Barnmaven

So this is what they mean by that

I know I have a reputation for being a hippy-dippy "bloom where you're planted" sort of mouth breather from time to time.  I'm not always that way, sometimes I'm not even remotely that way, but just as with many of life's Grand Lessons, I think if you repeat something often enough to yourself you start to maybe "get" it.  And in the grand scheme of life's plans I firmly believe in the value of striving to find peace - if not outright pleasure - in accepting the material circumstances I find myself in.  

There have been times in my life I've been truly unhappy in my circumstances.  Sometimes I really did try to make the best of things, sometimes I didn't.  When I did try, though, if honest trying didn't bring about a level of situational peace I really could live with, I moved on.  In retrospect I believe that often those situations really weren't a good fit, and divorcing myself from them was the best choice.  Not always, of course, but I can live with that.

I've been with my current employer for a little over six years now.  I genuinely mean it when I tell you that I want to be working for them until I retire.  Its a great place to work, great people, great products, interesting business and I've learned much.  The last year or two, though, were a lot of stretching for me.  We partnered up with another company and began to third-party some of our business processes over to this other group.  Some of those processes happened to be what I liked to think of as my business processes.  This new partnership meant my life and the lives of many of the people I work with would change, in some cases significantly.  This new partnership is also vital to supporting the long term growth of my company.  Without it we might still grow, but not in an efficient way, not in a way that maximizes our use of space, time and people.

There are a lot of people out there who make a living off of helping people to implement, drive and survive change. Its a growth industry.  Pick your program, there are lots of them -- everything from the basic "Who Moved My Cheese?" series to Spiral Dynamics.  You can have anything from a course-completion certificate to a PhD and make a comfortable living as a writer or a consultant in the field of corporate change management.  And no wonder -- most people don't like change.  The most successful people in the world thrive on it, the happiest people in the world either already know or have successfully learned how to live with it.  There are a lot of different folks with a lot of different formulas that can tell you how to how to get there, but I believe ultimately people can't - or won't - learn how to successfully navigate change until they are faced with a situation where the reward for making the change is so meaningful that it completely obliterates the alternative as a viable choice.  

Some change management programs try to teach people to embrace what can't be changed in the hopes of finding peace, if not meaning, in the new reality.  Other programs explore the psychology of change.  Spiral Dynamics teaches that successful change happens when people have both the need for change and the resources to navigate the change.  Without the resources necessary to make the transition, many people will experience great stress and ultimately be bypassed by a change they are not able to make.

That's where I found myself the past year or two.  I struggled at first.  Visibly.  It was noticed.  I didn't help myself or my future opportunities; in fact, I hurt them.  But I was fortunate in having a lot of support from a few peers, from friends, from SG.  I was able to evaluate the need for me to change with a clear understanding of what both the costs of and the benefits to change might entail.  Eventually I made a decision to not just fight the change but to go along with it in a positive way.  It was hard at first - I had to pretend.  A lot.  Paste on a smile and say "OK" when I felt like flipping everyone the bird and hiding in a corner with a bottle of chardonnay and some powdered donuts.   Eventually a day came when I actually found myself embracing the changes, and beginning to finally live in the moment, enjoying what I happened to be doing at that moment instead of worrying about what I would or wouldn't be doing in the future.

Because of that I was given the role of working on assignment at the location of our new business partner as a problem solver and a liaison between them and our transition team.   I'm busier than I can ever recall being in any job - not just task-busy, but mind-busy too.  Every day brings new opportunities to find solutions, to support people and to help make something happen.  Every day I get to experience success in both small and large ways, and I get to enjoy it in a way that I could never have if I hadn't found the way to not just live with my new normal but to completely embrace it.  Even better?  I've had an opportunity to have a very positive impact on an important project and the visibility can only improve my career outlook down the road.

Embracing this transition has involved releasing some deeply-held fears.  I have feared no longer having importance.  I have feared loss of status.  I have feared confrontation and having other people be right where I was wrong.  I have feared being left behind, left out, held back, pushed out.  At some point I was drinking from the end of a fire hose full of fear, and I realized that my fear was what was hurting me, not the change itself.  I had to stop worrying about what might happen and start being part of what was already happening.  And so I decided that was what I would do, and from that point on, everything has felt different.  Not perfect, not always , but so much better.

I realized after going through all of this that I didn't actually know or believe as much as I thought I did about living in and through change.  And honestly, I really did think I knew a lot.  I've been through a lot of change, but apparently not as gracefully as I could or ought have.  That's humbling.

(Not only is it humbling but it leads me to consider all the other things I think I know lots about and wonder when those "learning opportunities" are going to present themselves.  Oh, GREAT.)

