Month: January 2010

Driving a Truck

Big Little Wolf has an interesting and thoughtful post up today: Good driver, bad passenger? She prompts introspection about the need for control and the willingness to take charge, which I think are two related but separate impulses.

My father has always said that dancing with me is like driving a truck. I am a graceless dancer who struggles to let myself be led. Not a big problem, given the paucity of partner dancing in my life. But, still, a metaphor that stays with me. I have a powerful need for control, and it’s one of the things I most dislike about myself. My need for control gets in my way on a regular basis: I choose no over ambiguity, prematurely shutting off options or experiences, I am quickly frustrated when things do not go my way, and I avoid activities that would require me to release the reins and surrender to them (eating “scary” foods like oysters, riding roller coasters).

None of these are pretty qualities, I know that. But I thought further about what BLW was saying, and realized that while I crave control over my life, when it comes to actively taking control in a group setting I’m much more wary. I remembered something specific from my time at business school (a time of my life I so rarely think about!) It was the first semester of my first year, and we were assigned a small group project. I have no idea what the project was, but I remember that my group of about 6 people from my section was clustered into one of the round tables in the window alcoves of Aldrich late into the afternoon. As the sun set, people grew cantankerous and wanted to be finished. Again, I have no memory of the content but I know that I, infuriated with what felt like a waste of time and a lack of clear direction, started taking charge of the conversation and setting forth specific plans for the group.

I don’t remember what happened from there, though I vividly recall myself stepping into a leadership role on that dark afternoon. The next week, project behind us, one of the men in my group, a much older guy with years of impressive military service pulled me aside after class.

“Can I give you some feedback?” he asked. What was I supposed to say?

“Sure,” I said, nervous and feeling like something bad was coming.

He went on to deliver some criticism in the guise of feedback about the way I had assumed control of the group’s workplan and efforts. I blinked back tears as I listened to him, and then fled to my apartment over an Italian food store and cried for hours. I’m sure he had many good points, though of course I can’t remember them. That day comes back to me a lot, though.

When I think about the ways in which I am loath to be visibly in charge, I often wonder why. Is it some kind of gender conditioning that makes me believe that women should sit back and be quiet? I don’t think so, at least not consciously. Is it fear of putting myself out there, into a position where I might attract more criticism like the early HBS experience? Maybe. That feels closer to why. Is it a deep feeling that someone else would do a better job at leading? Maybe. That feels like it could be why as well.

It strikes me that this could be the worst possible combination: to be as rigid and in need of control as I am, yet to be unwilling to expose myself by taking an active leadership role … isn’t this the worst of both worlds? I don’t like this mix of traits in myself at all, but changing both feels daunting. To let go of my need for control would require that I learn to feel safe in the world. The moments when I do feel safe enough to relax my white-knuckle grip on my life are rare and special, but I don’t know how to make that into a more normal reality. To be brave enough to more often visibly lead also seems intimidating to me: authentic vulnerability is hard for me and doing this creates it.

Don’t know the path out of this particular knot of fabulous personality traits, but perhaps being aware of it is the first step. Thank you, BLW, for making me think yet again.

The Help Haiti Blog Challenge

My dearly beloved Kelly Diels twittered me last night and asked me to participate in her Help Haiti Blog Challenge.  She asks that we all think about how we can contribute, whether it is a service or a good or our time.  And yes, yes, yes I say.

Last night Matt informed me that he had been online giving a family donation to his firm’s fund for Haiti (which they match!  Yay!) and Grace asked him what he was doing.  He explained to her what happened and she apparently turned and ran downstairs in silence.  She returned holding a crumpled dollar bill and gave it to him, saying she wanted to give her own money too.  This story, told to me when I got home, made me cry.  I am so fiercely proud of this behavior.  Grace has exactly $11 to her name ($10 now) and each dollar has been earned the hard way (usually by losing teeth).  I find the fact that, without hesitation, she wanted to share some of her treasured piggy bank store, overwhelmingly poignant.  I’m actually not sure I’ve ever been so proud.

I am going to follow in the footsteps of my friend Aidan on this one.  Pursuing an idea she and I have talked about in other ways, I will donate $2 for every comment left on this blog between now and Monday morning, January 18th. Please come comment.  Please.  I will donate to Partners in Health, whose story so moved me in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains.

My favorite line from that book seems an apt way to close this plea:

The idea that some lives matter less than others is at the root of all that is wrong with the world.

They don’t.  Those people are our people.  As Gracie told me this morning, chin trembling, she could imagine being hurt or without a house or without her mother.  And she wanted to help the children who wake up that way this morning.  And so do I.  Please help.

White Trash Food: Sauerkraut Salad

I’m honored to be hosting a guest post by The Kitchen Witch today.  TKW is one of the blogs I read every day, and I have grown to adore her particular combination of humor and wisdom.  I love the way she writes about life, often, through the lens of food.  And some of her recipes are inspiring – as a paltry cook myself I haven’t tried any yet, but I will!  Please go visit her blog – you won’t be disappointed.

My sister’s best friend in North Dakota was a girl named Lisa. I liked Lisa–she didn’t care if I followed her and my sister around like a hungry dog. This was a bigger deal than you’d think, because I had no friends of my own. Thus, she pretty much had to tolerate me all of the time. Because, much to my sister’s disgust, mama insisted that we were a package deal. “But I’m 3 years olllllllder than her,” my sister would protest. “I don’t see why I have to drag that baby around when I play with MY friends.”

