"The Best Advice"

 

         Just like most people, I’ve received my share of “deconstructive” advice over the years. You know what I mean. The two cents worth that a busybody must impart with great sincerity and greater hypocrisy. You smile and nod your head with a vague look in your eyes. You bite your cheek to prevent spewing your desired response, and instead you politely say, “Thank you so much for your advice.” Then you go on ahead and ignore it all because you doubt the motivations of this “well meaning” advisor.
         However, I do know that some people in my life bestowed wonderful tidbits of guidance and philosophy that carried me through rough times. Many of these pieces of advice came from unexpected sources when I least foresaw the impact of their wise words. I’ve grown to cherish these principles and thought I’d pass them along today. I don’t want to present these canons in any particular order because at different points in my life, they’ve taken on different degrees of importance.

• 1.  Don’t have a television set in your bedroom. Couples don’t need that distraction. (This came from my mother right before I got married.)
• 2.  Try everything twice because you may not like it the first time around. (My father’s marital advice. So many different levels to this tidbit . . .)
• 3.  Never stay in a relationship if there’s physical or emotional abuse. (Both of my parents were very firm on this.)
• 4.  You have your entire life to reach for goals and dreams. (My father finished college at the age of 48 and started a new career at 50.)
• 5.  Enjoy each and every stage of child rearing and parenthood. (Remember, your relationship with your children lasts your entire lifetime.)
• 6.  Sometimes, you just have to put your head down and plow through the bullshit by sticking out a bad situation until you get to the “good stuff.” (Delayed gratification leads to such tremendous rewards.)
• 7.  Choice becomes a part of every day. We cannot often control what happens to us, but we can choose how we respond to those events. (I’ve always had trouble with this because I want to try to control situations/events/people. You know, trouble shoot and prevent; but somehow that rarely works.)
• 8.  Plan for the worst, but hope for the best. (These words guide my daily life now more than ever.)
• 9.  You can spend your life miserable looking at what you don’t have, or you can spend your life happy with what you do have. (I can never understand why some people choose to be unhappy, but they do.)

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

        

"The Best Advice"

         Just like most people, I’ve received my share of “deconstructive” advice over the years. You know what I mean. The two cents worth that a busybody must impart with great sincerity and greater hypocrisy. You smile and nod your head with a vague look in your eyes. You bite your cheek to prevent spewing your desired response, and instead you politely say, “Thank you so much for your advice.” Then you go on ahead and ignore it all because you doubt the motivations of this “well meaning” advisor.

         However, I do know that some people in my life bestowed wonderful tidbits of guidance and philosophy that carried me through rough times. Many of these pieces of advice came from unexpected sources when I least foresaw the impact of their wise words. I’ve grown to cherish these principles and thought I’d pass them along today. I don’t want to present these canons in any particular order because at different points in my life, they’ve taken on different degrees of importance.

1.       Don’t have a television set in your bedroom. Couples don’t need that distraction. (This came from my mother right before I got married.)

2.      Try everything twice because you may not like it the first time around. (My father’s marital advice. So many different levels to this tidbit . . .)

3.      Never stay in a relationship if there’s physical or emotional abuse. (Both of my parents were very firm on this.)

4.      You have your entire life to reach for goals and dreams. (My father finished college at the age of 48 and started a new career at 50.)

5.      Enjoy each and every stage of childrearing and parenthood. (Remember, your relationship with your children lasts your entire lifetime.)

6.      Sometimes, you just have to put your head down and plow through the bullshit by sticking out a bad situation until you get to the “good stuff.” (Delayed gratification leads to such tremendous rewards.)

7.      Choice becomes a part of every day. We cannot often control what happens to us, but we can choose how we respond to those events. (I’ve always had trouble with this because I want to try to control situations/events/people. You know, trouble shoot and prevent; but somehow that rarely works.)

