Unrealized Dreams

I was watching a little show on cable that is all about human interest stories about people and places in Texas, a place I've lived in twice in my life, called "Texas Country Reporter". My husband's family hails from the Texas area before his parents moved away while in the Navy, finally ending in the Kansas City area and later in Wichita, Kansas. My own family lived there during my own kindergarten and first grade years, back in a day that kindergarten wasn't a part of of the school system. I attended a private kindergarten. My father worked as a draftsman in the petroleum plants around the Jefferson area. My husband tapes these shows and we watch them when we have time. It's usually a mix of joy and sorrow to watch these shows as they tell stories of real, incredible people, the kind of people you don't always run across or have the time to get to know in this world of busy schedules and things that aren't nearly as important as getting to know each other. Not usually fancy or famous people. But interesting, quirky and everyday, normal people. And watching these shows always makes us miss Texas very, very much. We were privileged to live there as a couple for three years and have been trying to figure out how we can get back ever since.

The reason I called this post "Unrealized Dreams" is the number of stories that reminds me of a lifestyle that I would have liked, that has eluded me. I am a small town girl, if not a country girl, at heart. I love animals. I have always wanted at last one horse. I love cows, goats, dogs, and many other animals one would find on a number of farms or ranches. But I've always lived in town.

The Mom Bone

I love football. I haven't always loved it, but after I got married, I quickly realized if I was going to share and spend time with my husband during the fall months, I had better learn something about the sport. He had grown up playing it at all the different levels, peewee, Jr. high and high school. He loves the game. Now, on the other hand was me. I didn't grow up with brothers, but I loved going to the school football games, not at all because I knew anything about the game, but because of the social aspect of seeing everyone in town at the game. At the ends, I'd have to make a point to look at the scoreboard before heading home so I could tell my parents who won the game, because I often didn't have a clue.

But this afternoon, I sat and watched the Cincinnati University vs. Pittsburgh game and then the Florida vs. Alabama game. I had my favorites and was cheering and holding my breath right along with the best of them. And as their skills would bring forth the winners, I cheered for the teams I had been rooting for. I was so happy for the kids that had worked and scrapped all season long to get to the bowl positions that were due them. And then the strangest thing happened. The television cameras panned to show the teams that lost. The Pittsburgh players were shown one by one, in their own solitude, in their own very large space that belonged only to them in the tunnel. Faces weren't seen, tears were not witnessed, but emotion was so thick you could feel it. And I started crying for them. What the heck is this? I was rooting for the other team! I'm not just feeling sympathetic for them, I'm heartbroken for them. It's the Mom bone.

I'm old enough to be all these boys' mother. I have a son that could be on their team. I've learned through the years just how much emotion, hopes and disappointments ride on things of their lives, like football games. I can feel that disappointment. I know the adrenaline and hopes that are put into a competition that means so much and costs so much. And so I cry for boys I don't didn't even root for, much less know. I know, and hope, they have mothers that will be there to offer the comforting words, hugs, and plan the menu of all his favorites, if not tonight or tomorrow, when they finish finals and head home for Christmas. In the meantime, I hope somewhere, somehow they can know that there are mothers out here that cry for them and want to comfort them in their time of loss. It's one of those moments of motherhood that had someone tried to explain to me years ago, I wouldn't have understood at all. And I hope now that I've told you of my Mom bone, I hope someone else can identify and it's not just me being an overwrought mother.

Hope, Joy and Despair

Tis the season of hope and joy. But did you see or hear all the news stories during the Thanksgiving holiday of family tragedies all over the country due to people that have run out of hope and joy? It was shocking to me the number of reports. It's a well-documented fact that a number of suicides that occur, do so during the holiday season. How can a season that is known for extolling the virtues of such hope and joy also be so full of despair?

First, let's look at the reasons for despair. I'm sure a percentage of those that experience despair, anger and hurt are due to mental illness. We have an entire society that is diagnosed with some sort of mental condition or disease. It's common for the common-man to go to therapists these days in attempts to gain tools of dealing with their lives. Whether they simply need the ear of a unbiased third-party or not, it seems that most are prescribed medicines for depression or something more serious. I don't mean to implicate that I don't believe in real mental illnesses, but I do believe we've become much too comfortable with the idea of taking a pill to fix all our ills and we are too ready to let a doctor throw a diagnosis on us. After all, it provides a great reason for the way we are feeling, or a great excuse. We can easily say, "See, it's not my fault, I have a condition."

We have also become a society of people that don't know how to take responsibility for our own actions or lives. Granted, life happens to all of us. Things come along that we didn't ask for. We all have hopes and dreams and many times we fall short of seeing the fruit of those desires. There can be many, many reasons why we fail to achieve, but the negatives in our lives are oh, so much easier to focus on, aren't they? Think back in your life when something wonderful happened. How long did you fly high on that blessing? Now, on the other end of the spectrum, let's think of something bad that has happened, or something good that DIDN'T happen. How long did you hang onto that disappointment? I would venture to say that many of us continue to hold onto those kind of failures. We hold onto them as if they are a fond friend and then we add the next disappointment to it, and the next, and the next till we find ourselves in despair and broken. It's no wonder the phychiatric field is booming so well with people reaching out for something, anything, to make them feel better.

