It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

The Bone Pile and the IDS File

My weekday job involves writing and doing other communications work for an online veterinary community.  One of the longstanding features of this community is the Message Board area where veterinarians post questions, comments, or quandaries regarding cases, clients, life, and almost anything you can think of.  It’s sort of like a giant doctors’ rounds.

Two concepts that pop up in the Message Boards fairly often are ideas that cross over neatly into everyday life.

The Bone Pile -- (Spoiler alert: Do not read the following if you still operate under the belief that “doctors” possess superpowers.)

Whenever someone, often but not always a new graduate, posts about a case that went wrong and about their fear, horror, anxiety, and shame surrounding the case, almost inevitably, a more experienced veterinarian will chime in with this phrase.  “Every practitioner has a bone pile.”

It’s true. Medical practitioners -- whether veterinarians, dentists, or physicians -- are human.  And human beings make mistakes.  We make errors.  We have failures.  Sometimes we fail to communicate.  Sometimes we miss something.  Sometimes we forget something. Sometimes our skills prove to be insufficient.  Sometimes we fail to follow through.  Sometimes fate and physiology are not on our side.  Sometimes we just plain screw up.  These errors, failures, and losses stack one upon the other, forming the “bone pile” of the career.

In life, we all have our bone piles.  All of our failures, mistakes, cruelties, and inadequacies pile in the corners of our lives.  The cutting words spoken to a friend, the failure to listen to our children’s stories, the relationship that we blew entirely, the addictions, the jobs that we’ve lost, the financial setbacks, the burnt pie crusts.  The bone pile isn’t always stocked with T-rex femurs.  Some of the bones are tiny – wispy fish bones that poke and annoy, but are almost invisible.

Most of us don’t like to look at our bone piles.  We stack furniture in front of them, cover them with pretty clothes or expensive electronics, blur the outlines with food, drugs, sex, or alcohol, run from them into the next ill-considered job or relationship.  We call this “moving on.”  And, indeed, one can’t set up residence in the bone pile.  It’s a creepy, hard, and uncomfortable place that lacks the things we need in order to sustain us.  There is no love or nutrition in the bone pile.  It’s haunted by the ghosts of shame and failure.

But, to deny it, is to deny ourselves.

Here’s where medical practitioners do something right.  We speak of the bone pile almost fondly and return to it on occasion, but not with self-flagellation – with a purpose.  You see, doctors (of all stripes and spots) have learned that the purpose of the bone pile is education.  We perform necropsies on our mistakes – carefully dissecting away the layers to discover exactly what happened.  In hospitals, human physicians hold Morbidity and Mortality rounds, in which a case that produced an undesirable outcome is selected and presented in a peer group.  The purpose of these rounds isn’t to shame the doctor in charge.  It isn’t a public flogging.  The M and M is meant to highlight where mistakes occurred and ways of preventing those errors in the future.

We can’t “move on” from our failures or losses until we understand why they happened, and until we learn what we can do to keep the same pattern from repeating.  The bone pile will always grow – that’s the nature of human existence.  Yet, acknowledging the bone pile and its usefulness helps us to grow, to build our experience, and to move away from past errors.  Yes, so that we can make new ones!

If the inevitability of failure depresses you (it depresses all of us a bit, I think), then you may be glad to see the next tool.

The IDS File

The IDS file is usually mentioned in the same message threads that reference the bone pile.  New practitioners often have to be told about this tool, and sometimes experienced practitioners need a reminder to return to the IDS file periodically.  IDS stands for one simple principle: I Don’t Suck.

“I Don’t Suck” is a hard concept for most humans to grasp.  For veterinarians (and I suspect physicians) who tend to be goal-oriented perfectionists, the IDS concept is both incomprehensible and essential.  After all, if we tell ourselves that we are horrible, that we have failed, that we suck, that makes us good people, right?  Self-flagellation is virtuous, isn’t it?  After all, beating ourselves up over a mistake will keep us from making that same mistake again.

Uh, no.

It sounds good.  And we all do it.  We writhe in guilt over the case that went wrong – obsessing, losing sleep, researching until our eyeballs pop out of our heads like Boston Terriers with glaucoma.  We label ourselves – “I did it again.  I can’t be in relationships.  I should just die alone.”  “I can’t believe I said that to her.  I’m a horrible mother.”  The problem with the “I Suck” approach to our humanity is that it doesn’t prevent us from making mistakes, and it doesn’t make us any better in the areas where we’ve failed.  I’d argue that it makes us worse.

This is a hard story to tell.  A number of years ago, I was called out to castrate a horse.  Gelding is a common surgery, and I’d performed hundreds by that time.  The patient was a gorgeous, 6 year old, well-mannered stallion who was only being gelded because he was being moved to a stable that didn’t allow stallions and he wasn’t going to be used as a breeding animal anyway.  The surgery went well.  I never could pinpoint a moment where anything went wrong.  When he stood there was no bleeding beyond the typical few drips.  I watched him in his stall for about 20 minutes to be sure.  I wasn’t on call that night, and I’ll never know what happened exactly, but he began bleeding that evening.  I still don’t fully know the chain of events, but the upshot was that my patient wound up bleeding to death in the trailer on the way to the referral facility.

