connection

On telling the story and not stopping at the joke

A boy doesn't look happy to be cleaning the kitchen sink.
~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment
An image of a boy who doesn't love doing chores.

My father was born in the Netherlands in 1942, almost two years into the Nazi occupation. He was young enough to have only one real memory of wartime: sitting outside and playing, refusing to come in while the air raid siren blared and his mother and nanny tried to get him to come inside.

But he had three older brothers who remember the war.

They tell only a few stories from that time, but one of my generation’s favorites took place during the last winter of the war when the families of three Fonds sisters were all living in one house out in the country: 6 adults and 12 children (plus any people they might be sheltering in the hubbub). All the husbands worked in the resistance movement.

With that many people, everyone had a job. Even two-year-old Peter had to go into the woods to collect kindling. Tante Nell made sure the household ran.

One day, it was the job of one of the boys to do the dishes. But children are still children, even during war, and he didn’t want to, so he hid in the bathroom under the stairs.

Nell saw that the dishes were not being done, figured out where he was, went there, banged on the door and announced loudly for all to hear: “Poop on your own time! Dishes now!” He came out and did the dishes.

That’s the story they told us when we were young, and we laughed and laughed. Between the pounding on the door and the yelling about poop, it was fantastic.

I asked to hear it again when I was in my 40s. That time, they gave me the actual story.

With that many people in the house, everyone had a job. Even two-year-old Peter had to go into the woods to collect kindling. Tante Nell made sure the household ran.

One day, it was the job of one of the boys to do the dishes. But children are still children, even during war, and he didn’t want to, so he hid in the bathroom under the stairs.

Nell saw that the dishes were not being done, figured out where he was and gathered everyone in the living room. She gave a very serious speech about how hard things were, how they were all sacrificing, how they all had to pull together and play their part, that each person was needed. The boy felt so guilty that he came out of the bathroom in tears and vowed to never try to skip his chores.

Not nearly as funny, but I was glad I got to hear the real version.

This makes me think of Hannah Gadsby’s first big Netflix comedy special, Nanette, where she initially plays a lot of painful situations for laughs.

“When you laugh you release tension, and when you hold tension in your human body it’s not healthy psychologically or physically…it’s even better to laugh with other people…. When you share a laugh you will release more tension because laughter is infectious…. Tension isolates us, and laughter connects us.”

Then she explains that jokes just need a setup and a punchline; jokes are frozen at the middle, at the trauma point. Stories, on the other hand, need a beginning, a middle, and an end. In Nanette she takes us past the joke point and tells her real story about how those traumas affected her and, writ large, how they play out in society as a whole. And we discover that truth and vulnerability can connect us even deeper than laughter does.

We’ve all told the joke instead of the story, like my uncles did with their war story. When we were kids they never introduced it as, “In July of 1944 the Nazis searched our house in Velp, hoping to find proof of our father’s work in the resistance cell headed by our family doctor. The cell was dismantled; several members were arrested and either executed or sent to concentration camps, where they died. We fled to our mother’s sister’s house in Ermelo, in the country, a couple of months later. On the way we had to sleep in a barn because the farmer would only let our mother and baby brother in the house. Another sister’s family fled there, as well, and all of us rode out the Hunger Winter and avoided starvation together.”

It’s human nature to play trauma for laughs, to tame it for chit-chat purposes.

For example, I could say that the day after my marriage ended our daughter came home with lice. Lice! On top of everything else, creepy crawly little bugs!! And then talk about all the different ways I tried to get rid of them over three rounds of treatment.

But any further conversation would dig into more vulnerable territory. How it was actually the day after three police officers came onto my porch to arrest my husband of 21 years for a sex crime. How angry I was at him, how hurt, how shocked but not surprised. How I had to tell the kids and our parents about his arrest. How I’d stopped eating and drinking from the stress and wandered the aisles of Target, light-headed and overwhelmed, buying new bedding and pillows and lice removal systems, worrying about spending the money because my husband would surely lose his job and I was a stay-at-home mom who only worked freelance.

How I oddly came to appreciate the lice situation and the three rounds it took to get them truly gone from her long beautiful hair because we had to sit together for hours, me tenderly and patiently running the fine comb through her hair. Over and over and over. It would have been easy for us to retreat to our corners to nurse our wounds, but the lice forced us into close proximity. So there was good in it.

The joke versions of our stories are fine. But I hope we keep getting better at telling each other the full stories.

I’m going to give Gadsby the final word:

Stories hold our cure. Laughter is just the honey that sweetens the bitter medicine…. Your story is my story and my story is your story…. That is the focus of the story we need: connection.

