Siblings - an arc in the circle of life.........

Reconnections

Our siblings are some of the people in our circle of life who can actively share in the joy and the memories of our childhood. Unfortunately, along our life journey, circumstances, some out of our control and some of our own making, can cause a relationship with our brother or sister to break or become fraught with tension, resentment and anger. When we experience such intense negative feelings in our relationship with our siblings it can become very daunting to even approach the idea of healing the rift. It may feel intimidating to start mending fences, but the 'family that was' is the tie that binds us, and through reconciliation it can be very rewarding to have our siblings be a consistent part of our life, as well as our children's lives.

As in all relationships, it takes multitudes of love and effort to make the sibling relationship a positive one. To be able to rebuild the relationship we need to walk away from the history that caused the friction. We can not focus on placing blame, and instead accept that our goal can not be total agreement on everything. Leaving room for different perspectives is very important. The goal of our reconciliation must mean letting go of the concept of being personally right.  It is therefore not necessary to rehash all the old, negative feelings - these must be set aside - but in the process we should be ever mindfully aware of meddlesome troublemakers, be they inside or outside of our family.

No family is without it's problems - the blending of different personalities is never easy and  accepting to ignore the foibles of others is definitely difficult, but by restoring peace to our sibling relationship we will not only benefit ourselves but will be able to bring harmony into the heart of a parent - mother or father - , who has been torn by the division of their children - children they love equally and want only that they experience the loving sibling connection that was nurtured in their family from babyhood to adulthood - a chain that they never expected could be broken. 

Reconnecting with an estranged sibling is possible. Instead of looking back on the relationship and seeing pain, mistakes and heartache we can look ahead and see strength, learned lessons and pride.  With the right attitude and communication, the links in the broken family chain can come together again and siblings can move in the direction of a greater closeness.

In every thought there is power for change.....

Additions To My Collection Of Random Thoughts

My journey has taught me:

That I can not reach for anything new if my head is still full of my past

That when I acknowledge my self-worth, no one can make me feel worthless

That I can steer myself in any direction I choose

That I should never let what others expect of me dictate what I expect from myself

That my life can be different if I don't allow others to poison my day with their negative thoughts or opinions

That other peoples opinions of me do not have to be my reality

That some people will like me for no reason and some people will not like me for no reason

That I will see the true colours of someone when I am no longer beneficial to their life

That I should not be sad any longer for being without the people in my life who are happy being without me in their life

That I can love the people who treat me right and forget about the ones who don't

That sometimes it is better to leave a broken relationship (personal/family/friend/work) than to hurt myself trying to put it back together

That if someone wants to be part of my  life they'll make an effort to be in it - they should put me there - I shouldn't have to fight for a spot

That I should not keep a spot in my heart for someone who doesn't make the effort to stay in my life

That when someone treats me like an option I can narrow their choices by removing myself from their life - it's that simple

That I should never chase love, affection or attention - if it isn't given freely by another person, it isn't worth having 

That I will no longer let someone take me for granted as I am now strong enough to walk away

That I'd rather have no friends than fake friends

That no matter how I feel, I must get up, get dressed and show up for life

That I will not let anyone break my soul

That pain has given me lessons that have taught me to be who I am today

  

My life journey has shown me that we can house the bodies of our children, but not their souls.....

Growing Up 

When my third granddaughter Rhianne was barely three she was already acting like an adult-in-training . She loved to wear her Mummy's shoes, strutting like she was born knowing how to balance in heels, her feet dragging only because the shoes were far from the right size for her. No matter how many times I tried to explain to her, as she pushed her dolls around in her doll carriage, that real Moms don't wear their high heels when they take their babies for a walk, Rhianne simply didn't care to hear about it. She turned her nose up at me and continued pushing her way around the family room, stopping only to readjust the trailng scarf wrapped loosely around her neck.

She was always eager to talk to anyone willing to listen and periodically she would stop to sit and chat and play with the blue veins on my hands, pulling them up and watching them fall back and then state that I must be very old, and then toddle off again, into her own little world. On occasion, she would walk by and lift up her shirt and I would laugh and tell her that I could see her belly button. She then would stop and lift up my shirt to make sure that I had a belly button too. Sometimes when she was feeling particularly close, she would announce that we were friends forever but sometimes, when she was feeling particularly out of sorts, she would declare that she and I were not friends anymore. Her need to exert her opinions and individuality constantly made me aware that she was definitely her own person and I was glad that she had such a strong character, even if it would need to sometimes be tamed along her life journey from babyhood to toddler to pre-teen. 

As she grew more into herself, leaving behind her babyish looks and jumping right into  toddlerhood, I was amazed by her ability to watch and learn, and mimic the actions of the adults around her. She would play dress up constantly, and repeat the words and conversations she had heard, always placing them in the right context in her playtime scenarios. And all the while she would wear her high heeled shoes - to day-care and/or any family function she attended. She even argued the need to wear them in the winter snow.

