How to Survive the Holidays, Part 2
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
I watch How The Grinch Stole Christmas! each year, and each year, without fail, I notice a new verse that I hadn’t noticed before. This year the verse was: “He has garlic in his soul!”
“Garlic in his soul? Wow, that’s bad,” I marveled.
My 5 year old asked, “What does it mean to have garlic in your soul, Mommy?”
“Oh, it’s just a figure of speech. It means that he’s a bad person.”
She said, “Mommy, there are no bad people, just people who make bad choices.”
I looked at her as if she were the incarnation of the Buddha himself, and I said, “You are right. There are no bad people.”
And then, silently, to myself, I thought, “For the most part.”
My Buddhist meditation teacher had been trying to get this very thing through my thick head for months, by the way. Each week, I’d go to class and she’d explain how all people deserved my compassion. She’d tell me that all people wanted the same thing: to be happy. Some people, she said, were just deluded about how to get to that happy place, so they continually behaved in ways that hurt others.
This all made sense to me in theory and especially which I was sitting right there, surrounded by other people who were all trying to become compassionate souls. Then I would go home and watch an episode of Criminal Minds and I would think, “Serial killers don’t deserve my compassion.” It was a downward spiral from there. Soon, the person who honked at me because I didn’t press my accelerator quickly enough after a light had turned green was just as undeserving of my compassion as that serial killer.
And then I would feel as if I was the one with garlic in my soul because I couldn’t even muster an ounce of compassion for a poor stranger who, for all I knew, might be in a rush to get to the hospital.
I wondered: Could I get to the same innocent place that my 5 year old seemed to inhabit? Could I, if I worked hard at it, eventually come to see the inherent good in all people?
And that thought got me thinking about the holidays and how so many people just don’t enjoy them. What if, instead of feeling resentful, put upon, and thwarted, we all realized that we all wanted the same thing come this time of year?
If we all realized that we had the same goal—to feel happiness and joy—would we fight as much about what to cook for Christmas dinner? Would we stress over how clean our houses are or whether our light displays were just right? Would we worry about buying the right things for the right people? Would we care what people bought us, or would we just feel loved that anyone thought to buy us anything at all?
These questions got me thinking about a conversation I’d had with my husband the day before. We’d just gotten home after spending a few days with relatives. It had been a great time, but I’m an introvert. If you know nothing about introverts then, to understand this story, you must know this: introverts require a lot of quiet time because our thoughts are already pretty dang loud. You put our thoughts in a room full of talking people and we start to feel drained and stressed out.
Coming off of three days straight of Not One Moment of Quiet Time, I was a ticking time bomb, reading to blow at any moment. Problem was, my husband was off at some bike race, so I was alone with our 5 year old, who is just entering that stage in life when she does not stop talking. People had warned me about this stage when I’d first become a parent. When she’d been a little baby, they’d told me things like, “You won’t be able to wait for her to talk, and then once she starts talking you won’t be able to wait for her to stop.” I’d thought that such people were the worst parents in the world. They wanted their kids to shut up!? What kind of parents were they? I would never want my lovely little peanut to stop talking. I was going to love every sweet word that came out of her sweet mouth.
Eh, it’s nice to be naively idealistic every once in a while, I suppose.
To all of those people who were met with my “You Must Be the Worst Parent in the World” evil eye after they told me such a thing: I apologize. Thanks for trying to warn me. You certainly meant well, and you definitely knew of what you spoke.
This past Saturday, every time my sweet little muffin top opened her sweet little mouth to utter something that I’m sure any stranger would think was adorable and cute and absolutely sweet enough to record for the ages, I thought one thing and that one thing was this, “Just shut up already. Just SHUT UP already! PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF MY PERSONAL SANITY, JUST SHUT UP.”
When it got to the point that I was worried that I was about to say, “Just shut up already!” out loud, I called my husband and asked him to come home. He did.
As soon as he walked in the door, I could have said out loud what was going on in my head, which was: I just spent the past three days with YOUR family. If anyone deserves ME time today, it’s ME, not you. Where do you get off spending 5 hours setting up for some stupid bike race? Did you really need to do that today of all days? And you know you can’t take more than half of a day anyway. It’s not fair. We’ve talked about this before. You either get the morning or the afternoon, but you don’t get both…
I could have, but I didn’t. Instead, I said, “I need to go for a walk.” And I did. After spending 45 minutes alone with my loud, introverted thoughts, I was much better. Then, when I came home, I was able to say, “Wow, I have a really hard time going day after day with no quiet time. During the work week, I’m alone and no one talks to me during the day and I apparently really need that. Today Kaarina kept talking and talking and talking and I just kept wishing she would just shut up or lose her voice or go to sleep or something. Thank you for coming home because I really needed the break.”
He said, “Anytime.”
And the next day he took our daughter with him to a bike race, so I had 5 hours to myself. And it was bliss. And that would not have happened had I had the former conversation rather than the latter. At least, I don’t think it would have.
It made me realize that my husband and I have different definitions of happy, and our roads to happy don’t always travel in the same direction. More important, sometimes what he needs to feel happy (spending time away from his family) conflicts with what I need to feel happy (spending time away from my family). But that doesn’t mean that either one of us has garlic in our souls. It just means that we need to talk about what we need, and come up with solutions and compromises to solve those conflicting needs.
And this made me wonder if all conflicts are about the same thing—one person’s definition of happy conflicts with another person’s. I wonder if the belief that we all have the same goal–to be happy—could help us better communicate our way through any conflict. It seems worth exploring. What do you think?
If you know what you need to be happy and you know what your spouse needs to be happy, can you more easily work out how you can help each other get to your happy place?
