Successfully Tackling Fear. And Teeth. Oy.

Hello. Hell. Oh.

Yes, Readers, it has been that kind of week. In fact, it’s been a difficult several weeks, but for now, let me just fill you in on where I have been since my last post. To hell.

Just kidding. “JK” as the 14-year-old likes to say in a smarmy voice. But I did go visit my family last week. This trip involved me driving solo from our leafy suburb outside Albany to Washington, DC, with the two children. Driving solo is something I used to do without a second thought. I used to LOVE driving solo, rolling along the highway, singing aloud to whatever was playing on the car stereo. That was in my twenties, when I was single, definitely not a mother, and definitely before my frontal lobe had fully developed an awareness of death. Nowadays, driving gets me nervous.

Okay, I thought, as we set out down Interstate 87, so driving gets me nervous. It didn’t used to. So I made a decision. I turned my thoughts to those previous solo trips, back in the long ago, such as the time I drove down the California coast on 101, along all those winding, cliffside roads - there was even a perfect moment when I was driving along Ventura Highway and "Ventura Highway" by America came on the radio - and then up Highway 5 to Berkeley in time for Souxsie and the Banshees at the Greek Theater. These memories helped. I found myself enjoying the drive, listening to whatever the children picked on Spotify, and almost relaxing. What also helped, and I pass this on to anyone who might also have a fully developed frontal lobe, was the thought that popped into my head: Just because you’re afraid of something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

This struck me as a thought so perfectly formed, so evident a product of successful cognitive behavioral therapy, that I made it a mantra: “Just because you’re afraid of it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”  Say it with me, you of the fully developed frontal lobes!

Now this thought has corollaries such as, “Being afraid of something doesn’t prevent it from happening,” which advanced worriers will recognize as a delightful form of magical thinking. You have to be really experienced at worrying to imagine that by worrying you will think of every possible thing that could go wrong and thereby prevent it. 

Then there’s this: You can’t control a lot of what happens or doesn’t happen. Which is the kind of thought that triggers the old fear reaction, righty-o, Readers? But then you just repeat the first one. "Just because you’re afraid…." Ventura Highway....

Also try a little mindfulness practice of noticing that fear is just an emotion – it’s not the sum total of who you are, it’s just a feeling you have and like all feelings, it comes and it goes and you are still driving down I95 in heavy traffic but you are not dead.

I also like to visualize fear as a small object, kind of a mushy blob, if truth be told. I picture this blob as if it's in an animated short film in which an invisible source wraps it up in some kind of packaging - plastic wrap, or cloth or some other magic wrap that encapsulates it neatly - and pulls in the blobulous edges, and reveals that underneath the fear packet there is other stuff – life, other emotions, the world. The fear is just a little packet and it can be tossed away.

So that was how I got all the way to Washington on very little sleep without any incidents just in time for the 11-year-old to knock out her front teeth on the sink in the bathroom at the pool and for us to take an emergency trip to the dentist in our bathing suits.

The lessons here are two: one, for those with undeveloped frontal lobes, is not to flick wet towels at anyone or do anything to another person that might cause that person to jerk sideways or duck down or move in any way towards hard or sharp objects; and two, for those whose frontal lobes are fully functioning, is that whatever the heck it is that you fear, fearing it makes no difference. The problems, the disasters, the incidents come from unexpected places.

But I don’t want to end on a sour note. While my stomach still turns over those teeth, the outcome could have been much worse. She didn’t knock them out entirely. They broke. The dentist glued them. He and I are hopeful that will be all that’s necessary. Time will tell. Meanwhile, she is fully functional and as far as looks go, she is unmarred, so all is well. 

Grit: True Marker of Success

I’m thinking about perseverance. Grit. Stamina. Why? Well, the husband showed me this article about Carol Dweck’s research on mindset, motivation, and success, which talks about how to praise children. The wrong kind of praise extinguishes their will to try harder. The basic idea is that praise should be specific and focused on effort, not on labeling a quality of mind. Say, “I love how hard you worked and how much you improved since last time,” not, “You’re so smart - you’re my little genius.” Now, actually, as my mother-in-law noted, psychologist and parenting expert Haim Ginott and his proteges Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish said this very thing in the 1970s and 1980s; now research has proved them right. Luckily I read Haim Ginott when my kids were little (props to the MIL), and Faber and Mazlish, so I have done everything perfectly through much perseverance and grit regarding them and they have turned into persevering little cusses, if I do say so. Not a wrong word uttered ever. Parenting 101? I wrote that curriculum.