 

 

Being there

I love my job.  I love my company.  If I had to pick a commute (provided not commuting was not on the table), I'd pick this one over most - but grudgingly, what with gas prices exceeding anything resembling reasonable anymore.

Working or not working has never been a choice for me as a parent.  Like most parents, the kind of choices I can make have more to do with what kind of work I will do, what kind of hours I will accept, what kind of pay is necessary to keep us housed and fed and reasonably healthy.  Less often anymore is it a choice over whether a parent will stay home.  So many families are struggling to find jobs in this nerve-flogging environment of unemployment that for many families, both parents might be home full time. 

And when work is available, for most families, both incomes are necessary to pay for the necessities.  I have much respect for those families where parents have made the sacrifice of spending any time with one another to work separate shifts so that the staggering cost of child care doesn't make working untenable. 

When families do have a choice of a parent staying home, more and more Mom isn't the automatic default.  While I still think the career/parenting paradigm is more of a struggle for women than for men, I'm gratified to see many fathers being engaged in the nurturing and care of babies, some to the point of being the parent who is present for daily activities.

I used to think that if I had an actual choice to work or to stay at home, I'd always choose work.  Of course, back then I didn't have fence to mend, irrigation to repair, painting to do or horses to ride.  I know better now.  I am also faced with the fact that as my children age, the time is soon coming when their need for an available parent close to or at home will wane.  What if I had the ability to meet my family's financial needs and still be more available to my kids?  What if that came at the potential cost of delayed promotions down the road?

Deborah Spar, president of Barnard College, suggested in a article in Newsweek that too many women these days think they are supposed to do it all and do all of it perfectly.  That even when we know better, even when we tell other women its OK to not be able to do it all because no one can possibly be a full time career person, homeschooler, designated team driver and keep a perfectly immaculate house and have dinner on the table each night, we don't allow ourselves the same leeway.

Spar quotes a former student:

 'Girls need to have all their grandmothers wanted them to have, while looking as pretty as their mothers wanted them to look ... You try so hard to be who everyone wants you to be while attempting to maintain some kind of individuality and in the end you seem to lose everything.'

I think I'm old enough now to appreciate - and more importantly, accept - that there is no way to win the game when half the cards I'm holding are still face down on the table. 

The upcoming months signal a big transition for me and for my company.  When the rubber meets the road, I will likely be making some decisions about where I want to go right now career-wise, and it will probably be the nearest opportunity I have to work toward a path that - for now - means I do something that affords me the ability to be there for my kids in a way I can't at the moment. 

I think its OK to accept a career path that has a flat point in it for a while and then re-evaluate down the road a little bit what it is I'd actually like to be when I grow up.  And, truth be told, I'm ambivalent about what it really means to be "successful."  Does that mean making lots of money, having lots of power or having a personal life that is stable and enjoyable and where I have the leeway and time to be the mom I think I should be?  In a perfect world, those things wouldn't be mutually exclusive, but in the real world they most certainly are.  I don't want to take a back seat to anyone, but does taking a path where I have fewer people to manage and more time for my family really mean that I'm not still in the game?  Maybe it just means I've swapped out a few of my cards.

 

 

Dragging

I spent Thursday and Friday over on the Wet Side of the state to join a small group of report writers to learn our new reporting software.  The program we've been using since I started at my job is being phased out.  Even though I'm a manager now and no longer an analyst, I still keep my hands fresh writing ad-hoc reports and working with our project manager to put new reports up on the portal. 

Training classes are frustrating to me.  Instructors have a script to follow, and they spend (to me) an inordinate amount of time talking about structure and theory.  Dude, I know why I'm writing this report, I know when to use a chart, when to use a list report, when to use a crosstab, blah blah blah blah blah.  Just show me how this new software works with my data and let me have at it.  Please.  So I spend the first part of the day busting through all of the exercises in the material and the rest of the day twiddling my thumbs.  Its really exhausting. 

The nice part was getting to have dinner with my friend Julie and her man and check out their new digs.  I'm in love with their house and I assume they won't notice if I sort of quietly move in.  I also got to see my brother, which doesn't happen often enough.  We had a lovely dinner and caught up on things. 

I got home after a four hour drive over the mountains late last night and then got up while the moon was still out this morning to head up to the Blues with Michelle for the last orienteering ride of the season.  9 miles round trip, I think we came in second this time.  Bugs had an excellent day, with the possible exception of the fact that he hates water.  We had to cross two small streams and when I say small, I mean they were little trickles of water, inches wide and less than that deep.  But it was water and therefore he didn't want to cross it.  His final resort, after it being explained to him that across was where he was headed, and no, I wasn't going to get off and walk him over the terribly frightening water, was to LEAP ACROSS.  Like a 15-hand mule deer jumping a 6 foot fence.  On the upside, if he's ever a wash as a trail horse he may have a career in the jumping ring.   Silly nag.

