A Life's Witness

After my husband died nineteen months ago, I thought I might write a book on living single in a couples’ world. Wanting to use my own experience and that of others, I have interviewed dozens of widows and widowers.

The word most often used by everyone I spoke to was “loneliness.” What that word really means is that no one knows what they do, think, read, where they go, nor whom they meet, and, not only that, no one really cares.

Some people have a child who calls everyday, that helps, or there is a close friend who is involved. Living in a retirement community also helps, as one never needs to eat alone. But it is difficult to find a new old friend.

This leads me to a different concept, that of a witness. A witness to your life is that person who sees you brushing your teeth, watches whether you’ve taken your medication, hears you talking on the phone, and knows what you plan to do every day. A witness is usually the companion to your life and an active participant in it. And that can be whomever you are living with—mate, child, friend.

A witness can also be someone you talk to every day and with whom you share the minutiae of your daily life: what you had for dinner, the latest article you read, the movie you saw, the friend you bumped into. Someone truly interested in your whereabouts—the way we were interested in the daily doings of our children when they were small.

My friend Dr. Michael Rafii sent me this quote. As far as I know, this was the first time the word “witness” was used in this context. Susan Sarandon's character says the following in the 2004 movie Shall We Dance:

We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet…I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things…all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying, “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.”

Becoming aware of the meaning of “witness” could help in defining the nature of one's loss and the subsequent need for a replacement, even if only a partial one, or, on the contrary, it could help to identify that role in one's life that one must now do without.

Not everyone longs for a witness, a few men and some women felt at peace with no one close to them. These were either people who never experienced nor wished for much intimacy or their loss was so many years ago that they have adjusted to being alone.

In wondering who might need a witness and who might not, I thought of affiliation needs. These are genetically programmed. Think of children going into a kindergarten class: one may run to a group and join in the activity, another may go off by him or herself and prefer to play alone. These propensities usually remain throughout a lifetime. So I am guessing that people with high affiliation needs, when becoming a widow or widower, would suffer more from a lack of a witness than someone with low affiliation needs.

However not all witnesses fulfill their role well. There are indifferent spouses who notice nothing and don’t communicate, each partner living their life next to, but not with, the other. This may suit people with low affiliation needs. Then there is the spouse who is always critical or even abusive, and even though he or she is a witness, it is a dysfunctional relationship. Although one may be better off without such a person, there are many who remain in such dyads, afraid to leave it, preferring to be a victim than to be alone.

It would not be a bad idea for engaged couples to ask each other about their affiliation needs. It would reduce a lot of unmet expectations between one spouse who needs a lot of togetherness and the other who needs space and time alone. Understanding these different needs would allow for negotiation and compromise.

I wonder whether living in today's often alienated world people feel isolated and keep texting each other and constantly updating their whereabouts on Facebook and Twitter in order to have a witness to their lives.

For those who are lonely and are wishing for a witness, be proactive on your own behalf. I have sought out friends I could telephone in the evening when I get home to an empty and silent apartment. I keep my computer work for those hours too. I accept invitations to go out and reciprocate as often as I can. I have joined organizations that meet on a regular basis, do volunteer work, and ask friends to watch movies with me in my home.

I’m inviting readers to write me in care of this paper with comments and suggestions. This is a work in progress.

Early Brain Development

Just what we need: another difficult, if not impossible, dilemma for working parents! As if juggling home and career is not frustrating enough, research has uncovered the importance of staying home with a newborn or at least providing one-to-one contact on a daily basis by a good childcare person.

From birth, a baby’s brain cells keep making new connections and discarding others. This will shape a lifetime of experience, making the first three years critical. The question of nature vs. nurture¾does heredity shape a person, or does the environment have more influence¾is now finally answered. It is both. Experience (nurture) shapes the brain (nature) and this in turn influences how we react to future experiences.

Some of the most recent discoveries coming out of neuroscience are about the formation of the brain. A brain at birth contains over 100 billion neurons, as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. The pattern of wiring between these nerve cells is shaped by what the baby encounters.

