Month: December 2019

a solstice celebration

I was listening to a friend this morning as she tried to find the word to describe how she felt about my family’s willingness to participate in our annual Winter Solstice celebration. It wasn’t jealousy, she said, because she was really happy for us, but maybe there was a bit of envy there because she couldn’t imagine even asking her husband to play in such present, reflective and non-traditional ways. 

I realize I’m really lucky. I also realize and celebrate how hard I’ve worked to create this reality, as my family’s openness and my willingness to ask for what I wanted wasn’t always the case.

I travel back in time, not to a prior Solstice, but closer to Spring Equinox, to Easter morning a big handful of years back. We had plans with extended family that afternoon, but I was really craving some quality nuclear family time before we headed out. I did my typical thing, polling each member of the family as to what they’d like to do. Answers varied from play with my Easter Bunny toys to watch TV. If we’d have been a more religious family, we’d at least had time sitting together in the pew of a church, but we didn’t have that glue. I tried to rally my husband for support. I tried cajoling my kids with the promise of maple syrup if we could all just dress and get to a restaurant for brunch. I was met with resistance from every side. 

I resigned myself to a typical Sunday morning routine with everyone doing their own thing at home. Bitterly, and full of self-pity I transferred the clean clothes from the washer to the dryer pushed the door shut. The latch didn’t catch, and it swung open. Not even aware of my mounting loneliness, hurt and rage, I kicked the door with my foot. It felt so good. I kicked it again, this time harder. It felt even better. One more time I stretched my bent knee back to get ample torque and let my bare foot fly. With all the commotion I was making, I’d roused curiosity and the stomping and pitter-patter of nearing footsteps could be heard. I was bawling at this point. The dryer was left in a V-shape and could only later be closed with three big strands of duck tape. The kids were staring at me in horror. 

What was WRONG with me my husband asked?

At the time, I hadn’t a clue, but with a whole lot of reflection (and paid therapeutic support) my situation became clearer to me. Nothing was wrong with me, but I wasn’t living a life in alignment with my values of connection, spirituality and quality family time, and I didn’t yet have the vision or skills to create it. I didn’t believe I deserved or had the power to create the rich family-life I wanted. And perhaps most crucially, I hadn’t the voice and confidence to express to my life-partner what I wanted to create.

My therapist helped me to see that if I wanted my life to be different than the one in which I was currently experiencing, then I needed to behave differently, either by creating powerful moments for connection on my own or by sharing explicitly with my husband what I wanted for our family and clearly making requests for us to do it together. It wasn’t fair to anyone if I was being ambiguous or passive-aggressive. She was my cheerleader, encouraging me in good ol’ Mary Oliver fashion to fight for the precious life I wanted to live, encouraging me to live boldly and deliberately. I was scared out of my mind. What if I asked in no uncertain terms for the kind of quality time and support I wanted and got denied?  What if I shared with my spouse the life I wanted to build and he wasn’t on board? 

Then you have very valuable information, she explained. 

Gulp. 

Flash forward through piles of journals.
Flash forward through loads of e-mailed attempts at conversation.
Flash forward through the awkward and jerky starts and stops of novice face-to-face, all-masks-off conversation.
Flash forward to participation in a Mindful Communications course and role playing with a classmate over the phone.
Flash forward to prayer and practice and failures and start-overs and redos and apologies and self-inflicted time-outs.
Flash forward to the important learning that I will be just fine should I have to create the life I want to live on my own.
Flash forward through the tearful and snot-filled vulnerability of meaningful, transparent and difficult heart-to-heart conversation.
Flash forward to now.

Now I can share confidently with all my men:

Guys, I love you so much. Nothing means more to me than to create really rich and meaningful experiences. This year for our annual Solstice celebration I have invited someone I really respect to do some soul work with us before the sun sets. You need to be home with an open mind and ready for action by 2:00. And because our time sleeping together in one room playing “olden days” means so much to me, I’ll pay anyone who makes it all the way until sunrise $20. Lastly, please come to our gathering with an activity, game or conversation starter to share. 

And guess what. 

When we were tucking ourselves in for the night and one of the boys asked, is it just me or has mom gotten her way all day? my incredibility supportive and very handsome husband replied yes, and that’s okay. 


Life is hard

This morning at Reading Circle we will conclude our discussion of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In this autobiography of her youth, Maya delivers wisdom niblet after wisdom niblet. The kind of wisdom only gleaned by a young mind with keen observation skills. With poetic clarity she reminds readers again and again what it’s like to navigate the world with only so many years’ experience to draw upon. She paints a vivid picture of the world as she interpreted it as a child, and she does so with such brilliance, insight, poetry and humor that I practically have the entire book underlined. 

