Amber: My Sister Through My Eyes

Amber’s life began on June 28, 1975.  As soon as she could walk and talk, her enthusiasm for, sweetness to and curiosity about other people were immediately apparent.  She never knew what a stranger was, if you turned your back on her for a moment you were sure to turn back and find her striking up a conversation with whoever happened to be passing by.  I can picture her as that little girl and I can picture her by her mothers side always wanting to help, the true personification of Mothers little helper, always wanting to be of service.

These two qualities that defined her as a child, the interest in others and the genuine desire to help them and make their lives easier, continued to define her, no matter what hardships she endured, throughout her life. 

There was another side to her greatest strengths, as is so often the case with all of us, they were also her greatest obstacles.  Amber’s selflessness and self-sacrifice caused her to perhaps give too much while not asking for enough in return.  The great stores of energy she drew on to work an increasingly demanding and exhausting job, while raising her kids, and caring for her family were eventually drained.  Her body was more frail than she realized and her will alone was not enough to sustain her.  In addition her innocence and her complete lack of guile which allowed her to see and expect the best in others left her vulnerable to hurts, a heart like hers could not make sense of, and she at times blamed herself for the failings of others.  But no matter what the cost she would not abandon that innate loving kindness and sweetness.  

It is no wonder that, as her health began to fail and she could no longer keep up with the demands of her Title Insurance job, she went back to school to work in healthcare.  After graduating first in her class she decided to pursue working with cancer patients and in that she found what she considered to be her true calling.  She choose healthcare because she cared deeply and passionately about all those who crossed her path and because she had suffered she had vast stores of empathy and compassion for others who were suffering.  She became a true friend to her patients and their families and she liked to think that she, in some small way, shared their burden and by doing so made it lighter.  When her health continued to deteriorate to the point where she could no longer do that job she mourned it for the rest of her life.

Even this loss did not take away her sweet spirit and she continued to pour her love and care into her children, her family and her pets.  She became quite active on social media and was a tireless cheerleader for others, always striving to make them feel loved and celebrated.  She was, in the last months of her life, contemplating writing a book in order to share her triumphs and tragedies, letting people know they were not alone and still trying to help as many people as she could.

Amber’s life had its hardships and was far too short, but all those that knew her felt blessed by that knowledge. Her sweetness , her kindness, her innocence, her lack of guile and her generous heart were so special they could not be ignored.  She is gone from this world but her influence remains with us and if we can, through her example, open our hearts to love freely and to treat each other with compassion and forgiveness, she will have achieved her true aim in life, she will have helped forever all those she loved.

Amber’s life ended at home surrounded by people and animals she loved, her parents, her son and her beagles.  She will be so sorely missed.

Goodbye Pat and Goodbye 2015

I have never been so relieved to have a year come to an end!  For the most part it was a good year but the end was one of the roughest times of my life.  The whole month of December was kind of awful for a myriad of reasons but the toughest moment came the day after Christmas when our good, family friend Pat passed away.

My family moved in with Pat who was around fifty at the time, when I was a little girl.  We had just moved back from California and had no money, no prospects and no where to live.  Pat was at that moment, and for the rest of his life, our guardian angel.  He was unfailing kind and generous, sweet and playful.  He was the best of friends and the best of people.  He lived with my family for the rest of his life and died in his own bed at my parents house.

He was what some might consider an unremarkable man who lived a remarkable life, filled with tragedy and loss and ultimately redemption and love.

The thing that was so very remarkable about Pat once you got to know him  was how happy he was with so little.  In our modern view, the gifts that life gave him were so pitifully few, he was never in love (the one date he ever went on ended with getting kicked out of his house for dating) he never had children or a high powered career, he wasn’t famous, he didn’t change the world.  And yet in all the time I knew him he never shed a tear (he said he had cried all his tears when his mother died), he never complained about the life he was given, he never forgot to say thank you for even the smallest gesture of thoughtfulness.

I’m not really sure if understanding the life he lived makes his unfailing contentment more or less amazing.  He lost his mother at age seven and was sent to an orphanage with his brother.  A couple of years later he lost his father as well.  He continued in the orphanage until he was adopted by some cousins but even that  was shortlived and he time and again ended up homeless on the streets of Detroit.  He though about becoming a priest but was disillusioned by the hypocrisy he witnessed while working around the order.  He went into the army and was one day away from shipping out to Vietnam when he contracted double pneumonia and was eventually given an honorable disability discharge.  He had a mental breakdown a few years after he left the army and was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent some time in an institution.  He moved to Colorado and ended up buying a house for his beloved poodle Blackie.  That was the only reason that he bought the house because he wanted his dog to have a home and a yard and so he provided them.   Some time later he started going to the church my father worked for and that was how we met him.  When we moved back from California, homeless and desperate, we found out that his dog had died and he was terribly lonely and heartsick over his dog’s passing.  The pastor of the church thought it might be a blessing for him to have some companionship and it was undoubtedly a blessing for us as well.  From that day on he was a part of our family.

