The Power of Happy Opinion

I just realized...
I will probably live the rest of my life with the knowledge that there will always be someone, somewhere, who thinks I’m evil. I’m pretty sure my parents do now as well as my sister and her husband. He once said he couldn’t bring himself to speak my name, but I really don’t care very much about that.

While growing up, our parents' opinions define us. We're good boys and girls if our parents say we are. It's terribly difficult to think we're good when our parents don’t. This is probably a good thing. Maintaining parents’ happy opinion helps children make wise decisions. However, there comes a time when children must be released from the defining opinion of parents.

My girls were raised with a view toward independence and self image, self worth, self dignity, and self respect. When the natural time came, they told us they were released from the death grip of our opinions. But for children who are raised in homes with a high degree of control and parental management, this day never comes.

Looking back on my emerging adulthood in my parents’ home, I see my attempts to become an independent agent. However, when I made decisions contrary to my parents wishes, their swift and severe response boiled down to, “If you don’t repair what you have done, from this point on you will live your life outside our happy opinion of you.” I was always terrified and got back in line.

My one regret in this life is that I didn’t stand up to my father sooner. The very first time he insinuated my girlfriend’s family was “white trash” (for enjoying catsup on their fried fish), I should have stood up and said,

“Dad, we’re leaving now. We’ll come back to visit again but you should know this: I’m forgiving you this one time for what you’ve just said. If you ever do it again I’m going to kick your ass or you’ll never see me again.”

I would have to have seen myself as a different person to say it. Sadly, although I was being influenced by several people, the only person who would have been able to convince me I could kick my dad’s ass…was my dad. Of course, he wasn’t about to break the spell. I did eventually tell him to bugger off, but it took me nearly 50 years. I was at least 30 years into my adult life.

Now I live in the same place I would have been if I’d stood up to him at 19. It’s a high price to pay, but in return for this opinion of a few people I’ll probably never see again, I get my self respect, dignity, worth, self image, the whole lot. No one is ever going to disrespect me, my wife, or my children without hearing about it from me, and possibly, even at my age, suffering a little violence.

I just wish I’d paid sooner.

Rescuing Definitions

Do you remember solving equations years ago in a high school math class? If so, I’m awfully sorry. Math teachers introduce equations like Y = 5x2 + 2x – 3 (5x squared, my blog won't support superscript!) and then show how to use the quadratic formula, the skanky looking thing above, to solve them. At the risk of putting you in a math coma, let me focus your attention on a single part. There’s a good lesson here, but it has nothing to do with math.

Inside the radical, what my students would call the “big check thingy,” you find b2 – 4ac (b squared). That’s the discriminant, and it’s very useful. If you substitute numbers for a, b, and c, and do the arithmetic, the discriminant becomes a number. Since it lives inside the big check thingy, the number it becomes says a lot about the solutions of the equation. For example, if it’s a negative number, there can’t be any real solutions because no one can calculate the square root of a negative.

I tell my students the discriminant discriminates. They tell me it’s a bad word. But it isn’t wrong to discriminate I say. Yeah, there’s that bad definition, but there’s also, “to distinguish, differentiate, make sensible decisions, and judge wisely.” Don’t we want our children to do that? If there’s time, I bring up predjudice. We talk for a minute about the other definitions for that word like, “preconception, partiality, predilection, predisposition, bias, and influence.”

Paint me green and call me Gumby, but I wanted my own children to skillfully discriminate with a healthy amount of prejudice. Every time they left the house I hoped they took a predisposition with them toward alcohol and drugs. I prayed they held a bias about sex, and anything else that could harm them. I was desperate for them to judge wisely about everything they did right down to using their seat belt.

Discrimination and prejudice are only wrong when used to harm other people. They’re not just words, they’re really important concepts we don’t want to lose in the face of some ugly ones.

Mike

Ps – could you tell I’ve just learned to use hyperlinks?

Embrace the Voice

I asked a student the other day, “What are going to study in college?” Without a moment’s thought, he turned and replied, “The voices in my head are telling me to go into psychology.”

If you hear voices in your head you might have problems – possibly serious problems.

But if you hear a single voice, constantly explaining, talking, but not to you, talking as though someone else were listening….

Not all writers have the voice in the head, but if you’ve got the voice, you’re probably a writer. That voice is not doing writing; it is writing, looking for the page. The voice in my head is named Ted. He wouldn’t shut up so I went ahead and named him. He gabs when I’m under stress. If I’ve got something that I really need to do but don’t want to I can always count on Ted to show up and blab about something unrelated to anything. He also talks when I’m doing something mundane like mowing the yard or exercising. I trained for four marathons and actually ran three, and Ted talked through nearly every mile. He talked, in fact, about this topic today, interrupting my attempt to count laps in the pool.

Before I was a writer, I tried to ignore Ted. I just figured I was bored; my mind was filling empty space, using language as light exercise; words were dumb bells. Now that I know I’m a writer, I give Ted a little more respect. I realize he’s writing, and I need to listen and get it down.

Woah. Does that mean he’s really the writer and I’m a just a scribe?

Hmm…maybe Ted will write about that tomorrow.

Life In The Lanes

I swam tonight with two dolphins. Hendrix college swim team was practicing, and two ladies in the lane next to me passed me, seemingly, on every length. During one of the first few laps, while I was still lucid, it dawned on me they were younger than my children. I swam with them for short lengths, then forty-five minutes later I pulled myself out of lane 2, pausing on the ladder to regain my balance. The dolphins were still at it.

Back in July, Cindy read in the paper that the new Hendrix facility would be open to a limited number of community members. We frantically met the requirements for inclusion, eventually taking two of about forty memberships out of the 200 offered. We’ve never found an activity we could do together. We’ve always enjoyed being in a pool, but we’ve never been swimmers. Before this began in September, we wondered how we’d fare. We barely made it two laps, and that was with gasping for air every chance we got to hug the edge.

But it was never about proficiency or prowess. We exercise to stay healthy into the twilight; we swim to be together. Even though we don’t share more than a couple of sentences once we’re in the water we are still together, and that matters more than anything else. So, when Cindy found out I had planned to swim longer than she and said, “That’s okay, I can get out and wait for you,” I said,

"We’ll finish together."