While she took such care to become part of the 'adult' world around her, I so desperately wanted to keep her young and innocent forever. I didn't want to reach the time when she would give up her pretend existence and her high heel obsession.  I wanted her to stay who she was - idiosyncracies and all. I wanted to continually be able to witness the times when she was so clearly amazed by the world she could hardly contain herself. I wanted to play games with her forever. I wanted to always fall into her contagious smile and hear her adorable giggle. She brought such a free-spirited happines into my life - and filled even my worst days - with a grandmother's joy.

I continue to watch the changes in her as she is now in her pre-teen years, and I can't think of a more amazing gift than her existence, particularly after her very traumatic and precarious medical beginning. I am now anxious to see the paths that she will choose to travel along her life journey because if who she is now is any indication, she's on her way to becoming someone very special, high heels and all!

The amount of happiness we have depends on the amount of freedom in our heart.....

Overcoming Perfectionism

She had always been striving to be 100% -  to be more than just enough. This had been going on all her life.  In elementary school, the importance of getting all those A's, being the teacher's pet, always getting the gold star. In high school, being smart, being popular, being good at sports. Whichever path she chose to fit into, there was always the need to be the best. She always needed to excel. Wanted to be the perfect child. Not to even mention the pressure to be the perfect parent and to have the house with the white picket fence.

She had memories from her childhood and young adult years - she remembered people having hobbies, doing things they enjoyed with no value system attached. Whether it was painting, knitting, writing poetry of making furniture in the garage, the point of doing these things was the joy.  She didn't remember a whole lot of apologies being made about how something wasn't up to some pre-defined set of standards. The end product might have wound up on a prominent wall or it might have stayed hidden in the garage. The point was the experience, not the outcome. 

Somewhere along her early life journey there was a change in values - the bar had been set so high that it became impossible to just let life take its course. In some recess of her mind she could not just simply enjoy her life as she had chosen to use each activity she pursued on any given day as a defining point of who she was. Her attempts at artwork were never good enough to hang in an art gallery so she lost the joy of just putting paint on a canvas and having fun; her dyed Easter eggs were a bit amateurish and the color a bit blurry; her poetry made sense to her but others with whom she shared her work didn't understand her thoughts or words. She never seemed to be able to score as many baskets in the basketball game at school; her down hill ski runs were never as good as were those with whom she skied; her high jumping heights could have been higher.....and, as her life moved on she continued to pursue each and every day striving for perfection. The pie crust was never flakey enough, the Christmas turkey could have been a little less dry; her attempts at writing never seemed to be good enough to win a contest and/or good enough to be published. No matter what she attempted, it was never good enough. She was not enough. Instead of feeling the fun of pursuing something she liked to do, she used everything as a scale of her own value, so each time something fell short of her personal benchmark, in her mind it was actually her falling short of being perfect.

Through life's lessons she has now become aware that through her need to be perfect she had shut herself off from a wealth of joy, of fun, of pure pleasure. Now, if each pursuit is no longer a review of her personal worth, her world can open up. She can detach from the outcome, She can even start a project and not feel that she needs to finish it and what a freedom filling concept that is. Life can be simple - no 1st place ribbons needed! She has learned now that she is okay - perfect in her imperfection - and it is okay to be average, even to be below average sometimes. It is okay to just be. She now revels in the comfort of mediocrity. She now seeks joy as her end result and the path that gets her there is irrelevant. She now makes no apologies for a cake with a sunken layer - it's just a cake after all. 

      

Along my journey it has been liberating to discover that I do not always have to be in control and that in the process of letting go, I can be free.....

Letting Go

I used to be excellent at being in control - at least the kind of control that I thought I had, the kind that would wake me up in the middle of the night with thoughts of what needed to be done, what relationships I needed to tend to, and what my future might look like, should look like, or probably would look like. It wasn't as if I woke up due to some unknown force and those thoughts slowly crept into my awareness. The thoughts were already fully constructed entities soaring through my mind before my eyes even had a chance to open. I started my days in total control craziness!

The truth, I discovered, was that I was never really in control. I didn't have control over the people in my life that I thought were my mainstays and I didn't have control over whether situations in my life remained firmly in tact or fell apart at the seams, so when the winds of change blew in, I was knocked flat on my face.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take hurricane force winds to knock a control freak over, it only takes a small breeze. I had so much invested in the outcome that anything different from what I expected became a massive blow. Controlling anything takes a ridiculous amount of energy, for little reward. In fact, the reward is even more of a sham because it wasn't me that made the situation the way it was - it was likely what would have happened anyway, minus all the meddling on my part.  

In reality, all the moments in my life that I would call my 'worst' have one thing in common: they all turned out okay in the end. No matter the anxiety involved, in some way or another life's happenings have worked themselves through. Maybe not perfectly, and some events somewhat life shattering to certain degrees, but I survived, picked up the pieces, and moved 

on.  And, in the end, what did I have to show for all the energy I had put into wondering how things could possibly fall into place. Nothing. Not a thing.

So, I am working on giving up the reigns. I am still an active participant in my  life, I've just learned to be more laid-back, and now exist with the 'go with the flow' kind of way. I have made that much of a change as the paths I have travelled on my life journey have taught me that it is much easier to let everything just be and then figure out the logistics later.