Tag: life lessons

The Archetypes of Story

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“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” – Neil Gaiman

This was originally published on 7/5/2023. Heads up – you may have already read this!

My kids have been clamoring for me to tell them stories at bedtime. They don’t want made up stories, they want real stories.

One of their favorite protagonists is Simon the Bad Cat. He was a character with a capital “C” – I adopted him from a neighbor when she moved. He proceeded to get into all sorts of trouble breaking into other people’s houses, picking on my dogs, and getting into cat fights. He lived a full life of 19 years and left behind a treasure trove of stories.

Telling these stories has made me think of the hypothesis that are a limited number of plot lines for our stories. I’ve heard this theory in several different ways from nine to twelve archetypal stories. But drawing from overview on Wikipedia of the work of Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories here they are:

  • Overcoming the monster
  • Rags to riches
  • The quest
  • Voyage and return
  • Comedy
  • Tragedy
  • Rebirth

Can I fit the Simon stories into these categories? Here are our favorite bad cat stories:

Rebirth: Simon the cat got a claw stuck in between his shoulder blades while fighting another cat. It abscessed and made him so sick that I had to take him to the vet so they can drain the wound. Simon died on the operating table and they had to use kitty CPR to bring him back. Did the hero return home transformed as a wiser cat? Well, he did mend his fighting ways so that we never had to drain an abscess again.

Comedy: Five doors down was a neighbor named Steve who hated Simon because he was always getting into his stuff and messing it up. But it was a love/hate relationship because he noticed how smart Simon was as well. One day when Steve was showing some new tenants around the shared laundry room, he told them they must never leave the outside door open because there’s a bad cat that would get in. They pointed to a shelf right about Steve’s shoulder and asked, “Like that cat there?” and Steve turned around to see Simon smugly listening to his speech.

 Voyage and return: Simon the cat had a habit of breaking into houses and garages that he subsequently couldn’t get out of until someone opened a door. So I was used to him occasionally being gone for a night or two. But when he went missing for twelve days, I did all I could to find him: putting up posters, walking round the neighborhood calling for him, calling the pet shelter. Finally, I accepted that he was gone forever and gave away his food. On day 13, Simon nonchalantly walked up to the back door and demanded to be let in.

Overcoming the monster: I met Simon when I had a 150 pound dog, a gentle mastiff named Samantha. When we’d go out for a walk in the morning, Simon would hide in a bush, then jump out and smack Samantha on the rear. Then having “overcome the monster” (or at least scaring her half to death), he’d proceed to join us for our 12 block walk through the neighborhood.

Telling these stories to my children, I wonder if it is just a silly ritual. But I believe it helps them at a deeper level to make meaning out of their lives and days. Maybe one day when they are struggling with a monster or experiencing the rebirth and renewal that sometimes comes with life, there will be a niggling of a Simon story that reminds them they aren’t alone on their journey.

Perhaps it’ll even help them understand my story of the quest and how that led me to have them as a single parent. Even if it just creates a basis for loving stories, I believe it will help them to live fuller and more imaginative lives.

Don’t you still love a good story?

Writing About the Shadow Side

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I am not willing to be a smaller version of myself just to be with you.

When I wrote a recent post about the bad cat I used to own, I realized how much fun it is to talk about the dastardly characters in our lives. And simultaneously, I thought that I don’t often write about bad characters.

Fortunately, it’s mostly because there aren’t that many in my life right now. I work from home, my kids are in schools that are well-suited for them, I meditate daily to irrigate my irritations, so I’m generally upbeat and resilient. Quite frankly, the primary bad character in my life is me when I’m tired, usually the hour before my kids go to bed, and then I just try to keep my mouth shut as much as possible.  

But I wonder if it’s also because I’m uncomfortable writing about the shadow side. So, in an effort to understand the people that I’ve learned a lot from being in conflict with, I’ve tried to write about them with what I hope is no intent to harm as Vicki has explained how to do so well.

My ex

There’s no doubt that I give my ex-husband a good “bad boy” airing out every now and again. His infidelities, gift for projection, and overall lack of self-awareness provide for some pretty good fodder.

But I’ve also done enough of my own work to see how I contributed to the failure of our marriage. His rocky childhood that left him insecurely attached made him cling to me. My tendency towards independence and stubbornness made me run from him. I hurt him deeply when I said I wouldn’t have kids with him, just one more chip to add to his shoulder.

