Memoir: Part II of the college years

Since her freshman year had begun in September, the Christmas holiday was the first time that Kathryn had returned to her parents' home in Delaware. Most of the other students went home to nearby towns every weekend because Middle Tennessee State University was a suitcase college. Occasionally, Kathryn went home with a friend on the weekend and enjoyed a home-cooked meal, but more often she stayed on campus in a mostly empty dorm on a mostly empty campus.

(Her only sibling, an older sister Lynda had begun college at the University of Kentucky four years earlier in 1963. On the day that Kathryn and their parents had taken Lynda to her dorm on the Lexington campus, the fourteen-year-old Kathryn went to hug her sister good-bye, and Lynda pushed her roughly away. Stunned and deeply hurt, Kathryn had been confused by her action. Even though there was usually little affection between them, there had been nothing to signal such overt rejection.

After Kathryn had gone to college in 1967, Lynda moved back in with their parents in Delaware with her two-year-old daughter. Depressed, she was going through a divorce that she didn't want.

Though Kathryn didn't know why, she and Lynda had never been close sisters. They were almost four years apart in age and in school, but decades apart in knowing and loving one another. Perhaps that was part of the reason Kathryn had been so affected by the sorority sisters' rejecting her.)

But now back to the present, Christmas 1967. Living so far away from her home, Kathryn had not seen her parents since September. Because the MTSU dorms were closed for the holidays, Kathryn flew to Delaware for the Christmas break between semesters. Kathryn did not consider Delaware her home. Her parents had moved there with her father's job after Kathryn had graduated from high school in North Carolina.

In contrast to what one might expect during the Christmas holidays, the mood around her home was tense and gloomy. In one of his depressed bi-polar states, her father mostly sat in his Lazyboy chair, falling sleep in front of the TV. Her mother seemed unusually nervous and tired. The Christmas tree was up but not decorated, and Kathryn's mother asked her to decorate it. She discovered it was no fun to decorate a tree by herself. But still Kathryn kept trying to make things happy for the holidays by playing Christmas music and passing around the eggnog.

On Christmas afternoon, Kathryn, Lynda, their mother, and two-year-old Shelley were in the green and yellow kitchen, preparing a traditional Christmas dinner. Since early morning, the fragrance of roasting turkey wafted through the house from the avocado green oven. The voice of Johnny Mathis singing “Jingle Bells”and other Christmas carols floated into the kitchen from the stereo in the formal living room, where stood the decorated tree all lit up with opened presents still underneath.

In the adjacent dining room, the dark mahogany dining room table with the ladder back chairs around it was all set with her mother's best Desert Rose china, the highly polished Candlelight silverware, and cloth napkins. Excited by all of the unusual activities, little Shelley was dancing around the kitchen.

Kathryn sat at the maple kitchen table, peeling oranges for the ambrosia, wondering if she was getting enough of the white part off when suddenly out of nowhere, Lynda told her two-year-old daughter Shelley to tell Aunt Kathryn that she hated her. And of course, not even knowing what she was saying, the little girl began loudly to parrot her mother's voice, “I hate you, Aunt Kathryn! I hate you, Aunt Kathryn!”

Even then, Kathryn knew that these were Lynda's words, not the child's. Uncharacteristically, Kathryn physically lit into her sister and began to strike her, yelling, “Tell her to stop! Tell her to stop!” What she really wanted to say to Lynda was “Stop it—stop rejecting me. Stop hurting me. Stop hating me.”

Kathryn honestly didn't remember the rest of the holiday, but she was so affected by the incident that back at college for the spring semester, she suffered from extreme worry and severe insomnia. Night after ruthless night, she lay awake thinking about her family. But keeping the family rule about “always looking good in front of others,”she didn't confide in any of her friends.

Adding to her family troubles or perhaps because of them, she felt overwhelmed by her school work that semester. Her grades began to plummet. In a called-conference, her Western Civilization II professor, Dr. Crawford, known as one of the toughest professors on campus, questioned her in his rather condescending voice, “Why aren't you doing better on my tests?”Apparently, as he told her, English majors usually did well on his essay tests. Vowing to study harder, she cringed at his remarks and blamed herself.

Then things got worse. Her Modern Poetry class was taught by the wife of the English Department chairman, the formidable Dr. Virgina Peck. Besides undergraduates, the rather small class also included graduate students in English. Kathryn felt intimidated by the subject matter, the professor, and the other students. With little confidence in her own intellect, in desperation one late night while explicating a modern poem, she copied too many words from a library book without giving her source directly after each paragraph.

