Choose to Do You

I’ve been experimenting. For the past week, before I make any decision—even the smallest—I ask myself: What do I want to do?

Sounds like a ridiculously obvious way to make a decision. But try it. In this culture of shoulds and musts, it can be shockingly difficult. Shocking because this is also a culture that encourages you to “do you”—so you think you’re doing what you want to do. At least I did.

I'm not one of those women who selflessly devotes all her time to her children or who is married to her job. I love my crew and I like my work, but I make sure I zip out for yoga class at least twice a week. I make time for coffee with my girls. I’ll buy myself something pretty when I get a notion. I make time for my own pursuits.

But for many of us, doing what you want to do means fitting your stuff around someone’s staff meeting, someone’s piano lessons, someone’s doctor’s appointment, someone’s nap schedule. And that someone isn’t you.

This week I realized it was impossible for me to make a decision without first thinking about what was on Said Husband’s schedule or Little Bitty’s wish list or someone else's agenda. I’d said yes to baby-sitting, an out-of-town shopping trip, a graduation ceremony, and a pot-luck before I could stop and think of myself.

The more you start working your stuff around someone else’s stuff, the further back you fall in line and the more likely your own stuff is to be bumped or back burnered. If you’re not careful, you start to forget what it is that you really want or like to do. You start to think that your happiness lies in how well Junior performed at the piano recital or how much lower hubby’s cholesterol is since you’ve been cooking more.

And you are happy about all that. You love these people. You are glad to support them.
The problem is not saying yes to other people. The problem is when it means you’re saying no to you.

What about me? That is the question that’s going to stop you from drifting into a totally co-dependent state where you cease to exist outside of the people around you—an invisible state that evolves from ignoring your own gifts, talents, passions and desires until they finally atrophy, shrink and wither.

My friend Renai, who does a fabulous job of executing her own creative energy—despite running around after an ailing mother, an ailing man and two busy kids—admits that “doing you” is a hard job to manage.

“I was thinking the other day that I know why women/moms just opt to put our needs on the back burner or nix them altogether,” she says. “It's damn hard. I always feel like I'm trying to squeeze in a little bit for me and not a day goes by when I just don't want to throw my hands up and say, “Forget it.” But I eek out 5 minutes here and an hour there; maybe that's the way it has to be for now.

The point is that she’s...eeking. Which means she’s asking herself the magic question. And she’s answering it. And she’s doing the hardest part of the experiment: choosing to do what she knows her own heart desires.

There will be folks who find this amazingly selfish and practically impossible. In the real world, no one can just do whatever she wants to do, we think. But that’s guilt-rooted thinking. Instead, think of it this way: what you want to do is what your spirit calls for. And if you’re moving in Spirit, everything else will move in Divine Order. That makes way for the possibility that you can do what you want to do WITHOUT HURTING ANYONE ELSE. You can do what you want to do AND everyone around you will be fine.

It’s true. At least it has been for me, for this week.

Falling and Failing in Love

We’ve fallen out of love. It happens to everyone, apparently. I’ve read at least one expert opinion that is doesn’t take but 18 months of constant contact to change the chemistry from blazing to blasé. They also say it’s not the end of the world—nor necessarily the end of the relationship. Couples can forge strong, lasting relationships based on a new kind of love—one that simmers comfortably, even if it never returns to a boil.

(According to Reva Seth, author of First Comes Marriage: Modern Relationship Advice from the Wisdom of Arranged Marriages, many people in arranged marriages seem to have the opposite experience. They enter a relationship with no expectation of feeling “in love” but grow closer and more loving over time. Lucky them.)

All that sounds reassuring. But when you watch your partner’s mouth move to form the words "I'm not in love with you," it’s like being dropped into an elevator shaft—without the benefit of an elevator. And it’s just as sickening a sensation when you have to admit that the feeling is largely mutual.

That said, my world actually did not end when I got this news. Said Husband is very adamant that “in love” and “love” are two different things and that he retains the latter feeling for me. (That, too, is mutual.) And we’re both optimistic—and have been assured by many folks who’ve been married longer than we have—that this is just the proverbial “bad patch."

In a way, I’m glad all this is out in the open. Call me odd, but for me hearing the worst is better than imagining the worst. For months, we’ve had a hard time talking, touching, even looking at each other. I just couldn’t figure out why—so my mind ran wild with unresolved speculation. But somehow for me, once I know what I’m actually dealing with—the cold, honest truth of it—I feel like there ought to be something I can DO about it. I feel like I have some power in the situation.

So I did what I tend to do when my life feels like it’s running away with me: I sat down and starting writing, trying to map out a resolution. I decided that perhaps we can push past this phase if we stop wallowing in the painful, disappointing feeling of it and start thinking about what is really going on. To that end, I’ve made myself a list of questions for each of us to ponder.

1. What are the things that I’m not in love with? (Buy a fresh ream of paper and make a list.)

2. Are these things annoyances or things I truly disrespect? (Get over the annoyances. Deal with the deep stuff.)

3. Can any of the “disrespect” stuff be discussed and resolved? Am I willing to understand these things differently (i.e. from the other person's perspective) and accept them, too?

4. What are the things that I do love and respect about my once-beloved? (Make another list and really do your best to fill up another ream of paper.)

5. If I weigh these things with an open heart, are they substantial enough to outweigh the other?

6. Can I be patient enough and stay open enough to make sure the answers I give to these questions are really, deeply true?

I figure that if I really stay deep and contemplate these questions, only one thing can happen: We’ll discover that there are things about one another that just cannot be overcome. And those things will be the ones that tell us, with certainty, that were not meant to make a life together. Or they will be the ones that remind us that nothing can tear us apart.

My objective side says that, either way, we’ll benefit from having a clearer idea of how to move forward. The optimistic side of me hopes that the process will reveal something beautiful and valuable—a new way of thinking that will open our hearts wide to love again.

The Easy Button

My good friend Renai and I were commiserating the other day about the trials of 21st-century school selection. Gone, for us modern mamas, are the days when you packed a peanut- butter sandwich in a Holly Hobby lunch box and sent your child off to the school down the street. Now we have School Choice. Which means we have to choose: Public school, private school, neighborhood school, magnet school, charter school, home school, even un-school.

Can we afford private school? (No.) Can we get financial aid? (The answer for me, after turning over more paperwork for preschool than I did for grad school: No.) So, charter school? Magnet school? For magnets, you're supposed to attend the Choice Fair to learn about your options. Then you have to go to open houses at each of the schools you might be interested in. I thought open house meant a chat with the principal and a peek into some classrooms. Um, no.

Tuesday I spent an hour and a half at a school taking in a Power Point presentation. Listening to gifted kids describe their day. Participating in a Q&A with a panel of teachers. Hearing from the “enrichments” specialists (who were called art and music teachers in my day). Listening to the school band—the elementary school band—play three selections. (Three.) Walking down halls where outside each classroom door is the teacher’s name and the name of the college(s) from which she or he graduated. (As if the teacher’s alumni status would matter to my child who will be five when she enrolls.)

That’s if she enrolls. Because, this being a “choice” school, we have to fill out an application, participate in a lottery and wait to see if we’re selected. So, after having participated in the exhausting process of exploring all my options and making the very best possible choice for my child—I have, in fact, no choice in whether she attends the school or not. (Of course, if she doesn’t “win” the lottery, she can go to her neighborhood school. In which case we’ll have to choose whether she should go to the year-round school or the traditional school….)

What I want to know is this: Where is the easy button?

Why has everything gotten so complicated? I don’t mean just the school stuff. Right now I’ve got to make choices about my career, about what kind of car to buy, about which contractor should build the French drain in my yard, even about marriage. (We think of marriage as being a choice you make once, but I’m learning that even that is a choice I have to keep making over and over again.) And each decision seems to require research, reading, evaluation, pricing things out, mulling things over and double-checking your facts.

Some things—like where your kid should go to school—warrants a bit of research and rumination. But so many other things just aren’t worth the effort. How much time did I spend in the baking goods aisle the other day trying to decide whether to buy natural sugar, organic sugar, free-trade sugar, dried sugar cane or to go to the nearest Harris Teeter for a bag plain old Dixie Crystals?

Sometimes the choices are difficult because we don’t make the one choice that could make things easier: The choice to simplify. Choosing to join the one committee that you feel passionate about instead of spreading yourself over too many obligations. Letting the kid play in the yard instead of signing her up for nine different extra-curriculars. Skipping the obligatory luncheon. Letting Saturday actually be a day off.

What would be wrong with choosing the thing that is simpler but just-as-good? The evening I bought a rotisserie chicken and served a bagged salad for dinner with my friend, I had just as nice a time as I did at last year’s multi-course brunch for 30 on New Year’s morning. (In fact, the impromptu chicken dinner was probably nicer because my back wasn’t aching from standing up washing collard greens until after midnight the day before.)

