HAPPINESS...OR NOT

Lately I have been reading a lot about happiness. It is definitely the new buzz word. It seems to be everyone's goal. As with anything that seems to be overworked, I am getting a bit sick of it. I think that we all should try to find a life that we can be happy with but it seems that too many people are taking this idea to the extreme. I get the feeling that many people think that they need to wake up happy and go to bed happy every day. This is not possible and I think that the danger in feeling this way may result in feeling like a failure when we feel unhappy. Life is full of unhappy moments as well as happy moments. Whatever happened to grinning and bearing it? For me, some days just seem to go wrong. I'm okay with this and I just try to survive those days and hope for a better day tomorrow. There are phases in everyone's lives that are not happy. I am no exception. We can go months or sometimes years where we have bad times. The goal is to find joy once again but we certainly should not feel like failures. Only when we accept difficult circumstances as part of life can we move on. With this new push on happiness, I wonder how many people are feeling worse thinking "why can't I be happy?"

I'm sure that there are people who can wake up and feel joy and happiness every day. I am not one of them. My goals in life are to feel many moments of joy and happiness, to experience as few moments of unhappiness as possible and all the other days? Those other days, I want to LIKE what I am doing...or at least not DISLIKE it.

A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT FEAR

This post really has nothing to do with Irene or the fear people feel about this storm. It is about fear in general. Not long ago me and Thomas were going to a dinner for a scholarship he received. There were a few kids that had gotten it so on the way in, we met another mother and girl we know. It had been raining cats and dogs on the drive there. It was coming down harder than I've ever experienced and it caused some temporary flooding. There is an underpass with train tracks above on the way to the restaurant and it was filled with water. The only choice was to park on "the wrong side of the tracks." This mother saw us make the turn and since she didn't know the area well, she followed us. We ran through the rain to the restaurant that was pretty close by. After chatting with the mother, I found she was quite stressed out because she "didn't know what was going on." When we left, it was not quite dark but she was quite worried anyway. I guess she felt we were literally heading to the "wrong side of the tracks." What struck me was how fearful she was to have to walk back to her car. I felt it was not scary at all and fear didn't even enter my mind. All I could think was how awful it must be to live with that kind of fear. I am not sure why I am not a fearful person but I definitely appreciate this fact. Fear does not keep a person safe, it only inhibits a persons enjoyment of life.

FEAR

Yesterday Tom went to our beach house at the Jersey shore to bring in the grill and lawn furniture so they wouldn't get blown away by hurricane Irene. Maybe it's because my middle name is Irene but I don't feel scared by her at all. I hoped that Tom would not get turned away when he tried to drive onto the barrier island where our house is located. He will leave this morning before the storm hits. As I watched the reporters on TV, I wondered why they are working people into a frenzy. I think it's sad that our news people have turned into entertainers and not actual reporters. In this case they are "entertaining" by trying to scare people. People are watching with rapt attention. Don't get me wrong, I would not be one of those people who tried to ride the storm out and stay in a dangerous location. Also, I would be very upset if my house gets destroyed but I just can't understand the fear people have. I have heard people compare this to 9/11. What? Will that be the thing that people do now, compare everything bad to 9/11? I think it's quite possible that the media has put this idea into people's minds. I feel it's sort of like brain washing. When I was watching the news channels last night trying to see where the mandatory evacuations were, I started to understand how the brain washing is done. The longer I watched, the more I wondered how serious this storm was going to be. I thought, how the leaders in our area would not require evacuation unless it was serious. Then I started to wonder if they too were falling prey to the hype. I have not doubt that the mandatory evacuations are a good idea but I was annoyed when Mayor Bloomberg talked about the possible "tragedies" that could occur. Maybe my annoyance lies with the wrong people. Maybe the leaders understand that if they don't scare people, people will not listen and do the right things to stay safe.

I have a sister-in-law who lives in a house that has been flooded many times. She doesn't panic. She just gets out when the time comes. She does get frustrated and sad that once again she will have to hire contractors to come in and fix the mess. She is probably worried right now just wondering if this will happen again. Is she afraid" No. Will my husband heed the warnings and evacuate our beach house? Yes. Will he have any fear? No.

HOW I GOT TO BE "RICH"

The biggest thing on my mind lately is how we will pay for our kids to go to college. We are in that category of parents that are told that we are "rich" enough to pay the full freight but in reality we really can't. When filling out the FAFSA (free financial aid form), I learned that we would be expected to pay up to $50K per year for our kids college education. I have three kids and if they knuckle down and graduate in the "normal" four years, I will have one or two kids in college for a period of eight years. Using simple math I calculate that I will be expected to come up with $400K! Hah! So, since Thomas just headed off to college I can't help but think quite a bit about all of this.

I spend some time complaining and more time facing the reality and thinking of ways to pay for college. I've learned that one of my "friends" has no sympathy at all for me. She is of the belief that I am just lucky that I have the money and other assets that are keeping our family from getting the need based aid. I can't seem to get this off my mind. For me, the bottom line is that Tom and I have really sacrificed more than others to get into the position we are in. After our kids are off to college, not only will all our savings be gone but we will also have a substantial amount of debt. It is true that others who do get free aid will have debt and they won't have any savings either. This bothers me because after years of working hard and sacrificing we won't be any better off than people who sacrificed less than us.

