Looking foolish along the way

Eating crow: humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proven wrong after taking a strong position

Eat humble pie: to apologize and face humiliation for a serious error

I’m not sure either of these describes exactly how I feel, but they come close. I had a particularly, and unexpectedly, emotional day. Around noon, I learned that a friend’s sister overdosed last night. I didn’t know the sister, but this recovering alcoholic can tell you that there is something about hearing that this disease has claimed another person that shakes you at your core. I believe it was that shaken state that allowed everything to bubble up to the surface.

I can’t write list posts or tell you how to get through your first day of work or even how to make more room in your life for love. The only real thing I have to offer is a candid view of the way I live my life, and to be as achingly honest about it as possible. And I’ve been wrong. About several things.

It started innocently enough. I stopped by Old Navy on my way home from work to pick up a pair of pajama shorts since it’s become clear to me that Date #4 will not take the hint and leave behind the necessary boyfriend boxers I would prefer to sleep in. While there, I decided to be a good auntie to my cousin’s 1-year-old daughter and pick up a few cute little things. I dumped it all on the bed when I got home, changed into my new shorts (ah…) and stared at the clothes. They were so cute, so little, and I couldn’t wait to see her in them. A feeling started to come up… and I shoved it back down.

All day, I’d been shoving it back down.

The loss of my friend’s sister stirred up my still-raw emotions over the loss of my friend Maureen back in March. I shoved it back down. Date #4 not being able to spend his birthday weekend with me stirred up feelings of jealousy, resentment and fear. I shoved it back down. As I stared down at the little girl’s clothes, it stirred up emotions of something I’d lost years ago, and I shoved that down too.

But it wouldn’t stay down.

As I tried to finish going about my night (I needed to blog, get my work and running clothes ready, make some concrete business decisions…), it just wouldn’t stay down. Something wasn’t right. It’s been this way for a few months but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was maybe my sinuses, maybe not exercising, not having my work and life balanced just the right way or not doing the right kind of work. I searched, all the while shooing away this nagging feeling that I wasn’t working something important out. Shoved it down.

It came up. All at once.

I miss Maureen and her death has affected me. I can’t ignore that. I don’t want to feel that pain because it is so very strong. I am missing a friend, a person who totally got me, who gave to me and took from me, to whom I told “I love you” every time we said goodbye. I wasn’t dealing with those feelings, that grief. I ignored it.

What I really want when I imagine a good, fine life for myself is to own my own café, just as I envisioned it in December, an airy cozy shop full of funky vintage furniture, good coffee and an owner (me!) who knows everybody. I would be in a cool town, maybe not too big but too small. Somehow I got the notion into my head that it just wasn’t grand enough a business for a smarty-pants like me. So I shelved it, said it was best left for retirement.

The most startling realization to you, my readers, might be what else I see in this picture. As I run my own successful café, I very clearly see children running around my shop. I want children. Three years ago, I was an alcohol who could not bring myself to bring a child into my world. That experience has been far more impacting than I ever thought, and fear has driven me in that regard.

I realize now that when it comes to the emotional things in my life, it’s going to take much longer to heal than I thought. It wouldn’t say much about my friendship with Maureen if I weren’t still moved to tears a mere five months later. I am. It wouldn’t be treating my disease with enough respect to think that the choices I made years ago because of my drinking would just go away on their own. They haven’t.

As to my business choices, I think I simply veered off course looking for something perhaps a little more glamorous, a little more grand than my simple dream of owning my own coffee shop. But now that I’m back there, it’s like a warm blanket, familiar and just right.

In some respects, I’m back where I was in December, which isn’t necessarily bad. I feel a little sheepish, a little humbled admitting that my ego inflated as I attempted to fluff myself up to meet these grand ideas. I don’t always know what I’m doing. I thought I was just putting on a brave face. When I put a brave face on, I only fool myself. And fool myself, I did.

