Don't ignore this one critical thing in your life

I’m going to hot tub with a bunch of my women friends tonight under the full moon. It’s part of my on-going birthday week celebration. Last night was Indian dinner with one group of friends and tonight I’ll join my women in the hot tub and we’ll marvel at the moon and the life that brings us together.

My kids and I will have a different kind of celebration this weekend together: it’s always important to my youngest that we actually sing Happy Birthday.

One of the things that I’m so grateful for in my growing up is that my mother taught me how to make days count. Especially important days.

I remember her and my aunt Cheryl transforming our basement into a haunted house for Halloween, complete with smoke from dry ice and peeled grapes for the dead guy’s eyes. Once, we all dressed in period costumes, blindfolded my sister, and brought her to an alcove overlooking a gorgeous fountain in one of St. Paul’s most beautiful places, Como Park. We had an elaborate brunch waiting. Another time, I remember a detailed, across-town treasure hunt that my mom sent the kids on, hunting for treasure.

Creating a ritual around a day or an event impresses that event in our minds and hearts and becomes part of the story of our lives. And although we are the writers of our own life stories, sometimes we don’t know how to devise great story lines.

 This telling of a great story…a living of a great life, is part and parcel of Tending the Fire Within. I love to plan a party or an event and I love to tell the story. They go hand in hand.

So what does it take to make a great life? A great story? A few things seem clear.

Our people. I’m not saying we have to have a gazillion friends. For some people, their “tribe” is their best friend. Or their family. Everyone does this her own way. I love so many people I just can’t keep up with them all. But however we do it, we gotta have our people and they have to have us. We need each other.

Time together. I know that quality time is important is key (I’m talking about some quality time right here, right?) but we really need the quantity, too. We have to make the time to have these things happen in our lives.

But the biggest thing that we’re losing our historical cultural memory on and more people find tricky?

Ritual. We need some way to mark important moments, some way to mark our community’s connection, so way to say: Hey, I belong to you and you belong to me and isn’t that the coolest thing?

Ritual is the linchpin of a great life. Think about it: going to the lake cabin every summer, eating that nasty lutefisk every single Christmas Eve, flying a kite on the first days of spring, hunting for Easter eggs. Our stories become our lives and our lives become our stories.

We’d best make sure we’re telling good stories.  

Tending the Fire Within lives and breathes for this kind of thing. We’re damn good at it, if we do say so ourselves. If you’re finding that your group needs a little cohesive action and you don’t know how to find it, I hope you give us a call and let us help.

And keep an eye open. Because I’m about to launch some online offerings that will bring some of these ideas right to you. Right there, with you. Just where I like to be.

               

Let me know what kinds of things that you do with your people to make life hum along. I’d love to hear your ideas.  Just leave a note in the comments below. I’ll think about you in the hot tub tonight. 

An open letter to my daughter.

Dear darling girl,

Funny how sometimes a mother has to write a bunch of strangers rather than to write directly to her girl. Maybe, someday, when you’re not fourteen-years-old and pissed-off at me about half the time, you’ll be able to hear this from me.

No matter. I still have to say it. It’s one of the things that I’ve learned and I hope you learn too: Say it anyway. Even when you can’t say it to the right person. Say it out loud and clearly and then…move on.

So you’ve got this solo violin concert tomorrow: your first. And you’re scared to death. New things have never been easy for you, but standing in front of a group of strangers and playing a fairly complicated piece? Yeah, that’s got to be getting your knees shaking a bit.

The thing is I know you’re going to be great. I also know that my opinion on this doesn’t count for much right now. You were pretty clear last night when I asked you if you wanted to hear what I think: “Mom, no offense, but you don’t know anything about music.”

It’s a lovely thing for me that you consider me someone who doesn’t know anything about music. What it means to me is that your standard is high. Not because I do know, especially, anything about music. I don’t know how frustrating it is to switch to third position when you thought the piece was played in first position. The circle of fifths makes my head hurt and I haven’t been practicing the guitar enough to build even the smallest of calluses on my fingertips. I almost always have to have you sing the harmony because it’s easier for me to hold than to harmonize. I am one of the least musically-talented adults in your world.

