Featuring My Voice on The Huffington Post

Last Friday night, The Huffington Post informed me that they’d published a blog entry – mine. This is so cool, so exciting, such a breakthrough, you say! Wow! You say. Unless you’re a journalist, perhaps. (See below.)

Okay, it felt great. For a while. From the time the blog editor accepted my post and told me they’d edit it and let me know when it would be published, until the time I clicked on the link the editor’s assistant sent me, it felt great. Then I noticed that the post had actually already been up on the site for two days, which I hadn’t known. Since it was what I’d sent them, word for word, I assume they decided it didn’t need editing, and just posted it. It was a blip. An instant. Over before they remembered to inform me.

Now Readers, I am grateful – don’t get me wrong. The Huffington Post has a lot of readers. However, since I didn’t realize my post was up, I didn’t advertise it until it was no longer front of the queue. If that’s even how The Huff Post operates. Nor did they tweet it, as far as I can tell. So it was a blip on the front page of HuffPostWomen, and now it’s searchable. Which means it’s there but I never saw it there There. Still, it’s there There, and you can click on my name and see my bio and my headshot, which the husband took on his iPhone outside the piano store where the kids were having their recital. We were going to use the real camera, but someone forgot to put the battery in it. (Me.)

Don’t worry, fame hasn’t changed me a bit. Maybe that’s because I didn’t exactly achieve fame. Or maybe it’s because the group of writers I see for the occasional lunch consists mostly of journalists. I am not a journalist. If you ever need a head resizing for swelled head syndrome – you know, when you start to think you’re really hot and you’re going somewhere and your capella starts to swella – I have the cure. Just tell a group of journalists you’re publishing a blog post on The Huffington Post. Their reaction will return your head to its usual size - pinhead.

See, journalists are professionals who expect this thing called “payment” for their writing when it appears on a large media outlet. That bozos like me are willing to slave for hours crafting work as fine as they are able for free is pretty much journalists’ idea of one of the major things wrong with the field today. And I agree. So, yeah, I told a group of journalists, who were just not that impressed. And I don’t blame them a bit. On the other hand, I am a fiction writer who has turned to non-fiction and blogging. I’ve come to expect near zero monetary payment for my efforts; but recognition is payment, too. It doesn’t put money in the college savings account, but it feeds the soul.  Dale Carnegie said so.

And it sounds good to you, right, Readers?  On the continuum of total failure to hugest imaginable success, publication on the Huff Post falls  - where? I am not sure. I mean, it’s a media machine. They publish lots of blog posts. On the other hand, it’s a huge site with tons of readers. It’s just kind of hard to gage. It is definitely on the continuum. Of that I am sure.

So how did this happen? Well, as I mention in the actual post, a high school classmate (thank you, Amy!) sent me the video of Arianna Huffington giving the commencement address at Smith on Redefining Success. So I watched it and found it very moving and exciting. Afterwards, I sent her an email thanking her for her speech, and for bringing this conversation about success and women and making a new women’s movement into the mainstream. I didn’t labor over the email, or send a big request – or any request, actually. I just wrote a thank you. Of course I mentioned my blog. There’s a link to it in my email signature, so that was available to her. And then a couple of days later, a response from Arianna H arrived in my inbox, with an invitation to “feature my voice” on the HP.

To sum up: I took a chance and I wrote. She replied. I took another chance and wrote a post. My post went up. I can send in others. That is cool, I have to say.

Arianna Huffington Read My Mind

I’m pretty sure Arianna Huffington read my mind. That’s right. She is that powerful. You see, Arianna Huffington gave the commencement speech at Smith College this year - I owe a big thank you to a high school friend who sent me the YouTube video - and guess what her topic was, Readers? That’s right, redefining success. She said to the graduating class, “I want to ask you, instead [of climbing the ladder of success], to redefine success.”

Now, naturally, my immediate reaction was a small freak out. That’s MY topic, and now SHE’S stealing it. But I am a mature person with a growth mindset, not a fixed one, and a positive attitude, not a zero sum one, so I quickly realized that actually it was great news. Arianna Huffington is talking about redefining success and SO AM I. My blog is part of the gestalt. Or maybe I helped create the gestalt and SHE picked up on it. Whatever. There’s room for both of us. But most of all, REDEFINING SUCCESS IS IMPORTANT.