In the final chapter she describes her mother’s compassionate understanding and ability to allow her baby to struggle and work for what she wants — to become the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Maya explains that Mother understood the perversity of life. 

Mother understood, and more importantly, she allowed Maya to discover it too— in her own time and her own way. The comfort with discomfort that Mother displayed (both her own discomfort and that of others) demonstrates her intimate relationship with struggle and hardship as well as her faith in her daughter’s ability to navigate the complex world. Maya learned not to sugar coat life’s hardships, nor succumb to any victimhood thinking. 

Unlike Maya, I didn’t grow up black in a world made for whites, nor did I grow up in an age pre-civil and pre-women’s rights. Instead, I grew up a member of the majority in the comfortable suburbs of a small town, in the age of Baby Sitters Club books and the Brady Bunch. I grew up with the Huxtables, the Sievers and the Cleavers. I grew up thinking that all of life’s difficulties could be sorted out in a hundred pages or a half an hour. I grew up thinking that the struggling that comes with being human was an option, and I was failing miserably. I spent my time not observing the people and situations around me like Maya, but instead studying the habits and social norms of actors on television or cookie-cutter characters in children’s books. And I tried my damnedest to emulate perfection. Is it any wonder that I thought there was something inherently wrong with me and my family? We were nothing like what I saw on the tube. 

My grown-up attraction to Maya’s tell-it-like-it-is honesty and vulnerability touches the same sweet spot that lit up three years ago at my first appointment with my hairdresser. I can’t remember how I responded to her greeting and “how are you?”, but whatever I said set her off to clucking and repeating, 

Life is hard. Oh, life is hard. Honey, life is hard!

No one had ever said that to me before, and in the matter of a moment I felt like I’d landed in a lap I’d always wanted to inhabit. I felt understood. I felt the presence of a truth speaker. I felt connection and the openness that comes with honesty and accepting struggle. With not pretending to have my shit together. There was no judgement of the “you should just be grateful sort”. There was no advice. There was no rescue. Just solidarity.  I recall this moment as one of the prominent notches in my personal timeline. I see it as a shifting point for how I want to view the world hard and inhabit spaces. 

Like Maya, her mother and my hairdresser, I want to acknowledge that life is hard (maybe the Buddha said something along these lines too?). Like them, I want to offer compassionate empathy while not distracting from or pretending the pain is not there. Most importantly, as Maya demonstrates page after page, no matter how hard life is, it’s also magical and painstakingly beautiful if you’re paying attention, and as humans, we can do hard things.

Gentle metrics of success

Almost five years ago I was asked to define my gentle metrics of success. This was novel to me and an impetus for the personal growth I’ve experienced since then. 

This metrics was not to include numbers; no salary, 401k, 529 accounts or any of the normal western world stamps of success like home ownership or leaving a little something behind for the kids, but rather was to approach success from an end-of-life sort of view. 

What makes my life successful? How do I know I’ve “made it”?

As I created this metrics, clarity poked her head up out of the depths of fog, pointing me in the direction of my North Star. Most of the items on my list were sensual. None required a fat bank account or proving my worthiness:

A body that is capable of moving, touching and loving, 
soft clothing, a warm home, beautiful spaces and textures, 
natural and nourishing food from the earth, 
deep conversation, social connections and community, 
presence in nature with her feels, sights and sounds, 
music that moves, 
scents that invoke and inspire,
the ability to travel and participate in lens-expanding experiences, 
time to reflect and integrate,
the energy to create. 

I noticed that a lot of these items on the gentle metrics had to do with pleasure. Growing up with the hard-work ethic of the midwest, smack in the middle of a country settled by puritans, pleasure wasn’t something that was brought up much, nor was the body. In fact, all these “luxuries” that made up my gentle metrics were ideals I held as superfluous, extra, or special treats, as opposed to a way to live. 

Work, strive, suffer and save was the unconscious operating model I was using, something I had picked up without noticing along the way. I was living a life of numbers. Slave to the to-do list, clock and mile marker and prone to adding one more class to my schedule or dropping one more penny into the piggy bank.

I can pinpoint this request as a serious pivot-point in my life, leading me to ask such questions as: 

Why do I work?
What am I working for? 
How do I spend my time? 
Who do I want to spend my time with?
Where do I spend my time and how do I leave the spaces I inhabit?

I am so grateful to the wisdom teacher who offered this life-enriching question. I am grateful for recognizing my values and transforming my pace and way of being in the world. 

I write this blog to remind myself of both my values and my success, as I still occasionally slip into “am I doing enough, earning enough, offering enough” mentality. 

I share this blog to pay it forward. What is your gentle metrics of success?

With humble humanness,

Katie