At the next class, Dr. Peck said to Kathryn, “See me in my office.” With her heart in her throat, she found her way to the office and entered into a world of academia: built in book shelves piled high to the ceiling with old and new leather books of all colors and a huge old oak desk with piles of student essays neatly stacked on top. Dr. Peck leaned back in her swivel chair and told Kathryn to have a seat.

Then she slowly pulled out a book from her desk drawer, one that Kathryn recognized immediately as the library book that she had used to explicate that poem. Kathryn's eyes opened wide, and she could feel the heat as her neck and face flushed.

Dr. Peck asked, “Do you know what plagiarism is?”

Kathryn stammered, “Not exactly. I'm sorry. I didn't know. It was late, and I was so tired. Did I not footnote enough to tell you where I had gotten the information?”

Ignoring her question, the professor threatened, “Plagiarism is stealing, and you have stolen someone else's words and ideas and passed them off as your own. For such an offense, I can have you expelled from the English program and possibly even from the college”

Humiliation and shame clung to her like a dense fog as Kathryn made her way to the nearest restroom to cry in a dark stall. She told no one about the incident.

There was one person whom Kathryn felt that she could trust enough to confide in about her home life—a kindly psychology professor, Mr. White. When she told him her story about the Christmas incident, he told her the most freeing thing, “You don't have to go home for the summer. It's not written in stone that you have to go back to that environment.”

So began her journey away from her family--to independence and self-reliance.

When Kathryn told her parents that she wasn't coming home that summer, they almost seemed relieved. They didn't try to convince her otherwise; they didn't say “Are you sure?” or “We are sorry,” or “We shall miss you.” Since they had some business to take care of in Cincinnati concerning Lynda's divorce, they drove down and helped Kathryn settle into Nashville's downtown YWCA.

And there they left her at eighteen years of age to completely fend for herself. A summer which she would recall in vivid detail—a summer of growing up.

to be continued . . . 

Mindfulness: body awareness

Having spent so much--too much--time in my head, I look for ways to re-connect to my body. To wake myself up to my physical body, instead of taking it for granted or of being aware of it only to criticize it.

When I awake in the morning, I stretch slowly like a cat before I get out of bed. Fingers, toes, feet and hands. Arms and legs and whole body stretches. And of course, breathing deeply with each stretch. Being grateful for waking up again! Stretching throughout the days is good for you and your body, too.

Secondly, each morning as I meditate after breakfast, I start with a body scan awareness exercise. I breathe into each part of my body and send gratitude and healing energy to it. I may breathe into my toes and thank my toes on the out breath. And continue up through my body to the top of my head. Once I finish the outside/exterior of my body, I begin with the interior and usually start at the top breathing into my brain and thanking my brain on the out breath. And continue down through the inside of my body, finishing with three breaths in and out, thanking my skeleton system, muscles, and skin for holding it all together!

If there is a particular spot that hurts, like my right hip, I may breathe into to it an extra breath and send healing energy there. Since I can be so antsy, this whole exercise helps to calm me down.

If I'm stuck somewhere out during my day, like in a doctor's waiting room, I will practice my meditation body scan again. It helps me be more patient. Last week as I waited in the private room for my eye doctor, I had just finished the body scan meditation when he walked in. Nice timing, doc!

During the day, as I shower and wash my body or chop fruits and vegetables for cooking or cut material for quilting or wield a paint brush or type on a key board or write in a notebook or walk from room to room or on the sidewalk or on a trail, I try to be aware of my body and breathe in and out and thank my body for working well.

When I practice yoga--whether in a home practice or in a yoga class--I try to get out of my mind and to be mindful of moving my body and to thank my body again. Yoga is one of the best ways to help you develop body awareness because you get into pose/position or asana and hold it for a few moments, breathing in and out.

Lastly, when I look at myself in the mirror, I look at myself through gentle eyes, through eyes of love, as I'm sure my Mother/Father God sees me or as those who love me see me. I try not to pick out each flaw and groan about why my skin isn't smoother or my stomach slimmer or whatever. I try to see my body's beauty and to thank it for its functioning so well through all of these years!

We have been too critical of our bodies; let's now learn to appreciate these amazing bodies of ours! If you think about it, the way they automatically function is phenomenal. They are the houses of our souls, and they have an expiration date. Love them, just as they are.

Positive body awareness is a practice--a habit developed in small ways throughout the day. There's no right way to do it or right time to start. Just begin now in any ways that you choose!

A memoir--Blue girls--part I of the college years

Pushing herself backwards through the clothes hanging in the narrow closet and sliding the door closed, she collapsed into this dark place--the only place of privacy available to her.

