My father-in-law doesn’t like how often I use the “L word”.  When he listens to me say “I love you” to my wife and kids, or when he receives cards, letters and email signed “Love, c”; he frowns, scowls, and often complains to me that, by using “love” so often, I’m contributing to a societal trend that seems to be robbing the word of all meaning.  As he has often explained, conversational “love” is becoming as meaningless as “Have a good day.”

When I think about my childhood, I can’t remember my own parents using the L-word very much, if at all.  I’m certain that I was loved, as were my 4 siblings, I just don’t remember it being talked about or mentioned.  And I don’t recall ever hearing my Dad tell my Mom “I love you” (nor my Mom telling my Dad).  Again, I’m certain they loved each other, I just don’t remember it being spoken.

I am the middle child of 5 kids and the product of of a substance abuse environment - Dad was a drunk (calling him an alcoholic seems to imply some attempt at recovery and, as far as I can tell, there was practically none).  I have a lot of the symptoms of “middle child syndrome“: craving attention, feeling that I’ll always be ignored, feeling that there is not enough love for me, feeling that life will always have me trying to catch up to my older brother (I want to be #1 and rarely feel I am).

I think my frequent use of “I love you” and all the other ways I try to use the L-word stem from a feeling that, in my early life, I didn’t hear it enough, and I feel some sort of internal deficit.  I give what I hope to get.  Also, as a Dad, I tell my kids as often as I can, in some measure to avoid being like my Dad, and because I adore my kids and want to be sure they know it.

What triggered this post is a terrifically written rant -“I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Jonathan Franzen - about his discomfort with, among other things, rude cell phone users and their all too frequent, too public, too loud I-love-yous.

My father-in-law and I have an uneasy truce about all this: he suffers hearing it, and occasionally reciprocates; I courteously listen to his complaint about it.  Meanwhile, I freely offer verbal love messages as often as I can.  And I encourage others to do the same.

OMG Thanksgiving is here already! Where did the year go? Here’s a short list of what I’m thankful for.

I’m thankful for:

• My beautiful and loving partner.
• My gorgeous, wise, brilliant daughter.
• My handsome, smart, funny, sensitive step-son.
• My beautiful, happy home.
• My Mom and our sweet relationship.
• My generous, loving in-laws.
• The opportunity to love people for my career.
• My friends and the sweet love they rain down on me.
• My great podcast guests, who teach me something new each week.
• Tim & Susan Bratton, founders of Personal Life Media, for their endless loving support.
• All my podcast and blog audience.
• My sponsors.
• My fellow Human Awareness Institute (HAI) facilitators - friends and colleagues and so much more.
• Janet Dale, COO of (HAI), holder of the light, the rock on which HAI stands.
• Stan Dale, my friend, mentor, teacher, surrogate father, who helped me open my heart, helped me dream my dream, then taught me how to have my dreams come true (I miss you every day).
• My country, land of opportunity.
• Every single day, every hour, every minute, every second…because every second I get a second chance to choose love.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

love

c

Recently I’ve been thinking about “men” and “men’s work”.  I had a great interview with Ken Solin about his book – The Key to the Men’s Room:  What Men Talk About When Women Aren’t Around.  Ken and I talked about men’s pride and pain, hopes and fears, failures and triumphs, in the service of learning how to be better men.

As I thought about Ken’s ideas on how men can support each other, I noticed how different my closeness to men is compared to my relationships with women.  When I have the rare crisis in my life the three top-of-my-list people I’m most likely to call are all women.  I have a half-a-dozen or more men that I consider close friends, but the conversations with them happen after I’ve talked it out with my “best” friends.

I think a lot of men are like me in this. What with our “father wound” and our “be-a-man training”, a lot of us guys have a life-long history of superficial associations with each other.   Maybe we played on teams together or were Boy Scouts together, but by the time adulthood arrives, a lot of men have learned to bring their deepest feelings to women.  It’s as if we men think that women can teach us to be better men – which is probably true, and also not really possible.  (I wonder how different it is for gay men?  And I can’t help but notice that even my gay friends often have closer friendships with women.)

Thinking about all this has me reaching out to my men friends a bit more, looking for some joyful male bonding.  And I’m appreciating the women in my life who help me be a better man and I’m appreciating the men in my life who help me be a better man.

1. Choose love.  Be love.  See love.
2. Forgive.
3. Free your heart from hatred.

4. Free your mind from worry.

5. Ask for what you want.

6. Love what you get.

7. Give freely.

8. Expect nothing.

9. Tell the truth.

10. Repeat steps 1 through 10 as desired.

I was a one-year-old in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools in Brown vs The Board of Education.  When I was 2 years old, in December of 1955 Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. The bus driver had her arrested.  After a 381 day boycott of public transportation, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public transportation was unconstitutional.

Just after my 4th birthday the “Little Rock Nine” required federal troops to escort them to high school.  I was almost 7 when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter.  The following year was the time of the “freedom riders“, student volunteers harassed and beaten for taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibited segregation in interstate travel facilities.

When I was ten, in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, 37-year-old Medgar Evers, was murdered outside his home, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) attending Sunday school were killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings, and JFK was gunned down in Dallas Texas.
I was twelve in 1965 when Malcolm X was murdered.  That was the year that we watched on television when Blacks begin a march to Montgomery in support of voting rights and were stopped at the Pettus Bridge by a police blockade. Fifty marchers were hospitalized after police used tear gas, whips, and clubs against them.

In 1968, when I was almost 15 years old, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis Tennessee and Bobby Kennedy was murdered in LA.  I grew up in a violent, racist, frightened nation, when Black Americans were routinely treated as less-than human.

Last night I cried listening to Barrack Hussein Obama’s acceptance speech.  While I know Obama’s election does not automatically end racism and bigotry in the US.  As Winston Churchill said in another context, “…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”  I am filled with hope.