How Do I Be Happy

15 May By 7 Comments

 

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Mid-life is a really complicated time. I suspect it is for many women.  I am done (thankfully!) with all of the physical work involved in caring for young children.  These children are now teens and the work involved is mostly mental and emotional.  They think I should be completely done with looking after them, but I know my job is only getting harder.  Parenting people who don’t think they need to be parented is a big challenge. At the same time, I am eyeing the finish-line and thinking about what my life will be like in my next phase when the kids are off to college and I am alone in my house.

Add in some peri-menopausal hormones to the unpredictable and irrational mix of changing emotions generated on an hourly basis by three teens and we have quite a party around here.

Having a general idea of where I am going helps me make meaning out of the chaotic present. When I look ahead and wonder whether or not my kids will visit me when I am old, who my friends will be, and if I am destined to become a penniless bad lady, I remember that being more and more of my authentic self is the best thing I can do to avoid these outcomes. Relationships thrive when people are brave enough to be themselves and accept others as they are. Money comes from working hard, so I may as well put in a lot of effort to the things I love to do so much that they don’t feel like work. I have made people, for heaven’s sake, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life at a job that requires me to punch a clock if I don’t absolutely have to.  My time feels more valuable than that and I am determined to find a way to earn money which does not require me to answer to someone else.

Perhaps it is human nature to strive for happiness. So many people are stuck in situations that are less than optimal, but still, they find ways to be happy. What if the act of striving for happiness – through love, service, creativity, gratitude, connection, and self-awareness – was actually the key to all good things in life?

It makes me happy to connect with other people.  It makes me happy to create a happy home and serve my family. It make me happy to work through issues with the beau and feel the triumph of overcoming fear. It makes me happy to do creative, fulfilling work and help other people make their lives more the way they want them to be. These things are sometimes hard, but just because something is hard does not mean that it doesn’t make me happy.

Eventually, I want to be like my friend, Jean, whose answer to the question “what do you do?” is “anything I want to!” She has left behind the phase I am in, lived through things I don’t know about yet, and has earned the right to do whatever she wants to. I know there are limitations at each stage of our lives, but I hope that the limitations are more and more self-imposed as the years go by.

Not holding onto what was and keeping a very loose hold on what might be seems like a good plan for getting through mid-life. Trying new things in a safe way – like wearing my new leopard pumps with old favorites like jeans and a big sweater – makes me feel, well, free. Like I can do “anything I want to.” And tall, which is a good thing since my kids are all out-growing me.

We are all growing up in my house right now. We are each exploring limitations, discovering what makes us happy, and trying to see what the next phase of our lives looks like. Like the parallel play of toddlers, we each are doing our own work and take comfort in doing it next to each other.

Do you think about what the next phase of your life is going to look like?

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Building A Fire

8 Mar By 10 Comments

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Happy snow day to all of my fellow New Englanders.  Yep – the kids are home from school today.  Again.  Even though it always throws a big hitch into my plans, I can’t help but be swept up into the excitement of a snow day.  We didn’t have snow days when I was growing up in California, so to me, they are a reason to celebrate. To my kids, a surprise snow day is almost as good as Christmas.

My middle son, of course, thinks he made the snow day happen by sleeping with every single spoon in our house under his pillow.  The beau claims that sleeping with spoons is not commonly known New England snow day voo-doo, but NPR even acknowleges that it exists. I think he just had a deprived childhood. Does anyone know where this tradition originated?

Snow days are a gift of “free” time with the kids for me and I get so excited (that is, until they start driving me crazy) that I usually end up making cookies, which is a sure-fire way to throw a hitch into my plans to lose a few pounds before this summer, but I guess there is still time to work on that!

The other thing I do to enjoy the special feeling on a snow day is to make a fire when I get up in the morning. I stay in my pajamas and enjoy my tea and write until the kids get up.  Making a fire isn’t as hard a people think – here are some tricks that make building a fire really easy.