I am not serious, Readers. Please. You know me. I’m nothing if not questioning of every single, eensie, tiny decision I make, as well as practically undone by every single large decision I’m forced to make. But not totally undone, because I may lack physical grit, but I have psychological grit.

Speaking of me brings up another point about perseverance and grit; namely, that teaching people is about more than just choice words, it's about modeling behavior. So how gritty am I?

A friend came to visit for a couple days, and I used her visit as an excuse to skip my morning mini-routine of yoga, and came downstairs to my comfy tea and reading chair to wait for her. While sitting there, I heard thumps coming from upstairs. At first I thought maybe my friend's son was up early and dropping books on the floor, but then I thought maybe she was doing yoga. I wondered how on earth, since the room is tiny, and when the rollaway bed is open, there is not enough room to stretch out on the floor. When my friend came downstairs, I discovered she had been the one thumping upstairs. She was indeed doing yoga in that tiny room. How? By folding up that rollaway bed. 

Would I have done that? Probably not. Possibly, she has a lot more grit than I do. Or, you know, a couple extra inches in height can make a big difference. I find folding that thing nearly impossible. Not impossible, but nearly so. Enough so that it’s a deterrent to me doing it myself. I can’t really reach across it well because my arms are too short. Because I don’t have those extra couple inches. Or maybe because my boobs are too big, adding a couple extra inches in width that render reaching across to close that thing and hook it next to impossible. Painful, even. But my friend has those extra couple inches in height, minus those extra in boobage, and therefore, I guess, was undaunted.  

I am not that gritty. At least not physically. I lack physical grit. This was brought home to me in numerous ways over the years I lived in New England and hung around with a lot of native Yanks. I’m thinking in particular of a humbling bike trip from Somerville to the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, about eleven miles, undertaken with our group of friends, subscribers to the Penny Pincher Gazette. I was going to say “subscribers all” to the Penny Pincher, but I know that’s untrue. They are thriftier than that and pass it around among them. That is how thrifty and gritty they are. Anyway, my point is, this bike trip involved hills like you’d not believe, and even though there were others as unused to arduous bike trips as I on our expedition, I was the only one whose 21 speeds proved insufficient and who had to walk her bike up one – or two, or several but who’s counting? – of those hills. 

But psychologically, I have grit and stamina. Today, I awoke to a loud boom – I offer this as an example of my psychological grit – which I attributed to a bomb for only a second, just one split second. I only wasted a split, split second of this morning on the idea of terrorism in my leafy suburb in upstate New York that is on absolutely nobody’s list of ideal places to make a violent political statement. Directly I had that thought, I knew that noise had to be related to the demolition of the burned house that has finally begun, around the u-bend of our street, five houses away. See? That’s how blasé and, well, gritty, I am. Yes, my first thought was: Bomb. Perhaps that's not the first thought my Yankee bicycling friends would have, but I had no control over it. The point is that it was only for an instant, and then I mastered the fear. Then I rationalized. That's grit. How else have I made it all these years without totally cracking? Considering my tendency to, um, panic. Sheer psychological grit. Grit that somehow links to my lack of physical grit in some kind of inverse relationship. It’s all of a piece. And by it I mean me. The ebb and flow of grit and no-grit that makes a person who she is. 

What I’m saying here, with these examples of my lack of physical grit and my questionable psychological stability, is that despite my weaknesses, my questioning, my struggles at times with motivation, I persevere. We each have our challenges - our issues, our childhoods, our illnesses, our phobias - that require grit. Sometimes the effort required might look to an outsider like just getting by. Sometimes that perseverance manifests in small wins. Sometimes perseverance manifests as big, public wins. Overall, do you keep going? Do you keep trying? I do. According to Carol Dweck, that is key to success. So – yay.

Arugula, Stoves, Sedaris, Success

FYI: One burner doesn't work....

