It’s About Making Babies!

Dr. Michele Borba writes about Parenting Solutions. Her article on Empower Girls To Be Strong from the Inside Out caught my attention. I think there are larger implications for children, parents, and adults trying to heal.

Parenting – or healing?

Dr. Borba wrote the book. Seriously. The Big Book of Parenting Solutions: 101 Answers to Your Everyday Challenges and Wildest Worries (Child Development).

Dr. Borba's parenting book

What I notice is that she offers clues and guidance for people healing from bad relationships and other aspects of low self esteem.

1. Be a confident mom. Girls don’t learn to love themselves by hearing our self-esteem dinner lecture, but by having confident role models to copy. Sounds so obvious, but how easily that child development tenet is overlooked. . . . So take care of yourself so your daughter can learn to love herself just as she is.

This is a two edged sword for someone looking for healing. The first is that the people around you are either part of the problem or potential resources. And you have to be careful not to confuse the two roles. If you don’t know someone confident and of sound character – you will need to find one. For some that might be a competent counselor or minister, for others a respected family elder. But you do have to be around good people to get better.

This also implies a very powerful way to help a friend – be confident, honest, honorable, compassionate – and confront disrespect. Above all, “do no harm” as the first rule of first aid goes. Never enable bad behavior.

Contact, community, and family

2. Stay connected to your daughter. . . Start a mother-daughter book club or go to yoga or exercise as a group. Watch Friends or Mean Girl with her.

My first thought on reading this passage (this is just a snippet of Dr. Borba’s article), was study results in England some decades ago. Orphans were dying, in the state orphanages. The death rate of babies that “failed to thrive” was noticeable and distressing. The fix? Cuddle. Hold the infants a while. Sheer physical contact turned around much of the disparity of unexpected infant deaths.

Look at how often even perpetual daters come together. People need contact. The hug and cuddling side-by-side may be the most powerful elements of healing available. Within a loving relationship you get the warmth, the exchange of pheromones and hormones from shared breaths, the exchange of body rhythms. Closeness is a physical expression of acceptance, respect, and affection – and distance is a very visceral expression of “I got better things to do.” For some people a pet can offer a reasonably safe intermediate level of contact. But true connection takes people of good character. You need someone to accept you that you respect and honor whole-heartedly.

3. Foster her strengths and passions. Find that spark in your daughter and help nurture her passions, capabilities, and interests. Yoga, horseback riding, drawing, basketball, writing, cooking: what turns your daughter on? . . . Let her know you love her for who she really is–not for what you hope she will become. Doing so is one of the best ways to nurture strong identity and self-worth.

Activities stimulate the body. They stimulate the senses with new inputs, new triggers firing off new thoughts, making new associations, helping the mind and heart to leap past obstacles and confusions while trying to connect things together. Making sense of one problem often takes putting things in perspective with relation to life, community, and family. Abandoning all activities is a very insecure and ultimately futile way to overcome problems and evade dangers. Besides, activities often include associating with other people – people that are often healthy and worthy of respect.

Choosing an activity should involve trusted friends or even family. Very few well adjusted, competent, happy, and confident people are well able to judge themselves fairly. Others are even less likely to be able to weigh their own strengths, weaknesses, assets, and issues fairly. For most people the value of an activity from work or family to hobbies is related to the people involved. Finding a community you enjoy, and getting the background skills, aptitudes, and experience to contribute to that community is a very healthy and worthwhile plan.

4. Find positive, female role models. Let’s offer our daughters female role models who feel comfortable in their own skin (and don’t need to rely on Botox, breast implants, dieting, and designer labels to feel attractive). What about J.K. Rowling, Erin Brockovich, Michelle Wei, Anne Hathaway, Great Aunt Harriet or even the neighbor lady next door? Expose your daughter to authentic, confident women, and then tell her why you admire them. Our girls need strong, resourceful female examples to emulate. . . to help daughters learn as early as possible that real happiness isn’t borrowed or copied, but lies within. That’s exactly why we need to help our girls become strong from the inside out. . . You can start by boosting your influence with your daughter and stay more connected in her life. It’s the best way to counter those negative media messages[emphasis added] and help her become her own person and enjoy who she is.

This all seems so obvious, how dangerous it is to let Hollywood and the drive-by media define who is popular – and let that affect how we choose people to admire.

Quick – name three people that have benefited your community in the last year, without donating money.

What about naming someone that has helped someone else, but not by giving money to a group or organization? That is, a personal interaction for the benefit of someone that could use the assistance, the help – the personal contact.

