Life Lesson #10 - You Can Have a Pity Party - But Don't Live There

In this weeks episode, you will be welcomed into a community of Ordinarily Beautiful People.  People who like to start their week off right, with a little inspiration and a smile.  A community of people who are supportive, kind and loving toward themselves and others.

You will hear an excerpt from the unpublished, retro-historical memoir, Life Lessons of an Ordinary Woman, written by the host Kim Farnes.  Life Lesson #10 - You Can Have a Pity Party - But Don't Live There; invites you to listen in, as a 13  year old girl learns how to manage her sadness over a sudden break up with her first, real boyfriend. 

You will hear references to the rock band, Def Leppard, be reminded of a song by pop star Melanie Martinez and discover a whole new way to look at the "Do not Disturb" hotel room door hangers.

You will be encouraged to send in your own personal triumph stories, by using the fanmail button on the podcast sites, or by emailing them to lifelessons.ordinarywoman@gmail.com.  

email: lifelessons.ordinarywoman@gmail.com

Facebook page: Life Lessons of an Ordinary Woman Podcast

Transcript

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Good morning this morning, my ordinarily beautiful friends. I hope you had a great week and that you had some fun finding and using your voice in some new and exciting ways. I loved hearing your stories that you sent me about last week's life lesson. You all truly inspire me in so many ways. As I shared at the beginning of this podcast journey that in my unpublished memoir, Life Lessons of an Ordinary Woman, I had written several chapters, each highlighting a very different life lesson. I choose the lessons that I put out each week based on either your responses or based off of something that happened to me over the course of the week, and it fits the next lesson perfectly. This one, you can have a pity party but don't live there, is the one I chose this week because I got to be a witness to a powerful, beautiful moment between a nine-year-old girl and her soon-to-be stepmom. I was asked to officiate a wedding of a couple this past weekend. It's always such an honor and a blessing to be the person that's chosen to unite a couple in love. This family is a blended one, so a moment was built into the ceremony where the daughter was gifted her own special ring to signify her important place in their new growing family tree. The moment she was given the ring on a necklace by her new stepmom, she started to cry. Of course the bride and groom, the guests, and the wedding party all cried, and I definitely cried too. It was beautiful. After the ceremony, the girl came running up to her new mom and told her, I can't stop crying. I watched as the bride embraced this little girl who was trembling through her little girl big feelings tears. She hugged the little girl with all the love that she had to give and told her, It's okay. She said, It's okay to have feelings. I'm here for you. Then she sat in her bridal gown on a lawn chair on the porch and taught this little girl how to breathe slowly through her tears until she felt more calm. I loved getting to be a part of that moment. How often were we told as kids in the seventies and eighties, something completely different? Remember that old saying? Stop that crying or I'll give you something to cry about. Different times for sure. This lesson is about the first time my dad told me that being sad was okay. He of course said it in his own way, but I appreciated that he took the time to honor the fact that sometimes even the kids who seem strong all the time need time to be sad too. So here it goes, life lesson number ten. You can have a pity party but don't live there. The first time someone told me that you can have a pity party but don't live there, I was thirteen. I was reeling as only a teenager can from a recent breakup from the boy who I had carelessly given my heart to. He was only a year older than I, but in teenage years I felt like he had a full grasp on who he was and knew exactly where he wanted to go in life, and I was certain that I would be a part of that plan. I had met him on a walk through my neighborhood. My parents gave my sister and I free range of the neighborhood, something that was the expectation back then. Come back home when the street lights come on was a common phrase that kids heard daily as they headed outside. We had walked by the house he had come out of that night, a house that had been for rent for several months. He sauce and leaned against the dilapidated front fence, almost losing his footing as he did so and said hello. His hello was different. It had a smooth, quiet, yet somehow lighthearted tone to it. My sister was the first to say hello back. It was a surprise to me that she didn't look at her that he didn't look at her to meet her greeting, as most guys did. His eyes stayed focused on me instead. Hi, I said. As I did, I used sign language to spell the hello as well, something that we had learned to do in our family so that Mom could know what we were saying at all times. To people outside our family, the signing looked like overstimulated gesturing, something