That old green-eyed monster

Shakespeare called  it “the green-eyed monster.”

The Bible names it as one of the seven deadly sins. Though many Catholics may mean something else by “deadly sins.” I believe that they are “sins,” that if we don’t overcome, will kill the very essence of who we are, of who we are meant to be. (By the way, the six other “sins” are sloth, anger, avarice, gluttony, pride, and lust.)

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than happiness.

Happiness is the true antidote to envy. Being grateful for exactly where and who you are is my definition of happiness. Knowing that your hard times will make you stronger and even more thankful for the good times might also help.

There are entire books written on the subject of envy. And of course, the internet is filled with advice about overcoming or coping with jealously. One article that I found particularly helpful was one also entitled "The Green-Eyed Monster." Joseph Epstein distinguishes between the words jealousy and envy, but I'm using them synonymously in my post.

Envy implies discontent, resentment, and bitterness. Epstein tells us that "malice . . . cold-blooded but secret hostility, impotent desire, hidden rancor, and spite all cluster around the center of envy." Certainly not feelings that you want to encourage to grow within you. Instead you will want to sow the seeds of contentment, gentleness, generosity, and love into your life.

According to Wikipedia from an article entitled Envy, “like greed and lust, envy is characterized by an insatiable desire . . . Envy can be directly related to the Ten Commandments, specifically, ‘Neither shall you desire... anything that belongs to your neighbor.’ Dante defined this as ‘a desire to deprive other men of theirs.’ In Dante's Purgatory, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. Aquinas described envy as ‘sorrow for another's good.’”

Jealousy seems to say that everyone else has it easier than I do and that they are so obviously happier than I am. But this is a false and dangerous belief. We tend to compare our lives, which is always a mixed bag of good and bad, with what we falsely perceive as the “perfect life” of another.

When we do this, we minimize our own talents, gifts, and graces and maximize the other person’s.  Ironically, we often do the opposite with our problems and struggles: we maximize our own and minimize the other person’s

Others seem more clever, more attractive, more popular, more relaxed, more athletic, more talented, more wealthy, more loved, more powerful, or more whatever than we are and therefore (or so it seems) they lead a charmed life. The other person, or so we surmise, faces no real problems in his/her life. Or if we do know that they face problems, we think, “well, their problems are not as bad as mine.”

But no one (let me repeat that) no one leads that proverbial "charmed life." Everyone’s life is a full measure of graces and blessings, as well as struggles and challenges.

One of my worst cases of jealousy nearly ruined the last decade of my teaching. By that time, I had given up being English Department Chair to another teacher in my department. That same year, we got a new English teacher who was young and witty. The chair took a real liking to her, and from that point on, it seemed that he favored her in every way. I would often say, even to him, that he treated me like some old aunt that he didn’t like very much. If not for my envy of her, I think that she and I could have been friends. Even if he did favor her, so what? I needed to be happy where I was--no longer burdened with the weight of being department chair--and free just to teach my classes.

The main thing about jealousy is that if we are envious of another, that means that we are not being accepting and loving toward ourselves, that we are dissatisfied with ourselves. Loving ourselves is the most important thing for us to do to get rid of envy. If we love ourselves fully, then we will not allow ourselves to live in the despair of jealousy. We will realize that envy is a self-poisoning of the heart and mind and that it is a spirit-killing and joy-killing enemy.

Trapped by our false ways of perceiving other’s lives, we denigrate our own lives and thus devalue ourselves. Since it is always easier to imagine the “fantasy” life of another, we remain stubbornly unsatisfied with our own. The tendency to compare ultimately leads to despair because our own real life can never compare with the perceived (but false) perfection of the other person’s life. And so, we are led into a spiritual dead end.

There is a rather pithy saying for this: Compare and despair.

Jealousy is referred to as “the green-eyed monster” because it is a monster that destroys us and our happiness. The cure for the “sickness” of jealousy is to love yourself enough--to know that you are who and where you are supposed to be--not to allow that green-eyed monster to eat you up, to eat up your happiness.

