All the Things That Have Been in My Head

This is just an old-fashioned blog post brain dump. Starts pretty frivolous, but gets more serious as it goes on. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Curtaingate.
If you follow me on Instagram you know that I’ve been in a little Curtain/drapery situation, but I finally finished them up and now I have curtains (drapes?) in my master bedroom. And they look good, REAL GOOD. Because for the first time ever I paid attention to drapes and how they look and how they should hang because I honestly didn’t know that they should be billow-y when closed (so you need about 2.5-3X the amount of fabric as your windows are wide) and the bottom of the curtains should just graze the floor. You guys, IT IS ALL IN THE DETAILS. Love, good design, life,  whatever– it’s all in the details. I’m trying to make my home a detail oriented place in both form and feel. Which is hard. I’ll admit, sometimes I care too much about how it looks. In part because how it looks does contribute to how it feels, but like most things, too much of any one thing (or too little) can become a pain point. Avoiding extremes and striving for the ever elusive, balance. For example I grew up in a home where how our home looked was more important than how it felt, and that didn’t turn out so well. On the other hand a friend of mine grew up with a very doting mother, but her house was constantly dirty and things left undone and she resented that as well. Of course if I have err, I will try to err on the side of caring more about the details in terms of how our home feels, but still… the curtains have mattered to me. And while they’re not as billow-y as they should be, they turned out well. I’m proud of me.

Kids in School.
I still can’t quite get over the fact that ALL my kids are now in school full time. Perhaps I shouldn’t be as excited as I am by this, but I can’t help it. I’m thrilled! I LOVE my children dearly, and I love being a mom and while being a stay at home mom was a privilege, it was also a sacrifice. I don’t know why motherhood has always felt like such a big deal to me–I mean it IS a big deal–but for me it’s been in a “I can’t believe I did this and survived it” sort of way. I’ve been trying to unpack this a little, here are some thoughts: I was on a podcast a few months ago (check it out here–I really liked this one) and they asked me this innocuous little question that had very little to do with the main point of the podcast (which was about caretaking of children with disabilities), but the question (as I remember) was, “So take us back, who were you and your husband before you had kids?”

Full stop.

Who WERE we? I don’t know. I have to squint to even see those two dumb kids in the distant past. From first date to marriage was 8 short (wonderful, exciting, but also stressful) months. 2 weeks after marriage we moved to New York City where my husband started dental school and I… sat in a lonely apartment and worked from home. By myself. And with Oprah–thank heavens for Oprah.my husband’s schooling kept him really busy, and we didn’t have a lot of time to settle into who we were as a couple before I got pregnant. We were married only 18 months when we had our first child and between the transitions to marriage and a new life in New York City, I hadn’t quite regained my footing before jumping into motherhood, which was by far the biggest change and challenge of all. I was 30 when I had my first baby, so not significantly young, but somehow it still all caught me by surprise. Who was I? Days after my first daughter was born the complete and dense thickness of post partum depression would be another new constant in my life, but one I didn’t even recognize was there (life feels hard so I guess I’m just always bummed now… shrug) and a feeling of life living me, instead of the other way around.

I was so lost. I was a wife and mother and me, last. Sometimes I hate that something so grand and beautiful and one of THE ABSOLUTE BEST parts of life–motherhood–became so closely related in my brain to difficulty, feeling tied down, resistance, survival. So much of that period of life felt like a fight to save myself–not literally–but the ME under all the titles, duties and relationships. The ME who was there before and wanted to be there after. The ME who loved feeling music pulse in my bones, the ME who wanted to create with my hands, the ME who loved comedy and laughing, the ME who was mostly carefree and happy, Not the new smaller me who questioned everything and wondered when my life was going to start feeling like my life again.

Our thoughts are powerful. If you’ve done any self-help reading or podcast listening in recent years you know that our thoughts, not our circumstances, are what dictate our happiness, or lack thereof. So while my circumstances were in no way extraordinary, the constant fight for ME was so often conflated with motherhood in my brain. The association has stuck. I didn’t mean for it to be that way, but in hindsight it most definitely has been.

I hate to derail the train of thought with a disclaimer detour, but please allow me to do so. Motherhood is a gift and a life unto itself, and much of it requires one to lose oneself. You must give, you must sacrifice (it starts with sleep and escalates from there) and those small tokens pay back in full, with interest. Even with a full time staff of nannies, cooks and the like, I think it would be a bad idea to have a child and try not to lose some part of your former self. It either won’t happen, or worse… it will happen and no one–neither you or your baby–will be better for it because I truly believe that the sacrifice and service of parenthood are part of the glue that creates those unbreakable bonds of love. It’s not just a new phase of life, you’re becoming a new person. So yes, losing yourself a little, giving more than you have for a time is part of the gig. You just can’t let it go on too long, or too intensely. (Hello balance.)

The point is, I’m finding that I am needing to re-wire my brain to disassociate motherhood with hardship and a removal of ME–something I felt I had to fight against (always looking for more ME time, always wanting to have time away for myself…) But perhaps it really is just a little harder for some of us than others, and for that reason maybe I really do feel a little more excited that ALL my kids are in school full time than other mothers, I don’t know.

