Internaf-News May 1999 Page 1Back to Index
SUPPORT by Joe Villa
One of Webster’s definitions of support is "to keep from fainting, yielding
or losing courage."
Last month I spoke about courage and the onset of physical barriers. This month I
would really like everyone to think about emotional barriers. These emotional barriers
some describe as "walls", "isolation" or "emotional loneliness
and/or abuse". I believe they are all put in to place for many different reasons. One
is for self-protection. The end result, though, often ends in self-destruction. In her
response to my inquire a friend wrote this:
" Like many others with a life-altering disease, I have the reaction of ‘
it's not fair!’ and am sometimes on the edge of depression. My family helps
tremendously in keeping my head on semi-straight (nothing is ever straight for
Ataxians!)."
Another had this to say:
"When you LIVE with a progressive degerative (degenerative) disease you deal with
loss continually. When I was newly diagnosed I found support groups very helpful. Not only
is peer information very enlightening, they eliminate the biggest problem -
isolation."
Another:
" I am 25, was diagnosed at 16 and was in a wheelchair by 21. I was angry, felt
stupid and useless and cut myself off from the world and waited to die. But I didn't die
and I got very bored and even more angry watching my friends move on with their lives,
getting exciting jobs and moving in with their boyfriends. I sat in my room and wished as
hard as I could for some miracle that would suddenly happen and make me
"normal". But guess what? Nothing happened."
It is the people who are closest to us who can feel them the most. And when these walls
are put into place, they are very hard to break down. Many times we try and succeed only
to put it them back in place shortly thereafter.
A friend wrote to me about her experience on the subject:-
"When I first found out about what was happening to me, that I had this incurable
disease, I closed up all of my feelings. I was so scared because the doctors told me that
I would just get worse… I had no idea what to say to anyone. How could they know what
I was feeling? My family especially felt the distance, but I just closed up further. I am
blessed to have a husband who loved me enough to overcome…(that wall). I don’t
know why he didn’t leave me. Over the next several years, I was hospitalized for
depression. Once I tried to take my life after coming home from the grocery store where I
lost my balance and dropped a jar of mayo. It splattered all over the floor up my leg and
on to the other jars on the shelf. The manager came over and told me if I ever came into
his store drunk again he would have me arrested. I spent a week in ICU. My husband took
the week off from work, dropped the kids at his mothers and did not leave my side. He fed
me and even helped bathe me. I thank God for putting him in my life. When I got out we
talked and talked. We set aside time each night after the kids were asleep, the TV went
off and we just sat and talked about anything. Sometimes it was a pity-party, other times
it was more uplifting and other times not about really anything at all…It took many
years for me to come to terms with my ataxia. I am now completely w/c dependent and at a
point that I cannot even wipe my butt after I go to the bathroom. However, because of the
love and support of my husband and family I can live with it."
If I may offer an example to reiterate what she said about walls and time, it took very
little time for the Berlin Wall to be built and many decades to be torn down. Emotional
walls as such can be built in a day and strengthened over time. And it takes time and
patience to break through them. Sometimes by removing one brick at a time. My friend has a
very supportive husband who helped her overcome those barriers. Unfortunately, I believe
she is a minority. From the posst I have seen on the subject, most are not blessed with
that kind of support.
Another had this to say:
"Its not that I didn’t love him, I just couldn’t deal with him. He never
talked to me about what he was going through. He kept telling me, that I wouldn’t
understand…What could I do? He closed off completely towards me…I was helpless
to stop him from drawing in on himself…"
Another said this: "Going through all of this with me was my husband who didn't
seem to accept that this was really happening. Had a hard time giving me the support I
needed."
I had a conversation with the wife of an ataxic some years ago. She felt hurt and
angry. Her kids were grown and she was a grandmother. It was not fair, because it was
their time to be the grandparents and they were young enough to enjoy their grandkids, but
he could not. Consequently neither could she, as she really wanted to. He held her back
from truly having fun and consequently, he closed up, most likely because of the guilt he
felt and also the hurt -- after all it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t run and play
or get down and wrestle with the grandkids.
These barriers or walls can happen even in the best of relationships, though. Many
times we are powerless to stop them from being built. So how do we overcome these walls?