I get it. Little do you know, though, that I sing in so many places with so many groups. One time, my women’s group was at a restaurant and we were singing happy birthday to Kristina. We sang in three-part harmonies and we sounded great! (I held the melody, of course.) When we were finished singing, the whole restaurant clapped. And then two other tables, who were also celebrating birthdays, asked us to come and sing for them. You would have been mortified.

Once, I led a national gathering of women in song after song. Yep, me, your musically deficient mother.

So, you’re right that I don’t know the technical details of your playing. If you use an up-bow and it should be down, I’ll almost certainly miss it. But I’ve been listening to you play for six years. I’m surrounded by musicians and music and it’s a huge part of my world.  And here’s what I do know.

I know that the power of music is in the playing. The technical skill is nothing more than how you get to playing a piece like it matters: the technical skill isn’t enough. When a player has her soul come through her instrument, through her fingers, that’s when music hits in the heart.

I know that I am starting to hear your soul in your playing. I hear your passion, your solidness, your feistiness. Yes, it helps that you can do a strong vibrato and longer bows and that you’re steadier on your feet. But what I hear coming through is the power of Irene O’Connor’s fire in the pit of her belly. When you dash your music to the ground and scream that you can’t possibly do it, that you won’t go and that I and no one else can make you…I know you’ll be more than fine.

Here’s the thing—I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I suspect that you won’t dare disappoint your teachers; that’s so unlike you. And I hope you go. Because when you have to push up against these hard things, you see what you’re really made of. You’re made of some pretty good grit. If you don’t have to force yourself to get up and do something sometimes, my guess is you won’t do much. And that’s not you at all.

Tomorrow at this time, it will all be over. You’ll have done it. And you will—almost certainly—be glad you did.

So, cast me out of your mini-rehearsal. Yell and fuss and agonize. Then take all that passion and feeling and depth that I so love about you, and let it come through the music. Try not to think too much about the notes: they’ll come. Just remember to say your piece in your playing. It’s beautiful, just like you. Everyone will feel that, even if they don’t know a thing about music. 

            P.S. Thanks for reading this before I published it and giving me your okay. Mama.

If I can keep a shamrock alive, anything is possible

There was a time when I'd say I couldn’t cook. When I was eighteen-years-old and living on my own, I ate white rice with butter and salt every night for months. Now, anyone who knows me will know that, while I still consider popcorn a major food group, I can throw down in the kitchen with some respectability. People change; they do it all the time.

There was also a time when I would say I couldn’t have kids because I couldn’t even keep a plant alive. 

The best demonstration of that was my St. Patrick Day’s shamrock.

First, I have to tell you about my mother. I’ve been lucky to live near my mother for most of my adult life, and she has always been a major piece of the undergirding for me. While her lessons and support are often profound, she is subtle, because she doesn’t talk much (unlike….me.)  

Many years ago, my mother gave me a beautiful, blooming shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day. My mother is not from Irish descendants. She has Swedish ancestors, mostly. But she married a guy whose parents had come over on the boat. She was the one who upheld the strong traditions of that side of the family. We learned to love Irish Soda Bread, we learned that the Irish have strong traditions of writing and poetry and music. That storytelling was an art. One St. Paddy’s, she made us kids green eggs and ham. Brilliant, if gross, hey?

The shamrock she gave me was healthy and full and had delicate white flowers. I was thrilled. I kept it alive for months. But it was with a sad and somewhat heavy heart that I handed the pot back to my mother: the flowers non-existent, the plant dead.

It was in the fall when I first gave it back to her.

The very next St. Patrick’s Day, the beautiful shamrock again appeared on my table—full, alive, and thriving. She hadn’t gotten a new one; she had nursed the same plant back to life, back to beauty. And she handed that beauty back to me.

