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Coping Skills

May 18, 2005 by

Everyone knows that people are born with their individual packages of abilities. Some people are excellent at doing mathematical calculations, adding multiple digits in their head before they enter kindergarten. Some people have musical talents that seem incredible. Recently I saw a piece on television about a young man whose first drawings were of staves of music and who was writing symphonies when his age was still in the single digits. Similarly, there are people whose bodies are so flexible that at young ages they already are doing amazing gymnastic feats. Indeed, we are not all created equal.

Of course environment is an important intervening factor. A home environment that allows a person to grow and develop in his or her field is very important, and indeed, most of the geniuses we hear about might never have achieved such stature without the support they got from their parents.

There are other talents that are less visible and less recognized. One of them is resilience. Some children seem to be born emotionally stronger than others. They seem to land on their feet no matter how much they are buffeted. These children possess a strength that most people don’t recognize: coping skills.

Coping skills are what allow a person to act in their own best interest in the worst of circumstances. They are what enable people to endure difficult situations without screaming or panicking. They provide for people a mechanism for dealing with difficult situations. Instead of taking the advice, “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout” (The Notebooks of Lazarus Long by Robert A. Heinlein) these people find a constructive response.

Once I had a young girl as a client. Her parents were going through a long and acrimonious divorce. It included public scenes, accusations, threats, and a lot of yelling. She was brought to me so that I could provide support. During the first session I asked her what she did when her parents were having a fight. She said that most of the time she would go to her room, close the door, and listen to music or call a friend. Sometimes she would take a shower. Sometimes she would go out and take a walk.. She proceeded to give me about ten more ways that she coped with her parents’ fighting. I was astounded. Here was a young girl who had the ability to make the world safe for herself by finding something to do to distract herself from the helpless and sad feelings that she could have been experiencing.

It was knowing her that helped me to understand that coping was indeed a skill that some people naturally possessed and others did not.

Some people, in stressful situations try to go head to head with the person or people who are causing them trouble. Often, that is counterproductive. When others are acting irrationally, then the best response is to stay rational. Often I tell my clients that in a stressful situation, “somebody has to be the grown-up.” Someone needs to keep thinking creatively and decide what the best course of action is. Sometimes it is to walk away. Sometimes it is to remain unruffled. Sometimes it is to comfort the person who is being unpleasant. Sometimes there is nothing to remedy the situation, but the person who copes with it effectively knows that at least he or she remained rational.

Parents can help their children by beginning to teach them coping skills early in life. Explaining to a hysterical three year old, “You don’t have to cry; you can tell me with words,” is the beginning of helping a child to understand that he or she doesn’t have to fall apart when things are not optimal. “Think of how handsome you will look when the barber is finished cutting your hair,” is a way of saying that one can cope with a process for the sake of the result. This will come in handy someday when the child will have tasks that do not give immediate rewards. “You are looking tense; why don’t you go outside and get some exercise” teaches the child that sometimes exercise can relieve stress. Parents should make note of how they themselves cope and teach those tricks to their children.

We are not all born as well equipped as my little client, but coping skills can be taught and practiced. The more techniques we learn, the better we are able to deal with our day to day lives.

Filed Under: Emotional health, Parenting, Relationships

Independence Day

May 12, 2005 by

Living in Israel is an intense experience, and living in Israel this past week has been an extremely intense experience. We all have been dealing with Remembrance Day for Israel’s soldiers and terror victims this past Tuesday night and Wednesday and with Independence Day that followed it on Wednesday night and Thursday.

I suppose Israel can be compared to one of my children. This was a child who was never indifferent about anything. His anger was anger and his joy was joy and no one could cry more bitterly nor laugh more heartily. I used to say about him that his nerve endings seemed to be closer to his skin surface than others. I called him my passionate child.

And Israel is very much like him; it is a place where emotions are high and contrasting emotions occur simultaneously.