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First of all, your fireplace does not have to be clean.  Fires do need air to flow up from underneath, which is the reason fireplaces usually have log grates to set the logs on, but they don’t have to be free of ashes.  I usually just shove the ashes and old cinders around and to the sides of the hearth until there are too many.  When there are too many, I wait until they are cool (at least 24 hours to be safe) and remove them.

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Recently, I discovered that my fireplace had a trap door in the floor at the back of the hearth. This door is for ashes!  Brilliant!  Maybe your fireplace has one too?!?

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With my fireplace shovel, I open the hinged door and shove the ashes right down the chute! Gone, No mess, no fuss!  No fear of my garage catching on fire from hot ashes in the trash can!

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I sometimes use my fireplace utensils to move around my log grate and andirons to make it easier to push the ashes down the chute. Sometimes, I just leave them in place and do a quicky job of it so I can get on with making a fire.

Your fireplace does not have to be spotless – a plenty perfect cleaning job is just fine here!

Before you begin to build a fire – make sure your flue is open.  This flap of metal that keeps the warm air in your house from going up the chimney can be opened or closed by various methods depending on how your fireplace is built.  You can check to see if the flue is open, by craning your neck and looking up your chimney to see light at the top (during the day).  Another way to check if it is open, is to hold a lit match in the hearth and see if the smoke from the flame is drawn up the chimney or not.  If you don’t have the flue open, your fire will not be able to draw air up the chimney and smoke will fill your house almost immediately!  This is very important to check before building a fire!

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Your fire will light easily if you can encourage the air to flow and the fire to grow up through your pile of logs, so it is important to build your fire well from the bottom up. I start by making a pile of kindling “logs” on the log grate by taking one sheet of newspaper at a time (or pages from my large newsprint planning tablet) rolled tightly in the middle and kept sort of loose at the ends.

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Pick three pieces of wood – the smaller the better – to lay across your newspaper kindling.  Leave room between each piece of wood for air to flow through.

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On top of the three smaller logs, place two larger logs on the diagonal, leaving room for air to flow between them.

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Lay one bigger log on the top of the pile, straight across, to encourage the “draw” of air from the bottom of the pile of logs to the top.

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Light your paper kindling starting at the back of the hearth first so you don’t burn yourself.

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Have you ever heard the phrase, “where there is smoke, there is fire”?  Well, I love the satisfaction of watching as the smoke in my fire builds and builds until it “pops” into a flame.  If I can see a concentrated amount of smoke rising from one area of the pile of logs, I know I am on my way to a beautiful fire. If the smoke is just swirling around, I may need to adjust the logs to create better airflow and then light more paper kindling under the pile of logs to get it going.

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Another tip:  if your flue is open and the smoke does not seem to have a strong draw up the chimney, open a window in the room just a crack.  Letting a small amount of cold air into the room will increase the draw of warm air up the chimney from your fire and help it get started.  You can close the window once the fire has created its own draw up the chimney.

Now, on to making cookies!

What are you doing on this snow day?

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The Accidental Happy Family

4 Feb By 8 Comments

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Yesterday, due to 1) a rare black hole in the sports schedule universe, and 2) compulsory down-time resulting from “natural consequences” of poor behavior choices the previous week, we had a free day. Granted, there is always something to do and even doing nothing is actually doing something, so there is really no such thing as empty time, but yesterday our schedule was oddly open and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to do something.

Feeling a little raw from being a tough-love mom during the previous week (see #2 above), I suggested that my three kids and I go out for a special lunch of pizza and bowling at the Flatbread Company in Somerville and then head over to Lyndell’s in Cambridge to get coffee (for me, of course) and some of the best cookies on earth (for the kids, but I was also planning to eat one, just to show my willingness to sacrifice my own health to join in the family fun).

From the wailing and whining and impassioned protests, you would have thought that I had said, “hey kids, let’s go out for succotash and then take in a four-hour Italian opera.” What’s a mom to do? Other than get really mad and insist that everyone “shape up” so we can go have some damn family time. And then yell and lecture about how ungrateful they all are. This did not get the desired result.

