Tag: relationships

Do One Thing Well

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“A year from now, what will I wish I had done today?” – unknown

Deep into the section on expectations in Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart, I had a huge a-ha moment. She was talking about a conversation with her husband in which they both confessed to each other that they had an easier time parenting on the weekends they did it solo. Because they set aside their expectations to be able to do anything other than parent for that weekend.

This put a shape to the experience I have had as a single parent. Because I never expect that someone else will take the night shift or be there on the weekend, I have had to set really clear boundaries on the work and hobbies that I do because I know I won’t be able to duck out for a couple of hours.

That means that nights and weekends, I pretty much focus on hanging out with my kids. I do get a few chores around the house done with their “help.” The tradeoff for giving up Saturday morning hiking with my friends has been the gift of not believing I can try to do both things.

I know many of my parenting friends do an incredibly great job of splitting up the parental labor. One person will do the 9am-noon shift on Saturdays so that the other can go swimming and then they switch and the other gets “time off.” I have a pretty good inkling that if I was doing parenting with a partner that I would try for that approach and be a lot more confused about what I could handle.

I don’t know who said “Do one thing at a time and do it well.” My mom? Winnie-the-Pooh? Or maybe it’s not ascribed to a particular person because everyone who has learned the wisdom repeats it. When I wrote the post a couple of weeks ago about being invited to climb a mountain this summer, so many of my dear and wise blogging friends reminded me that parenting goes fast and there will likely be time to return to my hobbies later.

I believe that at some point I will have a partner again and more personal freedom. However, there isn’t anything I would trade for this uncomplicated time where I learned to really spend time with my children and enjoy it. Sometimes not having help forces us to distinctly draw boundaries we wouldn’t know to set otherwise.

(featured photo from Pexels)

I Haven’t Tried Anything and Nothing Works

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“I believe you have to walk through vulnerability to get to courage.” – Brené Brown

I was talking with a friend the other day about her marriage. On the surface everything is fine but underneath one partner feels the pull towards adventure and the other partner doesn’t want anything to change. In fact as we talk through different possibilities of things that could give the relationship new ground – therapy, different types of dates, a shift in the balance of things – the answer was no to everything because it was too threatening.

It reminded me of a man I used to work with who would describe his team as running around with their hair on fire whenever there was a problem, which since it was a technology company, was often. If you asked them what they tried, he’d joke that they’d say, “I haven’t tried anything and nothing works!”

My friend’s situation also reminded me of my marriage after my husband’s infidelities were revealed and we were trying to work on it. He sat around and stoked his anger at his friend who had told me. Meanwhile I was casting about trying to find ways to heal. It felt like his check-ins consisted of asking me if I was better yet while he pursued nothing to find change and healing in himself.

While that might sound overly harsh, let me also admit that I’ve been the person in a relationship too frozen with insecurity and fear at what I might find to look under the hood. I’m thinking of a relationship I had in my 20’s where I found it too threatening to take that step towards introspection so that I preferred breaking apart rather than seeing whether we could alter our patterns and change together.

In the work scenario, I know it was our office dynamic that led to people not being willing to try anything because there was a company culture that was big on blame. Stepping your toe out to fix something could result in exposing yourself to fire. Creating an environment where it’s safe to be vulnerable seems like the best way to lead people to change, whether that be a family or a workplace.

Thinking about my friend and her marriage, I think relationships often set us up in dichotomy with each other. The adventurous one – the stalwart one. The one who wants to look – the one who wants to avert their eyes. So I silently root from the sidelines that they can cultivate a little more vulnerability to face change together.

I understand the fear that looking inside might reveal something ugly but I’ve come to learn it’s the not looking that is the real threat. If you don’t change from the inside, life will often change you from the outside. “I haven’t tried anything and nothing works” was a great company joke but it always required someone brave enough to break the trend to fix the problem.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Facing Our Fears Together

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“Be a lamp, a lifeboat or a ladder.” – Rumi

At bedtime last night my 6-year-old confessed to me that she runs ahead on the way to bed so that she can check under the bed for thieves. Not burglars, not robbers but thieves. But it was such an intimate moment that I didn’t ask about the word selection.

It struck me as I was listening what a privilege it is to hear someone else’s fears. Because what seems so real to us can feel childish to someone else. I remember confessing shortly after my daughter was born to a friend who doesn’t have kids that this was the hardest thing I’d ever done. My friend laughed, not unkindly but dismissively and I felt so exposed that I couldn’t say more.

Conversely I have friends to whom I can tell my biggest fears and know they won’t talk me out of them but instead will help me walk through them. In this way each monster we’ve faced together has been a bridge to closeness. It’s created the bond of facing things together.

When I’ve been the one entrusted with a friend’s hardship, I feel the honor of providing reassurance. Life has taught me we all fear different things but trust is built when we honor that they are real to the person who faces them.

So I told my daughter that it’s unlikely a thief would be patient enough to wait under the bed but I’d help her check. And I told her that when I was her age that I feared snakes under my bed. She thought that was weird until I told her that I had a prized set of four National Geographic books – puppies, kittens, frogs and snakes. I loved the puppies and kittens but I was fascinated by the snakes. So I could totally picture the hooded King Cobra ready to strike unless I cleared the bed by a good margin.