It was the mid-sixties in middle Tennessee, but it was more like the mid-fifties. Perhaps the sixties were happening in America, but they had not yet come to Murfreesboro. The wild and crazy sixties were primarily happening in the larger universities and on both coasts but not here. On other college campuses, there was an awareness of  war, of racism, of poverty, of politics, of life beyond college. Here in this small place at this small time, conformity was still the name of the game.

This April Saturday morning had begun early with Kathryn standing in front of a panel of white porcelain sinks brushing her teeth in the large public bathroom. The intercom cracked the silence of the morning, announcing that she had a phone call. Though early morning ones were unusual, the girls loved to get phone calls. The four black wall phones that were in Miss Mary Hall were located downstairs in a alcove on the main floor. Kathryn hurriedly ran down three flights of stairs to the bottom floor, thinking that perhaps her boyfriend Tommy was up early and calling her.

To her surprise, when she picked up the phone, she heard a stranger's voice. Identifying herself as the Dean of Women, Mrs. Elizabeth Frances asked if she were speaking to Laura Kathryn O'Drawdy. To which Kathryn responded that she was. The dean then reminded Kathryn that this was the morning that the sorority bids were going out. Mrs. Frances told her, "None of the three sororities that you have listed have given you a bid to join them." But she quickly continued by saying that the two other sororities on campus had chosen her, "Do you want to join another sorority, other than those you have listed?" Having set her heart on one sorority in particular, which most of her friends also wanted to join, Kathryn too quickly declined and mumbled her thank you and goodbye. Slowly replacing the phone into its cradle, her mind raced, "What do I do now?"

Heading back up the stairs, Kathryn walked slowly, in no hurry to get back to her dorm room, where the brutal light of day was now coursing through its windows. Where else could she go? To whom could she turn? As she trudged down the sterile long hall way with its bare, pale green walls to her dorm room at its end, she was in a painful shock. She flashed back to all of those futile hours in the last few weeks of dressing up for and going to the rush parties, trying always to present her best self, even when she knew no one in the sororities. She had tried to mimic their curly, teased hairstyles and their Villager dresses. She had thought that some of the girls would see her--really see her--and like her.

Humiliation and shame followed her as Kathryn entered into her room. Before she even had time to tell her roommate and best friend Linda about the phone call, three pretty, petite, and perky sorority sisters, dressed all alike in blue sheathes emblazoned with the white Greek letters Alpha Delta Pi, bounced in and gleefully grabbed Linda, telling her that she had been selected to pledge ADPi. Congratulations were pronounced all around as she accepted their bid and was pulled out into the hallway. Linda only had time to throw Kathryn a questioning glance before she was swept away.

She so wanted Linda to tell them, "No! I can't go if you haven't also chosen my best friend Katie, too!" But of course, no such words were forthcoming and out the blue girls danced, giggling and pulling Linda with them as they flew on up the hall to their next room on their list.

Left all alone, Kathryn  wanted the earth to open up and swallow her whole, but the little room in which she found herself had no warmth nor softness to enfold her. It was a double dorm room with all the trapping of a 1950s dorm room, matching thin, nubby orange plaid bedspreads on identical twin beds on either side of the room. The only chairs were hard backs, pushed under the built-in dorm desks that each held a blue manual typewriter and college textbooks neatly stacked to the side with yellow pencils and blue Bic pens in a cup on the corner.

Kathryn was just beginning to fully feel the double rejection, which stung like hot nails piercing her chest. Knowing no where else to turn, she backed herself into the closet and heard the soft clanking of the metal hangers. As she sat on her neatly paired shoes on the closet's floor and felt the flutter of clothes on her face, it was finally stone silent. It was then, and only then, that Kathryn let herself weep like the little girl that she knew herself to be, despite all appearances to the contrary.

Emerging from her cave an hour or so later, she literally had no where to turn. She went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her swollen eyes. She knew that Tommy would not understand her need to have sorority "sisters." She was in no hurry to call her mother. Having gone home at Christmas, she had seen immediately that her mother's plate was already too full with trying to care for her bi-polar husband, her depressed older sister, and her toddler granddaughter. Kathryn couldn't turn to any of her non-sorority friends because in her family, she had learned a few family rules to be kept: not to talk, to keep the secrets. Don't let anyone know about your pain and disappointment. Put on a false face for the world to see.

As Kathryn left her dorm room to walk about campus on this luscious and devastating spring morning, her mind drifted back to this past Christmas at her home in Delaware . . .

Mindfulness and the smart phone

Finally, I "caved in" and got a "smart" phone. Obviously, it has a lot of really neat features, my favorite of which so far is very recent pictures (and videos and face-to-faces!) of my granddaughters. But really those pictures just make me want to be there with them more, to hold them in my arms and to study every aspect of their faces and their sturdy little bodies.