So this week, people were buying memorial candles to light either in memory of their family members who had been killed in military service or terror attacks or in memory of all of our lost soldiers and innocent victims of terror At the same time, people were placing Israeli flags on their homes and their vehicles until the country was plastered with blue and while

All over the newspapers, airwaves, and posters appeared information about the memorial services that took place in cemeteries throughout the country. There was also information about all of the Independence Day concerts, ceremonies, street performances, military fly-bys, and fireworks displays that occurred in cities all over Israel.

Each year, Remembrance Day begins with a siren sounded at eight in the evening for one minute during which everyone and everything falls silent. No vehicles move on the road. No one speaks. After the siren there is a ceremony at the Western Wall that is televised throughout the country. By eight o’clock, all of the stores and restaurants and places of entertainment have closed.

There are memorial events throughout the country. The one we attended was a large gathering at the Jerusalem Convention Center at which family members and friends spoke about their lost loved ones interspersed with appropriate music. Most heartbreaking was listening to David Hatuel whose pregnant wife and four daughters were murdered by Arab terrorists last year. He spoke about them and about missing them, of course, but he also spoke of retaining his faith in G-d.

On Remembrance Day itself, stores are open. Children go to school and commemorate the day with ceremonies there, but the atmosphere is restrained. People seem to talk more quietly and have more patience with one another. Throughout the day, all that is shown on television are stories of those we have lost. One after another child appears in the screen as a baby in mother’s arms, a toddler, a schoolchild, a Bar Mitzvah boy, a few pictures of the teen years and then the terrible news that the family received. Sometimes there are stories of how the person died, his last words, his last video, the one that he was taking at the time of his death. Sometimes there are pictures of the scene—and always, the viewer is left with the feeling of loss and emptiness. One after another the precious lives that were lost become part of our consciousness. This year, musicians found poems written by some of the deceased soldiers and set them to music. Then Israeli artists performed these songs as a tribute to those who wrote the words.

Remembrance Day ends at Mount Herzl, in the area around Herzl’s tomb. There Independence Day is declared and the festivities begin. Just as restrained and solemn as Remembrance Day is, that is how exuberant and enthusiastic Independence Day is.

One of the most beautiful parts of the opening ceremonies is the lighting of the twelve torches, one for each tribe of Israel. People are chosen on the basis of their contribution to the society to light each torch. Each one has a story that inspires. One can’t help but be impressed with the people we live amongst, their myriad origins, cultures, religions, races, languages—that all have been woven into this wonderful crazy tapestry that is Israel.

We spent the later part of the evening in the woods not far from our home with about 50 other people, sitting around a campfire and singing songs to the accompaniment of an accordion and listening to their stories of growing up in Israel or arriving as immigrants in the early days of the state. The air was electric as we heard from afar other people singing too and listened to the booms of the fireworks from several nearby communities.

This morning we ate breakfast on our front patio, sitting in our garden, the sun warming us and our flag waving, and we toasted the next year, praying that that our leaders will make wise decisions and that the country will remain strong.

And then, this afternoon, like just about every other Israeli family, we all got together for a traditional cookout! Our son and daughter-in-law host his family and hers each year and this year the weather was pleasant and the children were cooperative and it was hard to believe that there were over 30 children in the house.

On our way home we heard on the news that all of the parks in the center of the country were completely filled- so much so that people were barbequing on the roadsides. Similarly, all of the beaches between Ashkelon and Herzliya were completely filled. There were traffic jams throughout the country and people were asked to have patience…

The downs and the ups, the sadness and the joy, the loss and the completeness, it’s enough to make one confused and upset. However, I think that this emotional shifting of gears is just one more example of the strength that has helped us as a people survive.

The theme this year for Holocaust Remembrance Day, just a week ago, was the difficulty of liberation. How does one go on after the pain? Yet people did it and formed new families and achieved and prospered. So each year, Israel gets to exercise its emotional muscles and we learn once again that after sadness there can be joy.

Filed Under: Emotional health, Family life, Israel, Spirituality

Mother’s Day

May 8, 2005 by

So it was Mother’s Day. Funny, something that had been a given since my birth is foreign to my experience these days. In Israel, Mother’s Day which has been transformed into Family Day, is observed in February. Most people who were brought up in the US completely forget about US Mother’s Day after their first year or two here.

