Examined Lives

What's it all about, Alfie?

A week ago today, I stumbled out of a screening for the movie Motherhood that threw me into a funk that lasted three days. (Granted, I was already on the precipice, and I was getting a cold, so perhaps I was vulnerable.) In it, Uma Thurman plays Eliza, a Manhattan mom who struggles to get everything she needs to do done in one day: Walk the dog, feed the kids, shuffle the car in a daily ritual known as street parking, shop for her daughter's birthday party to be held that evening, see her best friend, take her younger son to the playground, pick up the cake, decorate the apartment and, somewhere in there, make a deadline. 

To a certain extent, I felt validated watching Eliza whirl like a proverbial dervish, trying not to screw things up. That's the story of my daily life, except my deadline's not a blogging contest to get a job, it's a job that helps put food on the table. But I also felt depleted, reminded once more of everything it takes just to sustain an existence that sometimes feels woefully fragile. (Eliza and her husband aren't rich, and their home is, like the apartments of my friends and neighbors, cramped to the gills.) Aren't the movies supposed to offer an escape?

Don't get me wrong: I am grateful for my life. I live in a city that allows me to strive or hide, depending on the day. I have friends who are kind and interesting. And I have a family that keeps my heart, and days, full. But of late, when I look around at my friends, many of whom seem to be juggling as fast and as hard as me, I think: Why? What for? It just seems as if no matter how hard we work, we don't get as far anymore. 

A friend who once wrote for all the big-name women's magazines goes from one underpaying freelance copywriting gig to another to help make ends meet. She'd like a permanent job, but—and you've heard this story before—no one's hiring. And she's brilliant! Her husband has a creative job in marketing, and he makes decent money, but after taxes and rent and expenses for their three kids—what we call essentials, not dining out at Nobu—it's still a stretch. Another woman I know is an academic, her husband's in technology. But after childcare—and she doesn't get much, seeing as she's with her kids whenever she's not in the classroom—and, again, reasonable expenses, there's not much left. 

Suze Orman would say, Watch your spending. And believe me, we have. My husband and I go on a date maybe once a month; the cost of babysitters tacked onto a $12 movie ticket (apiece) plus dinner is prohibitive. (Sometimes, we just take a walk for an hour in Central Park.) We eat out only once a week, and it's usually pizza or inexpensive Chinese. We brown-bag lunches, don't own a car, and walk everywhere if we can. The last purchase I made was a coat, and only to replace the five-year-old one I had with a ripped-out lining. (My copywriter friend hasn't shopped for new clothes for a year.)

Some people I've vented to say it's because we live in the city, that the cost of living is sky-high. But they don't understand. Our work is here, and if I had to commute the cost of gas, or monthly train pass for me and my husband would pretty much get rid of the savings we'd see by moving to the burbs. Plus, our kids are in crazy-good public schools here. And is the only solution really that we move? 

I worry about my retirement, I worry about college. And I suspect BurbMom does, too. You see, this isn't a city versus suburb argument. Whether you live in an apartment building on the Upper West Side or a house in a leafy hamlet, life these days feels tenuous at best. Where are the well-paying jobs? (Not in journalism, at least, for which BurbMom and I are trained. Not in academia, as my friend is discovering.) Where's the reward for hard work and years of schooling? Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?

Here's a trailer:

—CityMom

My bizarre "story of stuff"

With a handful of exceptions -- essential tech items, significant gifts, certain books, black cashmere sweaters -- I can't hang on to things. I have, for the past few years, been systematically emptying my rooms and closets (and those of my family) in a haze of donating, recycling, handing down, and what have you. People are noticing. It's become somewhat of a joke among my friends that I have no furniture, and it's a scandal to my mother, who says the condo looks like we are moving out.

Why am I like this? This neurosis, and I think I'm labelling it correctly, has been gathering steam since it clicked with me how buying anything can't possibly be green if you count the energy expended along the production cycle (If you haven't seen the official Story of Stuff, please do check it out.) So there's that. Then there's the disappointment factor; whenever I do buy something nice, it inevitably gets destroyed as it goes through the chipper of daily life. Beautiful oak tables with glass stains. A plethora of cat scratches on the piano. Barf on the Turkish silk rug. Antique clock smashed by the kitten. And so forth. Why bother? Earthly things crumble, so I'm practicing non-attachment. A few precious vases are hanging out in my underwear drawer along with what little jewelry I still own.