Whew...okay. “I can do this,” I remember thinking. 

But I didn’t. Again, by the fall, I would kill the thing. And again, I would hand it back to my mother.

When St. Patrick’s Day rolled around again, she gave me another chance.

And I killed it again!

I just didn’t take the time and energy to pay attention to the thing. I’d forget to water it, or water it too much or just generally neglect it.

But once again, the shamrock was sitting on my table on St. Patrick’s Day.

Maybe the third time is a charm. Maybe I just grew up. Maybe I decided, once and for all, that I can keep a plant alive. Sometimes, it’s in the deciding, isn’t it?

Today, many St. Patrick’s Days have come and gone and I’ve figured out how to keep the plant alive, thriving and beautiful. The little white flowers are wonderful. A couple years ago, I thought I killed it again: there may have been too many people watering it. I knew what to do. I cut the greens back, set it in the sun, and was patient. It came back. I can, officially, take care of my own shamrock.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, Mom. And thanks.

In love, you get what you allow

Recently, I decided that I would say “Yes!” to any attraction for a man that I felt and see where it goes. In the past, I have had a habit of preparing a cost analysis in my head, imagining what the outcome might be and one way or another, finding a way to squelch whatever comes my way.

So the “Yes!” is a different strategy. There are all kinds of reasons I suppose—my youngest child is, at six-years-old, no longer a tiny baby, or maybe I’ve just been single long enough. My ex-husband is in another relationship and I may be over him once and for all. And to top it all off, it’s almost spring and the stirrings of new life and bountiful energy remind me how much I like kissing a man who I’m wild about.

After a recent test run at this new policy, I’ve realized that I’ve got another policy pretty firmly in place. I’ve got zero tolerance for being treated badly. So, today, on International Women’s day, I’m just saying out loud that if I’m saying “Yes!” to a man, he’s got to say “Yes!” right back to me to have it go anywhere.

I’ve been out of this game for awhile. And the transition from married with children to single mother of four kids (three still at home) hasn’t been the easiest thing I’ve ever done. But it’s been good. I like my kids, I like my life, and I’m surrounded by people I love and who love me. Lucky is what I am.

Well, I’m lucky and I’ve worked my ass off. I have paid attention and made changes and worked hard to create good things in my life, to take care of myself and the people I love and stuff that has to happen for my life to work. I’m all over it and it’s working.

So, shortly after stating this new commitment to “Yes!” an opportunity presented itself. I met a man at an event that we were both attending and we were attracted to each other. We spent some time together over a few days…having meals together, talking about our lives. It was fun. When it came time to part ways—he lives in another state—he reached out, put his hand around my neck, and pulled me close to him. And kissed me.

Oh. I like kissing men—how lovely that is. I might do more of it.

We said goodbye and that we’d be in touch. My “Yes!” plan was working pretty well. I was leaving the event and I texted him and we had a little text exchange, the same way we had for the past few days. I texted him that I might like to kiss him again.

And then the phone got cold. He didn’t respond to my text. There we were texting along and he suddenly disappears. No answer. I was puzzled.

Texting can be a weird thing. It’s not a phone call, where hanging up without saying anything would be obviously rude. And it’s not an email that you get to when you get to. Texting is somewhere in between. But here’s where I’m at: if we’re in the middle of a texting conversation and I say I want to kiss you again, you don’t just drop the conversation. Unless you’re dead. If you’re dead, then I get it.

Truly, the only thing that I could imagine that would make dropping this conversation so abruptly okay is something like the man was reading my text about me kissing him and that he wandered happily into the street and got hit by a car and ended up in the hospital. And then he would apologize for dropping me like that.

But that’s not what happened. What happened is that I didn’t hear from him for another twenty-four hours. The next night, he texts and says that he’d been thinking about me all day, despite being back in his busy life.  Yeah, okay. I texted him back agreeing that life sure is busy. 

He’s reached out a couple times since then and I’ve been friendly, but uninterested. I'm not angry and I don't regret this thing, I'm just not interested.

