By Land and By Sea

Even if it is 40 degrees in Chicago in April,
sometimes a boy's gotta' fish.

Last week was Passover, so we took a little time off work, hosted a few guests. Something of a family reunion. Although not everyone could make it, attendance was pretty good.

We're at Lincoln Park, here, FD's showing the giraffes our kite. They were impressed.

Once or twice, if you're a regular reader, you've found me depressed after a holiday break like this. The kids come, they go, they take my grandchildren with them. They threaten to leave one or two behind, but the little people somehow find their way to their car seats at the end of the holiday. Although I miss them already, it's okay. It always was.

We played a lot of games, some indoors. This year's indoor Bozo's Grand Prize Game was even more of a hit than last year. I didn't tell the kids that Bozo the Clown has passed on to that big circus in the sky.

There's this idea that children really prefer a good cardboard box to the toy inside, and it has been shown, without a doubt, to be statistically significant. After they all left I spent a bit of time smashing boxes for recycling, and throwing things away. I spent about eight hours getting my house together, and will need another couple of weeks to find things, return them to their proper owners. (Empath Daught, if you're reading this, I found some make-up with the chometz (rhymes with dumb-its, means not for Passover use), and someone's sleeveless tee-shirt is still hanging in the bathroom upstairs.)

What else, what else. The best thing about a family reunion is that the generations divide. Sure, it's great for the grandparents to bond with everyone, but leaving the younger people to talk until 3 a.m., just talk, catch up on their lives, and me and FD not hearing a word of it, is kind of wonderful, if you ask me.

This is the essence, really, of a family therapy, that siblings should have their own relationship with one another, not something based upon their relationship to their parents, although that's obviously okay, too. The closeness is something to shoot for, and the way to shoot for it is to get the parents out of the room.

Same thing, really, with marriage. You have to get your parents out of that relationship, too, although it's surely a good thing that they're there, if they are there, when you need them. Nothing like having a parent around when you need one. Same, too, with kids. I called one of mine yesterday. Conversation went like this:

Uh, honey, are you around tomorrow at noon?
Son: I think so!
Great, the guy is coming to fix the dryer and I'm with patients until 1:00.
Son: No problem. Will there be food?

What else, what else.

You can establish a boundary around your practice, with enough practice. My practice is full and yet I was gone for 10 days and had maybe 2 phone calls while I was off, from new patients. I'm not sure how you do this, but it is worth working at. Using your team, using the patient's resources, this is all in there somewhere, as is encouraging independence. I guess we should talk about it more sometime.

What else, what else. I read a good book by Colm Toibin, Brooklyn. It's a post-war book about a nice kid from Ireland who comes to America, leaves her family behind knowing that at most she will see them once a year, traveling by boat. She's here in America for a better life. It's a wonderful novel, rich in character insight. The whole idea of separating from family for a whole year is mind-boggling, isn't it? And yet people used to do it all the time, and many still do.

And I complain about a few months apart from mine.

therapydoc

Separation

This morning I wake up really early with a plaintive OneRepublic song in my head,

Come Home.

Lyrics :

Hello world
Hope you're listening
Forgive me if I'm young
For speaking out of turn
There's someone I've been missing
I think that they could be
The better half of me
They're in the wrong place
trying to make it right
But I'm tired of
justifying
So I say you'll..

Come home
Come home
Cause I've been waiting for you
For so long
For so long
And right now there's a war between the vanities
But all I see is you and me
The fight for you is all I've ever known
So come home

Oh

Everything I can't be
Is everything you should be
And that's why I need you here
Everything I can't be
Is everything you should be
And that's why I need you here
So hear this now

Come home
Come home
Cause I've been waiting for you
For so long
For so long
And right now there's a war between the vanities
But all I see is you and me
The fight for you is all I've ever known
Ever known
So come home
Come home

It's an anti-war song, is the truth, or so I learned on YouTube trying to find you a link. Watch it after you read this.

This isn't a political blog, but I do have an American flag drooping over our front-room window, and I'm thinking I should bring Old Glory to the cleaners, but don't want to take it down, not even for a day. The song has nothing to do with my personal politics, fyi, I just like it. There's a love song in there somewhere. Has to be.

