musings

A sage on the plane

I took the 6:30 shuttle home from New York last Saturday. As I am wont to do, I lingered near the gate so as to be one of the first people onboard (after those first class folks – taking first class on the shuttle is something I will never understand). I like to sit right up in front, in order to get off fast. I sat down and put my bag on the window seat next to me, hoping to avert anyone from joining me. No dice.

I was texting and emailing on my iphone when a nice, albeit slightly doddering, elderly lady asked to sit with me. I stood up and let her in. I smiled briefly at her and then returned to my iphone. Overcome with the emotion of the day, I found myself crying quietly. Big, fat tears were rolling down my cheeks as I sat and tapped on my phone. I wiped them away as surreptitiously as I could, aware suddenly that my seatmate was staring at me.

After the doors closed and I was forced to shut down my phone, I sat back in my seat and shut my eyes, trying to contain my roiling emotions. The nice woman next to me said “you are breaking my heart.” She spoke almost under her breath, such that I wasn’t sure she was talking to me. I looked at her, enquiringly, and she repeated herself, looking into my red-rimmed eyes.

I was taken aback. Wiping my face with more fervor now, I laughed self-consciously. “Oh, I’m fine.” I said, hoping the conversation would be over. She wanted to keep talking. She asked me what I was crying about, and I tried as gently as I could to make it clear I had no interest in discussing it. I am terrible in situations like these, woefully bad at making my own desires (ie to sit in silence) known. This friendly woman was not taking no for an answer.

Then she dropped the comment that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. “You looked so hard when I sat down.” My head whipped around to look at her. Hard? “You looked so put together and self assured and I was shocked when I looked over and you were crying.” She shrugged as she shared this matter-of-factly.

I haven’t been able to get this out of my head. I am reminded of all the times my father has said that the great task of life is to understand how others perceive us. Of the wisdom of my friend’s comment about not confusing people’s insides and outsides. Of how frequently I apparently come across so radically differently than I feel.

It amazes me to hear this. I, who feels and is many, many things, but pretty much never either hard or self-assured. I, who mostly feels shy and awkward in social settings but is sometimes told she is a bitch. I, whose personality is defined in large part by a deep seam of insecurity that sometimes manifests as judgment. I was going to ask how it is that vulnerability can come across as such a formidable wall, but I realized that question is dumb: of course in 35 years we build up calluses over our sore spots, build barricades over the holes that have tripped us up over and over again.

I guess it’s no surprise that on a day already jammed full of reflection and introspection the universe sent me this slightly hunched little woman to remind me of this. To hold up the mirror for a second, just long enough for me to see the unattractive reflection and commit anew to change.

Honest & Scrappy

Wow, so Aidan of Ivy League Insecurities surprised me today by bequeathing The Honest Scrap Award. Cool. My first bloggy award! It’s an award for “honesty and sincerity” in blogging and I could not be more touched. Because, just as Aidan says, I strive to be honest and sincere and know that this is something that is not always natural for me, who likes so much to please people and to be just who they want me to be. No. No more! This blog has been one place where I’ve been working out Who I Really Am in a way that I deeply hope is honest and sincere and yes, scrappy.

So, I learned the rules (and a lot else) from Aidan, who says I am supposed to share ten honest things about myself and then pass the award on to seven bloggers I think deserve it. My initial thought is it’s damn hard to think of ten interesting things about myself, but I will try.

1. I cry almost every day.
2. The things I like least about my physical self are: insomnia, cold sores, overly muscular legs
3. When I was learning to drive I almost drove my parents’ old Jeep into the ocean. My dad was shotgun. I was so scarred by that that I still can’t drive stick shift.
4. I am tone deaf.
5. I warm up really quickly to people but have a hard time being authentically vulnerable.
6. My godmothers are really important to me and I am profoundly honored to be godmother to three children now. I was really scared I would never have that special relationship with anyone.
7. I’m really uncomfortable about aging; getting old terrifies me.
8. I constantly count things in groups of eight (cars in a parking lot, window panes, ceiling tiles) and click them off on my teeth as I count (Aspergers, or OCD, anyone? also, teeth being worn down to nubs).
9. I wish I hadn’t gone to business school and know now I went out of inertia and a sense of what I “should” do rather than any real passion for it.
10. I still print out photographs and assemble old-school photo albums, creating several per year. I think my house will be overtaken by the photo albums.