I have one more trip over the mountains for work on Monday and back here again on Tuesday and a week full of meetings after that.  I say all this only as a way of letting you know that if I don't manage to post anything for the next week or so, its only because I'm frantically trying to find time to sleep.

On a bright note, one of my posts was syndicated on BlogHer this week. Go check it out! 

Do what it takes?

The Interwebs are abuzz over Catherine Hakim's new book Erotic Capital.  Hakim, a British sociologist,  is best known for authoring books and articles centered around women in the workplace and gender equality.  A self-described feminist, Hakim has made a career of attempting to understand and iterate the social, political and economic impact woman have in the workplace and how pressures of conformity and patriarchal values create challenges for women.

Given her background, many feminists are perplexed by the assertion she makes in her latest book, that a woman's best bet in the workplace is to leverage her sexuality in order to even the odds.

Yep, that's right.  A feminist telling us to use our looks to get ahead. 

Not only that, Hakim asserts that women who don't take the time to maximize their sex appeal via diet, makeup, wardrobe and options like Botox are being are simply lazy and counter-productive.

To be fair, I haven't read the book yet.  Its sitting in my Kindle account, waiting for my droid to have a 3G signal to download it.  However, the salient points Hakim makes via her interview with The Daily Beast, are worth discussion and don't require the finer points of the book to be open to debate.

"Anyone, even quite an ugly person, can be attractive if they just have the right kind of hairstyle, clothes, and present themselves to the best effect...This isn't a frivolous spending of money.  It has real benefits."

In and of itself, nothing about this statement is truly offensive.  I remember attending a seminar geared toward women in business back in the late 1980's where we were advised to pay attention to how the senior executives in our company dressed.  If we wanted to succeed, an easy way to demonstrate our "acceptability" was to dress the same way.  If the men wore suits and ties, women should wear suits and low heels.  If everyone wore solid colors - black, blue, etc - so should you.  If the environment was casual, be the best-casually-dressed worker in the office.   I don't think its such a stretch to encourage people to look their best at work, it demonstrates a level of attention and ambition that assures higher-ups that you are someone who's not just marking time at your job, you're in the game. 

Social research doesn't lie; people make assumptions about other people all of the time based simply on how they look.  It stands to reason that a competent employee who dresses like a slob is going to be less favored than an equally competent employee who dresses well, all else being equal. 

Hakim asserts that "Everybody should use all the assets they've got, and this is one asset that women have often been told is inappropriate to use.   I think women need to stop having a chip on their shoulder, or feel uncomfortable investing in erotic capital.  Attractiveness and beauty has real value."   She claims that things such as Exercise, tanning, coloring your hair and even plastic surgery are necessary evils for career success.   She identifies social skills as another invaluable asset.

Its disconcerting to have someone with Hakim's considerable research behind them to bluntly advise us that we must look better in order to compete.  But is it true?

I wonder if the reaction to this book would be different if the title were less threatening.  Looking good doesn't necessarily convey "erotic" appeal.  Dressing nicely and maintaining one's looks don't necessarily insinuate that a woman is exuding sex appeal.  Utilizing a word loaded with not-so-subtle visual imagery as part of her hypothesis is certainly one way to create controversy and ensure a greater number of book sales.  But then, without having read it, I have no idea whether Hakim is simply advising women to make sure they look good at work and not telling us to show off our boobs in low-cut tops and wear stiletto's to maximize the draw power of our legs and asses.  Because truly, those are completely different concepts.

I've met plenty of women in the business place that easily fall into stereotypical categories.  I've worked with women who were gorgeous and marginally competent, who slept with or sucked off whichever man was required in order to get a better salary, a better bonus or a promotion.  I've worked with women who were incredibly good at their jobs but who were challenged either by less-than-stellar looks or a timid personality or both, and heard them degraded behind their backs by coworkers and higher-ups based simply on the scale of their physical attractiveness.  I've heard people say things like "Oh yeah, she's really good at what she does, but..." 

Then there are those women - the ones who have it all.  Either blessed genetically with good looks or having earned them via a lot of time in the gym or under the scalpel, these women also have the brains and the personality to boot.  And frankly, they blow the competition out of the water.  They work hard, they get things done, and they look good doing it.  That's pretty hard to compete with. 