Her introduction is a call for change. “But what I urge you to do is not just take your place at the top of the world, but to change the world.” She continues,  “What I urge you to do is to lead the third women’s revolution.”  (She says “movement” in her actual speech, but “revolution” in the transcript.) Why? “Basically, success as we’ve defined it is no longer sustainable. It’s not sustainable for human beings; it’s not sustainable for the planet.”

Readers, I plotzed.  In Yiddish that means, literally, exploded, but I think you know what I mean. I was excited. Thrilled. I peed in my pants with thrillment, and not just because my bladder is less dependable than it once was.

In spring 2012, I gave a talk at a women’s group on my personal history with feminism. In my research for that talk, I read several books, one of them Backlash by Susan Faludi. Have you read it? I recommend it. At the time it came out (1991), I recall that I ignored it, saying, I know all about the backlash against women. I live it.

But I learned from reading the book that despite being a feminist, a lot of my understanding of feminism was shaped by people who were invested in dishonoring, shortchanging, and discrediting it – like the founders of the Heritage Foundation, whose goal (or one of them) was to turn back the clock on women’s rights to 1954. Inadvertently, I allowed myself to be influenced by their disparagement and to distance myself from “those feminists” – you know, the “angry lesbians,” the “humorless wimmin,” the child haters, the motherhood haters. I, and by me I mean me and you, Readers, began to attribute a lot of negative stuff to feminism that wasn’t essential to it. Which is part of how the movement got pushed out of the mainstream, corporatized as “girl power”, and how we ended up with a lot of people who refuse to call themselves feminists, even though they believe in women’s equality. In a nutshell. Newsflash: The media is powerful. My conclusion: The push for women’s equality had stalled. The conversation needed to return to the mainstream.

So, voilá. Enter the mainstream.

What of Arianna’s theory itself? So how does she redefine success? Well, in addition to  “our society’s notion of success is … money and power,” she adds a “third metric.” This metric is made up of the following elements: well being; wisdom; wonder; and giving back. “Metric” is a funny term to apply to sometimes ineffable, always intangible qualities like those. A metric is a measurement; but it has a poetic meaning, too – poetic meter.  Well, it’s unusual, but I’ll take it. The point is balance. She describes her third metric as the third leg of a footstool. And it’s true, as she says, that a two-legged stool is unstable. A culture resting on power and money is, too. Without the balance of those other qualities, the search for stability through money and power runs unchecked. Conversely, and I know this from experience, if you have some sense of well-being, you are less likely to be in a panicky state of grasping after money or power. When you add that poetic quality to life, you can put them in proportion and use them as tools, not as ends in themselves.

What originally impelled me on my search for a meaningful definition of success was the need to find a way to “count” the other areas of my life, outside of work, in which I had been investing time, effort, and creativity, so that I could feel successful. Just a couple of days ago, in my monthly conference call with a couple of women, we talked about how important it is not to discount other areas of your life outside of work just because you don’t find success in your work. In other words, using work as the only valid yardstick to measure yourself is a bad idea. And I found that it was much easier to feel successful if I had a basic feeling of well-being, as well as a feeling of moving towards something and moving with a purpose.

As for money and power, I can attest to their importance in a general sense. So Arianna Huffington’s three metrics are money, power, and this third metric that deals with the ineffables of well-being. I wouldn’t call this a complete redefinition of success. Money and power are old standby earmarks of it. But adding that third metric is a huge step. And money and power are important, too. Now before you bite my head off for being too materialistic, let me just point out that we can talk capital-M and capital- P money and power, in which case we’re talking about bigwigs; or we can talk about lowercase m and p money and power, applicable to littlewigs like me. Take power. Everyone needs to feel like an agent in his or her own life.  Everyone needs to feel he or she has some say, some choices, some ability to effect change. That’s power. It’s not Power, but it’s power. Now take money. Everyone needs enough. What is enough? That’s a topic for another day. But I personally felt a lot better and more successful when I found a way to earn some. It gives a person independence - again, that sense of agency. And of course it’s related to power, too, to the sense of agency. Things interconnect.

