Do Good and Succeed

“The organizational psychologist Adam Grant argues that the key

You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

to his own success – and yours too – is tirelessly helping others.”  - Susan Dominus, “The Saintly Way to Succeed.” New York Times Magazine, Sunday, March 31, 2013.

Well, I have to write about this one, don’t I? I’ve known my share of saints, or pseudo-saints. People who engage in activity, sometimes frenetic, that I’m tempted to label pathological. Let’s be honest: I do label it pathological. In fact, if I were to have titled this article, I would have called it, “The potentially pathological origin of success.”

When I was in my 20s, I used to hang around with a guy who became capital-S successful. This guy claimed to feel only two emotions: happy; and uncomfortable. We can argue about whether “uncomfortable” is an emotion; but I did that and got nowhere, so let’s not bother. What I am getting at, Readers, is that I had an annoying tendency to pick at people’s motives for how they lived. My modus operandi was pinpointing the thing they didn’t want to think about or feel and proving that that motivated them to work too hard or shut down emotion or whatever thing I considered a fault. A pathology.

My idea, I guess, was that once we all faced the things we were avoiding, we would all – do what? Sit around together, I guess, being real. And unemployed. But it would be an authentic real unemployment. Not some pathetic attempt to cover up our inadequacies with public recognition or a paycheck to spend on clothes, movies, and other entertainment to mask our inner selves. Or with actual accomplishments. Heavens.

So. While I set about to prove that this guy needed to EXAMINE his feelings and UNDERSTAND his motivations, and generally face his demons, he set about – well, I can’t tell you exactly because that would be too revealing. Let’s just say that he set about implementing a vision he had for improving the world through access to knowledge, a vision that involved changing technology for us - with the intention of improving the world.  Meanwhile, I EXAMINED my feelings and UNDERSTOOD my motivations, and did – well, nothing extraordinary. Years later, he’s still working on his vision, much of it in place, trying, as he told me not so long ago, to make things a little better for people.

I’ve found that the really successful people I’ve met all have this kind of annoying claim that success really stems from helping improve the world in whatever way you can.

Adam Grant, the focus of this piece, lives by a philosophy of helping others whenever and however he can, and he usually can. He’s a professor of organizational psychology at Wharton who studies happiness and success at work, among other things. Many other things. So many other things. This guy, in fact, is so busy with helpful acts that most people would collapse under the weight of them all. Aside from being the youngest tenured prof at Wharton, he’s Google’s go-to guy, just for starters, and he helps everyone and anyone else who asks.

Another annoying point most capital-S successful people make is that by focusing on doing good work, pettier concerns (like success?) fade in importance. Ironically, as you let go of seeking success, it comes to you, apparently. Like a cat. Along with happiness. Also like a cat. Adam Grant is further proof. Like on steroids.

According to Adam Grant, helping others increases productivity and creativity, keys to organizational success. Sometimes more than traditional reward systems, doing good motivates even people in tedious jobs like telemarketing. He did a study of how to increase hand-washing in hospital personnel and found that if there was a sign over the sink saying “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases”, people washed their hands longer than if the sign simply read “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases.” So apparently we have this propensity for altruism built into us.

(Although maybe the outcome reflects our ability to use denial to our benefit. When only thinking of themselves catching diseases, people don’t wash their hands carefully because they assume they aren’t susceptible. It won’t happen to me.)

Research shows that people feel better about themselves and their lives when they give to others. Altruism makes the altruist feel good. This is the kind of truth that gets existentialist teens and early 20-somethings worked up about living virtuously: If even giving gives the giver something, then how can one ever live unselfishly?

Writing from the ripe old age of no longer 20-something, I ask, who the hell cares? Or, more insightfully – or at least less succinctly – why is it bad to feel good about something as Good as doing good? 

Readers, I now see the nobility in pursuing external work, even if it might be rooted in avoiding existential anxiety or fear or depression. At least it’s positive. At least it’s other-centered. At least it does some good for others, and some good for ourselves.