I can see it from both sides, honestly.  I value a person's ability over their looks, and as a manager I know that I want to hire people who will get the job done.  But as a woman in the workplace who is also interested in cultivating my own success, I often must consider how my physical appearance might benefit or harm me.  One button too low?  Does this make me look too casual?  Am I over- or under-doing the hair and makeup?  What is it I want to accomplish today and what meetings do I have where I may need to generate a better impression?

I have had the (mis?)fortune in the past of supervising stereotypical office bimbos. Women that reported to me but who were also sleeping with other managers in the company or getting massive boob jobs and distracting the entire office with their low-cut shirts, I can tell you quite honestly I'd rather have someone who is a lot more discreet in their clothing choices, regardless of the quality of their work.  Its not that I resent another women for being pretty or sexy, I don't.  We come in all shapes and sizes, and just because someone looks different from me or is younger than I am doesn't mean I'm competing with her.  However,  in my experience, a woman who openly flaunts her sexuality in the work environment becomes a distraction, breeds jealousy and resentment in her coworkers.  Even if she isn't sleeping her way up the ladder, if she's wearing micro-minis and being obviously sexual in her behavior, everyone will believe that she is.  

When you're managing people, you need teamwork from your people, and the pockets of overt hostility that such a woman engenders, unless she is staggeringly brilliant at her job, aren't worth it.  On that basis alone, I'm going to assume that Hakim isn't telling us to "whore it up" to get ahead, but that she rather means to look and act our best and that success will naturally follow.

I'm inclined to follow my natural instinct that the inclusion of the term "Erotic" in the book's title and the somewhat inflammatory nature of Hakim's comments in her Daily Beast interview are deliberate and designed to increase interest in the book itself, and that what she's actually proposing to her readers is something other than what the book's title suggests.   And if I'm wrong, and that's what she's actually suggesting, I will less-than gently opine that she's got it all wrong.  Crossing a certain line when it comes to what you wear and how you act at work will do you more harm than good.   And the more women that cross that line, the harder they make it for the rest of us to remind the corporate patriarchy that we are competent, we are personable, we are capable of success without using our lady parts to get there.

 Edited and added:  There is no question that our concepts of attractiveness are largely culturally defined.  There has always been an existing conundrum for the career woman who is also a conscious feminist:  How do I work to change cultural concepts while also surviving within them?  If I attempt to change the culture yet still conform to it, am I damaging my message?  Hakim's new book does little, if anything, to solve this dilemma.

Admit it, you're jealous

I suppose I should have some shame that I keep bragging about my commute, but I really have a hard time not going on about it.  Almost daily I'll be in the middle of my drive home and be struck by something beautiful -- a Northern Harrier flying next to my window as he searches the field for dinner; a beautiful field of alfalfa with nothing but sun and blue sky behind it; a cloud formation so striking that it takes my breath away.

I left the island in 1983 for the city to go to college.  After college I got a job, and then another job, and then eventually I moved to New Jersey for yet more jobs.  All of my commuting, for 24 years, was in the city.  I either drove or took the bus, paid for parking, struggled to find parking, and except for my home street, pretty much all the road was a minimum of four lanes.  Four lanes FULL of cars.

I've been in Central WA for four years now, and I don't think I'll ever take this drive for granted.

This is what it looks like as I leave work on a rainy day:

No, I don't know what that smudge on my window is, either.

Then I head down the hill and into the Horse Heaven Hills for about 20 miles.  All I see is this:

Yes, I know what THOSE smudges are.  Lots and lots of dead bugs.  I don't bother washing my car much this time of year. 

Finally, I come to the really fun part of my commute.

I push the button for my 4 Wheel Drive, and I need it:

 

For about five miles its nothing but a gravel road in the fields.  So far I've seen coyotes (alive and dead), the skeleton of a dead cow and a dead sheep.  And some antelope. 

Oh, look!  Off in the distance!  TRAFFIC!

Hard to tell from my crappy cell phone picture, but that's a farmer discing his field.

All too soon, I head down the hill to the end of the dirt and back to pavement.

Still, though, I'm not struggling with a bunch of other commuters.  The locals look like this:

Its not all fun and games, though.  I do have to put a few miles in on an actual highway.  I don't like it.  I think its ugly.

Soon enough, though, I cross the Blue Bridge and turn twice, and I'm on my street:

 

That's my white fence and mailbox on the left.

I don't care that its a 45 mile drive each way and that it takes me almost an hour.  I don't care at all, because I used to have to drive on the Garden State Parkway to and from work and it took me almost an hour and I was only going 20 miles.  Being flipped off, cut off, yelled at and stopped dead in traffic was the routine. 

