– Check the Pulse of Your Relationships –

First things first. It is very important that you know the basal metabolic rate (BMR) of your relationships.  I spent four years working in the Dept. of Emergency Services at a major New York City hospital center, and if it is only one thing that I learned from working in that environment, it was the importance of checking vital signs and being careful to keep them stable.  That is why the first thing that any medical facility will do when you present for treatment is to check your vital signs.  However, in order for them to know whether your vitals are weak or strong, they must have knowledge of the standard BMR.  If you enter the facility through the emergency department as a result of sustaining trauma, the first thing they sought to do is stabilize your vital signs.

Why are vital signs so important? Because they give the medical provider insight into the seriousness of the problem for which you are seeking treatment. Your pulse and blood pressure speak to the condition of your circulatory system; your temperature tells them the condition of your endocrine system, that is whether your body is fighting an infection or invasion of a foreign substance into the body – as indicated by the presence of high temperature (fever), or whether you are suffering from over exposure to cold – as indicated by a lower body temperature; your breathing sequence testifies to the condition of your respiratory system, and so on.  In short, when you know what the vital signs are in a stable patient, it is easy to identify problem areas in a patient who is not medically sound.  Any variable shift in the vital signs indicates a problem in the area affected by that shift, and gives the medical provider a point of encounter from which to implement treatment.  By that same token, knowing the BMR of your person to person relationships will indicate when trouble abounds, because the first indicator will more than likely be a variable shift in the vital signs – attitude, personality, demeanor.

For all intents and purposes this message is being written in plural form because sooner or later all interpersonal relationships will encounter areas of instability. However, knowing where to apply the first plan of intervention can increase the benefits of damage control and decrease the risk of sustaining further injury that might jeopardize the quality of your relationship.  In that regard, this message is being brought to you from my heart, because I have sustained much collateral damage in every area of my life where relationships are concerned.  However, I am writing it from the standpoint of my roles as a wife and a mother, wherein I have suffered most intensely, because I know how painstakingly hard it can be to pick up all the pieces of a broken heart.   I know what it means to invest yourself into a person’s life and then watch them slowly edge away from you until you turn around and what was no longer is. I know that when that happens, it is only a matter of time before you find yourself on one side of the reviewing stand, and they are on the other and there is a parade of conflict in the midst of you.

Please bear in mind that there is a variable range of safety on both sides of the balance beam. This variance is there to indicate subtle changes in the situation that tells you there is a forthcoming problem, but the danger is not imminent.  This is the time to implement corrective action.  It works exactly the same way in relationships.  You need to systematically monitor the vital signs of your relationships – husband/wife, mother/child, superior/subordinate, etc.  You’d be surprised how much you can learn from a tremor. It tells you that the real thing cannot be that far behind – much like thunder and lightening.  If you hear one, it’s only minutes before you see the other.

Please don’t wait until your relationship is running on empty to pull over and try to find a gas station. By then, it may be too late.   If you are not running on a full tank, you run the risk of running out of gas before the end of your journey.  Moreover, even if you don’t run out of gas, you will still not reach peak performance, because you will develop a level of insecurity that will slow you down and cause you to lag behind. It reminds me of a road trip we took to DC a few years ago.  As it were, my husband knew fully well before we left New York that his gas supply was low.  However, in the interest of “saving time,” he decided to “risk it.”  Sadly enough, that is one of his favorite phrases, and I cannot accurately tell you how many times that thought process have wrecked  havoc on this family.

Low fuel notwithstanding, our trip got on the way. However, less than half-way through the trip, as we were dashing down the New Jersey Turnpike, my husband started to get paranoid about running out of gas.  He kept pulling over the other driver who was with us and telling him that we we’re “running out of gas.”  During one such instance, the other driver said to him, “Are you on the red yet?”  He said, “No.”  So the other driver said, “Then you’re still good. You have nothing to worry about.”  Well that was easy for him to say, because he was not in our car with my husband.  Instead of increasing his speed, my husband slowed down to the pace of a snail climbing uphill through molasses, paying more attention to how much further we had until the next rest stop – rather than the distance we had left between us and DC.