I still deal with today, as I motion words and actions with my hands. I have learned to sit on them to keep them still when talking to others. If I don't, I watch embarrassingly as new people will follow my hand motions with their eyes until I stop. He smiled at my hi. My name is Jim, he said. As he introduced himself, he made a few gestures in the air, mimicking what I had done with my hello. He told me later when I kept using sign language at other times and after he met my mom, that he had no idea what I was doing the first time I met him, but he said, I thought that whatever it was, it was cute. When he said that, I felt my cheeks get warm and flush, the first time that that ever happened to me around a boy. Time spent with Jim was exhilarating. He had moved to our neighborhood from New York. His dad had left the family for another woman after sixteen years of marriage, and when I met his mom I could tell she was sad. Not just the for now kind of sad, but the deep down don't know how to recover from this kind of sad. She would glance up and give me a cursory wave hi when I walked in with Jim, but her eyes never sparkled a hello. I didn't know her well, but I wished my biggest wishes for her every time I saw her, that some day, somehow she would be happy again. Jim did his best to care for his bum. At fourteen he found a neighbor that let him do his landscaping for pay. Jim worked harder than most adult men I knew. I would walk home with him from the corner market sometimes and help him carry a couple of grocery bags to restock their cupboards. He never complained about helping his mom, but you could tell it was wearing on him. One day while we were putting away the groceries, he had reached up to the top shelf. That was the first time I noticed the scars on his lower back. He always wore long shirts, but this day he didn't, and so I saw. He noticed my reaction as I couldn't help but inhale and gasp. He turned to me with an embarrassed look on his face. I went to him and hugged him deep. I wasn't much of a hugger then and I'm still not, but I wanted to pull him in so tight that his broken pieces, no matter how many there were, would stick back together. He kissed me through my tears in the kitchen. It was my first kiss. I don't know if it was his. I was surprised at my full body reaction to that kiss. It felt warm and safe and wonderful, but also a little strange. Two days later he was gone. The house was empty, and the fore rent sign went back up. The empty rooms I saw when I peeked in the windows seemed as dark and empty as my heart felt. I felt a loneliness and despair I had not yet felt at thirteen. I ran home with tears streaking down my face and didn't stop until I had landed in my bed under the covers where I thought no one could hear my sobs. I felt a hand on my calf. That was somewhat heavy and comforting. I heard they moved, came the deep voice of my dad. I wasn't used to him being gentle or affirming with his words, so I didn't move for fear it would change again to anger or frustration. I'm sorry, he said. You go ahead and have yourself a pity party over this, but don't live there, okay? As he said that, he got up and off my bed and left my room as quietly as he had come in. Give it three days, he said gently, as he stood in the doorway. It will still hurt. He paused, took a deep sigh, and patted the door frame with his hand. But it won't it'll hurt differently, not as bad. As he stood there in the shadows of the hallway looking at me, I wondered who had hurt him. He wasn't the type of man that talked about emotions or feelings, so I knew that this was coming from a place he probably kept locked away, and I didn't want to pry. Thanks, Dad, I said, as I wiped away my tears. I wanted to him to know that I appreciated his understanding. I was hoping we would have more conversations like that one, especially because my mom couldn't have them with me, but we didn't. Dad's time paced prescription on my feelings, writing themselves, was just about perfect. It was two days later that I caught myself singing along to one of my favorite songs, playing on my mom's radio on my way to school. I shocked myself when I caught myself singing. I tried to muffle it because I was, as I told myself, supposed to still be sad. Jim had left me, and I knew deep down when I saw the fore rent sign back up on his fence that I could never ever be happy again. It was then though that I smiled a little, then I started to sing again. My sister looked over at me, patted my hand, and we belted out in unison the remainder of Deaf Leopard's number one song at the time, photograph. My heart was broken and I had quite a few more pity parties for myself after a few more guys let me down, when I had some untimely job losses, and when I wrecked my first car and had to go without one for a while. Pity parties are a normal and appropriate reaction to a setback or disappointment. The term is generally used to gently remind or encourage someone to get rid of their negative mindset and start focusing on solutions. Pop star Meneline Martinez came out with a song called Pity Party in 2015. It's a good example of the pity party my dad was talking to me about