This post is about marital separation, and the feeling that characterizes this stage of marriage. It isn't the same as wishing someone home from a war, but usually there's missing. Emptiness defines separation, and loneliness.

With separation one of two partners has to leave home. Someone has to pack up and go or it isn't a real separation. Sometimes a spouse will leave voluntarily, walk out, close the door, and that's it, game over. Too little, too late. Therapy didn't work. The love is gone, the relationship dead, the formal beginning of the end. From here we go to dissolve the marriage, dissolution, another D word, a softer word, as in dissolve into water. Means divorce.

Feels harsh, divorce, and it is. Also lonely. Dissolution-- soft, like water.

Yet there is no limit to the cheer-leaders, family, friends, colleagues who encourage the divorce option, who have been there and profess to be quite happy about it; and so many others who have suffered abuse in marriage, who see everything in terms of abuse, who support the leaving, toast to it. Bring on the party. Here's to a new life. The old one is over. Move it along, jump to the chase; what is this no man's land, anyway. Make a decision, please; it's been three weeks.

Relationship therapists don't see separation this way, actually. We don't see it as an entre' to divorce.

First of all, we know that no matter how you label a relationship, it is never over. These reside in our heads for years and years and years, no matter how we label them, even relationships of our youth. So what is the rush to finalize the ending of a committed relationship? It isn't over until the ink is dry. Boyfriend, fiance, lover, friend, spouse, partner; what happened there, in the relationship, the meaning of that person, will not disappear with a signature.

Therapists see all kinds of separations, you should know. So we snuff out the panic when a couple nervously asks, Might it help, a little space, some time apart? This one quotes the statistic that 3 out of 4 married couples endure a separation, generally not due to abuse or neglect or even a marital problem.

Normalizes it, doesn't it, that 3 out of 4 couples separate? That's well over a majority.

When separation is not about the relationship, it is usually due to a work transfer, or the needs of a sick family member, perhaps a change in status, like having to attend to the estate of a lost loved one, executorship, maybe. When crises happen, togetherness is the expected outcome of the separation--as soon as possible, if you don't mind. Fix whatever this is so we can so we can be together again soon. There is stress, being apart is stressful, but ways of communication transcend geography mainly because a couple wants to transcend geography. There is no discord.

Come home.

When separation is due to marital distress, however, therapists are in less of a hurry (depending upon one's treatment perspective) to push a couple back to the same home. We entertain objections, surely, from one of the two partners, but might advise :

Take a break.
get some space,
give yourself a chance to heal, to think.
Rearrange priorities,
see your own behavior, own your part of these problems, don't minimize.
Understand your significant other in a more rational way.

A little distance and we gain perspective. Of course this is within the context of therapy, for sure. If your time is spent at the bars crying in your beer looking for sympathy, it's unlikely any light bulbs, epiphanies, will be going off any time soon.

Thoughtful separations like these are healing for older couples, but for people new to marriage I tend not to recommend them, although there are certainly exceptions. But young people do well in marital therapy living together, not apart. The therapeutic mission will be to test new behaviors with one another in-house.

Young marriages are still in the test tube, the laboratory phase, everything is an experiment. The therapist can add a twist of this or that, present new perspectives, but the successful couple, with a little therapeutic insight, will comes up with the ideas that work independently, will finesse the experiment. And voila, it's back to being in love again.

Therapy is more complicated for older couples with history and emotional inventories . Negative emotions associated with a partner's misdeeds feel hard-wired to the victim, intractable. So many memories, so many disappointments, repeated enactments of dysfunctional behaviors, reactions. We can change these in therapy, work to understand one another, but the love won't catch up with the intellect, not so quickly. Not usually.

Time. But did you say you want to know how long you should be apart?

This depends upon each of the partners, how committed they each are to change, and how disassociated they feel from one another. Can we predict it? Can we predict how long a couple will stay separated?

Some of us take pot shots, guesses. I have a short but open-ended list of questions that make mine feel educated.

(1) How huge is the inventory, the list of pain, the wrongdoing?
(2) How deep is the anger, the hurt? Is this really immeasurable?
I actually measure it in terms of days, then hours, number of tears, holes in the plaster.