Overall, if you look at the bigger picture here, you have a media mega-mogul – female – talking about balance in life; and you have a corporate superstar –female – identifying as feminist and talking about changing policy at the top; you have an intellectual with government experience – female – addressing the difficulties of “having it all”; and you have a book about family life, written by a man, and focused on developing happiness and well-being and success OUTSIDE of work. A man focusing on his family’s well being. Forget whether you totally agree with Sheryl S. Forget whether you totally agree with Arianna H. or Anne Marie Slaughter. Forget whether Marissa M. is an Aspie. Just look at the discourse. There are prominent people – women and men – talking about creating a better, more fulfilling, and more meaningful life. That is good. Period. The conversation is happening. And I am part of that conversation.

This post appears in slightly altered form on The Huffington Post.

Aerosolized Particles of Success

Why does the dog keep nudging me and pressing up against me with his wet self? Does he smell

Maybe it's 'cuz he wants that flower barrette out of his hair.

cancer on me or something? Is he sensing stress? Or does he just want affection especially now, when he’s wet and stinky?

Don’t answer.

I’m operating on too little sleep, and what little I had was interrupted by the husband’s pager. I swear I got dizzy backing the car out of a parking spot today. I looked behind me to make sure there were no children or dogs in my path, and when I turned to face forward, the world went upsie daisie like it does when you’re on a loop de loop rollercoaster. It was time for a nap.

In other news, I thought that in lieu of a coherent blog post I’d offer a brief collection of stuff, possibly factual, possibly misstated, that could be construed as relating to success.

For example, did you know that when you flush the toilet aerosolized particles of fecal matter can fling themselves out of it and land up to six feet away? On your toothbrush? So close the lid.

How about this: multitasking is a myth. You probably already know that, right? Unless you’re me, you haven’t been beating yourself about the ears over your incredible inability to do two things at once the way Jamie Lee Curtis does* as the mom in the remake of Freaky Friday with Lindsay Lohan - a movie I thoroughly enjoyed. Because if common sense hasn’t proven to you that you can’t do two complex things at once, research now has. What we think is multitasking is actually just switching back and forth between activities fast. Each time it takes a little extra energy to re-establish where you left off before. That’s inefficient, and tiring.

And finally, on failure, this: A producer friend of Nora Ephron talked about how she and Nora dealt with setbacks and movies that bombed. They reminded each other that they were lucky to have had a chance at bat, and that it was a privilege to have another. They recognized that, although they were disappointed, they were lucky to be able to pursue their goals, while so many others struggle to fulfill much more basic needs. Always look for ways to be grateful; gratitude puts life into perspective.

And now, as Samuel Pepys so often said, “And so to bed.” Although, to be completely honest with you, Readers, I have to admit that it's, "And so to HBO Go for an episode of 'Spiral'."

*That’s ironic, by the way; Jamie Lee Curtis as the mom is a total fail at multitasking.

Secret of Successful Families: The Family Meeting

Bruce Feiler sums up his research on happy families by offering a “nonlist list of things that happy families do.” This list consists of the following three nonrule rules:

1. Adapt all the time. 
2. Talk. A lot. 
3. Go Out and Play.

Feiler offers multitudes of ways to follow each of these nonrules. One of them is the family meeting. The family meeting appeals to me for several reasons.

• First of all, there is so much in a minute. You don’t even have to have relatives who are psychoanalysts to know this. Nor do you have to be a mindfulness meditation expert. Just think about how (surprisingly) much it hurts if a driver passes you and gives you the finger, for example. And that’s someone you don’t even know, and a situation that’s not even personal. Now think about all the casual remarks that pass among family members rushing around to ballet and soccer and work that affect you. A stray snap on a day when you have a short fuse can have its own sort of a butterfly effect on your mood and life. Yes, it’s true, I do have relatives who are psychoanalysts, AND I practice mindfulness meditation, so I may be a bit more invested in what’s going on under the surface in a moment than most. In fact, this may be the secret to my failure more than anything else – all that time parsing and analyzing can get you into a thoroughly tangled state of conflict and make it hard to move forward with your goals. But since that last sentence completely undermines what I’m getting at, let’s pretend that I’m 100% in favor of trying to understand your emotions in a situation, so that you can make an informed decision, or can react intentionally instead of instinctively. This takes time, and conversation. A meeting provides a forum to catch some of those moments that could use a little dissecting: To address some of those moments that result in decisions on the fly – decisions and their effects that never get fully explained.