And now my seven bloggers!

1. Mama at The Elmo Wallpaper

2. Kelly at kellydiels.com

3. Diana at Diana’s Notebook

4. Jenn at Breed ‘Em and Weep

5. Kate at sweet/salty

6. Launa at Wherever Launa Goes, There She Is

7. Jen at jengray.com

Firestarter

Today was a fascinating day, so full of thoughts and emotions that my head and heart are both full to overflowing right now. I spent the day at Aidan’s house with Danielle LaPorte and a fascinating, diverse group of 23 people (22 woman and 1 man). We started with introductions. Most people talked for 2-3 minutes about where they were in their lives, what they did and wanted to do, and what their challenge was. I spoke for approximately 15 seconds and ended my brief sentences with a shrug. I was reminded today of how, in a group of strangers, my default is to feel awkward and shy. I felt very shy in that room. I didn’t talk again all morning.

Danielle spoke about her own story, commenting on the inflection points and decisions, wise and unwise, which had brought her to where she is today. Among the comments that she made that I remember verbatim was that you have to ask for what you want. A promotion, readers, success, a contract. You cannot expect good things to simply come. You have to meet grace halfway, she said. Asking for what I want – or for help of any kind – is something that makes me both nervous and uncomfortable, so I don’t like hearing this, but I know that it is true.

Danielle asked several thought-provoking questions, among them:

What are you sarcastic about? (this may indicate a place of defensiveness)

What do people thank you for? (gratitude is tied to your own genius)

How do you want to feel?

This last one led into one of Danielle’s key points. She asserted that we are all driven by our need to feel a set of core desired feelings. That all of our behavior and decisions are in search of these feelings. To figure out what those are, therefore, is a critical step in clarifying what our life should look like. What professional and personal infrastructure should we have to maximize how often we feel the way we want to feel?

I don’t even have answers to Danielle’s searching questions yet. Just more questions. More than once today – in fact, over and over – I welled up with tears. I found myself in the grip of a swell of emotion both powerful and inchoate. This is not the first time I’ve felt this. I have moments where I feel full to the brim with thoughts and feelings that I am powerless to control and unable to name. I know there is a tide turning in my spirit, but I don’t exactly understand where the undertow is taking me.

I struggle to remember that there is a design in what looks like utter lack of order, a reason why things happen. I know in my core that I believe these things. I fiercely want to trust that there is a place where I will feel unfettered and like I am doing what I should be doing. I have never felt that, have not felt passionate or intellectually alive since college. For all of my grandiose aspirations and big, inarticulate dreams, I know that I also, truly, fundamentally, want to feel useful. I want to contribute. To whatever it is I am doing, to the big or the small, to something.

I end today with many more questions than I began it with. Zora Neale Hurston said there are years that ask questions and years that answer. I’ve had a series of question-asking years in a row. I look forward to the fruition of some answers.

Choosing or Not Choosing? With grandmothers.

Maureen Dowd’s editorial, “Blue is the New Black,” is just the last in a series of articles I’ve read recently about declining female happiness. I find the topic depressing, of course, but I think it’s right on. Dowd’s final assertion that our plethora of choices may be responsible for our malaise is both suspiciously accurate and deeply saddening to me. I think often of how hard our mother and grandmother’s generations fought for those very choices. How dismayed they would be to know that finally, the future they had envisioned is here, and yet it is resulting in the polar opposite of what they wanted. More despair, more pressure, more unhappiness, and not less.

I think of my grandmothers, both of whom were college educated but neither of whom pursued her own career. I am fortunate to have had two wonderful grandmothers, each of whom could be called a force of nature in her own way. My mother’s mother, Nana, was a tall, slender whip of a woman who was always perfect coiffed and dressed. She was intimidating to me for a very long time for the perfection and gloss of her exterior. She devoted her life to her family, and to a few causes dear to her heart, among them Middlebury College and Planned Parenthood (kind of a big deal back in the day). There were always fresh flowers on the table (cosmos and zinnias, in particular, make me think of her), pearls around her neck, and birthday cards in the mail, arriving right on our birthdays, with her small, perfect script writing inside. In her house I remember perfectly-made beds with crochet bedspreads, the lazy susan top on the round kitchen table, and the super recliney chair on the screened in porch. I remember Sunday school and the framed age-by-age pictures of my mother and her brother above Nana’s bed and the step down to my grandparents’ bathroom.

