Things to Learn from Others

I belong to a so-called "blended family." It's an interesting story. My mother died of a heart attack in December 1986. Her next youngest brother and his wife invited my dad over for dinner a lot and to family parties they were having just to keep him socially occupied, and help prevent loneliness from setting in so badly. He told me they had done the most of anyone for him after Mom's death.

Only ten months later Mom's brother, my uncle, died of lung cancer. So Dad started to take my aunt out to dinner and ask if she would like to go to family events together. He told me he merely wanted to reciprocate for her in her loss.

Well one thing led to another and several months later Dad told me he was going to give her a ring - on Valentine's Day, no less! They got married in June 1989. People ask me how long I've known my step-mother and I answer, "All my life."

Although I was already an adult and living away from home when my mother died and my dad remarried 2-1/2 years later, I still have a lot to do with my step-family because I visit as often as I can. I was checking out a little book called, Nurturing Your Blended Family, by Ralph Ranieri (Liguori Publications) and I came across a paragraph that I found applicable to anyone, whether in a blended family or not.

"I know a woman who never misses an opportunity to point out things for her kids to learn, even from negative experiences. If the children complain about a teacher, the mother says that maybe the teacher's baby was sick and she was worried. If a child is upset about his poor performance in a soccer game, she reminds him of what the great quarterback Charlie Ward said after a close loss to Notre Dame: "Nobody died." If a receptionist or store clerk is impatient with them, she says maybe the clerk's boss is giving her a hard time. She wants her children to know that people do not act in an impatient manner just because they are mean, and that disappointments have to be put into perspective. Understanding other people's emotions helps children understand their own. ...moving into a blended family, gives children ample opportunity to understand people's emotions - and consequently their own."

I think that final sentence has an incredible amount of wisdom in it. We can learn so much about our own emotions by pausing for a moment to consider what is really going on in another person's life with whom we are interacting.

So often I think we like to believe that we are king or queen, and that every waiter, clerk, other driver, etc. should bow to our commands. But we have to recall that all of us have bad days. Something didn't go right at work; we had a fight with a family member; we're feeling sick; we're running late - lots of things that affect our abilities to act our best. And so do other people.

What Ranieri is trying to remind us is that if we feel we are not being treated as we should be by someone else, chances are they having a bad day just like we do occasionally. We need to pause before we snap back at them. Maybe we even need to ask if something is wrong. Showing a little compassion or empathy for the person we are dealing with can have an incredibly positive impact on his or her life because you have shown that you care (at least a little) about them, and that you understand, or at least that you are trying to.

Such understanding can make all the difference in the world in someone else's life - and your own.