Grownups
We had cousins visiting over New Year’s. A couple of generations younger than we are with two children under the age of five, they have an intercultural marriage celebrating Christmas, Chanukah, Canada, Northern Ireland, and vegetarianism. But despite all the differences, they came to celebrate the attachment of family.
After all, family is what holidays are for. ‘Tis the season for sharing with all those we care about but don’t have enough time to see at other times of the year. Over a two-day period, we got to experience a couple of lovely young children – how they interacted with us, with their parents, and with each other.
The girl loved having someone read to her. She’s currently fascinated by dinosaurs and discovered a book that could answer most of her questions about them. The baby boy is a charmer. Calm and observant of the world around him, he has discovered the power of pointing at objects that interest him. Everyone looks at what he’s pointing at!
And it was fascinating to watch them relating to each other. When they played together, the girl would give her brother an object and he would throw it away, laughing. Then she’d scoop it up and laughingly give it back to him, whereupon he’d throw it again. Or she’d make faces and he’d laugh.
At other times, she seemed to get tired of all the attention her baby brother was getting and she’d collapse into a teary heap in the corner, wanting the same sort of consideration for her tears. Her parents wisely did not fall into her trap, but eventually got her back to her cheery four-year-old self. Then we all enjoyed going out into our overly warm holiday weather and building a snowman with what snow was left on the ground.
We had long discussions with the parents – about parenting, about their relationships with their own parents, and about how becoming a parent changes your relationship with your own parents. After all, becoming a parent means you are no longer just someone’s child. You have an added perspective on life. But you are also always the child you once were – so as to better understand the child you now have. That’s what love is (see the xkcd cartoon above).
And our multicultural backgrounds allowed us to share traditions. So, instead of turkey or a roast, we cooked up a spicy macaroni and cheese one night, and a vegetable and ricotta lasagna for New Year’s Eve. And, although we would have wished to stay up until midnight and crack open a bottle of champagne, we all faded away by about 10pm, dictated by the needs of the very young and the waning energies of the young at heart.
What is remarkable about this very ordinary family gathering was how well everyone got along – even with all our constitutional and cultural differences. After all, we have all participated in family reunions tinged with anger, envy, or other forms of destructiveness. Families may have a history of hurts to overcome so as to be able to enjoy one another. Perhaps the pleasurable nature of our visit was due to the fact of our not being immediate family to one another.
The snowman was the only casualty of our visit. Instead of hanging around as a reminder of our good time together, he succumbed to the melting temperatures and left us with only a small heap of his former self strewn with one carrot, four acorns, and two dried hydrangea blooms.
But our memories won’t melt any time soon. It was a good holiday.
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Now You See Me. Then You Didn’t.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=776
I’ve been away since January. Away from this blog, I mean. Hence, the blank panel comic. All I can say two-dimensionally about my absence is that I was deeply involved in another writing project which left me no time to write this blog.
I do owe an apology to everyone who wondered why I stopped writing here. I didn’t expect to be away this long. Next time I need to take a break, I will try to let people know that I am taking time off. Instead of just disappearing into the blankness.
Of course, it’s absurd for me to try and convey in a few words what I experienced while I was away, as the cartoon panel suggests, but I did think of coming back and changing the format of my blog by dispensing with the introductory cartoon. I guess I was experiencing the ongoing and frustrating complexity of finding just the right picture to convey the gist of my thousand words. Sometimes this hunt takes me several hours.
But then I find the one that seems just right, the one that made my search worthwhile. Like the one above. The truth is, I love research.
I do want to tell you that I may not always be able to come up with a cartoon I want to use. If that is the case, I will simply write a blog without it.
Blankness can convey so much. It is about my absence. It is about what I hide from you. It is about what you imagine that I hide. It is also about whatever you wish to see in the blankness. Whatever you see is whatever you project into the blankness from the depths of your personality – even if you see it in me. So then, the blankness becomes you, because you construct it with your own imagination.
In essence, this is what happens in psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. I offer you a blank panel with each session, and what you “draw” in it becomes what you show me of who you are. Of course, we do this through exchanged words, but I have been known to ask someone to draw for me or to show me a photograph that was charged with personal meaning.
And what I see is not just what you fill the blank panel with but also what you leave out of your drawing. There are certain issues I would expect to encounter over a period of time of knowing you, even if that period is only the short time of our first meeting. So, if an issue is not there – usually because you have forgotten to mention it, I will notice, and bring it to your attention when I feel the time is right to do so. It’s my job to look everywhere I can to discover things about you that you may need to learn about.
Do you remember looking at passing clouds as a child, perhaps with a friend? Do you remember how the same cloud could look like many, many different things to both of you? That is how your imagination might work in psychotherapy, bringing many personal images into the room to construct the multi-faceted jewel that becomes more and more the complex person you are.
The same thing happens when we work with dreams (see blog entries: Dreaming your Creativity; Insomnia; Wishing and Reality). People say to me, “This dream makes no sense. It’s totally crazy.” And I say – the crazier the better. The craziest dream is like a multi-layered cloud that contains many of your essential qualities. You dreamed it to communicate something important about yourself, and then your unconscious disguised it so that it would not cause you any anxiety. People are always hiding from whatever issues cause them anxiety by burying or disguising those issues within themselves. We all do this in one way or another.
It’s safer, though, to discover the meaning of a seemingly blank and crazy dream by exploring it with a psychoanalyst who is trained to work with you to understand it.
And eventually, you will be able to fill in the blank panels yourself. Then you will be able to read your own life story.