Realistically, I don’t know if I committed an error in surgery, if the horse did something later on that opened a clot, or if there was an error on the part of one of the other practitioners that saw him that evening.  I never will know.  But, this horse looms large in my bone pile.

Here’s what happened to me.  I excel at self-flagellation.  For months, I spent the drive to work wracked in nausea, my vision blurred so badly I could barely see the road.  I was terrified to do any surgeries.  At all.  The record lurked in my stack of files because I couldn’t face writing it.  I told myself that I could never geld another horse again.

None of this made me a better veterinarian.  Clinical acumen and anxiety-ridden paralysis don’t exactly go hand-in-hand.  Telling myself I sucked only got in the way of the confidence I needed to treat my other patients properly.

Fortunately for me, I had a boss who was more than willing to share the stories of his own bone pile, an office manager who had no intention of coddling me and booked surgeries for me (including geldings) just as she always had, and a technician who blessedly saw the shakes I tried so hard to hide and made certain that she could be there to assist me and who always had the phrase that got me through many a tough case, “I know you can do it.  I have great faith in you.”

And I had my IDS file.  It’s a literal file these days, still hanging in the rack in my home office.  Back then, my IDS file was a collection of cards, notes, and pictures from clients jammed into my cubby slot and briefcase.  Each of those cards said essentially the same thing: “Thank you for caring for our animal.  You are a wonderful veterinarian.  We are grateful for you.”

Human nature is a funny thing.  Even though I said that the story of the gelding disaster was hard to tell, those words were much easier to type than the messages of the IDS file.  We are much more comfortable with our failings than we are with our strengths.  Typing the phrase “you are a wonderful veterinarian” feels awkward and self-aggrandizing.  Even alone in my office in pre-dawn quiet, I feel embarrassed, as though I should duck my head and blush.  Yet, in this same office, I can glance around the room and see at least three mementos belonging to my IDS file.

In our everyday lives, the IDS file may be harder to compile.  I’m learning to build mine from bits and pieces.  Some of it lives in my email folders: kind or funny notes from friends, compliments on articles, thank yous from school or other organizations.  Some of it lives on my refrigerator, dresser, and bulletin boards in the form of art and gifts from my children.  Some of it lives in boxes of old letters (remember those?) and cards.  Some of it lives in the objects about me – my Alice in Wonderland teapot from my husband.  Some of it lives in my mind – in the memories of conversations, small triumphs, and unbelievable joys.  But, I’m learning, on the days when the bone pile seems unmanageably high, to go to the IDS file in whatever form is handy and to find the things that tell me that “I don’t suck” or to find the people who will let me know in their own ways that they “have great faith” in me.

Yes, our pains and failures have to be moved on from, but they must also be learned from.  And we need to learn from and embrace our triumphs and joys to the same degree.  Ultimately, we are the only ones who truly create both our bone piles and our IDS files, and it is up to us to decide how to use them.

What do my kids say?

I worry about what my kids say in public. 

Most parents reading that sentence are probably having one of two reactions.  The honest ones are thinking, “Oh, God, me too!” while those who prefer not to look too closely behind the curtains of their own lives are saying, “Well, then maybe you should raise them better and stop polluting their minds.”

It might come as a surprise to realize that I’m more closely aligning myself with the second set of parents here, but not in the ways you might think.  I don’t worry about the following things:

• Whether my kids have picked up swear words that they might pass along – They have
• Whether my kids will talk about the R rated movies they’ve seen – They will
• Whether they’ll pass along their knowledge of reproductive anatomy or physiology – Oh, well, at least they know the correct terminology.
• Whether they’ll out us for “always going to fast food restaurants for treats” – In my kids’ collective mind, more than once = “always”

I worry more about the value judgments they absorb from us, and how they convey those judgments to the rest of the world.  If there is one lesson in life that I would really like to give them, it is that every person has his own story.  The problem with this is that I also want them to understand that evil and malice do exist in the world and that it is the responsibility of every person to confront injustice.  Reconciling those two ideals becomes, for me, a giant, tangled, who-gave-the-ferret-the-yarn mess.

Mike and I are not perfect, and yeah, I do worry that our children might pick up something that slipped from our mouths in a moment of anger, irritation, irreverence, or sheer stupidity.  But, overall, I think of those things like viruses – something that may cause a transient infection but will be eradicated if the patient is generally healthy.  I believe that when parents try, most of the time, to live and speak the lives they want for their children, that is largely what the children will learn.  But, I worry about the hidden lessons, about the stories that my kids will take away that are right for our family but may not fit another household.

Here, let me give you three examples: two are moments when my children passed along things from our family – with different results, and one where another family’s values intruded on ours.

If you’ve read this blog for a while, then you probably realize that religion holds a somewhat tentative place in our house.  Mike is pretty opposed to organized religion, and while I was confirmed Catholic, I’ve fallen away from the Church whose teachings differ so drastically from my core values.  As a result, our kids have been raised with a pretty sketchy idea of theology.  My general message to them has been that I believe that all religions – throughout history and cultures – are ways of coming toward the same basic truths.  In this, we’ve tried to teach them to respect everyone’s religious beliefs.  Well, that hasn’t always worked.

