Written Summer of 2014

I looked in awe as I watched my mother and my aunt turn and walk to the door at Souderton Mennonite Homes, compassionately leaning on each other, yet also steadying each other. My mother has struggled with congestive heart failure in recent months and my aunt has been receiving chemotherapy for cancer, but off they went, finding the support and encouragement they needed together.

We all need to feel needed. I’ve recently realized this as I have been searching for a new job that uses my 50 year old gifts and helps me cope with an empty nest. I realize it’s not an easy place to be…plenty of educational degrees and spunk to last a lifetime, but nevertheless…over 50. How do I continue to feel like a vital part of life when my daughter, my last child, travels 1000 miles away to study architecture at Iowa State University? That distance alone has my heart reeling. What if she needs me? What if she gets sick? What if she feels alone and desperate and yet is so far away? I could use a stimulating job to distract me.

So what keeps people like my mother and my aunt going when they’ve experienced health issues and have lost husbands and other loved ones? Resiliency seems to be what keeps the newly ousted New York Times executive editor, Jill Abramson, moving forward. She touted in a speech to Wake Forest University, “It meant more to our father to see us deal with a setback and try to bounce back than to watch how we handled our successes. Show what you are made of…” In a recent article from the Boston Globe, Deborah Kotz suggests tips on developing resiliency:
1. Have a sense of realistic optimism. Stay positive in the face of adversity.
2. Rely on a social support system. You need friends and loved ones to buoy you in times of distress.
3. Work from your strengths, not your weaknesses. Write down the five things that are best about you and let those things lead you, rather than listing deficiencies that need to be overcome.
4. Set goals. Research indicates that people who establish goals are more resilient.
5. Be mindful. Acknowledge that opportunities abound. Part of being mindful also involves being authentic in how you handle the situation. Knowing that you are staying true to yourself throughout can make you more resilient.
6. Embrace the small rough patches. See minor challenges — like dealing with a new boss or a flood in your basement — as a way to build your resiliency over time.
7. Adopt an attitude toward gratitude. Rather than dwelling on all the things you don’t have or used to have, think of what you do have that you can be grateful for.

These are things my mother and my aunt must have learned a long time ago…because at ages 96 and 91, they certainly are resilient.

Written Spring of 2013

Looking back and looking forward. Sometimes they seem the same. I’m reflecting on educational decisions and how they often decide the course of a person’s life. My daughter, my youngest child, is trying to decide where to go to college and what to major in. It’s odd, but all I can think about is my mom and how she was the only one of her siblings that was not sent down to Eastern Mennonite School for her high school education. The year was 1936 and there was no Christopher Dock High School and so some parents sent their young children to EMS if they wanted them to receive a Mennonite education. “But,” my mom recalls, “the barn burnt down that year and my parents didn’t seem too anxious to send me. And I wanted to go to Lansdale High School with my friends.” So when she graduated in 10th grade from the local school, she went on to Lansdale High School, later to become North Penn High School. How many pathways of her life were affected by that one missed opportunity?

My daughter, Vanessa, has expressed an interest in architecture. She attended a high school introduction to architecture course this past fall at Temple University to see if indeed that was an interest of hers. She enjoyed the class and her love of math and art seemed to coalesce in this one field. The teacher recommended architecture schools for the students to think of attending. One of them was Iowa State University. Vanessa loved even the mention of Iowa, the home of her father and grandma, uncle and cousins.

It wasn’t that long ago that I took a job teaching at Iowa Mennonite School and traversed the many miles with a college friend to our new home in Kalona, Iowa. There I met my husband Ken and married him on the lawn of my in-laws, far away from the PA woods and creeks of my hometown. My girlfriend also married a Midwestern boy and never returned, making her home in Chicago. Ken and I returned to the Indian Valley and raised a family, but the pull of Iowa can be seen in our children.

Three generations of decisions. Yet we all have changed each other’s lives. I want for my daughter the same thing I want for my mom…the chance to live in Harrisonburg, Va and go to school and learn in that Mennonite mecca, but just like with my mom, my daughter is pulled elsewhere.

God, I leave these past decisions and the present decisions in your hands…