Last week I was sooooooooooo excited that The Dude finally allowed me to sell our set of wood Adirondack chairs, stained and peeling on the patio, because I am not the handy scrape-and-paint type, and never will be. Every time I looked at the chairs I felt a reproach, mainly from my parents, who bought me the damned things. For the last few years, my Mom regularly maintained them, but, well, that's not happening any more, either. And I hate to say it, but with my mom's illness, she hasn't noticed that I have shedded a few things she thrust upon us; piles of quilts, vintage tablecloths -- gak! 

My dad figured it out, finally.  "You don't like furniture because you hate to clean!" Uh, exactly. Is there something wrong with that?

Stuff weighs you down. Yes, we are going away - far away, to Tibet - this summer, but it's been hard figuring out how to handle the cats, and the payments on all of our stuff (house, car, insurances for more stuff).  Reading Walden this spring just pissed me off even more. The guy had it right.  We work and slave and worry to buy and take care of...stuff. Not only for stuff, but a large part of it goes for that.

You can't be truly organized if you have stuff, either. It takes far too much time. The only way to keep track of your crap is to purge regularly. Otherwise you're a slave to the C*ntainer Store, and to storage, and labelling. I regularly discuss this with friend L., who has a purge bug, too, mainly for the organizational high. We compete. We egg each other on.  It's a little sick, but we can't stop.

I think it may also be an aesthetic thing for me, though, and one which is almost impossible to practice a) when you have young children and b) live in a New Jersey condo instead of a Japanese temple or New York loft and c) don't have a ton of money.  I mean, if I could do it again, I would just dump a wad o' cash on these cool sectionals by Ligne Roset and call it a day, and try not to get upset when they get full of cat hair.

~BurbMom

Do I make like a child, or be all "I am woman?"

In mindful circles, we talk a lot about trying to live life "like a child again," with the same sense of wonderment and joy, that sense that every moment lasts forever. On the other hand, we chicks are constantly being barraged (at least, I am; if you regularly browse ladies' mags, you probably are, too) with the message that we only come into our own in our [fill in the blanks: 30s/40s/50s/wise elder years].  Yelp out loud for each time you're heard or read: 

I'm finally comfortable in my own skin.

I know who I am/what I want/my actual bra size.

I've finally found the meaning of life.

I've arrived.

Lately, though, I'm wondering if childhood had the advantage in the "knowing thyself" and "choosing," along with smooth skin, endless summers and all the rest of it. What if, in fact, we know exactly who we are, and what we want, when we are children? What if we stuck to that, through the confusing years of our 20's and early 30's?

I remember the things that made me happy as a child, and I realize now how much I miss doing so many of them. Some of the things were introduced by my parents, like the piano, but others I gravitated toward naturally as soon as I had an inkling:  Reading, acting, singing. I wasn't thrown a pu-pu platter of activities hoping that something would stick (though I was exposed to travel and culture); I instinctively knew these were the things that made me happy, because my mind was clear, uncluttered by hormones, endless activities, bill-paying, work, or alcohol.

I've seen a trend of women getting back to these youthful desires. Some are again studying high school languages, or playing sports they loved, like rowing. Others are looking toward second careers as their kids sprout wings. I suggest to us all, whether looking for work or a hobby of substance:  Look back, ladies.  It may not be the wisdom of our years that'll carry us through, but the instinct of babes. 

~BurbMom

Don't worry about me being happy

The tiny kingdom of Bhutan was in the papers again yesterday for the concept of gross national happiness, a measure concocted by its former king. It's a philosophy that's shaping up to be an antidote to pretty much the rest of the world's "complete dedication to economic development"—a devotion that's unspooling into a tangled economic mess nowadays. Bhutan's position is revolutionary. According to the article, "Under a new Constitution adopted last year, government programs — from agriculture to transportation to foreign trade — must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce." Imagine a world where the goal is to make everyone happy, not just the monied or powerful few. 

