Ringing in the New Year

We’re on the cusp of 2016, and I wonder what earthquake resides therein, if any.

Our family in 2007, just after my chemotherapy.

 

We’ve had some pretty tumultuous years, and many have been 7.0 or higher on the Richter scale.  The year 2007 was certainly momentous, as I was diagnosed with cancer, and 2009 is up there, and 2010 was also memorable, and further earthquakes were felt in 2014 and 2015, so the ground has shaken under our feet more than once, but we are still standing, by God’s grace.

When the Earth shifts, the tendency is to shift with it;  the building is crumbling around you, and you can easily be part of the collapse.  But this is a time to stand,and stand alone, and be tried; it’s good for the soul, and makes a man.  Then you don’t need to run hither and thither finding comfort and seeking advice;  you have gotten your roots down in the midst of trials, and can draw from that.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea (Psalm 46:2)

By Gods grace, this is the faith that we have, for 2016 and beyond!

Breast Cancer: A Rational Discussion

[Note for Non-US readers:  In the US, you would almost think that breast cancer is the only cancer out there, judging by the attention it gets.]

Ok, let’s just be clear about one thing:  I am actually very sympathetic to those woman (and a few men) who happen to have breast cancer.  I am.

But sometimes, we have to draw clear lines between being just sympathetic/having a healthy respect for these brave women and sucking up all the oxygen in the cancer community, such that breast cancer is as large as the Milkies themselves, and all other cancers are small, comparable to toe cancer, or pinky cancer.

(And don’t laugh:  Bob Marley died of toe cancer, so it can be deadly.  It’s especially a killer if you don’t want the doctor to lob off your toe, and this is how Bob died.  He wanted to keep his toe.  Your mileage may vary.)

You would almost think that Congress replaced the stars and stripes with pink bows and ribbons and flags and other such symbols – all pink – and then there are the tee shirts brandishing us to “Save the Boobies,” which I happen to be all for, but along the way I would have liked to have saved my esophagus, which is half gone, and with my most recently re-occurrence, I came to respect and positively like my left lower lung, which was partly removed as well.

I respect the milkies, and am sad when they get lobbed off, but I think my body organs should command at least as much respect.  What color should represent my stomach – perhaps blue, and can we drum up a campaign for poor middle-aged burned-out men who ended up getting the stomach dug out of them, all to fight the beast cancer – isn’t that something to wave a flag over?  I know a young girl who lost the bottom of her left leg to bone cancer when she was eight and now wears prosthesis; shouldn’t we give her leg the time of day, or is it just the Milkies that we should mourn?

How about a “Save the lower Esophagus” awareness month!

And if there is a National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October), why isn’t there a National Esophageal Cancer Awareness Month?  Why not?

And we could even get into an objective medical debate about the whole issue:  what is more important, essential bodily organs or an organ – however wonderful – that is just used to 1) feed a baby when we have all sorts of formula these days and 2) draw men, who are of course enthusiastic about the said organ.

No, no, there are other cancers besides breast cancer, and other colors that can be flown besides pink.  Mind you, this is from an impartial observer who has been a fan of the milkies his entire married life, but we have to balance this out with the reality that there are other organs that are not just nice but essential, and these body organs should also have their own color, and campaigns, and champions and ribbons and walks for life etc. etc. etc., even though these organs (mostly internal) are less attractive than that which hangs down.

The Cancer Scare

I think that everyone should experience the cancer scare at least once in their lifetime.

The Cancer Scare is when you are tip toeing through life from job to home to Church to family to friends and to bed, only to get up the next morning and do the same, and on the weekends we vary this with working in the yard or going camping for the weekend or seeing a movie on the big screen, and the week starts over again and we repeat.

Into this sedate ritual of a life comes perhaps a pain or spot on the skin or a ache that doesn’t go away, and when it gets bad enough – yes, it has to get bad enough – we haul ourselves off to the doctor to see what might be wrong.  Of course the doctor, who owns the fancy machine in the basement, recommends a test, so we get the recommended test from the machine in the basement (which insurance pays for and for which the doctor gets a cut, but that’s another story) and then we wait.