Every therapy for separated couples will be a designer therapy, by necessity, with a designer treatment plan. Objectives and goals are discussed, as well as an exhaustive investigation of each partner's emotional life. That certain responses are predictable, based upon that history, unfolds over time, and this is the insight we're looking for.

Thus there can be no textbook treatment for any particular marriage, which is why the work itself is as much an art as a science. We have our methodology, but procedural order will depend not only upon the broken dish of the day, but the way the therapist determines it to fit back together.

Is it time to block that metaphor yet?

Not to beat a dead horse, for those of you who read me, but there are three patients, three patients, remember, to every marital therapy-- the two partners and the marriage. That's a lot of therapy, a big treatment plan, so sorry. And the emotions don't just heal up overnight. People forgive, but they really can't forget. That memory thing will get you every time.

It would be nice if there were a switch, if we could will ourselves into loving again. Hypnosis, maybe.

Sorry.

That's why, if the rabbi or the priest, or the mullah, etc., has one thing to advise a young couple, it should be that they should stay out of denial, not brush any problem aside, look to the family of origin, the roots to the tree, the reasons people do what they do, the reasons they don't do things they should do. Attend to this right away, don't ignore "issues" let them build up inside until you have reached the point of no return.

Cuz that's a very, very bad place.

The Anti-Relationship drug, the thing that will ruin you is denial. You lull yourself into thinking, If I don't discuss this it will resolve on its own and I will love my partner again. These problems will go away in time.

Right.

Think again.

therapydoc

Love's Gonna' Get You Down

That's Chicago. I'm home.

FD and I joke that we don't get vacations. For people who seem to be hopping on planes fairly regularly, we still don't take real vacations. There's none of this hanging around with nothing to do.

No Vegas, no Jamaica, Italy, or Costa Rica. But sometimes, if we leave for long enough, if the sun cooperates, we really do feel as if we've been away. We're refreshed. Exhausted, but refreshed. I left ahead of him this time. We were apart for a week.

I forget sometimes that little kids wipe you out. How you people in early childhood education do it, I'll never know.

The Story:

She's at the wheel, I'm supposed to be paying attention. When she has the baby, this will be my job, driving the boys to school.

Turn right on Third, then at the light make a left on . . .,

I don't write it down. In the back seat someone is telling me why he likes Mika.

When it's my turn, I take Vine. She takes Vine, too, she tells me later. She doesn't warn me that it can be confusing. If you exit too soon you end up on Cajuenga and may never get out of Hollywood. That's just the way it is. You don't panic, you don't tell the kids that you did this, got lost, not while they're in the back seat, anyway..

Lollipop by Mika

Hey,what's the big idea?

Yo, Mika!

I went walking with my mama one day
When she warned me what people say
Live your life until love is found
'Cause love's gonna get you down.

Sing it!
Say love, say love
Oh, love's gonna get you down.
Say love, say love
Oh, love's gonna get you down.

Mama told me what I should know
Too much candy's gonna rot your soul
If she loves you let her go
'Cause love only gets you down.
Take a look at a boy like me
Never stood on my own two feet
Now I'm blue as I can be
Oh, love only got me down.

Once the kids are in school I can sit in the backyard and smell the orange blossoms and lilac trees. I can even talk to patients on the phone in the recliner. It's not a bad life. It almost sounds like a vacation. I will be working here soon enough, and I have that sexual assault prevention program to set up. May as well relax while I can.

Usually we visit in January, when it's cold, or in July, when it's a hundred degrees in the shade. Nobody tells us that late March in the San Fernando Valley is as close to perfect as it gets. If Californians have a reputation for being a littly high, this is probably why-- lots of sun and orange blossoms.

I'm always telling you to change your sensorium, to stimultate the brain with new sensory data to lift your depression. You don't have to travel to California. You can buy a bottle of scents, something powdery, maybe, whatever scent you like. But I'm thinking aroma therapy started in California in the springtime. You could jolt an airplane in empath daught's backyard.

Too bad you can't bottle sunshine. It's one of those chaval things.*

We wait for a baby to be born. She has absolutely had it with pregnancy, which, as you might know from personal experience, gets a little old in the last week or so.

The ugly truth is that it has been six months since I've seen my kid. Sure, we Google Video-chat (better than Skype), but it's not as if we can take a walk in a museum or a park and just chill, not if she's in one town, and I'm in another, half-way across the country.