Caitlin has considered herself a polytheist for several years.  She tends to favor the ancient Greek pantheon, but will consider the influence of the Egyptians.  She has no patience for the notion of one omnipotent and perfect deity.  She prefers the concept of a number of gods, flawed in human ways, and fulfilling different roles.  Since Caitlin is also typically opposed to sharing information with others except on a need to know basis, her beliefs haven’t generally been a problem.  A couple of years ago, however, she came home from school with one of those stories that made me wince.

Somehow she had wound up in a religious debate with a classmate in which she insisted that the Greek gods are real while the classmate, offended, said that the Greek pantheon were myth and that “there is no God but God.”  This was the point where things fractured a bit.  Caitlin, always ready for a good, speculative argument, demanded, “Well, what if the Greek gods are real and your God is imaginary?”

I’m still grateful not to have received an irate parent phone call on that one…

Incident number 2 took place in our car a year or so ago.  Aidan and two of his friends were riding in the back seat of our van while I was driving and trying not to listen to the 3^rd grade boy dialogue.  No one should have to listen to boys who somehow consider themselves out of earshot.   In my attempt to drown out the fart-jokes with internal white noise, I missed the beginning of the conversation.  My attention focused when I heard one of the boys say,

“That’s so gay!”

Aidan didn’t miss a beat.  “What’s wrong with that?”

“Huh?”  The conversation stopped.

“What’s wrong with being gay,” he asked.

Neither boy had an answer, other than a muttered “nothing,” so the world returned to methane-based humor.

My initial, and current, reaction was pride in my son.  I was proud of him for speaking out against a stereotype, and I was proud of him for breaking from the group to look at his own values.  Usually we worry that if one of his buddies said, “Hey, let’s go jump off that bridge,” Aidan would be the first one over the rail.

But, part of me wonders.  Where do we draw the line in speaking out for our beliefs?  Is it more right for my son to assert his value that no way of being should be used as an insult than it is for my daughter’s classmate to try to impose his belief in a single, omnipotent God on her, or her to impose her polytheism on him?  Part of me says, well, of course.  The one is speaking out against injustice while the other shows a disrespect for someone else’s religion.  But, is it ultimately the same thing?

Now, I happen to know the parents of both my son’s friends well, and I’m reasonably confident that none of them would be okay with their offspring using “gay” as a pejorative.  But what if one of those boys had belonged to a family who truly believed homosexuality to be a sin?  I would argue that Aidan was simply asking, “What is wrong with being gay?” and that his intent was to say that it’s not okay to use someone’s identity as a slur, but might not the hypothetical parent view the conversation as an attempt by my son to impose his beliefs on others?  I don’t know.

The third incident may explain some of this further.  While we generally try to provide a healthy balance of foods for our kids – we receive a weekly “farm box” from a local CSA program, we don’t stock fluorescent orange chips except as a special treat maybe twice a year, the bags of Halloween candy last longer than the twelve months between trick-or-treats, and a fruit or vegetable is mandatory in every lunch – Mike and I aren’t fanatic about every ingredient or product that crosses the kitchen threshold.  Sierra may have a whole-grain flour, nut, and raisin bar from Trader Joe’s with a glass of Kefir for breakfast but a Skippy peanut butter and Smuckers strawberry jam on white bread (with the crusts cut off) sandwich in her lunch.  (This week, these are her menu items of choice.)

Most of the time Sierra, like her siblings, packs her own lunch.  And for a first grader, I think she does a damn good job.  Her typical lunch involves the aforementioned sandwich (sometimes she mixes it up and has leftovers in a thermos jar), a pack of dried seaweed, a container of Pirate’s Booty, and a piece of fruit.  Nutrition-wise, I’d have to say, “not bad.”  She’s got her protein, her carbs, multiple vitamins and minerals, and nothing super-processed or with a lot of ingredients whose chemical structures were the stuff of my undergraduate nightmares.

You may have noticed that first graders are not into nuance.  Shade of grey tend to fall into two camps for the seven-year-old: black or white, good or bad, right or wrong, healthy or bad-for-you.

Knowing this, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Sierra came home a couple of months ago saying, “We need to buy a different kind of seaweed.”

Ok, not a comment I would have expected to hear in my former, non-kelp-purchasing, kid-free life.  But, what really threw me was the next line.

“M says that the kind of seaweed I bring in my lunch is bad for you.”

My first reaction was a series of three-letter acronyms for expletives.  Seriously?  Some kid had decided that our brand of seaweed is unhealthy?  What sort of freaky universe was this?  Could someone please choke that child with a Twinkie?

I’ll admit it – we did double check the sodium content (the only potential unhealthy thing I could think of).  It was fine.  As I type this, I feel like an idiot.  What kind of adult allows a 7 year old to influence her perception of how she feeds her children?

Well, we’re nearing the end of the school year, but M is still at it.  Last week, Sierra was visibly upset (since this child’s default expression is a huge grin, upset isn’t exactly hard to discern.)  Sure enough, “M still says that my lunches aren’t healthy.  Now he’s saying that my sandwich is bad for me.”

Aidan, from the back seat, made the noise beloved of pre-teen boys – that sort of cough, laugh, vocal fart that indicates a level of derision un-expressible by words.  “What the heck is wrong with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”  I have to give Aidan credit; he may rain a torrent of judgment down on Sierra, but other kids are not allowed to make his little sister feel bad.

“He says that the kind of bread we buy is bad.”