It takes courage to do so, because always there are emotions involved. Guilt and hurt are
present and when these two extremely strong emotions are involved, pain will usually be
the result
Finally, my question to everyone is that if a "wall" is present, when we
offer support are we in for the long haul or do we faint under pressure, yield to the
emotional barriers or lose courage in the trials that await us?
Just a thought and may God bless y’all!
A Look At Mother's Day
by Thresia Eaton
The month of May is for mothers, when most flowers are in full bloom and the days
are warm and beautiful.
In my search on the history of Mother’s Day, I was surprised to find that it started
in ancient Greece in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. Then in the 1600’s,
England celebrated a day called "Mothering Sunday". During this time many of the
England’s poor worked as servants for the wealthy. On
Mothering Sunday the servants would have the day off and were encouraged to return home
and spend the day with their mothers. A special cake, called the mothering cake, was often
brought along to provide a festive touch.
As Christianity spread throughout Europe the celebration changed to honor the "Mother
Church" - spiritual power that gave them life and protected them from harm. Over time
the church festival blended with the Mothering Sunday celebration. People began honoring
their mothers as well as the church.
In the United States Mother's Day was first suggested in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe (who
wrote the words to the Battle hymn of the Republic) as a day dedicated to peace. Ms. Howe
would hold organized Mother's Day meetings in Boston, Massachusetts ever year.
In 1907 Ana Jarvis, from Philadelphia, began a campaign to establish a national Mother's
Day. Ms. Jarvis persuaded her mother's church in Grafton, West Virginia to celebrate
Mother's Day on the second anniversary of her mother's death, the 2nd Sunday of May. By
the next year Mother's Day was
also celebrated in Philadelphia.
Ms. Jarvis and her supporters began to write to ministers, businessman, and politicians in
their quest to establish a national Mother's Day. It was successful as by 1911 Mother's
Day was celebrated in almost every state. President Woodrow Wilson, in 1914, made the
official announcement proclaiming Mother's Day as a national holiday that was to be held
each year on the 2nd Sunday of May.
While many countries of the world celebrate their own Mother's Day at different times
throughout the year, there are some countries such as Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey,
Australia, and Belgium which also celebrate Mother's Day on the second Sunday of May.
Mother's Day is a little different than other holidays, because it is a day set aside to
express our love and gratitude for all the things that mothers do. A mother is a maker, a
mender, a moderator, and a teacher. A mother mends broken dishes and broken hearts, hurt
noses, hurt feelings, torn clothes, old baby dolls. She is moderator in times of verbal
war (especially with those siblings), minor skirmishes, in times of temper, in times of
hair-pulling. She teaches how to laugh and say our prayers. She can teach the love of
books and of music. There are countless blessings that mothers teach us.
Mother-love is a wonderful and precious thing for which we should daily give thanks to
God. Please remember your Mother always, even though you may not always agree on things.
Some important days in May, 1999
May 1
Beltane ---
In the Celtic tradition, the two greatest festivals of all are Bealtaineand
Samhain--the
beginning of
Summer and Winter. To the Celts, as to all pastural peoples, the year had two seasons, not
four;
subtler divisions concerned crop-raisers rather than cattle-raisers. Beltane, the
anglicized form,
corresponds to the modern Irish Gaelic word Bealtaine (pronounced 'b'yol-tinnuh',
approximately
rhyming with 'winner'), the name of the month of May, and to theScottish Gaelic word
Bealtuinn
(pronounced 'b'yol-ten', with the 'n' like 'ni' in 'onion'), meaning May Day.
The original meaning is 'Bel-fire'--the fire of the Celtic or proto-Celtic god variously
known as Bel,
Beli, Balar, Balor, or the latinized Belenus--names traceable back to the Middle Eastern
Baal,
which simply means 'Lord'. Some people have suggested that Bel is the British-Celtic
equivalent of
the Gaulish-Celtic Cernunnous; that may be true in the sense that both are the archetypal
male-principle deities, mates of the Great Mother, but we feel that the evidence points to
their
different aspects of that principle. Cernunnous is always represented as the Horned God;
he is
above all a nature deity, the god of animals, the Celtic Pan. (Herne The Hunter who haunts
Windsor Great Park with his Wild Hunt, is a later English Cernunnous, as his name
suggests.) He
is also sometimes seen as a chthonic (underworld) deity, the Celtic Pluto. Originally, the
Horned
God was doubtless the tribal totem animal, whose mating with the Great Mother would have
been
the key fertility ritual of the totemic period. (See Lethbridge's Witches; Investigating
an Ancient
Religion, pp. 25-27.)
