This month’s take a breaks will focus on
Halloween and Dias de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Today is about making a
headband that’s inspired by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
These are easy to make as it’s simply attaching
flowers to a headband. If you want to use silk or plastic flowers, these can be
glued to the headband after cutting off the stem. You can also make paper flowers and
wire them on and of course you'll want to intersperse skeletons amongst the flowers.
Below is a video as well as additional directions.
The comic Patton Oswalt,
whose wife Michelle McNamara died suddenly of unknown causes in April, was interviewed
this past week on Conan. Oswalt’s comments were both funny and poignant"I'm like
every bad '80s sitcom where there's a dad raising a kid by himself, and the mom
is somehow... Except my '80s sitcom sucks. There's no punch lines. It's just,
there's a lot of insomnia. There's a lot of me eating Cheetos for dinner, and
I'm waiting for my daughter to turn to the camera and go, 'No wonder I'm in
therapy!'"
What caught my attention the
most came at the end of the interview when he described taking his daughter to
Chicago, two weeks after McNamara’s death, as a way to cope with Mother’s Day.
He felt that they both had done well in dealing with the situation when an
older ticket taker at the airport recognized Oswalt and proceeded to tell them
how sorry she was about their loss. In a faux Polish accent, Oswalt launches
into the woman’s comments about how her mother had died and that she never got
over it. “I’m sad every day.” Now Oswalt
is afraid that every holiday the “Polish
Woman of Doom” (PWOD) will suddenly appear spreading her message of despair.
Thanks to social media,
Oswalt’s video is getting a lot of play and I’d recommend that people watch it.
This is clearly a resilient man who is coping with his lost with some excellent
tools, including the love and support of family and friends. According
to grief/loss researcher, George Bonanno, one of the most helpful things you can do for a grieving person is make them laugh- “laughter almost always has a
positive effect.”
Oswalt’s comments about the PWOD,
which are incredibly funny, drives home the point that telling a grieving
person that grief never ends is not helpful. It’s also not true. A loss can be
a precipitating factor for longer-term problems, such as PTSD, and the
literature shows that by six months if the grief isn’t really resolving, major
interventions are needed. Clearly the person in need of help is the PWOD.
In keeping with celebrities
and death, one of the more disturbing things I’ve recently seen was the
reaction to Gene Wilder’s passing. Facebook and magazines covers contained
images of he and Gilda Radner with comments like “finally united.” Really? He
and Radner’s relationship was at best eight years. His marriage to Karen Webb
lasted 25, ending with his death. After watching TCM’s Role Model: Gene Wilder it’s pretty clear that Wilder had found his bliss with
Webb and the life they were living.
I don’t quite understand why
there is such a glorification of unending grief when it’s not only unhelpful
it’s down right unhealthy.
It’s almost the end
of September and the oak tree leaves are turning glorious shades of color and
providing millions of tiny acorns (future oak trees). So today’s “take a break”
is all about celebrating America’s National Tree (designated in 2004).
The oak tree family
is made up of hundreds of species and can live over 200 years, providing all
sorts of benefits including lumber and food for wild life.
You can find some
variety of oak tree for almost all planting zones in the US.
• Go for a walk
and collect leaves and acorns and try some of the following projects:
Collect acorns, dry
them and use them to accent candles (flame less are probably better to use with
dried acorns).
Make an Acorn Garland. It’s up to you whether you want to paint them or leave them as is.String beads between the acorns. Might be a
pretty garland for a Christmas tree.
Mini candles: Remove
the caps and fill with melted wax. Insert a small wick before the wax hardens.
Float in a shallow for a centerpiece. My husband has been known to float tiny
candles like this while he’s taking a bath.
In 2021, I
wrote what has become a very popular post Dating and Finding Love When Living with a Chronic Disease. Recently updating the post, I re read the comment There are people that look for partners with health issues so they can
be in a relationship where they “can take care of you.” I could do a post just
on this type of individual.
So here’s the
post on why you don’t want to be involved with people who pity or feel sorry
for you because of your diagnosis. Yes, we can all use a helping hand and we
like it when people “get us” but pity is degrading. In fact it can keep people
stuck in believing that they are their diagnosis.
When people
pity, they feel guilty when they interact with that person, so it becomes
‘painful’ – and that ‘pain’ gets transferred to us, so that people who pity see
US as painful! Never mind that what’s painful is their reaction to us, and
choosing to see us as a pitiful thing instead of a fellow human being. (Brilliantmindbrokenbody)
Stella Young at her TED talk nailed it when she noted that disability
is being objectified as a form of what she calls “inspirational porn.” ...we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of
nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate
you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is,
it could be worse. I could be that person."
The “I’ll take care of you” person expects something in return. You can
become the default or built in excuse for their not doing certain things-e.g.
the co-worker that shows up late for work every day and asks for additional
vacation because of caring for a sick spouse. The trade off may be your putting
up with some pretty unacceptable behavior. Bottom line, if someone tells you,
“but I just want to take care of you,” run for the hills.
As noted in the original 2012 post,The important point is
that you don’t need anyone feeling sorry for you because of your diagnosis.
Relationships work best if they are on equal footing. Each of us comes with our
strengths and our issues.
Before the leaves start dropping off the trees,
try removing leaf tissue to see a “skeleton of veins.” While most of the
directions below call for bleach, you can get a great effect if you prefer to
skip that last step. Be sure to wear gloves when working on this project.