CT Scan – used to test for cancer

What are we waiting for?  We wait to see if we have cancer, and even though we are waiting waiting we get up the next morning and go to work and to home and to Church and to maybe friends and family, but we are not tip toeing through life like we used to.  No.  Perhaps we lived the living equivalent of a pop culture life, so superficial that the most philosophical adage we’ve internalized is lyrics to the Beatles Let It Be, but no more.

Now life is serious, and I might have cancer.

Welcome to the Cancer Scare!

This is not Halloween, and you don’t get to take the costume off, and the next day you don’t drop the pumpkin in the trash.  No, it’s not Halloween.  It’s your life, and now that life – which did all those wonderful things in the routine you called living – that life is in question, and you are in question:  to be exact:  your very existence.

And there are nights where you don’t sleep much and days where you look out the window, and if you are a fool, you look on the internet and find that this isn’t Halloween – No! – it’s a nightmare, but you remind yourself: the test results are not back.  No, they are not, and who knows;  it might be nothing.  It probably is nothing!  Most likely.

No, it is something, you are convinced, and when you look at the clock, it says 3:47 am exactly in bold red letters, and the next time you look, it’s 5:12 am.  What happened to the time?

This is the cancer scare, when life becomes real even though you have now realized that this life has a termination date; it is dawning on you that we come with an expiration date, like a sausage packet at the grocery store, only you’re the sausage!

I would recommend the Cancer Scare to anyone.  It does good for the bones, and helps the circulation.   Some say digestion is better after the Cancer Scare.  The mind thinks clearer and perhaps now we even bend the knee because – after all – this is all about ME!

Life will never be the same, no matter what the results are.

On Christmas

I suppose I should write something about Christmas, it being that time of year.  I like Christmas. I like the idea that – at the heart of it – we are celebrating the birth of our Savior, and what can be better than that! Oh, of course, I know that Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25th in an English-like stable with English barn animals around him, and I know Christmas as a holiday was instituted initially to replace a pagan winter festival, but still: it’s awesome that Jesus came to this earth to help us sinners, and that is enough reason to celebrate it. If not on the 25th, then whenever.

I also like the idea of gift giving, as it shows something called love between us. We could celebrate Christmas by hitting each other over the head with spent paper towel rolls, but its much better to celebrate by showing our love for one another.  We give gifts because we love those we give gifts to, and that’s fantastic.

And for kids, Christmas is, well, the best day of the year, and who can argue with that, these little minds being all excited and wanting to get up at 6 am and sneak downstairs to open up gifties that have sat unopened under the tree for far too long, and it’s all so exciting.

Of course, like everything, Christmas has its downside. It’s a lot of work, and when you’re an old, burned out middle-aged fellow with a large family and a cancer survivor to boot, more work isn’t looked forward to. This, however, is the Grinch in me and it should be denied, meaning I shouldn’t ever listen to it. We don’t have time for such Grinch-like thoughts. It’s not Christmas.

On the other hand, Christmas – like everything in America – has become just another exercise to pluck money from the wallet, and this follows the trend of denigrating anything meaningful into and excuse to buy, buy buy.  Increasingly anything related to tradition or culture has become a rouge to separate a fool from his money, and this commercial capitalism aims to make fools of us all. Now, I’m not against business as a concept – as the business of America is business – but this business threatens to strip meaningful celebrations of all real value, and it all becomes O so artificial – the creeping progression of Black Friday into Thanksgiving day being exhibit number one in this gallery. You can read my rant against this here.

(Then again, it is possible to turn other pointless low “holidays” into something very, very important; the capitalists have not plumbed the depths of the concept, really.  Groundhog Day:  why not turn that into to a festive occasion to buy expensive gifts for your pets?  The cat may yawn, but someplace someone will make money.  Then there can be Daylight Savings Time day, where we use the extra hour to  – of course! – shop;  what else would we do?  The possibilities are endless!)

And then there is the whole issue of being politically correct.  If you want to be a racist holy-roller judgmental square who likes to hearken back to their grandmother’s era (or great, great grandmother’s era), you say “Merry Christmas,” whereas if you are truly trending and progressive and along with everything EU and secular, “Happy Holidays” suffices. I will let all this pass without too much of a comment, but suffice it to say that we are, in 2015, a society verging on being totally cracked.