"Little is good about envy, except shaking it off, which, as any of us who have felt it deeply know, is not so easily done," writes Epstein. Being loving to yourself is the way to shake jealousy off. Loving yourself feels like being ever so tender and gentle with yourself--nonjudgmental toward yourself. It means no negative messages about yourself, absolutely no put-downs toward yourself in your head or in your heart. Only loving messages about yourself to yourself--as if you are talking to someone that you love very much and don't want to offend or hurt in any way.

Loving yourself means being kind, patient, protective, and generous toward yourself. Can you do it? Can you love yourself enough to shake off any minor pricks of envy or, at least, to shake off, what Epstein calls, "its deep, soul-destroying, lacerating stabs"? Loving yourself is easily said, not so easily done. It takes lots of practice.

Self-love is not selfish love. It's something that you truly have to accomplish before you can honestly love another. I think that it is now time for you to begin your practice of self-love day by day and to allow envy to fall by the wayside. If you feel jealousy creeping up again, then you will know that you are not being as loving toward yourself as you need to be. Love yourself deeply until envy fades away again. Practice self-love always.

The puzzle of each of us

Now that I have time in retirement, one of the things that I am doing is trying to put the pieces of myself, my life together. To see who or what exactly created the puzzle that is me. And for the most part, I am sharing those pieces with you in my memoirs on this blog, which can take some courage, or as some might say, some foolhardiness. Because I know that I am possibly going to be judged and probably found wanting and that I may be misunderstood.

It's as if I can hear the voices saying: she just needs to get over herself, she's telling too much, she's revealing too much, she's blaming others, she should take responsibility for who she has become, everyone has dysfunctions in their lives, get over it, everyone has things to overcome, she's not so different from everyone else.

Blurry puzzle pieces are appropriate for what I'm trying to convey!

And hey, you may be right if you are thinking some of these things: all of us do have some things to overcome, and we overcome them in different ways. One of the ways that I am choosing is by sharing myself with you, dear reader, and hoping that you will "judge tenderly of me." We Americans are possibly in the habit of too soon saying: "get over it." I remember recently being hurt by someone, and that same week as I took a walk in the park with a couple friends, they both said, "Well, you have to let it go and move on." And it had just happened!

Perhaps we are too much into the "instant gratification" culture, but some things take time. Some things may take 50 years! I believe that the more deeply something affected us, the more time it may take to process it. Or like me, you may have put off processing things because of time restraints--as in you may be busy raising your family, working your job, or living your life.

Also I do not believe that all families are dysfunctional. Some families give to each other a strong sense of being loved and accepted. So that the family members have a strong sense of self-worth. In my mind, that's the definition of a functional family. I have a couple friends who tell me that they felt loved in their families and that they got from those families positive self-esteem. So there are functional families on one end of the spectrum, and on the other end, extremely dysfunctional families and everything in between.

I am not blaming others for who I became, nor excusing myself, but rather trying to understand myself better and to figure out who or what affected me. I do take full responsibility for my choices in life, but again I am trying to understand why I made the decisions that I made. For better or for worse. A poem that I used to really like in my younger days is the one about being "the master of my fate, the captain of my soul." It's called "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley. I still like it, but I no longer believe it. I do not believe that we are entirely our masters nor captains of our fates; I do not buy the idea that we are entirely responsible for who we become.

"No man is an island, entire of himself," John Donne tells us. We are made up of many pieces and people and events and, of course, of our responses to them. Many things have created us--things in our environments and in our dispositions (or in our genetics). And as much as we are alike, we are also quite different. Things that may not have bothered one person might really affect another. We cannot give ourselves complete credit nor take complete responsibility for who we have become.

As for the possible "complaint" that I'm revealing too much in my memoirs. Actually, I think that's what memoirs are for, and for far too many decades, I hid too much in my life. I pretended things were okay. I was taught not to tell, not to talk about family matters, to keep the secrets. For example, I was supposed to keep the secret of my father being bipolar and all that that entailed, or else he might lose his job. And yes, even now, it may be foolish to put myself, my life out there, so to speak. It can be somewhat scary to tell of the mistakes that I have made in my life, or even to make mistakes as I write my memoirs here on my blog!