Time and again life gave him obstacles and problems that he saw for what they really were, gifts.  The pneumonia that wrecked his lungs and was the foundation for a life time of lung problems wasn’t a curse it was the blessing that saved him from the horrors of war.  The death of his beloved pet was the reason our family came to stay and he finally got the love and friendship and the home that he had never had.  It didn’t make him bitter that life had been so hard because he knew the worst that could happen, he’d lived through it, and the qualities of character and personality that caused him again and again to seek a life of service and a purpose in helping others, helped him to remain happy and positive and unfailingly grateful.

There have been so many lessons I’ve learned from Pat in our life together but his last lesson and gift to me (and one that I needed more than ever as I dealt with the loss of him) was that this too shall pass.  Pat lived a life blighted by pain and suffering for the first two thirds of his time on earth but the last third, though it maybe didn’t make up for or remove those lost years, did give him something he’d always wanted, a home, a family and unconditional love.  I imagine it would be all but impossible for me to experience the amount of loss and devastation  in my life that Pat suffered but even if it did, the memory of how he dealt with that loss and the knowledge that it did eventually get better will stay with me through anything.

So goodbye Pat, I loved you and I will always miss you.

 

You Are What You Think: Likes, Dislikes and Change

Have you ever had something come up and you instinctively disliked it?  Was this dislike based on an actual reason, or was the dislike merely because it wasn’t what you were expecting?  Why does something changing have to be about liking or disliking?

Humans have a complicated relationship with change.  We can find it disturbing if it comes upon us unexpectedly, but if things stay the same for too long we get bored.  If we don’t have any perspective or control over our reactions to the changes in life; than we spend our time constantly rocketing from one reaction to the next, a helpless passenger on the roller coaster of life.

I was told recently that you have to divorce yourself from the outcome of a situation and focus instead on doing your best and that is the only way to come through a troublesome situation unharmed.  It was exactly what I needed to hear.  The situation I was going through seemed completely dreadful at the time and I really had no control over it, or any way to make the bare facts of it better.  The sad part, for me, was that I had been looking forward and working toward this moment for quite some time, and now it here it was and it was not at all what I was expecting.  My only option at that point was to try and focus on my attitude toward the situation and not the situation itself and that is what I tried to do.  I will admit that I could have done a better job, as it was I stayed pretty distraught about it for a few weeks.

Looking back now my instinct is to be hard on myself for this lapse but that would be starting the cycle over again.  So instead of beating myself up and disliking my reaction to this change, I’m gonna think about how to do better next time.  Life is never going to stop changing and I’m never going to stop working on myself and those things combined give me something to look forward to.  So bring on the change, life, and I will try to see it for exactly what it is, neither good nor bad but possibly exciting!

You Are What You Think: Judge Not

What  you think is the true basis of your whole personality, it directly informs your feelings, words and actions.  In this series that  I’m calling “You Are What You Think”, I am going to explore why what you think about is so important and the causes and consequences of different thought habits.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this quote during the 19th century and it is as true today as it was then and for a very obvious reason.  What we think and how we view things are completely intertwined. A liar, for example, is unable to trust others because he always suspects others of being as deceitful as himself.  Ken Keyes put it another way during the middle of the 20th century…

This is why it is so important to pay attention, not only to what you say about others and what you say about yourself, but to what you put into your brain and what you think about or how you process that stimulus.  If you continually let your baser impulses run wild, if you don’t repeatedly and thoughtfully pursue empathy and rationality, you really have no basis on which to judge others or the world in which we live.  You cannot say “I am a good person and that person is bad”, because your own perspective is biased.  Thoughtfulness or mindfulness in your approach to life is the only way to be sure that your perspective is as accurate as possible and when you view the world in this way, you are often less inclined to judge others, because of your increased awareness of what you do not know about that person’s feelings or motivations in acting the way they do. To round this quote session out, here is one from a favorite TV show of mine from the 21st century…

When you act or speak in ignorance of what another’s circumstances might be, you reveal that ignorance to the world around you.  Or to put it one last way, from an even older source than Emerson, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” Another problem with spending so much thought energy on judging or disparaging a situation or another person is that you are wasting time and energy on a thought process that will ultimately leave you, in no better position than when you started out. A better use of your time might be to acknowledge the issue and then turn your thoughts away from the problem itself and who’s to blame and toward finding the best solution to the problem going forward.

