This piece is about a bit of serendipity. Right after receiving a note from a fellow blogger offering free job materials for those who will donate even $5 to his wife’s “Walk for Cancer,” I found a comment on my Providence Journal article “At Last, Here’s How to Train Your Husband,” * from a breast cancer survivor. Here are the stories:
Job materials for those who help his wife: Career fitness coach Malcolm Munro is about living life productively and harmoniously. Malcolm has the most incredibly helpful books, videos, and tools imaginable. And in asking us to help his wife, he is giving us a present.
To learn more and see how you can help, please go to Malcom’s site Career Fitness Coach . Look the very left, you will see Help Cure Breast Cancer! In very tiny letters there is a link Please Sponsor a Survivor! DO IT and you will receive life skills tips from Malcolm that are invaluable.
Next a friend called to tell me about a comment from a professor complaining about sexism – so I went back and read all of the comments. This one struck me as one that should be shared. Written by the author of Boob, a Story of Sex, Cancer and Stupidity , here is what Karen de Balbian Vester had to say:
I was encouraged by this quote: “psychologist Helen Fisher… in a Today Show interview, said, ‘If you can train a pigeon, you can train a man.’
Having taken a dog obedience class wherein I learned it’s the pet-owners who are most in need of the behavior modification, I feel well-equipped to implement the positive reinforcement techniques I learned there, especially since they dovetail nicely with the mental modification work I’m doing on myself, derived from Emmet Fox’s Sermon on the Mount and Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, both of which maintain that if you focus on the positive the negative is less likely to occur.
And really, how important is all this minutia? As a breast cancer survivor, I learned from Lawrence LeShan’s book, Cancer as a Turning Point, that one thing cancer survivors have in common is an inability to accept life on life’s terms.
My husband is a kind, intelligent, talented man who has earned the lion’s share of the income since the birth of our daughter so if he wants to scar the kitchen counter by not using a cutting board, it’s his prerogative.
He does put the toilet seat down (something I’m always grateful for when I visit the home of a husband who doesn’t), and he cooks dinner and cleans the windows on occasion. He always remembers my birthday and anniversary and he never criticizes me.
Sadly, I’ve had to face my chauvinism and give up my expectation that every man should be able to do home and car repairs, but after twenty-four years of, on the whole, a happy, satisfying marriage, why am I focusing on the negative?
What I’ve discovered is that I often nag and carp the most when something is off with me, most often caused by a spiritual imbalance. This is corroborated by the old co-dependent chestnut that if you point the finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you. To read more on this, visit my blog at http://mysite.verizon.net/kdebv
On a day in which we saw another gloomy financial picture — these stories of survival and love are like the sun shining in a clear blue sky.
* At last, here’s how to train your husband, Sunday, January 3, 2009 and Rita Watson: World News.
Copyright 2009 Rita Watson