We talked about the probability that when her little brother is 6-years-old, he’ll probably have his own thing that he fears and she prepared her answer for how she’ll reassure him. Hand-in-hand we talked about facing our fears, looked under the bed and then had a great night’s sleep.

(featured photo by Pexels)

Fantasy Climbs

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“One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art in conducting oneself in lower regions by memory of what one has seen higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” – Rene Daumal

I felt my phone ping with a message while I was trying to get dinner on the table the other night. At that moment, one little person wanted raw carrots instead of the perfectly grilled carrots and needed more hummus. The other little person was tired and having a moment of personal crisis and didn’t want to eat at all. As I was shuttling between kitchen and table, I snuck a glance at the message. It was my friend inviting me on a mountain climb of Mt. Adams with him and his son this summer.

Oh, it was so easy to envision myself away from that disastrous dinner and instead picture eating instant noodles from a tin cup on the side of a mountain at our base camp at 9,750 feet. I felt like it would be a complete luxury to say “yes” to climbing and trade in the work of parenting for a couple of days of slogging up a mountain with only the sound of our breathing and our footsteps crunching in the snow.

Even though I could rationalize how safe a climb Mt. Adams is with no crevasses or avalanche danger and rest in the reassurance of climbing with a friend that I’ve summitted that mountain twice with, I knew I’d have to say “no.”

Because even a safe mountain climb means being on the side of a 12,281 foot mountain for a couple of days, exposed to weather and human frailty. And in the very slight case that anything happened and I got hurt or dead, I’d be so angry at myself for leaving behind two young kids. Even if I was dead – I’d be dead and angry!

It highlighted for me the wide chasm between who I am now and who I used to be before kids. First of all, I’m entirely flattered that my friend thinks I could make it up Mt. Adams.

Secondly, it was a moment of realization of how completely my priorities have changed thinking about how I use my time, not only for the climb but also the commitment it would take me to get in shape to climb again.

But most of all, it made me feel yet again the wonderful work of our friends as they hold space for us when we are otherwise occupied, off on our quests to find meaning or just not feeling ourselves. Those friends that we can journey through all the phases of life and still find something to talk about with are a sacred gift.

So I told my friend, with a huge heaping of gratitude, that I’d have to take a rain check until I get my kids in shape and we can all climb together. In lieu of me going, his son is going to borrow my backpack and ice axe so a little bit of me is going by proxy instead. Maybe I’ll get to send my tin cup also so it can have dinner on the mountain too!

(photo is mine – of sunset from base camp on Mt. Adams)

Feeling Things All the Way Through

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“What is not expressed is depressed.” – Mark Nepo

The other day our honorary grandfather said to my two-year-old son who was fussing over a circumstance in his life, “Boys don’t cry.” While it was said totally genially and as a way to humor a child out of a mood, there was no doubt that he believed that mantra.

Which brought to mind the quote included at the top of this post by author Mark Nepo, “What is not expressed is depressed.” The longer that I live, the more that I have come to understand that emotions wreak havoc if not allowed to be felt all the way through. It brought to mind a comment I heard from emotions researcher Barbara Frederickson that all emotions have utility – sadness and depression when experienced in the typical course of life often tell us to stop doing what we are doing.

It’s when we refuse letting them tell us things that we shut down our own ability to listen to our inner source of knowledge. I spent years doing that when I was married because numbing my emotions was easier than taking the steps to acknowledge that under the surface of my positivity that I was miserable.

I haven’t gotten much better at vocalizing my less enthusiastic emotions since then but I have gotten better at recognizing them. The other day I was really resistant to working on a particular client project and internally thought, “Wow, I can’t stand this project.” And that strong note which often doesn’t arise in me made me realize that the way this particular project is structured doesn’t work for me. Observing that, I could acknowledge I won’t do it this way again.

Watching my son with his honorary grandfather reminded me of a passage I read in Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner. In it he points out the similarities between old age and childhood – the body does not support everything you want to do so you learn to play, you aren’t at an age where you have to prove yourself and:

Very young children and very old children also seem to be in touch with something that the rest of the pack has lost track of. There is something bright and still about them at their best, like the sun before breakfast. Both the old and the young get scared sometimes about what lies ahead of them, and with good reason, but you can’t help feeling that whatever inner goldenness they’re in touch with will see them through in the end.

Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner

The great thing about toddlers is that there seems to be very little artifice to the emotions they share. In the course of learning to regulate them, they express what strikes them at the moment. Boys do cry as do girls, and then they move on. It’s like watching master class on authentic expression and I can’t help but be impressed and learn a little bit more every day.

Foul

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“Forget injuries. Never forget kindnesses.” – Confucius

This week I got the opportunity to fill in as a lunchtime playground monitor at my daughter’s school. When the kindergartners were out, one of them ran up and said there was a boy that was hurt where they were playing soccer. He was surrounded by a group of interested and supportive onlookers and as I knelt to examine his sore side, I heard:

Boy #1: I don’t think that was a red card. [I assumed they were talking about the foul system in soccer.]