Because a man is either going to be crazy about me and act like it or…not.

I told a dear friend of mine about my newly-discovered “policy" and initially, he laughed.

“You have a zero tolerance policy?” he said incredulously.

He figured that I wouldn’t get very far on my “Yes!” plan or my plan for kissing more men with such a policy.

Until I explained it to him. Basically, I realize that I have no more room in my life to be treated badly. And especially by a man. My dad is dead now, and it’s not speaking badly of the dead to say that the guy treated me like dirt. He may have valued me in some way, and I know he loved me and I’m pretty sure there might have been something in the past 45 years that he was proud of about me. But I wouldn’t have any way of knowing it based on his behavior.

And for a long time, I was looking for him to show me something better. And then I did the typical thing of looking for it in other men who didn’t know how to treat me well. Back then, I explained the bad treatment away and made the best of it. The deal is that I can understand why people behave badly--I have a lot of compassion for what makes us behave badly. That used to be enough for me to allow a man to not tend to me when I’m sick, to show up late or not at all, to say one thing and do another, to make commitments to me and blow them and me off.  

I have explained and allowed bad behavior from men because I understand that under the bad behavior, there’s a great guy in there. Basta!

I’m ready to have a great guy living fully and out loud. Over the past decade, I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter why someone can’t meet me half way or all the way, he still can’t or won’t. And if I allow it, then that’s what I get: halfway.

These days, I have all kinds of men in my life who treat me well, who care about me, who see and respect me. Men who call me and see how I’m doing. Men who, when I was injured and couldn’t move, sat with me and read me poems and made me fruit salad and ate nachos and brownies with me. Men who come and help me push my car out of the driveway so we can jumpstart it in the street. Men who leave me licorice surprises and chocolate bars on my desk. Men who send me flowers and men who fix the gutters on my house. Men who pore over words with me and create good stuff to read. Men who raise money to help me buy a car when mine is stolen. Men who plot and scheme business plans with me. Men who hold me up when I need holding. Men who love me out loud and all the way.

I’m a lucky woman.

These men are my friends, my family, and my community. There isn’t a lover among them and I won’t be kissing these guys.

So what about that man? Yeah, where is he? I don’t know where he is, but I know this: He’s going to be open-hearted, expressive, and crazy about me. I’m not going to be guessing about where he stands—it will be abundantly evident.

And I’ll love kissing him and when I say I want to kiss him, he will happily respond unless he is hit by a car or is, in some other way, dead.

Until then, life is good and I’m patient. But it is getting to be about springtime. 

When complainers are a good thing

Marcy gets up enough courage to go to her boss and tell her that she didn’t appreciate her talking to another employee about Marcy's problem without coming to Marcy first.

This is a big deal for Marcy because her boss—call her Denise—doesn’t always respond well to an employee pointing out something that isn’t working.

Instead of listening, Denise interrupts. She’s defensive and wants to tell her side of the story; she wants to explain the complaint away. Sometimes, Denise yells at people who complain about what she does. Other times, she starts crying and is moody for days afterwards. Denise just wants to be appreciated. She wants Marcy to see that she really is a great human being.

Denise may be a great human being, but she’s strangling the life right out of her relationships by not knowing how to take a complaint.

If you want to have high-quality relationships wherever you are, you need a functioning complaint department. In business or in love or with your neighbor across the fence, you’ve got to be able to listen to people say things that they don’t like. About you. If you’re committed to building good relationships, you’ve got to take that complaint and put it through a process of examination so that you can either eliminate it or work on it.

That’s not easy. But getting good at taking complaints will change your life and every relationship in it. Complaints aren’t going away. We have complaints about people and they have complaints about us. How we take those complaints and what we do with them can deepen our relationships…or blow them up.

A company without a good way to handle complaints will become known for poor customer service and won’t do as well as it could, if it survives at all. A personal relationship without a good complaint process is equally doomed.