If you’re not careful, doing the easy thing can seem like cheating. We think we're supposed to do the thing that takes the most effort, the most time and the most life blood in order to prove that we’re doing our all and giving our best. Hey, I don’t have anything against doing the best you can. But sometimes—probably most times—what we do best is what we do with the most ease. Sometimes we need to give ourselves a break, see the rat race for what it is and take the easy way out.

Just say know.

You want him to know. Know what? Whatever. Just know. Know that sexy lingerie seems like an intimate gift, if he really knew you intimately he’d know you’d rather have the newest book by your favorite author. That you’d die for your children, but you’d give anything if he’d take them completely away for a long weekend. That though it looks easy to keep all the balls in the air, it’s nearly killing you. That you’re worried. All the time. About everything. And that it would mean so much to you that, even if he doesn’t know, he wants to know.

When you call your best friend and utter half a sentence, she can finish the rest of it. Because she knows. But she’s not your partner. It’s not her life you’re sharing. It’s his. And you want him to get it.

But he doesn’t.

Some experts say he can’t. Sounds sexist, but some research says he’s not programmed to think the way you do. It's a fact of genetics that what seems logical to you just doesn’t make sense to him. (No, he’s not nuts. He’s just wired differently.)

That’s not to say that he can’t learn. With some practice, he can start at least to hear. But that’s his work to do, if he chooses it.

Your job is to stop thinking he’s just going to know. In fact, to quit worrying about whether he’s going to know or not. Your job is to make sure you know.

I’ve found that since I’ve been partnered—and especially since I had a child—it’s harder to think about myself as an individual. Somehow, when I start to think about what I need, what I want or what I want to do, the needs and wants of the rest of my crew creep into my reflections and decisions. It’s as if, when I married and had a baby, my own desires got taken from me and poured into a mixing bowl with my family’s. And for the life of me, I can’t unmix myself.

Maybe that’s how it’s meant to be. But I just don’t want to completely lose myself in the mix. I don’t want to forget what I want. I don’t want to forget what I know about myself.

I believe you need to know your true needs—from the inside out—and to speak them first to yourself. To look in the mirror and say:
I need four days alone.
I need cotton pajamas and the new Toni Morrison novel.
I need to find a way to rest my worries.
I need to stop needing to juggle.
I need to let some of this Super Woman stuff go.

You need to know. To admit what you know. Then give yourself that. Without guilt. Without apology. Without self judgment. Accepting that it’s okay to need what you need. Understanding that giving yourself what you need is okay, too.

Insist Upon Your Life

“You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die or insist upon your life.” —Odetta

Odetta, the legendary folk singer, died on Tuesday at the age of 77. Her interview for the New York Times' "The Last Word" is a video worth watching. She is a beautiful, strong, wise and elegant woman in the way the Earth herself is beautiful, strong, wise and elegant.

Sounds Like a Plan

I like to think of myself as a planner, since I operate best when I can have things laid out before me. But, in truth, I don’t plan so much as I actively look for and affirm interesting opportunities to present themselves. The plans come after the fact—based on what I can envision around the next curve in the road.

This paradoxical combination of creative calculation and reliance on faith—not blind faith, but faith that peeks through its fingers at the possibilities that lie ahead—has worked well for me.

Until recently.

For the past few weeks, the future I’ve seen and the plans I’ve laid have ended up in a multi-car pile-up. A job that seemed meant for me dissolved before I could claim it. The book proposal that generated so much excitement is still waiting for a publisher to claim it. When a potentially career-changing writing gig fell through, it wasn’t a simple matter of that magazine’s editor not liking my story idea. The whole magazine folded. How’s that for having a door slam on your foot?

And that’s just the work-related stuff. All around me—in my home, in my relationship, with my child—things are breaking down, springing leaks, sputtering, fizzling and wobbling unsteadily. My life is, as we say in the vernacular, a hot mess.

I don’t know whether to blame the ineffectiveness of my planning or the astigmatism of my faith. I tell myself that if I had planned more effectively, maybe my life would be on more solid footing. Or if my faith were less blurred, maybe the need for solid footing would be moot: I’d be flying on wings.

But maybe not.

Maybe blame, with its negative implications and guilt association, is unnecessary, because maybe what I am experiencing is just the dip and dive of life. Maybe this is me falling free of a plane I’ve been pushed out of, dropping from the sky toward the open arms of earth and feeling the fierce pull of gravity in the long moments before my parachute opens. (At least I still have enough faith to believe the parachute will open.)

Today in the mail, I got a little postcard that says: “We affirm that divine order is at work and that Spirit is guiding us each step along the way.”

Maybe all this is just part of the plan.

Order in the court

The 60s and 70s were times of upheaval and turmoil by most readings of American history. But my life back then was comfortingly orderly. We grew up with simple routines that were, looking back on them, almost comforting. Every school-day morning the clock radio flipped to 7 a.m. and woke us to the sounds of WBTM’s playlist that seemed to consist solely of Paul Simon tunes. My sister and I knew to slip on the clothes that had been laid out the night before. We could hear Daddy in the kitchen boiling water for our cereal. Mama combed our hair while we spooned our oatmeal. Even the last minute rush out the door was part of the normalcy of our mornings.

Then it was laundry on Friday, housework on Saturday morning and church on Sunday. And still there was time on Sunday afternoons to take a drive to visit family friends. By sundown on Sunday we’d still be playing tag and catching lightning bugs while our parents lingered over their goodbyes. No one was frantically trying to get ready for the next frantic week. It was peaceful because times were different. But also because my parents lived and raised us according to their sense of order.

What happened? Those routines worked for all of us—or seemed to. (My mother was often late for things but never frazzled and frantic as I so often am.) So why am I not following that lead?

In so many ways, I’m freer than my parents were. There are fewer rules, more choices and more "conveniences," so my life is much more “anything goes” than theirs. And while that would seem to make things so much easier, it also seems to open the door to chaos. Having a whole cornucopia of choices means… well, that we have to wade through all of them and decide what to do. Frankly, it’s all too much.

I’m not nostalgic for the 70s. (The eyeglass frames alone are enough to make me never wish to turn back time.) But I need more order in my life.

People who know me will think I’m heading into OCD territory; I have a rep for being pretty organized. But “order” the way I’m thinking about it feels a little different from “organization.” The latter has a whiff of everything-in-its-place rigidity. Order feels more fluid, more instinctive. Order isn’t uptight, but it is focused. It’s about being on purpose.

My first step toward a more orderly life: A more orderly mind. My brain is so frantic with thoughts that it’s hard to get a thought-out thought…out. You’ve got to make sense to yourself, self-help guru Iyanla Vanzant likes to say. I’m so busy doing and going and rushing and responding to the needs of other people that my hours are often consumed by tasks that seem necessary at the time, but that don’t always yield much at the end of the day. Even getting my life in order has become a task that I’m rushing through and tripping over.

I’ve got to stop. Stop trying to keep up with the self- and society-imposed demands to respond— instantly and cleverly—to every request that hits my desk or my ear. I need to be still long enough to see what’s really needed. (First, I need to check for what I need. But that’s a post for another day.) I need to stop to get a sense of what really makes sense and a sense of how best to move toward that. If I give myself space to breathe and think—and ease myself away from the tendency toward swift, blind reaction—I have the feeling that a sense of order will follow. May it be Divine Order.

Making Plans

I’ve asked and asked and asked: What is our mission? What are our plans? What are we going to do together? What does our Big Picture look like?

And I haven’t, for the life of me, been able to get a clear answer from my husband.

I don’t know if he can’t answer. If he won’t answer. Do the questions offend him? Are they too esoteric? Do they just seem silly? Is he just the type of person who wants to flow wherever life takes him? Is he a “let go and let God” guy who believes that you don’t have to plan at all? Does he think planning is futile? Unnecessary? Ineffective? I don’t quite know what be believes. And has been driving me crazy.

Eventually I started thinking, “Ef it! If he won’t talk about a plan for our life, then I’ll just start making plans of my own.” I began to throw myself into creating long-range plans and short-term schedules. I started fleshing out ideas that I’ve had, putting some meat on those dreams. Getting organized. Getting disciplined. Getting ready to roll.

It has bothered me to set goals that don’t include him, but I've felt t like I have no choice. The call to get moving is very strong, but I’m the kind of person who can’t press the gas without some directions, a map, a destination in mind. I need a plan for my life. I'm going to have a plan for my life. Period.

And then the revelation came.

Maybe that was the point: For me to do it for myself. It's my life, after all. I know myself well enough to know that if he had responded to my queries about his dreams and goals, I would have thrown myself wholeheartedly into his vision for our future. Because the reality is that I didn’t have a clear vision of my own aspirations. I had reached my previously set career goals (The NY magazine job). I had spent the past few years catching up on my personal goals (Marriage? Check. Child? Check. House? Check.). Now what? I had no idea.