Bel, on the other hand, was the 'Bright One', god of light and fire. He had the Sun-like
qualities
(classical writers equated him with Apollo) but he was not, strickly speaking, a Sun-god;
as we
have pointed out, the Celts were not solar oriented. No people who have worshipped the Sun
as a god would give it a feminine name--and grian (Irish and Scottish Gaelic for 'Sun') is
a femininenoun. It may seem a subtle difference, but a god-symbol is not always regarded
as the same thing as the god himself by his worshippers. Christians do not worship a lamb
or a dove, nor did ancient Egytians worship a baboon or a hawk; yet the first two are
symbols of Christ and The Holy Spirit, and the second two of Thoth and Horus. To some
people the Sun was a god, but not to the Celts with the feminine Sun, even though
Bel-Balor, Oghma, Lugh, and Llew had solar attributes. A traditional Scottish-Gaelic folk
prayer (see Kenneth Jackson's Celtic Miscellany, item 34) addresses the Sun as "happy
mother of the stars", rising "like a young queen in flower".
Symbolically, both the Cernunnous aspect and the Bel aspect can be seen as ways of
visualizing the
Great Father who impregnates the Great Mother. And these are the two themes which dominate
the May Eve/May Day festival throughout Celtish and British folklore: fertility and fire.
The Bel-fires were lit on the hilltops to celebrate the return of life and fertility to
the world. In the
Scottish Highlands as late as the 18th century, Robert Graves tells us (The White
Goddess,p. 416),
fire was kindled by drilling an oak-plank, "but only the kindling of the Beltane
need-fire, to which
miraculous virtue was ascribed...It originally culminated in the sacrifice of a man
representing the
Oak-god."(It is interesting that in Rome the Vestal Virgins, guardians of the sacred
fire, used to
throw manikins made of rushes in the River Tiber at the May full moon as symbolic human
sacrifices.)
...Beltane for ordinary people was a festival of unashamed human sexuality and fertility.
May
poles, nuts, and 'the gown of the green' were frank symbols of penis, testicles, and the
covering of
the woman by a man. Dancing around the May pole, hunting for nuts in the woods, 'greenwood
marriages' and staying up all night to watch the May sun rise, were unequivocal
activities, which is why the Puritans suppressed them with such pious horror. (Parliment
made May poles illegal in 1644, but the came back with the Restoration; in 1661 a 134-foot
May pole was set up in the Strand.)
Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Little John played a big part in May Day folklore; and many
people with surnames such as Hodson, Robinson, Jenkinson, Johnson and Godkin owe their
ancestry to some distant May Eve in the woods.
Beltane and Samhain are traditional 'Mischief Nights'--what Doreen Valiente has called
"the
in-between times, when the year is swinging on its hinges, the doors of the Other World
were open
and anything could happen."
May Day ----
The first day of May is a festival combining a welcome to Spring, courtship rites, dances
and games. Celebrating a flourishing of nature and fertility in humans and animals, the
festival is believed to have originated in the ancient Roman Floralia, beginning in 258
b.c., in honor of Flora (Greek, Chloris), the goddess of flowers and Spring. At that time,
flower dances and processions were common. With the Roman occupation, such celebrations
took hold in Britain and continental Europe.
In the Middle Ages, May Day became one of the merriest holidays in Britain. People went
into the woods after midnight to gather Spring flowers and hawthorn branches, returning at
dawn singing and dancing. The major events of the day were dances around the Maypole, the
selection of the fairest village maiden as Queen of the May, and rustic morris dances
featuring such characters as Robin Hood (whom local youths impersonated in dances and
dramatic performances) and Maid Marian, the hobbyhorse,and the fool. Cornucopia
It is the tradition on May eve for people to tear branches from the Hawthorn, to bedeck
the
gates and lintels of their homes. The Hawthorn (or Whitethorn) is the tree of hope,
pleasure
and protection. It is sacred to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld who came into the
sunlight for six months of the year, until winter.It is also dedicated to Flora, the
goddess of
the Roman May festival of Floralia. Hawthorn heralds the coming of summer when
hedgerows throughout the countryside are filled with its white blossom. The branches which
are used to adorn the house bring protection to your home and boundaries at a time of
boundary between the seasons. For good luck the hawthorn branches should be kept
outside the house. It is said that if you sit under a hawthorn in May the fairies may put
you
under their spell.