Hello. Have we all been enjoying our arugula? C’mon, you know what I’m talking about. Up and down the East Coast, which is where I've been, we've all taken a new interest in that particular leafy green, because we’ve all read that article in the paper about nutrient levels in leafy greens, and the most nutrient-filled is, yep, you know it, arugula. So don’t even pretend to have always loved it, just tuck into your arugula salads. I recommend a citrus twist. Yum. Just don’t think about that other news item  about how that final spritz of water that perks up our arugula before it arrives on the grocery store shelf contains, more often than it should, E. Coli and Campylobacter bacteria.

Anyhoo. I’ve been away, enjoying my arugula salad and otherwise vacationing. Since we last communicated, Readers, the husband, the 11-year-old, and I journeyed to pick up the 14-year-old from her ballet intensive. At least I think we picked up the 14 year old, although she appears to be a clone of the 14-year-old, a little taller, and a little tweaked, attitude-wise. But we persevered to the beach, and managed to close our garage door when we left the neighborhood. We're all getting used to one another again. Family dynamics have changed. 

Which seems like a good segueway to David Sedaris. Now, I’ve read a lot of definitions of success over the past two years, and I was not expecting anything about that topic from David Sedaris, but there I was, reading his latest book, when I came across something new. David and his boyfriend are driving around Australia with a friend, Pat, who invites them to picture a four burner stove on which one burner represents family, one friends, one health, and one work. To be successful, she says, you have to “cut off one of your burners. And to be really successful, you have to cut off two.”

So they each name the burner they've cut. David says it was friends, though he wasn’t proud of it, and also health, and his partner Hugh says it was work, which makes sense since he must travel around with David to David’s speaking engagements and therefore not have time for his own work; and their friend, a businesswoman with several homes and cars and what to David looks like success says family and health.

What do we think of this? This is so old school. This stove is a pot-bellied one and the analogy is, too. I mean, c’mon. What a narrow definition of success that is. One that excludes maintaining health and human connections. What would Arianna Huffington say about it? Where’s that Third Metric? Although, honestly, we all fear that David’s friend Pat is right – and by we I mean I – that to manifest material success requires singlemindedness, and that singlemindedness requires cutting out those pesky distractions like taking care of your body and meaningful connections to other people, related to you by blood, affection, or both. And vice-versa. Pat’s definition is what landed me in trouble, so feh – I reject it! Maybe we need to let a few things simmer on low while we bring others to the boil; but cutting off a whole burner? Bad idea.

When I started this success blog, I’d done that. I’d cut out work. Yes, yes, I was working – I was being a full time mom – but I wasn’t developing my professional self. I don’t want to wade into the quagmire of seeming to suggest motherhood isn’t work, which necessitates high boots and a tromp though the grasslands of apologia. Motherhood certainly is work, and it certainly should be compensated somehow, by respect, by social security benefits, by family leave policies, etc. That’s a whole different story. My point - and I think I do have one - is that, like many stay at home moms (SAHMs), I identifed myself as something else, too. Something related to a profession. While I was being a SAHM, I was also supposedly a writer, but I wasn’t really, because being a mother of young children is a full time job. So, for large swathes of time, I turned off that work burner.

Did it make me a better, more successful person in those other areas (burners?) No, I don’t think so. In fact, ironically, while that burner was off, it was the only thing that seemed to matter to me. Work. Profession. Earning money. I couldn’t stop thinking how I wasn’t doing any of it, and how much of a failure this made me. It wasn’t as if I focused better on those other burners. No, I focused on that one, and felt that lack of success there meant I was a failure everywhere.

This was a rawther counterproductive and downright miserable cycle of despair in which to find myself, and so I began to look for a better definition. I also began to look for some paying work. But the instant I turned on that work burner, I felt better. No, that’s wrong. First I felt really shitty, and I floundered around looking for jobs and so on, so really, the first time I obtained some paying work related to my profession, I felt better. A lot better. A billion percent better. It didn’t take much. It didn’t take the career coming to a boil. It just took a little bit, a simmer, if you will, and everything started to improve.

So my new view of success is much more holistic than Pat’s. Carrying on with the stove analogy, you want to be an Aga, or a Viking, or whatever. The idea is to get all the burners working. 