• Second of all, a family meeting sounds like a reasonable idea when it’s hard to find regular nights to eat together because this one’s got an extra rehearsal and that one’s soccer game time changed and that one forgot he had to teach his medical students and the other one has a book club, because all of those ones have book clubs; you’re not actually a suburban mommy if you don’t - but that’s another story. These meetings don’t have to be long. They shouldn’t be long. Sunday night, which Bruce uses, seems like a good time to me. Usually everyone is home then, and there’s an opportunity to look at the calendar. This doesn’t guarantee that we won’t be scrambling for forgotten appointments, but it does help us become aware of our commitments, at least for a moment, together. This group moment might well improve the chances that we’ll get where we need to be on time. I make no promises, nor do I have any proof, since as of this writing, our family has had only one family meeting.

• Third of all, the family meeting, as Bruce describes it, is child-centered. Or to be more precise, while parents may set the agenda, the children should be vocal participants. This gives them practice explaining themselves, exploring and expressing their opinions, and listening to others’, which I defy anyone to deny is good life training. Since the message in my family of origin was “Children should be seen and not heard,” this idea appeals to my rebellious inner child. Let the children be heard and seen. Then let the parents make final decisions.

• And last of all, the family meeting is a way to solidify or otherwise emphasize the idea of the family unit as a unit. I like this idea of emphasizing the family as a unit. It’s one of Bruce’s ideas that’s so fundamental you don’t even see it: To be a successful family involves focusing on the family itself, and seeing it as a working group, not just as a staging ground for “real life.”

The Meeting

Now, I’d been mulling this idea for a while. I was intrigued and wanted to do it, despite the hoke factor. So when the 5^th grader came home, I think it was the very day I behaved so admirably at the DARE assembly, with a letter announcing that she’d won a leadership award, and that there would be a ceremony at an arena at a community college to recognize her and the other recipients, I had my entrée.

Readers, if you would kindly lower your bayonets, I will continue. After feeling my moment of pride in my offspring – a moment immediately followed by one of complete amazement: I have never won thing one for leadership – I realized that this ceremony would conflict with the 9^th grader’s ballet schedule. Frankly, that went without saying, since the 9^th grader spends less time not dancing than she does dancing. So the question was, should she miss the classes, which were in rehearsals for her end of the year performance, to attend her sister’s ceremony? Perfect for a family meeting.

I’d like to tell you that each participant met the announcement with equal enthusiasm; but that would be a lie. The husband was on board – surprising to me, considering the aforementioned hoke factor.  He was even willing to commit to weekly meetings. However, when we told the children we were having a meeting,  the 9^th grader’s reaction was, “Oh no,” and the 5^th grader’s was, “Are we in trouble?”

But it went well. Or at least, it didn’t go badly. When I brought up the awards ceremony - ballet schedule conflict, I tried to remember Bruce’s advice to let the children do a lot of the talking. The 5^th grader immediately announced that she wanted her sister to attend her award ceremony. The 9^th grader countered immediately with acquiescence. Conflict resolved? More like conflict swept underground. I suddenly saw how good an idea a family meeting was. I think it’s the kind of thing that might just help keep people close. If you’re the kind of person who acquiesces because your sister states a strong preference, despite your own mixed feelings, then eventually, you may avoid your sister, to avoid hearing her state her preferences. But if your sister can start to understand that her preference acts like a command, then she may begin to be a little more careful and less categorical – more empathetic – in stating it.

Since their conversation had apparently ended, it was up to me and the husband to stir the pot. How did the 9^th grader feel about missing the ballet class to go to the ceremony? For that matter, how would the 9^th grader feel about having her sister at her upcoming recital? And how would the 5^th grader feel about the looming conflict over missing a soccer tournament to go to (another) dance recital? I wanted the conversation to be both concrete (about this particular conflict) and hypothetical (attending each others’ awards and recitals, etc.) Okay, I know, this may be slightly nauseating, as if I envision a golden-paved road of award upon award for my children, stretching into the future. However, even the most curmudgenly reader must admit there are many milestones ahead (God willing), with attendant ceremonies. It seems worthwhile to figure out who needs to go to what when.  But mostly, I wanted the big sister to express her preferences and feelings about attending her sister’s award ceremony, and to see how important her presence was to her younger sister. Also, I wanted the little sister to realize that her big sister would be sacrificing something very important to her (dance class) at a difficult time (rehearsing for upcoming recital).