8.      Plan for the worst, but hope for the best. (These words guide my daily life now more than ever.)

9.      You can spend your life miserable looking at what you don’t have, or you can spend your life happy with what you do have. (I can never understand why some people choose to be unhappy, but they do.)

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

        

“Looking for Answers”

         Ever wish for the power to see into the future? Ever long for the ability to know ahead of time if the path you’ve set out on will take you where you really want to go?

In my twenties, I set out on a journey with David that meant we selected a trail and forged ahead no matter what barrier blocked our journey. During the first years, we struggled with meeting basic necessities. Like most people, our twenties meant scrounging for every penny just to make it through each month. I remember evaluating everything by gallons of milk or gas. Did we need to go to a movie? That would be “spending” three gallons of milk on entertainment. How much did I want that new top? It would cost me the same as a tank of gas to go see my family. By being budget conscious and frugal, we pulled together enough money to purchase our home, but it wasn’t easy. Our next goal, having a child, proved an unexpected challenge, too. While many of our friends and family members seemed to pop out babies with great ease, we found ourselves looking for the answers to infertility. The answer we found, adoption, led us onto the wonderful path of parenthood.

         In our thirties, David had the opportunity to start his own business and work from our home. We couldn’t turn down the chance of having one parent at home at all times. The freelance business brought its own trials. Clients loved to send contracts with short turnarounds on completing the work, but then they bogged down the payment process. Sometimes a project’s payment wouldn’t come in for more than two months. If we’d had a crystal ball that could have predicted the shortcomings and obstacles of self-employment, would David have attempted his business? Even with hindsight on the difficulties we faced, we probably would have made the same choices because the benefits of having a parent at home outweighed the uncertainties of sporadic income.

         Every decision we made as a couple, we made with the goal of keeping our family strong. Many times, life piled seemingly insurmountable obstacles on the trail before us. Often, we plowed forward blindly on the pure faith that if we put family first we couldn’t get off track. Sometimes onlookers from the sidelines catcalled and jeered, trying to steer us into another direction. They’d throw large bricks of doubt directly in front of us that made us lose our footing and momentum. Eventually, we learned to block out the noise of the faceless crowd and kept true to our trek.

         I thought, foolishly, that I’d eventually hit an age where everything would fall into place. Where the wisdom of my years and experience would mean I wouldn’t flounder on this winding trail of life. However, questions still plague my days and nights. Obstructions make me pause and second guess myself. I find that I’m still trying to divine the future as I take another loop along the path. My soul searching illuminates the road just far enough ahead for me to know that keeping family whole and strong will secure safe passage.

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

“The Best Advice”

         Just like most people, I’ve received my share of “deconstructive” advice over the years. You know what I mean. The two cents worth that a busybody must impart with great sincerity and greater hypocrisy. You smile and nod your head with a vague look in your eyes. You bite your cheek to prevent spewing your desired response, and instead you politely say, “Thank you so much for your advice.” Then you go on ahead and ignore it all because you doubt the motivations of this “well meaning” advisor.

         However, I do know that some people in my life bestowed wonderful tidbits of guidance and philosophy that carried me through rough times. Many of these pieces of advice came from unexpected sources when I least foresaw the impact of their wise words. I’ve grown to cherish these principles and thought I’d pass them along today. I don’t want to present these canons in any particular order because at different points in my life, they’ve taken on different degrees of importance.

1.       Don’t have a television set in your bedroom. Couples don’t need that distraction. (This came from my mother right before I got married.)

2.      Try everything twice because you may not like it the first time around. (My father’s marital advice. So many different levels to this tidbit . . .)

3.      Never stay in a relationship if there’s physical or emotional abuse. (Both of my parents were very firm on this.)

4.      You have your entire life to reach for goals and dreams. (My father finished college at the age of 48 and started a new career at 50.)

5.      Enjoy each and every stage of child rearing and parenthood. (Remember, your relationship with your children lasts your entire lifetime.)