Anyway, I will wish you a bad happy holiday but a great Merry Christmas, and pray  (i.e: not send positive vibes your way) that you keep at least a little money in your wallet during this holiday season. It’s a great time of year, if we really know what it’s all about.

My Stand on Facebook

Let’s be clear:  regarding social media,  I am a stalker, not a poster.  That is, I don’t post, even though some have encouraged me to do just that – as if not posting is a bad thing – but I am not persuaded.

I really don’t care about other people’s kitty cats, and I don’t expect them to care about mine.  In my book, they are just an animal, and God in his infinite wisdom gave us domain over them, though I don’t think they got the memo.  I warm slightly more to pictures of infants, babies, toddlers and children in general, though I often find these young humans “almost as cute as a Stahl baby,” which happens to offend everyone.

Cute are the sayings on Facebook, like “When your past calls, don’t answer.  It has nothing new to say,” but I avoid the vulgar ones and positively like the Brunstad posts and other posts that actually are edifying and give me something to think about.  So social media isn’t all bad!

I do like to follow different young people that I know on Facebook but don’t find my life so interesting so as to post a picture of it.  This is true.  Others in my family reprimand me for my stalker ways, but we are all different.  I prefer to write something that shows in some degree that civilization is still continuing rather than post, “I baked a cake,” with a picture therein.  (I don’t bake cakes, but a friend used that as an example, and it stuck with me.)*

Someday perhaps I will have as big a heart as this fellow, and Post…

I respect those who post and wish in some ways I would be hit with such an urge.  Maybe someday.  So when you see a picture of my cat or my ingrown toe nail or a robin on our front yard tree in a snow storm or my cute kids who are growing older and getting less and less cute by the day – when you see any of that, know that I have like the Grinch gotten a bigger heart, and you can see a picture of me on Facebook cutting the Christmas ham with an ever so ridiculous smile on my face.

*Not that posting about a baked cake is bad.  It's just that it's not where I'm at these days.

Technology (Part I)

I am a month out of my CyberKnife treatments, so we can now take a high-level, 30,000-foot view of it.

To begin with, we should remember that in the 1970s or before, I would have been toast.  Cancer was a death sentence: period.  There wasn’t much they could do, nor did they.  Fast forward to 2015, and the march of technology and science has saved millions of people and created amazing technologies, CyberKnife being one of them.

So even though it seems like everyone is getting cancer or has had it, the statistics show that fewer people are being diagnosed with cancer and more are being saved; at least that’s what they claim.  I happen to be one of those that got cancer and one who has been saved, so it is all personally relevant.  And technology is a big part of the reason.

We happen to live in a Gee-wiz era, with CyberKnife as only one exhibit.  The Stealth Bomber is not aerodynamically fit to fly; it has a computer to make constant in-course corrections so the thing stays afloat.  Cars now drive themselves, and even though drones are commanded by a soldier sitting at a console in the US, the device kills half-way around globe.  Rovers drive on distant planets like Mars; and if you want to see a real-time web cam of Zhuang, a panda at the Gengda Wolong Panda Center in China, you can – and right from your living room. It’s all quite amazing.

You can see these Pandas at Gengda Wolong Panda Center in China over the web on web cam!

Besides this, there is a multiplicity of gadgets that could not even be imaged when I was a kid.  iPads and Xboxes and SmartPhones and ATMs and 50 inch wide screen TVs and faxes and cloud computing and PCs and Google and and and.  On and on it goes, and my brain is tired;  I can’t come up with any more examples but, being an IT guy, I could if I thought harder.

We went to the moon on 64k, they say, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s absurdly small.  Men actually bounced on the moon with only 64k helping to automate the entire trip!  They didn’t radio back, “Problem.  Our Ram is stone age.  Aborting mission until a respectable Ram is available.”  No, they hopped and golfed and gathered stones up happy as could be, oblivious to their grave technological shortcomings.