Ok, well, white bread criticism makes a bit more sense to me than seaweed-critique, but I was becoming annoyed.  Biting back a number of comments that would not endear me to the 1^st grade parent body, I dredged up, “Well, anything is bad for you in the wrong amount.  Even water can be bad for you if you drink too much of it.  The important thing is eating a reasonable amount of each kind of food.”

This is our default answer to junk food, why pizza is not a vegetable, whether soda=poison, and any other random nutritional question.

So here is my quandary.  M and his family obviously had nutritional right on their side in the white bread question.  Realistically there isn’t anything healthy about the sandwich bread Sierra eats.  (I’ve learned to pick nutritional battles because I fear that if my children decide that cannibalism is the only reasonable antidote to whole grains, I will be the first menu item.)  However, where is the line between M being informed about healthy foods, M educating his friends, and another family’s way of life trampling all over ours?

And where do my kids draw the line?  When does their belief in freedom of religion collide with someone else’s values?  And where does indignation over a slur become telling someone else how to live?

I don’t really know.  I haven’t answered these questions for myself yet.  And so, I do worry about what my kids pass along.

You Can (not) Be Replaced

“You can be replaced.” It was a catch-phrase of my college years.  A joke, tossed out when someone was being difficult, amusingly irritating, or just teasing.  It was a joke, until one day it wasn’t.  A response from a friend one evening struck deep.  In that moment, I felt that I had been replaced, and suddenly the joke wasn’t funny anymore. 

It’s been nearly 20 years, the friendship has been long-since repaired, and yet, I still don’t use that phrase. 

We call jealousy “the green-eyed monster” and portray it as a moral failing on the part of the one who exhibits it – equating jealousy with spite, vengeance, pettiness, and malice.  Sure, jealousy can make us act in those ways, but to link jealousy with “badness” shows a lack of compassion, toward others and toward ourselves.  The fact is, even the best, kindest, and most generous of us sometimes feels a hot flush when confronted by the apparent threat of someone we see as prettier, smarter, more talented, more loving, a closer friend, a dearer confidant, a better worker, etc. 

I recognize my own response to jealousy – stop me if this sounds familiar.  My arms and legs feel hot and heavy.  My chest closes up.  I feel a rush of anger and yes, hatred, toward the other person.  That anger is immediately followed by an overwhelming wave of guilt and self-loathing.  That’s when the voices start – again, let me know if you’ve heard these before.

“What kind of horrible person hates someone just for being a good friend?”

“Her house is prettier than yours; why can’t you get off your lazy ass and clean once in a while?”

“So, they hired him.  Deal with it.  You can’t do [fill in the blank professional task] anyway.”

“Well, of course they invited her and not you.  Look how pathetic you are.”

And round and round the circle goes.  Because the worse one feels about oneself, the more jealous one becomes of someone who might be “better” who might – and wait for it… Replace us.

Yep.  Jealousy, that thing we label as a moral failing, is rooted in something pretty basic, I think.  I know when I take out my jealousies and look them in the eye, I see one thing.  Fear.  I don’t really care if someone else has more money, talent, looks, brains, humor, or compassion than I do.  I care that I am not enough.  I am afraid that I can be replaced.  Maybe I’m not unique after all.  Maybe my uniqueness is a failing.  Maybe that rejection really did say something about me.  Maybe my kids really would rather have so-and-so as a mother.  Maybe my husband really would be better off with another wife.  Maybe the friendships that I see as close are really just sort of ‘meh’ to my friends.

Unfortunately the fears that drive jealousy are, like all fears, extraordinarily good at masquerading as something else.  The fear of being replaceable shows up as:

• Indignation – “How dare that slut flirt with my husband/boyfriend/partner that way!”
• Derision – “Please!  Doesn’t she really have anything better to do than bake all day?   What, did she lay the freaking eggs herself, too?  Must be nice.”
• Defensiveness – “He totally cherry-picked the research that backs up his point.  I can reference just as many articles that validate my opinion, and there aren’t any quacks on my side.”
• Anger at innocent bystanders – “Will you quit making that racket right now!  Your father and I are trying to have a peaceful conversation.  You’re giving me a headache.”

Do you recognize any of these?  I do.  Fear of being “left out” (translation: superfluous, unwanted, replaceable) runs so deep for me that I don’t always see it until I’ve stepped in a giant, steaming pile of my own bitchiness and insecurity.

I’m getting better about recognizing the fears that drive some of my behaviors.  That recognition isn’t always comfortable.  It’s a lot easier to be angry, indignant, tense, and controlling than it is to openly acknowledge one’s own feelings of inadequacy.  Some of the toughest conversations I’ve had in recent years have been the ones where I’ve found myself forced to make this apology (or something similar): “I’m sorry I’m being that way.  I’m jealous, and I’m so scared of being left out.  I’m afraid that you’ll realize how worthless I really am, and then I get all tense and weird, and then I hate myself even more.” 

Yet, weirdly, on the rare occasions where I’ve had to strip off all of the masks, the result hasn’t been rejection but a deepening of the relationship.

The reality is that none of us can be replaced, but we can all be augmented, and we need to be.  None of us can be everything to someone.  We can’t fill every role in another person’s life or on the job.  We each bring our own unique qualities to a relationship whether personal, familial, or professional.  Even when relationships end, the driving force isn’t usually replacement; it’s adjustment.  Something in that interaction no longer fit, or something else was needed.  The presence of someone else in a relationship (business or personal) speaks only to the needs of the other person, or organization, in that moment in time.  