Finally, I have come to believe that the first years of our lives impact us for the rest of our lives. We must come to terms with them, with our families of origin, if we are to come to terms with ourselves. If we truly are on a quest to be our true selves and to surrender our false selves.

I have come to believe that another extremely impactful time in our lives is our teen years, our high school years, perhaps even beginning in junior high. Perhaps the time from the 7th grade through high school or even into college. I believe that those years "mark" us for the rest of our lives. In contrast to studies about the early years of one's life, I haven't read any studies about the teen years being as important as the early years, but I do know that our development again speeds up in those teen years. For example, just as there is a huge difference between a 2 and a 4 year old, there is a huge difference between a 15 and a 17 year old. It's just a conclusion that I have reached from experience and observation.

I am making a study of my life because I want to see who I am when others are not defining me. When I am not allowing the world to define me, who am I? I write my memoirs for myself, my progeny, and for you, my reader. My yoga teacher read a poem this morning in yoga class that really spoke to me:

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing
And are raised to the rank of prince
By the slippery ease of their light judgments

But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst.
You love most of all those who need you
as they need a crowbar or a hoe.
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
To dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stundenbuch

What my 60-year-old self wants to tell my 30-year-old self

In my 20s, 30s, and 40s, I was always reading “self-help” books and making resolutions after resolutions after resolutions about how to improve myself. I spent an inordinate amount of time on thinking that I needed “improving.”

From the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards' resolutions to Ben Franklin’s scheme about improving himself in his famous Autobiography to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem "The Chambered Nautilus" that tells us to “Build thee more stately mansion, O my soul!” to the iconic drama called Our Town by Thornton Wilder, the literature that I taught my students was often about improving oneself or about how to live life better.

Since I am the adult-child of a dysfunctional (I know that's a word so overused that it no longer makes an impact) or damaged family with a bi-polar dad, a narcissistic older sister, a depressed, and finally rageful, mom, and I was in a family of origin that had moved about every two years because of my dad’s job, I grew up feeling unloved and uprooted. That was what was imprinted on my psyche. I thought that if I could just be good enough, then they would love me, and then I would have a solid foundation (roots) under me.

I was so uptight that I felt that everything was my fault and my responsibility. Of course, I married men with the opposite issues. Men whom I could take care of, not men who made good husbands nor good fathers, not men who would love me and give me roots. Those were things that I had to do for myself.

Now that I am happily in my 60s, I want to tell that 30- year-old-self, who always resides in me, that you are perfect just the way you are, that you are beautiful, that you are smart, that you are an amazing young (old) woman, that you are good enough just the way you are, that you don’t need to improve. I want to tell her just to breath, to relax, and to enjoy the journey. So now I'm telling that to her and to you, dear reader, no matter what your age. Just stay in today doing the best that you can with what you have been given and that will be good enough. God (Jesus) asks no more of you, nor does the Buddha! You will make yourself and God happy! Being just exactly who you are.

A memoir--my first love--a tribute to teaching and to all of my students!

All of my remembered life, I had wanted to be a teacher. Early on, when other children may have played mommy or daddy or doctor or soldier, I would play teacher, setting my dolls and teddy bears up to teach them. They were such good, well-behaved students!

In school where I felt safe and appreciated, I loved learning. I loved words. In choosing to major in English in college, perhaps I was searching for my own voice. At any rate, I tried an early marriage, finished college, and found myself on my own again, living in Ashland City and teaching English at Cheatham County Central High School (CCCHS) in 1972 at the age of 23.

At that time up until about 1985 when I transferred to Harpeth High School, CCCHS was the only high school in Cheatham County, so we teachers got to experience students from all over the county, and the students from the small towns all over the county got to meet each other, perhaps for the first time. We would graduate about 250 seniors a year, so the school was big enough to offer some electives without being too big--it was the perfect size really.

Teaching wasn’t exactly love at first sight. That first year of teaching was frightening and frustrating. There were a lot of tears in the afternoons and evenings. And, thank God, there was a lot of support from other teachers.

My first principal Mr. Todd had hired me in the morning, and by that afternoon, he had put me directly into the classroom. With no in-service or time to prepare a lesson, I had to wing it.