Bhutan aside, I have been thinking about happiness. Not about how to get it, but how we seem quite intent on attaining it. Intent to the extent that it has become a pursuit along the same lines as, say, being thin and looking young and getting rich. We will be happy, damn it! 

But what's wrong with that? We should want to be happy. And of course we do! But what I'm talking about, though, is this seeming drive to be happy all the time, to the point where melancholy, ambivalence or ennui—you know, the stuff that makes us human—is seen as failure. This pressure to be happy. We will be happy, damn it! Don't worry, BE happy! According to Common Ground, we've equated happiness with living a life devoid of negative emotions. Got dumped? Slap a smile on your mug, get out there and meet someone new! Credit card woes got you down? Be glad you have a roof over your head! "But, when we suppress the negative emotions," says the article, "we also suppress our ability to feel the positive emotions, to feel happiness and joy." 

So what's the answer? Writer Richard Schoch suggests redefining happiness so it doesn't simply mean having a smile plastered on our faces no matter what life throws us. He writes, "Lasting and profound happiness is the active orientation of your life towards meaning, purpose and value. It's a reflection upon the character of your life as a whole. This kind of happiness is strong enough to withstand misfortune and does not depend upon good fortune. It isn't about feeling good, it's about being good."

I say it's about striving for balance and feeling comfortable in one's skin. It's about being mindful (there's that word again), aware of our impact on others and on the planet and tapping into our need to do right by ourselves and others. Schoch summarizes Aristotle's view on happiness as this: Flourishing in the art of living. That seems about right. To live well is to, well, live.

—CityMom

(Photo from Politics of Well-Being.)

The beauty of self-denial

I'm off coffee!  I did it!

Now, as many of you know, I have been trying to do a body detox for oh, about a year now.  But giving up coffee and alcohol -- step one in any detox worth its salt -- is perniciously difficult, for me at least. (I just don't have Gwynnie's iron will, for which my liver probably thanks me.)

Why torture yourself, you ask?  After all, there are some good reasons to stick with a coffee habit.  It has been linked to protective effects of colon cancer or Type 2 diabetes. It can help your workout be less painless, and of course kick butt writing blogs.  But there are bigger health reasons for not drinking coffee in my case -- even one mug kicked my digestive system into acidic overdrive and made me a raving ball of tension each morning for a few hours. Cutting out caffeine may also reduce discomfort from fibrocystic breasts, which are the wobbly D-cup bane of my existence.

After a few weeks of trying and failing to give coffee up, however, the effort became more than that.  It became a battle of wills:  Me, versus my piggishly determined body. The more I failed, the worse I felt about myself.  Each small victory, on the other hand, made me feel like a million bucks. 

Appparently, too, exercising willpower in one area can eventually increase it in others -- like a muscle, willpower grows stronger the more you exercise it. Now if I can only work this denial magic on cabernet, black ballet flats and Tumi handbags.

~BurbMom 

Photo:  Bon Cafe 

Freakishly recreating my childhood home

Background: We've been moving my parents' stuff in to our home as they downsize to one condo, plus a few weeks a year (or so they say) visiting us. Along with the boxes of mementos cluttering up my attic, they put in a few larger items of furniture, some of which I had coveted. Others, not so much -- but they furnished much of my home with eco-friendly free antiques from their vast collection, so who's complaining?

Enter weirdness. When we chose the tile for our kitchen, a while back, I chose a reddish color to look a bit like terracotta. It just so happens to match closely my parents' kitchen tile. Then we got two cats -- a cat hunched over a food bowl in the kitchen is one of the most vivid memories of my childhood.

Flooring + cat + furniture = my parents' kitchen dining area is now my own. And it's freaking me out.  Did I do this to satisfy some subconscious craving for childhood?  Or because I'm design-challenged and have no unique ideas?  I did have a happy childhood, but overall my current lifestyle could not be more different than my parents'. They are country; I am (or was) city.  They are meat and potatoes; I am hummus. They are Colonial farmhouse; I am New Jersey condo. In fact, as a child I often longed for a mid-century modern home, and used to taunt my dad about it, saying I'd dump all his antiques as an adult and furnish my house in steel and glass.