Yet, have I changed? After all, what I found most interesting about this article about Adam Grant was that Susan Dominus worried that motivation question, too. While he avoided getting into why he is the way he is by saying he’d simply inherited the “fix-it gene,” Dominus warmed the cockles of my heart by pressing on. She was into the potential pathology, too. So Grant has a book out, Give & Take or something, and he defines three kinds of people, because all experts have to make categories and lists: givers, matchers, and takers. The givers, the tireless givers like Grant, he says, are usually powered by dual motives – the desire to please, and its corollary, the fear of disappointing others.

I also learned this excellent term, “compensatory conviction,” which refers to the common situation where anxiety about one thing (the thing that evokes that “uncomfortable” emotion) motivates the pursuit of another. In Grant’s case, his pursuit is doing good.  Of his underlying anxiety Dominus writes, “Mortality, he said, was the one subject that gave him something like panic attacks.” It had been that way since he was a kid, and he had “lost days at a time to his anxiety.”

Panic? Anxiety? Fear of death? Read on, Macduff!

His solution was to notice that idleness allowed his anxiety to poke through, and to therefore eliminate idleness from his life. Doing good keeps him busy and makes him feel good the way altruism makes anyone feel good; but it also keeps him from feeling - uncomfortable. But at least he knows what his fear is, and even if, like my capital-S successful friend, he chooses not to navel-gaze, he is aware of his compensatory conviction. He just doesn’t have that need to confront it, that apparently I do. Susan Dominus does, too, so I am not alone. Maybe it’s a writer-thing.

So I say, hang onto your defense mechanisms, be powered by your existential fears, if they help you do your good in the world, Adam Grant, and everyone else.

Now, I’m thinking of sending him my book proposal and asking for some input. What do you think? He can’t say no.

Groundwork for Success. Or Just Groundwork.

Okay, this doesn't have much to do with success, but oh well. More on that to come - and that's a threat. Meanwhile, here are some of the reasons why I haven't been thinking all that much about success: Highlights of the last week, which overlapped with the end of school vacation:

Felt annoyed that unlike NYC, our city didn’t manage to plan for spring break to encompass both Passover and Easter, but only Easter, which left every lapsed reform Jew I know to have a seder on Good Friday or Saturday of Easter weekend, still technically Passover, but not the first or second night of it, as it should be.

Had my fourth round of venom immunotherapy. That's venom therapy for stinging insect allergy, to clarify - allergy shots, to the uninitiated. My arms didn’t go insane this time. Insane in this case means swelling up an entire sleeve size and itching so much I was afraid I’d turn into that woman who had a chronic itch in her head that was so constant that she actually scratched a hole into her skull. Yes, that is right. So, yes, they – the arms - did go insane the time before last, but last time, they only swelled up a bit, and they only itched for two and a half days, and with Allegra and Benadryl at night, and ice packs during the day, I was able to keep my arms.

Was gripped with awareness of impending loss of elder daughter, who will be going to college in three years (never too early to start mourning) and therefore insisted on a family trip to the smallest, sorriest butterfly house you can imagine, full of rotting fruit and grownups who disobeyed the only rule there: (Please) do not pick up the butterflies. There were more people than butterflies in this house, and all the grown up people were stumbling around with their fingers out, scooping up butterflies from rotting fruit. Ah, family outings.

Meditated several times without changing in any essential way.  

How to Be a Successful Woman: Be Human

Do you want to know the weirdest thing about Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In, Readers? I relate to it.
That is weird. Why would I relate to a book about climbing the corporate ladder? Excuse me, climbing the corporate jungle gym, as Sandberg prefers to describe it. I’ve done everything I could to arrange my life so that I would have blocks of free time in the afternoon. This plan has led me as far away from corporate life as anything could have. I worked in an office right after college, and I discovered that it depressed the hell out of me. After ruining a perfectly swell linen skirt with grass stains on my lunch hour, I had to face it: I am not your corporate type. Whatever that is.

On the other hand, why wouldn’t I relate to a book about how a seemingly competent woman struggles with self-doubt and has to double think and analyze every step she makes? If I’d known I could do that on a stupendously large salary, I might have stayed on the professional path.

