It’s funny, but I was with a loved one who is deep into twelve steps last weekend, and it got me noticing how often we are so focused on minding someone else’s business, we forget to work on the one person whose life and character we could effectively change.

It is such a habit, however, that one really must be vigilant! It crops up all the time and I don’t think we realize it. If we could get a handle on that, I feel that tons of relationships would instantly improve! What heaven on earth that would be, really. There is usually so much more we love about a person than we don’t like, but often focus so much on the things they need to change so that we will really be happy, we stop noticing.

In walks single lady who lives alone for a weekend and all I could notice, with two different sets of friends on two different weekends, were all the tender loving things their spouse was doing that they had lost sight of. Clarity comes real fast when there is no one but yourself in the house….no one to blame for undone dishes, toilet seats left up, trash not put out.

I may hire myself out as a visiting therapist who comes for the weekend and lives with you. Don’t know of anyone doing that, but I seem to do it naturally. Instead of a homewrecker…I’m a homesaver! Hmmmmm. Might be a need for that! And I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and eating meals with people and watching movies together. I am also a great guest right now because I have no furry companion to worry about while I visit.

But I did go to the animal shelter today to see if a dog was calling my name. There was one whose eyes met mine for a long long time. Hope I do better with the shelter match program than I do on Match.com! I have higher hopes it will come out right for both of us, but I am going to let him miss me over the weekend, just to be sure (actually, he’s not up for adoption yet, I am not that heartless). When its time, if it is meant to be, we will begin our relationship. I’ll keep you posted!

Why isn’t there a “So sorry to hear you’ve lost your home” or “Our thoughts and prayers are with you as you try to find a new job in this economy.” Somehow a regular sympathy card just doesn’t do it.

And where are the occasions to mark these losses. Should we have a firepit gathering where we burn the deed we didn’t pay off? There is no funeral to mark or signal the end, or even the beginning, of the mourning process for these things. I feel like people are suffering all around me, and yet we have no celebrations, or un-celebrations, to help release our grief.

I know I am sounding a bit morbid here, but for anyone going through these rough times, the grief just sneaks up on you when you least expect it, while you are trying so hard to bundle it up and leave it by the curb with a happy face and a ribbon on it. Sometimes you just need to give yourself permission to feel sad and cry. I have.

I am really noticing the effects of what I call “show up love” in my own life lately. I have recently been through a series (eleven to be exact, but who’s counting?) of fairly severe losses in my life, all within an eighteen month period. Now only one of these involved the death of  a loved one (my furry companion of over a decade) but all were, upon reflection, small deaths of hope, future, dreams, and optimism. What I failed to notice was that I had not allowed myself to recognize that and to grieve. Everyone knows to come to a funeral, but what if there is no body, no date, no place to acknowledge the event happened? Does that mean it didn’t happen? There is no Hallmark card for losing your home, your living, your dreams. People just continue with their own lives while you are trying to push your grief as far away as possible. It is still there, and sensitive people see it and hear it when they are with you.

Strangers were also more prone to notice than close family members (sons excluded), as it turned out. The fact that I seemed so isolated and people seemed to run the other way, as they do when you are going through a divorce (as though they might ‘catch it’ if they got too close) brought the pain to a head. Someone who has not lost their home and been thrown into turmoil trying to quickly make sense of another, cannot understand, but perhaps if they thought about it? What would it feel like to experience that situation? Is it not possible for us to truly walk in another man’s shoes for a brief time? Is there no way to step into their situation with them and look for ways to bring comfort?

I have found that it is. That there are good souls all around who can just be willing to re-arrange their priorities and just show up in my life. After hearing some unpleasant news before a recent unexpected surgery, my son was at a loss to cheer me up and get my mind back on the best possible outcome. Just then my cousin walked in the room, bright and cheery and full of tales of the parking garage and my whole countenance changed because hers was so bright and uplifting. I went into surgery full of hope and it went well.

She just showed up. And by doing that she changed everything for me. It often isn’t something major that is required of us. We all bring a new outlook and a new pair of eyes into a situation. When we step into someone else’s space and look at it with them, right where they are, right where they live, when we come to walk with them through it, we open all possibilities to see something they might have missed. The mere holding their hand going through it or letting them know you will be there after, makes all the difference in the world. Maybe especially when they soldier up, “there’s no need, really, I’ll be fine.”

