Susan let’s make a pact to no longer be disgusted with ourselves. We won’t let it happen again, but if being a limerent is the most foolish thing about us, it’s not so bad. There are far worse things! 🙂

I am thinking I might start asking people to call me Tereza as well. 😉

“Rationing wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. For a lot of people, they ate better after rationing than they did before the war started.”

Invoking the two cup rule…

He seemed very savvy and could read his audience from the questions they asked. A few of the memorable things he said.

– Rationing was as bad as it was made out to be. For a lot of people, they ate better after rationing than they did before the war started.

– The British government did a masterful job of engaging the population. Everybody did something. His father drove the bus that took workers to/from the local Spitfire assembly plant. He got called up. Somebody called the British Army and told them that for every day his father didn’t drive the bus, Spitfires weren’t being delivered to the RAF that day. The British Army decided 5-10 Spitfires/day was probably worth more to the war effort than a 35yr old bus driver and mustered his father out by noon the same day. He was back driving the bus the next day. His mother sewed canvas bags to keep rationing books dry. He showed us one.

– In 6 years of war, he missed 5 days of school. When bombing debris blocked the road, the bus stopped, the kids climbed over the rubble and walked the rest of the way. After school, they walked back, climbed over the rubble and the bus was waiting for them. His teacher was a teacher by day and an Air Raid Warden by night. The Germans kept him busy at night and he would sometimes fall asleep in class. The gentleman had a picture of his teacher asleep at his desk. He said that when that happened, one of the kids would pick up the book and carry on.

– Prior to the war, unemployment was high and rickets were endemic in Britain. He said a year later both had disappeared.

– The most memorable thing he said was, “The war was a terrible, terrible thing. But, for many people, like my family, it was the best thing that ever happened to them.”

I hope the IWM recorded his talks.

Agree DrL, I noticed the same, that she considered herself lucky and then goes on to tell her story that one could totally twist around and say that bad things happen to you etc…
Besides that limerence mess I am in I am actually a person that looks at life pretty positively.

I absolutely love what you said about limerence lessons – don’t be mired in sadness over the wasted time! That spoke right to me with where I am on my journey right now. I’m pretty disgusted with myself over that exact thing and hopefully can learn to one day appreciate a bit of the “sweetness” without letting it become “rumination” (just kind of angry about it for now).
Also trying to keep front and center the truth that my LO was, and could only ever be, temporary and my REAL friends and family deserve my FULL heart, which unfortunately they have not had for quite some time. Working on fixing all of that now. 🙂
Appreciate everyone’s thoughts and insight more than I can say!

The thing that really struck me on the second watch was when Tereza (her first name is Amelia, but she says “Tereza” so stylishly I’m sticking with that) says at the beginning, “I’ve always been very lucky.”

And then tells her story of living with her grandparents because her father was a POW, losing her twins at a young age, and outliving her husband and daughter.

The fact that she sees her life as lucky because of all the positive things that happened speaks volumes.

It’s one of those lessons that seems (superficially) so obvious and banal, and yet I kind of have to keep reminding myself of it. Not in the sense that I have to work at loving my friends and family (!), just that the “urgent” concerns seem so dominant in the moment that they crowd out time with family, when they are actually so trivial.