And the video chat thing has to be at the end of the day. My attention span is that of an ant by then. They're due to arrive in Chicago any day now, ants. To their credit, they have a fairly decent work ethic, and do focus day and night. So maybe that's not the best example.

Anyway. It's healing, being there, just working a little, hanging out with my daughter and my son-in-law, and his parents and their kids, and my grandsons who look at me as if I'm from Mars, but isn't it great that Martians arrive and bring baseballs?

We throw the rubber baseball and nerf football around for hours. They find these things, which I would bring any girl-child, too, in my carry-on within moments of arrival. We make up good games, like roll around in the grass to hold onto the ball, and kick your brother, but gently.

It's a two-week trip and my carry-on still has a little breathing room because of empath daught's closet. So many short trips, for years luggage has been shunned in my world, it's hard to break old habits. And who knows if you'll ever see it again? Picture this:

FD is waiting outside the office to take me to the airport. My short week is over. Thirteen people are scheduled for phone or g-chat appointments while away. I want to say goodbye to my friend, a colleague. She works in the office right next door. Her door is cracked, so I know she's alone. Knock knock.

"I'm out a' here. Watch the shop, okay? I didn't tell anyone to borrow my computer."

"Huh? You'll be in tomorrow, right?"

"No, I'm leaving now for California tout de suite."

"Get out!"

"No, seriously. Come look at my luggage."

She sees the one bag. "You are nuts."

Maybe, but I'm gone.

Long trips aren't good for the back, even if you sit all day for a living. So mid-flight I get up and find the galley to stretch. The flight-attendant tells me it's her galley, would I mind taking a seat? Okay, I say, but I'm only following doctor's orders, doing this. She lights up. Well, in that case, she says, come back in half an hour and you can have it all to yourself.
Who said flying has to be so bad?

Let's not talk about how they see you as something just peeled off a shoe if you fly stand-by (the return trip).

My first day in L.A. is all about reconnecting with everyone. It's two hours later for me, so by ten I'm am asleep, right after the Office and 30 Rock; they've waited for me to watch the shows.

As you may recall, my morning alarm clock is someone pulling at the covers.

"Bubbie, Let's play!"

Life is grand.

"Coffee, " I mumble. They have heard the same mumbling from their mother, so they don't object. I pop the waffles in the toaster, pour the syrup on the plates, make the coffee.

The machine is tricky, but I paid attention to the tutorial the night before.

My daughter shapes the guys into little people who want to go to school. How she does this inspires me. I yelled and threatened my own kids, eventually picked them up and forced them into seat belts. But maybe they were younger even, than these guys. Must have been.

She's still working, has been working from home for three or four months. Once she wrote a book for someone about the virtual worker. In the book she suggests that if you're working from home, you should dress like you would to go to the office.

Right.

At lunch she says, "Maybe we should do something. Go somewhere. Like a museum, maybe the Getty. Get out and walk."

Anything to put her into labor.

"Sure."

We're very pleased with this field trip. We're walking around the Getty, enjoying the art, and she reminds me that it has probably been fifteen years since we did this, walked around a museum together.

She's enjoying the entire gestalt. It's something I tell people to do. Take your mom to a museum. Take a walk. And here we are, doing that.

The Getty is free. We don't know this, and both of us, without saying it, have been hoping not to have to spend a lot of money. By the time we get out of the house, time is slipping away, closing in on the end of the school day. We at least want to get our money's worth out of the museum. She calls my son-in-law, her guy, my fifth son, who will pick up the boys. We're free to have the day together.

The exhibit is what you would expect, basically your typical Renaissance religious painting tour de not force. But it is certainly marketed to me, specifically. This one has my name on it. It's called, Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575–1725.



Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575–1725


In the one below, Joseph is fighting off Potifar's beautiful, seductive wife. She wants him in the worst way, this woman, according to the bible story. Who said the Torah was dry? Certainly not the first and second books. But he will not be seduced, not Joseph (you saw the braoadway show). After all, he's Jacob's son, and it's bad enough already that as the patriarch's son he has been living as a prince in Egypt for years and still hasn't called home.



That's it for anything Jewish in the exhibit. But it was interesting getting top billing like that.