The other side of this story is the hope and joy that the season offers to everyone via bells ringing, carolers singing and the hope of the perfect present from the perfect person. We dream of apologies, forgiveness and loving, functional families. The Christmas season has encompassed the religious and the secular hopes. Again, it's easy to be dazzled by the pretty sounds, glistening sights and wonderful smells of the season. It does become magical. But, again, it's pretty fleeting. How long into January does it usually take to begin feeling the isolation and cold of the winter set into your soul? The hope that the religious celebrate is much, much less attractive to the eyes, ears and nose. It is only attractive to the soul. Many find that grasping hold of a faith and belief in God during this time gives them something more to lean on and learn from and a promise of Someone that loves them. But as is the case in the rest of the world, the church has it's share of hurting, broken people that fall short of living up to someone else's expectations simply because they find them in a church. So church and Christians get a black eye overall for the fact that people naturally look to people for fulfillment and not to God.

We all experience these things. We all hope for things that are likely unrealistic to expect. We all have our failures and disappointments that we can dwell on and hold onto. But not all of us do. Some people seem to just naturally look at the positives in life, not exactly like positive-thinking, just seeing the hope in any situation. Some positive souls have it in their DNA, they come from families that are just more naturally happy and see the silver linings. The rest of us have to work at it. But we have support, if we know who to turn to. God's Word is full of hope and support. When we turn to Him and keep Him close to our hearts, He will teach us. There are also people that are encouragers. Start finding the positive and negative people in your lives. If they like to tear you down only to help themselves feel better then they probably aren't adding anything positive to your life. Some are very crafty or hold positions of authority so it would seem easy to rationalize that their criticisms and suggestions are for our good. Be honest with yourself and if you can't think of times when they extended love, friendship and support, then you need to make some decisions about their influence.

During this holiday season, let's surround ourselves with hope and encouragement without expecting anything materially specific. Our expectations should be in a hope and joy and contentment that flies in opposition to the world we live in these days. The more we seek and find, the more the negative influences this world provides will be attractive, tempting or snagging. Let's look ahead to 2010. Let's make it a year of encouraging, hoping, fulfilling, contentment and lifting up each other. I'd love to hear from all of you about the good reports that I feel is all of ours to claim.

Just Stopping In

Hi everyone! I just felt the need to stop in and say howdy! I really have been missing Biscotty's. My NaNoWriMo writing started out with a bang but has dwindled to just a fizzle by now. I haven't given up, though. My story plot and direction didn't have any. I do have some ideas and intend to hit it again in the morning. I have discovered that writing with family around and the weekends is more than challenging. At least, for me.

I was reading a blog this morning by someone that doesn't have children yet about children. Don't you just love people like that? They have definitive opinions about parenthood and how things really should be with children when they don't have children. The subject was public schools serving doughnuts to children for breakfast. Of course, the jest of the blog was that there should be healthier menus for "our" children than fat-laden and sugar-laden doughnuts. Now, I totally understand the extreme obesity problem we are seeing in the American public, much less our children. And I totally understand the lack of nutritional value of the typical doughnut. I should probably say that I LOVE doughnuts and have had my fair share, along with a few other people's fair share of doughnuts through the years. But I am paying for such gluttony, and family genes. I no longer can have gluten, thus doughnuts of any nature is off-limits for me. That said though, I also have to say I have worked in public schools and I know, for a fact, that most schools are much too aware that many of their children's only meals are the ones they get at school. I don't recall offerings of breakfast for students when I was a student, but that was way too long ago to mention. Times have changed. Greatly. Now for the added snafu in this equation.

Here, in Michigan, the state's public education budgets have been cut twice just in the past month or so. Greatly. Entire curriculums and programs have been offed with the signature of a pen in the governor's office. Our schools are down to the bare bones. Teachers have long been using their own money to buy school supplies for their students, as have most schoolteachers across the country. Now, if you consider the hunger issue and how it affects the school students across the nation, what would you want for those that cannot afford to eat at home? Don't consider YOUR child, as we all know that only the best is what you want for your child. We all want healthy options for our children. But we all want our children to have full stomachs so they can stay on-task and not be thinking about the hunger pains and growling stomachs all day. We all have seen the study results that say that hungry children suffer academically. But what do you want for those children in your area that go home everyday and have no meals? Do they even eat at all during the weekends? Have you ever considered that? Are you still so concerned about the nutritional value of what they may be served for breakfast now to protest doughnuts?

We have to be practical enough to realize that offering a breakfast program at all is still a real trick for any school district in these days and economic times. And most of us are educated enough to know that cheap foods and stretched budgets doesn't allow for many healthy options. But isn't a full stomach, which allows a child to get their minds off their tummies and on-task of learning, better than protesting feeding these children doughnuts? Would you personally go into a cafeteria and deprive a child of the last breakfast they may have on Friday morning till they return on Monday because it's not "healthy"? How many meals will you miss during the next two days?

Don't get me wrong. I understand the need to educate and do what we can to change our society's views of food and nutrition. But until we solve the disparity of the haves and have nots and virtually walk in another's shoes, how can we go about protesting that that is fed to children? If you do have the nerve to do so, I suggest you also find ways and solutions to the problem. Work with your local grocers, farmers, coops, mothers groups, church groups, whomever that may donate or spend time and personal money to change the situation in your area. There is never a cut and dried answer to such issues these days. There can be a politically-correct answer but it rarely solves all the needed aspects of a problem. Don't be myopic without considering that for most of us....there but for the grace of God, go us!