Here, in the spring, I squeal in delight as I see the first new foals and the calves, legs still splayed as they try standing for the first or second time.  I see endless sky and mountains that fill me with wonder.  I see the Columbia River, mighty and broad, sweeping her way past the Wallula Gap as she turns the corner and thrusts herself toward the Pacific Ocean, falling over dams and skirting thousand-foot high cliffs.  I see countless Red Tailed and Sharp Shinned Hawks, California Quail, Red Winged Blackbirds.  I see eagles, sometimes, and deer.  I see rabbits and badgers and foxes.  I regularly watch kestrels drop off the wire and grab something right next to my car on the road as I swerve to avoid hitting them.

I wouldn't trade this for any city job, ever.  I dont' ever see myself going back to "civilization."

 

Rolling along

Years ago I dated an older man, whose favorite response to "How are you?" was, "Rolling like thunder down the road of life." 

Five or six days ago, I think what I was doing was more of a crabwalk, and I've not quite hit "thundering", but at least I'm picking up speed.  Rolling like...a Red Flyer wagon wheel, or maybe a big, rather odd-shaped rock that tumbles down a slope.

And so, amidst what seemed at first to be a very terrible week, there was a bright spot or two.  The birthday of my daughter, the support of friends, the warm fur of my horses when I warm my cold hands under their manes on a cold morning.  The sweet brown eyes of my dogs as they gaze at me in love.  The warm weight of a cat who has taken my sitting down as an invitation to have a snooze on my lap. 

If I am grateful for anything today it is that when life seems hardest to bear, when I begin to wallow in those thoughts of "I hate having to do all of this by myself" that I realize I am not by myself.  In those times when I feel I just can't take one. more. step. -- He's there.  It seems odd that struggles might be the best way to grow my faith, but its true.  I'm not one of those people who believes that every difficulty we face in life is somehow placed there by God to teach us something.  Oh sure, there are things we need to learn and perhaps there are times when that's the case, but I rather think that we have struggles and pain and misery and suffering because of the things we as human beings do to one another.  But that no matter what the pain, now matter how many tears we may cry over it, that God sees our pain and hurts right along with us.  That He loves me, and you, so very much that the simple fact that we have suffering breaks His heart.  And when I think of what Christ endured, I feel somewhat ashamed of my suffering because it doesn't begin to equate with what agony it must have been for Him. 

So there's gratitude.

Gratitude for other reminders;  that my Mom is, always has been, and always will be the kind of mother who loves her children and feels that her job of providing band-aids for skinned knees doesn't end when we graduate from high school.  In the absence of daycare and the necessity of still getting to the office for meetings and to accomplish my job during what is our busy season, my mom didn't wait to be asked for help, she cleared her schedule and pitched in by picking C up from school and getting A off the bus.  She came to my house and folded laundry and did crafts with the kids and fed them lunches and snacks and dinners. 

Gratitude for new things learned; that even though in my self-pity parties I often feel that I am the only person who is handling everything and being consumed with worry and anxiety over my child's struggles, that they have a father who worries about them every bit as much.  Who will take C to his Doctor's appointment today because it was the only appointment we could get and I would like to make it to work again. 

Gratitude that I have an employer who is flexible and who values families.  A boss who says "Go do what you need to do." 

I found a solution that I think will work; a mom who gave up half her family's income to be with her kids until they are in school full time, who has a sibling with issues just like my children, who in all ways appears calm, patient and who loves kids.  Who, for what I can afford to pay, will pick my children up from school three days a week and alleviate the need for my struggling son to be in an aftercare environment that is chaotic and noisy and completely overstimulating and overwhelming for him.  The first day he didn't have to go there he was so much better.  Mom and I both thought he seemed relieved that he didn't have to go to group aftercare anymore. 

We started an additional medication last Friday for the ADHD and we increased the dosage on his medication for Bipolar.  The aggressive behavior tapered off significantly this week and he has gotten some good reports from school.  He's still very active - overly so, and perhaps the second medication isn't quite the right one - but we are on the right track.

So we're rolling right along.  Waiting for the next bump in the road, but I know we'll get over it when it inevitably appears.

 

A minor complaint

Today has just yanked the stuffing out of me, pissed all over it and left it to dry on the sidewalk.  I didn't want to wake up when the alarm clock went off.  I didn't want any of the stuff I premade for my lunch.  One of the dogs crapped on the carpet.  My hair wouldn't comply with my most insistent attempts to tame it.  My son wouldn't wake up so he went to his dad's for the day in the same clothes he went to bed in, unfed.  I've been grumpy, tired, paranoid and overreactive all day.  I even mistook a minor request for some information  from my boss wrapped it around the knobs in my brain so many times I converted it into a suggestion to get my resume ready.  Then I cried about it. 