Looking back, my sister sort of had a point, but Mama was too busy and too smart to relent. She knew that if left to entertain myself, I’d hurl myself to the floor, threatening to die of boredom, within 5 minutes. So Tagalong I was.

Sometimes we ended up at Lisa’s house, which I found thrilling. Lisa had two much older brothers, and spying on them (without detection) was one of my favorite pastimes. I studied them voraciously, not altogether unlike Goodall and her apes. They talked on the phone to girls and had pimples and listened to music other than The Osmond Brothers. Quite exotic, I tell you.

Lisa’s mother, Barb, always wore perfume and lipstick and was the only woman I’ve known who actually smoked cigarettes in those long holders, like Cruella DeVille. She was perpetually on a diet and dressed provocatively. I remember eyeing her breasts with suspicion, wondering when those globes were going to go AWOL from her clingy shirts. To my disappointment, I never witnessed it.

My mother tried to be friends with her, but Barb was, in the end, just too racy for mama. I think the clincher was one fateful trip to the movies, when my mother discovered, to her horror, that the film Barb had chosen was X-rated. Mama didn’t say a word, but I’d have given a million dollars to have been a fly on that wall.

Barb wasn’t much of a cook, but she was generous with invitations to dinner, which was nice. Except. Barb followed a strict weight loss plan and once a week, that plan advocated eating liver for dinner. Now this would have been okay if there was one night–say Wednesday–that was Liver Night. Then, no problem. I could be permanently busy on Wednesday. But Barb wasn’t that organized. Liver Night was frighteningly fluid in that household, and mama told me it was bad manners to ask what was for dinner if invited. I do beleive the threat “beat you until you can’t sit anymore” had been uttered regarding that breach of etiquitte.

But it also wasn’t polite to always refuse an invitation to dinner, so I spent a few nights in flat-out terror, eyes glued to the stove, wondering what menace was lurking in the pot.

Luckily, I never got liver, and luckier still, my problem got solved for me. Not long after my 4th birthday, I got bronchitis. My nasty, phlegm-soaked ass was stuck in bed. Quite gleefully, my sister set out for Lisa’s house on a rare solo venture.

When she came back, I was huddled in a blanket, on the kitchen floor, watching my mother cook dinner, fuming at my sister the traitor.

The Traitor poured herself a glass of Hi-C and said casually to my mother, “Mom, what does screw mean?”

There was a long pause. Then my mother continued peeling potatoes. “You mean like when you screw in a nail?” my mother said.

“Nooooo, I mean screw like what Barbie does with Ken,” my sister said, rolling her eyes in disdain.

We learned two lessons that day. One of them was a vocabulary term. The second: do not play Barbies with Lisa’s older brothers in the room.

Lisa spent most playdates at OUR house from then on. Liver Night Problem solved.

This recipe for revolting (I assume) Sauerkraut Salad came from Lisa’s grandmother. Suffice it to say that I know now why Barb wasn’t much of a cook.

Sauerkraut Salad

1 green pepper
1 small onion
3 stalks celery
1 can (1 lb.) sauerkraut
1 cup chili sauce
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon paprika
3 tablespoons lemon juice

Chop green pepper, onions and celery fine. Then mix with sauerkraut and all remaining ingredients. This is very good with cold cuts.**

**Her endorsement, not mine!!

The obscurity of an order

Light the first light of evening, as in a room,
In which we rest, and for small reason think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl,
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one …
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

-Wallace Stevens, The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Good night, Whit

Last night, as I tucked Whit in, the room was heavy with nostalgia. It was dim, his favorite lullabye was playing, and I curled into his bottom bunk, breathing him in as he lay with his back to me. One week from today he turns five, and this awareness is stitched through every moment of every day lately. I can barely bear it. I kept my eyes closed as I felt him turn his head to look at me, and I heard his low giggle, presumably at the unusual delight of seeing me “sleeping” in his bed. The nearness of him, the just-bathed little boy smell, the familiar lullabye music, the nearness of his birthday all swelled into a huge wave of nostalgia and sadness and, predictably, I found myself blinking back tears.

I thought about how recently I wrote about how his “babyhood clings to him” and how that is just not true anymore. I thought about the moment he was born, a moment as clear and crystalline as any I have ever experienced, I thought of the million times he has driven me to yell at him and the million and one times he has made me cry with sweetness. I turned to sit up and felt his hand reach back and grab for me. “Don’t go, Mummy,” he murmured, so I stayed put for another song. Peculiarly, I remembered those last days of pregnancy, when the baby feels so tight in your drum-hard belly that you feel it every movement with an exquisite, painful awareness. My emotion felt that big inside me, almost as though I could not contain it with my physical body.

Finally I forced myself to open my eyes and sit up, and I leaned over Whit, studying his face. My gaze moved slowly down his face, his features unfurling again to me as if brand new: his eyes, so blue even in the darkness, his long eyelashes, his pale skin, and his defined cleft chin, one of the very few tangible things he has inherited from me. He reached up a hand and clasped me behind the neck, smiling, with what struck me as a curious, surprising awareness of the moment. I smiled back at him, “I love you, my little man.” Tears ran down my face and I saw puzzlement wash into his eyes. I smiled again, trying to reassure him that nothing is wrong, and felt relieved when his face softened. “I love you too, Mummy.” He pulled my face down so it was right next to his. I felt his soft cheek against my wet one, and turned to give him a kiss. He clasped his hands behind my neck, holding me to him. “I love you as much as the sky,” I heard him whisper.

Oh, my baby boy. Five years old. There is so much tenderness I am not sure I can stand it.