Monthly Archive: October, 2007

My husband Rick/Dick and I saw Across the Universe at the movies the other night and I was struck with how very free–tortured, but free–those kids were. It was the 60s in the height of the drug years and escalaltion of the Vietnam War and the protests. They were struggling but they were struggling together. They were experimenting but they were growing. I was reminded about how it was to be young and broke again. The highs. The lows.

And I think of how it’s different now.

We fought against “The Establishment.” Kids now are the establishment and are not comfortable in it. They are changing it from the inside out. They are networked and they appreciate design. They don’t like management. They are self-motivated and they want to be guided by collectively-held values. They don’t like the constraint of roles and rules. They want to make up their own roles and rules, as they go.

We jumped into our lovelives and marriages. Young adults now are scared and tentative, worried about commitment and their futures and getting everything right. And then, when they do make the big decision, their weddings are huge fairy tale productions, girls dressed up like princesses, moving toward a Perfect Day which can only be a letdown when the Perfect Man fails to live up to the standards of the Perfect Life.

We just had our babies. Oh, with some thought into home vs. hospital births, breastfeeding, cloth vs. the new throwaway diapers–we even took childbirth classes. My mom came to help out with my first one and she really did help me. For women now, it’s a major research project. And their lists of dos and don’ts overwhelm me.

This is a generation of women who as girls were on the soccer field, who made high scores all the way through school, who are educated and equipped to do a lot more than house work. They are A students. We’ve taught them to be strivers and perfectionists.

Marriage and motherhood is the opposite of striving and perfection. It’s an art. It’s an enormous skill set and mind shift.

Too often women aren’t getting the basics of living with others, much less a man. One thing that the communal living of the 60s taught us–Sharing apartments and houses with an odd assortment of people taught lots about just getting along.

Also, probably most important, you never know enough bout yourself or your man or marriage before you get into it. You can’t. Marriage is a learn-as-you-go project and the only thing to do is open yourself up and enjoy the ride.

What I wish for young women today? Joy. Love. Fearlessness. Just keep out there and look for love. Create it. Have fun with it. Play. And, when it’s right, dive right into the unknown.

A true story from a younger friend:

I’ve been dating this guy for about 2 months, and it’s going well. But slow. The other night, we were both beat from the week and opted to do a low key dinner and see a movie. We had a really nice time, he’d picked up a bottle of wine at lunch and brought it over. After the movie, we hung out at my apartment. We talked, laughed. I’m always surprised at how easily things flow when we’re together. Then, around 2:30 in the morning, he said he had to head home.

My mind started racing with that junk thinking: Wait - what? It’s almost 3am. He lives 45 minutes away. Why wouldn’t he want to stay? What is this saying about how he feels about me?

What I should have said: “Oh, you’re leaving? That’s too bad. Well, at least I’ll be able to get up to go hiking in the morning!”

What I actually said: “No, stay!”

I whined. Completely out of character. But why wouldn’t he want to stay the night? I was surprised, tired, and caught off guard.

He said he’d stay a little longer (an immediate concession, but I missed it at the time), but he had plans for the next day, and friends were picking him up early from his house. A little while later, I walked him to the door, he kissed me goodbye and headed home.

The next day, I felt bad about the way I’d behaved. And after I’d slept and had some breakfast, his leaving didn’t feel like that big a deal at all. He’d given legitimate reasons, and he certainly hadn’t made a mad dash for the door. On the contrary, he’d kissed me a few times more, hugged me, kissed me on the forehead and said goodbye. (Romantic much?)

Who was that girl last night? Not much attractive about her! Needy, childish. Certainly not me. And poor guy! He’s never done a thing to make me think he doesn’t care. And he probably left thinking he’d messed up!

He called me 2 days later to say hi and see how the rest of my weekend went. He said he was sorry about the other night. He told me about his weekend, and explained a few things about who he is and where he was coming from, and I apologized too. And suddenly, I’m feeling very calm about the whole thing. Maybe this might actually be a good thing! Huh. Guess we’ll see.

…He also said, in addition to having to get up in the morning, that he’d been feeling “a little gassy” from dinner, and hadn’t wanted to subject me to his farts all night! I guess you really do just never know! ;-)

In the book Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth is nuts, crying on the bathroom floor for months, leaves her husband–the suburbs and babies just weren’t going to work for her–falls in and out of love on the rebound and then takes off (with a big fat book advance) for a year-long trip to find herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia.

