The Fight

I grew up watching fights. They are spelled out pretty closely in Becoming Alice. There was Dad fighting with Mom; there was Mom fighting Dad the only way she knew how, by crying. There was Dad fighting with my brother about everything he thought poor old Fredi did wrong; but there was Fredi who didn’t know how to fight. There was Onkel Max and Tante Dora fighting each other about everything and anything in the most mean and hurtful way possible. Perhaps they enjoyed it. I’ll never know. It was my first lesson in fighting.

Fast forward a decade or two and then I myself was doing a marriage. I grew up determined not to have a marriage like either Mom and Dad or my aunt and uncle. I had learned a little something in the process and was learning a whole lot more as I was doing marriage myself.

I learned that the early years of marriage are one way and the middle years of marriage often are quite different. It is when the fight comes out in the marriage equation. One partner wants things to go one way and the other partner pulls in the exact opposite direction. The fightensues. Over what? Over many things. How to raise children. How to make your money. Where to spend your money. How to behave socially. Who to be friends with. What to do about problem adolescents … especially those out of control ones. What to do about grandparents who interfere. What to do about those that need help, financially and/or physically. The list goes on and on.

Do any of these marriages survive? A lot of them do and they have a couple of things going for them. I find that those fights that stay on the issues have a much better chance of surviving than those that move on to attacks between fighting partners themselves, attacks on their shortcoming and on them personally. They usually are not about the issues that prompted the fight in the first place.

The marriages that seem to survive over the years are the ones where the partners have deeper reserves of positive feeling, lets call it love, for one another left over from the early years. I’ve known many couples who have gone through major problems and ended up with the most solid and satisfying marriages in the next stage of their lives.

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Dealing with Stress

I’ve been pretty proud of myself in recent years for being able to meet stress head on. Life just has a way of throwing things at you that very often you don’t like, and can’t do a thing about. It’s taken a long time but I finally got to the point where I trained myself to shrug my shoulders … oh, not that you can see me do it … but the concept was incorporated and I sort of digested the negative, told myself I couldn’t change the problem one iota, and then went on with my business. I was even so good at it that I was able to talk my husband out of the stress he was feeling.

It wasn’t that I got to this point without going through lots of pain. I started out by dealing with stress, such as emotional upsets, disappointments, and direct attacks from loved ones, by sitting down and crying. Then one day, my husband said, “How can we work this thing out id you’re just sitting there crying?” It made me stop and think. He was right. Crying didn’t change anything. But imagine how powerful it is when you take the blows that come your way without even wincing. It was on the day that my husband challenged my crying that I decided never to cry again. I trained myself to do that. It can be done.

So, of late I have been able to digest stress of most every kind pretty well. Until a few days ago … and it has been over the most ridiculous thing in the world. You see, we are in the process of trying to sell our house. First, I stressed over the fact that nobody came to even look at our house. I knew the real estate market was bad, but I thought perhaps there might be some people who looked at houses on the weekend as their entertainment when they had nothing better to do. No! We didn’t even have anyone look at our house. Nor did we have anyone pronounce that they did not like the style, it was overpriced, or the bedrooms were too small.

O.K. I said to myself. I began to work on the stress by getting ready to deal with not selling our house altogether. We could always rent it out. My stress level went down.

Then, last weekend we had a couple look at our house who really liked it … a lot. Hallelujah! Stress level went down. Two days went by and we heard nothing. Stress level went up. Then we got an offer. Stress level down. The offer was much too low. Stress level up. We counter offered. No answer yet. Stress level is still up.

I’m trying to work with myself and my stress level. Somehow I can’t seem to get my mind off this thing and get on with all the other things I should be doing. This house sale keeps jumping back into my mind.

Maybe I’m not such a hot shot after all when it comes to dealing with stress. I think I’ll take an Ambien tonight so that I can get a good night’s sleep.

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Survival

I was stuck in traffic on the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles, trying to keep my blood pressure from exploding, when the words coming out of my radio changed from being a background noise to actually saying something interesting. The commentator spoke about a trial in which an exotic dancer left her club and was accosted on the sidewalk by a fellow employee. She was beaten and sprayed with an acid that left her in excruciating pain and scared for life. The reason for the attack was stil unknown. The victim was taken to the hospital where she eventually recovered, although with life-long, permanent scars to her skin. The trial that followed ended with the judge proclaiming that she had never presided over such a heinous crime and sentenced the accused to life imprisonment.

The victim recoverd. She survived … physically. But is it over for her? There obviously are two kinds of survival, the physical and emotional. People don’t pay much attention to the emotional survival. They think that once the danger or attack has passed and the victim has survived, life goes on as it had before. That’s the way television shows us all sorts of crimes, the courtroom dramas that follow, the congrats and hugs  between the players after the drama is over, and then a scene showing the stars going happily back to their normal lives.

I don’t think so. I think the emotional hurt goes on long after the crises are over. I know it must have for the poor woman who was so brutally attacked. I know it did for all those survivors of WWII that took so many years to get back to even keel. I know it took many years for me. What happened to me and my family at that time, as told in Becoming Alice, took me the rest of my childhood and adolescence to digest and overcome. Today those suffering through the emotional traumas following survival in war are said to be suffering from post-traumatic stress. I think it applies to everyone, not just the survivors of Iraq and Afganistan.

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