I’ve been kind of appalled by the responses to  Lean In. It’s too one-percenty. It’s about “clawing your way to the top.” It doesn’t consider the real problems of most working women, or of most women, or of other particular groups of women.  She was “lucky “ to have Important Male Mentors.

So what? Does every woman have to speak for every other woman to speak truth? To make a difference? Isn’t Sheryl Sandberg’s experience as valid as mine? Or yours? Or your cleaning lady’s? And frankly, it’s the one percent who can make some immediate policy changes just by being who they are at the top. Is this bad?

I have to admit that I was one of the people who read Sandberg’s Barnard commencement address a couple of years ago, and her profile in the New Yorker last year, with skepticism. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to find the flaw. If she’s a great business woman, then she must be a sucky mom, right? Or be divorced.  Or hate other women. When I really paid attention to her, however, I had to admire her words and recognize my own thwarted ambition.

A lot of people complain that she’s blaming the victim, telling women they have to fix themselves internally before structural change will occur. To them I say, have you actually read the book? She’s talking about the need for internal and external changes. Leaning in means not prematurely cutting yourself off from seeking promotions or taking on extra leadership roles just because you might want flexibility to have a personal life and children. She says it’s better to lean in to your goals and keep going towards them, and work out the details later; don’t cut off possibilities for yourself because you’re afraid you’ll have too much work or responsibility. When women do that – and they definitely do – then they often find themselves in lesser work that’s unfulfilling, and ultimately they may drop out of the workforce.

Sound familiar, anyone?

Her section on mentors is a little harsh. In short, she says there’s been too much emphasis on women finding mentors, as if a mentor is the secret key to success. She says, “We need to stop telling them [women], ‘Get a mentor and you will excel. Instead, we need to tell them, ‘Excel and you will get a mentor.’”

Speaking as one of many women who has lamented her lack of mentors and looked at finding one as the deus ex machina necessary to success, let me say, “Ouch!” However, after rubbing that bruise, let me also say that her words echo the phrase, attributed to Buddha and familiar to habitués of yoga studios and meditation retreats everywhere, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Honestly, she’s just saying you’ve got to work hard. No one is going to get you there until you’ve proven yourself.

So, here’s what I like about this book:

1.     She’s honest about her self-doubts. Lean in also means learning to work with the negative, doubting voice in the brain and acting confident, even if you don’t feel it; it means, to quote a friend’s favorite phrase, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

2.     She’s honest about her intellect, her luck, and all the help she’s received from men, from women, from bosses, and from assistants.

3.     She’s honest about her mistakes, like the time she failed to see the raised hand of one of the few women in the room and called on man after man. At a talk on gender equality.

4.     She says she’s a feminist. If you think this is minor, just check with any female under forty and find out if she wants to identify herself as feminist, and then look at the other prominent women in business and notice how they distance themselves from the term, and from the “issues” that are “women’s.” Why do you think we haven’t had that final burst of change that would institute meaningful family leave policies, equal pay, paid sick leave, and flexible scheduling across all industries, businesses, jobs? Because women have had to distance themselves from these issues to get ahead. And once they do, like Melissa Mayer, Chief Yahoo at Yahoo, they pretend being a woman makes no difference in the world.

The feminism I grew up with taught that once women made it to the top, they were going to change things for everyone. Well, the movement stalled, didn’t it? As Sandberg says, women who made it found themselves adhering to a stereotype about what men are like, and men often have to do that, too. The point was supposed to be that when women gained equality, then men would have more options, too. Only it didn’t work out that way, because women at the top forgot that last step: speaking out to make change. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t. She says, “I believe that this will create a better world, one where half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by men.”

5.     She gives practical advice. She talks about how to negotiate salary. She talks about how to navigate the mentor-mentee relationship. She talks about how to handle negative criticism. In every instance she talks about challenges she overcame.