Oprah is fascinated by this woman and the book. Oprah has said over and over again how very important it is to retain your sense of self. And this book is about the complete loss and then discovery of a renewed sense of self.

Oprah thinks that the self is something that you have that needs to be protected. And with a beautiful self like Oprah’s, no wonder! But the self is an illusion. We are creating ourselves as we live. You’re adding, strengthening or pruning neurons as you read this. Put in enough information–and who in this culture isn’t?–and soon you’ll find that the old you is no longer able to efficiently process what’s coming at you. You’ll find that for a while everything’s all wrong because your brain is literally reorganizing. For a while, all is chaos.
Like I say in Men Are Easy:

At some point you will probably find that the life you constructed no longer works. Maybe you can no longer tolerate what you tolerated before. Maybe he’s not changing and you are. Or he’s changing and demanding that you adapt.

In these times, your relationship to love and to others is undergoing intense growth, and transition, in nature and in life, is rarely smooth.

A time of intense growth is not like the bloom of a flower. It can be more like Mount St. Helens, rumbling and growing in pressure until it erupts, obscuring everything known. Eventually life comes back, often more beautiful than before, but the landscape is never the same again.

This is not the territory for sissies.

Our culture tends to think that chaos is breakdown, but, in nature, chaos is the re-ordering to a higher level of efficiency and complexity. Fear makes it all much more difficult to handle. When you’re afraid that you’re crazy and that you are having a breakdown, your brain can’t function properly. The brain fails to process as well.

But when you understand that the chaos is a good thing, that it’s temporary, and that it will result in a higher level of functioning, then you can relax and get curious about it. Once you understand that you’re changing your relationship to all of your relationships, then you can just wait and let it all shake out.
Too bad we all can’t just run off to Italy, India, and Indonesia. But we can all eat, pray, love, and talk and laugh with our friends. I’m just glad that I’ve been able to go through the craziness in relative obscurity. If Oprah’s going to go through it, it will be in a spotlight while running an empire. Geez.

According to a NY Times article and a study on PubMed, women who “self-silence” during arguments significantly increase their risk for heart disease. Men don’t. They can suppress feelings and not suffer health effects at all.

Maybe it’s because men “fight and fly” when stressed. We women “tend and befriend.” We need to talk and bond. When we women feel cut off, we stress out.

Another, more general, explanation may be that closed systems fail to thrive. When living systems are cut off from the free flow of information, matter, and/or energy with their environments, they can’t get the proper feedback to regulate themselves.

The NY Times’ Well blog gives the four signs of bottling up from Dr. Dana Jack’s book Silencing the Self: Women and Depression:
1. I don’t speak my feelings in an intimate relationship when I know they will cause disagreement.
2. Caring means putting the other’s person’s needs in front of my own.
3. Often I look happy enough on the outside, but inwardly I feel angry and rebellious.
4. I often feel responsible for other people’s feelings.

Men simply don’t have these issues. Men are emotionally wired differently. They can’t mix information and information very well. They aren’t quite so sensitive and tuned in. Just read some of the literature on babies and mothers and their intense interactions. Brain development happens in both the mother and infant. Women teach babies how to soothe themselves, to self-soothe. The infant’s social brain develops in interaction with the mother via the more primitive emotional brain. We are all about making peace and putting their needs first.
What do you do when you realize that bottling your feelings up will make you sick but when also know that saying what you feel will make the whole thing worse?

Practice opening up in the face of threat. Note the anger and then get curious. Treat it like martial arts or like walking meditation. Take very good care of yourself first so that you can do this–It’s difficult to get on top of anything when you’re tired and hungry.

My husband and I will get into spats. And I wrote the book. Then, of course, he’ll remind me. It’s infuriating. But behind it all we know we know that we’re okay.

Bottled up feelings are not good. A closed system is always self-destructive. Always. The secret is to learn to open yourself in the face of threat. To see the whole process for what it is–a momentary insanity. If you can’t do it yourself, then do it with a very good therapist. When you get this down, life with men at home and at work is so much easier.