As I was on the end of hour two on what ended up being a two and a half hour conference call, ear cartilege begging me for mercy, bladder screaming for relief and voice cracking because I'd failed to fill my water glass before the call started, I put my hand to my face to shove up my glasses and rub my eyes.

Ouch.  What was that?  Ouch again.  Right there, next to my nose, what?  You bastard, a zit.

HeLLOOOOOOOOAH PMS!  Mystery solved; source identified.  You are well advised to steer clear for a few days.

Woman Eternally Conflicted

Even though I've suspected from a very young age that I have a mind that doesn't work quite the way a "normal" mind is supposed to, I still have the capacity to be surprised when others don't share my opinion.  I guess I'm just that naive.  I can't understand why anyone would hate another person because of the color of their skin, or how someone could fail to see the innate beauty in an egg fresh from the bidness end of your very own chicken or how anyone misses the fact that there is almost nothing in this world so breathtaking as a half naked child covered in dirt, grubbing away in the garden alongside you.  I just think you should all know that I think you think the way I do and I am shocked beyond belief when you just. don't. 

I've worked in transportation for a very long time.  And I've always worked.  I had a period of about two weeks in 1998 when I was unemployed, prior to that my longest time frame between jobs was 6 days.  There are two threads of thought interwoven into these sentences.  One:  I have throughout my career worked mostly around really crass, un-PC and mostly chauvinistic men who probably believe that women belong at home, and for my entire career I have worked my ass off to be respected by those men.  Part of my current job today is to make decisions about which trucking companies my company uses to ship product.  Don't think for a minute that I don't experience a little shiver of joy every time a trucking company salesperson comes to see if they can get my business, because 99% of these salespeople are men.  I enjoy very much that they need to earn MY respect in order to be considered, and I like watching their faces when they realize that they are dealing with a woman who is smart, knows her business, and has the temerity to be balls-out blunt  when the situation requires. 

Two:  I've always held a job.  I've never stayed home with my children.  I've never had that particular option.  I think in the biggest part that it is due to my own choices in life, some of them not so great, many of them selfish, some of them largely inescapable.  I've always been the breadwinner, even when I was married.  At some point in time him not working might have been an option, but me not working was never on the table. 

I have to admit, though, that when it came right down to it, I don't think I have the ovaries to be a SAHM.  At least when they were little - we lived in suburban New Jersey.  All I would have had to keep my brain from wilting would have been a baby and my house.  Possibly my internet connection would have kept me sane, but that's questionable.  I just don't know that I would have chosen to stay at home, even if I could have.  Nowadays, possibly.  I have a fair bit more to take care of than just the house - I could take a three week vacation and do nothing but repair fence & irrigation, catch up on eleventy billion chores, and for ONCE spend time working my horses more than one lousy day a week.  There would be ever so much to do - and I would love it.

Its not that my world doesn't revolve around my children.  I believe to my core that raising them is one of the most important things I will ever accomplish in this world, and that the price of failing at that task is higher than I can pay.  When I'm not with them I think about them.  I have their pictures and their artwork all over my office so that any direction I look, there they are.  When they are at J's house for the night and I think about going home to a house without them there, my heart turns over solidly in my chest and I get that sort of hollow sick feeling you get when you know something's not right.  I may not have been born to be a mother, but a mother was born right along with my daughter. 

I have  a liberal arts degree - a bachelor's degree in English, to be precise.  Or rather, imprecise, as I honestly believe there's almost nothing more useless in this universe than an English degree.  My liberal arts education did little to prepare me for a career in anything.  College itself provided me with an endless education in athletics and interpersonal relationships, the fine art of beer-bonging without spilling it on your sorority initiation dress and how to set a formal table.  There are, beyond those precious and banal skills, a few things that to this day make their impression known.

I had a roommate my freshman year, Becky.  Becky was the first girl I'd ever heard use the word "masturbate" out loud in front of people.  Becky encouraged me to take some of my general credits in the Women's Studies department.  I ended up with about three semesters worth of women's studies, grounding myself for a lifelong interest in women's rights and women's welfare.  I loved my TA in my Introduction to Women's Studies.   She was out and proud, smart, engaging, challenging.  She was first openly gay woman I had ever met, and she set cornerstone in the foundation of my viewpoint.  From her I learned to see queerness not just as a societal and cultural issue, but as a women's issue.  It was there, in that class, that I began to consider and question what it truly means to be a feminist. 