The classroom I was put into was called an “open classroom,” primarily because it had no walls. It was an open area made up of three classrooms in a “pod,” or a semi-circle. There were over a hundred high school freshmen to whom another teacher--one of my “team” members--was giving information and directions.

As the students ignored the teacher who was talking, I walked around trying to get the kids to listen, yet they ignored me too and continued to converse and joke among themselves. And there was such a sea of faces that the two other team teachers and I were definitely outnumbered!

Feeling sorry for the teacher who was trying to speak over the top of their conversations, and at my wits end, I walked up to the front of the pod and asked the other teacher Ms. Rye if I could speak from behind the podium. Even though my voice shook, I proceeded to lecture to the large group of students on respect and self-discipline, on how they were being disrespectful to the teacher by not listening to her. To my surprise, they actually got quiet.

That may have been when I began to establish my reputation as a “take no hostages” type of teacher. I believed in education and in discipline and believed that the two should go hand and hand--that one could not happen without the other. My motto was discipline first (classroom management); then learning could take place.

In the next few years, the pod system and so-called team teaching broke down, and at last, I got my own classroom with four walls. Now I felt that I could really get down to the business of learning and teaching about language and literature and life.

How I loved to learn and to teach! I felt myself come fully alive--perhaps for the first time--in my classroom where I felt free to be my best, my true self. I had a confidence there that I had nowhere else. Being a morning person, I would get up at 4:30 a.m. to grade my students’ essays and watch the sun rise on a new day. I usually graded essays until 6:30 a.m., then got my family ready for school and work, and I would be in my classroom by 7:30, eager for the day, for my students to enter.

My classroom was my home away from home--perhaps my true home. I trusted my students--maybe even when I shouldn’t have. I shared my life with them and functioned best under the illusion (delusion?) that they were for me a friend. The grammar that I taught was an old friend, the literature was like a new friend, and the composition was a fickle friend, for I never quite knew how best to teach writing.

Writing was a tough concept to teach. With my somewhat mathematically mind-set, once I thoroughly understood a concept, I liked to simplify things for me and my students, for I always wanted them to know why we did what we did in language, why we chose one verb over another, or why we put a comma there, or else they would just be guessing about the correct answer. Teaching writing didn't quite follow such rules!

Teaching saved my life really, and it took my life away, but I loved it. No matter what was happening or not happening in my home life, the classroom allowed me to forget, and for eight hours each day, it allowed me to be live fully in the mindful moment. I simply loved being with my students--even the “stinkers”--they too kept me on my toes!

I had high expectations for myself as I did for my students. I believed that we teachers should live by a higher standard than others in society--that we should be models--paragons of virtue, if you please--for our students. I believed in the importance of education. I believed, for instance, that public education was the backbone of our American democratic society. It was what gave the students an equal chance to be successful. Education was a way of improving one’s self and one’s life. I believed in my students.

For me, it was the sweetest of times. Often in the evenings as I would read to and cuddle with my young daughter Ellen, I would nod off to sleep right there in her bed. My husband John would wake me as he went to bed later that night. Then I would snug with him before falling asleep again. It was a busy life--the life of a teacher, a wife, and a mother--but I embraced it whole-heartedly, and the years melted away like a candle burning down to its essence.

Albeit in the same county, in the mid 1980s, I transferred to a new school, Harpeth High School (HHS) in Kingston Springs, and there, I had to re-earn my reputation as a tough disciplinarian with high academic standards. In the new school, I became the English Department Chair for grades 7 through 12. With my belief that the English Department was the foundation of a school and set the standards for the other departments, I tried to help make it a strong department.

In the 1990s, I saw that America was changing rather rapidly as to the make-up of its society, and I believed that “the highest result of education is tolerance.” I believed that true tolerance was achieved through understanding. Thus I instituted into the HHS English Department a world literature course for the seniors, whereby they would study about the major world cultures and major religions through literature. At HHS in their sophomore year, the students would study American literature, in their junior year British literature, and then world literature their senior year--in an ever-widening view of the world. I considered that change to the English curriculum to be one of my most important contributions, and after I retired, I was saddened to see it regress to the way it had been--with no study about world cultures and major religions through literature in the senior year.