Frankly, I don’t think David subscribes to Pat's theory, either. For one, he points out that his friend Pat “seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.” For another, while he says that he cut off the friends burner, there he is, riding around the Australian bush with his friend. But I’m not going to speak for him. I don’t know what he’s like, really. Antisocial, reclusive, peevish? His sandbox is the nexis of humor and pain, his medium is memoir: We know he’s got problems. Which brings us to the next burner, family. He ends his essay with a painful memory of a senseless power play between his 11 year old self and his father, which ended with him turning off the family burner. But then over time he realized that “without them, I was nothing.” It’s not a heartwarming realization, though. It's more a recognition of how connected we remain to family, even when we’re grown and evolved and fully therapized and can move thousands of miles away. There’s a note of resignation, or perhaps defiance, when he says, “Cut off your family, and how would you know who you are? Cut them off in order to gain success, and how could that success be measured? What would it possibly mean?” With a suggestion or implication or another tendril-like tenuous gesture that you need family, if only to measure how far you’ve come, how different you are from them.

Anyway, somehow, that family burner has to stay on, too.  I write this after returning from a week’s vacation with my sister the psychoanalyst and her family, for a couple days of which our father joined us.

But back to the burners. Yeah, I think the goal is really to keep them all going. As I mentioned, some may need to be turned to simmer for awhile while others come to the boil, but you need them all. As someone’s granny said, “If you don’t have your health, you have nothing.”

You can eat your arugula and have success, too! In fact, you must.

Addlepated Check-in

Welcome, Readers, to my disjointed blog post. Highlights of the week include the following:

*  Reader comments on my last blog post set me off on an hour of Internet research on Spiral Dynamics. In brief, the idea behind Spiral Dynamics is that human (and societal) development can be described as a spiral of inter-related, but still hierarchically arranged characteristics. Each level has a color ascribed to it, and my thoughtful commentor told me he (pretty sure he) thinks I’m between Green and Yellow. Well, that left me no option but to find out what that means. And it means that I am poised at the brink of the second tier of development, between levels 6 & 7, just one level more above me, although there is the possibility of more as yet undiscovered levels. Heady stuff. Possibly I might become a Spiral Wizard, which can only be a good thing – unless it’s a terrible thing. One critic, according to Wikipedia, decries the whole Spiral D as hierarchical in a bad way, leading to Nietszchian ubermensches, and we know where that ubermensch stuff leads….straight to Auschwitz.

One of the summaries of the book on Spiral Dynamics was written by someone at the Esalen Institute, so I knew for sure I was in the land of alternative theories. Esalen is known as a center for “realizing human potential,” and is one of the main homes of New Age.  I went to Esalen in the late 80s, out of curiosity. It is gorgeous. Prominent memories are: 1. Large naked hairy man spread-eagled prone in a mineral hot tub overlooking the Pacific. 2. Eating meals in silence.

*  I poisoned the dog. Yes, I forgot that the lawn people had been at the house, spraying their so-called organic and environmentally friendly fertilizer and herbicide, and let the dog out. I was trying to do the right thing and play with him by tossing a ball for him, and watching him pick it up, lope towards me, drop it, and munch on grass, before the husband and I left him alone while we went out for dinner. We returned to a scene that I won’t describe, and ended up on the phone with animal poison control, who told us the dog would be fine, that those particular earth-friendly lawn care ingredients would only cause him an upset stomach. Uh, yeah. Also, it didn’t help that the rising 10th grader said she would never believe anything I ever said again about caring for the earth and not using bad chemicals…..To which I could only say that these friendly chemicals only caused the dog stomach upset, not neurological impairment or death. Still, I felt terrible, and suggested to the husband that he give up his secret competition with our next door neighbor over the lawn and let the crabgrass and clover grow. He’s never going to out-grass Tom.

today, both dog and plants recovered nicely

*  On the plus side, the pachysandra has completely recovered. And I can prove it. The roses, alas, have mostly succumbed. I promise to find some kind of literature about how to care for the remaining two bushes.

*  After over three weeks of eagerly scanning the camp’s website for photos of the rising 6^th grader, mostly to no avail - "look, dear, I think it's her leg!" -  we will be seeing her tomorrow! I am very excited, and not only to fact-check her claim, written in several letters to family and friends, that she has 104 bug bites. So there goes the argument that summer camp is bad for kids because it’s yet another regimented, over-scheduled program. Clearly, my child has had plenty of free time. 