Now-a-days, besides smart phones, another popular trend is mindfulness. Jon Kabot-Zinn tells us that "because mindfulness is so popular at the moment, it is very easy to misconstrue what it really involves: 'I get it! I will be more present and less judgmental. Good idea! Why didn't I think of that myself? Clear sailing from here on. No problem! I"ll just be more mindful.'"

But it's just not that easy. Mindfulness is a state-of-being that takes practice.

Ironically, smart phones and other such devices usually make us less mindful. To prove this to yourself, just do some people-watching and notice how many of us are on our phones, instead of being here in the present moment--enjoying the person next to us or the food that we are eating or the activity that we are attending. Using smart phones is like an epidemic--a sickness, really, among us. One of the several dis-eases of our contemporary society. Let's put our phones away for a moment and be really present.

But how do we make mindfulness our default setting? Instead of being on the setting of automatic pilot or of mindless doing? How do we truly cultivate mindfulness?

For decades we have been in this highly conditioned and tenacious mode of unawareness, of mindlessness. So the way that I look at it, it may take us years of practice to become the mindful person that we would like to be. But the good news is that it's not a contest; it's not a test. Every little mindful step, every little mindful moment, every little mindful thought, emotion, or action is a victory for us. And the most important thing that I want you to do as you seek mindfulness is to be gentle and loving with yourself.

So the first step in wanting to be more mindful is the one that you have already taken, if you are reading this blog: awareness of our mindlessness. And a desire to become more mindful.

While the idea of mindfulness is simple, it is not easy, but it is necessary to our living a more joyful and peaceful life. It is not so simple to maintain mindfulness, even for short periods of time. Unless we implement it and sustain it through an on-going, regular practice, mindfulness will become just one more thought to fill our heads and to make us feel more inadequate--as Kabot-Zinn says it becomes "one more concept, one more slogan, one more chore, one more thing to schedule into your already too-busy day."

The benefits of mindful are multi-leveled, so I refer you to this recent article on its benefits: 20 Reasons Why Mindfulness Is Good for your Mental and Physical Health. If you want to read more on mindfulness, I mentioned a few good reads on my last mindfulness blog.

For me, mindfulness is an antidote to our crazy world and makes my life a little less crazy, a little less scattered, a little less chaotic. It's an antidote to my constant thinking, thinking, thinking. It balances out thinking for me.


Let's start slowly with a few simple, but challenging steps--

1. Try to do one thing at a time and focus on that one task or activity, instead of jumping around from one thing to another, trying to accomplish dozens of things at one time. I believe that our society has created a lot of ADHD in people.

I know that we women especially have been proud of our multi-tasking, but that is in the past. Mono-tasking is what you want to practice now.

2. Try to sit still for 10 minutes a day and just breathe--in and out--being aware of your breath and of your thoughts, coming and going. Just let them come and go; do not act on them. Be here now; be some place else later.

It doesn't matter if you sit in a chair, on your couch, or on a cushion on the floor. Just tell your smart phone to let you know when 10 minutes has passed! It doesn't matter if you need to scratch your nose or move your leg into a more comfortable position, just try to do so mindfully.

3. Try to find a yoga class that suits you--and attend it once a week. There are so many classes out there, so try to find a teacher and a class that you like and one that suits your schedule and is close to you.

For instance, since I am a morning person, I go to a morning yoga class, which is only five minutes away from my home.


Practice these steps for a few weeks or a month until I blog again about mindfulness. I've decided to blog about this most important subject the first week in every month. Please let me know if you are a student of mindfulness and how your first week goes. And if we must, which we must, let's use our smartphones more mindfully, too.

A memoir: And so this is Father's Day

"It doesn't matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was." --Anne Sexton

Since Father's Day was Sunday, I got to thinking about fathers. Lots of people on facebook and otherwise write/talk about the wonderful fathers that they had/have. One of my former students on fb has been detailing for several days the things that she loved about her father and what he taught her--a beautiful tribute to him.

(I haven't many regrets, but I do regret giving my daughter the man who is her father. In my post about him, I said that that was her story to tell, and it is. Suffice it to say that Ellen and her father are estranged once again (and for countless times before), and probably for the last time, which is sad because he now has two beautiful granddaughters, that he could delight in.)

But I do understand the young woman in her early thirties (me) who was optimistic and wanted a child. Hoping, hoping for the best. Not yet understanding who my husband was, what was to happen to my marriage, nor the influence of a father on a daughter. Still denying then that my own father was not the best one for me.

When I was a child, my absolutely favorite TV show was the sitcom "Father Knows Best." Never missing a show, I wanted my family to be just like that TV family--loving and joking with one another. And of course, solving any problem perfectly within a half-hour's time-span!