Sometimes I feel like life is in slow motion, but normally that is when bad things are happening and I can’t seem to get the gears to switch into forward mode again, no matter how hard I try, I just feel stalled. Positive things seem to go so fast…I am always re-living them, going “gee, just 24 hrs ago I was with my son at his concert, or eating dinner with a friend.” But as I survey the landscape of things that don’t seem so hopeful, or for which I can’t see what is the next best thing I can do to get moving, I feel like I have run out of gas on a back country road. I am just waiting and hoping someone will come along with some help, or a can of gas!

It is true, we are to forgive and then try to forget things we perceive as wounds to our psyche. They are personal, and often not intended by the person who said them in the way that they were received. I find email and texting particularly prone to misinterpretation. Partly because there is not only no eye contact or observed body language, but also  no tone of voice to listen to for inflection or compassion.

So is a blanket “I’m sorry” good enough? I don’t think so. If it doesn’t acknowledge the perceived misinterpretation, it will never suffice. It puts all the onus on the wounded party to absorb the hurt. If the person who has been offended is brave enough to bring it up, it needs to be addressed in a non-defensive way. This can happen only where both people are willing to talk about feelings, and open to the fact they both have played a part.

This will forever be the most difficult part of family dynamics for me. So much is said in jest and in sarcasm that it is difficult to separate the true jabs from the ones that were meant to roll off your back. Some of us are more thin-skinned or sensitive, evidently, than others. Not all of us want to repair the damage. It is a place to really test our personal communications skills, over and over again. Perhaps that is where we also decide to make changes in our own delivery, to benefit future generations going forward. For that reason it is worth trying, though it can be painful to attempt it and very possibly met with total resistance.

In that case there is only one choice. Try to forgive, and try to move in a different direction. However, if given the chance to truly hear and accept the pain my words may have caused someone close to me, I hope I will always try to find the courage to sincerely apologize for the damage those words have done. The results may be truly miraculous in lifting a burden I was not aware I had added to that person’s soul.

Sometimes, I almost forget about them. Sometimes they forget about me. But mostly, they are meant to be acknowledged and celebrated. Often they only mean we have survived another year. If that has been a difficult one, as this has been for me, it may feel even more important to acknowledge that, with God’s grace, you made it!

Several weeks before this birthday I decided to make sure I didn’t spend it alone, apt to wallow in a woe is me, I think I’ll eat some worms attitude. I also decided that next year I would have a true celebration and invite all my friends and life-support people. The funny thing is, by putting that thought out there, I found that all of them checked in THIS year! I heard from so many people, the phone hardly stopped ringing the whole day. Because someone put something on Facebook, I also heard from so many people with whom I have shared the privilege of finding their homes over the years.

I had offers of dinners and lunches and overnight excursions and calls from my children and an elegant dinner out with my son. I couldn’t have asked for more. Oh yes, but there’s the point. I did ask. I put it out there that I wanted to celebrate with my friends…next year. What a surprise to me that it happened a year early!

You have not because you ask not. How true scripture often is. So simple. And yet I tend to feel that I don’t want to ‘use up my tickets’ in case there is really something important down the line. I also hesitate to ask God for something in case He can’t do it, I don’t want Him to look bad. How silly that I am worried about having God’s back! He has mine, all the time, and if He can’t do something, He still wants us to ask.

I made the comparison to a friend that when my son is out on tour with a well known band, often I would know people in a city where he was going to perform  who would love to see him play but perhaps didn’t really have the money for the tickets, or just as possible, it may already be sold out. Given that he often gets a few complimentary seats, I overcame my reluctance to ask him, and most times he had tickets he was glad to provide.

For my friends, whether he had the tickets or not, the mere fact that I asked was the major thing. They were fine if he didn’t have them, but thrilled that I had asked on their behalf. I believe it is that way with God. He can’t always give us exactly what we asked for, but if he could and we didn’t even ask, he might never know we had that desire in our heart, enough to put it out there. I assume He would feel the way my son would, when after the concert  I said” Oh, I had some good friends who  would have loved to see you”, and he would have said “Mom, I wish you had asked… I had four tickets and I didn’t know anyone in Buffalo! They just went to waste.”

You have not because you ask not. Think about it.

Forget about that! I just spent four days fighting the pain of what I didn’t know was a kidney stone. Ouch! The last time I went to the hospital in that much pain I came home with a 10lb son!

The emergency room was no different than I remembered it, fast tracked into a room for a five hr wait to see a doctor and get on some pain IV….I nearly fainted in the meantime, but at least I finally has some respite and I had a CAT scan that told me it was not an alien inside me eating my guts, because that is what it felt like!