Yet at the same time, I am grateful we didn’t have kids together. In fact, I’m so grateful, that it provides a lot of power and motivation for the long days of parenting. All of that makes it pretty easy to wish him well.

My sister

I haven’t talked to my sister since she sued my brother for a million dollars. She didn’t talk to my mom for five years after my mom suggested that she settle the suit (which they eventually did). My sister is a litigator which might make this more understandable because she’s just using the toolset she’s most comfortable with.

But our relationship has been fraught my entire life. She hated me growing up and sometimes I think that the times when she’s liked me and I’ve behaved in outrageous ways to try to secure and retain her affection have been the worst.

I don’t feel like I can walk some safe middle ground between my siblings – my sister forces me to take a side and if it’s not wholeheartedly hers, then its not acceptable. On the eve of me going into labor with my first child, my sister suggested that if I liked my brother so much, I should sell my house, give her the money that my brother owed her, and he could owe me instead. Any consideration of where I should live with my new baby was not her problem in this scenario.

Yet my mom wants peace in the family and I get that. She’s worried my sister will be all alone when she passes. I see the wound of belonging that I believe my sister has carried forever. Growing up in a family where everyone is pretty happy and optimistic, and she couldn’t talk about that fact that her feelings didn’t match, and I think it left her angry and disillusioned. I feel for her and yet until she repairs that wound a bit, I can’t swim the undertow of her anger with two children in my arms. I’m not sure I could survive her undertow without children either.

My former business partner

I still wonder why my business partner decided to tell me about my husband’s infidelities. It wasn’t because he was worried about the ethics of it. He’d slept with too many married women for that to seem like a logical guess. And he was better friends with my ex-husband than with me. He must have either been angry at my ex or wanted me to think he was a hero.

As a very charming and smart narcissist, he made my life pretty bumpy for a long while. Not really the infidelity thing but the running a business with someone who believes the rules don’t apply to him. But like my ex, so many years have passed and I’m so grateful to be out of the situation, that I mostly feel appreciative for him for giving me the impetus for changing my business and personal life completely. In fact, he drove me directly to meditation and I couldn’t be happier about that.

My list of bad characters have taught me a lot. Yep, because they aren’t in my life, I have pretty bland blog posts – nothing like the stories I had when they were front and center. I think I’m okay with that.

I’m also thinking about writing about bad guys because of the podcast Vicki and I did with Mark Petruska. We talk about his fantastic eco-thriller, No Time For Kings, and how Mark, as a happy optimist, manage to conjure up such a dark character as Drake. It’s a great podcast if you have a moment to listen.


Search (and subscribe!) for Sharing the Heart of the Matter on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or Pocket Casts or click here to listen on Anchor: Episode 18: No Time For Kings with Mark Petruska

(featured photo from Pexels)

Dear Mom

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“Life doesn’t come with a manual. It comes with a mother.” – unknown

It seems like when I see a headline on the news relating to something that happened to a mom, it starts with something like, “Mom of two is ____” (fill in the blank with missing, found guilty, bitten by a dog and so on). She also might be a real estate agent, banker, engineer or some other profession but it seems in my non-scientific survey, that they always lead with her parental status.

Which I take to be evidence of the importance of mother figures. This post is a both a celebration of moms and also a chance for me, as a somewhat new-ish mom, to learn what is the essential stuff of motherhood.

If you feel comfortable, please tell me in the comments what was the most important lesson your mom or a mother figure taught you and/or if you are a mom, what is the primary thing you want your kids to get or learn from you. I’ll compile a list and publish it.

Here’s my start for the list:

My mom taught me to speak and write. Her precision with language is extraordinary so just by listening to her and having her guidance, I learned a great deal about speaking English properly. It’s only in later years that I’ve realized that my mom only speaks what she believes to be true, which is another dimension of her gift to not only be precise in how she says something but also in what she says.  

As for being a mom: I observe my kids eat better, communicate more clearly and follow the rules more closely when they are with people other than me. I sometimes, just for an instant, wish they would want to step it up and impress me. Then I remember what an honor it is to hold their fragile conception of love like a baby chick in my hand. When they are grown and have learned to behave and handle themselves well, I hope I’ve created a space in each of them that knows you don’t have to perform to be loved.

(featured photo is of my mom, my son and me)

(quote comes from a post on Philosophy through Photographs blog)

Packing Lists Are Not Optional

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“Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow.” – unknown

My kids and I were recently playing in a small space nestled on the top floor of house that we don’t use often. My daughter caught me picking some dried playdough out of the carpet, looked at me and said, “I was younger then so I didn’t know any better.”

