musings

What Do We Want?

This week, both Aidan and Mama have posted thought-provoking musings on the question of what we want. This is a topic that resonates deeply with me, and one on which I have no good answers. I can relate to both Mama’s sense of oh my God, this is my life? and to Aidan’s sense that as long as we keep asking the questions things will eventually turn out okay. That is, after all, where the vast design comes in … right?

For me the most basic realization that the question What Do You Want? brings up is that I truly have no idea. I wish I did. It is a perennial quest, this effort and need to tune into my own voice, my own deepest desires and wishes. A quest that I continue to fail at – but I keep dusting myself off and starting over. And I do think that what we want shifts over time, sometimes so gradually that you wake up one morning and realize: hey, things are different now, where I am no longer fits.

This is one of those topics that, for me, can get awfully abstract awfully fast. That is why I loved Jonathan Fields’ post on a related issue so much. He focuses on what he cares about, rather than what he wants, but of course those two things are inextricably correlated. This is, I guess, one place to start: what I care about. Maybe I will see patterns on that list that will help shed some light on what I want.

I won’t share the list now, because I don’t have it yet, but I do know the two little people in that photograph are at the top of the list. I care profoundly about them and I want intensely certain things that have to do with them. But they, and all that they represent, are not all I want or care about. And, in fact, some of the things I suspect I want are actually in conflict with the things I want that have to do with my children. That’s where so much of the tension in my life comes from. I know many women feel this, too, and I am grateful for their companionship because it eases the bone-deep guilt.

This is one of the fundamental questions I struggle with when it comes to what we want. I imagine it’s pretty common for some of the things we want to be in direct conflict with or opposition to each other. Life is, after all, a series of choices and compromises. But how do we parse this set of trade-offs, and how do we live with the regret or unknown about the things we have to leave behind? I’ve never been good at closing doors, which explains a lot of how I wound up where I am professionally (and is why my latest MBTI result of S vs. N does not make sense to me). Ultimately, I know that choosing the road that closes the fewest doors and displeases the fewest people is not the way to happiness. That is not what I truly want.

There are a lot of things that go into a life, and what we want is only one component (and often not the most important one) of that. I think, often, of these marvelously simple and wise sentences by Carol Edgarian (thank you, Lacy):

How much does it take to make a life? More than we are told.

Obviously, how much what we want plays into what our lives do and might look like ebbs and flows over the course of time. There are other people who lay claim to parts of our life, to parts of what we want (or should), and this changes our trajectory forever. I know that this is both inescapable and, finally, a big contributor to true happiness, and that being realistic about how much freedom we have to pursue our wants and dreams is important. But I still think that listening to what we really and truly want is vital to an authentically-lived life.

On this second day of my 36th year I know that my life is both exactly as I planned it and nothing like I imagined it. I will continue my efforts to figure out the answer – at least today’s answer, or part of it – to the essential question of what I want. And I am glad for those friends near and far whose questions and support and prompting help me get closer to those answers. Thank you.

the other side

Well, I made it. I’m on the other side. It has been, unsurprisingly, a reflective weekend.

Today I went for a sail with Grace, Whit, Matt, and my parents. We were on our way out of the harbor when I looked around the cockpit, wondering why there were only five people onboard when I was fairly sure there should be six. It honestly took me several minutes to realize that it was because I was not counting myself.

This strikes me as a fairly sad metaphor.

On Friday night Mum, Dad, Matt and I all did the online Myers-Briggs. I have long been a big Myers-Briggs (MBTI) believer and a committed ENFJ (a personality type represented by something like less than 1% of all HBS students, which explains a lot of my experience there). I’m all J (anal, on time, organized, rigid) and all F (feeling vs. thinking, classic heart vs. head). On E (extraverted vs. introverted) and N (intuitive vs. sensing, ie big picture/intuition/instinct vs. details/data/granular) I have always been closer to the middle.