May 2
Mother’s Day - Spain
May 5
Cinco de Mayo --
Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Mexican victory over superior French forces by 5,000
untrained and outnumbered Mestizo and Zapotec Indian guerilla troops under General
Zargosa at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.
Although the French later occupied the town of Puebla and were not defeated and expelled
for several more years, the victory at Pueblafilled the people of Mexico with enthusiasm
for
their country, and played a role in the eventual success for the progressive reforms of
Benito Juarez. Moreover, Cinco de Mayo symbolizes the right of people everywhere to
self-determination, and of the ability of indigenous people to withstand an aggressive
andexpansive culture.
Today Cinco de Mayo is celebrated especially byMexicans in the United States as a time
to honor Hispanic culture. The holiday includesfestivals and parades, with singing,
mariachi
dancing, ethnic foods, and other revelry.
May 9
Mother’s Day, US & Can.
May 20
Mjollnir
Ascension -- occurs 40 days after Easter Sunday; it commemorates the ascension of Jesus
into heaven. Ascension, which falls 40 days after Easter, marks the completion
of the spring cycle of holy days.
Germanic festival of Mjollnir is the celebration of Thor's hammer. In medieval times, this
was considered to be a good day for ritual contests.
May 23
Pentacost
Whitsunday -- the 7th Sunday after Easter, the day when the Holy Spirit is reported as
having descended upon theApostles.
Rosalia
Rose Festival celebrated by the Romans.
May 24
The Mothers
Sacred day to the Mothers, three goddesses worshipped in Celtic countries as bringers of
prosperity and good harvest.
May 29
Oak Apple Day
Ambarvalia
Roman festival of purification. Involves walking around fields of growing crops to gain
the
favor for plants.
In England it became Oak Apple Day, commemorating the escape of Charles II from
Cromewell’s army by hiding in an oak tree. It is customary to wear oak leaves on this
day.
May 31
Memorial Day
Humor and Folklore by Martin
R. Burke
Seven signs you have nothing to do at work...
1.You've already read the entire Dilbert page-a-day calendar for 1999
2.You discover that staring at your cubicle wall long enough produces images of Elvis.
3.You've figured out a way to get Gilligan off the island.
4.You decide to see how many Mountain Dews you can drink before the inevitable explosion
occurs.
5.People come into your office only to borrow pencils from your ceiling..
7.You now require only a single can of cola to belch the names of all seven Dwarfs.
8.The 4th Division of Paperclips has overrun the Pushpin Infantry, and General White-Out
has called for reinforcements.
Bumper Stickers
Cover me. I'm changing lanes.
My kid can beat up your honor student
Support Search and Resue-GET LOST!
If you don't like the way I'm driving, you come and get these handcuffs off!
I'm out of Estrogen and I have a gun
If you're close enough to read this, I'm close enough to slam on my brakes and sue you!
Forget about world peace-visualize using your turn signal!
i souport publik edyoukashun.
Honk if you love peace and quiet
Jesus is coming-look busy!
Horn broken-watch for finger.
Bad Cop. No Doughnut.
I still miss my ex-wife, but my aim is improving!
Earth First! We'll stripmine the other planets later!
Born free. Taxed to death.
Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.
Be nice to your kids. They'll choose your nursing home.
A honeymoon couple is in the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The bride is concerned
"What if the place is still bugged?" The groom says "I'll look for a
bug". He looks behind the drapes, behind the pictures, under the rug "AHA!"
Under the rug was a disc with four screws. He gets his Swiss
army knife, unscrews the screws, throws them and the disc out the window. The next
morning, the hotel manager asks the newlyweds "How was your room?", "How
was the service?", "How was your stay at the Watergate Hotel?" The
groom says, "Why are you asking me all of these questions?" The hotel
manager says "Well, the room under you complained of the chandelier falling on
them!"
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