Mothering and Fathering, in Politics and at Home

This morning, listening to NPR, in defense of Mitt Romney’s firing thousands of people to preserve his profit, a support said, “Well in capitalism there are winners and losers, and I don’t fault him for being a winner.”

I was trying to let my judgment of this position go, this “How could she be so cold and cruel?” and what I got in touch with was the difference I often have to mediate between what I have come to call Mothering and Fathering in the married couples I mediate. 

Regardless of the sex of the person, the partner who “mothers” supports the child’s internal world. They want to shield their child from the world’s cruelty so that the child may grow strong, with good self-confidence, and they want their child to be safe. 

Fathering sees the downside of this “coddling” (a judgment) as creating a child who may become a “wimp” with no courage. They advocate for consequences as the best teacher. “Let him climb the jungle gym, and if he falls, he’ll learn.” And lessons learned this way are never forgotten.

It occurred to me, that at their best, this is exactly the difference between the Democratic and Republican sentiments. The Democrats want to protect the weak and as any mother would, to see that all god’s children survive and thrive. Republicans focus on autonomy and independence. They like capitalism because it fathers us with real-world consequences.

All children benefit from having both these points of view in their upbringing, especially if they are negotiated well so they child gets the benefit of each, and not, as so often is the case, conflicting messages about which is best.

I’ve been thinking for a while that what we need in the political arena is a Mediation Party, one which represents both Mothering and Fathering energy. Having read his books, I believe that Obama had this potential, but it can’t really be done alone, and he didn’t have a Mediation Party to back him, so like so many families, we ended up with a polarization between the two existing parties and so deadlock.

I like to image what might happen if the Mediation Party did exist. Business and personal spheres all flourishing, government supporting our internal and external needs.

Mediation Has Ruined Me

I’m finding fewer and fewer good reasons to justify being upset. I still get upset, but I’m noticing that in order to maintain it for any length of time, you have to keep giving yourself a pep talk about how wronged you were; and those talks are seeming less and less convincing to me.

I know most people are really good at those. Some people can take a tiny incident (some incidents are actually so tiny nobody notices it but themselves) and keep cheer-leading their hurt for years, decades!

I think being a mediator has ruined me for upset. Over and over I see people resolving their differences, discovering the moment of misunderstanding, uncovering the positive intention which was missed, letting go of the grudge and finding Love right there underneath.

My grudge-muscle is atrophying. Still all these people around me continue begrudging me and others as if it were normal. Well, it may be normal, but it sure ain’t healthy!

Pre-Occupied

People keep asking me what the Occupy people want, what they expect to change, how do they expect to do it, why they don’t have any leaders or agenda?

Of course none of these people have ever been to a GA (General Assembly) meeting, or gone to any of the thousands of online documents and chats about content. What they are really asking is: Why hasn’t the Occupy movement done anything that is “newsworthy” enough to be reported in the commercial “news.”

I could quote Einstein to them, “No problem has ever been solved by the kind of thinking that caused it.” It is apropos.

Those of us whose political habits are pre-Occupy are so preoccupied with the structures of power and information that got us into this mess, we not only don’t question the process, we have a hard time noticing when change is occurring.

It’s the same with my clients. By the time most of them come to me, their relationship is in the same kind of disarray our society is, these days. They too are about to lose their homes, their dreams are already turning into nightmares. 

Still they come to me hoping I will change some “thing” within the existing structure - usually they hope it will either be how their spouse is, or who is their spouse.

Instead I do what the Occupiers are doing, I set up camp beside their “business as usual” processes, and advocate for inclusion, for all the parts of themselves and of their spouse that have been marginalized, downsized, foreclosed, and disenfranchised.

At the macro level that the Occupy movement confronts, I don’t know what the solution is. On the micro level of the family, the solution is just as invisible to the couples I work with as it is to the 99% who keep asking when the Occupy Movement is going to fix everything.

It’s hard to see the answer, when you’re right inside the problem – so close you’re actually part of it. That’s why a marriage mediator is do valuable. I stand just outside their marriages, so I can see the way out. “Follow me.”

The Mirror You Married

Stop looking into the mirror which is your spouse, and blaming them for the reflection you see.

You don’t do that in your bathroom cabinet, nor the full length one in the hall, nor even in the huge mirrors in public places.

In those you look and see yourself and you let the mirror be.

So why, when you marry a mirror, do you suddenly become so angry at it? You stay calm, of a summer’s day, when the pond reflects your life. Why not blame the water? Accuse the fish? Blaspheme the muddy bottom?

But put a mirror in pajamas, with admittedly foul morning breath, and you act like your own flaws which show up in your own heart when you see the love in their eyes deserves your derision.

Take a moment and reflect. Be kind to the mirror you married.

Take Note: Have a Happy Marriage

Spend this week collecting moments of happy coupledom. 

Catch a couple as their hands touch when they walk side-by-side. 

Notice the look between marrieds over a shopping cart.

Record the tone one of them uses with the other which conveys love, even though the topic is tomato paste.

Pin these around your house like post-it notes. 

Knit a sweater of them for the long winter approaching.

For extra credit: try one with your spouse.

Take Your Love for a Walk

The couple I worked with last night love each other. Like so many couples who come to see me.

Like so many couples who come to see me who are about to divorce.

They come when the fighting gets intolerable. When so much of the space between them is filled with either shouting, or the silence of the fear of the shouting, that they can’t move anymore. Then they come to see me, and I sweep it all away, and there, sitting patiently like an old dog waiting to be taken for a walk, is their love.

How do we come so easily unhooked from something as powerful as love? And by what? A dirty dish? A few minutes late? An errant thought about what I was thinking that you were thinking when you didn’t say anything after I was silent?

And when they find it again, their love; there in my office. It makes them so happy. So why do we let it go so easily?

Maybe it’s like being blown away by a sunset. When you turn your head away, in that next moment, all you see is your own shadow.

My book proposal is DONE!

The book, Tired of Having the Same Old Argument, is born. Its infant stage, a book proposal, is DONE!

This week it will take its first step, out of my hands and into the world. Into the literary world of agents, and then publishers, and then book stores, book mailers, and finally it will find its new homes, with readers who will translate the pictograms in black and white first back into sound, and then thought and then finally, back into understanding - my understanding about love and marriage - and the cycle will be complete.

This kind of writing, trying to hand what I understand to another is new to me. It’s not at all like the poetry or self-reflective prose I’ve written for years in writing groups. Those groups let me form words in the moment and pin them down like butterflies, and then just admire the natural beauty of it all.

This writing is more like stone sculpture. Elise and I went to the Accademia Gallery in Florence that has some of Michelangelo’s unfinished work. You can still see the huge stone block and the heavy hammer blows he used to cut away what was not wanted. In some cases, his chisel made it all the way in to where the hand or an elbow should be and unable to resist it, he changed to a lighter hammer and a smaller chisel, and he carved not just flesh, but veins beneath the skin appear. So incongruous a quarter inch from rough hewn stone, and yet so completely convincing you can see the pulse if you stare.

Writing non-fiction seems just like that to me. You block out ideas, hammer them down to the paper, and from time to time, polish some perfect moment right down to the pulsing life of your original thought.

Then the polishing begins. Chipping away the not-quite-right, turning a sentence around and round until the words recede and the living meaning is all that can be seen.

After months of polishing, the few chapters I have finished say as close to exactly what I wanted to say as I can imagine. I’m sure the reader will agree. I can feel it.

The question is: will those employed in the business of publishing, agree?