When burn out threatened or things got rough for me or outside forces intervened, I clung to what I believed and closed my door and taught my students. I probably would be clinging still if I had not been pushed out of teaching in 2010 by a new school director, who let go of all county-wide part-time or job-share employees.

Yet, retirement has been good to me. I love that my time is my own--to write my life stories, to sleep in until daybreak, to read as much as I want, to watch old movies, to love my granddaughters, to do morning yoga, to move more slowly, to create--to paint or to quilt, etc. But make no mistake, the teaching life was better.

Here is a poem I came across recently that I wrote in the early 1980s--after I had been teaching for about 10 years.

Each early morning hour as I enter my classroom,
I see the sun light filtering through the windows,
Causing the varnished desks to shimmer and shadow.

I thrill again at the sight of those old wooden desks,
Which symbolize so much tradition
And which represent the students who daily embody them.
The posters, which cover the pale green block walls,
Are reminders too of the classroom atmosphere and its content.

As I go about my morning chores--
Lovingly replacing a book to its rightful space on the shelf,
Picking up a scrap of paper with someone's handwriting on it here,
Recovering someone’s jacket from there,
An emotion of overwhelming tenderness wells up inside me.

I love you old classroom with your inoffensive, poster-covered walls
And your well-worn, nondescript soft carpet.
With those beautiful old wooden desks,
And that upright podium, standing out there front and center,
Like a well-worn sentinel of memories past and those yet to be made.

As my feet quietly tread the familiar yet unmarked path to the podium,
The bell sounds, the voices and noises of youth are heard,
And once again the day erupts in reverent apprehension of the life to come.

A memoir--the stigma of ugly

Emily Dickinson wrote

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

If one person can read this post and think differently about herself, then it will not have been written in vain.

In reading back over some of my memoirs, I find that many of them are negative messages that I received about myself, especially from my only sibling, an older sister named Lynda. In this post, I want to write more about a major message that I got from her and perhaps inadvertently from my parents and from some others.

Thinking that I was “ugly” through my teens and into my 20s and 30s and 40s had a huge impact on my life.

You may remember these paragraphs from an earlier post:

“One night at the dinner table, my mother asked my sister if she would show me how to pluck my eyebrows. Lynda responded that it didn’t matter if I plucked my eyebrows or not, that I ‘was so ugly that plucking would not help me.’

“What I don’t recall is my parents’ reaction to her hurtful remark. I don’t remember that they said or did anything. I envision silence around the table, almost as if they agreed with her assessment of my looks. The sad thing was that I believed her.

“Still later at a country club dance when I was a freshman in high school and my sister a freshman in college, we were both dressed to the 9s. Lynda was dancing, and I so wanted to dance. A young man approached our table where I sat with my parents, and he said to them, “Your other daughter is so pretty.” Then he looked down at me and said, “Ooopps!”

I have included some pictures of myself for you to view in my posts--sometimes they are there as if to prove that I was indeed “pretty.”  But the truth is that in comparison to my mother, and yes, even to my sister, I was not "movie-star" or "fashion-model" pretty, as were they.

Another really sad thing was that I got in my head and in my heart that nothing was more important than being pretty. So the belief that I was ugly became a stigma or a mark of disgrace in my life.

It mostly began in my early teens. At first, I thought that it was my nose that was particularly unattractive. Then it was my skin. And the occasional blemish would horrify me. Later in my 20s, my skin became so dry in spots that it would flake off. Then it was my chin that was ugly. Later the focus was on my mouth; my lips were too thin. My mouth was too small; my teeth were too small. (Once a student told me that I had hamster teeth.)

Then a few rude men made me feel bad about being fairly flat chested in my 20s. "You're not much up top, but you're okay," a stranger said to me at a dance club one night. Even when their off-hand remarks probably meant nothing, the negative comments of unthinking people would become burned into my psyche. Then the focus became my eyes, especially when a student asked me if I were Asian. And on and on through the decades. Mostly it was "sins of omission," when no matter how hard I would try to look good, no one would say anything to me. Compliments to other women or girls on their looks made me feel less than. Simply put, I was crazy.