This is how it works: a baby is stimulated by a voice, a mobile hanging over its crib, a touch. This stimulation produces electrical activity in the brain cells. Continued activity reinforces specific neural pathways, which in turn change the structure of the brain. If these connections or synapses are not used they wither away.

The best example of this is language. An infant’s brain is wired to learn all the sounds of human language. The sounds that are never heard at an early age cannot be reproduced correctly later. This is why people have accents when learning a new language as adults. Their synapses for those sounds specific to the new language have been lost at a young age. This is similar to the mechanism which make it best to learn music when young, as well as many other types of learning.

What wires a child’s brain is repeated experience. The electrical charges flowing from axons that transmit the signals to the dendrites receiving them become synapses that permanently connect the two. The more synapses in the brain, the more intelligent and well-functioning the child can become. A brain wired for musical talent will need opportunities in the environment to fulfill itself. Thus nature influences nurture, which influences nature¾ad infinitum.

Unfortunately, if there is heredity for aggression and the child is abused, he may well become an aggressive adult. With good, early parental care and love, such aggressive tendencies may never surface. On the other hand, there are abused children who never become aggressive. Their brains were not wired towards that tendency. So you need a certain susceptibility in the brain to begin with and life experiences that exacerbate it to produce specific behaviors.

What all this means is that the more positive experiences we can give our babies and children, the better developed their brains will be. Change the mobile hanging over the crib, provide new toys, play with your children, hug them, kiss them, hold them in your arms so they can see and interact with the world around them, talk to them, and read baby books and then children’s books to them even though they can’t read or understand the words yet. Interact a lot, learn the emotional cues and respond to them. Babies of depressed mothers are depressed, so be joyful with your child and have fun together.

Children who are not played with or touched develop brains that are 20% to 30% smaller than normal for their age. Remember the orphaned children of Romania, some of them so damaged by neglect that by the age of three they could not recover normal function. Emotional deprivation early in life or physical abuse has resulted in abnormal brain-wave patterns in these neglected children¾often irreversible.

Because of this we must rethink policy by providing adequate preschool programs that can boost the brain power of children under the age of three who live below the federal poverty level. We must re-think the cost of putting welfare mothers of infants and toddlers into the workforce without providing adequate daycare.

The rise of single parent households and the decline of community all point to grave consequences for the future of our children. Defective adults¾either emotionally deficient or intellectually incompetent, due to lack of early care and stimulation¾will be a burden and a danger to our society. Knowing all this, parents need to consider with utmost care, the staying-at-home option or research in great detail the daycare their children attend.

A child thrives best in a one-on-one situation, if that is not possible, there should be at least a high ratio of the number of caregivers to the number of children, so that each child can get some individual attention. Whatever the level of daycare you can find for your child, get in the habit of interacting with your child when you are together. Instead of trying to keep them quiet and “out of the way” while you cook, eat, keep house, and relax after work, involve the child in your activity as much as possible. Let dinner be ten minutes late if it means your baby’s brain is getting the stimulation it needs.

I know this all adds to the burden working parents already carry, but it is best to worry now and do something about it, than not to know and pay a high price for ignorance.

So hold your infant a lot, sing to your baby, listen to music and dance together, and read often to your child.

The Modern Man's Burden

This is my latest column, published in the La Jolla Village News on 03-Feb-11 and on the San Diego Jewish World website on 04-Feb-11.

When I talk of managing our frantic lives, I usually address women who work and have families. And I always say that they will have two constant companions the rest of their lives: guilt and exhaustion. Women admit to having frantic lives, going from one emergency to another, from one deadline to another, always catching up and never caught up.

Men, however, never admit to feeling frantic, instead, they go to time management seminars, which may help in getting better organized but skip over the feelings of being all too often out of control.

At home, today’s man has very different responsibilities than his father, who came home to a hot meal with children in pajamas ready for bed. He could relax with his newspaper in front of the radio, or later, the TV. Today’s husband comes home to a frantic wife who has also been gone all day, and he must help with the children, the meal, and the cleaning up. He is also in charge of fixing everything that’s broken, from toys to the washing machine. He is expected to perform as a plumber, carpenter, electrician, and an all-around handyman.

