Grandma Henke

There are two things I learned in my first years of marriage that are worth passing on.  

The first I learned from a book called “Fascinating Womanhood” which I read in 1971,  just before I went to Hawaii to meet Lynn on leave from Vietnam.     There were parts of the book I didn’t go along with, but the part that really affected me was the fact that you can’t change other people, you can only change yourself.     Too many times people marry knowing there are things about the person they are marrying that are annoying … but they think once they are married they can make them change into who they want them to be.     The book pointed out the flaws in this concept and gave a simple but amazing formula that really does help improve other people’s behavior towards you … and that is that you change the focus to work on changing things about yourself that  affect the other person’s behavior towards you.   It works.   

Over the next forty years I have found this to be very true.    I tried to find this book online but the only thing I could find was a link to one from New Zealand.   I don’t know if it is the same one or not … but it seems to be very similar and is downloadable for free.    Like I said, there were parts of the book that I didn’t care for … but this one valuable lesson about not trying to change others to suit our purposes works well and helped me in both personal and professional relationships throughout my life.   If we think we need to change another person we have put ourselves in a position of judgement.    If we aren’t careful we can spend far to much time focusing on what people do wrong instead of working on the one person we can change … ourselves.     By the way, there was also a book called “Fascinating Manhood” … but the concept is the same in both.

The other lesson … Don’t compare yourself to others … or others to others.   You never know the whole story behind the scenes.

When I was in my thirties and went visiting teaching to a woman who I thought had it all together.   She had five little girls who were polite and quiet, and her house was always clean, always smelled good and she was always well groomed and smiling.   She was always on schedule and prepared.    One day I commented to her about how well she was organized and how happy she seemed and she said, “Do you want to see my cupboards?”    Then she showed me her linen closet and all of the towels and sheets were folded neatly, facing the same direction, and stacked according to colors.   Her spice cabinet was alphabetized and there was not a single dish out place in her cupboards.   Her laundry room didn’t have a single piece of clothing on the floor and the washer and dryer were as clean as the day they were new.    I don’t remember what her exact words were but the gist of it was that it was our duty to strive for that kind of perfection.    I went home feeling very inadequate and discouraged because with my five children I was far from that kind of housekeeper.   

I kept her in my head as a standard for a few years but for me it didn’t come naturally.   It made me grumpy and irritable to try to maintain a home like hers.   My husband doesn’t like everything orderly and planned, and my children were not quiet and  well behaved at home (thank goodness they were in public).   My first interest was in playing with the kids and I never did master the linen closet or spice cabinet … or laundry room … so I always felt guilty.   

One day my husband took me aside and told me straight out that the things he loved most about me had nothing to do with housekeeping and that I was making everyone miserable with my new found housekeeping standards.    He fell in love with me for who I was, not for who I wasn’t.   He pointed out that everyone sees and compares themselves to what everyone else does the best … what they allow us to see, not what really goes on behind their closed doors.     (He’s kind of smart that way.)         

An unfortunate sideline of the above story is that this couple got a divorce several years later so it was sadly apparent that things weren’t as perfect behind the scenes as I imagined  them to be.   It made quite an impact on me.