And yet.  Here I sit, ogling a 17th-century food slicer.

So I did a bit of research and found, lo and behold, there is an emerging field called "design psychology" that might explain this oddity.  It holds that many of us, in fact, do seek to recreate our youthful environments. A Boston Globe article quoted Toby Israel, an environmental pscyhologist:

Toby Israel, author of "Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places" (Wiley-Academy, 2003). Israel,who is based in Princeton, N.J., and has a degree in environmental psychology, contends that "each of us possesses our own unique environmental autobiography," a repository of memories and impressions of past homes and significant places. And only by recognizing and understanding these influences -- "our buried sense of home," as she puts it -- can we turn our surroundings into a place that truly feels like home.

Perhaps that why so many celebrities and financiers are impossibly mixed up. They become rich overnight, move into some soulless mansion, and become completely untethered.

~BurbMom 

Get me some inspiration—stat!

I'm overwhelmed and a bit lost at sea and needed some fortifying. And though I'm not the kind of girl who memorizes inspirational messages—mostly because so many of them are cheesy, or sound good but say nothing, not really—I do sometimes find solace in the good ones.  Here goes:

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. — Anne Lamott

And then, there's this:

The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. — Dag Hammarskjöld

And honestly, you just have to laugh:

Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep. — Carl Sandburg

—CityMom

Monday blahs? Consider today a sublime mental challenge

CityMom wrote a tribute to David Foster Wallace after his suicide last year. In his writing, and in his life, Wallace wrestled with the truly nitty gritty nanobits of what it means to be human. The New Yorker has just come out with a fantastic profile of him along with an excerpt of his final work, unpublished in its entirety. The book deals with the supremely unsexy world of the IRS, specifically how his (fictional) agents deal with the tedium of their work.

As far as I can tell from these briefs, the book holds some truths that are so applicable in these dark days, during tax time, and practically every Monday. Specifically, a lot of life -- most of it, actually -- is pretty damn tedious. The only way to stay sane is to try to rise above it all mentally; to absorb yourself in the tedium (for me, Monday carpooling, laundry, piano lessons and dinner prep), to do your very best in the small things, to consider that the rough polishes the diamond within -- whatever you have to do to gracefully keep the dull parts palatable. 

This doesn't mean shopping or celebrity gawking or drugs, by the way, or any other avoidance technique. He meant choosing the high road mentally, of grasping our lot and choosing to think positively about it. All of which we, as thinking beings, the top dogs of the world, are eminently capable.

As Wallace said,

"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed." 

He went on to say:

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing." 

Sadly he seems to have failed to achieve full mental freedom in his own life, but he fought pretty damn hard and completely honorably for someone being constantly barraged with all kinds of nasty body-chemistry gone wild.

For you, David, and in the name of intellectual freedom, I'll try to get through my Mondays with peaceful perseverance, if not joy.

~BurbMom

Photo credit: The New Yorker

Why don't men care if the house is messy?

I promise I'll get off this topic soon, but nesting and cleaning have been top o' mind recently for me. When I can get outdoors more, I'll move on, hopefully.  But meanwhile, I must recant an amusing tale, with CityMom's kind permission.

I recently enjoyed a lovely afternoon of lunching out with her, followed by a chat session at her place. (I drove in, ditched my station wagon in the parking garage, and was gloriously urbanite for a few hours.) When I arrived, pre-lunch, she had just finished cleaning, and her stylish crib was immaculate.

Post-lunch -- now, we're talking only a little more than an hour -- we returned to quite a different scene. A pile of newspapers here; a few empty plates there; a big box o'toys half-emptied on the living room floor, perchance a child's winter coat or two adorning the furniture. The usual Saturday afternoon melange.

CityMom was anguished, and sputtered at CityDad: "I just cleaned! It was clean!  BurbMom saw it...and look at it now!"  I nodded my head sympathetically. I well knew what was awaiting me at home, and it was nothing like what I had left. Undoubtedly the kids, along with some of their miscreant neighbor accomplices, had worked over the tidy house in my absence, systematically emptying, daubing, gnawing and mashing, while The Dude, oblivious, plonked away on his laptop or watched golf.