That’s why I was pushing so hard for us to talk about it. I was hoping that he would help get me motivated or that we would motivate one another. In the end, not having a response from him ignited a fine-then-I’ll-show-YOU attitude that fired me up to get off my ass and start to think about the life I want.

To be honest, I’m still not absolutely clear on where I want my life to go. (Hmm, could that be why Said Husband has been so closed-lipped? He doesn’t quite know the answer to the questions I’ve been asking?) But I know some things I want in place. I know how I want my life to feel. I know I can find the ways and means. How, exactly, will it come together? I don’t quite know. But I’m working on a plan.

Keep Something To Yourself

Okay, okay, I admit it: My name is not Zenia. (That’s a derivative of my grandmother’s name--a woman who needed a Plan B if ever there was one.) Everything else on the blog is true, though all the names have been created to protect the inno… the people I’m writing about.

When I started this blog, I needed to be anonymous because, frankly, I was pretty disgruntled with the state of my situation. I needed to vent. I needed to work some things out. I knew I needed to “go There” but I didn’t know where “There” might be and I didn’t want to risk shocking or offending or embarrassing anyone along the way. But I didn’t want to censor myself, either. Where better than the blogosphere to be totally you…and be totally invisible?

It didn’t take long before I started to think about coming out. Invisibility is apparently not a cure for the identity loss I mention in my profile. (That's true, too.) So I did what I always do when I have to make a decision. I carefully weighed the pros and cons. Then I asked all my friends for advice.

Now, my circle includes a wide-ranging collection of minds, so I was not surprised that each gave a different reason for her answer. But ultimately each answer was the same: To a woman, they all said, “Keep it to yourself.”

Was it not yet ready for prime time? No, they said they appreciated the premise. They praised the writing. But they knew it was mine—and they encouraged me to have something of my own.

Indeed, these passages are about having a room of one’s own—if only a virtual one. This blog (and perhaps every blog) is about having your own place—a place where you can just be yourself and speak your piece, without repercussions or self-incrimination or self-censoring. Without mincing your words or retracting your thoughts.

Ultimately, if it is to have any value beyond me, Plan B stops being just about me venting and plotting my escape from an unsatisfactory life. It’s about women (and men) taking control of their lives again.

A couple of months ago, when I wrote about “having your own” I had money on my mind. But I realize now that having your own is about more than what’s in your Birkin. It’s about owning something that no one has given you and that no one can take. It’s about having something that you hold in your heart that you value and love. It’s that thing you possess in full, with no co-signer. The stock market can’t crush it; the bank can’t foreclose on it; it can’t be outsourced, downsized, diminished, discounted or divorced.

This is the question that began Plan B: What do you have that is truly your own?
This is the question that each post asks and encourages us all to answer: What do you own that no one can take from you?

What I have is my name. And it isn’t Zenia. It’s Tamara.

What would happen if...

...when someone asked you to do something and you weren't really, totally, quite exactly sure whether you wanted to do it or not, instead of saying, "Okay, yes," you said, "Um, no."

Choosing Your Lane

I just finished listening to Brick Lane. I bought Monica Ali's book on tape for a road trip that never materialized, and have since been listening piecemeal each time I go on an errand that takes more than 5 minutes. Little Bitty has been enthralled—“Mommy, can we hear the story?”—probably more fascinated by the lyrical cadence of the narrator’s Euro/Bangladeshi accent(s) than the story itself. (It's not a children's book by any means.)

It’s a story of a woman, Nazneen, whose arranged marriage took her from Bangladesh to London with a highly mis-educated, vapid, but kind husband—and the cultural evolution that happens for her and her family in the years just before and after 9/11. There’s a bit of romance and a bit of politics. But the theme is mainly this: Does one wait and allow one’s life to be arranged by fate—by God? Or must you take your life into your own hands?

For Westerners it seems like a no-brainer. We’re all about self-determination, venturing forth, blazing trails. But the book illustrates how difficult a choice it would be if you’d been raised from the womb in a culture where, as a woman, as a Muslim, you understood that virtue lay in allowing your fate to be decided for you. Trying to be a good wife, Nazneen relies on prayer, housework, family caretaking, and mental submission to her husband’s winding academic monologues to suppress any thoughts that might veer into the realm of decision-making.

Most of us would recoil at the thought. (How Third World!) So we do the same thing without thinking.

Don’t we? I do. There are times when, rather than put my mind to the task of accomplishing a major goal, I delay. Let me just wash these dishes; it’s only a few. It won’t take but a minute to make the bed. I can tackle my stuff after I return this phone call. After I create another blog post.

I put my mind to the things I know I can accomplish easily—things I can see. (Look at the china sparkle!) It’s easier and yields a quicker payoff than getting to the difficult business of taking action and making decisions that will have a bigger influence on my fate.

I think for those of us with any kind of religious background, there is, ingrained, the idea that the Higher Power knows what is best for us and will nudge us in that direction, keeping our destination a secret from us until the very last minute—then leaving us to deal with it as best our faith will allow.

But, whether we’re religious or not, the idea of making a decision—and possibly making a mistake—is harder than relying on something or someone else to decide for us: a husband’s subtle preference, a child’s pressing need, a friend’s admonition, the cards in the Tarot deck, a sign in the stars.

To take our lives into our own hands makes us…well, responsible for our lives. And perhaps, deep down, we know what a grave and precious responsibility that is. Perhaps, paradoxically, it is because we know how important our lives are—how vital our purpose on the planet—that we suppress, procrastinate, equivocate and delay. We think that our own lives are too important for us to touch. But that can’t be true, can it?

And at some point, for many of us—if we’re listening; if we are present in our bodies at all—the call to lay our hands on our our own lives gets to be too great. You feel yourself pushed away from a situation that doesn’t suit. Or pulled to pursue a calling that gets louder and louder. At some point you realize that you are not fighting against a Higher Power, but responding to Its demands. And when that becomes clear, what is there to do but reach out to your own life and take it in your hands? What can you do but become your own Fate?

That is Nazneen's story. Check it out for inspiration.

I'm okay. I AM OKAY.

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.” --Buddha

Isn’t that breathtaking? Yin sent me this quote after a rich conversation we had on the nature of self-acceptance.

It was prompted when I related an offhand comment from Said Husband. I have often accused him of “lawyering” me—asking questions that make me feel as if I should be on the witness stand. The other day, as he was about to launch a line of inquiry about some subject, he said, “This may seem like lawyering to you, but I’ve always asked questions like this. It’s just the way I am.” (Emphasis mine.) I don’t remember if he actually said, “You’ll get over it.” But that was the implication.

It raised my eyebrows—and my hackles. What a terribly unapologetic, self-justifying thing to say, I thought. How without regard for my opinion or interpretation. How dare he dismiss my accusation.

And then I realized that what I felt wasn’t just anger. It was also envy.

Why don’t I have that same solid sense of self-acceptance? I don’t ever imagine I’ll lose the tendency to push for personal growth and self-improvement; I don’t want to.

But why am I not more willing to be okay with who I am in the midst of that process? To be more compassionate about who I am in the moment would be deliciously spirit-freeing. To accept myself, if not because of my flaws, in spite of them? That is the definition of unconditional self-love. To stand firmly in all myself as a Child of God—recognizing even the God-ness that hides in my chinks and quirks. That would be wholly holy. And don’t I deserve that as much as the next person? Doesn’t everyone? The Buddha thought so.

We women, I'm convinced, have a more difficult time balancing the I’m Okay/You’re Okay model. We either accept other people, bending ourselves around their tendencies (even if it means denying our own). Or we expect other people to be as pliable as we are—and are hurt and disappointed when they don’t yield adequately to us. But aren’t we supposed to compromise—especially those we live intimately with? Aren’t they supposed to compromise, too?

Of course. But there is a line—thin, pliant, as easily broken as the strand of a spider web—between compromising and being compromised. Compromises, good ones, feel healthy and mutual. When we are compromised—subject to concessions that ultimately devalue or undermine who we truly are—an important line has been crossed. Like a spider web, you can’t always see it, but you feel it to sticking to you uncomfortably even after you’re sure you’ve wiped it away.

It made for a rich debate with Yin. She pressed the point that we have to be ready—especially in intimate relationships—to set aside some of the “just the way I am” stuff in the name the union. I agree. But I argued with her (maybe as a means of convincing myself) that boundaries must also be drawn, even in the deepest I love you relationships, so that I love ME is never forgotten.

She defended my hackled response to Said Husband’s comment. What kind of thing was that for him to say? I was right to be offended, she said. But whether his stance is wrong or not, he raised questions I need to explore: Do I deserve my own love, no matter what? And how can I learn the art of self-acceptance?