The upshot was that we, the parental units, listened to the children, and then we told them we would make a decision. Meeting adjourned. Not exactly an unqualified success, but not terrible, either. Later, the 9^th grader came to us privately and said she didn’t want to miss her class. We told her we had wanted her to say that at the meeting so that the 5^th grader would know, but of course she hadn’t wanted to hurt her sister’s feelings. I suppose immediate openness was too much to expect from one meeting.

In the end, we decided the 9^th grader should go to the ceremony. In private, I told the 5^th grader that her sister was making a sacrifice by missing her rehearsal. The 5^th grader said, “Now you are making me feel guilty.” I told her I wasn’t trying to make her feel guilty as much as I was trying to make her appreciate that her sister was doing something nice for her – and that she ought to thank her.

So the 9^th grader came to the ceremony. On the way, the 5^th grader thanked her for missing rehearsal. Afterwards, the 9^th grader hugged the 5^th grader.

Overall, I thought it was good for the 9^th grader to hear her sister characterized as a leader, and good for the 5^th grader to know her sister heard that characterization.

We haven’t had a family meeting since; but I stand by the process.

Other People's Successes - & Bayonets of Hate

Readers, I have finished Bruce Feiler’s book, The Secrets of Happy Families, and I have things to say about it. I want to write, for example, about our foray into one of his suggestions: the family meeting. But before I do, I have a compulsion to tell you something terrible about myself. Here’s why. See, to tell you about the family meeting involves mentioning an awards ceremony for one of my children. As I’ve discovered, the slightest mention of anything about one’s children’s possible accomplishments, no matter how slight, puts you out there in front of the bayonets of insecure parents who want to immediately kill you for bragging, even if it’s only the most incidental kind of mention of anything about your child, even if it’s the humblest. You’re a braggart and jerk and deserve to be beheaded and for all your spawn to grow warts on all their visible epidermises (epidermi?), or you’re even worse – a humble-bragger, begging for notice while seeming not to and therefore deserving of none but contempt. Which is a problem if you want to actually get across a message of some kind. Why not just leave out the bit about the award/event, you ask? Well, that would be fine, except in this case, the occasion for the meeting depended on it. In other words, if I talked about calling our first family meeting without mentioning this event, then I’d have omitted the reason AND the content of the meeting, which would make for a pretty short and meaningless blog post.

So the thing is, before you get all bayonet-y at me, let me tell you about how my child didn’t win an honor and how well I handled it. Then you can decide if I deserve that beheading and if my child can go forth wart free into her uncertain future. And I can tell you about our family meeting (in the next post, because this one is already too long.)

Now the reason I know about these bayonet-y tendencies is that I’ve been jabbed by them – certain comments on my Motherlode posts qualify – but I’ve also been guilty of them. On occasion. And for only the very goodest and most understandable reasons; but I have felt some of those feelings I describe above. In fact, I felt them pretty recently.

I think the compulsion to tell you something unflattering about myself is also related to Anne Lamott. You see, Anne Lamott was giving a reading in Troy, and I was planning to go, even though she’s promoting her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow, which is all about prayer, and which might just be a little much for me, the atheist-ish, sometimes agnostic Buddhist Jew. Then I realized that the 5^th grader’s DARE graduation was the same morning, and I thought, Oh crud, I can’t miss the DARE graduation, because DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is, you know, the kind of program it’s important for a parent to support and for a child to see her parent support.  Since the graduation was at 9:30 in the morning, the husband immediately bowed out, citing some lame excuse about having to attend rounds on patients with strokes.  This left me to represent.