 Then there are my children, who have grown up in this “Gee Wiz” world and think its all normal.  The internet has existed for a millennium, to them.  The pyramids were engineered with a CAD machine, and Columbus charted the Atlantic with a satellite-guided GPS.  Of course.  There is no such thing as civilization without smartphones, ATMs, MP3 players, Google searches etc.  There just isn’t!  Once when they were smaller – though not so small – I enumerated the technology blight of the world that I grew up in: we didn’t have computer games, or even computers themselves, or the internet, nor smart phones, no ATMs, gone were the tablets and no one had ever imagined the internet; forget laptops or search engines or DVDs or cable TV and of course not Netflix.   Not even air conditioning or texting!  At some point, I ended the list of all the things I didn’t have, and I remember their reaction to as if it was tomorrow.  They asked, “Did you have electricity?”  They actually asked that! I told them, “No, we lived in caves and clubbed our prey to death, roasting the animal over an open fire!”

This is a transistor radio! It could not text or be used to check Facebook, but it did play music!

“Did you have electricity?” they asked.  We did.  We had three channels on something called the television, and that was that.  We had Gilligan’s Island and The Walt Disney Show and three (yes three!) news channels.  If you wanted to know what the weather was like, you went outside!  For music we bought something called an album – a real album – and spun it on a record player.  Music came out, and we were happy!  There was also radio – with transistor radios being as ultra-compact to us as the thinnest Apple device of today. When you wanted to do banking, you went to a bank.  When you wanted to play a game, you got it down from the shelf.   If you wanted to play solitaire, you shuffled the deck.  When you wanted to communicate with someone, you used a phone, and the phone didn’t even have a numeric keypad; it was a rotary dial phone; yes, it was.

Somehow we survived.  My entire generation didn’t perish because we longed to text but instead had to speak.  No, we passed notes to each other on paper in the classroom and got by just fine.  Nobody was financially insolvent because they couldn’t check the stock market real time or their finances using on-line banking either.  We actually grew up believing that multiplication was important because there was really no other way to do it, and the same with spelling.  We had to spell in order to spell.  There was no spell check, and no only did we survive, but we (mostly) became good mathematicians and good spellers.  We had to.

Alas, it was better in the old days.  Probably not.  Just different.  Funny to think, but I’m not sure what I would do now without the internet or my smartphone.  Isn’t that strange?  They have become such a part of my life that I can scarcely remember how I lived before the either of them.  On occasion I’ve actually gotten a phone book down from our top shelf and looked up a phone number rather than using Goggle search.  The whole process was so 1970ish:  you actually turned pages and had to remember the order of the letters; what can be more outdated than that?  And my smartphone: if it goes missing, I am unteathered from civilization; I might as well be lost in the vast Adirondacks forest with just the trees around me and the catcalls of the birds for music; no one knows where I am, and I don’t know where they are.  What a concept!  And what is life like without texting (how did we ever organize anything), and what is it like to never see pictures of other people’s always-cute kids and cats on Facebook, and could I stay afloat without daily checking my bank account in real-time?  I don’t know.

So I’m thankful for all this new technology and my robot friend, Cyberknife.  Where would I be without her?  Still, there’s been vast periods in human history where the only gadget they had was an iron plow, and the great invention was the printing press.  Einstein said at the explosion of the atomic bomb that everything had changed except the heart of man, and that is true of all this technology and is quite concerning – which happens to be the focus of the next post.

 

The Bills

The great thing about doing the bills is this:  if you want trials and tribulations in this world, you just have to sit down and do them.  Then, if you want the trials and tribulations to stop, you just have to stop doing your bills: “X” out of the online banking website, close your checkbook and tuck your bills into wherever you might keep them.  There, that’s it.  The trial is over.

I often think of the game of Monopoly when I go to my mailbox, and when I look through the envelopes, it’s like I’ve just landed on Chance and am about to pick up a card.  This bill is from some doctor’s office, and the Chance card says, “Copay added to your account.  Pay $35.”  Then there’s something from New York State.  Oh, what can that be?  Open it up, and yes – they want back taxes from a tax return that was filed three years ago and filed incorrectly and – yes – just now they are informing me and – yes – I have to pay taxes and penalties.  Don’t laugh.  That actually happened.

Real-life Chance Card from NY Tax Dept. Notice the dates.