OK, this has nothing to do with real estate.But you’ve got to admit, sometimes romance involves a great deal of pain before it passes through your life.

And please, especially if you live in Florida, drink 3 quarts (yes QUARTS!) of water a day to try and avoid these little monsters. I can tell you, you will never appreciate a lack of pain as much as you do after the darn thing has passed out of your body! Water, now….I mean it!

Two years after all the proposed help to the struggling housing market, all I see is more of the same and a continual slide in a downward direction. There have been no guidelines imposed to help cleanup the short sale, pre-foreclosure situation. There are many more people who have in the past year depleted their savings and 401K’s trying to hold onto their homes, only to be walking away from them bankrupt in the end.

There is no common sense at the top. The government sees everything as a way for them to impose themselves into the fray and act as though they have answers. All they have done is give modifications to the very people who could ill afford their homes in the first place, who put nothing down to begin with. Now they are defaulting on those modifications, or at least 90% seem to be.

The sad thing is they refused to give modifications to the people who put money into their loans originally, but perhaps have 750 plus credit scores, and not enough “hardship” but  instead of granting them a point or two lower on a mortgage that was going to remain upside down for possibly years, they determined to squeeze them dry and tell them they couldn’t possibly do a thing to help them. After a year or two of watching everyone else get the help by stopping the payments to their mortgage companies, they feel as though the good are unrewarded for their sacrifice while the ones who broke their agreements are given a pass.

This is the most outrageous part of this whole mess. We are not helping those who could hold on to their homes and help save the neighborhoods, instead making them look stupid for playing by the rules they signed up for. These are the people who should have gotten some help, and I am so tired of not seeing any come their way. As a country, we are now rewarding the illegal, the liar, and the corrupt while slapping the face of the honest and true. I am glad I have already raised my children, because the values that will succeed in today’s world are not those I would ever have been able to teach them. I just hope they will live to see those values return to prominence in their lifetimes and those of their children, because a nation like ours cannot survive by adhering to the new and very ugly rules in play.

I happened to be stopped at a busy highway exit ramp today and watched a man with a sign asking for money. He had just finished a bag of chips and carelessly tossed it on the grassy area where he was standing while he begged for contributions. It wasn’t the fact that he was asking for help that bothered me, but the fact that tomorrow the city would be paying someone with a long pole to come and retrieve the garbage he had left while he was asking for help.

It occurred to me that he was creating work that was also going to cost the very same people he was asking for assistance. And truly it would be work that he was capable of doing. It was an interesting cycle of thought.  We are creating the messes that we are having to pay to clean up. I wonder that people receiving their support from the hard work of others often care very little about taking care of that with which they have been entrusted.

Spending someone else’s hard-earned money on my own needs includes a heavy duty guilt that I am not sure everyone shares. It has sometimes not been the case, but often carries a weight that I can’t wait to be free of and get back to providing for my own needs. We may all have times when we have to depend on the good graces of others, but I cannot imagine it as a lifestyle.

I think that is why we do tend to help out some people rather than others. We all have our own lens through which we see someone’s difficulties as being some what their own fault. If we have never walked in those shoes we see it one way, perhaps. If we have, we have even higher standards we expect them to live up to. I often wonder if one were to track the contributions to a person on the side of the road asking for money, how many different stories one would find as to why people stopped to offer money.

Well, most of the time. Actually, while all houses have occasional problems, it is a pretty wonderful thing to know you can offer someone a safe shelter for their family. And when problems arise, if they are doing their part in keeping the contract, it is really very easy to address any problems that arise with the building.

I have met some of the most considerate people by being their landlord. From the moment they were lead to me or my property, we usually both sensed this was not a chance meeting. We both felt a connection to the other. And it really never changed after that.

There are still male former tenants who call me on Mother’s Day, former tenants who call to check out the possibility of buying their own home one day, some who call just to check in and see how I am doing and some I call for the very same reason. We have shared a home. Not by living in it together, but by caring for it together. It would be an ideal model for parenting after a marriage has come apart and one no longer lives in the home. It is still a place where you worked, fixed things up, had hopes and dreams for the future. You have shared a “space” on this earth and there is a certain sacredness to that. If you remember that, even the bad memories (of a previous tenant who had to be evicted and still owes you back rent and damages for the house)can fade in the light of having a tenant who cares for the house as a home, as you do. That is a special relationship.