I flash back to memories of my childhood in Philadelphia when my sister and I would walk to Castor Avenue and go from shop to shop looking for something special to give to our mother. How difficult the choice was! Nothing was good enough, pretty enough. What would she like? One year there was a small pink marble bowl on a pedestal that looked like a birdbath. Sitting astride the smooth shiny marble edges were two rough white marble birds. I loved it. We had it wrapped up and brought it to our mother. So intense was our anticipation of her joy at this quintessentially perfect gift that I have no memory of her actual reaction. I do know that it sat on the windowsill in the living room for many years.

Mother’s day was all about pleasing our mother, something that wasn’t such an easy task. I always wondered what it would be like to be the mother.

Well, what I can remember of my days as a mother of young children is some priceless gifts made of wood and tissue and glue and cardboard. I remember a plaster cast of someone’s hand and a fingerpaint print of someone else’s. But more than that, I remember the bright smiles and the exchanging of secret glances. I remember hugs and picnics and lots of laughing.

This morning, my older daughter called and asked if we would like a visit. She brought over her little girl, not yet 2 months old. Abigail looks so much like her mother did on a Mother’s day some years ago when she was one day old and her grandmothers came to visit me in the hospital. Then as now, I felt a sense of wonder and awe at being a mother, at being able to continue the line from the past into the future. Then as now, I am grateful to G-d for the privilege of being a mother.

Filed Under: Family life, Ramblings, Relationships, Spirituality

The Runaway Bride

May 4, 2005 by

Now it can be told: I was a runaway bride

Well, gee whiz… what’s so new about a bride running away? It’s exactly what I did.

I grew up in a home with the quintessential Jewish mother. Just getting up in the morning made me feel guilty. I was afraid to make myself anything more elaborate than coke for breakfast because it might change the karma of the kitchen. I remember my mother’s sense of betrayal when I chose to study philosophy instead of elementary education (which was what girls were supposed to study!). Only her friend’s comment, “she must be smart to study philosophy” made it OK.

In my social setting in the 1960s, the only way to be able to become an adult and make independent decisions was to leave home. But back then, a woman didn’t leave home until she went away to college (and since my parents were paying for college, they were able to prevent that), or get married.

So it was no shock to anyone who knew me well that by 19 I was engaged. When the engagement didn’t result in a wedding, I knew that I needed to get moving once again and so at 20, I got married.

And then I ran away……

with my husband to start a new life together…. And so far, it’s worked out, but we’re only 38 years into it.

Filed Under: Family life, Ramblings

My cousin Diane or The internet as a human lost and found

May 3, 2005 by

A few years ago I was living in Jerusalem while my husband was living in the US. The nights stretched out long and I had difficulty sleeping. It was then I began my hobby of genealogy.

I am an armchair genealogist. Anything that I don’t have to get out of my chair for is something worth exploring, but it if involves any real effort… well…

When my husband and I decided to get married, I went to meet my prospective in-laws. My mother-in-law told me about their family. They had some impressive relatives. She asked about my family. I knew of no one who was particularly noteworthy. When I came home and asked my father, he said, “Tell her you come from a long line of horse thieves.”

Well, there really weren’t any horse thieves that we knew of, but we certainly had no famous scholars, inventors, writers, artists, composers, and certainly no rabbis, so why would I make the effort to do any real digging? What I really wanted to know was what life was like for those people I did know about—my grandparents and my great-grandparents. Although I was born after the death of all of my great-grandparents, I was still eager to know as much as I could about them.

By the time I started searching, my parents had already passed away. I questioned my uncles, but they didn’t give me very much information.

One day I was sitting and thinking about where I could find additional information and I remembered that when my husband and I had lived in Pittsburgh, we had gotten in touch with cousins of my maternal grandmother. Perhaps they had information about my great-grandmother. I wondered if I could find them.