When others' favorite TV show was "Leave It to Beaver," I adored "Father Knows Best." I identified best with the little girl named Kathy on the bottom right. The program ran on TV from 1954 until 1960.

I was mostly enamored by the incredibly kind and wise father on this TV show and the loving and fun big sister, so unlike my own big sister.

But Dear Reader, if you've read any of my memoir posts about my family, then you know my side of the story, and it isn't anything like a TV family--unless it's more like "All in the Family" or Roseanne, which were about real-life conflicts within dysfunctional families--but at least, those sitcoms made us laugh.

There was no laughter in my family. As I have written in other posts on my family, for some reasons, everything in my family was s-o-o serious. Deadly serious. Perhaps the seriousness could be attributed to the only problem my father claimed he couldn't solve with his engineer's mind--the problem of my sister, or perhaps the seriousness was about how my mother had learned to approach life from her younger, darker days, or perhaps the seriousness had to do with my father's illness. I tried to be loyal to and to love my parents, and I was/did, but my ex-husband had it right when he referred to going for a visit to my parents' house as going to the house of "doom and gloom."

Most recently, I wrote about my mother. Now the time has come to write about my father.

A rare picture of my sister and me in my father's lap. Obviously a posed picture--I just noticed that that's not a story book in his hands! (It was the 50s and raising children was thought to be the mother's job.) It looks as if daddy is reading an engineering magazine! I well remember that big Citadel College ring on his finger, which he proudly wore most of his life. 

I have alluded to my parents' beginnings in another post, which ends with the sad, foretelling lines, "They could only break and break and break. They could only break each others' hearts." In that post, I used the metaphor of trees for my parents, saying that my mother was a magnolia tree because of her beauty and that my father was a loblolly pine because he was tall and lanky when he was a young man and because he was raised in the sandy soil of Central South Carolina. Speaking of trees that kept getting uprooted as my father's career moved us about the country, I alluded to the dark days ahead in his life and to something rotten in that tree.

My father and mother on their wedding day.

After decades of trying to figure out what was wrong with my father, he was finally diagnosed in the 60s with a disorder called manic-depressant, which today is called bi-polar. It is a terrible disease for the person who has it and for the family.

As a child, I only knew that my father had a terrible, reactive temper. Now as I look back, I see it as a temper that pretty much controlled our family, that pretty much kept us imprisoned. His loss of temper could explode over the smallest of things--like a traffic jam--and would spew out on everyone in the family and leave us stunned, quiet, and spent. Many of my earliest memories of my father are about his losing his temper, even breaking down a door at one time.

As I think about it, I really do not know very much about my father. He was a somewhat shadowy figure in my early life. We did not talk very much. He went to work in the mornings and came home in the evenings. Once I asked what he did at work to which Daddy responded that he was an engineer, so for many years I thought that my father drove a train! After dinner, my father would sit in "his" chair and watch TV--mostly westerns. He particularly liked John Wayne.

Now that I think of it--like me, he probably got a great deal of his identity from his career--an electrical engineer for the DuPont company. Like me, he "got retired" from his career in his early 60s; I think that he got a buy out. Like me, he probably felt lost for a while after retirement. He loved sports, golf, gardening, and writing, especially writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper and long, often critical, letters to his daughters. He loved to eat fresh home-cooked meals, as his own mother (who lived on a farm) could put on the table.

Here's what little I know about my father's history: He was born on a hot, humid summer's day, July 14, 1923, in a farmhouse in Bowman, South Carolina, the house where he lived all of his growing up days. He was the second son in a family that eventually had nine children--with the last child (his sister Sandra) being born the same year that my own sister Lynda was born. Story has it that when he called to tell his mother that his wife was pregnant, she answered that she was pregnant, too. A bit anti-climatic, wouldn't you say?

There were five sons altogether and eventually four daughters. Even for the times, they were poor in the 1920s and 30s. His mother apparently had a temper, too, because Daddy would tell a story about her getting angry and chasing the boys around the house with a butcher knife. My father's father was quiet; his mother definitely seemed to be the head of the family. Living on a working farm, she favored her sons.

Because there were so many mouths to feed and more all the time, the first born son C.F. eventually got to live with my father's mother's only sibling, a sister, who had no children of her own. As I was growing up, I knew my Great Aunt Pansy to be the "rich" one in the family. She lived in the city in a fine house with really nice things. I remember how soft the towels in her bathroom were. She eventually paid for C.F. to go to college.

On the other hand, my father joined the Navy to become a pilot. Luckily, World War II ended before he left the states. Then he went to college at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, on the G. I. Bill. He played football, in part to make some money to help support his growing family. My impression is that he was understandably envious and resentful of his older brother C.F., who seemed to be the favored son and nephew.