Years ago some people were described as “good people”. The “salt of the earth”. An “honest man” and a “good woman” or “good wife” were considered about the very best stature in the community. And it didn’t take counting friends on FaceBook to calculate it it took character, good life choices, kept promises, and associating with good people to be guided by them and to be a resource.

Rachel Lucas writes about her decision to quit smoking, Three Months Smober. And her story might apply to a lot of life decisions – addiction, overeating – leaving bad relationships.

What made me quit is fourfold and all came together in my mind at the exact same time, literally pretty much in the space of a few days, even if it took me another several weeks to assemble it all in my head and do something with it: (1) a good man, (2) an English spring/early summer, (3) turning 37, and (4) C.S. Lewis.

Rachel describes an “easy” transition – unblemished through three months since The Day. Her “good man”

” . . . but my best advice for someone who wants their spouse or loved one to quit is what I learned from the way Rupert dealt with my own smoking, and that is, don’t push the issue, but also do not ever enable. Pushing will just piss them off. Enabling will just, uh, enable.”

On her sojourn to England impacting the choice to quit

The second thing actually is what had the most effect but is also the hardest to describe. If you’ve ever spent a spring and summer in the south of England, you might understand this just fine, but for the rest of y’all, let me only say that I have spent the last several months literally enchanted by this country. Or at least the county and town I live in. It is so green. It’s never hot and it’s never cold.

I kind of think we all have access to beauty, to space and freedom to find ourselves as beautiful people in magical surroundings. But we have to look. Is it easier if we find ourselves in a changed environment, say if we move to another region? Maybe. But the change is the seeing the wonder in the people and world we live in.

The “37th birthday” isn’t what you think. This one is about realizing, accepting the danger to life and to dreams of continuing without a change.

As for the third thing, turning 37. That’s also easy. When I worked at the cancer clinic, we acknowledged a certain parameter: we never had lung cancer patients who’d smoked for less than 20 pack-years. A pack-year is the equivalent of one pack a day for one year. So if you smoke 2 packs a day for 10 years, you have 20 pack-years. Half a pack a day for 40 years is 20 pack-years. Four packs a day for 5 years is 20 pack years…and so on.

The nurses and doctors also said that most all the smoking-related diseases like emphysema don’t generally show up until 20 pack-years. So I always had it in my head that since I started at age 17, and smoked roughly a pack a day when I was smoking, I had until 37 or so to quit. Even though I didn’t smoke for several of those years, and often smoked only a few cigs a day, I still always had that “37″ in my mind. So when that birthday came this April, I flipped out a little. Knew the Time Had Come.

The last point? The C.S. Lewis? Is understanding her own worth – and her responsibilities to family and community.

And lastly, the C.S. Lewis thing. . .

A few months ago, I checked out from the library his book called “The Problem of Pain.” I wanted to read it in preparation for my visit to Auschwitz, which will be my next post by the way, and even if Lewis was advocating a religion I don’t subscribe to, he had a way of making points that speak to me.

Somewhere in that book, if I recall the context correctly, he was talking about how much easier it is for healthy, good-natured people to be “good” than it is for people who are born with bad nerves or ill health. In any case, he referenced a quote from the Bible, book of Luke, . . . which essentially it says that from those to whom much is given, much is expected in return.

I was thinking of it in the life-philosophy sense; at the time, I was not only reading about that for Auschwitz . . . but it struck me as regards my smoking.

To whom much is given, much is expected. I lost sleep for a few nights thinking about that. I have shockingly good health (considering what I’ve done to it with smoking and Taco Bell) and a sane mind that is also happy. I’ve never suffered any true trauma and have generally led an utterly charmed life lacking in any severe personal pain or strife or turmoil.

And yet I was sitting there every day actively destroying all of that with cigarettes. What the hell? What kind of asshole does that make me?

So…I just stopped. I ran out of cigarettes on Friday, May 29, and didn’t buy any more, and haven’t had or even thought of another one since then.

Is this a blueprint, a sure-fire plan that anyone can use to drop a bad habit, leave a bad relationship or job or situation? I doubt it. I doubt anyone can recreate the emotional investment Rachel has in her four foundations, or will experience the same epiphany in anything like the same fashion.

And yet Rachel’s advice is good. Don’t enable bad behavior in those you love. And when you know it is the right thing to do, decide and accept the argument and the decision.

Just, don’t run so close to the edge of the cliff. If she saw no cancer patients at less that 20 pack-years, I would assume that 20 pack-years would be about the 50% mark – half the people at that point would go on to health and cancer illness. I pray Rachel is in time. Just as I pray no one stays with a battering spouse that extra one day “too long”.

Blessed be.