Monthly Archive: August, 2006

I love my clients.

This morning’s session was wonderful. One great idea after another about weight and self-image and inlaws and opportunity and evolution of self and being more accomplished/richer/more privileged than some friends and about being less accomplished/poorer/less privileged than others. About work and managing up and watching people struggle and how to do it all better. About food, hormones, and sleep. About genetics, who we are and aren’t, what we love and don’t love, what works and what doesn’t. How to weave our way through life gracefully. How to have it all: love, money, health, and good work.

My client describes her life and I frame it using everything that I have read and learned and feel. The principles of systems science, evolutionary design, health realization, and simple self care permeate my reasoning. Bela Banathy, Syd Banks, George and Linda Pransky, Len Troncale (We’re waiting for the book!), Thomas Leonard, Robert Kegan, Ellen Langer, Joanna Macy. And the brain science people: Antonio Damasio, Steven Pinker, Patricia Churchland, Francisco Varela, Walter Freeman. And the business and money people: Michael Gerber, Jeffrey Fox, Dale Carnegie, Joe Dominguez/Vicki Robin.

And my client comes back with her insights. As valuable, as metaphorical, and as powerful as any I have heard or read.

My thinking integrates in the process. We both learn. We expand.

Chaos is revealed as growth. Angst signals a need for a shift. Negative reframed as positive expands perspective. New, more constructive responses are revealed. Wisdom comes naturally.

Life in the design space.

Who should be paying whom?

Kudos to Judith Warner, NY Times blogger, mother, wife, and author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, for taking August off from writing her blog, Domestic Disturbances. She’s walking her talk–or trying her best to.

Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain is so right on that it’s embarassing. Just when I think that I’m so unique, I read again about how I’m like every other woman on the planet. And how I have been my whole life.

I’m out of the nurturer/caretaker period when I actually cared what my children were doing and about considering my husband’s needs. Now I’m in a get-away-I’m-busy-and-too-busy-to-take-off-just-because-you-want-to period, hotflashing my way to saving us all, and, as part of the Great Turning, hoping that we can all turn this mess toward something approaching sanity and sustainability.

But it’s all hormones. Half a pill and I can be back to my old self, the warm and fuzzy Lynn, the nesting wife and mother.

And lose this? These power surges, this creativity, this independence, this passion for work?! No way!

Recently over dinner a neighbor said that when we get older, we become more of who we are. I am definitely becoming more of who I am–and even more of who I have not been. I think my husband’s a little freaked by it.

Oh, well. . .He’ll just have to deal with it.

My Aunt Ginny complained about how her neighbor’s grandmonsters were whacking down the irises with sticks in her front yard while the parents were on the front porch.

My mother had me and four little red-headed boys. Aunt Ginny had one girl and three boys. Mowing down our grandmother’s flowerbeds in broad daylight would have been a near capital offense.

No parent’s perfect. Motherhood is an exercise in guilt. It starts when you flash back to shouldn’t have ordered that third margarita the week before you found out you were pregnant.
But then there’s cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker’s nature-over-nurture take on parenting: What you do really doesn’t matter all that much. People are born who they are. Just be a good person.

I like it. It’s relaxing.

But I don’t really buy into it. Kids, like puppies, need basic training or they’re hyper, jumping all over, confused about what you and the world wants from them.
If the parents aren’t in charge, then who is? The kid?! Nothing’s scarier to a child.

I prefer Christie Mellor’s The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting.

The back cover says, “How did children become the center of the universe? We were here first!”

Sample chapter titles:

• Bedtime: Is Five-Thirty Too Early?
• Karate, Little League, and Ballet: Your Child’s Eighty-Hour Work Week
• Television: Is Six Hours a Day Too Much?
• Diaper Bag or Steamer Trunk?

First comes you, then your marriage, and then the kids. You’ll have happy children and you’ll have time for that martini.

Since when has HLN turned into total pap? I watched the “news” last night for the first time in months. Celebrity nothingness. People churning negativity, as if the Armageddon is here.

This morning I had to look up the best of the good news.

TED is packed with ideas. Brilliant people. Cool purpose. Hope for the world.

Majora Carter speaks on her life and greening the ghetto and fighting for the people of the Bronx. If it can be done there, it can be done anywhere. Even Maui.

I want to speak and be like her!

My friend Les Vogel turned me on to TED. Bless him.
Maybe we can do a TED conference or Aspen Institute on Maui? Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?