technology

Failing At Life

/ legreene515 / 2 Comments

Last year, Hubs and I went on a vacation to Mexico. We try to do vacations on our own at least once a year. I’m a travel fiend, and I also think it’s good for a marriage to have time to reconnect with each other without children being present.

We drove to a Cenote one day to rappel into (scariest but most amazing day of my life), and on the way back to the resort we drove through some small Mexican villages.

Descending into the Cenote

Our tour guide said, “I know you look at this and see poverty. I know you look at this and feel sorry for these people. Please don’t. This is the way they live. They have a simple way of life, and they are happy. They have everything they need: food, shelter, water, and love.” In essence, those people who look to us like they have nothing actually have their priorities straight.

We have gotten a lot of things wrong in the United States over the last few decades. We have also gotten a lot of things right. I love our country but sometimes I think we tend to focus on the unimportant things. To feel fulfilled and nurtured, we need social connection.

Lately, I feel like I’ve been failing at life. But, honestly, I think it’s our way of life that is failing me. It’s not meeting my needs. It’s making me feel far away from people. It’s literally making me lonely. I think we all need to step back and take a good, hard look at our lives and realize what’s really important in the end: love and family. Because we shouldn’t only feel connected to one another on vacation.

iPhones were invented as a way to help people connect socially, but they achieved the exact opposite. Now, we use our iPhones to shut one another out. How many people do you see every day walking around staring at a screen instead of what’s around them? I do this too. I come home from work every day, and my children are glued to their screens. We make them put them down for dinner, and lately, only because I needed and wanted a change in our family dynamic I’ve been doing other things with them at night to show them my love. Children thrive off of attention. When they don’t get it, they turn to electronics thinking it will feed their deep biological need for love and nurturing BUT IT DOESN’T!  Our families feel further apart than ever as we partake in technology, loving our electronics more than the living breathing people who should feel like they are the most important part of our lives.

And schedules. Work has become the driving force of America. That’s what happens in a capitalist economy where everything revolves around how many THINGS one person can buy. No thing will make you happy. People, with their cellphones, can now be reached 24 hours a day. They don’t know how to put their work away and truly relax. They are always available. This creates needless stress to them and to their families. Because while they might be available to work they are not emotionally available at home. It’s very hard to maintain a true presence while having one foot in the work-world and one foot in the domestic-world. Neither gets your full attention. Mistakes are made at work, and at home families suffer from lack of enough quality time with one another.

Parents, including me, over-schedule their kids and run ourselves ragged trying to get them everywhere, even as they juggle a job and their own social life.

Yesterday, I took Darling Daughter to OT at 2 PM (feeling bad I was missing work–trapped between two worlds that demand so much of me), came home for about an hour, did homework with the kids, took Son Number One to tutoring, and then met Hubby at the soccer field to pick up Son Number Two and Darling Daughter so we could eat and see a friend play. I didn’t get home until 9 PM, and by that time I was so riled up that I’d made myself angry. I shouted at my Hubby because I over-scheduled my day and felt worn ragged.

I wonder what kind of effect our always-on-the-go-no-down-time lifestyle is having on our kids. There’s no time to sit and reflect on life. Kids are bored without electronics. They need to be constantly entertained and so many of them don’t know how to have a real-life conversation unless they’re doing it through FaceTime. It’s no wonder people feel isolated and alone. It’s no wonder mental illness is on the rise.

We can learn something from that small Mexican village. What’s most important in life is meeting basic needs and LOVE. We are social creatures, and we thrive off of interaction with each other. Babies have failure to thrive if they are not treated with love, touched, hugged, and cared for. Why is it so hard for us to understand this lesson and bring it into our Western way of life?

Lauren and Hubs Ek Balam

Hubs and me at Ek Balam

When was the last time you stopped and enjoyed the little things? When was the last time you looked up from your phone to experience a moment of awe (the sun rising, the moon glowing, the waves crashing on the beach?)? When was the last time you sat down with your family, put away all the electronics, and really enjoyed one another? 

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The End Of A Play Date

/ legreene515 / Leave a comment

In my alternate life, about 10 years ago, I stayed at home with my oldest child. I look back on those days fondly. I don’t know if that’s with rose-colored glasses or not. I had a good friend, D, and we used to get together for play dates with our boys. We’d take the babies over to her house, or my house, or our other friend’s house. We’d make coffee (that’s when my addiction to coffee took hold) and muffins, talk, and let the kids play.

I loved those moments to reflect on parenthood with my friends. We could bounce ideas off each other, commiserate about parenting issues, laugh, love, and learn. Later, my husband and I moved away. I got a full time job, and I added two kids to the crew. And the play dates stopped.

I’ve had friends, and my kids have made friends. But somewhere along the way play dates ceased to exist. I wonder if this is because I work on the weekdays and somewhere people are still hosting coffee dates with their friends while their toddlers play. But I’ve also noticed that less and less people call up to have their child play with mine. I wonder why. Is it the way I’m raising my kid? Am I just nostalgic for a world that doesn’t exist in this technology-craved world we live in? Or is it because people are too caught up in their own lives to make room for friends?

