I’ve had a blast! When I thought about it last night, I feared that cabin fever had fatally led to sheer madness, but when I reflected a little more, I understood the reason why I felt so elated.

Although I can hardly get anything done, and I spend the days either playing Candyland or reading, I can’t be expected to go anywhere, and my load of social demands has been dramatically cut in half. When we ran out of juice yesterday morning, my sons’ typical mantra would have been “Mom, are you going to the store today?” Knowing that I can’t drive anywhere, nobody even asked the question and they happily settled for water to drink. Same with driving kids around all over town; I’m sure that all mothers of teenagers can relate – we spend a great portion of our days running from place to place, from one activity to the next, until the car can almost drive itself if only given a hint of where we are going. But not the past few days…everyone was content just with sitting at home and playing in the snow. What a foreign feeling it has been to face four whole days with no schedule! And what a pleasant one, I might add.

Just the other day I was reading a discussion a few people on a different site were having about freedom. When we speak of freedom, we often focus on the restrictions experienced by individuals and countries alike. We criticize communist countries for the lack of freedom their citizens have to endure; we condemn the oppression some individuals have experienced in the past, and we constantly hear about American freedom versus the sense of freedom which exists in other societies. We can speak our minds, and we can choose our beliefs; we are free to go to school and we are encouraged to protect our civil liberties, but in the greater scheme of things, are we really free?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the following are two definitions of freedom: a : the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action. b : the quality or state of being exempt or released from something onerous.

Certainly, we have the choice of being free at all times, but if one looks closely at the tenets of our western societies, we will realize we are not free at all. We might not have a sword or a gun pointed at us, but more times than none we run around in circles to meet all the demands of our daily lives. And if, Heaven forbid, something can’t fit into the tight space between one demand and the next one, we feel that we have let others and ourselves down. We run and run toward no specific destination, glad to have made it a day and already fretting about the demands of the days ahead. In itself, that’s not freedom.

The solitude and forced captivity of the past few days have taught me something important – we can only fit so much into one day, and what doesn’t get done before nightfall will still be there waiting for us tomorrow. And if for one day we need to let someone down for not meeting THEIR expectation, then oh well…at least we got to play Candyland.

House Guests

“Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your promotion.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is amazing how many of us go to great lengths to ensure that nothing harmful will enter our homes, but we rarely worry about the negative influences that we allow to pass into our minds. Most of us have specific and unique requirements for the people we welcome through our doors – no improper language, no smoking, no muddy shoes on the carpet, no loud talk…the sky is the limit – and if these people go against our wishes when they come in as guests, we have the right to tell them they should modify their behavior. If they don’t, we clearly have the right to ask them to leave.

Access to our minds works the same way. Regardless of how much power we think someone around us might have, they do not own our minds – we do. As hard as it might be to “evict” them, we have the upper hand on the situation, and they cannot remain if we don’t give them permission to stay.

Very often we don’t think we have that power. People and negative thoughts come into our lives and make themselves at home, leading us to think they have the right to tell us how to feel or think. If we don’t push them out the door the moment we notice their presence, they insinuate into the closets of our minds and look for weak, unhealed spots; once they find them, they immediately recognize old hurts as allies and use them as nourishment to grow new seeds of self-doubt.

In order to begin the cleaning process, we must first stop the constant flow of unwanted junk. Once we are stabilized, we can finally concentrate on cleaning out the old which no longer serves us. Keeping out unwanted people and thoughts is easier than it seems. We envision horrible dramas unfolding, and family members and friends who no longer talk to us after we tell them what our expectations are; even worse, we assume we don’t have the strength to keep the intruders at bay, and it will be only a matter of time before they come barging through the door again. In reality, their power is just an illusion, and their tendency to be offended just because we ask for respect only highlights the fact that we don’t need them in our world.

It is okay to invite in people and thoughts different than those we normally entertain, but they should know the moment they walk across the threshold that their input will only be considered and not blindly accepted as unshakable truth. After all, when all is said and done, they come and go and leave us to pick up the pieces alone.

