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I wanted to smack her mother. For those of you who haven't seen it (and by the way, "Made" is an EXCELLENT show), the girl is terribly afraid of calling attention to herself, speaking in public, etc. And though she's beautiful, she's a terrible loser, in that she quits EVERYthing without even trying, breaks out in tears if she has to speak to a stranger, and just seems to yawn her way through life. So I sort of wanted to smack her too, but whose fault is it that she got to go through life using tears to get out of anything scary? Enter her mother. "She won't make it," says her mother, when asked about her daughter auditioning for the school play. "She never finishes anything, she's a quitter, she won't do it, she'll NEVER do it." A fear of public speaking is one thing, a mother who doesn't even believe in you is quite another. Here this girl was, asking for help from MTV to get over her fear, and her mother wouldn't even say "Good for you", just "You'll never do it." How is any child going to excell in anything if their own parents don't support them? ***** This is another issue I had with my parents. (And let me first say that even though I sometimes talk about disagreeing with my mother, she is the nicest woman in the whole wide world.) But I was never encouraged to do ANYthing with my life. I think I was expected to go to college until I found a husband to marry, then I would have children and go through life just like my mother did, as a Mommy. There were many times when I came home with some new ambition, only to have the possibility knocked right out of me. "You have to go to school for too long, you'll never make it." That's all I ever heard. So I did what they expected, I got married and became a Mommy. ***** As long as I've had kids I have encouraged them to better themselves, to overcome obstacles, to not let ANYthing get in their way. I mean, with lives like we have, we'd all be quivering balls of slobber under our beds if we let our problems get the better of us. I haven't ever accepted "I can't" to come out of their mouths. ***** Buffy loves to watch that new show "Joan of Arcadia". Friday's show had the mother asking a priest if she could pray for her son's legs to heal (he's in a wheelchair). "Would you be sad if Spike couldn't ever walk again?" Buffy asked me. "Well, I hope that never happens to him, but there are a lot worse things in life than sitting in a wheelchair," I told her. "I'd just make sure he got a good wheelchair, then we'd get him one of those racing wheelchairs and we'd help him learn to race and play basketball, whatever he wanted. Look at Grandpa, he was in a wheelchair for 2 years and he has a great life, there's almost nothing he can't do." And I meant every word of it. If Spike lost the use of his legs, there's not much to sit around mourning. You pick yourself up and figure out how to get through life without the use of your legs, what else can you do? That's certainly nothing to cry about. "I can't believe how incredibly strong and CALM you were when your house burned down," I hear all the time. What the heck else am I going to be? The house burned down, I didn't have a place to live, but I knew people would take care of us and I knew that when it was all over and done with, we would be okay. Get a storage unit, shut off Water and Phone, dig my stuff out of the ashes and gunk, move to the Mother-in-Law's, start saving money and start looking for new rentals. Pretty simple. I am NOT a strong woman. Not the way people think. But when life throws you challenges, you can't just curl up in a ball and hide. You have to get through the challenge. It's not always easy, but there is almost always a light at the end of the tunnel. We are broker than broke right now, but one day we'll be okay. So we scrape by each paycheck and look forward to the next paycheck, and wait for the day when we won't have to. Or we figure something else out, like selling the convertible. I don't need anyone telling me I'll never make it. ***** But if you have kids it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to teach this to your kids. You can't just let them cry their way through life, because when they grow up there isn't anyone but themselves who will help them through their problems. When we watched our house burn down my kids were perfectly fine, we have been through worse and my kids knew that somehow we would be okay. When we are running out of food and payday isn't for another week, my kids know that whining about the lack of Doritos isn't going to help anything. Open the fridge, open the cupboard, cook up some noodles or some soup or eat some crackers. There IS food in the cupboard, you just have to do some work to eat it. A baked potato for a snack is not the worst thing in the world. But the main thing is to Believe in your kids. I know how frustrating kids can be, I know we lose patience with them, but how can you bring yourself to tell your kid "You'll never do it." Jeez. Your own mother. If your own mother doesn't believe in you, who will. ***** There are things that should be cried about. People go to the hospital with terrible diseases. Children die. Those are things to cry about. ***** Off topic: I never believed that my pets weren't going to heaven. When you think about the bond some people have with their dogs, how some old people have no one *but* their dogs or cats to keep them company in life, how can it be that God would not want those pets, their only family, to join them in heaven? And so when a child dies too soon, and 6 weeks later his pet hamster gets lost in the wall, I also sort of wonder if maybe that hamster isn't up in heaven keeping a small boy happy.
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