Family patterns, hot buttons and arrogance

  I am in the enviable position of being more excited about my future prospects and activities than I have ever been. I currently have 4 large projects on the go;  I kind of wish this had happened 10 or 15 years ago.  However, the opportunities just did not happen then. They are happening now.  My only recourse in this case is to work and be active for 10 or 15 years longer than most people expect to.  The downside is  I think  it has focused my attention totally on brain stuff to the detriment of some other areas in my life.

It is almost a joke, how busy and engaged I am in interests most people would just not have at age 60, and don't understand.  Actually, there are few people who even want to hear about it.  So I am posting it here along with my problem.

Yesterday I spent 3 hours with a friend and colleague putting her horses through their horsespaces to see which ones would work in an EAL program.  It was a lot of fun and encredibly soul renewing.  Back to my 10,000 hours with horses, like going back to my roots and to who I really am.

I am also re-writing the materials for the EAL certification program at Cartier farms.  It is a big project, for which they cannot possibly pay appropriately.  Part of my payment will be a free workshop in April on how to use horses in leadership programs.  It is also worth it to me since in the re-writing I am learning more about the EAL process.

The EAL education is also part of my Master's degree program.  I will be writing 25% of my Masters thesis on EAL and learning.  Right now I am working on a review of literature in the field of adult education.  I am finding this very interesting also, but it is a lot of work.  I want it to be done, but still have a lot to do. 

In March I will be facilitating 5 workshops for a software company that is marketing an emergency response program to oil and gas companies.  The first one is this week.  That means that I am studying the government regulations about emergency response, and also getting comfortable with the software and how it works.  I am feeling quite comfortable with the regulations and pretty good on the software.  I just have to go over the workshop materials and put that all together.  By tomorrow.

My husband and I are 40% of the organizing committee for the Honoured Guest Party.  This is the 96th year for this event in Raymond honouring the area's seniors.  We are planning for 400+ people, with a roast beef dinner, entertainment and special recognition for those over 90.  Last week I helped put up posters all over town and arranged for newpaper ads. This week we bought 'spring' plates, only a small part of the shopping that needs to be done.  We have already distributed invitations (abt 500) to the wards as part of organizing their responsibilities, and contacted other churches about what they want to do (not much). This project isn't really what I want to spend my time doing.  However, I try to do what I am asked, and we were asked to do this a whole year ago.

I am feeling so happy, enthusiastic and stimulated that I tend to forget some things I really know.  Like that there are members of my family who don't understand my conversational style.  Why is that important, you may say.  My style, which I have worked hard to understand, (and sometimes change) is one of making connections through commonalities.  That means that when you talk to me about something, I try to find things we have in common.  I forget that some other people just want to talk.  They are not interested in commonalities.  My oldest sister really got that, and we used to talk on the phone for hours about everything.  Lots of times she talked and I just listened.  But she was interested in what I had to say whenever that came up.  I really miss her.

My youngest daughter is a Rec Therapist.  She worked in an assisted living complex for seniors. Once she told me that people in their 80s and 90s just want to talk about their families - not their spouses or children, their parents and siblings.  Recently I watched two of my children in conflict and realized later that so much of what happened was about patterns, hurts and insults that happened 30 years ago.  We carry these things around with us for years, into our 80s and 90s.  I am certainly carrying mine.  The single defining thing that has influenced my life and probably my personality was the absolute certainty that I could never be good enough.  It was totally about my value as a person.

I have a sibling who thinks I am self-righteous and sanctimonious.  I really think this is about him because it is impossible to be self-righteous and sanctimonious when you carry around the certainty that nothing you can do will ever make you good enough.  I have another sibling who thinks I am arrogant and is certain that I think I am smarter than anyone else.  Her response is to put me down at every opportunity, and on occasion, to be ungracious and even rude, as she was recently. The effect of that on someone like me who fights the concept that nothing I can ever do will be good enough is not a happy one. It also leads me to the inevitable conclusion that she doesn't like me at all.  I am also certain that my hot buttons and hers seem to just trigger each other.  I know that I am not my best self when she is around, and she certainly isn't around me.

I have asked myself if I am actually arrogant.  These are the arguments I came up with against that point of view:

• none of my clse friends are 'educated.'  I don't care.  I enjoy them because they are smart, good-hearted and kind, in addition to being generally entertaining. Value has nothing to do with education.
• the more I learn, the more I know I don't know anything.  As a percentage of what there is to know, my information base is miniscule and I know it.
• I have never been any kind of social butterfly, the kind of person like my son David, or my grand-daughter Jill, that everyone remembers and hundreds of people 'know.'  No one would ever say I was the life of the party.  I have been painfully aware of this my whole life. It certainly does not lead to feeling  arrogant. I admire people that everyone wants to be with.  I am not one of those.
• I cannot play the piano in public.  I know it goes back to the feeling that nothing is good enough and I get so focused on that that I cannot play at all.  The connection between brain and hands becomes totally severed.  I gave up trying quite a few years ago.  This summer I played hymns in Sacrament meeting in a small branch in igh Level, but only after making it plain to everyone that I was poorly talented and they would have to accept my poor efforts as being the best they had at the time.   I admire people who can do it, I'm just not one of those. This contributes to great humility, not to arrogance. 
• I haven't done my visiting teaching and this month I don't want to. 
• I am re-writing the Cartier materials because I have a knack for making complex information simple.  In this case however, I will be making simple information simple rather than complex. Lots of people could do it.  I am doing it because of the rapport I have with the Program Director who is a high-power, alpha female (as you would say in the horse world).  She is also inactive because she doesn't have confidence to go to church alone in a new place.  She says it is a self-esteem issue.  I totally understand her. I think she has been treated like she is arrogant.
• When I moved to Calgary in 1966 I was quite miserable.  At a ward activity, I met a girl I had known in grade 1.  Some people would think she was a bit odd, but I liked her and it helped me to be less miserable to have a good time with someone I felt comfortable with.  Afterwards, her sister who was in my ward, told me that before she saw me with her sister, she had thought I was arrogant.  She thought I was arrogant because I didn't talk.  What does that word mean anyway?

ar-ro-gant:
    1.  having or displaying a sense of overbearing self-worth or self-importance
    2. marked by or arising from a feeling or assumption of one's superiority towards others. 

Maybe it is all in your perspective, but in my perspective, that's not me.

The question then becomes, when some one sees or feels that I am arrogant because I open my mouth (or don't), What to do?  One choice is to say we are both better off not seeing each other.  At the current time, this is my preference. Married people who do not bring out the best in each other end up in divorce.  "You can choose your friends but you can't choose your relatives."  Why try to build a relationship when there seems to be no advantages to me? It certainly is not making me happier.  That seems like a selfish point of view, and I guess it is, but in this case, there are no advantages to the other person either - back to: we are both better off.

The other choice is for me to try to never talk about anything, not my family, not my work, not any sharing of ideas, nothing.  Just a zippered up mouth.  That actually would work in terms of avoiding put downs and rudeness. I think the other person would be happy about it to.   However, I actually did already decide to do that, but then in my enthusiasm for whatever the topic was I forgot.  I always will. What kind of relationship is that anyway?

The only problem is the whole eternal families thing and my duty.  So I am at a real loss.