Seeing the futility of the situation, I called the whole thing off and went to my room for some focused pouting. I put away clothes and felt sorry for myself. I cried a little, thinking about how I dutifully do all of the things that have to get done for our family and never get to just have fun with my kids. And I thought about how they will never give their dad a hard time like this because his attention is a more scarce commodity, which makes me sad for them and jealous of him at the same time. It feels bad to think about all of this, but I take comfort because it is familiar. I know how to do disappointment better than I know how to do happy family.

When I live in the “now,” I can fill it up with all kinds of projects and driving and work and tennis and coffee and driving. It is sometimes easy to forget that the time with my kids is short, because well, it isn’t always fun (see #2 above). When I do pick my head up and look around, I panic that every day we do not go out for pizza and bowling and cookies, is a lost opportunity to make happy family memories. Memories that will make them laugh and reminisce together as adults. Memories of what a great mom I was which will make them pick a really high quality nursing home and visit me frequently when I am old. It is hard to know how to accomplish this since I didn’t grow up with that kind of family feeling. I want it now – for myself and for my kids – so much and I keep grasping for what I think it might look like and spend too much time worrying that I am not getting it right.

Then the beau comes along, with his sweet bald head and penchant for simplifying complicated things, and says, “maybe they just want to be at home, instead of do stuff with you, because they already have that feeling.”

And I realize that he could be right. (Again, dang it.) I guess my homebody kids might want to be here, snuggled in on a Saturday with their pj’s on all day, because, to them, home feels like a safe place to get away from it all. Maybe they can ignore me because they trust that I will always here. Maybe they interrupt me to tell me seemingly unimportant things (especially if I am working) because they do need me. And maybe jumping on each other and teasing makes them feel connected. Maybe they can experiment with bad behavior choices because they know, without a doubt, that I will always love them no matter what. Maybe they don’t want to go do anything with me because just being together in our house gives them the feeling I have been blindly grasping for. And I wonder if I will ever get better at seeing that I already belong to the family I have always wanted.

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How To Keep Focused On Getting A Better Life

7 Jan By 37 Comments

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Getting to the life we envision for ourselves often takes a leap of faith.

Once the decision to make a change is made, everything that comes next can make it easy to forget why you made the decision in the first place. Stress can play tricks on your mind and make you wonder if you were thinking right when you made your decision. Sometimes, you just have to trust yourself and try to remember how it felt to be sure.

This happened to me when I was getting divorced. When I saw the sadness my decision was causing my kids, I even asked my soon-to-be ex-husband if we could just live together like roommates for the sake of the kids. I insanely thought for a moment that we could go from fighting like cats and dogs to buddies. Yes, I was insane. In the panic of seeing what my decision would mean for my kids, I was willing to try any alternative to divorce. I temporarily lost my mind and forgot about all the reasons that made it impossible for me to share a life with my husband. I forgot how it would be better for my kids to see a strong woman alone, than to absorb and normalize the unhealthy relationship between two parents. I was losing track of the new husband-free life I had envisioned for myself. Instead, I was thick into the mess of change and doubting my decision.

Getting through the whole process was hard. It took almost a full year to feel better again and to get my hopefulness back. I can now see that I was just plodding along on faith that our life would be better than it was when I was married. Along the way my mind played tricks on me and made me fear things that I didn’t need to, but periodically along the way, I regained my focus and remembered some things that made it easier.

I was afraid of being a single parent, because I had forgotten that, parenting with someone you can’t connect with is so hard. As a single parent, I get to make the rules in my house. It is up to me to decide how much teasing is too much. I can require everyone to eat dinner together. And bathe. I can create customs like lighting a candle at dinner. When we were always waiting on my ex to get home for dinner or weigh in on a decision, many of the things that I wanted to do as a family went by the wayside. For years. Now I can make them happen. (Mostly. I do have ornery teenagers, you know.) I remembered that it is good to be Queen.