Yes, Sheryl Sandberg is different from most of us. She’s a corporate superstar, very bright, extremely ambitious, and powerful. She’s not a professional automaton, however; she’s a very human professional. By showing her humanness, she’s also in the vanguard of a changing working paradigm. This is what we were aiming for, back in the 1980s. She made it up there and now she wants to encourage more women and men to join her, and to be human about it. Maybe you don’t want to be part of her working world. Maybe your ambitions are totally different from hers. But I honestly believe that it’s people like Sheryl Sandberg who will help shape work life policy in a more equitable, family-friendly direction, and that will in turn make life better for all of us. She’s speaking her truth, and encouraging others to speak theirs. I say, applaud her for bringing the focus back to what a lot of us would like to think is old news: We’d like to think those feminist battles have been won, because they were exhausting. The battles were not won, however, and the movement, until very recently, had been beaten back into the tributaries of academia and radicalism. With Sheryl Sandberg, the women's movement, feminism, whatever you want to call the effort to achieve equality between women and men has moved back into the mainstream. Let’s lean in on that!

Climate, Economics, and Plywood

I was all set to write about Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, but then, OMG, Readers, did you read the New York Times Sunday? The Sunday Review? The Gigantic Lettered article, “Sundown in America” by David Stockman, to be specific? Because I did. And I haven’t emerged from underneath my dining room table yet. I haven’t yet emerged from underneath the slab of plywood perched atop the IKEA table that is my dining room table, to be specific. A slab of plywood, by the way, is perfect seating for twelve. Even fourteen, if your chairs are skinny. So most of the time, it is my desk cum repository of things that need to be returned to mail order catalogs cum missing scissors and books I am reviewing and so on. At Christmastime, though - and I mean Yuletide as only a secular Jew can mean it - the plywood lives up to its full potential. Sometimes at New Year’s Eve, too. But that’s on top of the table. Plywood. And this is April. And I am underneath. Because. Jaysus. Basically, according to President Reagan’s former budget director, the stock market is going to pop, the economy is going to drop, and we really are going to be in Mad Max land, before I even get to trade in my plywood and IKEA contraption for a grown up dining room table.

Did you see that movie “Contagion” about society collapsing in the face of a pandemic caused by Gwyneth Paltrow shaking hands with a famous chef somewhere in China? I did. I probably shouldn’t have, considering that I attempt to live my life without pharmaceutical aids. David Stockman’s article reminded me of that.

I am waiting for Paul Krugman to make me feel better. So you can see where this is going. The dog and I are going to cozy up under here. He doesn’t mind sharing his bed. Because Paul Krugman, while I love him, doesn’t offer much hope. He’s always saying, “Here’s what’s wrong with what Congress is doing, but it’ll be okay if Congress just changes things a wee bit.” Only then Congress doesn’t change, but still there’s the tantalizing possibility of change. However, compared to the obliterating vision of that article in the Sunday Review, Krugman’s just a tiny keylight of reason. Barely visible.

The husband, meanwhile, read the first two paragraphs of David Stockman’s piece and said, “He’s a conservative. I don’t need to bother.” Which is probably a healthier attitude than mine. Less open-minded, let’s be honest, but less likely to cause unrest.

That “Sundown in America” piece isn’t the only thing that’s been bothering me. Last week, returning from my allergy shot, I listened to some éminence grise from Yale about global warming, and when I got out of my gas guzzling vehicle, I couldn’t help but wonder what the point would be of continuing to examine success, when the planet is going to fail. This professor from ole Elay told the nice public radio host that only 16 percent of Americans are concerned and ready and willing to help avert climate disaster. 25 percent of us are concerned, but think the problem is sometime in the future no rush no bother we’ll figure it out eventually. Meanwhile, according to the professor, all reputable scientists agree that global warming is happening, and that while in the past, warming periods have happened spontaneously, this one is a result of human behavior. So why do we waste time arguing about the science, when the science has been proven?

Well, because 8 percent of us are climate change deniers. A very loud 8 percent. A politically active 8 percent, many of whom have ties to the petroleum industry. A small, vocal minority hijaking politics while the majority of us write blogs. Sounds distressingly like every other issue important to me. Guns. Reproductive rights. Equal pay. Marriage equality.

Splurggggghhhhhh. (Noise of despair discouragement face planted in dog’s bed.)

Then I thought, well, okay. I will say my piece. I want to try to make the planet healthy. I want to make the economy better. I am even entertaining strange thoughts about getting politically involved. Which  would really be a disaster, since I am decidedly lacking in politesse, or tact, or strategic thinking skills.