Good News! Never Underestimate The Power of Hope!

Would you have clicked on this post if the title had been bad news?

I turned on NPR this morning just in time to hear a gentleman say that you will never get someone to change their mind by yelling at them.  That comment tied in perfectly with this blog that I was already planning.

So would you click on a bad news link?  Maybe and maybe not, but don’t we all have enough negativity in our own situations without getting more of it from others?

Life is too short to be constantly focused on the bad stuff but unfortunately it’s human nature to obsess over the things that go wrong.  It takes effort to focus the mind on the good stuff.  It takes effort to count your blessings.  The reward from that effort is that you eventually train your brain to see the good without effort and you train the people around you to think of you as a source of inspiration and positivity.

When I became a stepmom I did a lot of research on child rearing and one of the suggestions I came across repeatedly was to not overuse the word no.  Instead of constantly harping on what the child is doing wrong and the dire consequences that will follow their mistakes, try to tell them what the right thing to do would be and the positive consequences that result from good decision making.  If you are only telling them what not to do, you leave them with no way forward, they are stuck knowing that what they did was wrong but with no information on how to make it right.  This same principle applies to every sort of human communication in our lives. It would work quite well in romantic relationships too.  So don’t be a nag, be a cheerleader!

The take away is this: if  you have a message that you want to get out there to the world, if you want to change peoples minds about an issue, I would suggest you take the advice of the quote above.  Don’t lead through fear or righteous indignation.  Don’t tell people what they shouldn’t do.  Tell them what they should do and why it would be better for them if they did!  Never underestimate the power of hope!

True Love – What It Is and What It Isn’t

The quote above is meaningful in so many ways. So let’s start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start.

“True love is not just physical”…  It’s not just physical, although the physical is a huge part of it.  Of course when you hear that love is not just physical, you interpret it to mean that it isn’t just about lust but I think it goes beyond that.  The definition of physical from the oxford dictionary is.. “of or relating to the body as opposed to the mind”.  So in a deeper way it means that true love is about the mind or rather the mindset as well as the body.  If your attitude or mindset is negative toward the object of your affection than it is not true love because either this person is not right for you or you are not willing to do the work to keep your mindset positive.

“Nor romantic”…  One of the oxford dictionary’s definitions of romantic is “of, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality”.  Don’t get me wrong, this viewpoint is important!  You should think that you are the luckiest person in the world and you should view your relationship through rose-colored glasses but what this quote says is that you need balance.  Romance is not the only component of true love.  No person or relationship is 100% positive all the time and you need to be able to see the down side of your mate and your relationship and still think it is worth it.  Which leads us to the last part.

“True love is an acceptance of all that is, has been, will be and will not be.”  This last part reinforces the need for more than a romantic viewpoint, because to some extent you need your love to be rooted in reality.  If you are waiting for your love to change, to become the person they should be, so that you can be with a “perfect” partner, than it isn’t really true love because you aren’t in love with who they are, you are in love with a figure that you have made up in your own head.  If you know that your love doesn’t want kids and you do and you are just hoping down the road they change their mind then you aren’t respecting them or their views in a way that you should with a true love.  When you talk to people that have been together forever they will all have stories about times when they were disappointed or frustrated and their relationship was on the rocks.  The one thing that made their love last was not that it was perfect, it was that they valued it enough to hang in there.  They valued it enough to accept it for exactly what it was and still hang in there.  That’s what true love is.  It’s seeing yourself and your love as clearly as you are capable of and still knowing that you wouldn’t want to be with any one else.

Understanding Anne Frank: Be the Change

“Be the change you wish to see in the world” is actually a quote from Gandhi, but it’s a sentiment that I think Anne would have agreed with.  Perhaps she didn’t know it at the time but the words she was writing in her diary were destined to improve the world.  She was living the principles she was writing about and was providing an example for generations to come of how to grow up, how to think for yourself and how to become the person you wish to be.  She was constantly evaluating herself, constantly being honest about her faults and constantly striving to do better.

Though the changes that the average person makes to themselves and their circle of influence may not become as well known and influential as Anne’s has, every little change adds up and slowly but surely things change for the better.  Anne herself had no idea the impact her words would have, she was simply trying to be the best she could under mundane, tense circumstances.

I would build upon Anne’s words and say that every moment is a new chance to change the world and that is why you don’t need to wait but also you shouldn’t wait!  There are no words to describe the sense of personal power and pride that comes from real and honest effort to better yourself.

