Friday, August 17, 2012

Mi Abuela

I lost my grandmother 5 years ago today on August 17, 2007.  She had a stroke on August 15.  They took her to the hospital and put her on life support, but brain scans showed she had no brain function so they disconnected her from life support and she lived for two more days.  I was not there at the time she actually passed, but neither was she, really.  For all practical purposes she departed this life on August 15.  She was 92 at the time.  She would have been 93 if she had lived 7 more days.

I miss my grandmother and I think about her daily.  She was the stay at home mother of 5 daughters and the wife of a rural mail carrier.  She was a tiny little woman with the most beautiful white hair.  You might think a person like that would not have much in the way of wisdom to impart, but she lived through a lot - The Great Depression, WWII, delivering 5 children (some of them at home; all without pain relief.) She taught me some very important lessons in my life.  Below are a few.

  • People will visit - you should make food.  If you were privileged enough to dine at Pauline Shanklin's table, you know what I'm talking about.  She was a fabulous cook.  She cooked I guess what you would call "country" food.  There was always homemade bread or rolls and homemade cinnamon rolls with this icing she made from leftover coffee and powdered sugar and I don't know what else, but it was divine and I have yet to eat a cinnamon roll as good as hers.  In fact, when she had the stroke that day, she was in the middle of taking a pan of homemade rolls she had made out of the oven and she just fell over dropping the rolls and all.  She had made them for my mother to eat on her daily visit to her apartment where she lived alone with no assistance.  Occasionally she would make homemade biscuits instead of rolls, but you should never call a roll a biscuit or vice versa because they are 2 totally different things and she would tell you just that if you asked for a biscuit when rolls were being served.  I lived my entire life thinking what a gracious hostess she was, and she was.  It was only recently while mumbling a lot of bad words out of frustration during creation of a large spread of food for a bunch of people that I realized there had to be times when she was tired or didn't want to cook and wanted to tell everyone to go eat some cereal, but she never expressed it.  To quote a line from a country song, she was like a "...Sunday morning full of grace and full of Jesus."  (Lee Brice, Hard to Love)
  • Going to church does not make you a Christian, but you should go anyway.  When I see that little thing people put on Facebook all the time that says something like "going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in the garage makes you a car" I get a little irritated.  Of course going to church does not make you a Christian, but what does that have to do with standing in a garage?  I understand the premise of the little saying, but what I'm saying is that if you are a Christian anyway and that is why you are going to church, you are probably going to get better at it if you go to church than if you don't. If you're just pretending about the whole thing, you probably have other issues on which you should work.  I realize there are people who attend church with ulterior motives.  I guess that's a problem.  But are there people standing in garages thinking they will become cars?  That would be an even bigger problem.  Anyway, Grandma always expected us to be in church and she was always in church.  Having grown up that way, I get disappointed in myself when I miss church -which I've done a lot of lately.  Perhaps it's guilt, but it can't be all bad to feel that way.
  • Women, girls, females, they will never stop gossiping and being petty, but you should stop.  I remember a story Grandma told my sister-in-law.  She must have been about 85 at the time (grandma - not sister-in-law) But my sister-in-law was complaining about some girls she worked with talking behind her back and being petty and mean.  Grandma told her that no matter how old you get it never stops and that very day some ladies in her Sunday School class were gossiping and talking about another lady who was not present at the time. This was surprising to me.  I guess I assumed there was a time we would all "age out" of the pettiness and ugliness system but there's not I guess.
There is so much more that I miss about her, but I'll save it for another time.  Of course I wish I could have seen her and talked to her just one more time before she died, but she knew I loved her and I know she loved me.

Thanks for reading.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Happy National Left Handers Day



Depending on where you get your statistic, somewhere between 10 and 20% of the population is left handed. I am in that percentage. Sometimes when I sign something in front of someone, they will comment "Oh, you are left handed. My (insert type of relative here) is left handed." I say "Oh, that's good." Then I add (mostly to irritate them) "My husband is left handed too." Then they say, "Are your kids left handed?" At this point in the conversation I bore them with a few facts on the tendency to be left handed. Included in this little rant of mine is the fact that being left handed is only partly hereditary, partly due to environment, and partly due to unknown factors. Randomly, there is a one in ten chance that any human being will be left handed. If both parents are left handed, the chance increases to somewhere around one in four. I have three children, all from the same two left handed parents and all my children are right handed. Maybe if I had one more child, he or she would be left handed, but I don't want to know that badly!