My father’s mother, Gaga, was entirely different. She was small and a ball of opinions. She could barely keep her sense of humor and her keen intelligence to herself; more than once I remember her whispering to me some cutting aside under her breath. Born in another era, she would have been an outstanding doctor. Instead, Gaga majored in zoology at Wellesley and spent substantial time volunteering at the local hospital. She loved Miss Piggy and the memory of her garden’s roses to this day make me swoon. She mothered four boys and embraced me, her first grandchild and a girl, with particular enthusiasm. Like Nana, she was devoted to Planned Parenthood. In her house I remember the mirror with the night and day lighting in her closet, the steep steps to the attic full of exciting dusty boxes, including old Princeton reunions costumes, and a wall full of books in the family room. I remember the curving driveway whose asphalt would get soft in the sun, the plot of black-eyed susans on the right, and the smell of Shower to Shower powder in the changing room at the beach.

Oh, I miss my grandmothers. Dowd’s words made me sad for them, for how their efforts (and those of my mother and her generation, the subject of many more posts) seem to have wound up going awry.

But her column also made me ponder choice, and the way that much of the complexity that drives unhappiness (in her description) is something I choose precisely because I refuse to choose. Some of my happiest friends are the ones who have made an explicit decision to focus on their families or on their careers, who have thrown themselves wholesale into one arena or the other. It is those of us who are marooned in the middle, in my experience, who are often the most conflicted and unhappy. In my determination to be a mother and have a career, am I in fact failing at both? A lot of days it feels that way. It also feels like I have a foot in each world and a home in neither. I wonder about this a lot. But I know that I am simply not ready or able to choose one exclusively at this time.

(caveat: I realize it is a great privilege available to very few women to stay home full-time.)

Obviously choosing to do both avails me of joys and satisfactions in both worlds. I suppose the essential question is whether those joys outweigh the additional demands and expectations I impose on myself (or is it the world imposing them on me? I don’t know) by choosing this bifurcated life. I say bifurcated when I wish I could say blended. I continue to strive to find a model with a more seamless integration between my professional and my personal lives. I don’t feel optimistic right now, but I also hate the conclusion that trying to live my life the way I have will result in more unhappiness, so I see no choice but to keep trying.

The myth of balance

Reading so much great stuff out there in the bloggy world today! I love this post called The Balance Myth, which highlights something I think about (and hear from others) all the time. People ask me all the time how I “do it” which always makes me laugh, as I think of all the things I don’t do, and the ones I don’t do well. I’ve even blogged about this before.

I drop a lot of balls. I often feed my kids breakfast in the car, I never blowdry my hair, I wear Juicy sweatpants 90% of the days that I am not at work, I have a very limited social life, my immune system is a mess from subsisting on caffeine, wine, and gummy candy, and I miss a lot of school functions.

But I also have certain rules and have made certain decisions that help me a lot. I always pack lunches the night before, I pay bills the day they come in the door, I avoid the phone in favor of email (more efficient), I cook for the kids a couple of times a week and the rest of the time I assort and reheat, I live in a small house with limited upkeep that is close to school, I shop a few times a year for kid birthday presents and store them until needed, and I put my kids to bed at 7:00 every night (preserving a few hours for my sanity).

Here’s the post’s key paragraph (in my humble view):

The big secret is that very few people feel even remotely balanced. We’re all being pushed and pulled in a thousand directions. I think the best we can hope for is to fall in love with the living of life and enjoy the ride.

Absolutely true and crucial to remember. Most of all feel we are a mass of loose ends inside. I forget this all time, as I admire women I know who seem to accomplish a thousand things a day, all while maintaining a sunny smile, a perfect outfit, and gorgeous hair. My wise friend who reminded me not to confuse people’s outsides for their insides was onto something: we have to remember, every single day, that probably all of those people who seem to have it all under control are just as flummoxed and frayed as we feel.

I think the post has other wise things to say, about finding things to do for “work” that we love, such that they don’t feel like work (I’m nowhere near that point). The line that strikes the deepest chord is me is that the best we can hope for is to fall in love with the living of life and enjoy the ride.

I think, ultimately, that that is the big prize. To love our lives. To accept them, in all of their mess and inadequacy and moments of blazing splendor.