Sometimes we monitor the gauge, but we are not in a position whereby we can do anything to implement corrective action. Much like my husband on the highway on a road trip from N.Y. to D.C. when he started running low on gas, which by the way he could have avoided, had he heed the first warning and stop for gas before getting on the freeway, or even the thru-traffic on the turnpike.

We continued the journey on a wing and a prayer, hoping for a miracle – much like the miracle of the oil that initiated the celebration of Chanukah – that would get us to the next filling station before our gas tank ran completely out of fuel.  I also have such a story of my own.

My husband has always chastised me against running on less than a half tank of gas. According to him, “I’m a man, so I can risk it, but I don’t want you, being a woman, stranded on the street corner.” (Such wise counsel; from a man who is always playing the fool.)   So, it stands to reason that I always fill up my tank before going out with the car.   However, on the date being immortalized herein, I had a three-quarter tank of fuel when I left home, so I opted not to stop and get gas because, after all, “we’re not going that far.”  Well, let’s just say that’s what I thought at the beginning of the journey, but circumstances proved otherwise.

When I left home, my intent was to “go and pick up my sister-in-law,” so that she could buy a dress for a gala affair that our church was having and we were all planning to attend. Our intent was “to run to Jerome Avenue and Gun Hill Road, and return home.”  Well, it wasn’t long before Murphy’s Law was implemented – and nothing went as planned. A friend of mine volunteered to come with us because she knew “exactly where to go to find the dress.”  When we didn’t find the dress on Jerome and Gun Hill, we opted to go to Central Park Avenue, in Yonkers, where “I know for sure that we could get a dress to her liking.”  However, through some fiendish twist of fate, we wound up going the wrong way, because instead of following Jerome to I-87 and exiting to CPA as planned, my friend took the service  road bordering Mosholu Pkwy all the way around the bend  to avoid the line of traffic leading us on a vehicular parade up Jerome Avenue, and instead of exiting to the Major Deegan Expwy, she got on the Sprain Brook Parkway.  When all was said and done, we found ourselves all the way to Hastings-on-the Hudson before my sister-in-law and I finally came to the awareness that “there is no way in hell  it should take that long to get from Gun Hill Road to CPA – no matter what highway we are on.”

As we continued our journey, Jev kept saying to me, “Mommy, remember you got to get gas. You’re running on half, and you know that daddy always tells you that you should not be running on less than half.”  In boldfaced confidence, I said to him, “Don’t worry, we’re getting off the highway at the next exit, which should be Tuckahoe Road, and once we get off, I’ll get gas.”  Well, we did get off at the next exit, which was indeed Tuckahoe Road.  Unfortunately, there was no street sign to indicate that it was, and so we went straight through the intersection to no-man’s land – onto a street that was going nowhere fast, following my friend, clinging closely to the edge of the winding road that had only two lanes – one coming and one going – paralleled by a never-ending cemetery on our side of the road and a tree-lined ridge on the other side – overlooking the main highway several feet below.

For as far as I could see, there was no way to turn around, and panic began to set in as one curve lead into another, and another. By this time, my friend was driving like she was running moonshine in the back hills of Georgia, because we had no idea where we were and we wanted to see some sign of civilization.  When we did finally come into a gas station, she made a rapid U-turn and repeated the process.  Me in my ignorance followed her, without stopping to fill up.  Twenty minutes later, I was watching the next gas station less than two blocks away, as my car spewed smoke from a three car collision that rendered my car immobile. My gas gauge rested very comfortably at a quarter tank.

When the dust finally settled, I discovered that at the moment of impact, we were less than one block from Tuckahoe Road, which was the next intersection, and two blocks from Central Park Avenue.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because sometimes you might think that you have everything under control, but when adverse circumstances intervene for which you are not adequately prepared to handle, you will fall victim to those circumstances – and what could have been a rescue operation now becomes a process of recovery and restoration at best…or a burial at worst.

Breaking up is easy, building up is what is hard to do – and sometimes it is even an impossible feat to accomplish. We witnessed that in grand scale on September 11, 2001, as what it took seven years to build was irreparably destroyed in a matter of hours.