The day before the graduation, the 5^th grader came home from school saying the essays written by four boys and four girls (one of each from each 5^th grade class) had been selected to be read aloud at the graduation (can we please just call it an assembly, for God’s sake? NO? Okay. Crup. Anyway.) By the way, it’s possible that the DARE assembly is called a graduation for the exact same reason I felt compelled to be at it: to make the students feel it was important. It’s also possible the assembly is called a graduation to make the parents feel important, which sort of thing happens, but I think not in this instance. Perhaps it’s called a graduation to make the police feel more important….

Anyhoo,  I had a vague recollection of my child showing me an essay, a few weeks before, and of me suggesting that it could be stronger if she added a little more detail by way of examples or something. That was the last I thought of the essay until a few days before the DARE finale, when I was driving the 5^th grader’s band carpool and the 5^th grader and her friends began talking about the essay. They spent several minutes wildly proclaiming how much they had “sucked up” to Officer Friendly in it, and how much they didn’t care if their essays got picked. They all agreed the whole exercise in writing the essay had been to suck up to Officer Friendly. Of course, I’d thought. Essays would be picked.

So then the 5^th grader came home with this announcement. She was detailed in her reporting of the teacher’s selection of the essays. The teacher had described narrowing the selections down to four girls’ and four boys’, but had been unable to decide among them, so she had mixed them all up and picked at random. The 5^th grader’s essay was not selected. But, she was quick to say, maybe hers had been one of the four among which Mrs. M had been trying to decide.

Readers, I would like to tell you that this didn’t bother me, but I would be lying. It bothered me a little that my child’s essay hadn’t been chosen and that my child would not be up there reading her essay at this graduation that would be keeping me from hearing Anne Lamott. What also bothered me, was how my child rationalized the situation by saying hers could have been one of the finalists. Was this some weird ego-protection device on her part? Or a pre-emptive assuaging of feelings I might not hide as well as I think I do?

As I said, it only bothered me a little. A first. It was just one essay. It was just DARE. What bothered me more was that the 5^th grader had done a pretty half-assed job on the essay, but still thought she might have been chosen. Or hadn’t thought about the long-term effect of doing a half-assed job. She hadn’t been strategic. Neither had I. I thought, my kid should’ve sucked up more. That’s what you’ve gotta do in this life to get noticed. You’ve gotta suck up. You’ve gotta be strategic. And you’ve gotta be whole-assed.

Directly I thought this thought, I became much more bothered by this non-winning. If I didn’t mind that she didn’t get selected, I did mind if other kids did. Certain other kids. Like the 5^th grader’s best friend, who hasn’t been so best friendly to her this year and has delivered one too many put-downs. It might not be so bad that my child hadn’t won; but what if this girl had? What if some of the other girls, who from time to time, had done things like turn their backs on my child at recess (true), won?  I tried to find out from my child who the other winners were, but she showed an annoying lack of knowledge, concern, or interest, so I would have to wait until the morrow.

Natch, the first mother I saw at the graduation was the mom of the 5^th grader’s bestie. She was chatting with Officer Friendly. Sure, I thought, Suck up, suck up. I sat down far away from her. I beamed hate bayonettes at her. Look at her in her yoga pants. So smug.

The first essay, read in a spindly voice by a nondescript girl, provided several details and facts that the 5^th grader’s had not. Next up was a boy. More facts. I began (continued?) to have uncharitable thoughts. Chief among them was involuntarily imagining these kids reading these essays aloud in ten years, whilst a montage of their descents into drug-addled depravity played behind them on a large screen. It was possible that these essays were selected by Officer Friendly and the 5^th grade teachers, not because they were so well written about the positive lessons their authors had learned from DARE, but because these kids needed the whole community of students and parents to bear witness to their promises to never smoke or drink or do other drugs; because, clearly, they were likely to become abusers. So it was actually good, in other words, that my child, had been overlooked.

Let me say, Readers, that I was aware of my state of mind. Envy, insecurity, anger, check, check, check. They were all present, and I knew it. Thanks to mindfulness practice and years of therapy, I was in touch with my mental formations. Helpless before them, but at least aware of that, too.

Now, I’m late posting to my blog this week. In fact, I missed posting last week. Not for lack of subject. I wrote this last week. It’s just been hard to click “publish” on this one; because this essay really makes me look bad. I mean, here I am, searching for a definition of success, and resenting others who have some. I know this is not pretty. Yet I feel compelled to go on. I might as well say it. I think, in my heart, I am no worse than many in my pitiful inability to channel what Oprah might call “My Best Self.”

