I discovered a new word the other day that has me soul-searching. Gramnesia, a portmanteau combining ‘grandparent’ and ‘amnesia’. A grandparent experiencing gramnesia trots out recollections of the good, easy times they had raising their children, and brings those up in a way which can be a tacit criticism of the way those children are now raising their grandkids. In other words, someone experiencing gramnesia has forgotten the complete picture of parenthood.
While it’s natural to look fondly back on the years when your children were little, it may be problematic if you make those now grown children feel it is unnatural to struggle.
As Allie McQuaid says:
In a follow-up Instagram Reel, McQuaid explained that the main reason these comments are unhelpful is that they don’t change the things parents of young kids are struggling with and they minimize the very real stress they’re facing.
“Our boomer parents telling us that we didn’t cry ever (whether that’s true or not is up for debate apparently..) doesn’t change the fact that OUR baby now is crying and needs our care,” McQuaid wrote.
Instead of judging or comparing, perhaps it would be more helpful for grandparents to be curious. What might they learn and discover from how their children are showing up now as parents?
Parenting techniques change. Smacking someone with a paddle may have been acceptable once, but now it’s illegal, for instance. Priorities change. Keeping up with the Joneses or maintaining appearances may not be as important to your kids as quality time with their kids. Perhaps the gramnesiac will have something to learn. and perhaps, too, they’ll discover a way to help, something they may have greatly appreciated when they were going through the challenges of raising children.
And also, as hard as it is to be vulnerable and discuss the hard times, those stories, call them ‘momeries’, (portmanteau of mom and memories) may make your child feel hopeful and encouraged as they shoulder parenting duties, that times will be both tough and rewarding beyond their wildest expectation.
Fear of failure can keep us from trying something we really, really want to try. And it can keep us from admitting that we have taken a wrong turn and need to reevaluate things. But, at some point, we have to ask ourselves, why? What is so bad about failure?
Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Each experiment that did not succeed helped him move forward on the one path that would ultimately succeed by ruling out the other paths. That attitude helped spur him on because each failed experiment was itself a discovery and taught him something he didn’t know before.
In this remarkable TED talk, Kathryn Schulz, a self-proclaimed wrong-ologist, talks about failure and our responses to it and suggests that it is in these moments of failure, or, as she sees it, moments when reality does not align with our expectations, that the moments of growth, creativity, expansion happen:
So effectively, we all kind of wind up traveling through life, trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything.
I think this is a problem. I think it’s a problem for each of us as individuals, in our personal and professional lives, and I think it’s a problem for all of us collectively as a culture. So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right. And second, why it’s such a problem. And finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make.
So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right? One reason, actually, has to do with a feeling of being wrong. So let me ask you guys something — or actually, let me ask you guys something, because you’re right here: How does it feel — emotionally — how does it feel to be wrong? Dreadful. Thumbs down. Embarrassing. Okay, wonderful, great. Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing — thank you, these are great answers, but they’re answers to a different question. You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you’re wrong? (Laughter) Realizing you’re wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right? I mean it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny, like my stupid Chinese character mistake. But just being wrong doesn’t feel like anything.
I’ll give you an analogy. Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there’s this pathetic coyote who’s always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? In pretty much every episode of this cartoon,there’s a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine — he’s a bird, he can fly. But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. And what’s funny — at least if you’re six years old — is that the coyote’s totally fine too. He just keeps running — right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he’s in mid-air. That’s when he falls. When we’re wrong about something — not when we realize it, but before that — we’re like that coyote after he’s gone off the cliff and before he looks down. You know, we’re already wrong, we’re already in trouble, but we feel like we’re on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.
We have all been raised to get the right answers on the test, to score a winning shot, to achieve. But reality is more complex than a true-false quiz. No one of us has all the answers. And yet it feels like we do.
Schulz thinks this can be dangerous:
Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you’ve got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they’re ignorant. They don’t have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they’re going to see the light and come on over to our team. When that doesn’t work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption,which is that they’re idiots. (Laughter) They have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they are too moronic to put them together correctly. And when that doesn’t work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. So this is a catastrophe.
This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly. But to me, what’s most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human. It’s like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds. And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing. That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring. The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is.It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past, and we can think about the future,and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this a little differently, which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this.And yeah, it is also why we get things wrong.
We are fallible. We make mistakes, constantly even, and no amount of convincing ourselves otherwise changes this particular reality. Once we accept this, we can soften our edges in the ways we treat each other and ourselves. We can jump into an uncertain future, not knowing what can happen because we realize we ACTUALLY DO NOT KNOW what will happen. That lack of knowledge isn’t something to be ashamed of or to pretend isn’t there like Wile E. Coyote who has just run off a cliff: it’s part of the human condition. We simply do not have all the answers.
Today, embrace the moment and consider each experience a learning opportunity to grow and stretch and learn. To maybe, even, discover you’ve been wrong and to incorporate that new knowledge into your choices going forward.
When we find ourselves in challenging times and are unsure which way to turn, let these words help guide you.