I was afraid of being alone because I had forgotten how much worse it was to feel lonely in a marriage. At first, I thought I would miss having someone at the bottom of the stairs to talk to after putting the kids to bed – then I remembered that my husband was hardly ever home in the evenings. I was always waiting for him to be there. And he wasn’t, so I never could feel settled. I felt sorry for him that he was still at work that late at night. And I hoped he really was at work that late at night. Which didn’t feel good. Now, I really value having a quiet house to myself when the kids have gone to bed. I remembered that I like to have peace at home in the evenings.

I was afraid of shouldering all of the responsibility of taking care of a house, because I had forgotten that doing everything by yourself when you have a partner, feels worse than relying on yourself. Shoveling snow, dealing with horrendous basement floods, and emergency room visits still feels hard and lonely. Then I remember that I did these things by myself, even when I had a husband, and it feels more manageable.

I was afraid to not have a man in my life, because I had forgotten how sad it feels to be with someone who doesn’t cherish you. I had forgotten that, much to my disappointment, I had attended social events alone, slept alone, gone on vacation with the kids alone, and generally gone about my life alone for many years. I had forgotten that I was well-trained for a life alone.

Then somehow I remembered how it felt when I decided that I would rather have the freedom of being truly alone than live a life with someone who made me feel alone. And sometimes remembering that feeling has been the only thing that has kept me going through the difficult, lonely, scary times.

Getting through hard things makes me feel like I can get through more hard things if I need to. Divorce is not good, it is hard on kids, and should be avoided if at all possible. In the end, it turned out to be the right thing for my family. It has made our world bigger, emotionally safer, and more open to possibility. I am still in the process of creating the home I envisioned for my family. We still have meals where there is too much teasing. My son still insists he is an iguana. There are umbrellas in the shower and pizza boxes on the counter and dishes in the sink more nights than I would like, but my life is much closer to plenty perfect now and it feels good to know that how it goes from here is all up to me.

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Make Yourself Happy

14 Dec By 6 Comments

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Trying to make other people happy is likely to create unhappiness for all involved.

You can be thoughtful of other people. You can be generous with other people. You can even be indulgent of other people. But, no matter how hard you try, there is never a guarantee that your efforts will yield happy other people.

Following this line of reasoning, any efforts I make to create happiness for other people, should be made simply because those efforts, in and of themselves, will make me happy. I don’t think that is selfish. Any effort to make another person happy should be given completely freely. We can hope that our efforts will make other people happy, but it is immature to demand that our efforts will have the result we intend. It is unreasonable to think we can manage that level of control over other people.

I believe this but I don’t always remember to live it.

Two of my three kids have birthdays in December. This year, two out of two kids cried on their birthdays. They were choosing to focus on the things that did not go as they had hoped and forgot about most everything else. This made me feel disappointed and frustrated and angry and defeated.

SONY DSC I worked hard to give my kids a special feeling on their birthdays because I wanted to make sure they felt extra happy. At least for one day. I did not realize that my efforts had strings attached until I felt resentful and disappointed when a different outcome occurred. Yet, as hard as it is to see my kids unhappy, I have learned that I am capable of making them even more unhappy by being upset and disappointed in them for being unhappy. I am impressive like that.SONY DSC

I tried to pull myself together and remember that there are factors in play which I have no control over. I tried to hug them while they ranted. I tried to bear up under the expectation that I could make it all okay. That didn’t work, so I just put them to bed.

Letting go of outcomes and focusing on what makes us happy and ignoring what makes us unhappy creates more happiness. For everyone. It just does. Some of us have to learn this lesson over and over again.

I sit here tonight faced with the choice of feeling bad about the way things went for my kids on their birthdays or thinking about what a relief it is to remember how I want to give – without strings attached – in time for Christmas. Living what I believe is challenging. Letting my kids learn to be in charge of their own happiness is a gift which is hard for me to give, but is worth high dividends in long-term happiness for us all.

Do you struggle with this too?

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