Ha, if I had a nickel for all the things I could say about that in my life! That thought prompted me to think of what I would say that about. Lessons like:

Not believing that the sign meant it when it said 45mph for the curve.

Not knowing that wool shrank when you put your mom’s borrowed skirt in the dryer.

You shouldn’t ever try to park a U-Haul by yourself.

Thinking that sleeping pads were just for comfort and packing lists were just suggestions.

The last one in particular made me chuckle. It came from the time in college when spent 5 weeks in Ecuador on a study trip – 2 weeks hiking in the Andes, 2 weeks living with the Cofani Indian tribe in the jungle and 1 week camping on a remote beach near the Galapagos Islands.

In the weeks before my trip, I kept choosing to spend all my time with my boyfriend instead of preparing so it came down to the night before I was to leave that I really started to get everything together. I looked at the packing list and was surprised at the entry for sleeping pad. I hadn’t spent much time hiking or camping and my family didn’t have any so I decided they were optional, probably for comfort, and I skipped it.

It wasn’t until the first night we spent camping in the Andes at 12,000 feet that I understood why sleeping pads are necessary. Lying on that very cold ground without anything but the thin nylon of the tent to insulate me from below, I absolutely froze in my sleeping bag.

Fortunately one of the items on the list that I did manage to pack was plastic garbage bags. The group leader showed me the next day how you could wrap your body in garbage bags for additional warmth. That trick got me through those nights in the mountains – just barely.

I’ve been very diligent in my packing for expeditions ever since. But I look back on that and think, “I was younger then so I didn’t know any better.” 😊

I’m guessing that for every person who reads this, there is a life lesson that pops up for you. Please leave it in the comments if you want to share!

High-Tech Drama

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“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain

I’ve been listening to The DropOut podcast about the trial of Elizabeth Holmes that is starting this week and it’s got me hooked. Elizabeth Holmes is the woman who dropped out of Stanford after one year and started Theranos, a company she said would revolutionize the blood testing industry because with just one drop of blood they could analyze for up to 200 factors. She raised billions of dollars of investor money, signed a huge deal with Walgreens, was on the cover of Fortune magazine, and lived a 5 star lifestyle. The technology never worked. Now she’s standing trial for 12 counts of fraud and facing 20 years in prison. She maintains her innocence saying this is the resistance you meet when you try to change the world.

This is not the uplifting, inspiring content that I usually listen to but I find it so reminiscent of my early career in tech that I can’t helped be taken in by the characters. When I graduated from college with my electrical engineering degree, I spent a lot of time working on projects as a consultant at Microsoft in its early days. They were growing so fast they gobbled up engineers. The narcissistic, massive egos, show-off-smart, bullying personalities they describe at Theranos remind me of some of the people I worked with back then.

Microsoft revolutionized the idea of giving stock to employees and they did it at all levels of the company so when the company did well, everyone made money. It was a big change from the old days when the engineers were paid a salary and when a company was successful, it was usually the sales people and the executives that got rich. At Microsoft in those early days when the stock went up so fast, everyone was getting rich. I remember working at a trade show with a Microsoft employee who just sat and watched the stock ticker all day so that they could calculate what “they made” during that day.

It made their employees very loyal and very proud but created a lot of arrogance and petty behavior.  I observed people who met with resistance to an idea and would throw a fit announcing that “they were going to retire.” Usually it was someone that was in their mid-30’s. <eye-roll> Once I working on a tech conference where we were practicing the keynote speech and a MS executive didn’t like the version of the script he was given. He shamed and bullied the person who had stayed up all night working on the recent revisions in such a loud and vocal way that it made me physically feel ill just to watch.

I probably learned more about human behavior, leadership and integrity in those days than all the rest of my career combined. I don’t work with those types of clients any more and other than the lessons that I’m grateful to have gleaned, I don’t miss those days. My 6-year-old daughter said something about someone in the news the other day – “Well, they are famous so they must be good.” We had to take a minute to talk about how character and values don’t necessarily come with fame and fortune.

In the coming months we’ll find out whether the jury will hold Elizabeth Holmes accountable for the billions of dollars she lost or whether that’s the price of doing business. In the years since Theranos went defunct in 2018, she’s started a relationship with a man from a wealthy hotelier family and they had a baby born just 6 weeks before the trial started. However it turns out, listening to the details as they are presented, being reminded of my days watching the power of money makes me so grateful for my life now in the slow lane where I earn my living with no drama attached.