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Survival and Celebration at the Holidays
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The holidays are sneaking up on us more rapid than eagles their coursers they came.
Let's whistle and shout and call them by name:
Opportunities to Triumph Over the Drama called Family Dysfunction.
Holidays can be filled with cheer, generosity, creativity, love, laughter, and nostalgia.
But JUUUUST in case you experience ANY discomfort in the sphere of family, especially this year when views about the current political climate may have differed, here's the updated version of my tongue-in-cheek and yet possibly useful:
by Jill Badonsky
I used to regress as soon as I returned home and a family member simply gave me a funny look.
I used to think every year that THIS year will finally be the one where I don’t turn into a bowl of weepy cranberry sauce with a garnish of pitiful. But I'm a sensitive creative person and I needed more preparation.
Here are six creative survival tips gathered from extensive studies from the Muse is IN laboratory where empirical results were extracted from subjects all over the world.. or from my mind, um, I forget which.
 1. Pretend like you are spending the holiday with the family of a friend of yours. It can provide necessary distance and perhaps even seem entertaining. Or along the same lines, make-believe you are a film-maker shooting a documentary of a fascinating family or filming the sequel to August: Osage County.
Too hard to get your mind around that? How about being just 5% more detached from the drama? Going for 100% is usually unrealistic and you end up eating too much pecan pie instead. Try wearing a disguise: a director’s beret,one of those glasses with the big nose, or a turkey – if you do this you must keep a straight face.
2. Whenever a family member pushes one of, you know, those BUTTONS, saying that thing or behaving that way that drives you flippin' crazy, making you FORGET every gain you've paid for in therapy, have an automatic response ready. (see Suggested Responses)
Suggested Responses:
- Say to yourself, "Well, bless their heart!" (Southern accents are particularly helpful here.). This tends to neutralize any graceless reaction by putting you in a Mint Julep state of mind.
- Think to yourself, "My bodyguard will be here in a minute." Imagine being able to hand your troubles over to your bodyguard and pay no mind to the offending party cuz things will be taken care of. This will give you time to pull yourself together to go see a movie versus responding with something you'll later regret.
- If you can't avoid incoming verbal torment, brush it off your body as if it were cat hair, cookie crumbs, or gnats. (Use a lint roller for special effect and even consider waving it while the offending party is talking, as if catching the debri before it lands on your mild demeanor).
- While they are pushing your sensitive buttons stare just above their eyes in the middle of their forehead with a blank expression on your face. Stay in that position 15 minutes after they've finished.
- When they are speaking, DUCK down as if dodging their verbal fire as it flies over you, sparing you any reason to be anything other than Audrey Hepburn-like or if you are a male, Gary Grant-like although, I suppose this is something Ellen DeGeneres might do.
- Just talk at the same time they are talking but replace their words with ones you'd like to hear instead. Do this without hesitating EVERY TIME they speak, (even if they are speaking to someone else). Plan all the compliments you'd like to hear ahead of time and consider speaking with an English accent to really confuse them.
3. Know that you are blessed because it's all fodder for writing and those of us with challenging families  and ex-boyfriends are amazingly creative sometimes BECAUSE of that.
4. Spend the holidays with someone else or visit a friend in the hospital. Life is short. I'm taking myself out to dinner... well, I don't actually have any family...but I still might have one or two mild disagreements with myself if I decide to cook instead.
5. If any of these suggestions made you laugh or were otherwise helpful, just bring them to mind during trying moments and then remember the remarkable amount of blessings we have in this life, including our creative minds, the miracles of nature, art, music, shooting stars, friends, human resilience and pumpkin pie.
6. And if that doesn't work, just squirt whipped cream in your mouth straight from the can.
In gratitude and whipped cream,
jill
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Renegade Pear
Lots of activity in this collage,
wouldn't you say?
But not the kind of activity you might expect in a kitchen.
There's traffic dripping out of the faucet, a renegade pear liberating itself from a fruit bowl light fixture, triangular tea steam, a friendly snake with a good yoke, and other things open to interpretation.
The point is, even a common kitchen is filled with wily mysteries if you enter simmering with imagination. Making a collage like this is completely liberating from the limitations of dry logic and from being stuck in the family fruit bowl.
With collage we destroy and then reassemble with according to what makes sense to us. They heal and inspire.
It's a good time to get lost, temporarily, in the timeless flow of creativity and the invention of new worlds. Stay vigilant.
Jill Badonsky, M.Ed., is founder of the
Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching Certification Training, yoga teacher, inspirational humorist, and author/illustrator of The Awe-manac: A Daily Dose of Wonder, The Muse is In: An Owner's Manual to Your Creativity and The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard). She has been facilitating creative wellness since 1985. She's also a renegade pear. Email her and let her know if YOU'RE a renegade pear too.
Wow, thanks for reading this far. And thank you for being a subscriber. Happy Holidays, loves.
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy;
they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
~Marcel Proust
(c) 2014 all rights reserved, share with credit and all good things shall rain upon thy domicile
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