Bettering yourself is the first and best way to better the world!  It is impossible to spread joy or kindness to others if you don’t feel that way yourself.  So take care of yourself and then spread that to all the people in your sphere from loved ones, to co-workers to strangers and you will be amazed at the changes you can make in the world!

Lollipop’s Guide to Love: Finding It, Knowing It, Keeping It

All you need is love right?  That’s what they say and if you believe that’s true then you might be interested in my guide to love.  Read on for my insights into finding love, knowing it when you do find it and hanging on to it!

Step One: You’ll Find it When You’re Ready / Don’t Be Desperate

My Mom always told me she found love when she stopped looking for it and that was my experience too.  How’s that for a frustratingly smug and vague opening? But wait, it’s true!  When you make finding love your soul focus, you lose sight of all the other aspects of your life.  You lose the enthusiasm and passion that make you attractive to a potential mate.  You also tend to jump at every opportunity when you are desperate for love and no one wants to feel that the reason someone is interested in them is because they are around and have a pulse.

Step Two: You Have to Love yourself For Someone Else to Love You

And the clichés keep on coming! This one is true too.  Confidence, happiness and a dash of self-aware humor are all attractive qualities and are unable to be achieved if you don’t feel good about yourself.  The thing that you have to remember during this stage is that you don’t have to be perfect for someone to love you, although always striving to be your best self can’t hurt in your search for love.  The key is to strive to be the best you, not the best version of some ideal that has nothing to do with you.  There’s an old saying that goes: “For worry, work is better than whiskey”.  This means if you really hate something about yourself, address it and work on it, don’t avoid it and let it fester.

Step Three: You Have to Put Yourself Out There and it Has to be The Real You

The other reason why loving yourself is so important is because if you don’t love yourself you will find this step impossible.  You truly have to believe you are worthy of love to risk putting yourself out there.  Guess what, it is really hard to find love sitting on your couch and watching TV or not filling out that online dating questionnaire, or not talking to that cute person at work.  In fact I would go so far as to say it is nearly impossible.  If you’re super stumped about where the love of your life might be found, there were a couple of good suggestions two sentences back and if neither of those options appeal to you than just do what you love but do it with other people.  Another idea is to think about what kind of person you would like to be with and go where those people might be found.  That last one is tricky though and requires thought about the Real You.  If you want to meet someone who is kind and community oriented but you absolutely hate DIY and getting sweaty maybe don’t look for love by volunteering at Habitat for Humanity.

Step Four: You Have to Have Standards, They Aren’t Just For Every Other Aspect of Your Life

As Cher from Clueless said “You know how picky I am about my shoes and they just go on my feet!”.  She may have been clueless about many other things but this one she got right.  If you don’t have some idea of what you want in mate, how are you supposed to find them?  Perhaps instead of trying to hook up with every rando that comes along, you should be alone for a while and think about what you want out of life and a life partner.  I’m not talking about physical attributes or fairy tales about how you might meet.  I’m talking about qualities such as “family is important to them” or “they have a decent job”, or “they are capable of being selfless”.  Obviously you can’t always judge a book by it’s cover and some people may seem nicer than they really are, at first.  But if there are clues, like they are really nice to you but really mean to everyone else, that they are perhaps not what they at first appeared, have some self-respect and hit the bricks.

Step Five: You Have to Find Someone Capable of Independent Happiness, Being Needed is Nice but at Some Point You Might Need Someone Too

This is one of my examples of knowing what your needs are and making sure they get met.  Standards people, they are really important!  If you are anything like me you love to be needed and there is nothing so attractive as someone that needs and appreciates you.  The thing you have to be careful about with this noble intention, is that there are folks out there who are incapable of being happy by themselves or indeed happy at all.  You will spend all of your time and energy trying to prop them up and talk them into seeing the world as a halfway decent place.  The only and inevitable result of this will be that they will continue to see the world as they always have and you will be exhausted and unhappy yourself.  Toxic attitudes are like any other contagious disease, no matter how strong your immune system if you keep making out with someone who has one you are gonna end up sick and tired!

Step Six: Is It Love?  The Three L’s You Need to be Sure Are There

So, say you have found someone that is in fact a decent person and everything seems to be going really well.  How do you know if this relationship has what it takes to last?  Let me introduce you, dear reader, to the three L’s.  And the three L’s are, drumroll please, Like, Lust and Love.

Let’s start with like.  In order for a relationship to work you must like the person you are with.  This seems really obvious until someone comes along that is absolutely drop dead gorgeous and you are in lust city, until you realize that every time they open their mouth you want to die.  This is a situation where you have lust but no like and that is not gonna work out.  The person you are with should be like your best friend and you should genuinely respect their opinions and have fun in their company.