And then I thought, well, okay. I’m in the 16 percent, and I will do what I can. But also, in the meantime, I should continue my inquiries into success, which is really an examination of how I think it best to live. After all, what are we going to do? Totally give up? Meals still need to be made. The children still need teaching. They are our only hope. This is not so much fiddling while Rome burns as it is being part of the band playing while the Titanic sinks. A little bit futile, a little bit foolish, a little bit noble. Making art of life, knowing it’s going to end, but still hoping to see that rescue ship pulling up alongside at the last moment.

So if I’ve been silent on the blog for a while, that’s why, in part. Also, I’ve been reading Sheryl Sandberg’s book. And I will comment on that next. Promise. 

10 Tips for Creating a Can-Do Child

In response to my previous post about the best advice Martha Stewart ever received, a friend emailed me, "So how do we teach our children what Martha Stewart's dad taught her?" 

Now, Readers, I have absorbed a lot of material about success over the last year – year or two (can you believe) – and it’s changed me in ways I can no longer parse into categories. Things have blended together in my head into a big smoothie of success. This analogy is my acknowledgment that I may repeat something someone else, someone much Bigger, someone much more Expert, someone much more Famous (which is not at all hard) than myself may have said, and if so, I apologize. In advance. In advance of any advance I may eventually receive for work not yet published, in fact.

Now that’s out of the way. 

My amalgamated advice is as follows:

• Believe your children are capable of great things – however they may grow up to define them.
• Tell your children you believe this of them.
• Praise and encourage all effort, persistence, and progress your children make.
• Encourage them to make and meet goals.
• Allow them time to be autonomous when possible and to find the creativity in all disciplines.
• Model, model, model for them your own effort, persistence, and progress toward goals you set yourself.
• Model your creative engagement. As one reader commented, show them that it’s worthwhile to devote full attention to whatever you do, and not to hold back in hope of something better coming along.
• Celebrate achievement – but focus on achievement being the result of effort. And persistence and progress.
• Model resilience after setbacks.
• Hope for the best!

Now, this list may skew a little vague and touchy-feely, and it is. Oh, it is. But I think and hope it works. I guess we’ll find out eventually. 

All of this advice begs a deeper question that came up from several emails and comments from my treasured readers: How much control do we actually have over our children's development? You see, Readers, I've noticed a tendency, a propensity, shall we say, among people to change their views on how much influence parents actually have over their children, depending on how old their children are, and how much of a mess their grown up childrens' lives appear to be. In short, Readers, I’ve noticed that the older children get, the less their parents say they have any effect on or control over their choices and personalities. 

Buddhists, Kahlil Gibran (“your children are not your children, they are blah, blah, blah"), and anyone who’s a grandparent will tell you: NONE.

And Madeleine Levine, my current book mama, says that once your kid gets to 11, 12, 13 and so on, it’s pretty much up to their friends to shape them. Krikey. This is somewhat distressing to the parent who spends a good part of the night obsessing over what courses her child should take in high school. 

So what good is my list?

One way of looking at this problem is that our parental understanding develops as our children develop from infancy to adulthood. We move from the SENSATION of having no control, except (and this is big) over their physical selves, due to our relative gigantism compared to them, to FEAR that we have no control over them, to HOPE that we aren’t responsible for them. That is, unless they turned out fabululious, and then we take CREDIT.

Another way of looking at this trajectory of responsibility divestment is that by the time our kids are adults, possibly with children of their own, they’ve defined themselves by making many mistakes and having many triumphs, and we are developing dementia. Because we humans tend to forget things were ever different from how they seem in the present, we feel we have no influence on them anymore and that, therefore, we never did. Neither of which is true, as anyone who has spent any time in psychotherapy will know. We did influence them, and we still do. Their eyes are always on us. But the enormity of responsibility for how a person grows up to interact in the world is much easier, perhaps, to disavow than to accept. Which is fine, Grandparents, if you must. You may wash your hands of our stupid choices. But then you aren’t allowed to take credit for our successes, either. And that extends to the offspring of those children you feel you had no ability to influence. And our eyes are on you.