As a young college student, feminism to me meant the right to be different.  To be respected.  Wage equality.  To be safe from violence.  To have a voice. 

And then I got older.  I had friends get married, become mothers.  I married, divorced, married again.  I became a mother.  I advanced in my career, not to stellar heights, of course, but to higher levels of responsibility and respect.  And throughout that process, my views on feminism advanced as well.

In many respects, feminism to me is still first and foremost about respect, about freedom from violence and ignorance, about equality in the workplace.  But its about a hell of a lot more than that. 

Its about choice.  Its about all of us or NONE of us.   It means that I have to be glad to see the biggest crop of women running for higher office than we've ever had in the history of this country, even if most of them are diametrically opposed to my politics.  It means that I support a woman's decision to be a stay at home mom just as much as I support a woman's decision to pursue a career.  Really being a feminist means that I want all women to have real choices in life, choices to be or not be a parent, to get as much of as an education as we want to have, to have safe and adequate medical care, to be respected in our choice of religion.  To live our lives with dignity, no matter how we choose to live them.  To

One of the things that disturbs me most is when I see women tearing down other women's choices.  Moms fighting over whether you should stay at home or work.  WOHM's who think SAHM's are somehow less smart and missing something; SAHM's who think WOHM's are letting other people raise their children (an assertion with which I most heartily disagree).  Women bloggers who think "mommybloggers" are sellouts; High-revenue bloggers who think bloggers with low readership and no ad revenue are stupid; Moms who have the time, money and ability to cook everything from scratch who judge moms who work too many hours a week and don't. 

I'm left wondering where all of this gets us, as women, as mothers.  Am I better if I tell everybody I'm better than you because I have *this* job or *this* value?  Am I better if I insist you're not as good as I am? 

I have this thought about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a feminist.  And that thought is that we either ALL benefit or none of us do.  That to me part of being a feminist is fighting for the right of women not to be torn down by other women.  That a bigger part of it is for women, ultimately, to really have it all -- "all" being whatever it is they hope, dream, aspire to.  For one it is to be rich and famous.  For another it is to be president.  For another, to raise her children and to keep her house beautiful, care for her husband.  For another, to have the right to marry her partner and not be discriminated against because she's gay.  Ultimately, we all share something that regardless of color, culture or social status puts us in the same room.   Yes, a vagina.  More or less.  ( I had to say that, it was getting too serious in here )

Very seriously, though, I was reading a blog by a SAHM today, and for a moment I started to feel vaguely guilty, and left out - as if she was part of some exclusive club that thinks I'm less of a mother because I work.  And then I realized that NOTHING SHE SAID even vaguely intimated that she had a negative opinion of WOH Moms - she simply had a positive opinion about SAH moms.  I realized the negativity I was reading into her words really came from inside ME.  I understood at that moment that a great deal of the enmity with which we treat other women actually comes from within ourselves, from our own guilt and shame over all the things we are NOT because we aren't taught to value and celebrate all the things that we ARE.

Today, I AM a mother.  I am a career woman.  I'm proud of myself and I'm doing the very best job I know how to do, for my employer, for my children, for myself.  And that has to be enough.  

Stop Lights and Street Signs and Traffic! Oh My!

In between my years in the lovely state of Washington, I had the misfortune joy of living in The Garden State for almost a decade.  Prior to living there I had been in Seattle for a number of years, so the concept of traffic was not unknown to me. However, Seattle has always had a fairly decent public transit system for those living on the outskirts of the metro area, so commuting wasn't too bad.  New Jersey was like moving to another planet.  Where all the drivers are on crack.  And carry guns. And public transit is nonexistent.

My first job was a temp position at a large corporate office in Woodbury.  I was commuting there from Toms River, so the drive usually took about an hour.  Without traffic it might have been a half hour hop skip and jump.  But the Garden State Parkway, while green and rather pretty in the southern reaches of the state, is aptly named.  Park.  Way.  The only thing worse than the aggressive drivers and the toll booths were the places where a local throughway would merge onto the Parkway, or where the Parkway would suddenly go from five lanes to three.  That was where life got a little dicey. 

Its not hard to imagine why the highways would be crowded, in a tiny state stuffed full of seven and a half million people.  What's amazing about New Jersey drivers is their innate ability to drive twenty miles an hour over the posted speed limit (yes, that would be about 85-90) and weave back and forth, avoiding the right lane drivers and the New Yorkers.  Where it gets truly mind-boggling is when you reach a stopped patch of traffic.  How there aren't MORE accidents is beyond my feeble mind to ken.

