The one thing caregivers need most (#98)

My mom was seven years old when her grandmother Josephine took her own life. I wouldn’t have known but mom told me the story once, while going over some family history files. She told me how Josephine had been a caregiver all her life and one day felt so stuck, so overwhelmed and alone, she made a terrible choice.

Caregivers often feel stuck. Even when they’re surrounded with gadgets and resources that visit and assess and provide bits of support, they can feel overwhelmed and isolated. Why is that?

In one of my favorite TED Talks, Hillary Cottam tells the story of how providing disjointed, expensive interventions to stuck caregivers fails to improve their outcomes or make them any less stuck. What worked? Building meaningful relationships with them.

We can’t fix everything. But we can do something. As my readers know, these are my personal mottos:

Start where you are. Make one thing better.

So what’s one thing, the most important thing, we can give to the 44 million caregivers in the US?

It’s relationship, what Hillary Cottam calls enthusiastic relationship.

"We need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services," she says.

How can we build supportive, enthusiastic relationships between those in need and those that provide help? It’s the one thing caregivers need most. Which means the sites, services and systems that focus on this will be the ones that have the most success, and the greatest impact on caregivers’ lives.

Being brought to ground by touch

Our bodies are our physical limits, and that limiting is not only a restriction, it is a comfort. As Matthew Sanford, who teaches adaptive yoga to people with body trauma, says in an interview with Krista Tippett, sometimes we need a boundary around our experience, something that contains what we feel.

There’s a reason why, when my son who’s six is crying, he needs a hug. It’s not just that he needs my love. He needs a boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed and it won’t be limiting his whole being. He gets a hug and he drops into his body.

The brilliant poet David Whyte wrote about this need in his lovely Second Sight:

And then there are times you want to be brought to ground by touch and touch alone.

To know those arms around you and to make your home in the world just by being wanted.

To see eyes looking back at you, as eyes should see you at last,

seeing you, as you always wanted to be seen, seeing you, as you yourself had always wanted to see the world.

Being brought to ground by touch gives us the opportunity to come back home to the world, drop back down into our bodies, to fall in. Touch permits us to once again be grounded in these mutable-yet-finite vessels we inhabit.

An open letter to the next generation of angry young women

Dear Alexis,

I won’t stop being angry.

I know you through your family; I've enjoyed seeing your exuberant smile and boundless energy as you walk onto the stage of adult womanhood. Welcome. I read your post as I watch my own daughter and son navigating their teen years, and I think about what is ahead for them. All the joy, and all the pain.

I read your exhortation to stay angry, beyond the passing of news about the Stanford rape case and its injustice. And I have to tell you a secret. 

I won’t stop being angry, ever.

Even as I pray, yoga, run, and cultivate compassion, I won’t. You see, I was sexually assaulted too, when I was a young woman. Another time I was assaulted on a running trail, and a man tried to pull me into his car. Like you and so many other women, I had to recount my traumatizing experiences to strangers and have my motives and actions picked apart by people who were supposed to be on my side, protect and advocate for me. I didn’t even get to the part where my attackers stood before a judge. 

My sisters are angry too; both biological and non-biological sisters have been through this, along with the men and women who love them.

My mother was angry too. I don't know about her experiences with men besides my father, because her generation wasn't allowed to speak up at your age. But I know she was angry, and more than that she found her voice by the time I came. She took me to NOW and ERA rallies when I was a girl, to marches, meetings, consciousness-raising sessions, and most importantly she brought me with her while she got petitions signed, while she stuffed bags with political literature and hung them on doorknobs, translating her anger and frustration to real change one doorknob at a time. 

Victoria Claflin Woodhull ran for president in 1872, long before women had the right to vote

She did something about it. And she taught me to do something about it. Now you are teaching, too.
My mother's generation dared to speak out, and mine has picked up the torch and carried on that work. But there is obviously much more to do.

So you see: you are joining a long, long history of angry women. 

I’ve lived with the reality of sexual assault and the fear of assault for decades. It’s part of the background of life, like living in a war zone where you never really feel safe, not ever. You never know when the bomb is going to explode, safety is an illusion, but you have to keep going.

that feeling you get

Unfortunately, I’m not alone in feeling that way. One in five of our sisters lives with that feeling too; wherever I am, I'm hanging out with survivors, with women who have not received justice. I know some of their stories; others can’t even tell theirs.

You have my love and respect for speaking out, for taking your case to the university. For every women who couldn’t come forward, you spoke for her, speak for her. It makes a difference.

There are so many of us, so many men and women who truly care about this issue because they and their partners and children have been through this pain. We move through the horror and don’t let it destroy the joy, the love, all the good things and good relationships in our lives. 

Keep going. You aren’t carrying this alone. 

There are more of us than you think. Way more. Every time you are in the grocery store, count five people. One of them (maybe more) is angry, maybe has been for decades. We won’t stop. We can’t. Our daughters and sons are counting on us. You are amazing and fierce. But most important, you are not alone. Don't ever think that. Knowing that you are not alone is *how* you stay angry without letting it destroy you. The way we treat women has to change. It is changing. 

Thank you, and thanks to your sisters and brothers who are out there adding your beautiful, unique voice.
 

What is The Thing For Which You Struggle?

Honoring the Struggle that Requires Everything

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Memorial Day is a day of remembrance for those who died in the fight for our good and lasting freedoms. It’s for those who literally gave it their all, whose struggle required everything of them. Some of these knew they were going to die, and did it anyway. Some endured great pain, and did it anyway.

For the fearful, the pained, those knowingly going to die, the struggle was about more than themselves.

Remembering those who struggled and lost everything is important not just because freedom isn’t free. Remembering them and their struggle is essential because we all struggle and fight in life, some of us more than others, and the knowledge that this struggle might require everything of us is part of making it real and present for each of us.

But it’s also essential because the lesson of these victorious dead is to make that struggle count for something greater than simply removing pain or discomfort. Those who gave everything to make their time on this planet count for something greater can teach us valuable lessons about the best life, about struggling for something worth the struggle. That includes the struggle against war and violence.

That said, in my view Memorial Day isn’t about glorifying war or armed conflict. I believe that is too narrow a view.

Memorial Day is about courage in the face of violence and death (which requires being present), and about thinking beyond ourselves, to make our inevitable life struggles count for much more than ourselves and our immediate families. That struggle even unto death might be the struggle of a soldier. It is also the struggle and courage of the peaceful protester, the civil disobedient, the evangelist who continues to speak his truth. It is the struggle of the field nurse who brings broken soldiers back to health, time and again despite its apparent futility, to give back hope.

To me, Memorial Day is a day to decorate the graves of these people too. Because if all we valorize and decorate are the graves of those who died fighting in armed conflicts, I believe we are selling our humanity short. Courage is courage, both on and off the battlefield.

Human rights activist Stephane Hessel, who was a concentration camp survivor and a redactor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wrote in his tract Indignez Vous!

We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence—choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate… To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts, TO CREATE IS TO RESIST. TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.

Looking beyond war, behind the war machine to truly honor those who gave their lives courageously for the great gift of freedom we enjoy requires, in my view, understanding their struggle and courage in this context. And it demands that we also view Memorial Day as a day to honor those for whom the struggle and sacrifice was in the service of nonviolent protest, in the service of love and peace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

I believe that the more we honor and seek to emulate these struggles-in-the-face-of-death for something greater, the better our communities, cities, and country will be, and the better we ourselves will become.