Recently out of the blue T-Mobile sent me a refund from 2007 for about $25;  I had used T-Mobile for about a day when I was getting my Master’s Degree and, for the life of me, I have no idea why they sent me this money, but I cashed it.  Figuratively, I picked up the Chance card but this time, fortunately, the money was flowing my way, rather than the other way around.  It does happen sometimes.

Then there’s actually paying the bills, which thankfully is as easy as ever. I use my banks bill-pay, and it makes the entire process 100 times easier.  No stamps, no trying to find a working pen, no writing out checks and making sure the envelope is sealed, and I’m always afraid the envelope will get lost or shuffled in some other papers or my kids will use the back of it to jot notes down while doing homework or something will happen to it on its way to the mailbox, but with bill-pay you make a few clicks, and move on with life.

The real problem is to make sure there’s money in the account.  That is not always easy, as our account is like a vast and unsettled lake, with a stream of water flowing in and a foamy and raging river flowing out, and sometimes the water gets so low in the lake, the fish are floundering.  But then just, you could say, when the drought gets severe and the bottom is cracked and dry, suddenly we look into our account and there is money – direct deposit – and we are now swimming, and McDonalds: here we come!

Like that.

Our redneck van (which happens to be red!); prayers requested!

But a Sword of Damocles hangs over our account – always – and this sword is the vehicles: those vehicles!  I can make up the most beautiful budget, and I’m an IT guy so this spreadsheet is worthy of anything I’ve done in the business world, with all the expenses calculated out to the penny, as well as the income, so if we just spend according to how the budget says we should spend, all will be well.  But all is not well, because at anytime one of our vehicles – may God bless them – one of them will need a repair, and it is common knowledge that a repair shall not and can not cost less than $300.  There was one month we were doing great, and the lake mentioned above was overflowing, and we were buying Aldi’s salmon if I remember right (something we rarely do), and all was well right up until the car started acting up and, $700 later, it was a different world.  I exaggerate in saying that we were asking the cats if we could eat out of their bowls, but let’s say we were back to beans and rice.

But the good news is that if paying bills is ever too much for me, I can end the trial by just putting them away.  It’s over.  I can also ask the kids to go to the mailbox.  Life is good.  Who knows: maybe today I’ll pass Go and collect $200!  It’s all in God’s hands.

Brunstad.org

Thankfulness (Part II)

[I wrote about this topic here, but it bears a second look.]

You wouldn’t think that these two words would go together: Thankfulness and Cancer.

A winning combination!

How could they?

It’s like mashing together Hitler and Daisies, or Halloween and apple pie, or some other weird combination that just doesn’t make sense.

So we beg the question:  how can you have cancer and be thankful at the same time?  Or, we could turn it around:  if you don’t have cancer, then you have a great deal to be thankful for, right?

Or both.

I’m interested in the first one, though: to be thankful for cancer, like being thankful for the flu or thankful when you stub your toe or, if you have kids, thankful for that special time in the middle of the night when you step on a lego – Ouch!  Thankfulness in that sense.

I must say, I am thankful for cancer, as crazy as it sounds.  Years ago, I followed a blog on NPR by the producer of Nightline, Leroy Sievers, who in the course of the blog posted a question:  “What has cancer taught you?”  So, the blog readers could write in and say what cancer has taught them, whether good or bad.

The interesting part is that 80 percent of the responses were overwhelmingly positive.  Things like, “Cancer taught me to be more compassionate,” or “Cancer taught me to value each day,” or “Cancer showed me that people loved me,” and on and on it went.  It was quite encouraging, downright exhilarating to read.  Here were people – average people – who had gone through some of the worse suffering you could imagine, asserting the many good things that cancer had done for them.  The good things!

Now, it wasn’t everyone.  About 20 percent were down:  “Cancer ruined my career,” and “Cancer sucks; I was sick all the time.”  So 20 percent couldn’t see any point in it all – after all, they felt like cancer cause a loss in their lives – but 80 percent thought different.  They saw the good in it all.

Amazing!

For myself, I worked in Dialysis before my cancer as a computer guy and would often see patients: these poor (usually) elderly patients, sitting hooked up to a machine for three or four hours at a time.  In an ephemeral way, I felt sorry for them and noted their suffering, but I really couldn’t have compassion on them.  I couldn’t feel it.  I had barely been sick a day in my life.  Well, that’s an exaggeration, but I was quite healthy, in my early 40’s, and a lot was on my mind, and I did have a computer job to do as well!