Setting Gratitude Free From Happiness, Pleasantness, And Goodness

An image of an empty bird cage with an open door.
~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

Alternative title: Gratitude practices for the grieving, ashamed, and stuck

An image of an empty bird cage with an open door. Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash

Of course we should be grateful—everyone says so. Literally everyone.

Expressing gratitude to their deity is central to every major religion. Thinkers as diverse as Cicero and Oprah, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Tony Robbins tout not only its benefits, but also its necessity for a well-lived life. A Gratitude Industrial Complex has sprung up to sell us journals, coloring books, posters, wall hangings, online courses, greeting cards, candles, jewelry, and social media memes. They all say that gratitude is the root of happiness, grace, beauty, love, sweetness, abundance, comfort, and success.

That sounds lovely.

But life is not always lovely. 

Gratitude experts know this, too, and will remind us that there are always things we can be grateful for, even during difficult times. These are often small things in our lives that make us happy, bring us comfort, or are admirable—a hug from a child, a warm sunbeam, a gift of a meal.

Again, lovely. 

But akin to using a chef’s knife only to spread butter on your toast: an underuse of a powerful tool. In relegating gratitude to the realm of the pleasant and admirable, in linking it to happiness and comfort, we weaken its ability to change us for the better, especially when life is difficult. 

“Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” G.K. Chesterton

If gratitude is happiness, what am I supposed to do with my gratitude that my cousin Esther died of colon cancer in more pain than a human being should be able to endure at age 39 with a 3-year-old daughter who would have no natural memories of her—but secure in her father’s love for the first time in her life?

Because I’m grateful for that, but I also fervently wish she were still alive to know the daughter who is the spitting image of her yet is also her own glorious person. Being grateful that she died secure in her father’s love does not make me one bit happy. Years later, I still grieve her.

Esther and I were born a month apart in the same city, went to the same tiny school for grades 5-8 where we were the top grade for the last three of those years, lived together for a year in college, and became close as adults after my move to New York City gave her a free place to stay. We both saw the spirit of our Opa (Dutch for grandfather) on the same night when we were 9. I’d thought we were as close as the sisters neither of us had, with the petty rivalries and jealousies and intense confidences.

But she never told me how unhappy her home life was. I didn’t find out until she was dying; some stories I didn’t learn until after she died. Her mother struggled with mental illness and alcohol abuse and their family life often revolved around managing or reacting to those. In addition, the things Esther was interested in and good at weren’t things her parents put much stock in, so she didn’t feel appreciated.

When it was clear that she wouldn’t make it through her cancer, she and her father were discussing her desire to be cared for at home. They went back and forth until Esther plaintively asked, “Don’t you love me enough to take care of me?”

What could my uncle say but, “Yes”? 

Because he did. He’d loved her that much all along, of course.

In the months that followed, he took the tenderest round-the-clock care of her, burping her colostomy bag, managing her mountain of medications, hand-feeding her when she became too weak. She died not only secure in the knowledge of her father’s love, but completely wrapped up in the experience of his love for her. I am so grateful for this—not only for her, but also for my uncle. 

But happy? No. 

“Gratitude paints little smiley faces on everything it touches.”
Richelle E. Goodrich

If gratitude is all about feeling warm and cozy, what am I supposed to do with my gratitude for my friend Bernadette, who called me out on a matter of racial stereotyping? Because I’m grateful to her, but any warmth I felt at the time was due to the heat of shame burning up my neck. There was nothing smiley about it.

Friends and I were talking about poll statistics before the 2016 election and I made a desperate joke about Hispanic people and cell phones and she called me on it. At first, I defended myself, because I knew my intentions, and I knew my love and respect for the people I’d stereotyped. I wasn’t mean-spirited. So I justified my behavior. After we parted it took all of 10 minutes for me to realize that I’d been wrong, that my intentions were not the most important thing in our interaction—that my words were. 

I immediately sent her an apology, and by the time I saw her the next day, I was grateful to her for calling me out, and told her so. Because she had the courage to say what she did to my face, I was given the opportunity to hear my words from another’s point of view: I couldn’t hear the stereotyping until she revealed it to me. I asked for her forgiveness, she gave it, and our friendship deepened. I am grateful for this experience because it made me a better, more humble person. 

Was it cozy? No. Is there a smiley face on the encounter? No. My gratitude has not made me any less embarrassed by it. 

“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
Dalai Lama

If gratitude is all about highlighting things that are admirable, what am I supposed to do with my gratitude that my husband of 21 years was arrested for a sex crime, enabling me to leave a marriage that was good enough, but that was also breaking my heart every day? Because I’m grateful for that, but what he did was not at all praiseworthy, and caused both immediate and ongoing trauma in our family. 