It is emblematic of either enormous confusion or major tectonic plate-shifting that my Myers-Briggs type has actually changed since the last time I took it. On Friday night I came up as an ISFJ. It doesn’t surprise me that I am now officially an I (though still quite borderline). I find myself more and more internally oriented, though the MBTI description of E vs. I is more nuanced than classic introvert vs. extrovert (I won’t bore you all with it now, but suffice it to say many classic “extroverted” personalities are actually MBTI intraverts).

The one that troubles me is that I am apparently now marginally more S than N (still, only 1% over the midpoint, but I used to be quite N). This concerns me because it seems to hint at deep uncertainty and distrust of my own intuition, something I have always felt quite sure about. I need to spend some time thinking what it is that the test (admittedly a short, internet-friendly version) is picking up on. As much as the overall movement from E to I makes sense to me, that from S to N does not.

More thinking required on that particular topic.

What else from the other side of 35? Well, it was really really hot today. I ran 6 miles and my knee hurt less in the last 3 than the first, which I think means either something really good or something really bad (I suspect the latter, sadly). The children are overtired and cranky. Grace reminded me of myself today in a spooky way: on the boat she was reading down below and I kept asking her questions. She finally burst into tears and I looked at her, surprised, and asked what was going on. “Mummy! I just want to read!” she said, exasperated. I get it, kid, I really do.

Oh, and Aidan, your post touched me deeply, more than you know. Thank you so much for your kind words. I wish I saw myself the way you seem to; even as I read your generous descriptions I hear the voice in my head: well that isn’t true, of course not! I’m very grateful that our paths crossed out here in the wilderness and I simply cannot wait to read Blackberry Girl!!

Instinct vs doubt

Last week, an email popped up in my inbox outlining all of the afterschool activities available at my children’s private school. As I read about karate and hip hop and book club and chess, a familiar anxiety gnawed at me. Once again, I wondered if, in my rabid opposition to over-scheduling I have overcorrected and am depriving my children .

My daughter is allowed one after-school activity a week. My son has only just begun to show interest, but I will offer him the same choice. I remember when Grace was a baby I fretted to the pediatrician that while my friends were at Mommy and Me music, gymnastics, etc, I mostly took my baby to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. He reassured me, “Don’t worry, she just wants to be with you.” Then he said, “you think this is hard now? Wait until she starts asking for activities.” And he was right. Grace is almost seven, and she regularly asks to participate in more afterschool activities than I am prepared to okay. My response, repeated so often if feels like a chant or a hopeful prayer, is that “Different families make different choices.”

My active limiting of my children’s “programming” goes hand in hand with a general philosophy that refuses to build them up into exceptional geniuses. I wonder, again, if this has negative repercussions. Will they doubt that I love them? If adulatory motherhood is now the norm, will I seem cold and not proud in comparison? This could not be further from the truth. I am proud of them every day, with an intensity that continues to amaze me after almost seven years; I am proud watching my son struggle to stay afloat in the swimming pool and watching my daughter painstakingly sound out words in a Berestain Bears book as she resolutely, slowly, learns to read. I don’t think I would describe either of my children exceptional on any dimension, and that does not make me any less proud. In fact it might make me more so. I aspire to raise happy, well-adjusted children who know how to listen to themselves, something I am admittedly weak at myself (it occurs to me that perhaps much of the intensity behind my belief is aspiring to give them something I wish I had more of). I want them to be able to entertain, make choices for, and trust themselves.

But I do feel guilty when I hear other parents talk about their child’s early reading, particularly impressive physical coordination, or early language acquisition. I simply don’t speak of Whit and Grace in those terms. Maybe I should? Am I dooming them to a life of mediocrity by refusing to extol virtues that I don’t really see? Don’t get me wrong: I love my children dearly, and because of that I think they are both downright terrific. I believe, however, that to focus on their exceptional promise and prowess at X or Y is to saddle them with both expectations and limits. I also view a lot of this exceptional-izing as competitive and I simply refuse to parent that way, because it undermines our tremendously strong common purpose: to support our children as best we know how.