But what if we used a complaint to learn more about ourselves, about the other person, and about how to do something differently? If we knew how to do that, we could use a complaint as an opportunity to make or deepen a connection. And connection is what we all want. People don’t complain because they want to hurt us, they complain because they have some need that isn’t getting met. Often, people complain because they care enough about the relationship to want to make it better.

That doesn’t mean people are good at complaining. That’s another blog entry for another day. But however people complain, we can get good at taking it in.

A complaint is a chance to see ourselves as others do. Or, at least as one other does. It doesn’t make the complaint right or wrong; it’s just information about how we appear. It can be incredibly helpful information, if we look at the information as a practical way to improve.

How do we take a complaint and turn it into gold?

·         We have to get curious. Nobody is going to tell us the real deal if we won’t take it in or don’t seem to care or worse, we seem hostile. So skip the eye-rolling, the attitude of “here we go again” or anything else that doesn’t open the door for someone to say what they want to say.

·         We don’t take it personally. This is can be a difficult idea to grasp. How can I not take a complaint about me personally? Right. Basically, you have to trust that whatever the complaint is and even if it is dead on, that this information is useful in figuring out some aspect of your life. It’s not a crucifixion. It’s not an indictment of your entire existence. Don’t make it so. You are still a human being on the planet, worthy of love and respect and care. Yes, you make mistakes and probably aren’t perfect. So what? So you’ve got something you could do better? Welcome to the human race, my friend. The sooner you accept this fact, the easier life gets. Just don’t swing the other way and use being human as an excuse for not making changes that you know you need to make. You do have the power to make changes.

·         Empathize with the person lodging the complaint. How hard is it for them to say this to you? How important must this be to bring it to you? Are they nervous? Are they telling you this because they want your relationship to be better?

·          Resist the urge to use the moment to lodge your own complaint. You know the old, “Well, I do that because you do this.” First, try to just hear the complaint without explaining why you do something.

·         Try to play back the complaint in your own words. Denise might say something like, “I hear that you’re upset that I talked to Bob about you without coming to you first. I get that.”  

·         Thank the complainer for bringing you this complaint. This might be hard. But you’re looking at a complaint as a way to help you see your full self, right? So you need to find a way to welcome people's complaints. If you can genuinely say that you’re glad she told you what was bugging her, do it.

·         Tell her you’ll get back to her. Sometimes, it’s enough to say you hear. If you can offer a true apology, a commitment to do something differently, and move on, great. But sometimes, complaints require more of a response. Time is our friend when it comes to responding well. Let the person know you’ll get back to them within a time frame. And then do it.

·         Have a system for evaluating the complaint. After you’re done with the conversation, find a way to consider the validity of the complaint and what is required for you to manage this piece. If you’re feeling ready to hear more, ask someone you trust if this complaint rings true about you.

·         Not all complaints are entirely about you. There can be all kinds of factors that bring a complaint to us, including the complainer’s inability to see her own faults. But at a minimum, the person who is complaining has an issue that is affecting your relationship. And sometimes, a brave person who complains to us represents many more people who don’t have the courage to tell us how it is. If you are hearing the same complaint from various sources, you’ll have to decide if you’re willing to make a change in your life to address this thing that is tripping up your relationships.

·         If you are running through your evaluation of complaints and consistently finding that the problem is solely that of the person complaining, you may want to consider that you are denying some information that could help you create closer relationships. What I’m suggesting is that you dig deeper, because you’re probably fooling yourself.

·         Lastly and perhaps most importantly, if you know that you’ve got something that isn’t working in your life, commit to doing something to help yourself. We’ve all got things that don’t work well. Don’t be that person that says, “Eh, that’s life.” Don’t set it down and forget about it until the next time the same situation comes up and look: you’ve done it again. To yourself and to everyone around you. I’m not saying beat yourself up. I’m saying just the opposite: lift yourself up. When we work to get something right and lift ourselves up, we lift up every relationship around us. And that’s what really listening to a complaint can do for us. Who could complain about that?