Amazing What a Text Message Can Do

My brother lives in California. The three hours earlier time differential, combined with our particular idiosyncrasies that he is a night owl and I am a day mouse, can result in some fairly small communication windows.

Fortunately, we both have unlimited text message capabilities.

That being said, I often wake up to several new messages in the form of advice/spiritual musings and/or general FYI life updates. Most people use text for brief snippets. Not my family. My brother, sister, and I all use them for long drawn out epistles. It is a carry-over from our collective inability to leave brief voicemail messages, but that is an arguably genetic trait and is a tale for another time.

So the other day I woke up to six new messages. One was from my friend Dave who was concerned, at approximately 1 am on a Sunday morning, that I see too many psychics. What was more disturbing to him than my allegedly frequent visitations to seers was that this was an aspect of my life of which he was unawares. In the wee hours of a weekend morning, my dear friend, Lauren, set him straight with this (exaggerated) information.

I suspect he felt a bit gypped because had he known about this fascinating quirk he could have used such information to entertain other people at social gatherings. As in: “My friend Mags is so WEIRD! Do you know what she does? She sees psychics, like EVERYDAY!” And the audience would be hanging on his every word as he describes his bizarre friend the way some people might describe a circus monkey.

False alarm people. The truth is that I do love psychics, but I only actually see a psychic once or twice a year at most. It certainly is not a bi-weekly occurrence as Dave was informed. The bigger mystery is why Lauren was misinformed, as she knows me just about as well as anyone. But I suspect she just wanted to get a rise out of her audience, and who can blame her really? As someone who loves her enthusiasm in general, I applaud her offering exaggerated, yet innocuous, information about me for the sake of a good laugh and some minor outrage. I mean what is the point of talking to anyone at 1 am unless a conversational bomb is going to be dropped? There has to be some compelling reason not to be snuggled in your bed.

This seems like as good a time as any to proclaim my belief that everyone ought to just go to bed at midnight. Nothing happens after midnight that makes much sense, in my opinion. Isn’t that when werewolves come out? See what I am saying?

But back to the texts I woke up to: the OTHER five text messages from that morning were from my brother. The major message imparted was that he felt I needed to speak to our father more. Robert pointed out that I have a lot of judgments surrounding that particular relationship and that it was time for me to let them go and to work on patching things up with Dad.

This counsel is particularly interesting when you consider that my dad has been dead for nearly ten years.

And what really got me was not the fact that my brother was suggesting to me that I open up the lines of communication with our dead father (he is a spiritual life coach, after all, and such advice is par for the course), but that he felt I had judgments about the relationship.

Now let me tell you something about me: I have judgments about a lot of things. Part of why I am writing this blog and writing the book is because I want to hold myself accountable in my attempts at letting go of judgments. After all, if I write lengthy blurbs encouraging others about the importance of being authentic, empathetic, and fair to others, then how can I not listen to my own advice?

It is sort of like when you decide to announce you are on a diet. You better start loading up on the veggies once you have gone public with your new regime. Or, at the very least, consume your ho-hos and whoopie pies when there is no one around on whose face you will register the words "DIET FAILURE," as you wipe the whipped cream from your mouth.

If everyone knows about your goal, it can be good incentive, I think, to actually follow through with them.

So with regards to judgments: this is a habit I have been trying to kick for years. I have had multiple therapists--in addition to what you now know to be my sporadic visits with psychics, reflexologists, and holistic healers. I read so many self-help books, that a friend once challenged me to go a month without reading one.

BTW: It was torture. I know how lame you are likely thinking I am at this moment, but frankly it was like telling me to give up ice cream, and it was not pretty.

When I consider the judgments I have about my father, and about our relationship, it is very true that it is a matrix from which many of my issues with judgments seem to stem. And the truth is that I DO speak to my father, I do believe that our relationship has become better, and I KNOW that if he were alive now, we would be able to make come amount of peace in a relationship that was volatile, unstable, and, most of all, misunderstood by both parties.

Of course, these realizations are fairly easy to assert in theory. In actuality there are no guarantees and there will never be a way to truly test if I am correct in my beliefs/hopes.

And no, even I would not put that much stock in a psychic. To be clear: yes I love psychics. But I have my limits. Plunking down extra dough to have a seer speak to loved ones who are on the "other side" is just bologne to me.

But I had thought that through all of this work on myself and self examination, etc. that I had done a pretty darn good job of letting go of the judgments I had about my dad, about myself, and about my relationship with him.

And then, boom! My brother calls a spade a spade and I wonder: How is it that my own perception of myself is so very different from how those in my life see me? How can my brother believe that I am so full of judgment when he knows, as well as anyone, how hard I have worked to let go of those judgments and repair that relationship?

But he does. And he is right.

How humbling it can be to think that you are so self-aware, so evolved, so “right on” about your path towards emotional freedom and peace, and then you are unceremoniously bumped off your high horse as someone hits you over the head with a baseball bat of truth.

Or, to be a little less violent, they hold up a proverbial mirror and wow-what you see is not what you expected.

In congruence with all of these realizations/thoughts/circumstances, yesterday, my husband and I went to see the movie “Everybody’s fine” with Robert De Niro. In it, he plays a recently widowed father of four who is trying to renegotiate his relationship with his adult children after the loss of his wife/their mother.

Maybe it was the image of the Italian-looking foreboding man with the crinkly eyes and the blue collar job that rang true to me in terms of my image of a father, but I was basically crying throughout the whole movie.

The movie is sad, this is true, but it is not as sad as one would imagine when watching me blubber from the sight of this man doing everything from packing a suitcase to eating a sandwich in McDonalds.

The truth is that I watched how misunderstood this father’s love for his children was, and that is what resonated with me on a visceral level. I watched how the the children carried on, convinced they knew the truth, that they were the ones who really knew what their dad was all about, what he needed and wanted from them and who he was in general.

And they were so blatantly wrong.

He saw through all of their shenanigans. They thought: He loves me if I am this way or that way. But that was not true.

It became so obvious that he loved them no matter what, they just lacked the intersubjectivity to see that reality. How sad, as so much of the turbulence in their lives and their relationship would have been eradicated with that simple realization.

And so it was with my dad. My brother’s text message prompted me to reexamine what I thought was a fairly closed up issue.

The endless tears at the movie obviously prove it was not.

So, ten years after my dad passed away, and I still have a lot of work to do yet on letting go of judgments. I have a lot of work to do on releasing the idea that I know what it was all about and how things went down, when I could have been wrong all along on the most crucial of components.

This epiphany is wonderful in many ways, but also extremely stressful. What if I am never able to really see my relationship with my dad for what it was and is? What if, in another 10 years, I am still hanging onto these judgments?

Oh, geez. Maybe I need to consult a psychic.