You Love Cockroaches! But Keep It To Yourself.

This is an allegorical tale, of course. Something that really happened to me (and others), but which illustrates something we’re all doing—and seeing it this way can help you have much better relationships.

Like all the best tales, this may ramble a bit. Feel free to refresh your beverage before you settle in to enjoy. I’ll wait.
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Let’s start this tale in Singapore. No, wait. Montréal. Friendly and youthful, a Swiss university pal and I met a couple of Singaporean businessmen on a Montréal bus tour, when we were visiting that fair city for our first times. We shared dim sum after the tour, and they taught us the Mandarin words for some of the dishes I’ve known since childhood in Calgary (all, however, were new to my Swiss room-mate) and gave us their cards and invited us to visit. Laure and I both thought, hm! Unlikely we’ll be in Singapore any time soon! But we politely said thank you and tucked the cards away.

Lo and behold, mere months later I was on my way down to Australia for a semester of university. And it happened to be Chinese New Year time, and it happened that the airplanes were scheduled to stop to refuel in Singapore anyway. So I decided to get off the plane for a while and see what there was to see. I wrote a paper snail mail letter to the address on the business cards of our acquaintances in Singapore, and their response was welcoming.

The businessmen were wonderful hosts, going way beyond what I would have expected. They put me up in a glorious hotel (I was 21 at the time, and had been planning to find the hostel and make my own way about, but happily I was smart enough for once to say “thank you” instead of “oh no, I don’t want to be any bother.”) Even better, they showed me about and introduced me to their friends and associates.

International shipping tycoons, they had people in town from Greece and India and other places. I was fed and feted and amazed. (I was also fed and feted and shown about by the girl I sat beside on the airplane, and her family – not just then, but six months later in Hong Kong, too.) And Chinese New Year in Singapore is wonderful. I found Singaporeans warm, welcoming, friendly, and kind.
Anyway, while I was visiting the Singaporean zoo (or was it the glorious botanical garden?) with a newlywed Indian couple, the topic of cockroaches came up. I mentioned that I had never seen cockroaches in my entire life in Canada, until my first tropical vacation in Barbados, just months before I found myself in Singapore.

The Indian husband exclaimed, “What!? No cockroaches? How lonely!”

Lonely. He thought life without cockroaches would be lonely. That really made me think. What a beautiful viewpoint, to even love the cockroaches in your bathroom.

To tell you the truth, maybe I have loved them since. Certainly that wonderful man’s viewpoint coloured the next leg of my journey.

After Singapore I went to Brisbane, for a semester of university. Being more curious than addicted to ease, it seemed natural to me to land in Perth and take the bus across, so I could see all I could see (and, yes, flew out of Perth again on my way home, taking the bus all the way around the north end of Australia on the way back).

Brisbane is a fragrant, delicious, tropical oasis. A mystical and magical land (why did I ever leave you, oh Brisbane? I lament it still). I discovered my favourite flower there – the frangipani (non-Aussies may call it by the much more boring name of plumeria). I discovered the fun of walking a mile barefoot to university, in a culture where it was fine to be barefoot all day, everywhere. (In Canada, barefootness seems forbidden most places outside a yoga studio or beach -- sad.)

And it was loaded with cockroaches. I mean, not loaded. But they were there. They were there just like the blades of grass and the ants and the cute little lizards (and enchanting big lizards). And poisonous snakes, and poisonous spiders.

The Aussies I knew treated all these creatures with equanimity. Even when they’d have lethal redback spiders spinning webs in the back yard, they mainly live and let live, without the manic need to exterminate that I see Canadians tend to.

I soon learned that the best way to manage insects in Australia was to keep the windows open. I will never forget the enchanting day that I was sitting on the floor of the first little bungalow where I lived, on Alpha Street in the neighbourhood called Taringa. I had the door open catching some breeze as I studied a massive analytical chemistry tome (funny how these tiny details stick in the memory!), and in strolled a glorious big skink. (like this: http://www.wildlifeqld.com.au/eastern-blue-tongue-skink.html )

“Hi,” I said, admiring his (or her) lizardy huge awesome boldness. “The kitchen’s over there! Lots of roaches and ants for you.” The skink kind of bobbed its head and turned left to the kitchen, just where I had suggested. I kept reading my book (well, kind of – more like I pretended to read my book while secretly admiring the lizard) while she/he disappeared towards the kitchen and vanished in that way lizards can, even big ones.

Being a student, I lived in old, kind of broken-down places. The second place I lived in on Explorer Street in Toowong even had vines growing through the slatted windows and even through the wall in the bathroom. My mischievous room-mates were always imploring me to check under the toilet seat before I sat down to go pee, but I didn’t take them very seriously. Aussies are always over-warning foreigners of the dangers of various Aussie wildlife, while completely disregarding them, themselves.
Thank goodness I did so much travelling before Facebook, and didn’t see this first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM1hhKgg434

I had some friends who lived in a modern apartment building, a male hairdresser (not gay! Always on the make) and a university mathy-computery professor who also became Australia’s bodybuilding champion a year or two later. Anyway, you get the picture. These guys were no slobs. They were tidy, clean guys. They had air conditioning and sealing doors, not like the slatted windows and vines growing through the walls in the places I lived.

