“It was a DIS-ASSSSS-ter,” the lady in the elevator comments through her cell phone to the anonymous person on the other end. “Just a disassssster. I’ll tell you more when I get home.”
Hmm. I sarcastically wonder if her situation is really a “DIS-ASSSS-ter or if she has bought into the OMG-everything-is-wrong-if-it’s-not-100-percent-the-way-I want-it phenomenon, a phenomenon where modern culture dramatizes inconveniences into disasters and has managed to make its way into my house.
“Oh my God, what do you mean the washer and dryer are not available tonight?”
“That means I now have no pants to wear, Mom! No pants!”
And my favorite, OMG moment, “Mom, there is nothing to eat in this house. When are you going shopping? I mean, there is nothing here!” my daughter says as the glare of the full fridge lights her face.
My response: “Do you mean there is nothing in a plastic bag made on an assembly line to eat in this house? Well, if so, by golly you’re right.” Usually, at this point they mumble something like, “Fine, I’ll just starve.”
“Hey, before you walk away, mind if I show you something?” I say.
On a good day, together we will cobble together a few things they can actually consume to curb the hangriness and reset the conversation. But most days – apparently, they do indeed simply starve to death.
I imagine finding them on the floor of their room, writhing in pain. I drop to my knees and frantically administer life-saving mouth to mouth resuscitation before whipping out vials of fruit and veggies juice. Amazingly, they live again.
There was a time when our 13-year-old, flush with Christmas money, started ordering chips from Uber eats. I can imagine her thinking something like, “OMG…I need Takis, and we don’t have any. Disastrous!”
It took me finding a random, oversized 7-Eleven bag combined with said child’s orange fingers to figure out what was happening.
These are first-world catastrophes played out in real life.
So, what is happening?
Like cookies tracking our every digital move, our brains find adrenalin in dramatic situations that used to be just life. We like that feeling and so we create more. Then we need a solution, an immediate solution to reduce the pain. In this case, hunger that can only be relieved by a bag of reddish-orange endorphin-releasing Takis from 7-Eleven.
Seriously though, there are reactions to real challenges.
Once I called my dad to ask about a doctor’s appointment he had.
“Well, they found some cancer on the top of my head,” he calmly shared.
“What?” I exclaimed. My mind started raced to the worse place. “Do you go back tomorrow? Like, when can you get this off, see what it is, know the next steps?”
“I’m not sure, dear. I’ve got a bunch of things going on – choir, teaching Sunday school at church this weekend, dinner here at the house with our friends on Thursday. I’ll call sometime next week to make an appointment.”
I hung up the phone, truly flummoxed. My dad was diagnosed with skin cancer and his response wasn’t, “I’m going to die.” It was, “I’ll get to it soon.”
Sickness, blown tires, roof leaks, job losses – these are all things that are important and must get taken care of, but they don’t have to set off all of our senses to create a catastrophic mindset. Disappointment? Yes. Inconvenience? Yes. Disaster? No.
Do we have to face real catastrophe to recognize that our life’s inconveniences are just that? That re-wearing a pair of uniform pants to school doesn’t mean you smell like Charlie Brown’s friend Pigpen?
The answer to dis-ASSSSS-ter is to train our brains to seek out hope, respite, and positive outcomes. As parents, we need to demonstrate this at home and recognize it if we have a proclivity toward the negative instead of positive in coping with life’s ups and downs.
Lest you think I have figured this out, think again. Thanks to the fine art of home ownership, I have learned over the years that I have become an absolute expert at finding every possible thing that’s wrong with our house. While we have filled every nook and corner – it’s a 1940’s original with a million little add-ons and fixes that make the house an aging maze – and she’s been good to us.
Over the years, I have become like an x-ray machine scanning for problems. And I find them. I find and find and find. There is endless scanning. I can’t help it. I find the next problem so, in theory, I can get ahead of it, which has created what feels like an untenable list of problems. I’ve trained my brain to keep scanning, because I know there’s a problem here somewhere. This makes my husband go crazy and makes me feel like we can never get ahead.
The great news is that thanks to our maker’s brilliant design, our brain pathways have plasticity to re-wire our neurological pathways allowing us to identify and change negative thought patterns. With some practice and self-control, we can relearn how to see our surroundings, so everything isn’t a dis-ASSSSS-ter. It’s just life.
When I catch myself scanning the house these days, I stop. I tell myself something I like about my space. Then I try to move on. Unless the house is falling down, it’s okay. We’ll do what we can, when we can.
To the lady in the elevator, I do hope everything is really okay.
To my dad who showed me that even the bad news doesn’t have to be a disaster, thank you. That was a great life lesson.
So, the next time a "little d" disaster strikes – no pants, an empty snack drawer, another home repair – I’ll pause, breathe, and ask, is this really a disaster or just life happening?
When wearing her work hat, Lisa Mozloom is a media and presentation training coach and PR practitioner at The M Network, but at home she is a woman passionate about raising three teens and loving her husband.
(Lisa Mozloom)
Lisa Mozloom