Perhaps a lot of young girls in their early teens--in middle school--get this same idea in their heads: that they are not pretty. I wish that they, unlike me, could have some guidance about such a thought before it becomes a belief that rules, and perhaps, ruins their life. I wish that they could have someone in their lives who makes them feel good about just who they are and just what they look like. And about that amazing person that they uniquely are!

Without sounding self-pitying, (I never intend my memoirs to sound self-pitying.) I want people to know that it is extremely difficult for a female to go through life feeling unattractive, and such a belief can affect most everything that she does. It influences both small and big decisions. I think one of the worst effects of feeling ugly is that it causes us to become self-absorbed and thus unhappy.

So convinced was I of my unattractiveness that early in my teaching career when a male student told me that I was pretty, I actually argued with him, “Oh, no, I’m not!” To this day, I remember the shocked look on his face. You see by that time, I had bought the belief--hook, line, and sinker--that I was ugly. And sink me it almost did! Both of my marriages were to handsome men, regardless of their values or whether they were kind or not. I couldn’t see beyond thinking that I must look “okay” if a handsome man is attracted to me. I turned away from some “ordinary” looking men, who may have been better husbands.

After our daughter was born and was a particularly pretty baby, my second husband used to brag to people all the time about how pretty she was and how much she looked like him. I remember asking him one day in a very small voice if he thought that Ellen looked a bit like me, to which he answered, "Definitely not."

I became a clothes horse and spent too much time and money on clothes and on makeup. My figure was never good enough; I thought that I was "fat," even when I clearly was not. I hated pictures of myself'. It wasn't until fairly recently (in the last 10 years or so) that I began to share my feelings about my looks with others--my daughter and a few close friends. I had been ashamed of my feelings and didn't want to illicit false compliments from them. It's rather ironic that now that I am old and fat and winkled, and probably truly unattractive, I see my face through the eyes of love and think that it's rather pretty, after all.  

What I’ve finally come to realize is that there is not just one kind of pretty. In my yesteryear, there was one kind of pretty--tall and slim with big breasts, long hair and big round eyes, great smooth skin and straight white teeth, strong features and broad shoulders. I was none of those things. Perhaps that is still the media’s ideal of beauty.

I know that "hurt people hurt others." And I wish to apologize to anyone that I may have hurt in the past. I didn't mean to hurt you, dear one. It had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me.

There are all kinds of beautiful people. Beautiful has little to do with their physical appearances. The most beautiful people to me are those who are kind and tender. They may be short and fat with short hair and small eyes and spotted skin. That’s all right; still they are beautiful, for they are kind and tender and their heart shines through their faces. I wasted a lot of time and energy on this issue. I wish that I had known that physical looks just aren't that damned important after all.

This is one of my favorite pictures of myself. I am 35, and I am pretty! Recently one friend said that I do not look happy in this picture; he was quite astute!

In my next memoir, I’m going to write about the Louisville years, where I first began to feel, in a word, ugly. I think that for me there were just those two words: pretty or ugly. I wasn't very good at seeing the inbetween.

But first I want to share with you a poem that I wrote years and years ago, but that I have come to truly believe more today--

All of my growing up years, I was told or overheard
How beautiful my mother was
How beautiful my only sister was
No one ever said that I was even pretty

From afar, I watched the beautiful girls at school
Wishing that I could be one of them
Later I befriended and dated only attractive people
To make me feel pretty, too, I guess

My sister gave birth to a beautiful daughter
Whom I embraced as my beautiful niece
And loved through the summer days
Until one day she grew up and floated away

I dated only good-looking men
Some of them were not such nice men
Twice I married those good-looking men
Twice I divorced those same men

I gave birth to my beautiful daughter Ellen
Who at times almost made me feel beautiful, too
(I already knew she was beautiful before she was born)
Now she has given birth to two beautiful daughters!

And I, I have come to set my own standards for beauty
I’ve learned to broaden its definition to include
Kindness and tenderness and understanding
Real beauty lies in learning to love yourself
As is.