After enduring far too many years of snarls and jug-handles and summer beach traffic and middle-fingered turn signals, I moved to the center of Washington State, to work at a winery.  Most people, when they think of Washington, think of Seattle, with mountains and evergreens and lakes and ferries and big islands (Vashon, Bainbridge, Whidbey).  One of the truly great things about Washington, though, its the diversity in both geology and climate.  West of the Cascade Mountains (a/k/a The Wet Side, Home of the Moss People), is green and often gray.  Rain and drizzle are what we natives TELL you it does all the time, but anyone who's visited the Pacific Northwest between June and September knows that we are all really lying.  We just don't want you to realize how pretty it is and actually MOVE here.  The Dry Side of the state stretches from the eastern slope of the Cascade mountains all the way across to Idaho.  Here you will find long valleys, beautiful rivers, stretches of dry, arid desert, bare mountains and wheat country. Trees?  Not so much.  Mostly in the populated areas and planted around rural homes as windbreaks.  The conditions in the Yakima and Columbia valleys, as it turns out, are ideal for viticulture, and so Washington currently boasts hundreds of estate wineries, most of them located within an 80 mile radius of where I now live.

The winery where I work is far outside of city limits.  The closest town is little more than a small  conglomeration of a few houses, mobile and manufactured homes.  Aside from the winery, land for miles around is devoted to farming.  There is an organic dairy, and circle upon circle of onions, corn, mint and hay.  Its a 45 mile drive each way from my home to my office down in the warehouse, and most days I take a vanpool with five other people.   We have pretty good public transit in the Tri-Cities, despite being very rural.  With lots of people working out at Hanford, across the river at the chemical depot in Umatilla, or at many of the area farms, we have a very robust vanpool system.  For three days a week it costs me approximately $50-$60 per month, then one day a week I drive myself in, one day a week I telecommute.

The vanpool takes the "boring" way, down I-82 and then out highway 14 along the Columbia River.  Once we get to the river, its less boring and rather pretty.  But along I-82, there is nothing but dirt, tumbleweeds and sage. Occasionally it is very foggy, but aside from the random coyote sighting, that's about the only variation.  On the days I drive myself, I take the scenic route, up Weber Canyon and through the Horse Heaven Hills.  For the first year or so, I was bowled over on a daily basis by the contrast between my new commute and my old New Jersey commute.  Picture New Jersey.  Picture five lanes of the GSP ground to a standstill for hundreds of feet, waiting to squeeze five lanes through three toll booths.  Then look at this:

  

In that fourth picture you can actually see a semi trailer ahead of me and another semi approaching on the cross street.  That's what I now refer to as "traffic." 

I can't imagine going back to New Jersey, or to any city, for that matter.  Yes, spoiled I am. 

  

Friday and an opportunity to help someone

I am breathing a sigh of relief, although I still have to get through work today.  In a way, my first day back in the office yesterday was a relief because having mounds of work to do and a plethora of people who all needed a piece of me kept me from dwelling on things.  And it was good to be around other people and to interact, laugh and talk and joke.  One more day to get through, hopefully with a lot of checkmarks on my To Do list, and then its the weekend.  Weather forecast says tomorrow might be riding weather!  I think a long ride on the river is just what the doctor ordered for this tired mom.

Speaking of tired and speaking of moms, if anyone here follows Anissa Mayhew's blog, you probably know about Anissa's stroke.  For those of you who don't, Anissa is a well-known long time Mommy blogger.  She originally started her blog when her daughter Peyton was diagnosed with Leukemia.  Peyton is doing very well these days, but 92 days ago Anissa suffered two strokes and has been in the hospital and then in a rehab center ever since, slowly regaining strength, the ability to talk, sit up, and move about.  Her husband Peter has been updating her blog as frequently as working, parenting the kids and spending time every day with Anissa would allow.  This is a truly amazing family, and this couple's love for one another shows in every word.  Anissa's getting ready to come home, a step which her husband and children are so very excited about.  She will still require outpatient treatment, but the family's copay for 40 days of outpatient treatment will be $100 a day.  This is not a wealthy family, like many American families (me included) they're probably a paycheck away from the cliff's edge.  Peter has asked their friends if 400 people could send them $10 apiece via paypal, which would cover every single day of Anissa's outpatient therapy.

I'm not in the habit of asking people for money, and I'm not really asking you for it now.  But if you follow the link above to Anissa's blog, you can read her story, and if it moves you the way it has moved me, maybe you would feel up to clicking on the Paypal link that Peter has provided and show little tiny bit of love for these folks. 

I hope you all have a beautiful weekend and that you get a chance to do something you really enjoy.