Choose wisely who and what you let in, and never be afraid to reclaim your space as your own. Your name is the only one on the lease agreement.

The Value of personal Boundaries

After so many years of being married to me, my husband takes some of my eccentricities with a grain of salt. One of the things he has come to accept is that I won’t kill anything – if I find an insect in my house, I carefully scoop it up with cup and paper and I take it outside. My take is that if it’s alive it has a purpose to exist, and I have no right to terminate whatever it is here to accomplish. Life is life regardless of its form.

This past summer, I spent a couple of weeks discouraging ants from coming into the house. After a little frustration and a few good old-timer tips, I finally succeeded. I even went as far as trying to save as many ants as I could and put them back outside, which my husband could only chuckle at. “You must be the only woman alive who worries about saving ants,” he told me one night after I spent several minutes trying to scoop up as many as I could from the dishwasher before running it. Too bad if some ended up drowning, but I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving them in there if I could do something about it.

To cut a long story short, the past week we’ve had new visitors. Although we spend $40 each month on flea-preventive medicine for our cats, something didn’t work, and a couple of determined fleas made it inside. Rabbits? I think people should use fleas as the totem animal for Easter – nothing reproduces any faster.

Unable to lure them outside in any other way, I finally gave in and fogged my house, killing all the fleas that had survived everything else. While I cleaned the house after the fogging, I thought about the extermination, and wonder how many tiny lives had succumbed to the killer fog. Craziest thing was that I was the one who had “pulled the tab” on the cans.

That led me to think about the importance of preserving personal space and setting boundaries. By setting personal boundaries, we create limits for how others act and speak in our presence. They are not designed to isolate us, but rather to keep out behavior we can’t accept in our personal space.

After we identify what our personal boundaries are, we need to make sure we express them clearly and consistently, without worrying too much about others being upset by the scale of their rigidity. People get most upset when they DON’T know what their friends’ boundaries are, rather than when they know. Once they are aware of their limits, they can relax and not worry that their words or actions might offend anyone. A lack of personal boundaries - or communication of them to the other party - can only lead to strained relationships.

Of course, it would have been impossible to explain my boundaries to the fleas, so I had to resort to more drastic measures, but as long as two individuals speak the same language, there is no reason why anyone would need to silently endure.

The Beauty of Imperfection

“There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.” ~ Christopher Morley

Some time ago I pondered about how different my life is now compared to what it was when I was younger. I remember needing others’ approval a lot, especially when it came to my parents. Although they never had non-realistic expectations for me, I had them for myself.

Anything less than a straight A was not good enough for me at school, and I always strived to reach perfection. I kept my house fairly neat but polished it within an inch of its life if someone was coming over. Same with the kids – I had this image made up in my mind of the perfect household, and anything less than that simply wasn’t good enough.

Somehow, through the years, I changed. It was not anything I did different, or anything I consciously acknowledged, but over time I realized that happy children are more fun than perfectly behaved children, and a house that’s not completely organized is more comfortable to live in.

My huge test was this year, when my parents came to visit. I had been extremely busy before their arrival, and had no chance to organize my house the way I always did. I took a look at it right before going to the airport and told myself it really didn’t matter – my parents were coming to see me, not my house.

And indeed I was right. I don’t think my parents thought twice about the toys or anything else that wasn’t in place. They were so happy to see us that we could have lived in a rundown shed and they wouldn’t have noticed.

That’s when I realized how often we needlessly worry about things that are only alive in our own minds. We assume we know how people will feel because that’s the way we would in their place, but in reality we have no way of knowing.

I have friends who have destroyed relationships because they were certain their partner was being unfaithful, when in fact the other person had no intention to betray them. Their doubts were the mere product of their own insecurities.

These days I no longer worry about what others think. I accept the fact that they may live, think or behave differently than I do, and I am comfortable being my own person.

Perfection is a state of mind, and it truly is in the eyes of the beholder. I believe my life is perfect as is now – I don’t have a perfect house, perfect children, a perfect spouse, and I am certainly not perfect myself, but I am happy and at peace. Even when some things remain undone.