But I do find myself wondering whether both my stubborn refusal to let my children fill their free hours with “enriching” activities and my disinclination to laud them as little prodigies is in some way harmful. I fear that I am letting them down by not being more flowery in my praise of them, and yet I keep bumping into my fundamental instincts that point in another direction. Even in an area where I feel relatively confident about my biases, doubt creeps in, mingling with my intuition; perhaps this combination of fear and sureness is the definition of motherhood. Is it driven by anything external, or is it just my own lack of confidence speaking? Is it inescapable, this essential uncertainty? I think it is this insecurity that underlies the comparisons and the effusive, designed-for-public-consumption praise. So for now I’ll keep following the intuition that howls loudly in one ear while trying to answer the doubts that whisper in the other.

Fix You?

I routinely have a short list of songs that I listen to on repeat (and I only listen to music when I drive, but since I commute a couple of days a week this means lots of listening to a handful of songs each week). Lately Coldplay’s Fix You as been at the top of this list. I’ve been thinking about what it is to fix someone, what it is to long to be fixed, and, frankly, about the futility of both.

And then lo and behold I read two interesting posts on this topic this week. The Extraordinary Ordinary writes about the inability to really fix others (even citing my current favorite song, making me feel both not alone and not original) through the specific lens of concerned motherhood. And Kelly Diels writes beautifully in her post about not being put on earth as a corrective action.

Both posts made me think, and also reminded me of the way the universe tends to support conversations that need to be happening in this way. I thought about the ways in which we cannot, in fact, protect our children from dangers both internal and external to them. But I thought even more about the stuff Kelly was thinking about, and kept returning to one of her sentences, again and again:

I am going to meet you where you are.

Oh what a great reminder this is of what we ought to strive for in our relationships. I am going to hear Kelly’s voice in my head this weekend and hopefully for a long while. I am going to try to remember that the world does not, in fact, need me holding the handle in order to keep spinning (oh Elizabeth Gilbert, did you get that right!). To remember that people are who they are mostly because that is who they are, not because of anything to do with me. To try to accept the light and the dark that exists inside everyone – even, gasp, myself! – because to do otherwise is frustrating for me and, probably, hurtful for them.

I wonder, though, where the line is between useful, productive self-improvement and accepting the self. I know few things better than that expansive, hopeful feeling of: yes, that is a good point, thank you for seeing me so clearly, let me do a better job with X and Y. I’m not saying we should not listen to others’ input and strive to be better and more mature. In fact I think “self-acceptance” can often be code for not trying to overcome our flaws or redirect bad patterns of behavior. But how to do this while retaining a fundamental commitment to our self-worth? That is the tension I don’t quite know how to navigate.

I’ve been thinking about the Time Traveler’s Wife lately, a book I love, probably because the movie came out today. That book to me is a beautiful meditation on accepting people for who they are, limitations and all. It is about loving someone, warts and all, and being willing to embrace all of the things about them that make them who they are, even the uncomfortable and inconvenient ones. A good lesson for us all.

I suppose, really, all of this focus on relationships with others is just a prelude to working on the relationship with self. As Jung said, the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely (I throw Jung out in a way that sounds like I might know others of his theories but I don’t, I just know and love that single quotations). Maybe I feel like working to accept others fully, to honor their complexities, is the first step towards offering myself that kind of forgiveness and love. Not an easy thing for me to do. I guess I can’t fix anyone else, and nobody else can fix me. But is it possible that I don’t actually need fixing?

Midlife

I’m staring 35 in the face. Sunday. I’m not too psyched about it. And mostly I am tired of people saying to me: “No way are you middle aged! You aren’t going to die at 70!” Hello, people, middle-age is a range, not the actual midpoint of your life. There is no question whatsoever that I am in midlife. That’s okay, by the way. Let’s not pretend otherwise is all I’m saying.

It was in this mindset that I read Brene Brown’s blog post today about the midlife journey. It rang every single bell that there is in my head (and that’s a lot – picture a carillon of church bells). Brene says it far better than I ever could. And wow it is lovely to have somebody express and articlate the things that have been swarming around my thoughts.