A Dialysis Center

A Dialysis Patient

Then I got cancer, and I never went back to my job at dialysis again, but in my travels I would see people who were in one way or another sick or infirm or unhealthy or bowed over or dragging oxygen canisters behind them or limping or aching in their knees due to it always seems the change of weather, and I have to say these knees don’t ever seem to have been engineered to last (someone should talk to the big man about that one!);  their teeth were bad and they contended with hands contorted from a stroke and diabetes was part of their story, as were bad veins and back problems that hurt even through the night;  some couldn’t breath, the asthma so bad, and medications were downed like ice tea.  Some were just terribly aged, their bodies breaking down, the beauty of youth far gone.

Suddenly I could have compassion on them.  True compassion.

But more than that, I’ve often reflected on how my life would have gone if I had not gotten cancer.  Of course, it’s easy to think that if this bad thing hadn’t invaded my life, how much better that life would have been.  Well, I had just gotten my Master’s Degree and had a better job, and who knows where my career would have taken me.  Making more money is a good thing, most would say, but here we can ask the questions:  would it have been?  What if it would have come with working 80 hours a week?  What if this lifestyle ended up being positively bad for me?   What if – the worse of the worse – I had lost interest in following Christ, and ended up a normal, puffed-up good person, all hollow on the inside but sparkly on the outside?

What if?

The truth is that that I needed to get cancer, in some profound and mysterious way.  I needed to slow down, and my life needed to take a different direction.  True, on the form of “What I need” that I had in my head, “Cancer” was not at the top of the list, let’s say.  How about “More sleep” (I had a young family then) – that would be at the top of the list or “More money:” that would be up there also.  But “Cancer?”  That wasn’t even on the list.  No, no, no.

But I needed to get cancer, and I needed to slow down, and I needed all the trials that came with cancer, and I needed to become a more compassionate person, and I needed to get my roots down into God more, and I needed to cleave to him, and all of it (or a good part of it) came because of this gift called cancer.

Gift?

None of it was a mistake.  It was all perfect.  There’s a verse in Romans that says something to the effect that all things work together for our best.  The best thing about this verse is that it’s true, if you believe it.  Everything does work for your best, but then again, you have to be willing to sacrifice something called “My Will,” which is a big sacrifice indeed, but once it is offered up, you can have peace with what has come your way and, yes, even be thankful for it.   And that is amazing.

Brunstad.org

 

Caregivers

Caregivers:  they are the unsung heroes of the cancer world.

Me and my wife

At Bolt Castle, 2011

Well, the patient gets loads of attention heaped on him or her, and as soon as you say the word cancer, the sympathy gushes forth, and everyone feels sorry for you and can tell you a heart-wrenching story of someone close to them who had it and how it turned out.  They come out of the woodwork to feel sorry for you, and in the midst of this horrible disease you have contracted, you are in the limelight.

The caregivers, less so.  The caregivers stand to the side and actually give the care.  They are the ones who bring the chemotherapy patient their food – food that is often not eaten – or administer the medications to the patient who has just had a surgery, and perform many, many other tasks like these.  Even worse, they are the ones who watch their loved one go through an awful physical crisis and often an emotional/spiritual/mental and financial one.

The caregiver.

Here is a secret that many don’t understand:  the caregiver goes through exactly as much as the patient does, but just in a different way.  We feel sorry for the patient, but what about the caregiver who has given everything perhaps day in and day out and has to face a crushing burden and fears of the unknown.  What about them?

It is the same way with the family as a whole.  The patient gets cancer, but everyone in the family – from the highest to the lowest, right down to the family dog or cat – gets cancer also.  They all get cancer.  Everyone has to cope, even the youngest child, and in their own way. They all have to face their fears, and all have to process what has happened.

It is all so difficult and, in some cases, it’s the patient who has to encourage the others.  The one who has the most to lose has to encourage the others who also have a lot to lose.  It can go in this way.  But as with all the ironies in life, one day the caregiver needs encouragement and support, but then next day the patient does.  And the one who is so strong often is revealed to be quite weak, and the weak one finds inner strength that they never knew they had.