Your Woman is Wonderful

So I did my homework on books about how to find and keep a great woman. Went online and did a search. To get a basis for comparison, I started searching for books about “finding a good man.” I came up with a load of books for women of every age, race, religion and description.

For the married woman: Good Husband, Great Marriage: Finding the Good Husband...in the Man You Married
For the religious woman: In Search of the Proverbs 31 Man: The One God Approves and a Woman Wants
For the Type A woman: All the Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right
For the black woman: The Sistahs' Rules: Secrets For Meeting, Getting, And Keeping A Good Black Man (Not To Be Confused With The Rules)
For the angry woman: Seven Attitude Adjustments for Finding a Loving Man
For the mature woman: How Not to Stay Single After 40: The Secret to Finding Passion, Love, and Fulfillment--At Last!
For the maybe not so mature woman: How to Avoid a Stupid Man: A Woman's Guide to Attracting Her Soul Mate
And my personal favorite: Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman's Guide to Winning Her Man's Heart

Next, I typed “finding a good woman” into the search. The results? Drum roll, please….

More books about how a woman can find and keep a MAN!

Winnifred Cutler’s Searching for Courtship: The Smart Woman's Guide to Finding a Good Husband came up third on the list. There was also Dating Rocks! The 21 Smartest Moves Women Make for Love by Steve Nakamoto, a former Dale Carnegie instructor, personal development trainer, and international tour director. (I am not making that up.) The cover art is a picture of a guy’s hand reaching under the table for a woman’s thigh. Also on the list—and I’m not making this up, either: The Women’s Basketball Drill Book.

God Bless Ronn Elmore. He’s the author of How to Love a Black Woman: Give and Get the Very Best in Your Relationship which is apparently the only book in the whole world that offers instruction to men about how to treat women.

Is it me or is there something wrong with this picture? One thing I know from having worked in publishing: They don’t keep printing the stuff if no one’s buying it. So why are women so eager to pore over books on how to find a man, please a man, hold a man? And why aren't men just as eager to get their relationships right?

Maybe it's not the motivation. Maybe it's the approach. That was the hint I got from a counselor today.

“You’re working too hard,” she said. All my sincere, heroic efforts—the talking and reading and journaling and blogging and working and working and WORKING and WORKING on the relationship isn’t actually doing much of anything for the relationship--and it's doing less for me. “You’re doing all the work and he gets off the hook,” she says.

Her suggestion (though not her exact words): Get a life. Spend more time focusing on me. Do what I like. Do more of what makes me feel happy and creative and fulfilled. Stop and let him do some of the heavy lifting for a change.

My secret fear: That he won’t lift a thing. But then, if he’s not willing, why should I bother? And if I’m busy having a wonderful time in my own life, how much would I care?

Whether he's willing or not remains to be seen, but if he isn't, he should be. He was lucky to get me. I'm creative and smart and not too hard on the eyes. I have a sense of humor and a sense of spirit. I was a good catch. And he worked hard to reel me in. I need to see in me now, what he saw in me then.

Maybe there really is the need for the book called Your Woman is Wonderful. But maybe it’s us women who need to read it.

Wow, Isn't He Great!

Today my burly, surly, buzz-cut Asian UPS guy (who has the most beautiful legs you've ever seen in brown shorts) rang the bell and dropped a package on my porch. A review copy of a to-be-published book. I opened the package and read the title.

Your Man is Wonderful

I don’t know about you, but I’m big on Signs from the Universe and this seemed like a neon billboard. Okay, okay, I thought. I get it. I’ve got to appreciate my guy more. I’ve got to be more affectionate. I’ve got to overlook his little flaws and quirks and annoying habits. Okay. OKAY!

It actually seems like a good book—and probably an even easier read than the Susan Page one I've been trying to get through. I skimmed it and it does say some simple, pertinent things about how to remember he's a good guy. Here’s the gist:

Good = honest, reliable, trustworthy, responsive, responsible and appreciative.

That’s it.

And here’s the problem: We don’t see these “wonders” because

• We don’t recognize how vital and important these basics are
• “We pick (to death) a man’s superficial flaws”
• We don’t allow the emotional space for the good stuff to grow
• We want what they can’t give us

In other words, we expect too much. That’s basically it, isn’t it? We want more than they can give us.

I’m going to read the book more thoroughly and see what else it has to offer. (BTW, it's by Noelle Nelson Ph.D. and it's due out in January.) It seems worth ruminating on. I know that I’m guilty of all four of the “don’ts” above. I don’t often stop to think that, I married Said Husband because he had the six good qualities—and I recognized them as a great foundation for a good relationship. Those feel like lowest common denominators for me. But I’m also beginning to recognize that time takes its toll and if someone isn't actively cultivating those qualities or allowing them to “flourish,” the denominator can get lower. The guy who used to be responsive shuts down. The one who used to be there when you needed him can’t be found.

My problem is that when I'm asked to do more to "cultivate" him, I get caught up in this burning question: Where is the book called Your Woman is Wonderful? The self-help bookshelves are lined with books about how to find a great guy and make him happy. But I don’t remember having seen titles that offer the “wonderful” man advice on how to show appreciation for the wife who bore his 8-pound babies and picks up his stiff, sweaty socks after she comes home from work and before she starts cooking dinner.

That’s the thing that makes me feel just...tired. With all the work that women do—much that goes unnoticed, unappreciated or dismissed—we’re also supposed to find time to develop strategies for cultivating his wonderfulness and protecting his six precious qualities.

I want to see the book for guys called Wow, Your Wife is Great or Man, What a Catch! Maybe it’s out there and I just haven’t seen it. I’m going to do a search. I’ll let you know what I find.

Making Plans

I’ve begged and pleaded. I’ve asked over dinner. I’ve asked in e-mail. I’ve written letters.

What is our mission? What are our plans? What are we going to do together?

And I can’t, for the life of me, get an answer from my husband.

I don’t know if he can’t answer. If he won’t answer. Do the questions offend him? Do they just seem silly? Is he just the type of person that wants life to flow and take him along with it? Is he a “let go and let God” guy who believes that means you don’t have to plan at all? I don’t know what be believes. And it drives me crazy. It is a the crux of our relationship issues right now because his refusal to respond has left me wondering if he even has any aspirations for himself or his family. And, frankly, I don’t know how well I can deal with a person who doesn’t. But I can’t really make a decision about what I’ll deal with or won’t, because I don’t know what is going on in his ever-lovin’ head.

Finally, I just started thinking, “Ef it! If he won’t get a plan for his life, then I’ll just start making plans of my own.” Lately, I’ve thrown myself into creating long-range plans and short-term schedules. I’ve been fleshing out ideas that I’ve had, putting some meat on those dreams. Getting organized. Getting disciplined. Getting ready to roll.

It bothers me to set goals that don’t take him into consideration, but I feel like I have no choice. The call to get moving is very strong, and I’m the kind of person who can’t press the gas without some directions, a map, a destination in mind. I need a plan for my life. I'm going to have a plan for my life. Period.

And then the revelation came.

Maybe that was the point: For me to do it for myself. It's my life, after all. I know myself well enough to know that if he had responded to my queries about his dreams and goals, I would have thrown myself wholeheartedly into his vision for our future. Because the reality is, that I didn’t have a clear vision of my own aspirations. I had reached my previously set career goals (The cushy NY job). I had spent the past few years catching up on my personal goals (Marriage? Check. Child? Check. House? Check.). Now what? I had no idea what was next.

That’s why I was pushing so hard for us to talk about it. I was hoping that he would help get me motivated or that we would motivate one another. In the end, his inability (or stubborn refusal or whatever it was) to talk about it ignited a fine-then-I’ll-show-YOU attitude that fired me up to get off my ass and start to plan the life I want. As my girl Rox says, “I ain’t saying it’s right and I ain’t saying it’s healthy” but it certainly is helping to the job done.

To be honest, I’m still not absolutely clear on where I want my life to go. (Hmm, could that be why Said Husband has been so closed-lipped? He doesn’t quite know the answer to the questions I’ve been asking?) But I know some things I want in place. I know how I want my life to feel. I know I can find the ways and means. How, exactly, will it come together? I don’t quite know. But I’m working on it.

Talking In My Sleep

I had a chance to go and meet one of my favorite authors. Not at a reading or lecture. She was going to be at a friend’s house, having tea. I was invited. To sit and drink tea with Said Author and my friend. Just the three of us. I was dressed to go. I was in the car. I was on my way.

And I never got there. Because I ended up having a huge, all-consuming “discussion” with Said Husband—on the cell phone, as I was driving, trying to navigate my way to meet Said Author. In the end, I was too distracted to find the place and too much a mess to have enjoyed it anyway. (And lucky I hadn’t wrecked the car in all that drama.) That’s what I told myself anyway, to mask my disappointment at my own self-undermining.