6.      Sometimes, you just have to put your head down and plow through the bullshit by sticking out a bad situation until you get to the “good stuff.” (Delayed gratification leads to such tremendous rewards.)

7.      Choice becomes a part of every day. We cannot often control what happens to us, but we can choose how we respond to those events. (I’ve always had trouble with this because I want to try to control situations/events/people. You know, trouble shoot and prevent; but somehow that rarely works.)

8.      Plan for the worst, but hope for the best. (These words guide my daily life now more than ever.)

9.      You can spend your life miserable looking at what you don’t have, or you can spend your life happy with what you do have. (I can never understand why some people choose to be unhappy, but they do.)

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

        

“New Voyages”

         I never want to spend my life fretting over the words never said, or the acts never completed. The changes in our lives during this last year bring home to me the importance of giving our best to those we love. Sometimes, I get so caught up in the minutiae of a situation that I bog everyone else down. “The Big Picture” always calls for taking risks and believing with heart over head. That outlook proves difficult for my often straight column approach to life, but whenever I’ve chosen my heart, I’ve never gone in the wrong direction. Whenever I push away my heart, anxiety suffocates me. Taking a breath, eating a meal, and sleeping at night all become impossible.

My head analysis tells me the “right” decisions, the cautious choices that assure safe passage across rough seas. My head won’t even weigh anchor if the voyage looks too dangerous.  The head must have life boats in tip-top condition. It makes certain there are enough jackets available for unexpected passengers. It plots my route and stays true to my course. But no matter how carefully my head plans for every exigency, a tidal wave broadsides me, flips my vessel over, and makes life boats and life jackets useless.

         My head, you see, doesn’t calculate for the totally unpredictable event. It cannot. That’s the heart’s job. The heart latches onto dreams and nightmares. The heart foresees the tsunami and still sets sail. The heart accepts risk because life’s random. That capriciousness doesn’t dissuade the heart. The heart believes.

         In the rough seas I now traverse, my heart speaks strongly to me. Believe. Believe. Believe. And so I trust my decisions. The moment I listen to the murmuring song of my heart, the decisions I must make ring true and clear. The head will step forward eventually. It will find the means of making the dreams a reality. By singing along with the heart, the voyage will prove challenging, but not impossible.    

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman             

“Blending in Marriage”

            After thirty-two years of marriage, friends often query, “How did you stay together so long? What’s the trick?”

            

            I usually shrug my shoulders and shake my head, “I don’t know. Lots of love, but sometimes you fall out of synch with each other. The love may not feel as overpowering as it once was; yet if you wait it out, it comes back stronger and better.” I’ll pause for effect, and then continue, “You have to be friends as well as lovers. And you have to be willing to give up some of the things that are important to you as a person in order to reach for what’s best as a couple. Marriage is never easy—but nothing in life is, right? You’ll both feel anger, frustration and hurt. Own the negative as well as the positive. Always pull together when there’s a problem instead of heading in separate directions or relying on someone outside of your marriage to ‘fix’ things when they go wrong.”

            One of the tricks of marriage is taking two separate lives, with different upbringings and experiences, and blending them together into something wonderful and new. In the early years of our marriage, we made conscious choices of the things we liked or disliked about our childhood. For example, I hated that we moved every two or three years. I wanted to settle on a city or town, sink in roots, and build a life in one place. That didn’t matter as much to David at first. Later on, when I started looking for a bigger house, it turned out David rooted more deeply than I did; and so we added on to our home instead of moving.

            Our biggest area of contention those first years? Keeping house. I grew up a clean freak. Baseboards and door trims got a white glove inspection when we lived on base, and I transferred that tidiness into my adult life. Many of our early arguments revolved around housework. David always pitched in, but did such a horrible job that I ended up redoing many of his chores. After one explosion on why he didn’t clean something correctly, he admitted that he rarely did housework growing up. His bungling attempts, which I misinterpreted as a passive-aggressive dodge of chores, turned out to be total lack of knowledge of how to get something spiffy clean.

