Month: November 2022

Categories
Slovakia Memoir

Thanksgiving and Harvest

I spent this Thanksgiving Day with my sister and her family – her husband, children, grandchildren, and their spouses, four great-grandchildren, and a granddaughter’s boyfriend. There were 18 of us in all and a few others missing, a grandson in the military and a granddaughter, who with her husband and four boys we would not see until the week after Christmas. Everyone not only contributed to the meal but also to the noisy, joyful interaction. It was a change from the last several years and a lovely day that included some treasured memories.

Our first Thanksgiving in Slovakia

I thought back 25 years years to our first Thanksgiving in Slovakia, November 27, 1997. By that time we had been there for three months. A couple of weeks before our American holiday arrived, Joe Ann and I talked about how we might use that day as an introduction of ourselves to our neighbors. While we were able to interact with those at the church who spoke English and with others through interpreters, when we were on our own in the apartment building we had no way to communicate with our neighbors. We didn’t know what they knew, if anything, about our reason for being in Slovakia. We were simply two American women living on the 3rd floor.

Since we had not met the families in the other 15 flats, we decided to write them a letter. We found some printable Thanksgiving stationery on the internet. Wrote our letter and had Daniela translate it for us. In the letter, we introduced ourselves and told them about Thanksgiving Day in America. We said we were thankful to be in their country and appreciated living in the same building with them. We told them we were grateful for their kindness and patience with us and our limited ability to interact with them. We also said that to show our gratitude we wanted to give them a gift.

Among the things we brought with us from the States was a box of Joe Ann’s cassette tapes. When the letters were ready and signed, we put them in an envelope along with a cassette. On Thanksgiving Day evening we knocked on the door of each of the other 15 apartments at 25 Bernolakova Street and gave them our Thanksgiving letter and tape.

Meeting a Slovak neighbor

Although we lived in our flat for over eight years, we didn’t get to know many of our neighbors. However, one afternoon we were surprised in the elevator by a woman who inititated a conversation.

“Hello. How are you?” the woman said in English.

Taking the question literally, Joe Ann replied, “I haven’t been feeling well.”

“Then, you must come see me,” said the woman.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Yes, I am Iveta Nedelova. I live on the eighth floor. My office is at end of this street.”

“Your English is good,” Joe Ann commented.

“Thank you. It is not as good as I want it to be,” Dr. Nedelova responded.

“Then, you must come to see us. We will talk together and you can improve your English.”

The beginning of a relationship

Besides spending time in conversational English together, Iveta became our doctor, gave us our flu shots each year, and helped me when I had knee surgery in Slovakia. Her son, when he was in high school, helped us with a camp for children from addicted families. She has been with us twice in Michigan, once alone and again before the pandenic with her husband and son. She serves on the board of the Slovak nonprofit we were part of forming in 2006.

But that is only a part of Iveta Nedelova’s place in our lives. It began in 1997 and continues to this day. We meet weekly on Skype. When my memoir is complete and our story is told, you will find her in several places. She is one of the cherished Slovak friends I am thankful for today.

Categories
Poetry

Why Do I Love You?

The poem below I wrote in 1974. It was not written with anyone specific in mind but was written in response to a sentence from a deep, insightful paper entitled If I Were Your Counselee; it was written by Milton Cudney, a professor of counseling at Western Michigan University.

“Think what we would have going for us, though, if you and I and others contributed only a little to each other, but that this little was multiplied by each succeeding experience we had with each other.”

Milton Cudney

WHY DO I LOVE YOU?

Why do I love you?
Because you love me.
And when you love me,
You become a part of me.
And I love you
Because I love myself.

Why do I love you?
Because you love me.
And when you love me, 
I become a part of you.
And when I become a part of you,
I am bigger than myself.

Why do I love you?
Because you love me.
And your love for me
And my love for you
Makes us both
Bigger than we are.

