Showing Tag: "life" (Show all posts)

Holidays with Family

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, January 2, 2012, In : Personal

I usually gain weight when I spend a holiday with family--and it's not just because. during the holidays, everyone eats too much and drinks too much. I turn to chocolate as my "comfort food," and so, I'm glad to return to my own routine of "normal" life with its exercise groups and swimming. Of course, the fact that I need to comfort myself with chocolate when visiting family is in itself revealing.

The other day my daughter-in-law turned on the music channel in her TV to a very loud degree. ...
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A Happy Family?

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, November 27, 2011, In : Personal

A family member emails that my writing is "crap" and that she will refuse to read my WTE feeds from now on. Since all along she has had the option of deleting my stuff unread, I stop to wonder over the urge to insult me. Name-calling is really a short-cut version of blaming. The speaker refuses to look at her own thoughts, feelings, and motivations and focuses instead on the "faults" of the other.

Relationships are a lot of work. We have to get ourselves to overcome--to forgive--not onl...

Empathy in Family and Beyond

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, June 27, 2011, In : Reading Life

When you’ve been touched by someone’s compassion or kindness, the experience stays with you, a soothing reminder in times of trouble. Experiencing empathy is especially important in childhood: we have yet to learn to reach out and thus depend on other people’s goodwill.

From my own childhood, two such people stand out in my memory. One was a teacher who never reprimanded me for arriving late—he seemed to sense that my home life was chaotic and that it was a feat just to get to sc...

Horse Boy and Other Life Stories

Posted by Edith Cook on Friday, June 3, 2011, In : Reading Life

When I grew up in postwar Germany, no animals existed in our home. For a short while, when I was eleven, we owned a dog, a nervous, yippy little fellow who was soon gone. My parents claimed he developed rabies and they got someone to kill him. I never believed the rabies story. A few years earlier, soon after my dad's return as prisoner of war from Soviet Russia, my mother raised a few geese, partly for canning the meat, partly for immediate consumption. She nailed their webbed feet onto post...