Here is what I remembered: We met them sometime in the 1970-1972 timeframe. My grandmother’s cousin’s name was Clara. She had a daughter named Sandy. Sandy had a daughter who had her “bas torah” at Rabbi Chinn’s synagogue in McKeesport, PA. That was it. That was everything. And, one of the facts was wrong.

I posted this information to the Jewish Genealogy newsgroup and within a day, I received a letter from a girl named Lara (who, coincidentally, had been in camp with my daughter Leah a couple of years earlier). Lara told me that her grandmother was a member of that synagogue and that her grandmother would be able to look at the plaques in the synagogue that list the Bas Torah girls and look at the 1970-1972 timeframe and she would know who had a mother named Sandy. Lara was living in Baltimore. She wrote again that day and told me that she had decided to go back to McKeesport to visit her grandparents that weekend and that she would be back in touch with me.

On that Sunday or Monday, I received a note from her telling me that my cousin would be contacting me and within a very few hours, I got a note from her.

But it wasn’t Sandy who wrote; it was Diane, the little girl I met all those years ago. She was grown up and my age now… OK, so I exaggerate a bit…

Diane called me from the US to talk and it was amazing. As we talked, it seemed to me that we were more like sisters than distant cousins. She remembered having visited our home in Pittsburgh and having studied with my husband. She had wanted to find us for 30 years and here we were, reunited through the internet through the kindness of Lara and her grandmother who cared enough to help.

Diane and her husband came to Israel to visit. We enjoyed touring with them, traveling to the Sea of Galilee and eating fish at a lovely restaurant at the water’s edge. We had a wonderful day taking them to Masada, to the Dead Sea at Ein Gedi, and to dinner at Mitzpe Yericho, a community overlooking Jericho, and watching the sun set over the Judean desert. We loved having them with us and have remained close.

As to genealogy: Although we are distant cousins (her great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were sister and brother), it’s amazing the physical traits and the character traits we have in common. We have the same warped sense of humor and we share the same values and lifestyle.

And my world is a much nicer place because of my cousin Diane.

Filed Under: Family life

Gardening and parenthood

May 3, 2005 by

One of the reasons I recommend the Writer’s Almanac is that it opens my eyes on a daily basis to the thoughts and points of view of others. Today’s poem “An Observation,” which can be found on the site, is about the tenderness of the gardener’s hand with the roots and the shoots of plants and how that ungloved hand, nurturing and protecting the plant is vulnerable to scratches and thorns. The last line reads “Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.”

I think of raising children and how one needs to be gentle so as not to bruise the tender growing sense of self of the child, but at the same time how parents sometimes feel emotionally beaten and abused in the process. Every parent at some point wonders if it’s worth it. Sometimes it seems that the gentler a parent is, the more scratched and scraped he or she is.

All of us developed within a framework of limits. In some families, the limits are very wide. “No, you may not have a 4th piece of cake.” And in some families the limits are very narrow, “You will sit at the table until you eat that last piece of okra; we do not waste food in this house.” Parents need to determine for themselves which behaviors are permitted and which are prohibited. Then they need to be gentle. They need to remain firm and consistent, but they need to be gentle.

Of course that means remaining ever vigilant as to our impact on our children’s developing sense of self and it means making ourselves vulnerable by listening to and empathizing with their feelings. However, it is our gentleness especially when our children are at their least lovable, that will nurture them and enable them to develop into the kind of people we hope they will be.

Filed Under: Family life, Parenting

Connections

May 1, 2005 by

This is a pretty lonely world. We are born into families who are there to love us and to nurture us, and if we are lucky, we learn to feel secure when we are with our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. They provide a safety net for us and help us learn which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. Their responses are the cues that help us to develop social skills.

Later in life, we are not held in the family in the same protective way. If our parents have been able to acknowledge our emerging maturity, then we are more and more on our own to make decisions, to figure things out, to plan, and to work at what we value. The freedom to choose is good and natural, but it removes us from the childhood cocoon.