What happens whe we
Are both bigger than we are?
We have love to give
To someone else -
Even to someone who
Does not love us back.
Categories
Relationships

Breaking Unwritten Rules

family dysfunction

Thanksgiving Day and Christmas are just ahead of us. The kind of image we see here is not what we want but it is what it is. Dysfunction within our relationships is often experienced at this time of the year when families gather for holiday celebrations. From generation to generation we can become carriers of dysfunction actively repeating behavior we once experienced passively as children and passing on dysfunction to those with whom we should have the healthiest relationships.

What we live with we learn. What we learn we practice. What we practice we become.

No one is 100 percent dysfunctional nor is anyone perfectly healthy. If we look at ourselves and our families honestly we will see that we are somewhere on a contiuum with the possibility of moving more towards healthy, maturing relationships.

In this post I want to talk about three unwritten rules that are part of unhealthy scripts learned in the roles we play opposite each other and how we can begin to break them. It takes time and work but is worth the effort. I know that from personal experience and from years of working with addicts and their families.

Don’t Talk

This is the first unwritten rule. Don’t talk about the painful things that go on in the family. Don’t talk to those in the family about anything really important and certainly don’t talk outside the family. Most children growing up in dysfunctional environments learn this well by the time they are eight years old or earlier. It is a pattern carried with them the rest of their lives and leaves them guessing at what healthy is and struggling with a certain level of loneliness.

Even when we don’t have secrets in our families, if we are unable to talk to one another we are susceptible to moving further apart rather than closer to one another when faced with a crisis.

Don’t Trust

The second unwritten rule is don’t trust. Experience teaches those in dysfunctional relationships that promises are made and promises are broken. They cannot count on what others say. People they thought were trustworthy are not. The only thing that is consistent is inconsistency. Among other things this leads them to grab what they can at the moment because it may not be there later.

Don’t Feel

In these settings where needs are not met family members also learn a third rule: don’t feel. No one will validate their feelings. People tell them how they should and should not feel about people and experiences. They also have others tell them how they are feeling or not feeling and how intensely. They come to doubt and question their own feelings.

These unwritten rules isolate family members from others and isolation keeps them from realizing how common their problems are. The only way to begin to get help is to break the unwritten rules.

For any of us, whether we have a mildly unhealthy relationship or a seriously dysfunctional one, we can do something that will make a difference.

Breaking the rules

When I was growing up my relationship with my father was not what I wanted it to be. There was no abuse or problems to hide in the family. There was simply silence; we didn’t talk about anything significant or important to us and therefore we didn’t know each other. As an adult, I didn’t know how to change the relationship until an activity I did with a university class I taught gave me an idea. On the first day of class I asked the students to introduce themselves and tell the class something they liked about themselves that they got from either of their parents. I told them I would start so they would have a moment to think.

I told the students I liked my love for learning, my creativity, and my curiosity and those were characteristic of my dad. When I got home that day I wrote a letter to my dad and told him about the class and what I had said and thanked him for modeling those things for me. We never talked about that letter but I know he kept it. However, that was the beginning of a 12-year journey to disclose more to one another and appreciate each other more. When he died, I still did not have the full relationship I wanted but it was so much better and I had no regrets.

Another activity that I have done with those I want to know better is to share with each other what we consider the most memorable event of the first 15 years of our lives. I like this kind of activity because it allows each person to choose what they feel safe in sharing. Telling my grandmother and my dad about an experience I had with this activity led them to spontaneously share their memories. My grandmother told us of her brother coming home from the Spanish-American war. Dad said he remembered the end of World War I and the German kaiser being burned in effigy at the end of a streetcar in downtown Holland.

These are tiny things that are like baby steps in getting to know and understand each other better and they can add joy to a family gathering. What was dysfunctional in my relationship with my dad was not huge but it was there and I’m glad I didn’t ignore it.

Breaking the rules in major dysfunctional relationships takes more, of course, but it is worth every bit of the time and work it takes. Support groups made up of people with a common problem are often a good place to start. For years Joe Ann and I participated in Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-anon groups respectively. They were safe places for people to break the unwritten rules. They provided a place to learn to talk, trust, and feel. We saw miracles happen in the lives of those who kept at it.

Knowing and understanding others and being known and understood by them is what we all want, isn’t it?