For some reason, I am recalling that when the 9^th grader was two, she became obsessed with dressing herself. And undressing herself. And re-dressing herself. Her room was a shambles, with everything always spilling out of the dresser and onto the floor. Needless to say, her outfits were not exactly matchy-matchy Garanimals. That didn’t bother me, actually. I’m not into matchy-matchy. But I didn’t want her wearing bathing suits or party dresses to school. Her very wise Toddler Time teacher suggested I designate one or two drawers of her dresser into which I was to place several outfits appropriate to the season, which she was allowed to wear in any combination she chose. I could rotate these outfits as needed. So, freedom to choose, but limited freedom. Parameters. It worked like a charm. Stripes and florals, skirts over pants, whatever. I didn’t care. In fact, I liked it. Eliminated some of the mess and all of the power struggle.

What does this have to do with the reader who responded that he felt it would have been useless to tell his daughter she could do anything she wanted to, because he knew it was untrue, and she would have known he knew it, too? He went on to explain that there were too many random factors at work in determining what a person could be; ultimately, he said, citing Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, success depends about 30 percent on ability and 70 percent on chance. This is a pretty bleak outlook, in some ways. It’s tempting to say, why bother trying, then? And yet, because I am not yet old, I persist.

I guess the connection is this: that we all operate within constraints, and yet those constraints can be the mold for our creativity and for our sense of autonomy. None of us can control the external world, but we can still learn agency from within that constraint. The point is not to say that the world is going to throw you curveballs, so you’d better spend your life ducking. The point is not to say that you must wear a red shirt with your blue pants, or else. The point is to say that given the need to wear clothes and your parent’s need for some kind of order, your choice is limited by circumstances, but within those limitations you can create your own outfit. Similarly, teaching your child that she can do whatever she wants allows her to stretch. The world may – will – prevent or hinder or complicate circumstances, but the child who believes she can do, will do what she can with what life hands her. Goals may need altering, but the can-do child will accommodate that. That’s better than not trying stuff in anticipation of chance working against her. Besides, hard work and creativity may alter goals and circumstances in positive ways.

Sonnets. Villanelles. Sestinas. Sometimes restrictions are liberating. Look at it this way. By frustrating your young child’s desire to do whatever he wants (wear a bathing suit to school in winter in Albany, NY, say) yet giving him some choices, you teach many lessons. One is that the world will not always bend to his wishes. Would you not say that is a useful lesson? Another is that he still has some control over himself and his person. Is that not also useful? And a final one is that there is satisfaction from working within constraints. Again, useful. It teaches him he can do anything he wants to do. In this case, he wants to pick his own outfit. It also teaches him to modify his goal to accommodate his limits - to revise what he wants to do, if necessity forces him to. And that, I think, is the way of the world. Success is determined by how fully you express yourself within your limits. 

Selected Bibliography

Dweck, Mindset

Faber and Mazlich, How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen & Listen So They Will Talk

Ginott, Between Parent and Child

Halvorsen, Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success

Mogel, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee

Pink, Drive

Whose Screw is Loose?

Is it mine?

Last week I had this piece in the New York Times Motherlode blog. It ran in tandem with KJ Dell’Antonia’s response to it. In case you missed them, they are about how my daughter's course selections for next year triggered my anxiety about how much to push for prestigious colleges and KJ's lack of anxiety about it and her heartwarming belief in passion and hard work. Together, they are still generating comments, which is good, since there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I am told. If only I could publish my blog in the NYTimes everyday, I’d get a lot more comments on it. Of course, I would have to grow a thicker skin. Maybe just let my tendency to eczema fulfill itself…

Because some of those comments – hoo boy. Let me tell you. I’ve tried not to read too many of them, because I can only stand so much. Plus, I am suggestible, so it’s best not to pay too close attention or I might start (really) believing them.

Interestingly, every comment I saw suggested or downright declared that I had better seek help for my mental illness. Which, you know, rankles, since I’ve been doing that for years. And none of those professionals has ever told me I’m crazy. Except one, but she was joking. I am pretty sure.

Meanwhile, every comment the husband read was about how the commenter hadn't been a bit concerned one way or another about college, yet his/her child had grown up to be an exemplary human with absolutely no stress or intervention of a parental nature.