My father was not particularly close to any of his brothers nor sisters; therefore, I hardly knew my aunts and uncles as I was growing up. They did not come visit us in the various states where we lived. In the summers we would go visit his mother and father for a few days on the farm, where we might see a few of his grown brothers and sisters and their children. He did love and admire his mother and seemed to be forever seeking her approval. Even as a child, I intuited that C.F.'s son Butch was the favored grandchild. One message that I got from my father's family (and from society at the time) was that boys were more important than, were superior to girls. My father probably wanted a son, but instead he had two daughters.

This family portrait was taken when I was about ten year old in the late 50s. We lived in Madison, Tennessee, at the time, the years I refer to as my best childhood years.

My parents' fighting with one another and my father's rage are my strongest memories from my childhood and teen years. A real bone of contention between my mother and father--something they fought about for years and years--was when he decided to financially help his mother by sending her money every month--supposedly to buy the farm. I'm not sure if his primary motive was to help his mother or to buy his childhood home or to have an investment. I think that it was the former, but maybe a combination of all three. Nevertheless, my mother did not think that we could afford to send his mother money every month, and she resented it.. After all, we didn't own a house yet ourselves; we were still renting houses as we moved about the country with my father's job. And if it were the case, I'm sure that my mother did not want to retire to Bowman, SC.

My parents would fight about the same issues for years--sometimes it was something that had happened in the distant past. Unfortunately, it appeared that my mother could really hold a grudge and never give up the fight. Most often, I did not know exactly what my parents were fighting about. Often, they seemed to  have their most violent fights after having bridge parties, where drinking alcohol was involved.

Once diagnosed with manic-depression, my father's illness was something else to be kept hidden in our family. Don't tell. Keep the family secrets. Dad may lose his job if people know. When he was diagnosed, unlike today, it was thought to be something to be ashamed of--a mental illness to hide from others, and unlike today, there was not as much to treat it with. The drugs back then had really bad side effects. At one point, my father even tried shock treatments.

Daddy would always stop taking his meds because he liked his highs, and the meds would make his life too gray. My mother and I would mope around, wringing our hands and hopelessly discussing what to do about my father's mood swings, which were increasing and getting more severe as he aged. Much to my dismay and disgust, once my mother became ill with COPD, my father began to have encounters with other women. We did not know much about manic-depression then; we had no internet to explain to us that it's main symptoms are

Mania Symptoms:

• An extremely elated, happy mood or an extremely irritable, angry, unpleasant mood
• Increased physical and mental activity and energy
• Racing thoughts
• Increased talking, more rapid speech than normal
• Ambitious, often grandiose plans
• Risk taking
• Impulsive activity such as spending sprees, sexual indiscretion, and alcohol abuse
• Decreased sleep without experiencing fatigue

Depression Symptoms:

• Loss of energy
• Prolonged sadness
• Decreased activity and energy
• Restlessness and irritability
• Inability to concentrate or make decisions
• Increased feelings of worry and anxiety
• Less interest or participation in, and less enjoyment of activities normally enjoyed
• Feelings of guilt and hopelessness
• Thoughts of suicide
• Change in appetite (either eating more or eating less)
• Change in sleep patterns (either sleeping more or sleeping less)

But I now know that his illness majorly affected the whole family. Before and after the diagnosis, I would get between him and my mother when they fought--to try to protect my mother--to try to get them to stop. One time I got so angry at his losing his temper once again and at his spewing out profanity that I actually spit in his face! Then I ran and hid! To my surprise and relief, he ignored my action. Oddly (or typical in my family), it was never mentioned.

Often my father's quick, unrelenting temper would cause me embarrassment in public places. He and my mother would sometimes fight on our rare outings to restaurants, and I would want to crawl under the table. Once when I was in college and wanted to go out for a pancake breakfast at the beach with him and my mother and some friends of theirs, he got so mad when he couldn't find the restaurant that he cussed at me, causing me to dissolve into tears, in the back seat with the other couple. In my family, so many simple, ordinary events were turned into family dramas.

My parents were not demonstrative; they seldom gave hugs or pats on the back. They did not say "I love you" out loud or very often to each other nor to us children. Once I grew up, the way my father showed his love was through the gifting of money. Very financially generous with his children and with his family of origin, he bought me several cars and helped with down payments on two condos and on my house.

My absolute favorite picture of me and my father, taken at my first wedding when I was about twenty and he in his mid-forties. 