The fact that bothers me is that my friend thinks that it is some sort of luck that put us in our position. She totally disregards what I had to do to get to this point. I grew up in a poor family where my mother sewed all my clothes and we drank powdered milk because we couldn't afford regular milk. My parents were not supportive of my decision to go to college and in fact told me that they would do everything they could to stop me. Regardless, I went anyway and often times woke up to temperatures in my apartment that were barely above 50 degrees because I couldn't afford to turn on the heat. While I was struggling to graduate to be able to get a job, Tom was living with his parents, working and saving as much as he could so we would be able to buy a house. We could not afford a house in NJ so we moved an hour away from his job to Pennsylvania. We bought the cheapest house we could find and put so much "sweat equity" into our house we sometimes would come home after working an eight hour day and be working outside on building a garage by spotlight until 9:00 pm. We dug a foundation hole for our garage by hand and I overcame my fear of heights when I had to be working all the way at the peak of the roof. I wonder if my friend has made any similar sacrifices. Since our kids have been born (18 years) we have only been on three "big" vacations. I only mention this because I had to listen to my friend tell me she is planning a trip to Switzerland for her 25th anniversary. We will also be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary the same year as her. We could not afford to go to a foreign country on vacation. For our anniversary I probably will be making a special meal to be eaten on our 29 year old dinner plates.

HEADED OFF TO RPI

Today we bring Thomas to college. He is my first so it is kind of weird. What's even more weird is I no longer have those sad feelings of knowing I will miss him. I am still worried that he will be experiencing home sickness and all those usual unhappy freshman year feelings but I feel peaceful otherwise. I know along with the unhappy feelings he will also experience all the happy feelings. I think I realize that this is just a natural progression and I can sit back and enjoy it. I also see that he is happy. He seemed to be getting really excited last night. It's nice to see, when it comes down to the wire, he has joyful feelings. It seems as if the anxiety has been pushed to the side for now. He never really seemed super worried; I think because he is pretty independent about a lot of things. Through high school he has learned to handle the day to day tasks and decisions. He still lets me pamper him by doing his laundry and making him Koolaid but he takes care of the big stuff, mostly having to do with school. He doesn't need his parents to organize and plan his day at school. Other than helping with proof reading he doesn't ask us for help.

When we went to RPI for orientation, we were told that we know our own children. If we feel that in general they make good decisions and were generally responsible, we didn't have to worry about them. Chances are, they would be fine. If we were worried about them, chances are we needed to worry about them! I'm not worried about Thomas. I also felt really good when they asked all the parents to raise their hands if their kids did at least an hour of homework each night. There were few parents that raised their hands. They explained that was because these kids were the smart kids and good grades came easy to them so they would just coast through high school. Although many things do come easy to Thomas he has always studied a lot and done a lot of homework. It was comforting to know that he would not be one of those kids that had a rude awakening in college as far as the time commitment. I cannot really tell what will happen with his grades. Will he be able to keep all those A's? I have warned him that there may be times that he is disappointed with the result of his hard work. Only time will tell.

DEATH AND FAMILY

I reread my post about the chaos surrounding my family because of the deaths last year and thought I should update on that as well. I really feel much better about it in general. I realize that it really didn't have much to do with the deaths but it had to do with family relationships and how I handle them. I think the biggest problem comes from the fact that I would PREFER to have a somewhat close relationship with both sides of the family. Even if this means that I would have to grin and bear some imperfections in people. My problem comes when I don't know how much I should be grinning and bearing! It really bothers me when I see family members being mean to each other to the point that they end up not speaking to each other. In the past I have not wanted to be one of these people so I tended to put up with a lot. During this past year, I have realized that I am putting up with too much. I have distanced myself from family members and I am much happier living that way. I am realizing that I am much better off avoiding contact. I have not had any big fight. I still have a cordial relationship with all family members. I just have not made any effort to be nice and keep in touch unless I feel like it. I have not forced myself to visit or talk with people. I realize how much happier I can be when I live like this. In reality, I don't think people care that much. At most I picture them making note of it, thinking I am wrong and then moving on. I can deal with that. I don't need my family members to like me. I have finally realized when they "like" me, I am often times less happy.

GOAL UPDATE

Unfortunately I did not meet my goal of climbing Mt. Wittenberg this summer. It was a combination of the fact that my iron seemed to be low and Thomas didn't seem that interested in the training. He would have been able to hike it anyway but I would have had to train on my own. I did not have my iron checked but I was starting to huff and puff and get extra tired when hiking. I have made a special effort to increase my consumption of iron rich foods for at least a month now and I feel better. I will continue to work hard to eat the right stuff but it gets annoying because I do not love meat like some people do. It's not that I have an ethical dilemma but it's purely a matter of taste. Carbs taste better to me! Also, when my iron is low it is not a case of just eating more meat or vegetables like spinach and legumes, it's that I have to eat a lot of red meat and even liver. I am not a person that hates liver but I certainly don't love it. I don't spend a lot of time discussing this with people because in general I am experienced at raising my iron and the average person does not understand just how much I have to work at it. It's foolish for a person to suggest to me that I can raise my iron by eating such simple things as spinach. I do love and eat a lot of spinach to help but it's always in conjunction with a red meat. Meat makes the iron in vegetables absorb better. Enough about iron....