Yet my friends told me they thought the comments were overall kind of in agreement with me.

Go figure. We find what we are looking for, I guess.

*

I thought, Readers, you might be interested in a few background details about the posts.

First of all, Gym Mom immediately identified herself. Not to worry. We are still on excellent terms. In fact, she emailed that she was “excited and proud" to make her debut in the Times. So all is well there. And you can see she has an excellent sense of humor.

I, too, have retained mine, despite glancing at one too many exhortations to let my kid eat lunch already. Far too many commenters use as evidence of my mental illness and my terrible mothering the “fact” that I am “making” the 9th grader skip lunch. Hello? She took lunch this year, her first year in high school, because I/we insisted. She has put her foot down about next year. None of her friends take lunch, so why should I force her to if she doesn’t want to? Eventually, one HT from Ohio wrote in explaining why she avoided lunch all through high school: "my high school cafeteria was like something out of The Lord of The Flies, and anyone who could avoid it, did." Of her cafeteria experience, the 9^th grader says, simply, that it's full of “drama.” 

Furthermore, since we live in a town that has its school schedule organized for the benefit of the all-important athletic teams that “need” to practice in the afternoons, high school starts at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 2:07 p.m., and not at the time that would most fit with adolescent development and support academic achievement. (Do NOT get me started on that.) The point is, the 9^th grader can have lunch slash snack when she gets home.

By the way, many of these kids take that extra period and use it for art or music, because they’re only allotted time in a regular schedule for one or the other, and this way they can take both. So it’s not as if it’s only the Type A tiger cubs who drop lunch.

Second of all, almost better than having something published was emailing with KJ Dell’Antonia about publishing it. After she accepted my initial essay, I decided I wanted to rewrite it, making it less flippant and self-deprecating, which doesn’t play well when Motherlode readers are ready with their comment-trigger-fingers. Subtlety doesn’t really work, as I’ve found on both occasions I’ve published in Motherlode. In fact, half the readers don’t even finish the piece, which I could tell this time, because they criticize me for being too invested, when I concluded by letting the 9^th grader make her own decision about her extra class. Yes, that little factoid eluded most readers. KJ told me she hashed out her response with her husband, who comes down a little closer to my side than she, and then it was a go. Still, she worried that she was “letting me out to hang,” because my piece was going to offend people who didn’t have ways or means of getting their children into top colleges. I could see that my piece hinged on my emotional conflict, while hers was a reasoned, logical argument, and therefore I would be blasted by people who didn't read the subtext, but I told her it was fine. I am all about conflict. So I put my head on the block and wham!

I am still here.

TMI? The Tao of Worry

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Readers, I am obsessing about my left breast. I feel nothing different in it. It doesn’t hurt. And yet, in the past, I have had pain there, and a few months ago, I had a pulled muscle basically right underneath it. I spent so much time poking around the area that I bruised myself. Right now, nothing is going on. Yet I feel like I feel something, in the sense of sensing something. I feel like I sense something there. A thickness. A weirdness. Which reminds me of two things. One is this story about the sister of a friend who went to the doctor complaining that her breast hurt, “Right here.” She said, jabbing at the spot. The doctor said, “have you been doing that a lot?” “What this?” She said, jabbing at the spot. “Yes.” Said the doctor. “Yes,” she said. The doctor said, “Stop doing that.”

The other thing I'm reminded of is the homeopath I visited for a while in hopes of curing my chronic exercise-induced urticaria. (That’s hives, for the uninitiated.) I was also having problems breast feeding my kid with my LEFT breast. After taking my medical history she pointed out that  I have issues on the left side of my body. Left ovary removed. Mastitis in left breast. Then she gave me a little bottle of something. It didn’t cure the hives. Years later, acupuncture alleviated them - and also led to the discovery of the lipoma (fatty benign tumor) on my left shoulderblade. Left, left left.

So the explanation of why I’m obsessing about my left breast may be that because I have a history of things going wrong on the left side of my body, when I start to worry about things going wrong, I tend towards the left (sinistra in Latin - root of sinister, if you think about it) side.