Do justice. Peace, justice, love are things we do and bring about, not things we wait for. With our best discernment, we offer ourselves to the world, hoping to make a difference. Kind words, loving hearts, calm demeanors, patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. The way of the One we follow. A servant’s heart but a leader’s strength.
Love mercy. Oh, how the world loves vengeance, cancelling, grudges, getting even, punishment. To love mercy is a kinder, gentler path, one that believes in the redeem-ability of every last one of us. One that doesn’t insist on being avenged or having the last word. One that delights in forgiveness and healing.
Walk humbly. No matter how hard we try to do or be right, we may be wrong. The other guy might be right. And, get this, God loves the other guy as much as God love you.
In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond – and his response is magnificent:
“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow. God bless you all!” ~Kurt Vonnegut
There is something soul-stretching about entering the zone, that timelessness we find in creating art. Writing, drawing, dancing, singing. All of it. Lose yourself in creating and find yourself a bit different on the other end.
If one of your friends were struggling with the problems you are facing right now, what words would you offer in support? Would you call them names, berate them, remind them of all the other times they messed up just like this and how, honestly, can they ever expect to get anything right, ever?
Probably not. Right? But often this is the way we talk to ourselves. We replay all our other mistakes in our minds, call ourselves stupid, sink into our shells scared to face the world.
But why do we do this? If the words we would offer our friend are what we think would help, why are we so reticent to speak kind encouraging words to ourselves? Maybe today is a good day to try a different approach.
Be a kind friend to yourself. Offer yourself words of support and encouragement. Focus on all the many times you got things right. Tell yourself the truth: you are precious and beloved.
In a difficult and challenging place and time, we are called to continue the fight for what is right and good, true and just, honorable and compassionate. We push forward– listening more, caring more, giving more. We can drown out the din and listen to our hearts which strive for peace and harmony, communion, reconciliation. We must hold fast to our principles and to hope as our anchor, especially now.
A guy cuts you off in traffic. How do you see him? Is he an inconsiderate lout caring little for the aggravation he causes you or a distracted hapless soul, perhaps late for an emergency? How we see this situation, or any situation, can have a profound effect on our lives.
In this thoughtful essay, Elizabeth Gilbert considers the power of perception. She recounts a time when her father and his siblings were reminiscing about their late mother and how she used to take a sip from any glass of milk she poured for them. They agreed on the fact, that she took a sip, but wildly disagreed on their perception of that fact:
At one point, they found themselves sitting around the old kitchen table, eating sandwiches and talking about the past. My uncle, the baby of the family, looked at the refrigerator and said, “I can still see Mom standing there, pouring me a glass of milk. Do you remember that sweet thing she always used to do whenever she got us a glass of milk? Remember how she’d take a tiny sip first, to make sure it wasn’t spoiled? Always looking out for us.”
My father, the analytical engineer of the family, raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said. “You are so wrong. Mom wasn’t sipping our milk to test it for freshness. She was sipping our milk because she always overfilled the glass. She had no sense of spatial relations. It used to drive me crazy.”
My brilliantly sardonic aunt looked at her two brothers like they were the biggest idiots she’d ever seen.
“You’re both wrong,” she said. “Mom was stealing our damn milk.”
So, what have we learned about my grandmother from this story? Was she a devoted caregiver, an incompetent dunderhead or someone who would steal the milk out of the mouths of her children? (Or maybe just an exceptionally thirsty woman.) The world will never know the truth.
But does the truth really matter?
I don’t think so.
Wow! What a remarkable difference in what each brings to the encounter. Now imagine yourself in each of those mindsets: hostile, critical, or grateful. Which would lead to the happier life?
We don’t have control over facts, but we sure have a tremendous amount of control over how we perceive those facts. We owe it to ourselves to try to see the facts in the most favorable light even if that means consciously going over all the possible interpretations of something and actively selecting the best one to pick.
These days it feels a bit like we are bombarded by news, so overwhelming in scope as to cloud out the sun. Overwhelm is on the menu. And joy can feel like an exotic indulgence. And yet, choosing joy can be an act of resistance.
As Maria Popova notes, drawing on her experience in writing The Marginalian:
14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.
Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.
Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.
Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.
Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.
I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.
Pausing to notice and delight in these little moments can counterbalance the great and pressing weight of darkness. It is from each of these moments, we draw value and solace, hope and strength.
And we persevere, weaving the ‘slender threads’ of the lifelines that save us.
Speaking to graduating law students, Julian Aguon said
No offering is too small. No stone unneeded. All of us – whether we choose to become human rights lawyers or corporate counsel, or choose never to practice law at all but instead become professors or entrepreneurs or disappear anonymous among the poor or stay at home and raise bright, delicious children – all of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.
And this is true for any profession, calling, or vocation. We each matter. We each contribute to the mix. We each are qualified to rescue this world.
In any time in history, including our own in which we now find ourselves, some individuals stand apart from the crowd on behalf of what is right. Their example inspires others from that moment forward in time.
What is our job in these troubled times? During any times, but particularly during times where we are seeing peoples’ rights eroded and trampled, when legal safeguards are flouted, and when authoritarianism is on the rise, our job is to hold the line. Continue to be a place of comfort and succor to the hurting, feed the hungry, grieve with the mourning.
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