Anyway, end of this story, she has the baby. Walking does the job. We have hit the mall the next day, not spending a dime, except for coffee, decaf mocha latte, heavy on the whipped cream, for me, at least. And after her short stay in the hospital, her littlest guy finds out, although he's been warned, exactly what it is that Mika means when he says, Love's gonna' get you down.

The kid is a good sport, but at four, it takes some getting used to, your mother holding someone else in her arms. All The Time.

He puts it in words and she reassures him that he's still way at the top of the pecking order. They have history together. She's only known this new little guy a few days. How could she possibly love him more? And it's annoying, isn't it, that he always has to be held? Come on. You think mama's made of iron? The dude looks small, but he's heavy.

Wrapping his head around this, he accepts it that she loves him, and she may even love him more.

After all, what choice has he got?

therapydoc

*Chaval is Hebrew, I think. Hard "ch", cha rhymes with duh, and val rhymes with doll. It means, What a shame, too bad. Works for almost everything.

Yad Vashem

were sent to slave labor.

Our tour guide told us that those who were sent to slave labor were allowed 200 calories a day.

The photograph above is in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. I took it off their website. The album is the only surviving visual evidence of the process of mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a unique document and was donated to Yad Vashem by Lilly Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier.

When I was a teenager one of my cousins (a South Sider) came to stay with us for what was supposed to be a couple of months. It turned out to be over a year and great for me, because as you know I was the only girl in my family and had my own room and it got a little lonely. So she and I talked into the night that year and it was very nice on all kinds of levels.

My cousin suffered from migraines and when she did, she mostly slept. One day I asked her what she thought caused them and she said she didn't know, but they started the day she heard about the Holocaust. I was fourteen and I hadn't even read Night by Elie Wiesel, or heard any first hand Holocaust stories, which was ironic since my parents had at least a handful of survivor friends.

All four of my grandparents had come to America in the early thirties, escaping Hitler's reign of terror.

Or I wouldn't be here.

I always felt a little guilty for not pouring over the books about the Holocaust. I read NOTHING about it in my social studies primers in grade school the fifties and early sixties. And I'm still a little light in this department. But I go to the museums if I'm in a city with a memorial museum and suck up as much as I can.

L.A. is good, Washington's better. The one in Jerusalem is the best.

So I was in Israel a couple of weeks ago, and since Yad Vashem is considered the world’s largest repository of information on the Holocaust, of course I had to go. I had been there ten years ago, but new founders have reinvented it, turned into performance art, a collection of photos in motion, sculpture, visuals and sounds, a sophisticated vehicle that breathes life into the victims, the perpetrators, and the bystanders of that awful period in time.

I've had it in mind to go to there since my youngest son, a particularly sensitive young fellow said to me after I booked the flight to Israel, "You should definitely go to Yad Vashem, Mom. It's very cool."

I rely on my kids to direct me in life, especially to things that are cool. For example, Empath Daught tells me what to wear (sends me home with sweaters), the Stooge tells me what movies I'll be able to stomach.

If you haven't been to any of the Holocaust museums then you're missing out. These memorials are much more than store houses of historical facts, artifacts, newsreels, etc. Their entire raison d'etre is to put you face to face with so much truth that you have to be emotional.

If you suffer from depression and know you can't handle too much reality then forget about this particular reality field trip. I tell MANY of my patients not to read or watch the news. Stay in LaLaLand and don't go to the Holocaust museums. But you HAVE to tell others to go in your stead. It's your responsibility.

I went with FD, his mom, sister, and brother-in-law, a few days after my niece's wedding. You last met them in a post I wrote about how saying incantations can help you find lost objects (I AM a social scientist, I REALLY am). We sang show tunes at Borders that Saturday night. It was unforgetable.

Anyway, bro-in-law Michael immediately sized up that we needed a guide for this exhibition. We were lucky to get Devorah Gold, perfect. Her grandfather made sure that her father escaped the Nazi's. He sent him away. I think she said that her father met her mother and married her in a DP (displaced persons) camp.

Devorah delivered every powerful line of her script with careful precision. It was like psycho-surgery. Hypnosis. I felt right at home.