When I began this post yesterday morning, it felt as though something was missing.  A conversation with a friend gave me the missing piece.  My friend pointed out that there is one circumstance under which we are all replaceable.  When we hide our true selves, and present a “generic, bland face” to the world, then, yes, we do become replaceable and are likely to be replaced.  Let’s face it – it’s a whole lot easier to replace those dishes you bought at Target or Ikea than the hand-thrown bowl you picked up at a craft fair.  The bowl may have irregularities and may not be glossy, but it called to you for a reason, and that reason was its uniqueness.

Here’s my goal for the next time I feel a surge of jealousy: I plan to say to myself, “Yep, I’m scared.  I feel threatened.  But, I’m still me.  I didn’t stop being the person I was five minutes ago.  I’m going to take a deep breath and trust that I’m fulfilling the roles that are right for me.”

How do you cope with your jealousies?  I’d like to know.  We each bring something unique to the table.  And no, you can not be replaced.

 

Just Let Go (of the plan)

My phone just sent me a reminder.  “Just let go,” it says to me every morning at 6:00.  Just let go.  I am a widely acknowledged control-freak, and some mornings I need that message more than others.

I ran across this photo yesterday morning on Facebook:

Obviously it’s pretty difficult and rather inefficient to go through life with no plan at all, but I think we program ourselves to believe that PLAN = SAFETY.  Our intellects know this not to be true.  We have a raft of sayings… “The best laid plans of mice and men…” “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” And on, and on.  Yet, how often do we catch ourselves saying, “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

We treat our plans as though we were plugging ingredients into a recipe or numbers into a formula.  If I do A, B, and then C, I will get result Q.  Except sometimes, we don’t get result Q.  Sometimes the outcome is X or 42 or purple.

I’ve been working with a team on developing a student loan simulator designed to help give veterinary students and pre-vet students an idea of how their choices after graduation may affect their loan balances and repayment.  In the introductory text, we have a bunch of disclaimers to the effect that this simulator isn’t a way to predict your future, it’s just an illustration, etc.  And as I have worked on those sentences this week, part of me imagines the students who will be entering their numbers, their visions of their future, and hitting “Calculate.”  I’m willing to bet that they have plans.  Many of them probably have their future mapped out so clearly that they believe they know what path their lives will follow until they die.

I was one of those students.  Yet, at almost every turning point of my life, I have found myself saying, “This wasn’t in the plan.”  We were going to have two children, not three. I was going to own my own equine practice by now.  We were going to live in our old house until our grandchildren were grown.  I went to veterinary school because I would never be able to support myself as a writer.  And, the list goes on…

Yet – and this is the reason for the phone reminder – most of the best things in my life have come from letting go of the plan, from allowing my life to flow with only gentle guidance from myself.

I took a watercolor class taught by Caitlin’s teacher last night.  Rick Tan is not only a terrific teacher but an amazing artist in his own right.  Just check out his blog.  We were working with wet-on-wet watercolors in the method the students use in school.  This particular technique uses a lot of water, and as anyone who has swum or boated in open water knows, water doesn’t like human control.

In high school, I hated watercolors; the pigment never seemed to stay where I wanted it, so I moved on to oils where I could layer pigment and control my brushstrokes and even the thickness of the paint for texture.  The down side to oils is that they take forever to dry, so they aren’t very practical for a two week camping trip in a crowded car in the Pacific Northwest.  I took up watercolors as an adult in order to be able to paint on our vacations.  Very practical for a landscape painter.  Part of the plan.  Gradually, I learned to adapt my perfectionist tendency to work with the watercolors rather than against them, but I still used relatively little water so that I could maintain control.  This painting of the Awahnee hotel in Yosemite shows the detail of the leaves applied with a very dry brush.

Last night, Rick started by telling us that we were going to play with color for our first painting.  He had us begin “with a blob of yellow…”  Something seized up inside me for a moment.  All of the control voices started shouting at once.  “I’m a landscape painter.  I paint from life or photos.  I don’t do abstract.  I know how to paint.  I don’t need to experiment with color.”  I’ve had some practice with these voices lately and I’ve learned not to argue with them.  Instead, I left them to chatter in the back of my head and loaded my brush with yellow pigment.

As soon as my brush touched the meniscus of the film of water coating my paper, the yellow flowed from the bristles and began to tendril out along the page.  I moved my brush in swirls, back and forth, in S-shaped swoops.  I played with deepening color in some areas, and lifting it off in others.  As we added different pigments to the page, I could feel the layers of my emotions flowing with the color – swirling, blending, deepening in some areas, lightening and bouncing along in others.                             C. Corp-Minamiji,  original watercolor 2010

 

 

C. Corp-Minamiji,  original watercolor 2012

 The end result wasn’t what I’d envisioned when I first dipped my brush into the paint, and I think that’s a good thing.  A friend of mine fought with her brush strokes during the first piece, her struggles reminding me of my own watercolor battles in high school.  “I think most of the trick to watercolors is letting go of perfectionism,” I commented.  And as she relaxed into her second work, her painting shifted.

How often do we try so hard to cling to our concept of the way things are “supposed to be?”  How often do we say things to others in the hopes of forcing the response that we want?  And how often are we disappointed?  Yet, it seems, to me at least, that when we let go, let events, people, and feelings follow their own currents, that’s when the richness swirls in.

