Category: Relationships

CREATE Mental Health Week – Making a Calendar for Orientation

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This is a guest post in the series CREATE Mental Health. All week we will be exploring how different people use creativity to create and maintain mental health. Today’s post is by Melony Bishop. Melony writes the blog, Stamping with Melony.  I love this idea – it blends creativity and function beautifully!  Welcome, Melony!

When my friend Faith recently approached me about creating a special stamping project, I couldn’t help but realize the additional cognitive benefits that were involved in this sweet hand-made gift.  Faith wanted to make a daily calendar for her aging father-in-law  to help him stay oriented to the date each day….  What a simple but powerful tool for this man and his caregivers!  A daily calendar hand-made by his beloved daughter-in-law!  What a fantastic way to “CREATE MENTAL HEALTH” in this man’s life!  (Maybe it’s the Occupational Therapist in me that couldn’t resist this purposeful creative calendar coupled with a cognitve component.)

After many hours, here is the fruit of this “labor of love” for Faith’s father-in-law!  🙂

Notice the details involved!  We designed and hand-made a central month page for each of the 12 months with a seasonal theme.  We then designed coordinating mattes for the days of the week and the date of the month for either side of the month.

Faith used the GoGo Boots Die Cut letters with the Big Shot to cut and adhere the names of each of the days of the week that can be rotated daily throughout the year.
She used the Simple Numbers Die Cuts to die cut each of the dates of the month to also rotate through each of the days of the months.  Both the days and dates were cut from Early Espresso Cardstock and adhered to 4×4 Whisper White squares using 2-way glue.

We hand-made little embellishments for all of the various holidays and special days throughout the year and adhered magnets to the backsides that will magnet onto the metal clips on the clipboard to designate those special days of the year.  :)  We stamped multiple different years as well for the center clip.

We used clear box cases to organize and keep all of the pages safe and handy for his caregiver to swap each day of the year.

Check out the rest of the months of the year that we created……..

A Good Friendship

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I spend a significant amount of time thinking about friendship and what makes it work. Perhaps it’s because I have had my heart broken by friends in the past – though I have been lucky enough to have some successful friendships too. Either way, friendships between girls/women can be tricky business. Some observations:

  • It’s OK to have short-term friendships. While we may think the “ideal” friendship is one that lasts for many years, there is something to be said for friendships that last for a shorter period of time. I’ve made friends with classmates, co-workers, neighbors who were in my life for only months or a couple of years at a time. Once that period of my life was over, so was the friendship. I have come to realize that that’s OK. It doesn’t mean the friendship was meaningless – it just served its purpose then faded.
  • Sex and the City is not real life. While most of us would love to have Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha as our friends – forever gossiping, traveling, and bonding together, the fact is, that rarely happens. More typically women have just one or two close friends (if they’re lucky) and often their close friends are not friends with each other. Expecting your life to be like Carrie Bradshaw’s just isn’t realistic for most of us (and really, would we want her life anyway?).
  • The “best friend” designation can be hurtful. If your tween and teen years were anything like mine, you spent a good deal of time negotiating who your BFF was. The thing is, I often see/hear adult women going through the same thing. And then once that BFF is found, a declaration is made to the world (or on Facebook). This might make the two in the friendship feel good, but it often hurts others. Is it necessary to claim one friend superior to all the others? What purpose does it really serve?
  • Someone who wants the best for you. One of my friends once told me that she had purged all of her friendships, and saved only those she could say this about:

“I only keep friends who I truly want to see happy and thriving, and who only want the best for me. I’m done with women who secretly want me to fail, mess up, or who harbor jealousies towards me. I’m through with “friends” who listen to my problems then blab.  The only women I want in my life are those who can be truly happy for me when I succeed and vice versa. ”

My friend’s pronouncement changed the way I think about friendships.  Watching her keep only the supportive, nurturing relationships in her life was liberating for her (and me!).