The new equality expected in the home takes away from leisure, and whereas it is well-established that women come home from work to more work, it is underestimated how much work is also expected of men at home. They don’t just mow the lawn and take out the garbage, which were their fathers’ sole responsibilities, they do everything else¾from changing diapers to bathing the children, from marketing to cooking.

There is more to do because we do more of it ourselves, not relying on outside help, which has become very expensive. We are also complicating our lives by owning too much, doing too much, and expecting too much from ourselves and one other. Old houses have small closets for a reason: people had fewer clothes, fewer appliances, fewer gadgets.

At work, men have multiple roles that create overload. They don’t just shout orders anymore, they must “communicate.” When I taught management skills, I suggested that bosses explain “the big picture” to subordinates, to make them feel more committed to the task at hand. I preached mentorship: be a coach to your staff, be a team player, share with colleagues within your department and outside of it as well. All this leads to information overload and anxiety. Performance now comprises both the bottom line and having the right attitude.

Taking on new roles, both at work and at home, reduces leisure time, time to relax, to recover, recuperate, regenerate. From early morning to late at night, men are performing. They are performing the traditional role of provider, even though many wives also provide, and they are to be the stalwart, strong, in-charge heroes of home and hearth, never admitting they’re exhausted, frantic, emotionally drained, and scared. Those are women’s prerogatives. So today’s frantic men, who cannot admit they’re frantic, need to take a look at their lives in a new light and admit when they’re feeling out of control at times, so that they can negotiate for themselves some semblance of harmony and peace.

Not easy if you have a two career couple and children; but doable if you are willing to lower your standards and live a somewhat simpler life. Personally, I don’t own anything that can’t go into the dishwasher or washing machine, or that needs ironing or polishing. When we went out for dinner, I ordered extra for take out so as not to have to cook the next meal. I invited friends for pizza on paper plates and wore a sweat suit. My mother would not have approved, but she did not have a frantic life. I did, and so did most of my friends.

It’s time to sit down together and see what can be eliminated, reduced, or where help can be found in order to simplify our lives. Sharing feelings helps, but is often hard for men to do. Take the time to talk with your spouse about the quality of your lives or the lack of it, about the need for leisure, for a couple’s time alone to decompress, time for quiet, time for love.

Constant overload puts pressure on the immune system. You owe it to yourself and each other to take some time out, some time off in order to silence the roar, to stop the guilt of the yet to be done. So, I conclude with my motto: “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.”

Outward Reflections of Our Identities

In reading the article “Is Pink Necessary?” by Annie Murphy Paul in the 23-January-2011 New York Times Book Review, I was struck by a question posed by the author: “Don’t our possessions reflect who we are…?”

If our possessions reflect who we are, I am an eclectic person. My “stuff” includes my grandparents’ photos as well as my grandchildrens’, with good art and junk side by side. A Gauguin sculpture sits next to a small wooden penguin picked up in Antarctica, the antique Russian box from my mother is next to the pretend glass of spilled wine on the coffee table—one of my favorite objects. So the fun and the serious, the irreverent and the religious fill my home and are indeed a reflection of who I am.

So I will stop complaining that I am a failed minimalist—I have not failed, for I have never really attempted it. I accept my clutter. Its meaning is now evident—I am a cluttered person full of everything in a wonderful jumble of adventures past and present and always ready to go where I haven’t yet been.

happy new year

my own new year's resolution is : " I wont improve this year. "

However this is my newest column incase you do want to improve.

http://www.sdnews.com/view/full_story/10905566/article-Doing-it-better--Change-comes-in-four-steps-?

New Posting

This is all possible because my grandson Eliot, who is a newspaper writer on a visit here from New York, has finally shown me how to use this blog. So now I will.

Check out my monthly articles and a poem here and there.

Check out my newest articles

For anyone interested in reading my bi-weekly columns in the La Jolla Village news, please click on this link for a full listing. (http://www.sdnews.com/pages/results_content?page_label=LJVN_home&widget=search_content&string=natasha+josefowitz&open=&)