However, we never really leave our parents and those we are close to. Their ideas, adages, and phrases remain with us for our entire lives. Karl Tomm, a well-respected family therapist has posited that the notion of an individual as a closed, self-contained unit, is an illusion. In fact, he believes that we incorporate into ourselves bits and pieces of all of the people in our lives who have been significant to us. He calls those parts of other people that become parts of us too the internalized other. When we remember what our mother would have said in a current situation or what our father might have quipped, we are hearing in ourselves that internalized other.

Likewise, we spread ourselves around to all of the people with whom we have significant relationships. They may say, “I remember your saying…” Or “when I am upset, I think about what you would tell me to do.”  This he calls “the distributed self.”

Karl Tomm uses those concepts (or at least did when I heard him several years ago) to help couples understand how their spouse is feeling and what motivates him or her to act. When I saw him working with the concept in a case demonstration, I was unbelievably impressed. However, what touched me even more was the spiritual aspect of his theory. It helps me to understand how we human beings interconnect, how people we love never really are gone because they reside in us, and most of all, how important it is to be careful about what we say or do to others. Our words are uttered in a moment, but their impact can last many lifetimes.

Filed Under: Parenting, Relationships, Spirituality

How to be a winner

April 29, 2005 by

This past week, Elisheva, Avital, and Dina visited us. They are three young sisters who are very close in age. There was at least one occasion upon which one of the sisters said something to another that made the other feel bad.

When the injured sister told me about it, purely for informational purposes, I am certain, I explained to her that I was not really in a position to make the remark not have been said. In fact, I was powerless to change the past. There are some things we just have to live with. My response was not terribly satisfying to my granddaughter, but it did trigger some thoughts on my part.

Many people believe that when someone has said something thoughtless or insulting or hurtful, there needs to be some resolution of the situation. Of course, in civilized society there often is. “I am sorry, Mr. Durante, that was a thoughtless remark I made about noses” or “Sorry, Mr. Clinton, I meant to ask you if you would like a peach, not an impeachment.” But there are more times that no apology is given and other times that even the apology is not satisfactory. “I’m sorry I said I only tripped because you have big feet; your feet aren’t really that big.”

At times like these, it is important for people to understand that sometimes you just need to live with it and go on. There are rude and impolite people in the world. Sometimes you will have the experience of being hurt or insulted by total strangers, but that doesn’t mean that you are any less of a person.

Things that other people say do not necessarily represent a truth about you. Often what people say about others only gives one a clue as to their own character. It is a wise practice not to become friendly with someone who is unkind to others. Someday, you might end up being that other!

I believe that a person has an inner core, a part of himself that is his essence. No one can touch that.

One of my heroes in this world devoid of heroes is Natan Sharansky. In his book, Fear No Evil, he writes of being held in the Russian gulag in a tiny dark cell, in solitary confinement. Yet, he always knew he was a free man. He never gave himself up. He recited memorized passages from the Bible. He played out chess games in his mind. He devised tricks to play on the guards. They had his body, but they never got close to his soul.

That is how he triumphed. That is how all of us can triumph over the negative people in our lives. We need to hold onto that inner core and know that it is strong and will always remain with us, no matter what others may say or do. That’s how to be a winner.

Filed Under: Parenting, Relationships

The seder is ended but the grandchildren linger on

April 26, 2005 by

This year we had just one extended family of our children with us for seder. Since the seder was over after midnight, my daughter’s three older children stayed over with us. I had forgotten how nice it was to have smiling happy faces greet me in the morning- to see people for whom the world is still full of surprises and possibilities. It was a pleasure to take them to services with me and to have the girls with us the whole rest of the day. They are bright and clever as well as beautiful.

However, we were not prepared for the next installment of the grandchild saga…. Yesterday we received a call from our son that his wife had fallen and hurt herself. We went to watch the children while they went to the hospital. When they returned, our daughter-in-law had a cast that immobilized her knee and her husband had to carry her into the house.

After some talking and consideration, we took their three daughters home with us until further notice. These three girls are very special not only for their own qualities, but because they sing and dance together. This morning at breakfast, we had a complete concert including solos. When I asked them if I could use their names, Elisheva and Avital said I could and Dina said it didn’t matter. All of them are quick and witty and clever and adorable.