In conclusion, I must say that the bestie’s class was announced next, so my suspense came to an end. The essay selected was – not the bestie’s. I sagged back into my chair. There was a second of relief. Immediately after the relief, though, came the remorse. I’d done a disservice to the friend, and worse, to her mother, with whom I’ve been quite friendly. It was ugly, people, ugly. I tell it to you now. 

Next week: The Family Meeting....

No Such Thing As Failure

Last night, the husband and I went to listen to a talk by Stephen Sondheim. It was actually not a talk, but a conversation between Stephen Sondheim and some lady named Mary. Sorry, Mary, I have forgotten your last name, as I almost always forget names. It’s to your credit that I remember your first name. You did a fine job. To give myself credit, let me say that I bought the tickets as a birthday present for the husband, who performed in “Sweeney Todd” in college, who was a composer before he was a doctor, and who just may get back to composing one of these years. Except that he’ll never be able to retire, because I, his wife, make too little money; but eventually, we will run out of British crime dramas to watch on Netflix, and he will have time of an evening to create.

It was really some kind of miracle that I found out about this Stephen Sondheim gig. I’m so out of every loop – except my own internal, neurotic ones – that it amazes me that I came across this event, in time to order tickets for it.  It was, of course, sold out last night.

Mr. Sondheim is 83, and still working. Artists never stop. He talked about his shows, mostly. He also gave little glimpses into the wild evening life he used to lead and had a couple stories about Elaine Stritch, who played Jack Donaghy’s mother on “30 Rock”, in case you don’t know her from Broadway. I learned that the phrase “Everything’s coming up roses” is from the lyric to the eponymous song from “Gypsy,” written by Stephen Sondheim. He admitted that coining a phrase that entered the lexicon was satisfying. I should think so.

But really, the most compelling thing he said, he said early on in the conversazione. (Throwing in a little Italian, just for kicks.) Mary Whose Last Name Escapes Me asked him if, when he was starting out, he worried that he would fail. He said, “I don’t think that ever occurred to me.”

Thank you, and good night. That explains a lot. That explains why I was sitting in the audience listening to Stephen Sondheim, and not the other way around. Or, at least, it explains one reason. It never occurred to him he might fail? That’s pretty much all I think about when I consider my writing.

Of course, it might have been a little easier for Stephen Sondheim to forget to consider the possibility of failure than it was for me. He had Oscar Hammerstein as a father figure. I had a father figure, but he wasn’t Oscar Hammerstein. He was my father. (Still is.) A fine man, a lawyer, but in no position to help me become a successful writer. He did help me get the job in a law firm that led me to decide against pursuing law. This was helpful, in its way, although more for defining what I wouldn’t do than what I would do with my career. Kind of like negative space in a drawing is important, but it’s not where the artistry lies. Usually.

So Sondheim’s first job was in the “family business,” too. Although he had some lean years, Sondheim had Oscar. Oscar Hammerstein helped him develop his skills and got him involved writing lyrics with Leonard Bernstein for “West Side Story,” when he was twenty-five. If he wasn’t working for Oscar Hammerstein, he could call Oscar Hammerstein for advice. So, you know, failure seems pretty unlikely to me, too, in that scenario.

I am glad that I didn’t call it a night after that astounding proof of self-confidence. After hearing that, I just listened and marveled at a person who had such self-confidence that he could question aspects of any of his works, without questioning his basic right and ability to work at that art.

In fact, he had a few shows that didn’t do all that well. One of them, “Merrily We Roll Along,” of which I’d never heard, closed after 9 shows on Broadway. It was, you know, a flop. Guess what? He revised it. He fixed it. That's the growth mindset at work, by the way, Readers. He kept on working at it, and eventually it showed in London and then on Broadway – years, indeed decades, later – and garnered great reviews. So he believed in his idea, and he had strength of character enough, or confidence enough, to deconstruct the parts that didn’t work for audiences, and to keep on revising them until they played well. Along the way he did “Company*,” and “Sweeney Todd,” and “Sunday in the Park with George,” and “A Little Night Music,” and a bunch of other musicals that you probably have heard of, even if you don’t care for musicals. 