I think that playing with companions, having a bunch of kids over at your house, and encouraging your children to socialize lets them become better leaders, communicators, you-name-it. They learn how to solve problems and how to listen to one another. If our kids don’t have that anymore, then where are they getting it from? The internet–probably not. I know kids, especially the teenage variety, socialize over the phone, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same for the moms either. We are all much too obsessed with the world of our phone to communicate effectively with each other at this point.

We have our friends at our fingertips, right? But when was the last time, you went out and really enjoyed someone’s company without looking at your phone? When did you go sit at a friend’s house and commiserate about how you’re screwing up your children? Don’t take these types of friendships for granted, because there is something to be gained from having someone who is battling the same storm at the same time as you.

I don’t have very many close friends. I can’t for the life of me figure out why. I’m generally a pretty happy person. I smile and make conversation. I have a hard time saying no. I might come on too strong sometimes. I’m a thinker, and I guess sometimes, I’ve been told, this can be intimidating to other people. I’m not a huge fan of small talk. I tend to make friends with men, because men tend to let the self-conscious go and just be real.  This is somewhat socially unacceptable, especially in the South. People still seem to think along the lines of When Harry Met Sally that a male and a female cannot just be friends. I get it. Sometimes one or both of the people in the male/female friendship develop feelings, but this isn’t always the case. Let’s be honest: adults can be adults and keep their belts buckled, right? It’s called willpower, folks. I think male friendships can offer something that female friendships never can–an understanding of the opposite sex. And so I think that having both female and male friends is important.

I grew up with two sisters though, and so I feel as if I’m sorely missing out on the days when I had a good female friend. I think about D and how are friendship wasn’t competitive. How we loved our kids, and we cared about one another, and that was enough. We had very little expectations of one another, but we were always there for each other when we needed to be. And I wonder where I went wrong from there. Maybe it’s where I live, which seems to be full of cliques. Maybe it’s that I neglected my friendships because I made specific choices not surrounding them. Perhaps I didn’t try as much, because I didn’t always realize how important friendships could be. Who knows, but I know what I’m missing and that makes me sad. I also know that there are a lot of women in my life I’d like to have a closer friendship with, and I hope to focus on making that happen in the next year.

Last night, I lay in bed trying to fall asleep. My mind has been churning lately, hence the uptick in blog posts and hopefully a finished novel before my life ends. I thought about D and how much I enjoyed our friendship. I thought about my friend T with love and how we enjoyed a part of our life together. And then I thought about how I don’t have a close friend to reach out to right now. I have church friends. I have PTA mom friends. I have co-workers who I love and enjoy. But I don’t have someone who I can call up and say, “Hey, what don’t you come over on Saturday, have a cup of coffee with me, and we can shoot the shit.” I don’t even care at this point if that person sees my house dirty (by the way, it is always dirty, so that person if she exists will see my house dirty). I don’t even care if they see me ugly cry some times. Because that’s what friends are for–to support one another.

I think it’s time we all put the phone down for a second and meet up in real life. We need to bring back the play dates. Not only will this help our kids socially, but it will help the moms and dads too. Our community, in the U.S., if not worldwide has become individualized to a fault. But children need other children and adults need friends, besides their spouse, who they can turn to in times of need. Humans, after all, are a social species. We literally need one another.

Instead of the end of the play date, maybe we can begin again.

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Ode to Technology

/ legreene515 / 2 Comments

Oh technology, how I love thee.
How I hate thee.
Let me count the ways.
 

You probably noticed this site changed. I thought, mistakenly, that if I changed the theme I might have access to the “add plugin” button on my dashboard. This is not the case, and it will never be the case.

Stupid me should have read a little bit more about web-hosting before I made my website. Apparently if you have a wordpress.org site hosted by someone like Bluehost then you can add a plugin. But if you are using a site hosted by wordpress.com then you can’t (you can only use the plug-ins they allow). I wasted money buying a domain name, and at some point in the future will have to move this site. Not now. I like this site, and I have too many irons in the fire (cliché) to go all willy nilly and work on exporting my site to a new one. I may never change it. It depends on how motivated I am.

The only reason I wanted to change it in the first place was to be able to place a mailchimp sign-up form on the site. I’d like you all to be able to sign up for my newsletter, so here’s how you can do it.

Click this link to signup for my newsletter The Greene Pen: http://eepurl.com/bo4ILP

Also, I’ll be simultaneously posting my blogs to my blogspot site:http://www.lululandadventures.blogspot.com.   I have abandoned this blog recently (so sad), but I figured if I just posted the same blog there then maybe I could get more readership since it post to Google too. And, oh yeah, I can embed the mailchimp blog on their site, unlike with WordPress.

So technology, I hate you for being so complicating. I love you for letting me spread the word about my newsletter and my new book, The Devil Within, due to come out June 22ndish.

And speaking of The Devil Within…Guess what Friday is? It’s cover reveal day!  Join me and a dozen of my friends as I show you the amazing cover Greg Simanson made for my book!

Peace out. Tell me your preference in the comments below: Do you like this theme called Apostrophe or should I go back to the previous theme, Hemingway?