Boy #2: Might not have even been a yellow card.

Boy #3: I was just trying to kick the ball.

Our injured kindergartner was sore but nothing serious and the boys provided a very nice escort to the door so that he could go to the office for some ice. I think they all earned an award for good sportsmanship.

That’s what struck me overall about the kerfuffles I stepped in to help on. Noel thought Clara ignored her. Greyson thought Connor attacked him. David thought Julian yelled in his ear. Maybe it’s because I was thinking about apologies this week, but in all the cases when I got the parties together to talk, the kids weren’t defensive and it made it so easy to talk through. There are so many things kids do well – although maybe kicking the ball and only the ball isn’t one of them!

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Flow of Life

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“Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.” – Yogi Bhajan

In 2014, I had worked up the nerve to have a child on my own. I’d chosen a fertility clinic, gone through all the screening and work-up process so by November 6th, I was sitting at my desk signing the last document I needed to begin the invitro fertilization process. I clearly remember that moment at my desk with my beloved dog at my feet thinking wondrously, “Life is about to change.”

Then the next day I got a call from my mom that my dad had died in a bicycling accident in Tucson. Sh!t! That wasn’t how life was supposed to change.

Seven years later I think through all the changes, big and small:

I have a beautiful baby girl.

My gorgeous dog dies.

My mom moves to be only 1.5 miles from me.

I miscarry a baby.

I get pregnant again and have a beautiful baby boy.

The pandemic happens.

My daughter turns 5 and goes to Kindergarten.

Kindergarten is virtual.

My son learns to walk.

And it goes on and on. Perhaps it’s because my kids change so quickly that’s making me learn to just enjoy the flow. One minute they have a habit that’s irritating me – like playing with water at the kitchen sink and getting it all over the floor and the next they’ve moved on and can now zip their own coats.

Yesterday I got a delightful message from someone I went to high school with offering me and my family free accommodations in Colorado for 4 nights in April. Yay – what a fun surprise. And it was also my dad’s birthday so he was close to my thoughts and I missed him.

The longer I go on, the more I realize that this is the flow of life – we go up and over some things and under others. It’s when I try to grab on to some branch to cling on and stay in one place that I suffer most. The more I work at my spiritual depth and faith, the easier it becomes to stay centered in the flow and live it all with openness and curiosity.

What a ride!

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Outer View

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“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell

I sent this picture to my mom. She wrote back that it looked like something that could be on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. I laughed because I snapped it to capture one sweet moment that was somewhat unusual in the typical the after-dinner chaos.

Life always looks easier from the outside, doesn’t it?

I think of a picture I took of a friend at a beach on a school field trip (back a few years ago when we could do those). She was sitting on a log with her two children nestled in her arms and I texted the picture to her adding that she looked like the quintessential mom. Her reality was probably that she was struggling to keep her children warm on a cold June day and to feed them without dropping anything into the sand.

Which is right? The inner view or the outer view?

The more I meditate, the more that I’ve come to believe that the outer view holds great promise. When meditation helps me drop the dialogue in my head that is always taking me out of the moment by planning for the next thing I need to do or recovering from the last thing that went wrong, I can see the outer view. Like in the case of the picture, I was still recalibrating after getting my kids to stop vying for a turn on the piano and also calculating how long til we started our bedtime routines.

It seems like there is a healthy and an unhealthy way to think of the outer view of our lives. The unhealthy way is to work hard to make everything appear in a certain way and then use other people’s perceptions to check to see if we are meeting up.

The healthy way is to get a glimpse every once in a while of what a trusted person sees in order to be reminded of what is so delightful about this moment.

So here’s a moment of my picture perfect life. There are other moments that aren’t as sweet but I bet when I look back on this time, this is how I’ll remember it.

Not Love Actually

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“Don’t be afraid of the solitude that comes from raising your standards.” – Ebonee Davis

Driving in the car the other day with Miss O, I checked in with her on her playground crush. This was the young man, Will, that I wrote about in the COVID crush post, who lines up on an adjacent heart, 6-feet-apart on the playground to go into a different 1st grade classroom.

When he initially told her that he had a crush on her back in October, Miss O said she had one on him too. But when I checked back in the other day, she told me,  “the interest had gone away.”

I asked what happened. She explained he started hanging around another kid, a kid she thinks is a bully because he yells “SORRY” when he apologizes. And she changed her attitude because the playground supervisor, Mr. C, is handing out awards for being good in line and Will is always messing around.

She stopped finding him attractive because she doesn’t like his friends and he wasn’t a good influence?? My job as a parent is done…. 😊

(featured photo from Pexels)

Twenty-Five Words or Less

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“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” – Harriet Tubman

I was intrigued by a question in one of my meditation books, Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner. “If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?”

I came up with two versions.

Life is a never-ending raffle. Curiosity buys you tickets. Love enables you to turn them in. And, most importantly — you have to be present to win.

OR

Thank you. You have shown up, laughed with me, made me think, kept me company when it was dark. But that’s not why I love you. I love you because you are amazing.

What would you say?