I’ve always believed that, when two reasonable people have an issue, talking it out ought to work. Never mind that, in seven years of marriage, it has rarely yielded much. In fact, I’m beginning to find that talk—at least the way Said Husband and I are doing it—has become a form of self-sabotage. There have been nights when discussions about the State of Our Union have kept us up until 3 in the morning. And, while these hashings seem important at the time, often, in the next-day light I realize that we haven’t covered much new ground or come to any major revelations or resolutions. And, adding insult to injury, I end up exhausted. Not only have I wasted a good night’s sleep, I’ve tanked my ability to function the next day as well.

But I keep doing it. Keep think talking is going to help. According to Susan Page, that’s my first problem. She’s the author of, Why Talking Doesn’t Work: Eight Loving Actions That Will Transform Your Marriage.

The title doesn’t do the book justice. You’ll find it on the “self-help” shelf, but its focus is spiritual. It encourages you to think of marriage (and all relationships) as spiritual practice—a way for you to grow as a person. More connected, more authentic, more aware, more at peace, more in Love. (Big L Love.)

The book asks you to eschew discussion, debate and verbal self-defense in favor of acting with a sense of good will, allowing the other person to just be himself, accepting what is and accepting yourself with the same compassion. Give up problem solving, Page writes. Talking and negotiating isn’t going to solve them—and you’re not going to change your partner any more than he’s going to change you.

So far, the only “loving action” that has come fairly easily for me is Act On Your Own. Stop asking or expecting the partner to do the thing, say the thing, have a revelation you want him to have. Just do what you need to do. I’ve been calling this the “Work Around”—and find that it’s empowering to see that I can find a way to do or have what I need, without being hindered by another person’s actions or inactions.

I’ve had a very hard time with the other “loving actions,” because they require you to consider some practices and concepts that, if you have any ego at all, really stretch you beyond your comfort zone. But I’m inching my way into the book, going back and literally re-viewing the concepts again and again. Remembering that this is supposed to be a spiritual practice—trying again and again until I get it. And reminding myself that this is about me getting it. Because until I get it, I’m going to keep spinning in the same circle of self-sabotage. And I’m never going to get any sleep.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

—Derek Walcott



Derek Walcott, born in 1930 in Saint Lucia, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. He has written more than 20 poetry collections and more than 20 plays.

The End is Near; We are About to Begin

Saturday I heard a story. And Sunday I heard a story. And Monday I heard a story. And today, another one. And all the stories were different. And all the stories were the same:

A woman—a divine and flawed human woman—looked at the man to whom she has committed her heart (a divine and flawed human, too) and saw unfold, clearly and in real time, the violation of his respect for her.

And I listened to the quiet, even voices of these women telling their stories. And I looked at their faces. And I looked in the mirror. And what I see makes me tremble. What I see makes me weep. What I see makes me speechless. I sit here to write without words. But I know I have to find the words. Because I know this:

This can NOT continue. This must end.

We cannot continue to watch ourselves being subtly and overtly dishonored and wonder, in the back of our hearts, if we deserve it.

We cannot continue to listen to backhanded excuses, limp justifications and round-the-bush half-truths, trying to make sense of what is senseless, saying nothing in response.

We cannot be in situations where there is more safety in blindness than there is in truth.

We cannot allow ourselves to be so busy with doing…name it, you know you are doing it…that we forget that Knowing is our strength, our health and the Source of our life.

We can’t continue to shoulder the blame for everything that is not exactly “right” in our lives—from the dust in the corners to the baby’s allergies to the fact that “he” is not at home. Because all that won’t stay on our shoulders, so it migrates to our throbbing temples, our breasts, our backs, our wombs—and lodges there, growing.

We cannot continue to mute ourselves and make ourselves invisible. We cannot be called out of our names.

We cannot forget who we are.

Because you do know who you are, don’t you? You are the vessel for the creation of all humanity. You were given the ability to feed the generations. You are the one everyone turns to for wisdom, because you have both intelligence and intuition—and you know how to use them. You are….

Oh, this will just sound like so much new age, neo-feminist, milk and moon-blood Goddess-centric bullshit. And who am I to tell you who you are? I can hardly recognize and define myself.

But I know this, too: I’m about to get real, real clear. Little by little I am waking up. And my sisters around me are waking, too. And when we wipe the sleep out of our eyes, we are going to start moving. Some of us are moving now—our faces unwashed, still pulling on our clothes—because it is time. This ignore-ance of our Sacredness has got to stop and we are the ones to stop it.

You: Stand in your Self. You: Support the woman next to you. Me: Still your hands, wipe the tears and find the words.

Because it's time.

He's right? Right!

Rox and I were talking the other day, as we often do, about the state of our unions. For us, that often means comparing notes about the unbelievability of the things husbands do.

They're different, she said. Of course they're different; we can see that dangling. But she meant that Modern Husbands are really, especially different. And they are more different from us than husbands used to be from their wives.

Think about it. This is the first generation where we are regularly connecting with people who are from other backgrounds, other classes, other races. Back in the day, people stayed close to home and married their high-school sweetheart. If they moved, they moved to places where there were other people from back home. (Thus the migration trends that led to the Up South phenomenon—where groups of people from, say, Georgia all landed in the same blocks in New York.) In my parents' day, you were taking your life and liberty into your hands to marry outside of your race. People kept to their own kind and their own class. (Some Black folks even tried to stick with people their own shade of brown.)

All that seems as outdated as a chocolate malted now, but it created an atmosphere in which people started off in marriage with a common foundation. These days we don't have those common roots for our unions. And this cultural chaos gets piled on to the fact of the Mars-Venus madness that ensues when you marry someone of the opposite gender—someone who, according to some scientific research, has a brain that just plain works a different way. Then swirl in the fact that gender roles have morphed, so there is no June and Ward Cleaver standard that we all know to live by. And top it off with the cherry that is our ego: We want to be right. We think we ARE right.

It is a huge, sweet, beautiful, tragic mess.

And then Rox dropped the real shocker: They are different and...sit down for this...they have every right to be. The challenge comes when you begin to think that the fact that he doesn't think like you think means he's just...wrong.

We are raised in certain environments with certain values and certain experiences that form who we are and how we live. It is all too real to us. And it’s all too right. And if the opposite of right is wrong, and if what he thinks seems to oppose what to we think, therefore he is wrong.

Right?

Maybe. Maybe not. He has a right to the opinions borne of his experiences. He has a right to do things in his own way, in his own time. He has a right to believe what has grown in his heart. I don’t have the right to tell him that his understanding, his beliefs, his ways are wrong. He is right. (Unless he is, in fact, wrong.)

AND.... And his rights and his rightness do not mean that I am wrong. I have the right to my own experiences and views and ways, as well.

So there it is. Simple as that. Right?

Right, Righteous Rightness.

I like being right. Who doesn’t? It’s our nature. It’s the way we protect the ego. And it feels so good. So of course I want to be right. I just don’t want to be known as The Person Who is Always Right. (A.k.a. “That Asshole.”)

I have to be careful. My temperament, my astrological sign and my life experience all make me tend to feel that if everyone would just please do what I think best, the whole world would operate so much more smoothly. It would be easy for me to lose the balance between “right” and “always right.”

In an attempt to steady that balance, I’ve been looking for another way to think about and articulate the right kind of “right.” I tried thinking in terms of being “righteous.” It has a nice 60s-hip, Rastafarian kind of vibe; but it feels too close to self-righteous. So lately, I have taken to using the word “rightness.” Being in rightness. Acting from a place of rightness.

What it means for me is that, whatever happens, I’m striving to respond in the best way. And not by the text-book rules. Not the way that could be upheld in a court of law. Not the way that’s technically right, defensively right, justifiably right. But the way that I know, in my heart of hearts, is right.

When I look at it in that way, I can’t help but think of a spiritual leader who famously and consistently defied religious “rules” in favor of doing what was right: Jesus. From my Sunday school days, I remember the story—and the image it created in my mind--of Jesus and the disciples, hungry wanderers, walking through the cornfields on a Sabbath. “They plucked the ears of corn and did eat, rubbing them in their hands,” says chapter 6 of the book of St. Luke.

Picking corn on a Sunday? The Pharisees were not having it. Technically Christ and his crew were harvesting and it was so totally against the rules to harvest on the Sabbath. It was against the law to heal a sick person on Sabbath, too. But He did it anyway. And did it right in the synagogue. Clearly, He wasn’t about the rules. He was all about the rightness.

The rightness is doing the best thing you can do under the circumstances. It is weighing the thing you might not really want to do, that it would be easier not to do—that no one would even blame you if you didn’t do—and doing it anyway because it’s for the highest good.