Try it: “Just let go.”

 

The Gender Line

I don’t much follow celebrity news, but Ashley Judd recently wrote a beautiful essay discussing the harm done by the objectification of women.  Harm done not just to women, but by women as well as men, and the harm done to men as well.  This essay keeps being labeled “feminist.”  [Side note: as I was finding the link for the essay, I noticed the title.  “Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance.”  “Slaps Media in the Face” – really?  The editors at the Daily Beast couldn’t find words to headline an essay about the dangers of stereotyping and objectification that didn’t involve a metaphor that conjures the most stereotypical image of female celebrity?  Shame.]

My own relationship with feminism is an uneasy one.  I don’t even like the word, not because I’m somehow opposed to the philosophical ideal of female strength and equality, but because it is a word that divides.  I don’t believe that men and women are the same.  I like feeling feminine, and I like doing many of the things that are considered “masculine.”  I prefer to exist beyond the labeling of my reproductive organs.  Can I be a humanist instead, please?

Misogyny, sexism, chivalry, feminine oppression, patriarchy, gender-bias – it doesn’t matter what terms are used.  There is an ugly undercurrent to each, a thread that says “We are different members of humanity, our differences and complexities scare the hell out of us, and we can only resolve them by assigning roles and expectations.”  In a world where physical strength conferred a distinct survival advantage, these labels may have made sense.  However, as technology and education have leveled the career (survival) playing field, our expectations around gender serve only to confuse, to enhance conflict and distrust, and to prevent us from celebrating – yes, celebrating – the very real differences that exist between us.

We all contribute to the problem of separation and expectation.  Daily.  The strident feminist who shuns makeup, refuses to buy guns or trucks for her son or dolls for her daughter is as guilty as the middle-aged man who states outright that no woman “can do that job as well as a man.”  And, the mother who pushes makeup on her adolescent daughter “just to cover up that blemish” is as guilty as the father who tells his son to “toughen up; don’t cry.” We all do it.  Don’t pretend you can’t see yourself here.

 What about the mothers whose default is to call the other mom to set up a playdate, even though the father is picking the child up from school?  What about that time you looked at a woman and thought (or said), “There is no way she should be wearing that.” When was the last time you had an opinion, really any opinion, about a man’s attire?  How often do we excuse a man lashing out in anger when we know that he is really frightened or hurt?  Why do we make the excuse?  Oh, well, because that’s just how men handle these things.  Why aren’t we angry at a society that refuses to allow men emotional expression beyond anger or fucking?  Why aren’t we angry that we set separate parenting standards for men and women?  We do.  Don’t deny it.  A man can be a good father just by showing up.  What about the mother who lets her son go off for an overnighter without clean socks or underwear?

Yet, we run around claiming that all is equality and fairness.  We tell our daughters “You can do anything a boy can do.”  Yet, we raise our sons with the expectation that they need to somehow treat women differently than they do other men.  We tell them, “Don’t hit girls.  Well, don’t hit anyone, but especially don’t hit girls.”  We train them to hold the door open for women.  Are they supposed to let it slam shut in the face of the guy behind them?  We tell our daughters, “You can have any career you want.” But we don’t give them the tools for that career.

A man is expected to state his needs and expectations in the workplace.  A man is expected to speak up when he sees someone underperforming.  A woman who speaks her mind professionally risks being classified as a bitch.  Yes, this phenomenon is real.  I have heard male colleagues yell and curse at clients with dangerous horses.  I have had those same clients call the office to complain about how rude I was when I suggested that the horse was dangerous and needed some training.

This isn’t an example of the poor, oppressed woman.  This sort of gender divide harms everyone.  Women lose (obviously) in terms of self-esteem, performance, and career advancement.  Men lose the input and experience of half of their colleagues.  And they lose the opportunity to put their own egos to the side and hear an alternate view.  Whenever we are allowed to entrench deeply within our own experience and self-expectation, we lose.

It starts so early.  Walk onto an elementary school playground and look at the first grade.  In kindergarten, those same children mingled, irrespective of gender. The active children rolled around in the grass and mud like puppies on caffeine while the more sedate children built castles of blocks and dreams.  By first grade, though, the lines begin to be drawn.  Girls clump together, trying on tiaras and cloaks, while the boys wield sticks and charge across the yard.  They still blend their games, but often the cross-over is gender-specific: the girls need a groom for the wedding or a king for the kingdom; the boys need someone to rescue. 

Earlier this year, I had an odd experience.  I was picking Sierra up from school, and as my whirlwind child tore through the classroom and out into the yard with a pack of boys, a mother of one of the other girls smiled and said to me, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but Sierra reminds me a bit of Ramona (from the Beverly Cleary books) – I mean in terms of her…of her physicality.”  The other mother trailed off as though she wasn’t certain that she hadn’t said something inappropriate.  She didn’t look critical; she looked almost half-envious, as though she wished that she had been that exuberant child.  But, that physicality wasn’t, and still isn’t, considered quite the norm for girls.  Sierra is Ramona in many ways.  Thirty years ago, she would have been branded a “tomboy.”  It isn’t unusual to see her, resplendent in princess gown and tiara, chasing her brother through the neighborhood armed to the teeth with Nerf gun and sword.