Categories
Slovakia Memoir

Making Our Flat Home

Dali showed us through the empty flat that was to be our new home. For sure it didn’t look like home but it had a lot going for it. There was a good-sized living room with windows that overlooked the street, a bedroom with a balcony on the backside of the flat, a guest room, and another room right inside the door to the right that would become our office; it was the only room that was carpeted. The kitchen was small but adequate. The toilet was in a tiny space like a small closet separated from the bathroom. In the bathroom was a deep tub, a sink that overlapped the tub with enough space next to it to put a washing machine.

The church placed a small refrigerator and table and chairs in the kitchen for our use until we purchased our own. The kitchen was a narrow L-shaped room. You could enter the top of the L from the entry room. It contained a small gas stove and oven, a sink, and a short counter top with cabinets above and below. You could enter the bottom side of the L from the living room. Right inside was the refrigerator and then an old-fashioned standing radiator beneath three side-by-side windows like those in the living room. The small table was pushed up against the radiator leaving room for three chairs on the open sides of the table.

The most unsual feature of the flat was that there was bright red linoleum with flecks of pink on the floors in the living room and bedrooms. It seems that when the building was erected, red linoleum was put on the odd-numbered floors and gray linoleum of the even-numbered floors.

As there were no closets in the flat, we would need to purchase wardrobes for the bedroom to hang our clothes and some kinds of shelves for storing various items. I was beginning to make a list in my head as we moved through the flat. I love to decorate and since we had to start from scratch to furnish the place, I was excited to think about what we could do with it.

When Joe Ann and I merged our belongings in our first house in Grand Rapids, we saw that we both had a lot of decorative items that were oriental – a Japanese silk screen, paintings of Chinese landscapes, celadon vases from Korea, ink sketches with black bamboo frames from Bangladesh, decorative boxes and one or two oriental figurines. This turned out to be ideal for our flat in Banska Bystrica. The red linoleum made us think Chinese!

Part of our living room with the green leather sofa and the Japanese silk screen attached to the wall by Velcro. The other half of the room is in the picture under the title of this blog post.

To go with our red living room floor we bought a black dining table that could seat six, a black etagere on which to display some of our oriental items, a dark green leather sofa and matching chair, and two other chairs with a black base and arms and an oatmeal color fabric. Since the walls were concrete, we hung our Japanese silk screen, our pictures of Chinese landscapes, and the bamboo framed ink sketches with Velcro. We added a couple of silk plants, a table lamp or two and a floor lamp we brought with us from Michigan.

The office was furnished with six tall brown bookcases set side by side covering the space of two walls. They were filled with the 2500 books we brought with us. The majority were music, theology, and addiction and recovery books. To finish the room, we added a desk and another workspace, plus a filing cabinet and a piece of furniture on which we could put a printer and store supplies in the cabinet space below.

For our bedroom we chose a white chest of drawers and white wardrobes. Our floral bedspreads were forest green. In the guest bedroom we placed two Slovak beds, a blond wardrobe and chest of drawers.

The small three-drawer chest we brought with us was in the entry room along with a small white stand and chair for our telephone. On the floor was an octagonal area rug with an oriental design.

Entry to our flat

Almost all our furniture was purchased at a nabytok (furniture store) one block from our flat. I’m sure they were happy to see us coming time and time again, although they found some of our purchases strange.

The two items not bought there were our appliances. We bought a refrigerator with a freezer section below that was a product of Sweden and a washing machine that was German made. The refrigerator was different enough that everyone who came to our flat took a look inside.

More than thirty American visitors spent time in that flat over the eight plus years we lived there; many stayed overnight. Slovaks in multiples of that number were in and out of our home over the years. We laughed, cried, had dinner parties, counseled individuals, read, prayed, played games, watched movies on the little television that played American VHS tapes, and worked in that space.

Before going to bed on air mattresses that first night, our container parked on the street waiting for another day to be unloaded after paperwork was done, we walked through the rooms again and prayed that God would be honored by the things that took place within those walls.

Writing this brings a flood of memories, a feeling of joy and gratitude, and a sense of peace that we made that flat into a haven for ourselves and others. I felt good about being home every time I walked in the door.