Tag Archives: family

Family and comfort food

Last night we made me mother’s Spanish rice. It’s a funny recipe to follow. It was given to me over the phone, more than 20 years ago. It is written on the back of a used envelope and it doesn’t have any measurements on it. It’s just a list of ingredients with a curly bracket to indicate which ingredients to cook on the stovetop first, before the rice is baked in a dish.

I’ve never made it exactly the same. This time my wife started it and I finished it, and it was only after I got it all in the baking dish that I realized that I forgot a key ingredient. Back into the stovetop it went to mix this ingredient in… it still tasted wonderful. My daughter loved it, and said it’s one of her favourite home cooked meals. I said the same to my mom at her age. It’s the quintessential comfort food for our family.

It’s funny how recipes get passed down; how families share food like traditions. My grandmother on my dad’s side is the best cook I’ve ever met, and she never used a measuring cup or spoon. Following her recipes was impossible. My mom would watch her and take notes, but could not master her dishes like granny. And granny’s repertoire was incredible. A Chinese decent Guyanese who married a Jew, she could make dishes from three distinct cultures, or fuse dishes and flavours with the expertise of an alchemist.

Everything she made was a favourite. I remember staying over with her once and she asked me in the morning if I wanted an omelette. I said ‘sure’ and she went to the kitchen to cook. 20 minutes later I heard her say in her thick West Indian accent, “Ehh-Ehh!” I asked what’s wrong and she said, “Ah, don’ have any eggs!” I had the stir-fried ingredients on toast and, despite the lack of eggs, it was one of the best omelettes I ever had!

It’s wonderful how we can be comforted by food, and how certain dishes can take us back to our childhood.

Walk with a friend

Yesterday after work I went for a walk with a buddy. It was damp and a little cold out, but I overdressed and was comfortably warm with a couple layers open/unzipped. I’ve always been someone more comfortable warm than cold, and believe that there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing for the weather.

One of the topics we discussed was that while on the outside everyone is coping and doing the best they can, the long game of dealing with Covid-19, which probably isn’t even half over, and the social effects of dealing with a pandemic are wearing people down. Pretending we are ok isn’t enough, when so many of us are struggling for such a long time.

I spoke to a firefighter recently and asked him what keeps him most busy at work right now. He said 3 things: Car accidents, overdoses, and suicides. Overdoses and suicides have gotten a lot worse since the pandemic started.

And we aren’t close to things getting better. Yesterday there were almost a half million (recorded) new cases of Covid.

I believe this was the worst one-day increase we’ve ever seen!

This is a depressing statistic that flies in the face of people who downplay the seriousness of the pandemic we are facing.

So things are not getting better, and people are struggling. What can we do?

First, take Vitamin D.

Next, check in with friends or family that might be really struggling. I saw this Facebook post from a friend today,

“Phone is always on, and coffee can easily be brewed. I’m doing a brother/sister check in. Especially this time of year. Showing support for one another…”

And one more thing I strongly suggest is getting outside with a friend. My walk yesterday was rejuvenating. My buddy and I talked openly and honestly about how we are doing, what we are struggling with, and what we just needed to vent about. But it didn’t feel like a rant. It was an opportunity to be honest about how we really feel right now. It was better than a phone call, although a phone call or video call can be good too. Meeting and doing something active was wonderful.

When I wrote “It’s just this” a few days ago I said,

We might have made these adjustments fairly quickly on the outside, but ‘this’ is still not normal, and so it’s draining, and requires more effort than usual. ‘This’ will take a bit more time to fully adjust to… We will get used to ‘this’ eventually, and when we do, we will find ways to thrive.

If we want to find ways to thrive, we need to first take care of ourselves. Go do something active with family or friends (within your bubble). Find reasons to be outside. Walk and talk. Connect with someone who you can be honest with about how you are really doing. Lean on those who can support you and let others lean on you if they need the same.

Digital bubble

Just a quick reminder that while our social circles are very small right now, we can still connect with others online. Make that phone call a video call. Make that video call a 3-way or 4-way conversation.

We need to be thoughtful about how many people we meet face to face with, but that doesn’t limit us from connecting with family and friends online.

Who haven’t you seen in a while that you miss? Well, you can still see them on a screen. You don’t have to tidy the house or add an extra cleaning to the bathroom, just pick up your laptop or phone and make a call. (Ok, maybe comb your hair first 😜.)

We live in an incredibly connected world and we can make distance and time zones disappear with the click of a few buttons. So, who are you missing right now? It’s time to open up your digital bubble!

Can you drive me home?

I don’t pretend to be a perfect dad, but let me tell you one thing that I do that I’m pretty sure I’ve got right. Whenever one of my kids asks me to pick them up at the end of the night, my default answer is always ‘yes’.

My oldest shared this with me one night when I picked her and three friends up from a club… We just dropped the 3rd one home and my oldest said about the kids me we dropped off second, “You know what she said to me before you picked us up? She said, ‘I think you dad actually likes dropping us home’.” We had a good chuckle.

