Complaint: My back hurts.

My husband’s does too. And so does my friend’s, who is almost ten years younger than me. She has a herniated disc. That sounds painful, because it IS. She even had to have an MRI. She hated it.

Did you know that something upwards of 100% of people over the age of 35 have back problems? (My friend is very advanced for her age.)

In today’s crumbling economy, it would appear our middle-aged backs are buckling under the pressure and wreaking havoc with our sleep, our waking hours, our lives.

And our kids are still young enough not to sleep through the night.

That’s the bitch of starting your family “later in life,” my friends. They’re young and leaky and you’re old and creaky.

But I digress.

Actually, I don’t really just want to complain about my back. I’ve actually been trying to complain less.

I spent so much of my misspent youth complaining, and a good part of my misspent early adulthood, too. Then I spent the first few years of being a stay at home mother complaining and enviously coveting the time my husband had away from the house at work, if only for the uninterrupted bathroom time.

So I guess now that I have children who are young and impressionable and all that, I don’t really want them to end up copying a complaining, back-aching gal such as myself.

And I’ve read so much about Buddhism, and it makes so much sense to practice what’s called “right speech.” This is simply trying (and of course failing a lot) to say the right thing at the right time and not saying something just because you feel like saying it. It’s the whole process of actually thinking before you speak, something I do way way too infrequently.

So the whole complaining thing comes under the heading of negative or wrong speech. Who does it help if I rant and rave about my problems or how late my husband comes home or how I hate to cook? Someone somewhere has it much worse than me, and probably someone somewhere has it better, but so what? What does it tell my kids if I’m a whiner? I don’t like it when THEY whine. So I guess I shouldn’t, either.

So let’s turn this complaint into a QUESTION: Why do we complain so much?

Do we expect anyone to actually do something about our problems? I posit that yes, we do. And in fact after years of study with some of the world’s best (and worst) psychotherapists and self-help books, I am here to tell you that nobody but nobody is going to save you, fix your problems, solve everything, and whisk you away to perfection-land. Not gonna happen.

At first blush this seems really depressing, right? But it’s not.

I remember really coming to this conclusion while talking to a wise person I knew in Southern California (there are more than one, contrary to popular belief). And I realized that I had always, and I mean all through my life to that point, been waiting for some mythical, metaphorical rescue helicopter to come and save me from whatever was troubling me.

I mean, often, this yearning came in the form of hoping/demanding/assuming that someone else (my husband, parents, friends) would FIX whatever I deemed broken.

But it doesn’t work that way.

So at the risk of going all Dr. Phil/Oprah/Jack Handey on your ass, the only rescue helicopter you’ve got is yourself.

It’s all in your hands, baby. Now what are you gonna do with it?