Happened that the hairdresser (Brent) had approached me in the Toowong mall on a bench one time (when you’re away from home sometimes it’s just nice to be out in public where the people are), and he brought me home and introduced me to his room-mate, Bo, short for Bohdan (he was a Polish guy).

[Digression: Actually I also was met at the Toowong mall by a very nice married couple who invited me out to their farm in Towoomba. When I got off the bus it looked like they had a whole one-room schoolhouse full of kids (I didn’t know they had kids when they invited me) but it was only five kids. The kids all ran around in the bush barefoot and could tell me in great detail about the feeding and biting habits of all the various kinds of ants. And there were farm chickens who wandered in and out of the kitchen. That’s the first time I ever had wonderful, wonderful Vegemite, thinly spread on hot buttered toast. I’m convinced people who don’t like Vegemite didn’t first have it served to them by Australians. You need to eat local food the way locals do.]

As you might be realizing, Queensland, Australia is a pretty sociable place. I remember being kind of freaked out at cockroaches sometimes landing on my friend’s backs when we were standing around talking outside. I’m happy that never happened to me. Once my room-mate Meghan and I talked about which would be better – waking up with a cockroach on you, or a spider? We both agreed on spider (we had two occasions to prove that choice, later, by bravery under fire).

So anyway I was dating Bo, the university professor, and one night when I was sleeping over, I got up to get a glass of water. The kitchen was crawling with roaches, like I mean hundreds of them. I went back to the bedroom to mention it to Bo and he freaked out a little and got a shoe and started hitting at them but it was CRAZY man. And so unexpected. They had a clean house. Hundreds of creepy crawly black things. Big ones, little ones, in between ones. All moving.

And from this I learned that it’s much better to have open windows and allow the lizards and the breezes and the roaches and the ants in and out. If you try to build yourself a sealed unit, what happens is that the roaches and ants get into your house, and they can’t get out, and no lizards can get in either, and then they BREED, man. They MULTIPLY.

It’s the same with life. People are much stronger and less polluted if they keep open boundaries. Let the dark things come in, and don’t try to hide them. Let the lizards come in and eat them out. Let the vines come in your windows, baby, and embrace life and how the universe supports you.

You can’t keep the roaches and ants out of your house. Trying to seal your unit only prevents the sunshine and green and lizards. If you try to seal your life away from all the black spots that are natural, you’ll do the same thing. You’ll seal out all the life-giving, wonderful green and sun and joy. So let your light body be porous. Let the good come in.

People who try to keep their boundaries inviolable and inflexible end up full of cockroaches, and that’s a fact. Think about it and see if I’m wrong.

So we think of cockroaches as a bad thing, right?

But then the Universe gave me a chance to understand a completely opposite lesson. When I went back to Brisbane five or six years later (mending a heart that had been broken while – here the story comes in a circle – living in Montreal for love), I realized there were two things I was really craving to experience again. Frangipani flowers, and cockroaches. Much to my dismay, it was the wrong season for both.

It made me realize though, that sometimes what we love most is the cockroaches. The dark spots in the people we love comfort us.

Of course, we love their fragrant frangipani flowers too, but you know the funny thing? Just like you might walk down a street and exclaim at the cockroach on the sidewalk, all you do to appreciate the frangipanis is breathe deep. And so people do with each other – they exclaim over the dark spots, and they say nothing about the bright, wonderful, fragrant aspects of each other, as much as they love those aspects of each other too.

Families love each other’s foibles. Their spouse and children’s and in-law’s failings. So as soon as you see a relative you haven’t seen in a long time, the first thing they talk about is some youthful indiscretion. Or a failure. Or a time you really sucked. The horse you fell off, the time your car got stuck in the snow, that loser boss who fired you. Do they talk about the people you helped, the bonus you won, the books you published? Likely not.

Unfortunately, that thoughtless, though natural, pattern of conversation breaks relationships. Do you want to talk to the relative who’s constantly harping on your failings? No. You avoid them like the plague. Unfortunately, the sting of their trash-talking can linger for a long time, creating frown lines and keeping you from success.

The relatives you do want to spend time with are the ones who talk (moderately) about the nice things they love about you. I still feel glowy and happy when I recall some of the compliments my grandmother gave me decades ago. That sweet scent lingers on. She was much, much loved for her habit of talking about pretty colours and nice-smelling flowers. She was not a woman afraid to give a compliment.

So start a policy, right now, of talking about the frangipani flowers. Have a family conversation about this, so you can make it funny. When you start harping on your teen about this or that failing, they can say to you, “Mom, you’re talking all about my cockroaches again. Can you please tell me about one of my frangipani flowers now?”

And you can say that back to them, too. Becoming aware of how you talk about the cockroaches and flower aspects of your family members can really improve your love life, especially your teenage parenting years. Think about it, and please let me know how it goes.

If you like this article, you might want to name a cockroach after your love this year: http://www.therecord.com/news-story/5330471-name-a-cockroach-after-your-valentine-this-year