* Zimmerman acquittal. Ugh. I feel it’s one of those times when joking about other stuff and being inconsequential and silly is not appropriate. Unfortunately, being inconsequential and silly is really my strong suit; whereas what’s needed now is some kind of Nelson Mandela-like vision of a better future. I guess I think our political-legal system is somewhat self-correcting, although unfortunately not without a lot of discomfort and violence along the way. There are bad laws, and they can be struck down. I am ready to march. 

Everman's Lessons on Success

The day: sunny and gorgeous. It would be a perfect day for deck sitting, except the deck chairs are kind of wet. Though not

as wet as I expected. The manufacturer has injected some kind of miracle webbing into the cushion that didn’t release its inner core of wet until I’d sat on one for some time. Then I turned it over and water dripped out. Me – dry; inner core - dripping.

Also this is great because now I have something new to obsess over, namely, how evenly the cushions are drying. After a rainstorm, I can periodically, every hour or two, or every fifteen minutes - or every five, if I’m stuck for other more wholesome activities - go outside and rotate the cushions. Because that’s the kind of person I am. I haven’t felt this good about stuffed anything since I used to sit on my transitional object (Bunny) to press her face the right way. It was flat, and I wanted it to puff out. Of course. Never happy with what we have, are we? But, hey, bunnies’ faces puff out. They are not flat. I wanted my bunny’s face to be like a real bunny’s and puff out. Which it did, if I sat on Bunny just the right way. So that gave me something to do. And do. And do. And do.

Yes, this is Bunny. She is my bunny.

Is it any wonder my nursery school teacher recommended me for a little play therapy at 3? And clearly, it worked. Because.

Anyhoo, I was going to talk about something I read in The New York Times that maybe you read, too, Readers. I'm referring to that article about the guitarist Jason Everman, who was fired from Nirvana just before they hit it big, and then after touring with them for a year, got fired from Soundgarden just before they became massive, and then he joined the Army and eventually became a Special Forces soldier? After such public failures, then the guy goes off and does something that is highly specialized and secret and is kind of like joining a secret society because when you’re in Special Forces no one can know exactly what you do. Even after you’ve done it, you’re not supposed to talk about it, but those who are in the know - those who are in the band - know how very cool what you do and did is.

There’s a lesson here about success not lasting or not being meaningful if it’s not based on something you value. And I guess, also, his story is a parable of how fame and fortune don’t mean much, if you don’t love what you do. And Jason Everman didn’t love the rock life. He was, according to this article, an excellent musician, so he wasn’t fired for lack of talent. Ironically, he got fired both times because he didn’t gel with the band. He didn’t play with the team. I say this is ironic because what I know about the military is that it’s all about team effort. And I know a lot about the military. I saw “Private Benjamin.” By the way, “Saving Private Ryan,” was the last war movie I ever watched and I blame it for causing the umbilical cord to wrap tightly three times around my first child’s neck which led to a c-section. I one hundred percent believe that she was trying to escape the terrible noise in the movie theater and got herself tangled. My belly was lumping up and down like boiling water during that thing.

But I digress. My point is that although Jason Everman didn't want to be in a band, he did want to be in a band of a different kind. So he just kept trying to find the right kind. And he did.

By the way, I think it’s cool that Jason Everman’s name is almost EverYman, which adds a further parable-like element to his story. Everyman's search.

But also maybe there’s another lesson for me and people like me in his story. That lesson is that you can leave behind public humiliation and what looks like terrible failure. This is pertinent for me because, as I may have hinted or mentioned here and there, I’m circling around a book proposal. And I’m hesitant to write about it here. As I told the husband last night, I had nothing to blog about, because I wasn’t about to blog about writing a book, and he said, Well isn’t that what this whole thing is about? By "this whole thing" he meant my blog, but we can excuse his unclear antecedent, can we not? And I said, What if I fail to sell my proposal and fail to publish my book after broadcasting that I’m trying to on my blog? On my blog about success. And the husband, the ratfink, said I really should write about it, because after all isn’t that the crux of the question?  After which I told him it was time for his Vitamin D pills, so that while he was swallowing them he would stop challenging me.