Even though I was fairly petite in statue, the opposite of his statue, I looked like my father and like his family. My mother and sister did not think that his sisters were pretty, and even though they didn't say it, I knew that I looked like them. So naturally, I assumed that I was not pretty. Unfortunately, thinking that I was unattractive became a huge part of my life, which was such a sad waste of my time and energy.

My parents came full circle, so to speak. When they retired, they had moved back to the town where Daddy had started working for the DuPont company. In the post about my mother, I wrote about the last time that I saw my father, but actually my sweetest memory of him was when he came for a visit after he had retired. I guess he was on a high, but perhaps the highs showed his true self more than the lows. He drove from Camden, South Carolina, to Kingston Springs, Tennessee, in one, quick trip and arrived earlier than expected in my driveway. When I went out to his car to greet him, he literally swept me off my feet in a warm embrace! This memory has come to symbolize for me my father's unverbalized love for me, for his children, for his wife, and for his family.

A note--Years after I wrote this blog about my father, I came across these paragraphs in a letter he wrote to me. He recognized that he could have been a better father, and that means a lot to me..

"I write about things that I should have spend more time talking to my wife, my daughters, my relatives and friends about through the years. Some for my own good, some for edification, some to provide the companionship, and better relationships.

"I should have been more outgoing, more of an extrovert than an introvert, should have been more emotional about the right things, shown more of my actual interest in our lives, been more encouraging, more talkative, more of the things that go with being or at least more closely approaching the ideal husband and father and to a lesser extent having a better relationship with relatives and friends."

Part II of seven characteristics of Doing versus Being

Sometimes when I have mentioned mindfulness to someone I've just met, they will ask me, "What's Mindfulness?" Well, it's not Buddhism or any religion, nor meditation or yoga, which are tools that we can use on the way to Mindfulness.

Kabat-Zinn's working definition of Mindfulness is "paying attention on purpose non-judgementally in the present moment as if your life depended on it." Now that's a mouth full! For me, being mindful means being fully awake, aware, alive in the present moment.

The last three characteristics of Doing versus Being (or of Mindfulness) mode are as follows:

5. Avoidance versus approaching--

Instead of trying not to think of something, such as some fear, which only enhances your anxiety, the Being mode encourages you to approach and to acknowledge the very thing that you feel like avoiding. This compassionate approach gradually dissipates the power of your negative feelings.

6. Mental time travel versus remaining in the present moment--

Living in the past often puts you in a regretting mood ,while living in the future may put you in worry mode. "We re-live past events and re-feel their pain, and we pre-live future disaster and pre-feel their impact," write Williams and Penman.

Don't allow yourself to get lost in a mental time warp. See memory as memory and worrying as worrying. Consciously know that you are remembering or that you are worrying about or planning for the future. This acknowledging helps free you from being a slave to mental time travel. You will be able to avoid the extra pain that comes from re-living the past or pre-living the future.

7. Depleting activities versus nourishing activities--

Sometimes life gets so demanding with projects in our professional lives and in our personal lives with on-going projects such as homemaking, childcare, or elder care that it's tempting to focus on these projects to the exclusion of our own health and well-being. You tell yourself that such busyness is temporary, and so you forego interests, hobbies, and pastimes that nourish your soul. Such thinking and Doing can drain away your energy and innate happiness.

For me, teaching would drain away my energy, but when I found kayaking, I discovered something that could replenish my energy and spirit. Nature and river and trails! And kayaking a white water river could always keep me very mindful and present; actually, that's true of any river really. Somehow being out on the river with the sky above me and the water (and sometimes those mountains) all around me connects me to and nourishes my soul.

------------

In the past and most of my life, I have lived too much in my mind, constantly analyzing, and striving for perfection and  approval. I had thought that my thoughts were reality, that they were me, that they were true, and I probably avoided those who didn't think the way I did. My mind was often in the past (if only a few hours back regretting something I had said or done) or in the future (if only a few hours ahead planning for the next day's lesson!), and I found myself often fatigued, even exhausted at the day's end.

According to Williams and Penman, characteristics of the Doing mode include judging everything, comparing the way things are with the way you want them to be and striving to make them different from how they actually are. Being on automatic pilot much of the time and getting lost in thoughts that you take too literally and personally. Living in the past or future and avoiding what you don't like. Finally, the Doing mode sees the world indirectly, through a veil of concepts [delusions] that short-circuit your senses so that you no longer directly experience yourself and the world.

Is this the way that you want to live your life? I have been extremely guilty of taking things too literally and too personally. And of trying to "improve" things that I really had little power over. What a waste of precious time and energy!

Characteristics of the Being or the Mindfulness mode include nourishing activities, being in the present moment, approaching and acknowledging, viewing thoughts as mental events, accepting, sensing, and conscious choices.

Would you like to live your life this way? I know that that is how I want to live!