  • Breaking up is hard to do. When friendships between women or girls ends it hurts.  A lot.  We may not see this type of heartbreak in movies like we see the breakup of romances, but they still happen.  And they take time to get over.  It’s OK to feel pain, regret, guilt, etc over the breakup of a friendship.
  • Friendships take a long time to cultivate. Someone once told me it takes 3-5 years to make a good friend, or group of friends.  I didn’t believe it at the time, but I sure do now.  There might be exceptions to the rule, but in general it takes a lot longer to grow a friendship than we might think.  So go easy on yourself if you are new to a community or job and don’t have a good friend yet – be patient (and a good friend yourself) and you’ll get there.
  • It should feel good. It’s taken me many years to realize something relatively simple: friendship should feel good.  Sure there will be times when your heart aches for a friend who’s hurting, but for the most part, friends should make you feel good (and you should make them feel good, too).  Uplifted, energized, heard, accepted – these are some of the emotions you might feel after a lunch date with a friend.  If the feelings are different (jealous, frustrated, angry, low self esteem, etc) it might be time to re-think the friendship.

What have you learned about friendship over the years?  What did I miss?

photo via VitaminSea

 

Psychology and Space: Is Your House Affecting Your Mental Health?

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I love houses. I love talking about them, thinking about them, working on them, decorating them…they provide endless amounts of entertainment and challenge.  Usually I indulge my loves of houses in my free time.  But recently I have found myself doing more talking and thinking about houses and space in my work hours as well.  Specifically, can our homes affect our mental health?  Yes.  There are many, many ways your home can affect your mental health.  Think of these situations:

People who are home-less

People who live in un-safe areas

People who live in un-clean, cluttered, and/or un-sanitary homes (think: Hoarders)

People who live in homes they cannot afford

Today I am going to talk about another group of people whose mental health is being affected by their homes: People whose homes are too darn big.  How can this be a problem?  Aren’t all of us pining to get into a house with more square footage, more rooms, more SPACE!?!?  Maybe, but I am beginning to see that too much space can be a problem as well.

Think of a how a “typical” suburban family might spend their evening: Dad in the basement watching basketball, teenager in his/her room playing video games, tween in the living room watching the Disney Channel, and mom in her bedroom reading stories on-line about Robert Pattinson.  Am I the only one who sees a problem here?

I’m afraid our homes have gotten so big (and so wired) that we often miss out on time that could be spent as a family.  Remember the old days when there was only one TV in the house and we had to take turns choosing what we wanted to watch?  Remember when we actually watched shows as a family (think: Cosby Show) and then talked about the funny parts all week?  While having our own spaces is neat and cool, I wonder if it is the best thing for our mental health, and for the health of our families?  Will we one day wake up and realize we barely know the other people living under our roof?  I hope not.

So before you buy a bigger home, or spread out to all corners of your existing house, think about what you are doing.  Share a TV, a couch, a bowl of popcorn.  Play Monopoly, or spend time just talking.  Enjoy your large spaces, but remember to spend time in close quarters with the ones you love, too.

photo by: Simplyeleganthomedesigns.com

 

Budgeting for Your Marriage

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What’s in your family’s budget?

  • mortgage/rent
  • groceries
  • cell phone/internet
  • car payment

The important stuff, right?

As I was going through my own budget the other day I realized I was missing an important category.  One that is arguably more important than any of the others: a marriage maintenance budget.

We all know that keeping a marriage/partnership alive and healthy is tough work.  Many of us would also admit that we don’t prioritize our relationships in the way we should.  So I am proposing a solution: make marriage maintenance a line item in your budget. If we set aside money at the beginning of the each year or each month the effect would be two-fold.  One, it would prompt us to take actually spend quality time with our significant other (and not just say we know we should).  Two, it would keep the health of our marriage a top priority in our lives (at least as important as paying the mortgage/rent on time).

What could you do with the money in your marriage maintenance budget?

  • Go to a movie
  • Hire a babysitter
  • Buy tickets to a baseball game
  • Enroll in tennis lessons (together, of course)
  • Buy a steak for a romantic Tuesday night dinner after the kids are in bed

The possibilities are endless  – but will only happen if we plan ahead and make our most important relationships a priority when deciding how to spend our time and money.  Lawyers will assure you, spending a little extra maintaining your marriage each month is a whole lot cheaper than a divorce!