You mean you didn't know ~

One of the phrases that has caused me pain over the years is "you mean you didn't know?" Over the past several years at work I have been on the outside of the people that were on the inside was not the favored one.



I was not the preferred person. I was the one to be there when nobody else was there and work all the evening shifts and holidays that nobody else wanted to work and take all the scut work. That's what I specialize in and it's what I do best.



And I get a lot of stuff done that way things would happen at work and decisions would be made and people would come to me and tell me about it and say, you mean you didn't know for a long time? It really aggravated me until I finally decided that if they didn't tell me, it didn't have to influence what I was doing.



And if it didn't come from my bosses, then I didn't have to do it. All of a sudden, communication started happening with me a lot more because I was taking action without the latest guidance because they had left me out again.



In my home life, I had that happen often when I would talk to my mother and she would be commenting on something that other family members were doing, and I would say, oh, I didn't know that in a very casual way.



And she would say, "you mean you didn't know?". In a tone that made it seem like I should have known and that I was a bad person because I didn't know. I felt a lot of guilt and a lot of pain from being left out.



And I was left out of some pretty major things in our family. Surgeries, naming, job changes, moves, new addresses, all sorts of things. I even had to come up with a formula that I told people in my family to use.



The formula is: Telling my wife does not equal telling me was the formula.



My kids thought that was pretty funny, but nobody else inside my family got the joke. It's almost as if they didn't understand why I needed to know any of that stuff.



But the feelings of being left out and ostracized and not even thought of or considered were amplified by things that I was going through at work and in my personal life and led to a lot of guilt and hurt from it. Which was usually expressed as anger.



I've learned to cope with it. I've learned to adapt to not knowing things. I've taught myself to be perpetually surprised at what I encounter, to say, "oh" Instead of "I didn't know", to watch and listen and not have to know.



And I've learned to turn the guilt away so that I don't accept any responsibility for stuff that wasn't shared with me. Always before I would feel responsible, but I've learned and adapted. And if I really need to know something, I'll ask about it.



But what I've learned is that I really don't need to know any of that stuff.

Ended my career ~

I recently ended a long career. As I have entered retirement, my wife has started calling me her "turtle" because I have slowed way down. It's funny because I accept it. I am purposefully trying to slow things down and take things easy.



I had a career in a field that is known to be high stress and I've been on for a really long time. And so as I purposefully not be in that mode, it's fascinating. I walk slower. That's partially because my joints hurt, but that's life.



I make decisions slower because I don't want to make a snap judgment and then get upset about it. I spent most of my life making snap judgments and fast decisions and then having to rush to fix it or rush to get something done for somebody else because they had missed a deadline.



And I've just really reached that point where I'm tired of that. But it's funny because I've grown to like hang drum music. Sometimes it's called a handpan and the instruments look like big turtles. I find that hilarious because I've always liked the turtle as a symbol.



So I kind of like the moniker although I don't want the negative side of it. A stranger passing by me one day outside of a hospital referred to me as "professor" and I really liked that - it made me want to go out and buy a sport coat with elbow patches just for kicks. I had a teacher in high school that wore one of those and carried a pipe. He would have the pipe in his mouth in class and drank Earl Grey tea all day long. We didn't call him "professor" but he sure was taking on that persona as a teacher.

But I don't mind being called a turtle or professor. I've gone fast for a long time and I still do, just in my own way.

Quality time vs Quantity time ~

Recently I got into a discussion about quality time versus quantity time. We were talking about which is more important, especially with children and family. In today's rush rush world, quality time is talked about and how you schedule time with people and you limit it because you don't can't spend a lot of time with them, but you want to maintain relationships and good development.



I was in a men's class thing at a church that I was going to years back. The speaker, instructor, facilitator was helping us discuss what we were learning from a book about men and family time and all that stuff and raising good kids.



That was one of the questions that he asked, which is more important in your children's lives? Quality time or quantity time with you? Of course, all the men in there were hard chargers developing their careers and everything.



We all said quality time because we want to make sure it's high quality and our kids get the most out of it. The man argued that quantity is more important than even the quality. because when we limit time with our children to 30 minutes a day that's all they're getting and they have no opportunity to just be with us.



Their relationship is limited and high expectations are put on it and if there's failure then it takes a while to recover from that if you can recover at all because the time you have available is already committed and limited.



His point was that we need quantity time with our children and with the people in our lives because the quality will come with the amount of time with more time spent. Now I can argue against that and say That's not always true, especially when it's a bad situation, or when there's pain and hurt involved that develops into anger or tears.



It's an interesting question. I was never one of those extremists that wanted to quit my job and spend all of my waking hours with my children because I personally wanted them to develop and to find upstanding individuals through relationships with me and their mother and others in the community.



That worked out well for us. All of our children did really well and grew up to be great people that I really enjoy hanging out with. But, I also understand that's not always the case with other families.



I often wished that I could have spent more time with my kids because I was working in a job that entailed shift work and prevented me from being there for a lot of different things. But I like the way we did it and I like the way things are turning out.





I love my family and when I get somebody in my life that I want to develop a relationship with, I add more time because my primary love language is quality time.



It was a good discussion and I keep thinking about it.



+++

Dogs from my past ~

I remember when I was a young teenager, we had moved out to the country after my dad retired from the Air Force. We had a poodle named Alexander. He had always been an indoor dog, but all of a sudden in the new house he became an outdoor dog. Dad built Alexander a doghouse and chained him to a tree, and there he was.



Dad felt like my brother and I needed another dog, a bigger dog, and he had heard about puppies close by. So we got a dog. We named her Muffin.



Muffin was a German Shepherd/Pitbull Siberian/Husky mix, and she had dark black fur with brown highlights on her chest and face. And as she grew, she was beautiful, and she was strong. Because of all the dirt and the house being new Muffin was an outside dog.



I was more of an indoor kid, and so I didn't go out to play with Muffin a whole lot. And as happens with so many pets, mom and dad had to feed and water Muffin more than me, and eventually mom had to do it all the time, and that was that.



But she was strong, that dog. As she grew, she broke every chain that dad put on her, and eventually he had to put a really heavy chain wrapped around the tree and then hooked to her collar that was really thick and big just to keep her in the yard.



I never did like that, and I wished that she could run free, but dad told me it was too dangerous and she might get hurt, she might get run over. One day she did get loose, and she was running around in the palm scrub behind our house.



Mom and dad had always warned us about rattlesnakes being underneath every palm frond laying on the ground and scorpions and banana spiders and all the other dangers that they could think of, so I was scared to go back there, but I didn't want Muffin to die.



And so I went and started trying to catch her. She would zoom by me, I would run after her, she would zoom by me again, and the thing that I noticed the most was how her eyes were so bright, and it was almost like she was smiling and laughing.



It was fun to see, but I was so scared that she would get hurt. So I finally caught her when she got tired and slowed down a little bit. And I took her back and put her on the chain, and she looked sad again.



Muffin got away several other times after that, and she was impregnated by another dog. And we think it was a German shepherd nearby. She had several puppies. Mom and dad gave most of the puppies away, but kept two of them because Muffin had gotten worms and was dying.



And she died shortly after giving birth. She was a strong dog, and I was always glad to hear her barks, but I'll never forget her eyes when she was loose.





#dog #history