Look past the cancer patient, and you will see a caregiver, and woe to the cancer patient without a caregiver!  A good support system is like balm; I personally think it does as much as a 55 barrel drum of chemo, or radiation on the order of Luke Skywalker.  We need help, and we need each other, and there is medicine in the smile of your spouse or the kindness of your kids.

Never take a caregiver for granted.  They hold the world up, as it were, when it is crashing, and have to hold themselves up as well – which is why it always best when they have God in their lives – to hold them up!

Brunstad.org

On Large Families and Being Organized, Part III

Today was a big day.  We hung a new schedule of chores up on our refrigerator, and every week someone is assigned a different chore, so the chores change by the week thus the participants can fully learn their chore but don’t get too bored doing it week after week, month after month, year after year.

The most recent Exalted Stahl Chore Chart

We try to be accommodating.

We’ve had chore lists of all sorts over the years:  one where everyday a child is assigned a different area to pickup, such as the living room (a simple chore list), or where it is task oriented (like taking out the garbage, also simple), or – in a vein attempt to get more work out of them – a combined hybrid scheme with both (complexity: moderate ); We actually once came up with one where there were three types of chores: an area, a task and one chore pertaining to supper, like setting  or clearing the table (complexity:  great).  The last was a work of art, beautiful in thought and depth, and of it course failed.

Well, all the chore lists failed and that miserably.  The first day or two we got some traction but then something happens on day three and four, and by day five the exalted chore list hanging on the refrigerator is covered by another item – perhaps a pizza coupon – and forever forgotten.

I happen to be a schedule-type guy.  First, I am of German stock.  I hate being late for anything; it is as if the Earth itself is thrown off its rotation when I’m five minutes late, and the moon crashes into the Midwest if its ten.  When I do something, every part of the task is mapped out in my mind against a timeline, so I can almost always accurately finish something in the allotted time.  That’s me.

So, the schedule thing grooves with my make-up, and seeing it fail year after year causes angst in my soul, but I haven’t killed my kids yet or totally freaked out, so that’s good.  And I’ve made amazing progress with my being late fetish.  A man with eight kids and sometimes bad health and besides it all being a burned-out middle-aged guy, I am late for everything, across the board it seems.  I don’t discriminate between work and church and friends.  I always arrive late, no matter how much I try.  It’s as if the Gods are now against me, and maybe when the idea that I will ever be on time is beat out of me, then I’ll start being only five minutes late.

I’m off subject.

We can ask: what happens to our dearly beloved schedule?  I don’t know.  It seems like everything trumps it and life itself conspires against us.  First, in order for the schedule to attain lift-off velocity, the parent has to apply pressure to the system to overcome the laws of inertia:  if a body is sitting in front of the boob tube, it wants to continue sitting there, thus the need for an outside pressure, sometimes great.  For a variety of reasons, my wife and I can’t seem to apply this pressure day after day, week after week and month after month, so it never becomes something called a habit.

Then there is life, and we have teenagers that go hither and thither, and we have a few studious ones who can’t have their homework time interrupted by such a low task as scrubbing the bathroom sink, and my wife and I also work, which throws the schedule off because pressure is no longer being applied, and if we don’t work we might not feel well, and then we have to shop to feed these children with black holes for stomachs, and on and on it goes.

Does any of it really matter?  Not really.  But I do believe that it’s good for the children to help around the house, and good for them to learn responsibility.  When I’ve wiped them into shape, they seem happier, and Phoebe says one of her best memories from childhood is when we played loud, jivy music and ran around like crazy, picking up anything in our path.  (That’s when I had energy.  Now I’m up for what the kids consider elevator music, but it’s not – just not rock.  Anyway,   its good to make it fun.)  And, on another level, it’s not such a bad idea for my wife and I to learn to be responsible parents and – in order to do what we should be doing anyways – we have to deny ourself; that is, turn off our electronic device, stop making excuses, and take charge.

Amazingly, we actually got something done today as a family, and we are at day two of the Great Schedule.  Tomorrow we’ll try for day three.

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