My marriage wasn’t horrible. My spouse and I could still have fun together, and we worked well on negotiating the needs of the kids and family life, but there was an essential hollowness to our near-sexless marriage, and there were years of agreements that he didn’t live up to, deals he didn’t keep. I was last in his life, but I decided over and over that I wouldn’t leave him; it was part of my deep value system to stay and I couldn’t imagine explaining why I was leaving to my kids. So I used the practice of gratitude to make my marriage livable for me: focused on what was good about our relationship, worked at being compassionate instead of bitter, and was disciplined about thanking him for every little thing. The day-to-day lived experience was more pleasant, but gratitude didn’t address any of our deep problems, neither did it heal my heartbreak.

I told very few people about this because I didn’t see the point: no matter what I did, he wasn’t changing, and I wasn’t leaving, so why make other people frustrated with him? After all, he was my husband and I loved him. It left me utterly stuck and lonely.

So once he was arrested and the truth (and then more truth) came to light, making sense of years-worth of his behavior, it was a relief: here was a solid reason to leave. I was grateful for that (and that he was caught before anything worse happened), but was there anything praiseworthy to focus on? No. 

But that’s also not entirely fair: our marriage produced two wonderful and sometimes infuriating children. It nurtured and encouraged our friends. We supported each other in our artistic pursuits and made it possible for each other to grow in our chosen fields. I can be grateful for that, but it’s a complicated gratitude.

A.J. Jacobs ran into a similar problem when he tried to thank everyone involved in his morning cup of coffee. In Thanks a Thousand, he writes that when he told his friend Brian that he was thanking dockworkers and truck drivers, Brian asked whether he was going to thank the meth dealers for selling drugs to the drivers so they could drive all night. That put Jacobs in a quandary:

“Brian’s comment may be flippant, but it sticks in my mind. It’s brought up an interesting problem. Not everyone who helps get my coffee to me is a good person. Or at least not everyone is acting in a way that is good for the world…. So…does the CEO of Exxon deserve my thanks?”

Jacobs doesn’t answer that question, but thanks the CEO of Exxon anyway, sending what he describes as a passive-aggressive, “Thank you, now please change,” letter.  

Gratitude can be more of a mixed bag than theologians, thinkers, and marketers often give it credit for. And I haven’t even gotten to people who are grateful for things other people think are tragic, like people with disabilities being grateful for their disability. 

“Attention must be paid.” Linda Loman (Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman)

So what gives these non-pleasant experiences of gratitude their power? At its base, gratitude is about paying attention. The pleasant versions of gratitude have us paying attention to things that make us feel happy, warm, cozy, and positive. The more robust versions can withstand us paying attention to things that are true whether they make us feel sad, uncomfortable, ashamed, or free because the more robust version highlights our connectedness–and we need connection.

“As adults connection nourishes us in a literal, physiological way, regulating our heart rates and respiration rates, influencing the emotional activation in our brains, shifting our immune response to injuries and wounds, changing our exposure to stressors and modulating our stress response.”

Chapter 6, Burnout, Emily Nagorski and Amelia Nagorski

Because of my cousin Esther’s illness and death, I know her better and I know my uncle better—I am connected to both of them in deeper ways than I was before. Because of my friend Bernadette’s forthrightness and her forgiveness, I am better connected to her, and better connected to myself as a person who can be wrong and not be destroyed by it. Because of my now-ex-husband’s arrest after years of lies and neglect I am better connected to myself because I’m no longer trying to convince myself that grievous behavior was loving; I’m better connected to my community because of the help they gave me in the aftermath; I’m better connected to friends whose families have gone through something similar; and I’m better connected to my children because of the intensity of what we went through together. My gratitude for each of those events is rooted in those connections and branches out in my writing, my relationships, and my work with children.

I am both more compassionate and more courageous, with myself and with others, than I was before these events. There’s no need to hide from or to deny sadness, grief, shame, or anger as incompatible with the practice of gratitude, or to expect gratitude to lift me out of those states, because I know I can be grateful for things that have made me feel each of those emotions. 

So let’s free gratitude from the cage of loveliness. Practicing gratitude may bring you happiness, beauty, sweetness, and success. But gratitude that rises from situations of grief, shame, and anger may connect you more deeply to yourself and to others. 

I’ll take gratitude-fueled connection over unrelenting sweetness any day. The more tightly knit our connections are, the more they’ll sustain us, encourage us, and challenge us to see connections where we’d been blind to them before. That can change the world. And that’s something to be deeply grateful about.