Yes, I do.

I want to be asked. I want to know they are getting home safe. I want them to plan ahead and ask me. I want them to know that I’m the backup if things don’t go as planned.

The fact is if I’m part of the plan, I know the plan is good. I know they aren’t driving with a designated driver that still had drinks, or left the party early. I know that my kids will call me if they feel stuck, or uncomfortable, or decide to leave before the person driving.

And I want them to know that I’m not rolling my eyes, or judging them, or doing it begrudgingly. As they get older, they aren’t going to come to you for the big things if they don’t feel like they can come to you for smaller things… And playing chauffeur for them every now and then in their late teens and early 20’s isn’t half the work that being chauffeur to sports and dance and musical theatre and singing lessons were when they were younger.

“Hey Dad, can you drive me and a couple friends home at midnight tonight?”

“Of course.”

The best they can with what they’ve got.

I’m sure if I go looking, I’d find a similar post I’ve written before, but this idea is worth exploring (again) and it was inspired by Aaron Davis’ comment on yesterday’s Daily Ink.

I don’t remember where I first heard this, but it was decades ago, before I became an educator: “People do the best they can with the resources they have.”

This is such an empowering position to hold when dealing with an upset person. They are trying, they are doing their best, they are hurting and need compassion. This shifts the direction of the conversation, especially when your own buttons are pushed by the person or when they are showing their upset by going on the attack.

If you go into a conversation with an upset person believing they are only there to attack you, that leaves you only with a choice of being defensive or going on the attack yourself. If you go into the same conversation thinking this person is upset and doing the best they can, suddenly you can shift to helping them, even when their strategy isn’t ideal.

This isn’t always easy. Here is an example from a while back at another school: Student does something very inappropriate. Parents are invited in. Parent has heard the student’s ‘creative’ perspective on how they are not at fault. Parent comes in with metaphorical ‘guns-a-blazing’ to defend the kid.

Whether it’s a father or mother that comes in, I call this ‘mama bear’ behavior. Mama bears will do anything to protect their cubs. So, what’s the worst thing that you can do with an angry mama bear? Attack the cub in front of them.

The easy, but unhelpful reaction to hearing a parent defend a kid, who has fabricated a story to the parent about the innocence of their behaviour, is to call the kid out. The harder thing to do is to remember that the kid is scared and doing the best they can, and the parent is angry and doing the best they can. A counterpoint at this juncture can easily lead to an unhealthy argument. So, a softer approach is better.

It’s a matter of remembering that we want the same thing… to take care of a student who has in our eyes done wrong and in the parents eyes has been wronged. And so that parent is doing the best they can with the knowledge and resources they have.

This doesn’t mean that you let the kid off. It does mean that you can take an approach that is more aikido than karate, more deflective and less of a direct attack.

Without going into specifics, I talk about how more than one kid was involved in the situation. I talk about how intentions aren’t always known and that two people can see the same situation in different ways. I ask the parent to remember that the other kid has a parent too, and might ask what they would think of the situation if they were the parent of the other child (this is delicate and not something to do early on, only when the parent is less angry than when they came in to defend their cub).

It’s only when the parent can see another perspective that I then discuss their kid, and the approach is that ‘we both want the same thing’. Without saying it bluntly, the approach is asking ‘Do you want your kid acting this way?’ or more subtly, ‘Do you want your kid being perceived they way they are being perceived?’

In essence, it’s about giving the parent more information and resources than they arrived with, to deal with the situation better than an angry mama bear has defending a cub from danger. It’s about saying, ‘Your kid made a bad choice’, and separating their behaviour from their identity and the parent’s identity too. And then it’s about helping both of them get the strategies and resources they need to make the situation better.

It’s not easy. But when a mama bear sees that you want what’s best for their kid… and that’s really what you want even though the kid made a really bad choice… then the outcome becomes what you intended it to be. That same mama bear parent has, at times, even wanted to go harder on their kid than I do. If it comes to this point, they are still operating under the same pretence, they are doing the best they can with what they’ve got.

Time with friends

We are camping with friends.

Weather doesn’t matter. It has been raining for 2 days. So what!

Time with family and friends is wonderful. It shouldn’t take a camping trip to come to this realization. Tell your loved ones you love them. Tell your friends how much you value them.

Don’t take the people you value the most for granted.

Goodbyes are tough

No matter how long I visit with family, the goodbyes are hard to do. I don’t know if anyone handles them well?

I’m not one that shows my emotions externally much, and this isn’t because I’m holding anything in… I am introverted and I internalize a lot. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.

It’s so much easier these days to say goodbye, with instant contact available at any time, but there is something special about giving your parents a hug. Sitting with them. Laughing with them.

Every opportunity is a treasure.

Appreciating your family

Sometimes it’s easy to take advantage of the people that are closest to you; to leverage the fact that they are just ‘always there’. The very people that would do anything for you in a time of need are the same ones who you expect to be there without showing any gratitude.