Still, he made me think. I mean, have I blogged for the past two years about all the elements of success and wound up in the same spot I started, with the assumption that Everyone (my Readers and me) will consider me a failure until I succeed? Or have I learned that success is also a byproduct of enjoying the process of working toward a goal?

Well. What do you think, Readers?

Abandonment, and Other Issues of Successful Parenting

Yesterday, we abandoned the rising 6^th grader on a muddy hillside, in the rain. The hillside was part of the grounds of her summer camp, but nevertheless, we left her there, shivering.

True, she was wearing a bathing suit and waiting to take a swimming test, but it was raining, and she was shivering, and she wanted us to stay for the test, but the counselors did not, and it did feel like abandonment to me.

Just the weekend before, we dropped off the rising 10^th grader at her 5-week summer dance intensive. That one felt less like abandonment, since she gave nary a backward glance as she grabbed the handles of the last haul of goods we brought her – t-shirts, Luna Bars, paper towels, Ritz Crackers – and disappeared down the hall. Besides, at that time, we still had the other one with us for a few more days.

So, as I was saying, we abandoned her to her composting toilets and her bunk, and I was forced to ask myself, Self, why do I insist on encouraging independence in my offspring, when what I most want is for us to live within spitting distance of one another?  If this is my definition of successful parenting, then I have to wonder if I’m going about it the wrong way. So then I ask myself, Self, why are other mothers able to find activities for their offspring that take them out of the house for several hours of a summer’s day, but bring them home again of an evening to fill the Sonos system with their strange blend of music and my schedule with their need for rides, while I seem to find places for my children that are miles and hours away from me? 

All of this encouraging independence ends up, you know, doing just that. After all, my parents sent me away to camp – and thank God for that. That, along with therapy, and of course an excellent education (which I am not at all sure I’m providing for my children, though I’m sure I’m providing much fodder for therapy), was the equivalent of a brief handshake, a quick smack on the bottom, and a point in the direction of “outtahere.” I haven’t lived near them since I left for college. 

Readers, this is most definitely not what I hope for my children; yet I seem unable to provide them anything other than what seemed perfect for me: a place to go where I could be something other than what my parents saw in me, if that was who I was. So they go away places, and I hold my breath and hope they’ll come back. Meanwhile, I envy the people who seem able to keep their offspring close. I want mine to be both independent and near, and that seems paradoxical. Why this focus on independence, anyway? I mean, aren't Europeans doing that family bed thing well into three generations? And they are totally well-adjusted, and don't even have trouble with alcohol. Why am I always saying goodbye to my children? More distressing to me is why are they always saying goodbye to me, and then going? Why aren't they clinging to me and making it impossible for me to remove my ankle from their clutches? 

After the camp deposit, we continued north for a “just us” getaway. By “just us” I mean, the husband, me, and my melancholy. We arrived at our inn quite late, and despite having arranged with the innkeepers about getting in, had to ring the bell and wake them. After that, it was just a quick flight up in our charming olde inne, to our bedroom, which has a comfortable bed that is definitely on a slope. But nevermind, because sleep is for the foolish – like the husband, apparently. The wise lie awake at an angle – is it a 4% or a 5% incline? I'm attuned to the degrees, thanks to my StarTrac treadmill at the Y– and replay montages of mud, rain, bedraggled children, sawdust, and composting toilets.

After sunrise, the wise arose, grumpy, and bathed, and ate a continental breakfast of a dubious croissant and cup of tea, while listening to the hacking and sighing of an emphysemic gentleman at the table nearby. He did not expire, which was lucky, because the husband, who is an halibut* – I mean, a doctor – would then be forced to do something. I, personally, entertained a brief vision of myself standing over the stricken fellow, whose physique is right out of an A. A. Milne poem illustration, and exclaiming in a bad Quebecois accent, “Monsieur, you are unwell!” 

Then we went out into the city, where my mood threatened to improve so much I was afraid I would forget to mention the tiny bathroom that makes our former NYC bathrooms seem spacious, and I wouldn’t want to seem to appreciate what I’ve got, now would I?

*I know that I really ought to eliminate that silly reference to Monty Python, yet I can’t do it, I just can’t, E. B. White and William Zinsser notwithstanding. My children are away, so let me have my silly reference, okay?

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.