Let’s talk about lust, baby!  If you cannot picture yourself kissing someone much less doing anything else to them it’s not gonna work.  On the flip side if kissing and stuff is all you do because you have nothing in common it’s not gonna work.  Keep this in mind as well.  If you end up with this person forever, there are gonna be times where they and you are not at your best looking and you are still going to have to kiss and do stuff with them, so make sure that sounds like fun before you commit.

Lastly, love, but wait isn’t that what we are talking about anyway?  How can love be a requirement for love?  When I say love I mean the kind of love parents have for their children.  The kind that makes sacrifice seem worth it and would have you gladly leaping in front of a bus to save them.  Hopefully your love story will not require you to die in order to prove your devotion but it will require you to put your own needs aside on occasion to be there for your partner.  It will also require you to tell them hard truths and see them at their worst and if you don’t feel that all-encompassing, selfless kind of love for them; then, say it with me, it’s not gonna work.

Step Seven: Once You Have it Don’t Take it for Granted 

Yay!  You’re in love, love with a big L, love that lasts a lifetime!  How do you hold on to that love in the crazy world in which we live?  Step number one: don’t take it for granted!  Don’t just assume that it will continue along perfectly fine without attention or upkeep because that is true of absolutely nothing in life. And if you are this far along in this article, one might assume that love is important to you, so take care of it.  Tend it, tend your partner, tend yourself, make it a priority in your life!  The definition of husbandry from which the word husband derives means: the care and cultivation of something.  So care for and cultivate your relationship and ladies just because you are not a husband does not let you off the hook.  I know society would have you think that you are doing your partner a huge favor just by being with them and putting up with their manly, ridiculous ways but, spoiler alert, society is full of it and men need just as much care and support as anyone else and if you can’t be bothered to figure out what that means to a man, to your man, than I can honestly say you don’t deserve him.

Step Eight: Don’t Give Up

We’ve come to the end of our road.  We have found love and like and lust and we are trying to not take it for granted.  So, what else do we need to make sure it works?  In short we need to not give up.  If all the steps above have been followed, it sounds like this relationship has been built on solid ground and includes two awesome, amazing people, so don’t give up on it!  Don’t do it, it’s not worth it, if you break it you’re just gonna have to start all over again and guess what, if you are a giver upper you’re probably gonna do that the next time too.  So don’t put yourself through that.  Nobody is perfect and things will happen to test the relationship and each of you individually but take breaking up off the table.  Don’t threaten to leave just to get your way.  Love is tough at times but it’s worth it so, please, don’t give up!

Understanding Anne: Words of Wisdom from Anne Frank Part One

I have read the Diary of Anne Frank several times throughout my life and each time something new jumps out at me as being so wise.  I remember the first time I read it was in school, while I was right around the same age she was.

The wisdom that stayed with me from this first reading, was the part where she talks about the difference in perspective between her and her mother.  Her mother believed that you should be aware of how bad it could be and is not and be happy that you are being spared for the moment.  While Anne herself thought you should look at how beautiful the world is and be happy that things are so good.

I remember thinking at the time that they were both right and you should do both things.  Be grateful that your world is so beautiful and be aware that it could be much worse.

It made me sad at the time, that Anne had such a difficult relationship with her mother, when both of them had very valid viewpoints.  I wished so much that they could have seen the wisdom in the other and in that way have grown closer.

I will say that seeing the issues that drove these two women apart, helped me in my own life to avoid the anger and hurt that many teens feel toward their parents and my mother and I formed a relationship during my teen years that provided a wonderful foundation for the extremely close bond we still share.

This post is the first in a series that I am going to do on all the many insights and wisdoms to be found in Anne Franks Diary.  She was a gift to the world during an extremely dark time and I can’t help but think that she would have been proud that she achieved her fondest desire; to go on living in the world’s memory long after her death.

Tribal Patterns: A Lollipop Twist on a Current Trend

One of my favorite trends right now, is the tribal patterns you seem to see everywhere these days.  This is not the first time this trend has been popular but it has been modernized this time around with a muted and sophisticated color palette.

The earrings above are certainly a perfect example of this gorgeous trend and I love this combination of colors!

The layering of a shorter piece on top of a longer one lends a sense of movement to the earrings pictured above.  I love the more colorful turquoise version and the neutral friendly white.

These earrings are inspired by a rain stick and also have an animal print vibe.  They are super simple but super chic!  All of these earrings are available on our Etsy store: http://www.etsy.com/shop/FunkyLollipop