I hope that she will maintain this balance.  But, I’ve already seen the pressures of society begin to bend her older siblings.  Aidan, by default a sweet, sensitive, cuddly people-pleaser, has begun working on his “cool” act.  He’s always had an affinity for sports, guns, and cars, but he is less and less willing to let any side of him other than the sport/gun/car/class clown face be seen around his peers.  Caitlin struggles socially as she and her peers enter their teens.  “Most of the girls just want to talk about makeup and hair and clothes and music,” she complains.  Caitlin loves to shop, will play with makeup a bit because she likes things that are pretty, even herself, but she doesn’t see the point in talking about these things.  She’d rather hold lengthy discussion about the merits of Marvel vs DC comics, or the more subtle points of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or compare and contrast Star Trek and Star Wars, but already, those conversations are the purview of the boys.  When we separate, sort, and label, everyone loses.

I don’t have a fix.  I wish I did.  I think that the only solutions to the big problems are the small ones.  What if each of us stopped, paused before allowing a judgmental thought on a woman’s body to be fully articulated?  What if we stopped before saying, “Don’t cry” to our sons?  What if we took a breath before leaping to the “bitch” label for a woman stating her case, or before brushing off the rudeness of an angry man?  What if we gave each other small spaces in which to move beyond the labels?  What if we quit blaming clothing, makeup, beer commercials, or politicians for our societal woes?

What if we ditched words like misogyny and feminism and moved toward one label?  I’d like to be a humanist, please.

Gift of the Small Things

I’ve managed to banish false modesty just far enough to admit that I am possessed of at least my fair share of creative gifts.  I can write, paint, draw (sometimes), cook, and sew.  However, at least two major creative arts lie outside my sphere.  I’ve long since come to terms with my lack of musical ability.  I appreciate music, I can play the notes on the page (on one instrument – the flute), but I lack the ear, voice, and vision to create from music.  As much as I regret my singing voice, I’ve learned to accept that in music, I get to be the audience.  Others create.  Photography, however, is another matter entirely.

Photography is a visual art.  It should be right up my alley.  Ah, yes, we’ll get back to the dreaded “should” in a bit.  Yet, as I’m sure readers of this blog have realized, while I can paint pictures with brush and with word, the simple act of framing the moment I see in a lens and pushing a button is beyond me.  No matter what I see with my eyes and appreciate with my heart about a scene, my photos rarely, if ever do it justice.  They never seem to penetrate the depths of the moment.  All of the elements are there, but something is missing.  In writing, one of the rules is “show, don’t tell.”  My photos tell.

Now, I have several friends and family members who are gifted photographers – some to the extent of professionalism.  But, one friend’s pictures make me downright jealous.  Her blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed are filled with beautiful, arty photos that capture the joy and delicacy inherent in the details of a scene or the small moments of life.  “This is what life is supposed to be,” her photos say as they trace the sunset-colored veining of a dragonfly’s wing or tease the impish glee from a child’s glowing smile.

‘Well, crap,’ I think, looking at her latest posts. ‘We’re good friends; our kids play together; we live less than two miles from each other.  How come my life doesn’t look like that?”  As I scan through sparkling shots of kayaks on open water, cherubic faces of happy children, and glowing, velvet, layers of color, I think of my bathroom sink, smeared with streaks of my makeup and flecks of my husband’s beard.  I focus on the slime growing in the container that I’m pretending isn’t in the back of my refrigerator, the piles of laundry – clean and dirty – taking over my bedroom floor.  I hear two of my three cherubic children screaming at each other in the backyard and keep my ears peeled for the sounds of violence or the stray obscenity.

Now, I know Robyn well enough to know that her life isn’t completely captured in her photos either.  I know her well enough to know her own struggles, lapses, and untidinesses.  In fact, those are the things that I like best about her.  Her openness about not only the triumphs and joys, but also the frustrations and failures, of her own life make me more willing to be real myself.

Yesterday morning was one of those glorious spring days that isn’t pastel-perfect but is instead layered with the exact proportions of shadow and light to fill one’s heart with a sense of miracle.  I ran just over 2.5 miles of my 3 mile loop, allowing myself a cool-down walk through the nature trail at the back of our local park.   I thought of my iPhone in my pocket and contemplated taking pictures, but I had just been looking and some of Robyn’s photos and knew how much the inadequacies of my own pictures would frustrate me.  ‘I wish I were like her,’ I thought, resting my hand on the trunk of a tree and studying the contrast between the umber edges of the bark and its silvery surface.  I closed my eyes, letting the sun warm my back, as my hand rested against the solidity of the tree, and was reminded of the warmth and solidity of my husband.  I walked a few feet further, picked a sprig of rosemary from a bush bursting with purple flowers, and brought the sprig to my nose, thinking of Sierra bringing me rosemary bouquets.  The willow beneath which Aidan and I gathered branches last year for his shelter-project had filled out with delicate, green leaves.  I touched the petals of a rock-rose, and my mind walked through my parents’ garden.  Strands of horse-tail reminded me of long ago trail rides, and the brief moments of respite before remounting my unreliable, bucking, yet beloved mare.  Flowers popped from a tree, and I wanted to show them to Caitlin, far away from me on her own adventure this week.