Life is a tricky thing. I’m skeptical of anyone who says they’ve got it all figured out. Especially in these early years, as we try to form ideas of who we want to be and how we can become those people, certainly we’ll look a little foolish along the way. I guess I’m just happy to be trying.

Why I might be OK with having children

If you haven’t read my previous post about my issues with mamahood, then go for it so you can get an idea of how serious I’ve been about not wanting kids. My sentiments are also echoed here and here [hat tip: Penelope Trunk; TwentySet]. Now, bear in my mind that the decision I’m scrutinizing is my own, and not the decision of whether or not to have kids in the empirical sense.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this lately, primarily because (of course) it is an issue in my fledgling relationship. Granted, we’ve both agreed that it’s not an immediate issue, but he would like to have at least one child with whomever he marries. It’s no secret that I’m crazy about the man, but I’m not willing to agree to children just because that’s what he wants.

We have had a lot of conversations about it though, and it's got me thinking about it on my own. As I began to examine my issues with having kids, talking about it openly and honestly with friends of differing ages, marital and child status, and watching people with kids more closely, I started to realize how close-minded I’ve been.

I began to realize that my problem is not with actually having kids, but that they become an end in themselves and not a side effect of living the life I’d like.

A few things happened leading up to this realization. One, I’ve been talking with a mentor of mine who is 50 and has the coolest relationship with her daughter I’ve ever seen. I have no qualms being totally open and honest with her, even with the ugliest parts of myself. She pointblank told me one afternoon that I was being close-minded when it came to my thinking regarding family life. I realized that I was assigning arbitrary labels to people and making assumptions about their lives based upon that. Married, divorced, middle-aged, overweight, with or without kids, single, thin, etc. Does the label make the experience of the life?

Somewhere around that same time I was leaving Date #4’s house, and an early-thirties-ish couple walked by with a stroller and a grandparent in tow. They were just taking a Fourth of July stroll after a fresh rain, chatting and such. “That’s probably the best thing that could ever happen to me,” was the unwelcome thought that popped into my head. Whoa. Where’d that come from?

On my drive home, I rolled it around in my head and realized the truth of it. I’ve seen a lot of families that are happy, in which the parents continue to live dreams independent of their children. While their families greatly enhance their happiness, their kids are supplemental to the happiness that they already experience in life. They are not, and never did, expect children to be the main source of their happiness in life. They are simply one of the aspects of their life that they derive joy out of.

I have been watching a few families in my life since I began to seriously evaluate this issue. One is a young couple who have probably the cutest baby girl I’ve ever seen. I’ve said before that if I could insure that a child of mine would come out that cute, happy and well-mannered, I’d have kids without a doubt. The thing is that I watch the parents, too. They’re happy, and appear to be very much in love. I’m not close to them, and so they may have more problems than I’m aware, but they seem like fairly transparent people. I see them together, separate, and with their families. I won’t lie – there is a part of me that craves a normal family life because of the dysfunctional part of mine. They are always friendly and seem to possess a sense of peace about their lives.

I also watch my older female mentor and her family closely. She’s been a single mom for a long time, and her daughter is a well-adjusted, intelligent young woman. She has self-confidence at 13 that I still wish I had. The openness and frankness with which they deal with the little and big things in their lives is truly inspiring to me. It gives me goose bumps. That family probably has the most irreverent sense of humor I’ve been privy to and they have a lot of fun in their lives. It’s clear that they simply enjoy the ride.

Finally, I watch the families that make me not want kids. In doing so, I’ve come to realize that the thing that bothers me is not that they have children, but what their intentions or preconceived notions were in doing so. They all have a few things in common for the most part. One is that they had their children too young and/or too soon into a relationship/marriage. I’ve watched people have kids and treat them as accessories, and I’ve seen people have kids because they wanted something to love. They were trying to fill a hole that remains unfilled. And now they have kids to take care of when they didn’t know how to take care of themselves in the first place. (Side note: I was in the ER with my grandmother last night and a 17-year-old came in with impacted bowels, i.e. constipation. Her second birth and she didn’t realize that she should’ve been drinking lots of water, eating fiber, and probably shouldn’t have waited a week to tell the doctors she hadn’t had a bowel movement. If you can’t take care of yourself, how will you raise a child?)