So today, I am back 25 years, wondering what to do with these girls for this vacation day just as I had wondered what to do with my children on vacation when they were young.

But for my children, there was no Passover vacation. Their childhoods were spent in Army posts in the US and in Germany. My concern then was how I could pack a kosher for Passover lunch for them to take to school. When they were asking the four questions, they were among a handful in the places we lived. We were strangers in a strange land. Our family possessed a rhythm that was unlike that of our neighbors. People would try and guess what we were doing because our practices were so different from theirs.

Once we had gone to a kosher restaurant in Philadelphia that was run by Israelis and they were selling hats like those worn on a kibbutz. We bought four- two for us and one for each of the children we had then. Our neighbor remarked to me a couple of weeks later that her son had noticed the hats we all were wearing for that holiday we had had a couple of weeks ago. I wracked my brain trying to understand what she was talking about and realized that we had all worn our hats one day. The neighbors were sure it was a custom of some odd Jewish holiday!

We spoke Hebrew in our home and our children never forgot who they were, but when we were able to bring them to Israel for a family vacation, they finally found a place where they belonged.

One by one, they found their way home, and so now, they and their children share the rhythms of our people with the rest of our country, and we are blessed to have all sorts of holiday activities to choose from to entertain our grandchildren.

But to tell the truth, just being with them is enough of a treat for me!

Filed Under: Family life, Parenting

Passover

April 17, 2005 by

I grew up in the 1950s in Philadelphia. My family was, what seemed at the time, a typical Jewish family. We would look forward to Passover as the beginning of the spring. In its honor, my mother would take my sister and me out shopping so that we would have fancy new clothing to wear to the two “seders” that we went to . One night, we would attend the seder at my mother’s parents’ home and the other night, we would have seder at my father’s parents’ home. Through some unknown mathematical wizardry despite the fact that all of the married couples had obligations to both sides of their families, each seder included all of my aunts, uncles and cousins on that side of the family, so in two nights, we saw all of our close relatives.

Of course our new clothing was always spring clothing and we wore it no matter what. I can remember one cold rainy afternoon being all dressed up in a sleeveless white linen dress and wondering how strange it would be to cover it with a heavy winter coat in order to go to my grandparents’ home.

Each year, my sister and I would enjoy the contrast between the two seders. At Grandmom and Grandpop Mager’s, there was a full seder. Grandpop would sit at the end of the table with a big black satin skullcap and start with the very first word in the hagada and except for the meal, would not stop until the last. My sister and I and our cousin Ada always used to listen for the first fifteen minutes or so because they were interesting. They included the Kiddush and the parsley and the four questions and singing “avadim hayyinu,” but after that, we settled into counting the pages until the meal. One year, Ada and I surprised our grandfather by singing the songs with enthusiasm and even getting up to dance with each other in the middle of the meal. I can still see the broad smile and the tears in his eyes.

At Grandmom and Grandpop Tizer’s. there was less formality. The seder at their house was abbreviated. We only hit the high spots, but we all were there together. They used to order seltzer in bottles that could squirt and they would usually have a case of seltzer bottles at the back of their store which was just at the threshold of their living room. My cousin Murray loved to take those bottles and squirt people. My grandparents usually served flavored sodas when we visited, but on Passover, they didn’t have any because there wasn’t any kosher for Passover flavored soda available in Philadelphia. Each year they would tell us that if we poured a little wine in our glasses and then filled them with seltzer, it would taste just like grape soda. Every year, we fell for it and every year we were disappointed. Every year, Murray would try to show us how he could eat a whole teaspoon of horseradish and every year he would turn bright red and beg for water. At the end of the seder each year, my grandmother would say, “we should live and be well—next year I will take you all to Israel for seder.” I knew that she really meant it.

This year we will be having seder in Israel as we have for the last five years. Joining us will be four of our grandchildren and throughout Israel the other sixteen of my grandchildren will also be sitting at seders. I like to think it is because of the effort of my grandparents. I know they would be proud.

Filed Under: Family life
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