I've been struggling through a book on spiritual relationship called Why Talking is Not Enough: 8 Loving Actions That Will Transform Your Marriage. (More on that later. Or check it out for yourself at susanpage.com.) I say struggling not because the book is too dense or academic or complicated. It’s simple. It encourages you to treat your partner with rightness. To treat him with good will. To think of giving more than you focus on getting. To overlook the thing(s) about your partner that makes you angry, hurt or willing to pull each strand of hair out of your scalp piece by piece. Practice acceptance. Have some compassion.

How hard is that? Very. The easy thing is to do what seems to be in your own ego’s best interest: to get yours, to blame him, to forget that you make him want to pluck himself bald sometimes, too. It is easier to be see yourself as right than it is to set aside your resentment, anger, hurt or fear long enough to see that the other person could possibly be right, too.

But in any love relationship (and I mean any kind of love) the best thing is the thing you know, in your heart of hearts, is right. And that means being in rightness with and for everyone involved.

So when it you both know it’s his turn to wash the dishes—and he always seems to have an excuse not to do it, and then when he does he makes a mess of the job anyway, and will invariably break something or put dishes away wrong, and you have no idea what his Mama was doing when she was supposed to be teaching him how to do this one simple task—but you also know he’s stressed about his project at work and could afford to spend some time on that, rightness means you’ll bust those suds yourself. Just this once. And maybe the next time.

Victimology

“Have you given any more thought to the idea of being a victim?” my husband asks.

Said Husband and I have been deeply, heavily, excruciatingly wrapped in a series of conversations, arguments and debates about the state of our union—and muddled if sincere attempts to improve it. We haven’t broken much ground. In part, probably, because when we ask each other such questions, the response tends to be visceral and defensive and angry. How dare he ask me if I’ve thought about being a victim? Has HE thought about being a victim?

The reality is that I have thought about it. Been thinking about it. (Evidenced, in part, by the creation of the blog you’re reading.) But the whole victim thing is slippery. When you are talking about a relationship between two people, it’s hard to parse victimhood. Each person plays a part in whatever is going on. Blame is very easy to mis-place. And when you are one of the people in that relationship, it’s easy to slip into the self-righteous role of victim. For some of us, martyrdom is easiest on the ego.

What makes you a victim, then? Even if you have been assaulted or disrespected or hurt in some way, what of that did you invite or allow or provoke? Wait. Stop. Invite or provoke is too loaded. We don’t say that a woman who has been raped “provoked” it by her attire or behavior. We wouldn’t justify someone’s assault of another person by using the excuse that, “She just made me so mad I had to hit her.” AND…. And, if we’re honest, we know that there are the masochistic among us who do actually try to provoke ill-treatment. Okay, so erase invite and provoke. Too much to contend with here. But let’s deal with allow.

Allowing something to happen that is hurtful or wrong, falls in that also slippery concept of the-lines-that-must-not-be-crossed. We all have these boundaries. (Some of us set them far from us and guard them too fiercely; others make weak, wobbly fences that we guard not fiercely enough.) And these boundaries will be approached and possibly breached, somewhere, somehow. The issue, then, is how we respond. What we do. How quickly we do it. How well we assess the damage and how we repair the breach. And—here’s where the victim thing comes in: How do we think of ourselves and the other person and the situation afterward?

What keeps us in victim mode: If we continue to focus on “how dare you?” If we keep looking at and lamenting the hole in the wall without doing anything to address it. Or if we mix up tons of quick-dry cement and build a higher, thicker, more impenetrable wall–where nothing can get in, but nothing can get out, either. (Yeah, it’s smart to fix your fence—but it needs to be one that you can see—and see your way—out of.)

A less victimized way of thinking is, “Why did that person think he should approach me this way? Are my boundaries clearly defined? What sign can I erect to indicate that my borders are not to be breached? How do I plan to respond if the breach is attempted again?

One of my computer dictionary definitions of victim is “someone who experiences misfortune and feels helpless to do anything about it.” For me, victimhood lies not in the misfortune, but in that feeling of helplessness. But I like to believe helplessness is only that—a feeling. Ultimately, we are never truly without help. We possess resources. We can gather information and support. There are hands outstretched. There is Spirit guiding us. And, most importantly, we have the strength of our own will, wisdom and motherwit. When we know that and when we own it, victimhood is out of the question.

The Fiction of Potential

We weeded and turned over the earth, mixing in manure and compost until the garden spot was black, rich and fecund. Then Little Bitty and I carefully sowed string bean seeds. Within days, they sprouted, strong and green. The tomato vines surged up and spread before I had a chance to stake them. The squash leaves were as big as my hand, their blossoms bright with potential.

Since then, one of the squash plants yielded a single yellow crookneck—then the leaves turned moldy and the vine split and rotted at the root. From three long rows of string beans I pulled one handful of beans—not enough for a meal. I got three plum tomatoes off the overgrown vine; the other plant dried up from the ground up. A few stunted green tomatoes are clinging futilely to the brittle, brown vine, but they have no way to pull nourishment from the soil.

It is sad to see. But sadder, still, is the nagging thought that my fruitless garden is a metaphor for my life. I am a woman of ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. Good ideas—for myself, for my career, for my partner and my child and my friends. “We could do this!” “You could do that!” “Isn’t this brilliant?” “Let’s try….” “Let’s start….” “Let’s do….”

The attic is full of boxes with concepts for novels, lyrics to songs, article ideas, beginnings of business plans. A publishable thesis manuscript, unpublished. Three issues of a lovely newsletter, now defunct. Just over my head—nestled into fluffy, itchy, pink insulation—live boxes and boxes of potential. My potential. Defunct. Fruitless.

Carolyn Hax, in her take-no-prisoners syndicated advice column, recently wrote: "Potential is fiction."

Fiction? Potential is something we hold up like a candle to light our way. We hire it. We vote for it. We marry it. We give birth to it—and nurture it with our whole hearts. Because we have been taught to believe in possibility. We have learned to believe that “may” or “might” or “could” or “should” is enough to stand on.

But in the movie Amistad, there is a scene in which Djimon Hounsou’s character— the enslaved Mende, Sengbe Pieh—is told by his American lawyer that something that “should” have secured their legal victory and freed Sengbe to return home to Africa, didn’t. Sengbe shouts in frustration, “What is this word ‘should’?” There was no translation for it in his language, he said. Either something happened or it didn’t.

And that is not fiction. We do or we don't do. We bear fruit or we don't. It doesn't matter how green the string bean plants are if there is nothing on them we can eat.

Potential is the story we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night. Frankly, I’d rather stay awake if it means that I am doing something instead of making dreams that will disappear in the light of morning. I want to do more than just send up green leaves. I want to flower! What would it take for me to finally, decidedly bear fruit?

I have to admit that I am only a potential gardener. Once my vegetable plants were sturdily in the ground, I left them to their own devices. Though it has been scorchingly hot, I wouldn’t break the rules and cheat the water restrictions in our drought-stricken city. My approach to organic gardening is to leave it to The Gardener. I could have done more to nourish the plants and protect them from parasites and blight. I could do more for myself.

My first step is to step away from the notion that potential is something I can stand on. I have to remember what Iyanla Vanzant wrote: “There is nothing between doing and not doing that can be trusted.” Between doing and not doing lies the quicksand of potential. And that's no place from which anything can grow.

The Best Worst-Case Scenario.

I wish I could remember who originated the concept. It was years ago when I first read about it in Ladies Home Journal or some supermarket women’s magazine. The advice was that, when you’re faced with a difficult situation, ask yourself: What is the worst thing that could happen? Then, once you’ve got that worst-case scenario in mind, ask yourself another question: If the worst thing did happen, what would I do?

It’s brilliant, because A) the worst thing that could happen probably won’t, but B) if it does, you’re ready for it. And C) if you have a strategy for dealing with the very bad, then any thing that happens on the spectrum between the worst thing and the best thing, will be a piece of cake to deal with. Because you have a plan.

If you’re really susceptible to pessimism, this may not be a good exercise for you; you don’t want to fall into a rabbit hole of negative thinking. And folks who believe in the Law of Attraction—that you draw to you the thing you think about—will be squeamish about giving any mental energy to any “worst thing.”

But I don’t dwell on the worst. I don’t expect the worst. And my focus isn’t on the “bad thing.” My focus is on the best thing I could do about it. What could I do to turn an unpleasant situation into something good? How would I make the best of a bad turn of events?

A fine example lies with the parents who lost children in the Katrina floods or the tsunami in the Indian Ocean—and then adopted orphans who’d lost their own parents. Their “worst case” didn’t devastate them; instead it resulted in incredible generosity and an outpouring of healing love. Of course I’m sure they hadn’t anticipated the tragedy they'd faced—who could have imagined that? But the point is that they found strength and hope when it was most likely to have been washed away. That’s what the exercise is about to me: looking for strength, tapping into hope.

What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best I could do? Once I imagine the thing and then see myself dealing with it, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. I see where my resources lie. I make note of—and give thanks for—my support system. Worry disappears, and a sense of empowered gratitude takes its place. And that’s the best-case scenario.