Mildly, CityDad replied, "It's a home, CityMom, not a museum. How about we rent another apartment to actually live in, so this one can always stay clean?"

Which was a darn funny response, and made us laugh. It's not like CityDad is entirely unaware of the tidiness issue; he's exemplary, in fact, among his kind. And The Dude would clean up, too, if I bugged him later. Well, maybe with the help of a raised voice, a few tears if I have to.  But what I don't get is -- why do we care so much, and they so little, if at all?  Is it all the lady mags constantly telling us how everyday simple and easy-peasy it is to keep a perfect house, all in just five minutes a day and eight simple steps a week and only 15 minutes before company arrives, so we feel like total shlubs if one thing is out of place? 

Or do females (and some gay dudes) face some greater biological or social imperative? 

~BurbMom

On not being Gandhi, Meryl or Obama

BurbMom wrote about why Obama makes her feel like a loser the other day, and sadly the feeling still persists a week after the inauguration, at least for me. He's not that much older than me or my husband, and I can't help asking why he is where he is and we are, well, where we are. 

My gym friend says I'm too hard on myself, that I've accomplished a lot. "You have kids, too!" she says by way of reminder, as if that were an excuse. But see, Obama has kids, too, and so do many of the bigshots he named in his cabinet. (Rahm Emmanuel, anyone?) Michelle Obama has kids, obviously, and she's First Lady. I'm the First Lady—at the line that forms for swimming classes. The first lady to pick up my dry cleaning (I'm an early bird). Or the first lady to fall asleep on the couch after putting in a heavy day juggling a freelance assignment and school pickups and homework and kitchen-scrubbing duty. 

I grew up in a family that always spoke of potential. You weren't supposed to just aim high; you were supposed to aim for the best. And so I applied myself at school; got internships at magazines and newspapers when everyone else was taking off for Europe for a summer abroad or hanging out at the mall with their boyfriends. I always had my eye on the prize. And for a while there the prizes did come: A coveted entry-level job at a news organization. A byline in a national magazine. A chance to cover a governor's state of the state addresses—all before the age of 22. 

But those prizes are harder to come by. (An acquaintance just got a plum story, and she's been at this a lot less longer than I have.) And I feel like a total washout. I'm not president. Nor an Oscar winner, accomplished peace activist, or Pulitzer Prize winner. I haven't really helped changed the lives of countless others for the better; lobbied for altruistic policies; or ran a soup kitchen. And no, I never did publish that novel, though my fiction used to get some interested nibbles. 

Sometimes I'm overcome with the feeling that I'm no longer a contender. I can't drop everything to cover a juicy story, anymore—not often. I can try, but I'd have to line up the babysitter first; make sure there are groceries so everyone can subsist—my husband happily cooks and sort-of happily cleans, but he can't for the life of him shop properly without spending double our food budget—and then forego food and sleep. The feeling of being torn between two worlds never stops, and that's exhausting, too. 

Clearly, I have to re-evaluate the meaning of the word "success." But it's hard. I live in a world of super-achievement—hello, its NYC!—and anything short of Obama, Angelina Jolie (she's gorgeous, talented, AND a philanthropist!) or David Mamet seems tepid. A guy I know who runs his own boutique ad agency barely acknowledges his achievements when congratulated. I once gave kudos to a female painter who's actually selling her work and has a gallery representing her, and she acted as if I was crazy to think she'd made it. Faced with their inability to appreciate their own success, I look at them and think, WTF? But for some reason, I can't look in the mirror and think: Don't be so hard on yourself. 

John Lennon wrote: Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. (And oh what plans they've been: A wicked-smart husband who's a good father; lovely, lovely kids. Some good assignments along the way. And believe me, I'm grateful. Very grateful.) But let's face it. John Lennon wrote that. The John Lennon.

Me? I'm the chick having a particularly vexing day. Rant over.

—CityMom

(Photo from despair.com.)