I’m going to quote Brene’s excerpt in its entirety – it’s long but every single word is both salient and resonant. Read it, any of you who are, like me, wondering what exactly this vague sense of an earthquake inside yourself is about. I am so grateful for Brene’s elegant words and thoughtful description of things that make so much sense to me: the notion that the very coping strategies that helped me get here are actually blocking my progress now, the idea that eventually I have to let go of the pleasing and figure out what I actually want, the identification of the most toxic kind of suffering being that that allows us to act as though all is fine.

An excerpt from Wholehearted: Adventures in Growing Up, Falling Apart and Finding Joy
Copyright © 2009 Brené Brown

Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.

By definition, you can’t control or manage an unraveling. You can’t cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect.
Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:

It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. The time has come to let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are.

If you look at each midlife “event” as a random, stand-alone struggle, you might be lured into believing you’re only up against a small constellation of “crises.” The truth is that the midlife unraveling is a series of painful nudges strung together by low-grade anxiety and depression, quiet desperation, and an insidious loss of control. By low-grade, quiet, and insidious, I mean it’s enough to make you crazy, but seldom enough for people on the outside to validate the struggle or offer you help and respite. It’s the dangerous kind of suffering – the kind that allows you to pretend that everything is OK.

We go to work and unload the dishwasher and love our families and get our hair cut. Everything looks pretty normal on the outside. But on the inside we’re barely holding it together. We want to reach out, but judgment (the currency of the midlife realm) holds us back. It’s a terrible case of cognitive dissonance – the psychologically painful process of trying to hold two competing truths in a mind that was engineered to constantly reduce conflict and minimize dissention (e.g., I’m falling apart and need to slow down and ask for help. Only needy, flaky, unstable people fall apart and ask for help).

It’s human nature and brain biology to do whatever it takes to resolve cognitive dissonance – lie, cheat, rationalize, justify, ignore (if you need examples, look toward Washington, D.C. or Wall Street). For most of us midlifers, this is where our expertise in managing perception bites us on the ass. We are torn between desperately wanting everyone to see our struggle so that we can stop pretending, and desperately doing whatever it takes to make sure no one ever sees anything except what we’ve edited and approved for display.

What bubbles up from this internal turmoil is fantasy. We might glance over at a shabby motel while we’re driving down the highway and think, I’ll just check in and stay there until they come looking for me. Then they’ll know I’m crazy. Or maybe we’re standing in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher when we suddenly find ourselves holding up a glass and wondering, “Would my husband and kids take this struggle more seriously if I just started hurling all this shit through the window?”

Most of us opt out of the dramatic displays. We’d have to arrange to let the dog out and have the kids picked up before we checked into the lonely roadside motel. We’d spend hours cleaning up glass and apologizing for our “bad choices” to our temper tantrum-prone toddlers. It just wouldn’t be worth it, so most of us just push through until “crazy” is no longer a voluntary fantasy.

Many scholars have proposed that the struggle at midlife is about the fear that comes with our first true glimpse of mortality. Again, wishful thinking. Midlife is not about the fear of death. Midlife is death. Tearing down the walls that we spent our entire life building is death. Like it or not, at some point during midlife, you’re going down, and after that there are only two choices: staying down or enduring rebirth.

It’s a painful irony that the very things that may have kept us safe growing up ultimately get in the way of our becoming the parents, partners, and/or people that we want to be.

Maybe, like me, you are the perfect pleaser and performer, and now all of that perfection and rule following is suffocating. Or maybe anger and lashing out kept people at a safe distance and now the distance has turned into intolerable loneliness. There are also the folks who grew up taking care of everyone else because they had no choice. Their death is having to letting go of the caretaking, and their rebirth is learning how to take care of themselves (and work through the push-back that always comes with setting new boundaries).

Whatever the issue, it seems as if we spend the first half of our lives shutting down feelings to stop the hurt, and the second half trying to open everything back up to heal the hurt.
Sometimes when the “tear the walls down and submit to death” thing overwhelms me, I find it easier to think about midlife as midlove. After a decade of research on shame, authenticity, and belonging, I’m convinced that loving ourselves is the most difficult and courageous thing we’ll ever do. Maybe we’ve been given a finite amount of time to find that self-love, and midlife is the halfway mark. It’s time to let go of the shame and fear and embrace love. Time to fish or cut bait.