First, Do Nothing.

I thought about going to yoga class.
I considered going to church.
Said Husband was outside sanding and painting the boards for much-needed book cases. I thought about helping him. Or taking the sander the old bureau that needs to be redone.
I need to write a letter to my friend who is ill, and send a thank you card to the woman who took me to lunch last week. I thought about doing those things. Or working on the text for my website.
I turned on the classic movie channel, thinking I might catch an old flick. Gene Kelly didn’t move me. Neither did I Love Lucy. Neither did Rachel Ray.
I acquired Obama’s biography. Considered reading that.

What I did instead was to lie down on the narrow couch in my room, pull a cotton spread up to my shoulders and allow myself to lie there until I fell asleep. I slept for a couple of hours until my child came in from play, squealing and chattering, and my husband finished his task, thumping things back into the closets. I got up long enough to quiet them. And then…I lay down again. I went back to sleep.

Okay, that was extreme. Oh, but I needed it! And there is something to be said for moments of silence, of quiet, of rest.

My days often begin at 7 a.m., and frequently end at one or two the next morning. I am famous among my friends for catching a few winks in the afternoon. (Still clinging to the idea that when baby sleeps, mommy should sleep—though “baby” is now four and hardly willing to nap herself.) But those naps are strategic. I figure that if I allow myself to sleep a while during the day, I’ll be able to stay up later in the evening to “get things done.”

The focus is always on getting things done. How many tasks can I accomplish in a day? How many tasks can I accomplish at one time? And I’m not the most "accomplished" among the folks I know. Many of my women friends work nearly constantly. Two jobs, some of them. A job and kids. Kids and elderly parents. A job and an all-consuming pastime. We turn our hobbies, our exercise regimens, even our social activities into tasks by which we evaluate our level of accomplishment.

For many of us, the very idea of stopping. For a minute. To rest. To catch our breath. To think. That is—well—unthinkable.

I wonder why? I think some of it comes from living in society that tells us we have to do more and more—and gives us the technology to be doing something constantly. But I think that, for some of us (okay, for me), there is a deeper need to prove ourselves. To prove that we can do everything and be everything. To fend off any criticism for our imperfections by being able to say, “But look at how hard I’m working….” To convince ourselves that we are good enough.

Doing—and being able to exhibit the fruit of our doing-ness—gives us a sense of power and control. But we forget that our source of power does not come from what we do. It comes from who we are. Before we do anything, we are powerful. Who wields more power than a newborn infant who can’t even raise her head? Who wields more power than the patient lying in a coma? All our energy, our thoughts, our decisions, our time, our attention is drawn to this one who can “do” nothing. That should tell us something.

Periodically, I will myself to do nothing. To let the e-mail pile up; to let the phone ring. To stop thinking, thinking, thinking about the next task I “need” to do. Once in a while I give myself permission to let things—and people—wait. I recall the phrase, “Cease striving and know.” And I do nothing.

It feels powerful.

Minimum Daily Requirements

Ever look at a box of Total with it’s 100% of 11 essential vitamins and minerals? Makes you feel like you’re eating the healthiest food in the world. Wow, look at the minerals! And all those vitamins! But it’s deceptive.

They’re talking about minimums—i.e. what you need to stay alive. But what if you want to thrive in abundant, overflowing good health? The minimum is not going to cut it. It’s easy to fall into a “minimum requirements” mode where the minimum is all you come to expect. Or, worse, you start to feel that’s all you deserve.

We accept minimums about a lot of things—the things we buy, not because they’re lovely, but because they’re on sale. The jobs we take just for the paycheck, not the creativity they inspire. Settling for Mr. He’s Alright instead of holding out for Mr. He-Treats-Me-Like-Gold. We accept the minimum as if that’s all we are worth or as if that’s the limit of our dreams.

That’s how I found myself in the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, looking at other people’s dusty, cast-off chandeliers in hopes of finding one under $75 for my dining room.

Meanwhile, I know exactly what I REALLY want. What I REALLY want is the capiz-shell pendant light by that I saw in my favorite shelter magazine. It's simple, subtle, gorgeous. And it's $2550. Mm-hmm, two thousand, five hundred and fifty dollars. Don’t know about you, but for me that’s a mortgage payment. Actually, it’s two. Not exactly in my budget… but that shouldn’t stop me from feeling like I deserve something that beautiful.

The price of my chandelier isn't the point. It’s about feeling free to say what I want and feeling that I deserve what I want—even if realism and practicality tell me it’s beyond my grasp. (And even as I remind myself that many people live without electricity, much less a light fixture of any kind, and they deserve beautiful things as well.) I don’t want to get in the habit of thinking only in terms of the lowest common denominator. It’s one thing to make peace with the fact that a $2000 home accessory is not the wisest way to bend your budget. It’s another to forget that you are worthy of things that are fresh and beautiful and awe-inspiring and affirming. Compromises have to be made. But standards can be held.

I think I’d almost forgotten. And it wasn’t until I reminded myself—and allowed myself to go boldly into my local lighting boutique and monopolize nearly an hour of the lighting designer’s time looking at all the chandeliers I loved (cost be damned), that I was able go back to Habitat and buy a $50 fixture that pleases me. It is identical to one the lighting designer showed me at ten times the cost. Hey, I deserve nice things and I have expensive tastes, but I’m no fool. And I’m still keeping a picture of that pretty capiz-shell number in my wish book.


P.S. I adore Habitat for Humanity. Love what they stand for; love what they do. I've donated to them every month for more than a 10 years now—and that's not counting the amount of money I've spent buying great stuff in their Re-Stores.

Plan B(itch)

Yve’s husband called her a bitch.

Well, he didn’t actually call her that. He programmed her phone number into his cell under the b-word. Instead. Of. Her. Name.

Look, I’ve watched the TV show “Girlfriends” enough to know that some people apparently use the b-word as a term of affection. I understand that it has come to fall in the same category of code-switching as the “n-word” among African-Americans. I know that there are academic dialogues taking place about the appropriateness of the use of “taboo” words and language in helping a social group retain a sense of group identity and belonging, and to mark “their rights and obligations relative to others in the conversational setting.”

Blah, blah, blah. Whatever.

I also know that using “bitch” or “nigger”—depending on who you are and what your intention—is tantamount to abuse or a hate crime.

And that’s an important point. But it’s not my point here.

My question is: What is Yve going to do about it? What can she do? What is she willing to do? And how do her circumstances affect her response?

She, like a number of women I know (many who don’t work outside the home and a few who do), lives a lifestyle that relies on Husband's presence and his paycheck. Like many of us, she doesn’t have much of a safety net of her own. She is, at least to some degree, dependent.

Unless you have a strong sense of personal power, not having a sense that you have a safety net (even if it's as simple as "I can always go home to Mama.") can make your lines-that-must-not-be-crossed quite blurry. You can find yourself compromising values that you might otherwise hold firm.

I just read a compelling quote from Retrouvaille.org:

"If you are not free to reject, you cannot accept."

How do we get to the place—within ourselves and within our circumstances—that we are as free to reject as we are to accept?

It doesn’t matter to me how Yve finally addresses this with her man, as long as she's satisfied with her decision. I love her, I respect her choices and I know better than to try to tell even my best friends what to do within their own marriages. He’s her husband, for better or worse. They have children. And, it takes two, so she certainly carries some blame in her relationship's breakdown as well. That makes it complex. Even if she had a million-dollar trust fund and a private hideaway on St. Kitts, there would be no easy answers. But what I wish for Yve—and for all of us—is the ability to make hard choices from a position of strength.

Are you ready to leap?

I barely talk to the woman any longer. But she offered me a piece of hopeful wisdom some years ago that that I still hold onto.

We were walking along the river one day, and I was lamenting my status—at work and in my life. I was past 30 at the time and felt like I hadn’t accomplished much—not married, no kids, no house, and working a part-time job well below my experience level. I didn’t see a family anywhere on the horizon. I couldn’t see any way that I could scale the career ladder before I was nearly ready to retire.

But she told me that you can’t always look at climbing step by step. She said that sometimes we have to look at making leaps.

I’d never thought about it like that—I was a work-hard-and-wait-your-your-turn kind of girl—but I never forgot it. And then it happened: I made a huge leap at work. And suddenly I was working on par with my experience and my aspirations. That leap caught me up. And confirmed that river-side lesson that I’ll never forget.

How do you develop a leap mentality? It’s a little different than waiting to hit the lottery. That’s passive. And it’s not about cultivating a willingness to step on people. That’s unnecessarily aggressive. (And bad karma, to boot.)

It’s about being intentional, being ready and being open—really open—to the world of possibility. It’s the Olympic hurdler with her feet in the blocks, waiting for the starting gun. She has trained, she has prepared, she sees the finish line ahead of her and she has willed every muscle in her body to know that she can break that tape. She’s just waiting for the BAM!