Sometimes it is easy to get frustrated by your family; to roll your eyes and think ‘here we go again’, rather than seeing things from their perspective. The very people that most appreciate you for who you are do not always get treated as nicely as a stranger would be treated.

Sometimes it is easy to be triggered by your family; to be immediately upset by something they say or do, something that you would tolerate far more by someone unrelated.

There is the saying, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, think of the first word in the phrase: familiarity. It is the family, that you are in close association with, that you know best, that can lead to a loss of respect, or lead to disrespect, from close awareness of faults or repeated behaviours that you don’t like.

It only takes an absence of these people in your lives, through time, geography, or death, to help you recognize that your familiarity also breeds love, compassion, and appreciation for those that love you, and that you love. Familiarity breeds love. Familiarity breeds compassion. Familiarity breeds appreciation. Or at least is should.

Who in your family can you show gratitude for today? What’s stopping you?

Rest and relaxation

It has been a week of being on hyper alert. The Coronavirus, Covid-19, has spread globally, and the news virus has been equally as aggressive. I haven’t payed this much attention to the news in over a decade. So with this being day 1 of my 2-week March break, I gave myself a short time limit to read the news this morning and now I’m going into rest and relaxation mode.

I’m going to stop listening to my current audio book and pick a good fiction to listen to. I’m going to enjoy a walk with my family. I’m going to binge a bit on Netflix. I’m going to take an afternoon nap.

Tomorrow I’ll check in on the world again.

A lesson taught with dignity and respect

My grandfather, Leon Bernstein or ‘Papa B’ as he was known, was an amazing man. As I shared at his funeral:

Papa B. is a Giant!

Like many of you, I know this because he told me so.
Papa wasn’t boasting when he said this, he was just telling you the way it is. If you were to measure a man by the legacy he leaves behind Papa would come as big as they get. In this way he is still a giant and always will be.

Here is a lesson that he taught me, wrapped inside of another lesson. It speaks to his character, and to the kind of person I want to be, that I strive to be. It’s a lesson he taught me when I was about 14 years old.

It happened at a family gathering at our house, it was the weekend and both sets of grandparents and a few aunts and uncles were over. It wasn’t a special occasion, our family often connected without a specific reason. I specifically know that it wasn’t a special occasion because I went for a bike ride with a couple friends, and if it was a special occasion, like a birthday, I would have had to stay at the celebration.

When I finished my ride, just before dinner, I came home and I remember that I was going very fast. I reached my driveway and I didn’t slow down. I made the sharp turn on my neighbour’s shared driveway and kept my speed up as I headed to the garage. But at the speed I was going I couldn’t make the turn and I hit Papa B’s car. My handlebar scraped across the car door leaving a scratch longer than a ruler, over 12 inches or 30cm. Then I fell to the pavement and scraped me knee.

It wasn’t a bad scape but standing up I looked at the scrape on me knee and then the large scratch on my grandfather’s car and I started to cry. I went into the house crying and I told my story of riding up the driveway and hitting the car. I didn’t admit to going too fast.

A few adults came outside to look at the car. I still had tears in my eyes as we looked at the large scratch on the front passenger car door. There was a remark about how big it was and the tears flowed. My grandfather spoke up, “It’s all right boy, the important thing is you weren’t hurt. Your knee will heal and the scratch can be fixed. All good.”

And with that we all went inside, me hobbling with exaggeration behind everyone that came outside. I got a bandaid from my mom, and the scratch on the car wasn’t mentioned again that night. I had convinced myself when I scraped the car that I was going to get in big trouble, but my grandfather said it wasn’t important, what was important was that I was ok. It was ‘All good’.

A couple days later Papa B came over and he asked me to come outside. He took me by the hand, something only he could do to a 14 year old in a way that felt natural. Holding hands was something Papa B did with all his grandkids. We walked to the passenger side of the car and he pointed. “See that,” he said pointing to the scratch I had made. “The scratch is horizontal. You were going too fast. If you were going a safe speed, the scratch would have pointed down as the bike fell, but you turned too fast and this scratch tells me so. It’s ok, I know it was a mistake, but I wanted you to know that I know you were going too fast.”

That was it. We went inside and it was never mentioned again.

This has shaped the way I have spoken as a teacher to students in my class, and now as a principal to students in my office. Papa knew all along, but he didn’t want to share this in front of an audience. He waited and taught me a lesson with dignity and respect. It’s easy to be angry and heated and forget to be like this.

That isn’t to say that I always choose to deal with things this way. And sometimes it’s good for students to see you upset, or disappointed with some emotion. But my default is to strive to be like Papa B. To choose a moment that isn’t public. To be gentle and respectful, but also to face the issue rather than let it pass.

Students make mistakes. People make mistakes. I make mistakes. When I remember this story, I remember that how we react to a mistake can be as much of a lesson as the lesson the mistake has to offer. Others deserve the same respect that my Papa B gave to me.