I guess my point is that as Gen-Y women we’ve been told that “having it all” is a myth. That makes me feel like I have to choose between my career and having a child. It’s saying that I won’t be able to do both. While I know that to some extent one suffers at the hands of the other, I’ve been watching this young couple juggle a baby and a new business successfully. By successful, I mean that the baby is clearly happy and well cared for, the business is doing very well, and they both seem extremely happy and still in love, though at times admittedly tired.

It gives me hope. Perhaps I can live life happily without any sacrifices.

The Subtle Allure of A Life More Ordinary (or the Brainwashing of American Women)

There’s something about magazines like Real Simple and TV shows like House Hunters that depresses me. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but every time I attempt a sit on the couch post-work I am irritated by things like Everybody Loves Raymond. There’s a part of me that is suspicious that these forms of entertainment have been created to make us believe that not only are you content with your life, but you are enthusiastic about it, a subtle (or not-so-subtle, in my opinion) brainwashing of home-improving, toddler-yogaing, exasperated-but-happy-at-the-end-of-the-day, we’re-the-same-kind-of-unique status quo. Welcome to the new yuppiedom.

Maybe I’m just feeling particularly fed up with the new American dream this evening, as I sit in my underwear, toenails unpainted and unmanicured, eating Oreos with orange juice, wondering why I’m throwing 5 months of perfectly good conditioning down the drain. Maybe it’s that I’ve recently fallen in love and have caught myself twice already daydreaming into that magical land I call Not A Chance in Hell.

That place involves a relationship that can survive my apparent two-year statute of limitations with a guy who looks like a J. Crew model, a baby as cute and happy as the one that couple at the café has that will magically disappear when it needs to be fed/changed/burped or cries inexplicably, a house that requires little-to-no maintenance which of course we obtained at a steal, a thriving business that I built and doesn’t require me to be around all the time, and a Holly who does not feel overwhelming pinned-down and caged by it all.

Puh-shaw.

That’s when I turn off the TV. And call Real Simple to remind them, once again, that I unsubscribed two months ago. I fight off the sneaking suspicion that somehow, somewhere my father has bribed a Starbucks barista to spike my lattes with hormones. I have been told repeatedly that one day I will want all of these things. When I get a case of the I-just-want-to-be-upper-middle-class blues, I daydream another life.

In this life I usually am married, or in a long-term committed relationship. Yes, I am happy and content being single, but like many, I would like to have a companion through life. I think a character in Shall We Dance? sums it up best when she says people get married so that in a world of billions, one person says they will be the witness to your life. I agree with this. 

At any rate, 90 percent of me says no to kids. This is mostly a financial decision in my mind. Yes, I know you can be financially well off and have kids also, but the majority of folks are not. Here are a few examples of childless couples who are financially better off than their peers (especially where it comes to retirement). And here’s an entire online community dedicated to couples who have chosen not to have kids for a variety of reasons. I take comfort knowing that I'm not the only one out there like me.

Mostly, though, this daydream life is about being able to do the things I am passionate about without any compromises or guilt feelings, such as diving tirelessly into my own businesses, having a partner who I still find sexually appealing, coming nowhere close to any variety of poop/snot/vomit, and traveling at will and on whim.

I have nightmare versions of both of my daydreams, too. There’s one that revolves around divorce, debt, failed parenthood and suburbia, and there’s one that mostly involves being alone for the rest of my life realizing at 47 that all I really ever wanted was a family. These things occur to me. It also occurs to me that none of these scenarios are realistic, and that in life we end up somewhere in the middle. The glory part is that I actually know that I will be happy whichever dream I pursue or end up with inadvertently (life has a way of surprising us). My happiness resides within me, whatever the exterior.

In the meantime, no more HGTV for me. Or Oreos for that matter.