What constitutes crap? This seems to have been a topic of considerable interest the past couple of weeks.
About 10 years ago my wife and I started to do some gardening --- flowers, shrubs, perennials, bushes, annuals. I don’t suspect that anyone from Better Homes And Gardens will be contacting us anytime soon, but we are enjoying the splash of life that this has added around our home.
Well, when we first started this gardening thing and it was time to do some weeding, I had a very difficult time differentiating the weeds from the actual plants. [For those of you who have done a lot of gardening, I’m sure that this sounds quite odd, but I really did have a hard time telling the weeds from some of the plants.] As a result, for the first several years of this new venture we had quite a few weeds growing in our gardens (sometimes even to the point where the weeds were overgrowing some of the flowers, shrubs, and plants).
When I first got married, I had what some people might call anger issues. My anger typically did not consist of “hot” episodes --- for example, yelling, swearing, throwing things --- I had grown up with this and I had figured out ways to avoid slipping into this type of behavior (at least, most of the time). Instead, my anger was of the “cold” variety --- I would simply clam up, set my jaw, and be virtually immovable.
Needless to say, this was quite disconcerting for my wife, Kathy. Right there in the middle of the garden of our life together were these ugly weeds. In fact, not only was my stonewalling ugly to look at, but it also ended up choking off a lot of the life-giving love we had experienced.
Kathy tried hard to point out my anger issues, but as with my first few years of gardening, I didn’t get it. These “weeds” were so much a part of me that I had a difficult time seeing how they could possibly be weeds. Besides, this cold anger had served me well --- it had enabled me to persevere through some difficult circumstances growing up, it had fueled my athletic career, it had pushed me to overcome some very big obstacles in my life. How could these be weeds!
And after all, even if they were weeds, I didn’t plant them there. They were planted by people in my past. It wasn’t my fault that I had anger issues.
[Have you ever known someone / cared about someone / loved someone who has had weeds growing in the garden of their life, but they have insisted that the weeds were not their fault --- as a result, getting rid of them was not their responsibility?]
Fortunately, Kathy didn’t buy it. And so we talked about my anger issues.
[As you might suspect, talking about my anger issues frequently ended up triggering more of them.]
And when I did unset my jaw sufficiently for us to talk, I would insist that this was just one of my little quirks, and that she should simply learn to accept it as part of an otherwise fairly decent package. And at other times I would argue that this was simply my way of dealing with life --- she had her ways (for example, talking about things) and this was mine, and that she should simply allow me to work through life’s “stuff” in my own way.
I am thankful that Kathy loved me enough to help me see that my anger really was unhealthy --- for me, for her, for our marriage (and ultimately, for our children).
As with gardening, being able to identify the weeds is an important part of owning our crap.
[More next week.]