There are more factors that play into this left handed equation like the age of the mother at the birth of the child (older mothers are more likely to have left handed children.) Infants who undergo a stressful birth or extremely low birth weight infants are more likely to be left handed. Babies who have been sonogrammed more times before birth  are more likely to be left handed. The way the world is mostly designed for right-handed people and the concessions left handed people make to operate in the world may be contributing factors as well. For example, how often do you see a left handed person operating a computer mouse with their dominant hand? My guess is not very often. We learn to use the mouse with our right hand out of necessity and practicality. There are left handed scissors, left handed golf clubs, left handed guitars, and many other left handed objects, but many times lefties just accommodate the righties possibly out of necessity or possibly due to our incredibly accommodating personalities and our higher than average IQ's. Just kidding!

Personally I use my right hand to do a lot of things. I cut right handed. I throw equally as bad using either my right or left hand.

For me, the biggest challenges with being left handed have to do with writing. People assume because I am left handed, my handwriting is bad. I'm not very fast with writing but I've worked very hard to make it legible and I actually have been told my handwriting is beautiful. Another challenge is because I turn my hand when I write, the back of my hand goes back over what I have written causing ink marks on the back of my hand that people often confuse for bruises. 

Besides the fact that most of us hate spiral notebooks, here are some other interesting facts about left-handers.

  • Left-handed people are more likely to be schizophrenic, alcoholic, delinguent, dyslexic, and stutterers.
  • People with neurological disorders such as Down's syndrome or autism tend to be left handed. 
  • Left handed people are more likely to have Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis than right handed people. 
  • Males are twice as likely as females to be left handed. 
  • Left handed male college graduates on average earn 26% more money than right handed male college graduates. 
  • The right hand is mentioned 100 times in the Bible, all in positive reference. The left is mentioned only 25, all negative. 
  • Lefties live on average 9 years less than righties. 
  • Lefties reach puberty 4 to 5 months later than righties on average. 
  • Southpaws are more likely to have asthma, allergies, and migraines. 
  • Left handers are 39% more likely to be homosexual. 
  • Recovery from strokes tends to be faster for left handed people. 
  • Lefties adjust to seeing underwater quicker. 
  • We are more likely to be at extreme poles on the intelligence scale.

August 13 is "National Left Handers Day." So friends, if you are lucky enough to be a lefty, celebrate yourself today, or not, but do remember statistically you will have on average 3,287.25 fewer days to celebrate than your right handed buddies so you might as well make the days you have great ones.


Thanks for reading.




Wednesday, August 1, 2012

The Food Court

Monday the children and I went to the Northpark Mall in Joplin, Missouri. I don't like the mall there and I don't like going to Joplin or for that matter Missouri in general, but Macy (middle child) wanted to go to a "Macy's" store and we don't have one in Northwest Arkansas.

 We ate lunch in the food court. We (and many other mall patrons eating lunch in the food court) chose Chick Fil A. It seems despite the recent media saga involving them, people still like their food.  I support Chick Fil A's right to stand up for what they believe is right despite the risk of losing customers. No matter what your view of the gay marriage debate is, if you've ever visited Chick Fil A - a restaurant that is closed on Sundays, has a big story on their wall about Christian marriage retreats, and gives out character building books and videos in their kid's meals- you should know what their position on this issue would be. Shock and outrage toward Chick Fil A is moronic. It's a lot like picking up a snake and then acting shocked and outraged when said snake bites you. You knew what it was when you picked it up. But the "media" took over and created havoc and mass chaos out of something simple  we already knew the answer to anyway.  I imagine the "media" is sitting back laughing at us right now over what they have created and how easily we are swayed.  Chick Fil A is having a gazillion dollar day today in sales and people are protesting on top of it.  It's the perfect storm!  Members of the media are probably humorously remembering the time they created havoc and chaos over the gay rights parades at Disney parks and how people were going to boycott Disney - their parks, their movies, their books.  That lasted about as long as it was convenient for people to boycott these things and then it was over.  No one seems to be boycotting any of it anymore and I predict the same will happen with the CFA saga. In the end great theme parks, movies, books and chicken sandwiches with waffle fries will win because people don't like to sacrifice what they like.