To make a conscious shift to the Being or Mindful mode takes practice. After all, it took many decades for us to "perfect" this Doing mode of rapidly getting things done or jumping from one task to another or multi-tasking.

Toward the end of my teaching career, as my students would call out my name for attention time and again, I would tell them that I could only mono-task! That's one way I slowly began to shift gears to the Being mode or to becoming more mindful.

So how do we begin to shift gears? How do we engage ourselves with the Being mode? How do we become more mindful?

In the present moment, of course.

To be continued . . .

Seven characteristics of the Being versus the Doing modes of mind or modes of living

Presently, I am reading Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams and Danny Penman from which I get these seven characteristics of Doing versus Being. Besides Our Town, Thoreau, and Buddhism as mentioned in my former blog post, other early influences on me concerning mindfulness include Thich Nhat Hanh, especially his Living Buddha, Living Christ, and anything by Jon Kabat-Zinn (son-in-law of Howard Zinn, who wrote the amazing A People's History of the United States).

Kabat-Zinn tells us "the cultivation of mindfulness may just be the hardest work in the world," yet paradoxically, he further says that "a lightness of being and playfulness [are] key elements to the practice of mindfulness, because they are key elements of well-being."

Here are four of the seven characteristics of Doing versus Being (or Mindfulness). (I'll cover the other characteristic in my next post.) See if any of these characteristics "speak" to you as they did to me.

1. Automatic pilot versus conscious choice--

Autopilot means thinking, working, eating, walking, or driving without clear awareness of what you are doing. The danger is that you miss much of your life in this way.

Mindfulness brings you back, again and again, to full conscious awareness: a place of choice and intention. It provides you with the ability to "check in" with yourself from time to time so that you can make intentional choices.

2. Analyzing versus sensing--

Doing mode needs to think, analyze, recall, plan, and compare. In this mode, we spend a great deal of time "inside our heads," without noticing what's going on around us.

Mindfulness is a truly different way of knowing the world. It puts you back in touch with your senses so that you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste things, as if for the first time (beginner's mind). You become deeply curious about the world again. Gradually, you cultivate a direct, intuitive sense of what is going on in your inner and outer worlds, without taking anything for granted.

3. Striving versus accepting--

The Doing mode involves judging and comparing the "real" world with the world as we would like it to be. It narrows our attention down to the gap between the two, so that you can end up with toxic tunnel vision in which only perfection will do.

Most of my life, I have been a perfectionist, wondering what made me this way and knowing that it made me crazy. Recognizing this toxic habit, I have been able to move beyond it, but it still haunts me at times and make me feel "less than." Finally, I've learned to say/think, that's "good enough."

Being mode invites you to suspend judgement. It means temporarily standing aside and watching the world as it unfolds, without preconceptions. It means allowing the world to be just as it is for the moment. It allow you to observe the world, rather than judge it, attack it, argue with it, or try to disprove its validity.

Or in my case, try to improve it.

Mindfulness liberates you from unhappiness, fear, anxiety, and exhaustion.

4. Seeing thoughts as solid and real versus treating them as mental events--

This characteristic of the Doing mind really resonates with me. For some reason, I mistook my thoughts for reality! I've always been too good at thinking, planning, and doing. My thoughts ceased to be my servants and became my master and a very harsh and unforgiving master at that. In the Doing mode, you tend to get on this treadmill of judging yourself: I should be able to cope better than this. I am weak. I am no good.

So you strive harder and harder (See number 3 above).

Mindfulness teaches us that our thoughts are just thoughts; they are events in the mind, mental events if you will. Furthermore, our feelings, too, are just feelings; they are not us.  Neither your thoughts nor your feelings are "you" or "reality." They are just your internal running commentary/emotions on/about yourself and the world. They come and go, come and go continually, but they are not you.

This simple recognition/realization frees us from the distorted reality that we have all conjured up for ourselves. With Mindfulness, we can see a clear path through life once again.

Now, more than ever, we (the world) needs mindfulness. "Our lives are now driven by the ever-quickening expectations that we place on ourselves and that others place on us and we on them. [These expectations are] generated in a large measure by our increasing dependence on ubiquitous digital technology and its ever-accelerating effects on our pace of life," according to Kabat-Zinn. With which, I agree wholeheartedly. We must learn how to use technology mindfully, and in our homes and in our schools, we must teach our children/youth how to do so also.

Mindfulness is a way of saving our world from destroying itself.

Did any of these Doing characteristics resonant with you, as they did with me? In my next post, I will share the three other characteristics of Doing versus Being mode with you, as well as give you a definition of Mindfulness and perhaps some ways to begin the practice of Mindfulness, if you are ready.