FD was upset by the way the museum worked emotions. The museum is set up to make you feel the experiences of those who perished, and those of the few who survived. My guy found it all too emotionally manipulative. After the tour he wandered off for about an hour to see the art and other exhibits. He totally tranced out, didn't even answer his phone. I was a little worried about him.

But I feel that this type of emotional upset is good for people. It connects us with reality and we have to know this reality. It's good to go through this. It's nothing, frankly, compared to the horror that that generation suffered.

It's a fact of life that the world is replete with horrific acts of mankind. Rape, torture, and murder are universal. Violence sells newspapers; it is the stuff of NPR. I have to wonder if there's something wrong with a society that is so captivated by horror. We're literally entertained by horror films and desensitized to violence.

Some of us even LIKE the Holocaust museums. Even though 6-10 million people died in that genocidal world war they remember.

And to this day there are people who deny that it ever happened. Not the war, the death.

We listen to fireworks on the 4th of July, barely connecting them to the rockets red blare, but at least it's an effort to connect to death and destruction. Annual memory pitches that honor Good Wars include Memorial Day and Veterans Day. We LIKE seeing photographs in newspapers and magazines of men (mostly men) in uniforms wearing medals; men who fought for freedom.

Yet, most of us manage to avoid the pictorial side of the Holocaust. The emaciated bodies of starved concentration camp survivors, the piles of dead in mass graves, the death marches to gas chambers, the empty eyes of children. .. just not attractive. A downer.

I have a well-heeled, wonderful friend who set up a social service agency for rape victims. She had problems getting funding. "I could get the money to stage a week's worth of performances of Madame (pronounced Ma-da-meh) Butterfly, but get funding for rape victims? Ha!"

So most folks don't volunteer to see photos of emaciated, dying people, or medical experiments that turn the stomach either.

But it is VERY cool going to museums in Israel these days, technologically speaking, seriously. Yad Vashem is virtually new, and at Masada, too, there's a new museum, complete with a "smart" audio tour. No longer do you have to hit a button on the remote control to hear narrative . The remote control knows where you are in the museum. You go into a room and you hear about what it is you're supposed to hear about what you're looking at, perhaps ancient coins or pottery inside the display case. It is very cool.

And at Yad VaShem, if you use a guide like Devorah Gold, you get a head set and hear her speaking loud and clear, explaining what it is that you're seeing, assuming you haven't drifted too far away from your group. The head-set audio tour is great for the predominantly aging populace that visits the museum.

Ten years ago, before the remodeling of Yad Vashem, I saw hundreds of pairs of shoes behind a vertical glass display case, the shoes of the victims of the Holocaust. Now the shoes are in a display under a floor covering of thick glass. We're encouraged to walk on the display, to walk on the shoes.

Go ahead, walk on it, walk on those shoes, says our guide. No one does.

I do. She's really saying,Walk in those shoes.

The museum is like that, very experiential. Do you want to know what the German soldiers were thinking? How could they kill every Jewish child under the age of 10, for example (a 1942 proclamation, Every Jewish Child Under the Age of Ten Must Die) .

Open the door to a wooden box on a wall and read a soldier's explanation to his family.

One officer, Karl Kretshmer says (I'm paraphrasing): It is a weakness not to be able to stand the sight of dead people. The way to overcome this weakness is to kill more often. You get used to it.

I'm told there's a movie we should see, The Wave, about a brilliant teacher who teaches children how to be murderers, willing executioners.

When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, soldiers were ordered to shoot victims in the head at close range. To do this they were ordered to first drink 1.5 liters of vodka.

14,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar in two days.

It is a weakness. . .

The Pope didn't leave his palace. . .

Martin Niemoller, a German pastor wrote these famous lines:

They came for the Socialists, and I did not object because I was not a Socialist.

They came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not object because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not object because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to object.

The only children who survived the Holocaust were those sent away by their parents. Some left on the KinderTrain (Google the Kindertransport Association). They left Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia on a train to Great Britain. Alone.

The "Righteous Among the Nations," risked immediate death if discovered harboring a Jewish person. But the Righteous (euphemism for Gentile) hid Jewish children in attics and closets. After liberation, some "lucky" children were reconnected with war-traumatized parents who came for them, whisked them away from their adoptive parents, the people who had loved and cared for them.

The enormity of such separation, so many separations, is inconceivable, even to those of us who think we understand separation.