Are you on purpose? Do you have a plan, so that if your number comes up, you’ll know exactly what you’ll do with that jackpot? It doesn’t have to be a 20-page life map. It can be an idea on the back of a napkin. But it should be a complete thought—because unless you’ve thought it through, you won’t know how to prepare.

You have to prepare. Identify and gather your gifts and talents and resources. Go get what will be required for you to step right up into your new role. Otherwise, when opportunity arises, you'll have to let it pass you by.

Do you believe? You know that Oprah thing: “God has a bigger dream for you than you can dream for yourself.” Do you believe that anything really is possible? And do you believe it’s possible for you? Are you walking around in the world as if you do?

You don't have to know in advance what the leap will look like. You just have to believe it's possible and be ready when it comes. And when you're ready—and not one second before you're ready—it will appear. BAM!

Know. Do.

She started quietly, lifting one picture off its nail in the wall and placing it in the hallway. Then she carefully took down another. By the time she started moving the furniture, she didn't bother to tiptoe. The bedside table slid along the floor. The nails she was wrenching out of the walls came free with a squeak and tinked to the floor. When her husband finally roused from sleep, the only thing left in the room was the bed he was sleeping in. "What are you doing?" he asked, trying to make sense of what he'd awakened to.

"I am MOVING!" she said, leaning in, looking him square in the eye. "You can stay. You can go. But I am moving."

That's my girl Rox. She'd started quietly, she says, months earlier, talking about how quickly they were outgrowing their apartment. It was time to move themselves and their two young children out of the two bedrooms they rented, she'd said. Over the weeks, she kept bringing it up. And he kept saying, "We're gonna..." But nothing ever actually happened.

That morning, she'd had it. Totally. After she emptied the bedroom, she started on the kids' room, and she kept going until finally everything but the bare necessities was stacked in the living room or packed in boxes.

All this talk about Plan B? She didn't have one. Hadn't looked for a new place. Had no idea where they would find one. She just knew it was time to go and that she was going. She was not asking. She was not suggesting. She wasn't waiting. She was moving.

What she had was more powerful than a B-plan: She had clarity--a crystaline certainty about what was needed. And she trusted herself and her God enough to know she could make it happen--whether her husband came along for the ride or spent the rest of his days lying in the middle of their empty room.

Her story made me realize something: a plan B is just courage in a bottle. It's something we stir up, distill, and label Our Saving Grace. But what really saves us is our own willingness (willingness) to leap right past fear, self-doubt, second-guessing or whatever else has been holding us back, and put our feet down on what we really want, need, deserve and demand.

The best plan is simple, really: Know. Do.

As for Rox, it was barely two weeks after she emptied the bedroom around her sleeping husband that she was moving into a quaint house on a hill in a lovely old neighborhood. Husband and children in tow.

Internal Coherence = External Fluency

So?

What do you want?

They say you can’t have what you want if you don’t know what it is. I suspect that you can probably have it either way. The problem is if you haven’t articulated what you want, you may be looking right at your heart’s desire—it’ll be sitting next to you on the sofa, grinning and winking—and you won’t even see it. Which will feel like the same thing as not having it. Such unnecessary anguish.

Why is it so hard to know—and to say—what we want? Is it difficult precisely because it’s so important? How can we make it easier for ourselves?

A few weeks ago, I had the wonderful experience of having a Style Statement consultation. Style Statement is a process in which you answer a series of probing questions about your preferences, your cravings, your interests—and the brilliant women who developed the process, Carrie and Danielle (carrieanddanielle.com), distill the information and present you with two simple, rich words that describe your very essence. The idea is that, if you have this mantra, this mandala of authenticity, you can use it to choose your next job, your next dress, your next man, your next sofa, the theme of your next gathering—with effortless ease. Because you’ll be clear that, though the Queen Anne settee is just lovely, the leather chaise is what really suits your style. It’s about knowing what you want through knowing who you are.

Internal coherence. External fluency. That’s a phrase I read today in the mission statement of a creative company where I used to work. (CraneBrandwork.com) It’s brilliant. Think about it: When you pull yourself together on a soul level—when you are making sense to yourself—then you can speak your desires into the world clearly, without fear or shame or hesitation. I believe that if you can say it, you can do it, you can have it, you can be it. And no one and nothing can get in your way, because nothing is as invincible or as undeniable as a woman who knows.

So, babe, who are you and what do you want?

What makes you smile?

“I just want to come home and see you smiling.” So says sweet, sincere Said Husband.

To which I respond with a smirk and a snarl. Further proof that there is, indeed, a deep problem. Because when a guy says he wants his wife to be happy, it wouldn’t make her mad if she wasn’t so unhappy to begin with.

I hear a lot of women say they’re sent off the rails by the slightest thing Dude does. Why would you put on that ugly green shirt? Why do you stir the chili counterclockwise? Don’t you know that the toilet paper should roll outward, not back? What are you, some kind of idiot?

I’ve started to realize—through lots of counseling, lots of self-help books, lots of quizzing other women, and the hard, long slog of gaining tiny bits of wisdom through experience—that when we’re just constantly angry about the things he (or anyone) does, we’re really mad about something going on within us.

The idea is to get past his counterclockwise soup stirring long enough to figure out what our own issue is. Because here’s the thing: Even if he's doing something that’s actually stupid, the fact that we’re also mad at ourselves just compounds the problem and distracts us from doing a real, objective analysis and, ultimately, finding a solution. His stuff is just a distraction from what is really trying to get our attention.

So, woman, why aren’t you smiling? What would make you grin?

It's Plan A, actually

I’m afraid some of this sounds so cynical and untrusting, as if I’m writing this with my lip curled and my neck rolling, a squinty-eyed, man-hater whispering, “Go ahead. Make my day.” That’s not the intention. (Even if it is, sometimes, my mood.)

My eyes are wide open and I love men. I adore my father. I revere my grandfather. I love and respect my husband. Overall, I have known some really amazing guys in my life. And then there’s Obama. (Hey, any excuse to mention Obama.)

I hope that my Little Bitty will (if she chooses to and if that’s her path) meet a fabulous, respectful, visionary, hard-working, talented, brilliant guy and live in a blessed union of bliss, balance and harmony. But I also hope that she will never forget that she is fabulous, respect-worthy, visionary, hard-working, talented, brilliant and capable of creating a life of bliss, balance and harmony—in or out of a partnership. And—here’s the thing—it will be especially important to maintain that sense of herself if she is, indeed, trying to make a life with someone else.

Ultimately, I guess this “parachute” stuff is not even about my man or my marriage or escaping anything. This is about maintaining myself—and encouraging other women to do the same.

It’s about identity—literally re-membering myself—putting myself back together—and creating my own definition of self that doesn’t include anybody’s name but my own.

It’s about finding purpose and committing to the work that I’m here to do.

It’s about husbanding resources—being smart about my finances, my “papers,” my talent and all my assets—and tapping my creativity to use them wisely.

It’s about cultivating the power and courage that will hold me up so I can keep doing what I need to do for self and family.

It’s about my spirituality, because it takes a strong spirit to give yourself wholly and trustingly to your family and relationships, but still maintain the person created by the Divine.

It’s about the belief that, if I tap into that power, that courage and that spirit, anything is possible. Joy and peace are possible. And that is what I want.

I call this Plan B, but I might need to change the name of the blog. This is about Plan A—putting your own mask on first, keeping yourself grounded and clear about who you are and what you need to be your best and do your best—for yourself and the people you love.

The Child That's Got Her Own

“Have your own money, girl.”

That’s what my mother always preached to me and my sister: “Have your own.” (Interestingly enough, she was repeating a lesson she’d heard all her life. From her father. My grandfather was a minimally educated laborer who worked to send his (six!) girls to college because he said he never wanted them to have to depend on a man. An impressively enlightened idea for a guy born near the turn of last century.)

But Mama and Daddy only had joint accounts, which they always seemed to manage carefully and harmoniously together. I wondered if she just thought she’d gotten the last trust-worthy guy, and that her girls were going to have to be extra careful—though she never said a man-bashing word to that effect.

It wasn’t until I was out of college that I realized something: My sister and I each had a bank account where birthday money, Christmas money, random windfalls and after-school job paychecks were dutifully deposited. As minors, we had to have an adult’s name on the account. Our sole co-depositor? Mommy. And as the years passed—and my parents never, ever let us withdraw any money—all those Christmas club deposits started to add up to quite a little nest egg. And Daddy couldn’t have gotten his hands on it without some kind of court order. Mama would never have touched it. She never did. But it was there.

One day I’ll ask her if she did that on purpose. Knowing her, she’ll say something vague and imply that I’m making too much of it. But I also know she’ll still say: You just make sure you have your own.