Author Archives: gettingoutalive

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About gettingoutalive

Brought up in one of "those" families - a challenge. Lucky enough to marry someone who inspired me to create a much-healthier family and have a life which helped me begin to love myself. From Texas to California to Wisconsin to Israel. From reliable, responsible child to rebellious teen to fearless young adult to grateful grandmother. Five beautiful, fascinating grown children. Fourteen amazing, enchanting grandchildren. From university teacher to researcher to couple counselor to political spokesperson to yoga instructor. Still married after all these years.

Bob Dylan…again

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I can still remember my oldest sister, Tamar, 9  years older than me, coming home from the University of Arizona talking about a new singer she’d seen in concert, Bob Dylan.

I remember her showing us the album cover.

I remember listening to the music.

I liked the words. I liked the sound of his voice.

It was so different from anything I’d ever heard before.

He couldn’t carry a tune.

I always felt different from everyone around me. I was Jewish in Texas…different. I was the Rabbi’s daughter…different. I had a crazy mother…different. I was willful and brash…different. When life kicked me around, I kicked back…different.

And there was Bob Dylan…a Jewish boy in Minnesota…singing off key with a gravelly voice and an in your face message to the world.

No wonder I liked his sound.

20 years later I had a bout of encephalitis. Mostly it was the headache from hell. But I also had tickets to see Bob Dylan in Jerusalem. No question. I was going. Headache or high water.

He was amazing. A grumpy old man. Pitted face. More pitted voice. No stage presence. No funny chatter between songs. No encore. Just a more gravelly, more off key voice with an in your face message.

My sister saw Joan Baez in concert a few years ago. She was old. She forgot some of the lyrics to one of her most popular songs in the middle. She yelled a politically incorrect epitaph at a heckler.

It’s 20 years since I last saw Bob Dylan in Jerusalem and I’ll be seeing him in Ramat Gan next month. He’s turning 70 this year. He  sings about love now. He sings about beyond the horizon. Still singing about the things most poignant in my life.

He’s changed and so have I.

But my oldest daughter saw him in Italy 5 years ago. Still grumpy. Still no stage presence. Still no encore.

A legend in his time.

Starting Out

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How many books and articles have we read about growing up in a dysfunctional family?

Parents who abused alcohol, drugs…us.  

Narcissistic parents. Negligent parents. Absent parents.

Over-protective parents. Over-indulgent parents. Overwhelmed parents.  

Confused parents. Abused parents. Amused parents.

It so often starts out badly for us in one way or another.

Somewhere on the spectrum of unhealthy, problematic, foreshadowing of complications to follow.

If our childhood were a movie, the background music would warn the audience of dark possibilities.

But in every book, every article, every home, each of us coped in our own way. Each of us took a different path. It twisted and wound its way through our childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. For many of us, the path went on to our own young parenthood. Our formative years shaped each of us differently. And with that we met all of life’s circumstances and made decisions which led to other circumstances…

and other decisions…

and on and on.

All interconnected. One step on the path to the next. One decision at one crossroad to the next.

They say that children raised in dysfunctional families fall into three categories:

One child made of glass. Fragile.

One child made of clay. Malleable.

One child made of steel. Tough.

I think they may be right…and wrong. The teenager or young adult may be that child when she leaves home but then her meandering path takes over. Where it leads may be out of fragility, out of malleability, out of toughness into limitless possibilities and permutations.

I was raised in a dysfunctional family. I was the child made of steel. At 58 the steel has become a crystal. With all the diversity of the fragility of glass, malleability of fractured light and toughness of tempered geometry. The beautiful diversity of the human condition.

Every day is a reflection of that diversity.