that day. The lyrics go, It's my party and I'll cry if I want to, and ends with, well at least there'll be more cake for me. It's important, however, to note the difference between sadness, where calling something a pity party is appropriate, and something more complex and long lasting like grief. Sadness is generally a single feeling. It can come and go and often goes away after your circumstances or your focus changes. It affects your immediate mood. It's a temporary emotion caused by a disappointment, a setback, or distress, like no one showing up to your birthday party, or ruining your favorite shoes, or someone saying something you don't like, or a teenage boy breaking your heart. Grief is different. Grief is an all-encompassing feeling. It's described as kind of a container that holds all the different complex emotions that you feel as a result of a significant loss. It's a nonlinear long-term journey that comes in waves and typically requires time and often outside help, like from a therapist, to help process it. It's not, of course, appropriate to call someone's grief a pity party and expect them to just get over it. I have felt both sadness and grief, and all of these things are true. I have held several pity parties for myself over the years. Parties where I bought my own pity party streamers, blew up my own bluster filled balloons, and baked my favorite too bad so sad for me cake, all while I'm sitting in my anger or disappointment over what someone said, did or didn't do. In fact, I don't know about you, but I imagine that there are still some pity party decorations from past parties that I've held for myself, that are still dangling from my ceiling. Reminders that I'm still holding on to that grudge or hurt caused by something I should have let go or been over a long time ago. I really like several of Buddha's quotes and sayings. One that I especially like goes holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. How true is that? Often I found that the other person, the one that I'm still mad at, rarely remembers their misdeed, so I work hard to let those go faster, trying to keep my dad's three-day time prescription for my pain. I was watching Joel Olstein the other day. He's a televangelist who's some really powerful, uplifting stuff he shares, and he was talking about people and those do not disturb door hanger signs, like the ones you see in hotels. He was saying that people can and often do disappoint us and make us sad when they don't do or say the right thing, that their words or actions can throw us off, and then we can sometimes take days, weeks, or even years to recover from their insensitivity. So we stay in that sorry for ourselves feeling, taking time away from living life fully, time that we cannot get back. He suggested taking one of those do not disturb signs and to imagine wearing it around our necks. Then when we go out into the world or look on social media or watch TV, to imagine that the sign is now blocking all the negativity that we used to allow in, as a sign you're wearing could now repel it all away. He went on to say it's up to us what we allow in. Thinking about it that way is a good visual for me. In fact, it did make me think of the 1970s Wonder Twins cartoon, where they'd fight the bad guys by saying Wonder Twin powers activate and hold up their matching good guy bracelets toward the bad guy, then he would be repelled away by them. I picture the negativity I can sometimes choose to take in, being repelled away from me by my imaginary do not disturb sign necklace. In preparing this episode, I read two quotes that I really like about dealing with emotions like pity. C. S. Lewis, an author who's most well known for his Chronicles of Narnia books, said, You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. How very true is that? The other one is from Jonathan Martinson. When I tried looking him up to give him credit for this quote, there are ten Jonathan Martinsons. So whichever one said this, kudos to him, I love it. He said, Feelings are much like waves. We can't stop them from coming, but we can choose which ones we want to surf. I hope that you're enjoying listening to these podcasts as much as I enjoyed doing them. There are only two more to go after this one, before all the chapters I have written are finished. I hope that as you go into this week that you will picture wearing that do not disturb necklace if you think that's something that may work for you, to retain your positive outlook on life. I wonder if you have any pity party streamers or balloons still hanging around your house long after they should have been taken down. If so, will this be the week you take them down? I'd love to hear your feedback and personal triumph stories about this week's podcast. I really do appreciate getting them every s and I read every single one I get. You can hit the fan mail button on these sites or email them to me at lifelessons.ordinarywoman at gmail.com. Also, please like, follow, and share this podcast with others that you think would make a good part of this community as well. Until next week, please remember that I love you and that your presence is a present to those around you.