Other things I noticed during my lunchtime mall musings were two young women who appeared to be no stranger to the crack pipe with several children who weren't wearing shoes, a girl with a very large baby drinking a bottle, and the Greek restaurant.  The Greek restaurant stood out because while every other establishment in the food court had at least a couple of patrons during our visit "Greek in the Box" had no customers - well except for the one girl who asked for a fork because Chick Fil A had forgotten to give her one and she didn't want to go wait in their long line again.  I felt empathy toward the poor girl working at Greek in the Box.   Not enough empathy to go over and order some hummus or a gyro or something wrapped in grape leaves, (I hate that type of food) but enough that I have thought about her and that restaurant several times since lunch.She and her Greek restaurant were being excluded from the fast paced lunch-life in the mall food court.  Someone should do something about this.  Greek in the Box should not be excluded!  The Greeks deserve a presence in the chaos that is lunch at the mall.  It's unfair that people will line up at the Mexican place or Great American Cookie, but not even glance at Greek in the Box.

 I don't know specifically why people don't like the Greek food served in the mall.  Maybe it's nasty, maybe it's overpriced or their service is bad or perhaps there's some other reason. However,  I do know if this was a typical day for Greek in the Box,  unless the restaurant is serving another underlying purpose like a front business for drugs or the mafia or purely designed to lose money for taxes or something, they will likely have to close soon.

Thinking of Greek in the Box and exclusion and media propaganda made me think of other media propaganda, specifically the constant media stories about the rampant bullying problem in the schools of today.  Of course, it's not all propaganda.  There are definite cases of torrential and horrendous bullying that do occur and I'm not trying to minimize any of that or say bullying is ok in any way.   But what I do see happening is well meaning parents who see some of these stories and out of the purest of intentions and genuine love for their child, decide their child is being bullied.

As a school counselor, I often receive calls from parents who want to report their child being bullied.  Often their call to me comes as the result of their child getting "in trouble" for something.  You never know for sure, but I get suspicious at times because I know my own children and I know when they get in trouble, if you ask them about the behavioral issues they had at school, you will likely get a story about how it was really someone else's fault.  This is a defense mechanism on the part of the child and I realize this, but some parents don't - probably because the media has told them they are losers because they work and do not spend enough time with their children. As a defense mechanism on the parent's part, they start to blame the school and other children because their child says they hate school.  Unfortunately, they don't realize the child does fine at school and is merely  saying they hate school because they got so much parental attention from the playing of the "it was someone else's fault, I'm being bullied" card earlier.

One of my least favorite and hardest types of  bullying to deal with is "bullying by exclusion" like one could perceive is happening at Greek in the Box.  Experts way more educated on this topic than I would disagree, but mostly I don't believe "bullying by exclusion" is bullying.  It is human nature to choose who you want to be with and who you want to stay away from during free time. Being excluded from play is unpleasant for sure, but if you watch long enough, you will generally be able to figure out why the excluded child is excluded.  Some examples I have seen are chronic behaviors like hitting, kicking, pinching, biting, burping in other's faces, throwing "boogers" on others, name calling, tattling, spreading rumors, licking others, the list goes on and on.  There is really no resolution to this problem other than for the excluded child to change his or her behavior or personality.  I see this as one of my most important and challenging roles as a school counselor to try to help these kids overcome some of their irritating habits.  Habit changing is a difficult thing though to say the least.

Tomorrow my summer break is over and I go back to work.  Although I dread giving up all my free time, it will be good for me to go back to a stricter schedule with more mentally challenging tasks.  Of course some of my duties as a domestic goddess this summer have been mentally challenging, but I'm better off as a worker rather than staying home.  Oh my gosh, that just made me think of another debate the media loves to propagate - the stay at home versus working mother debate.  Uh-oh, now I'm feeling all shamed and guilty.  Guess I better go build a gingerbread house with the kids.

Thanks for reading.