As I passed through the tunnel beneath the road, I realized that I had been taking photos in my own way.  Capturing the pearls of white-flowered fairy rings nestling in the darker blades of grass, framing a twisted palm frond glowing in the sun against the black asphalt of the street, picking the highlights off of a stick, fallen onto the bark mulch beneath a redwood.  The gift of my friend’s photos, and the gift I found in myself, is the gift of the small moments.  When we pause to frame and snap those details, we are capturing the essence of our lives.  Think back to the biggest events of your life.  What do you remember, truly?  Do you really feel, deep within you, the entire event or day?  Or do you smell the scent of a grandmother’s perfume, or do you recall the feel of your lover’s cheek beneath your hand, or do you hear a laugh, carried on the wind?

Photo credit: Robyn Beaufoy, 2012

Vulnerability -- For the Long Term

Caitlin is traveling with friends this week, and the trip involves a flight.  If there is one phobia that I haven’t quite managed to shake, it’s flying.  I love to travel, but you don’t want to be the person stuck next to me in a plan – I gasp and grab the armrests a lot.  Suffice it to say that while I trust the family taking my daughter and I’m so grateful to them for providing her with this adventure, my maternal anxiety is in overdrive today.  Caitlin doesn’t know that.  I’m not a big fan of letting my neuroses impact my children’s experiences.  I was texting a friend last night about my struggles with letting my daughter “spread her wings” despite my personal discomfort.  “Seems like adulthood is all about doing the hard thing for the long-term benefit,” I commented.

For me, “the hard thing” usually involves letting go of control.  (See ‘fear of flying’ – above. I’d probably be fine if I were the pilot.)  I’ve come to realize, though, that most of the time, my desire to control the circumstances around me has less to do with fear of what those circumstances may produce than fear of what will be revealed about me in those circumstances.

I intermittently follow Brené Brown’s blog at www.ordinarycourage.com.  Brown is a research professor whose work focuses a lot on the value of vulnerability and the trap of its opposite, perfectionism.  In an article for CNN, Brown writes, “Perfectionism is a 20-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it's the thing that's really preventing us from being seen and taking flight.”

I don’t know about you, but I have spent most of my life listening to the voices in my head that give a running commentary about how any thought, word, action, or inaction of mine will be perceived by others – the voices that say “that’s not good enough.”  Yet, all of the cool things, the magical things that have happened in my life have come from allowing myself to be vulnerable, to take risks – including the risk of looking like a screw-up or of being rejected.  It is only when I manage to turn off those voices, that the real me gets a chance to spread her wings and be heard.  (There’s a reason I write with the doors shut.)

But, the hard part is that vulnerability isn’t always rewarded.  Sometimes you will lose something precious.  Sometimes you will be misunderstood.  Sometimes you will, in fact, be rejected for the person you are.  And, it’s hard to keep plugging forward in the face of those losses, to convince yourself that it’s better to risk rejection as yourself than to be accepted for someone that you aren’t.

My son is a perfectionist.  His teacher, my husband, and I have spent most of Aidan’s academic career working on convincing him to take risks with his work, and to accept that the occasional mistake doesn’t necessitate starting over or giving up entirely.  Yesterday morning’s “book report” kerfluffle was emblematic.  When I asked, “How did your book report go on Friday?” I hadn’t expected him to burst into tears and bury his face in his hands.  It turned out that when I had nixed his original idea for the report (which involved copying a section of the book word-for-word), he got stuck and couldn’t figure a way out, but was too ashamed to ask for help. 

Shame is the evil cousin of perfectionism.

Aidan didn’t see his original idea as plagiarism.  To him, the part of the book that he wanted to present had already been written, so it was obviously “right.”  He struggles with the concept of doing anything original or creative to showcase what he got from the book because he’s afraid that what he produces will be “wrong.”

The lesson that I hope someday to get Aidan to see, and the lesson that I hope Caitlin will continue to integrate, is that we are so much more real when we keep ourselves moving forward in the face of our imperfections – our humanity. 

One last anecdote on the beauty of vulnerability:

I’ve written before about my friend, the singer Vatrena King.  Vatrena has one of the most truly lovely voices I have ever heard, but more importantly, she possesses a quiet, generous soul and iron strength.  In December, she held a concert that she and her friend and manager, Poppy Peach, had been planning and working toward for months.  A week or two before the concert, I interviewed Vatrena for our local paper, and she told me the history of one of the songs she would perform.  “It Is Well With My Soul” was written in the 1800s by a gentleman who had lost his family under tragic circumstances, yet, in the face of that loss, he wrote a song of acceptance and strength.

As fate would have it, Vatrena was hit by a nasty respiratory virus on the day of the concert.  Now, we’ve all heard of diva singers cancelling concerts for the merest throat tickle “to preserve their voices” – or, more likely, to preserve their sense of self.  Vatrena, however, though she could barely speak, powered through her concert with joy and humor.  She even joked at one point that while she is normally a soprano, she was having fun seeing what life is like as a tenor.

No, Vatrena’s voice that night wasn’t up to its usual standard, but her performance showcased something far more beautiful – love.  Her love for her friends, family, and fans in the hall that night shone in every note she sang.  She was willing to risk the vulnerability of an imperfect performance in order to be real and to show her gratitude to the people she loves.  And, that vulnerability created something far more powerful than perfection ever could.  Listen: