Isn’t it funny how one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, you’re off down the rabbit hole? I heard a great song on my sweetie’s country station the other day, “Your Mama’s Broken Heart” by Miranda Lambert. It’s about going a bit crazy over a break-up, and the refrain made me laugh because her mama’s advice was the same advice my mother always gave me.

A lot of us probably had the same mother, back then, when the biggest concern was “saving face.”

… don’t matter how you feel, it only matters how you look.
Go and fix your make-up girl, it’s just a break-up.
Run and hide your crazy and start actin’ like a lady…

Skip to our Miranda Rights. You know what they are: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law.

I wish more people would exercise their right to remain silent. There’s just TMI (too much information) these days. Things that were once considered intimate and private (as opposed to horrible things that were kept hidden) are now discussed too openly and often too loudly, everywhere.

On a positive note, because everything is out in the open, we have worked on shame issues, understand the range of what is normal, and now we see that we are all fundamentally the same. This has lead to a much-needed self-acceptance and the acceptance of others.

Over 40 years ago I had a moment I wasn’t proud of and have rarely shared. Rather than handling–my then husband’s suspected cheating–like an adult, in a fit of rage, I flung all of his belongings out the bedroom window onto the lawn below… in front of all the neighbors. Next I called my parents’ lawyer. Then I called the locksmith and had the locks changed before he got home from work.

My darling mother–the same woman who’d always told me to keep my problems to myself and suggested I buy a peignoir to fix my marriage–laughed uncontrollably when I told her what I’d done.

In 1968, when Andy Warhol said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” he had no way of knowing how true that would become with today’s social media… or that our attention span would be only 15 seconds, everything would be preceded by a hashtag, and some things are better kept to ourselves.