Devorah Gold asked her father why he married her mother, how he chose her. He said, straight faced, "She was rich."

"Rich!" shouted Ms. Gold. "How could she have been rich? She was a survivor!"

"She had two sisters," he replied.

She had relatives. Anyone who survived the Holocaust with relatives was rich.

It gives us a little perspective, I think, when we begin to feel sorry for ourselves.

Lest we forget.

therapydoc

Intimate Opportunities

No, not what you think.

I'm thinking about opportunities to connect and simply be with people, the ones that will make a difference years from now.

Here's a typical decision.

My d-i-l, an up and coming therapy doc, did something really wonderful. She's young and idealistic and she put herself on a registry that searches for people who agree to willingly go through dialysis to become stem cell donors. Plasma phoresis can be a brutal procedure. They stick a catheter in your vein for hours, perhaps in the neck. But there are types of leukemia that respond to healthy stem cells, and it's a rare opportunity to save a life. Her DNA made a match.

D-i-l went through dialysis for 6 hours, and days of hormonal preparation that made her sick and crazy (she felt a little off, she tells me). My son was with her the whole time.

It wasn't easy and it wasn't risk-free. Without the procedure, the person she matched (and she has no idea who this person is) had little to no chance of survival. We don't know if it worked, either.

So why do I mention this? Not to brag, although I'm incredibly proud of her and fall off my chair at the thought of these generous, wonderful, idealistic kids.

I mention it because healthy people her age (early 20's) are really independent. They'll tell you, I don't need you with me, and maybe they don't, but if you're not there when they need you, any procedure, even a minor procedure, can be a pretty lonely, empty, scary experience.

But the default for young people is often, "I don't need you, I'm cool." And sometimes they are, sometimes they're not.

If you offer therapy to a kid in college, it's likely the kid will say, "I don't need it." By the way, it's a GREAT time to get therapy, college, if you're lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to college.

It can be a real relief to parents when a kid says "I don't need it" when it comes to therapy And parents who are still on the fence about the actual benefits of therapy will say, "Okay, good."

You know what I say, right? Every one needs it, at least for a little while, at some point or perhaps several points in their lives, if only to deal with everyone else. So on that score, push the idea with your kid. Tell the kid to just go, try it.

Kids in their early twenties, even in their teens, maybe at any age, want to be independent and should be encouraged to be independent. But almost all of us have one foot in childhood, even if it's an unconscious foot.

That piece of us that's in childhood wants company. It's a healthy, social piece, assuming it's not a whiny, overly dependent personality disorder (we'll get to those another day).

I remember once telling my mother I'd stay overnight with her when she was in the hospital. She said, "No way, I don't need it," but she thanked me for it. I'm not patting myself on the back. I feel I'd have been a snail not to have stayed. It's not a question of being a good person. It's a question of quality time and being there for someone.

But back to young adults. When your kid is going through a medical procedure and tells you, "I can handle it alone; you don't have to be there with me," don't buy it. Be sure that SOMEONE in the family or perhaps a close friend is there. It doesn't have to be you, but someone.

If it is you, it's an opportunity. It's one of those snapshot memories you two won't ever forget. Remember the time. . .?

Delicious.

(As I was writing this I ditched the computer to get a cup of coffee and caught an NPR story on daughters pulling away from mothers during adolescence, and I thought how that ties into this, how it's not so easy to create these memories when your kid is itching for separation. So for sure, we'll have to talk more on that another time.)

But working people like me feel we've missed too many opportunities for intimacy with our kids. ANY opportunity you have to be alone with your kid that gets you out of the everyday hum drum is something to really consider seriously, if they'll let.

Sometimes you have to construct the opportunities, create them, take a kid on vacation overnight even, alone with you, perhaps. The time together doesn't have to be a medical procedure. Any time will do. Family vacations are fine, but they're also potentially really stressful.

Going fishing works, or to a spa maybe even. It can be hard to find a good hook.

In my family, going out and buying a new marine fish made for intimate snapshot memories. Picking it out, bringing it home. You bring fish home in plastic bags. Plastic bags can break.

These kinds of memories go in the What We Won't Ever Forget Book of Life.

You could be writing it right now maybe, at least working on the intro.

Copyright 2007, therapydoc