All of these works were collaborations, by the way, and all developed over months and often years. He’s working on something now that’s been steeping for twenty-five years. What really struck me, was that once Sondheim felt some idea he came across had “something to it,” he didn’t look back and question that judgment. He worked, and continues to work, to get that idea out. All of that work is built on a steady foundation of accepting his judgment of what is worth pursuing. For those of us who work at bringing ideas into the world, that is a great lesson in success. 

*Video clip of my favorite song from "Company," sung by Carol Burnett here. She sings it a little slower than others do, but you can hear the lyrics clearly.

Annals of Gardening: An Inventory

It’s taken nearly four years, but I am pretty sure we’ve finally killed the pachysandra. Yes, I know. You readers who are gardeners are amazed. Killed pachysandra? I thought that was impossible, you are thinking. If I’ve learned one thing in all my research on success, however, it’s that almost nothing is impossible.

To be honest, I didn’t kill it. At least not directly. In fact, I’ve regularly shaken little granules of fertilizer on it from a container left behind by the previous owners of our small cottage. They left behind the fertilizer, but managed to “lose” – that is, to toss out in a fit of pique or thoughtlessness, probably the former – every manual for every appliance in the house. But what does it matter? Every appliance has broken since then, so whatevs. I digress.

If not me and the husband, then who? The dog, of course. The dog killed it. He and his best friend, who lives across the street, have mowed it down, wrestled in it, lounged in it, peed and pooped in it (sorry – TMI?) while their owners stood idly by, chatting and waving off the school bus. The stuff has given up.

And yes, it has been almost four years since we moved into this house. It’s been nearly four years since my venerable father visited and left me with these words, “You’ve taken on a mature garden with this house, and it’s going to require a lot of work – staff – to keep it up.” More or less. I didn’t record him, and I am pretty sure my entire head filled with a mental drumbeat – “staff/can’t afford, staff/can’t afford, staff/can’t afford” – thereby blocking out the few remaining mental capacities I retained after moving from the city to the suburbs. So his exact words are lost. The rest of my brain, aside from the drumbeat, was screaming, “Fool, you were a fool, why didn’t you buy a house with a tiny yard? But he said pretty much that, because the words seared my innermost accesses, and there they remained, waiting until now to prove true. The way a father's words can. 

Now, when I say the pachysandra, I don’t mean all of it. Just the patch of it dead center in the middle of the front yard. Just the most obvious patch of it. There’s plenty on the side and in the backyard, still.

But there’s more devastation. I may have been overzealous in pruning the variegated dogwoods by the front door. The dog had nothing to do with that. 

Although, again, I am being perhaps disingenuous if I don’t mention that an actual, official, and not incidentally, very handsome tree specialist told me that they usually only last about eight years, which is probably how long they’ve been there, so I might as well give ‘em a last ditch effort to come back bushy and handsome. So I did it in good faith. There are a few buds. Same with the over-leggy hedge along the garage. A major hack job in a last ditch effort to revive it.

Not so the roses. There, following only advice I gleaned off the backs of cereal boxes, we seem to have under pruned some and outright murdered other bushes. Not a whit of green on those stems.

On the bright side, all the evergreens are still thriving. The rhododendrons are doing just fine. (Those are jokes. They require no effort, people.) The crabgrass, dandelions, and moss are also doing very well. And the ferns. (Ditto, and ditto.) Live and let live, I say.

Furthermore, as we say up here in the Northeast, it's early days yet. The dogwoods may well do me proud. Spring has only just begun. 

So what does this have to do with success? Well, Readers, this may be a stretch, but how ‘bout this? I still hold my head up when I walk the dog around the neighborhood, and the neighbors still say hello. I’m not an ulcerated mass of suburban guilt because my yard isn’t perfect. Nor am I trying to keep up with the next door neighbor, whose grass is definitely greener. I am putting my mark on the yard. Now, those marks may be lethal, but they are mine. I do have plans. If the roses and the dogwood and the garage hedge don’t come back this year, we will tear them out and replace them with something else. Probably pachysandra. (Kidding.) And that dead patch of pachysandra front and center? We may turn it into grass. The yard may have weakened since we moved in, but I am feeling more rooted. That’s one kind of success.