Serenity Prayer

Yesterday I got into a bit of a kerfuffle work-wise because I drafted a memo going to many of the Powers That Be at the office. I received a complaint from one of the cc’s that I had messed up her title and that of one of her underlings. Titles can be a touchy and confusing subject in the federal government, where there’s not much bandwith between the deputy assistant general counsel for underarm deodorant and the chief associate counsel for deodorant. Or some such. Anyway. I still can’t quite figure out what was wrong with my rendition of the title in question, which I copied straight from her signature line, but maybe it was her placement within the list of cc’s. I’ve gotten into hot water before for placing people in a cc list when they felt they should have been on the “to” line, and that was a highly delicate situation that required all my skill and diplomacy to manage. (“A grievous error has occurred…”)

Personally I don’t use my title in internal email communications and I think the whole thing is silly, but if that’s what you bring to the table, then that’s what is important to you. I try to accept people as they are, short of bigotry and cruelty.

My mom didn’t have any capacity for accepting people the way they are, and I think it made her very unhappy ultimately. She was always trying to change my father, my brother, and me and she would often tell me I needed to change things about Max or Sarah. You need to get Max to start driving. Wouldn’t it be easier for me to just accept him the way he is, Mom? Or I needed to go down to Gallaudet University and get an elite team of therapists to use sign language to communicate with Sarah. Mom, Sarah isn’t deaf, she’s nonverbal. She can hear and understand everything we say.

But despite my philosophy, I couldn’t accept my mother, not really. I kept trying to change her, to put her in time outs, to see if she would be nicer to my family. That wasn’t going to happen. She never did change. She got worse, actually, as she deteriorated mentally.

I’m coming up on the first anniversary of Sarah’s death in August and the second anniversary of my mom’s death in September. I think my mom spent the last thirty years of her life very unhappy, for many reasons. I really don’t want to be unhappy for the next thirty or however many years. I want to be able to accept this situation, to accept Sarah’s death, to grow, to find meaning and have more life left. That has to happen.