            When David and I had been married only a few months, he asked one night, “What do you do to the sheets?”

             “Sheets?” I echoed, puzzled.

          “They always feel so smooth. And they always smell good. Do you do something special with them?”

             “No. I just wash them every week."

           David paused, “Oh, that’s it, then. We didn’t wash our sheets every week. Sometimes more than a month would go by.” He made similar comments on the towels that never became cardboard stiff or smelled sour. Although all of David’s clothing when we first married fit into one paper sack, I was shocked to learn that he’d been told to turn dirty underwear inside-out and wear them a second time!

          These differences in upbringing caused friction during those first years. I couldn’t understand why David didn’t just jump in to clean something, often forgetting that he truly didn’t see that something was dirty because his level of tolerance was so much higher than my own.

            Eventually, we divided house cleaning and yard work not by the usual male/female divisions, but by what each of us likes to do most (or least hates to do). David prefers “picking up” or straightening up clutter. He likes to vacuum, cook, and clean the kitchen. I prefer dusting and laundry. We tackled grocery shopping together until recently. Both of us like working in the yard. Usually David will weed-eat while I’ll mow. We team up for clipping hedges, and I love to piddle in the garden

            Blending occurred in many other areas of our lives. Even after all of these years, we’ll sometimes find ourselves discussing a difference (yes, they still exist) and figuring out the best way to fuse two ways of viewing something into one solution. During this past year, we’ve had new challenges and changes that could strain a marriage; yet we seem to have mastered this blending skill. And frankly, it’s the mixing and merging that makes life interesting. 

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman 

“Fast Forward”

            Piddling through days requires conscious effort on my part. I frequently remind myself now that I don’t have to schedule every minute of every hour with crossing off an item from my “To Do” list. When I taught, there never seemed to be enough time for everything. I’d head into work extra early, crank up the music, and speed through my morning routine. During my conference periods, grading took priority if I didn’t have any parent conferences scheduled. If I managed to whittle down the pile by one or two classes, reading a book or visiting with another teacher became my reward. For eight years, I never returned straight home after work. Once my mother moved to San Antonio, my after school hours started at her apartment—in the early years we’d visit, later on I’d do her cooking and cleaning; and after she moved to assisted living, I helped her get ready for bed. The second phase of my day started once I finally arrived home. Evening chores demanded attention. I’d learned early on that I resented spending entire weekends doing house work, so I divvied chores onto different evenings.

            Somewhere along the way, I learned how to move into warp drive whenever necessary. In the time it took David to do one chore, I’d run whither and thither accomplishing several things at once. Our joke became that I lived in “Fast Forward” mode while he enjoyed “Still Pause.” With retirement, I’ve found it difficult to move to a slower pace. I tumbled into bed the other morning at 3 AM, woke up the next morning and mentioned that I needed to start the wash. It took a moment for me to realize that I can actually put off doing the laundry for another day. I could blow it off for the entire week if I want!

            Thinking back, I’ve realized that much of my life, I’ve pushed that “Fast Forward” button and zipped so quickly through events that I’ve almost missed them. I spent so much of my youth focusing on the next challenge, or the next expectation, that I rarely paused to enjoy living. My future focused goal setting propelled and compelled me to prepare for tomorrow without allowing me to savor today. My advice to the generation behind me? Don’t rush living. Learn to pause and appreciate success before rushing onto the next quest.   

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

“Insight—”

If they hurt you by their thoughtlessness

            Don’t forgive

If they forget to say, “We care”

            Don’t excuse

If they break all of their promises

            Don’t condone

If they make you feel guilty

            Don’t endure

If they place the blame on you

            Don’t accept

If they make demands upon you

            Don’t embrace

If they break your heart

            Walk away

Copyright 1995 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

Sometimes it's easy to give advice when you're watching someone else struggle through a relationship. However, having "Insight-" won't make your suggestions any easier to follow.