Good thing I’m going for my annual mammogram on Monday. After which, the husband asked, will I be able to relax about my boob for a while? Yeah, probably for about a month. Realistically.

Of course, maybe the mammogram will reveal something wrong, and then I’ll have the very shallow pleasure of knowing that I was right. Except that I’ve spent a portion of pretty much every day worrying about cancer, so eventually, I may be right, no matter what. Lately, I’ve added cardiac concerns to my worry list. Not that I have heart trouble – at least not that anyone’s discovered. That's precisely the point. No one has discovered any problem. Yet anything could develop at any moment. And it’s the stuff you don’t know about that will get you. It happened to a couple of friends of mine. Of course they are still alive and healthy. But they are living with the knowledge that there’s something wrong with their hearts.

The real question, though, is why the worry in the first place?

Aren’t we all living with the knowledge that there could be something wrong? Indeed, isn’t there something wrong with all of our hearts? Hello? They are eventually going to stop working. We are going to die. That is what is wrong. That is why the worry.

Here are two pieces of advice I've been given by Professionals for dealing with worry:

1. Set aside a certain amount of time every day to worry, and then don't worry until that time.
2.  Or, worry once and worry well. 

This advice doesn't work for me. I cannot "worry once," and the time of day I set aside to worry is usually 3-5 a.m., which is kind of a drag.

I’ve concluded that I need to think about death. “Come to terms with death,” as some might say. Perhaps all you Readers  have come to terms with death and live worry-free lives of great empowerment and fulfillment. If so, please share.

I find it interesting that my worries increase as things get better in other areas of my life. For example, I have paying work. I recently got a raise. I’ve had some success with my blog. My kids and husband are healthy, and I have friends. So the question is, do I have some kind of homeostatic mechanism at work trying to keep me at emotional equilibrium? You know, don’t fly too high, don’t dip too low?  Is it a self-protective system to remind me to balance my life and pay attention to my physical health so I can continue? Is some kind of tao of worry at work? 

Or is it a pathological set up, a self-sabotage that keeps me from fully expressing whatever it is in me to express? The time I spend in useless, pointless worry about illnesses I don’t have, is time spent not doing things that are useful. And it's not as if it's protective. 

How to remove the anxiety? Besides medication, I mean. Perhaps, Readers, you are thinking that I am an excellent candidate for some kind of pill. Perhaps you are right. But I prefer not to take pills. I prefer  to manage my anxiety in other ways. This attitude, I understand, is one symptom of the anxious person. Or one symptom of one kind of anxious person. My kind.

But I digress. The idea is to Come to Terms with Death. Is that even possible? Have you, Readers? I know that Tibetan Buddhist monks sometimes meditate in graveyards and charnel houses to accustom themselves to the idea. And there is a nifty mantra – sutra – on impermanence:

I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape growing old.
I am of the nature to become ill. I cannot escape illness.
I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death. 

It’s just not that appealing to meditate on these ideas. Yet, remembering that these processes – illness, old age (if you’re lucky), and death – are part of everyone’s parcel does relieve some anxiety. If you’re like me, you get into the mindset that everything in life is supposed to have a certain baseline: things are good, people are healthy, jobs are there, work is productive. So anytime something dips below baseline, there's a sense that there’s something wrong, abnormal, and let’s face it, kind of shameful. So it’s good to remember that there isn’t really a baseline, and that there’s nothing shameful about experiencing these natural processes of life.

All this blather reminds me of a high school weekend party I attended. I had a “deep” teenaged conversation about death with a person I won't name, because he was somebody’s boyfriend. Also because this is a blog, and I don't name names. But I apparently can't resist bragging about this boy obliquely. One of us was angsting about it (death) –guess who? The other one, he said he didn’t worry about death, because when he was dead, he wouldn’t care. And I found that so comforting. I had this moment of total release. It was so simple. Just letting go of the problem. It would come, life would be over, but it wouldn’t matter. Then he kissed me. 

Linking sex and death. Gee, has that ever happened before? Is there any literature on that? Well, anyway, it's a much more pleasant connection than I started with. Although mentioning sex does remind me of my left breast....