Call-out culture.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the culturally aware, yet highly sensitive times we live in lately and what a land-mine it can feel like. For the first time two days ago I heard the term “cancel culture” and since those two days I’ve been hearing it non-stop–cancel culture and call-out culture. First, have I been called out? Yes. And was I glad it happened? Yes. More than once. I’ve learned something and grew from hearing a point of view I hadn’t considered before. But like all things in life, from laxatives to logic, it is in the application and dosage where we must be discerning. Again this need for balance–any one idea taken to the extreme is going to come back and hurt us. Of course it’s wonderful to live in a time of such heightened awareness around race, LGBTQ, disability and other social issues that have been hurting minority communities for decades. As a white, cis-gender, able-bodied woman I feel a heavy weight of responsibility to educate myself and to invest time and money in becoming more educated about what I can do to make a positive contribution–Books and an e-course on white supremacy (that I have yet to start for the sake of transparency), are two of the ways I’ve gone about this, as well as reading articles and following people online that come from a variety of different backgrounds and experiences. I feel so very passionate about social justice and of course do all in my power to help raise awareness for the disability community because change absolutely must happen and it can’t come soon enough.

But here are some of the issues I’ve been confronting, questioning and wondering about in regards to this lately:
–I want to be a better ally for people of color and I want to learn what I can do to dismantle white supremacy, but I don’t want to feel like a piece of sh*t in the process. Being asked tough questions, confronting my bias? Yes. Being put down and made to feel inferior and stupid? No. There was one IG account of a woman of color that I started following specifically to learn about these things and almost daily I found myself feeling attacked or put down (not personally, but in general) for being a white woman. At first I felt that perhaps I deserved it and should be able to absorb this kind of “criticism” but I quickly realized that I was actually questioning if I was even a good person and had a general feeling of guilt and slight depression constantly hanging over my head. To be clear I was and am following other WOC on IG, many of whom also do this same kind of work and I don’t feel the same way from their accounts–even when they call out white women for behavior that we need to improve upon. And yes I know about “tone policing” and that as a white woman it’s not my place to tell a WOC how to share her message, (frankly I’m nervous to even be talking about this on here) but I also had to draw a boundary for myself and say, I’m not going to do any good in the world if I feel like a piece of sh*t while trying to do it.

–The whole “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. I’m not a disabled person, and yet I consider myself a disability advocate but yet sometimes I wonder if it’s OK to be doing my work when I don’t come from a first-hand account situation? Along the same lines, yesterday I asked on my IG about Taylor Swift’s new album. One person wrote that she hadn’t yet listened because she doesn’t want to “support someone who is appropriating LGBTQ issues.” She asked my opinion. I said, that from my perspective Taylor is using her very large and influential platform by bringing other people who are in the LGBTQ community INTO her space and sharing her platform WITH them. I did not think she was appropriating. She agreed. For me, and I presume for Taylor, NOT speaking out, NOT using our voices and NOT doing the work we do to try and bring more awareness to these communities would be a much worse option–and lets be honest, she would get slayed for either choice she makes. For me, I know the importance of listening to first hand accounts of disability–both my daughter and other adults I know and have interviewed on my blog–and I always encourage other disability moms and dads to do the same. But I still wrote a children’s book about disability and I’m proud of it.

–Call-out culture and cancel culture is starting to implode on itself. Like many people I know someone who has a gluten allergy, and the people I know who have a true allergy (meaning they get sick if even a tiny bit of gluten is digested) say that it’s becoming harder for them to be taken seriously at restaurants because of all the people who are just gluten-free making a big deal out of eating gluten when they don’t really need to avoid it. Waiters roll their eyes and aren’t as careful about avoiding gluten because how do they know who REALLY needs to avoid gluten? If we call out every person for every minor infraction are we actually improving our world overall, or are we just going to create more frustrated angry people who are so sick of being attacked for every little move they throw in the towel all together? In this wonderful NYT piece “I’m a black feminist. I think call-out culture is toxic” by Loretta Ross, she says, “Call-outs are justified to challenge provocateurs who deliberately hurt others, or for powerful people beyond our reach. Effectively criticizing such people is an important tactic for achieving justice. But most public shaming is horizontal and done by those who believe they have greater integrity or more sophisticated analyses. They become the self-appointed guardians of political purity. Call-outs make people fearful of being targeted. People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture. Shaming people for when they “woke up” presupposes rigid political standards for acceptable discourse and enlists others to pile on. Sometimes it’s just ruthless hazing.”

She goes on to say: “We can change this culture. Calling-in is simply a call-out done with love. Some corrections can be made privately. Others will necessarily be public, but done with respect. It is not tone policing, protecting white fragility or covering up abuse. It helps avoid the weaponization of suffering that prevents constructive healing.”

–When the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it’s bound to come swinging hard in the other. We went from Obama to Trump. I am concerned our social discourse will suffer the same swing–or that it has and that’s what is the cause of some of this mess.

–We’re not all on the same timeline. I have learned a lot about disability in the past 9 years. I wasn’t there before then and my hope is my that my understanding will continue to grow. Why should I expect someone else to be on the exact timeline I’m on? Of course that’s part of why I do what I do–to help others learn faster and point them in the right direction–but I’m so grateful to others who helped me and were gracious along the way. I think most of us are open to learning and most of us want to be good people, but we can know it ALL, focus on it ALL, learn it ALL at once.

–Nuance. Can we agree there is a BIG difference between the #MeToo movement and the need to hold people accountable for rape and sexual assault, vs. a tweet from a celebrity a decade ago that they’re embarrassed about now? Shoot, we were all still living under a social justice rock a decade ago (maybe most of us still are?) and when someone crosses a line, they absolutely should be held accountable. But like that hoity-toity camp counselor from The Parent Trap says, “Let the punishment fit the crime.”

Those are just a few of the things that have been in my head lately.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What about you? What’s been on your mind?