The Better Me

Philosophical Treatises

I've been busy, busy, busy lately. A good busy. A satisfying busy. The kind of busy that I enjoy, but that always makes me think, "Boy, I hope that I'm really fulfilling my life's purpose with this stuff. I hope that I'm not wasting my future, and missing my destiny."

You know, the whole "Time is the fire in which we burn," (Star Trek: Generations) and "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity" (Thoreau) type of thing. Both great philosophical treatises, of course.

But on I press, hoping that with the help of the divine, some common sense, and a little bit of dumb luck, I'll somehow complete whatever it is I was put on this earth to do.

My Guide to Surviving Too Much to Do

I don't have that much going on. I only want to plan a family reunion, sell enough things on Craigslist to be able to afford the gas to go to the reunion, keep the house clean, play with BabyMoney (3 yrs.), hold LittleGuy (1 yr.), who's going through that phase where he cries all the time unless he's being held, write blog posts for PYP, keep up with my church obligations, make sure my husband feels like he's getting enough TLC, get a tutoring and writing business going well enough that I can hit it hard in the fall when my potential clients come back to school, prepare the lessons for my day-job well in advance so that while I'm marketing and moonlighting as a tutor and writer, my teaching prep has already been taken care of, catch up on digital scrapbooking pages, and write for this blog and MoneyDummy.net. And I really want to get that next draft of my novel written. Oh, and at some point the editors of the lit magazine that accepted my story are going to get in touch with me for the revisions, which need to be done by the end of July, I think. Oh, and my husband's grandma is lonely and I promised that I'd e-mail her sometimes. And I just got a tutoring client, which is very awesome.

I'm feeling the burn, and I need to make sure that I don't fizzle and die and crash. So, since this blog is the place where I focus on getting and keeping it together, I'm working out my plan of attack here.

1. Do the basics. The basics. The things that are really, really important. I need to make sure I take time for prayer and meditation. And by time I mean about ten minutes a day. I need to take the kids to the park every morning. Children need to be outside during the summer. And yes, that's more important than any old part-time business. I need to keep the house functional and clean. Unless I do this, I can kiss everything else good-bye because when the house spins out of control, nothing else works really well. And the huge sense of success I get from continuing household improvement is keeping me going right now, and I need to keep going. So that tells me how I should spend my mornings, at least. Now I don't have to wonder anymore.
2. Some things are worth doing only medium-well. Whoever coined the phrase, "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well," did the world a huge disservice. Some things are worth doing only medium-well, just to get them done. I would love to spend fifteen minutes choosing, editing, and cropping photos and then putting them on richly detailed digital scrapbooking pages, but it ain't gonna happen. What's really essential is that I preserve the memories somehow, even if only by opening a Scrapbook Factory template and pounding words out for a few minutes. I can go back and add pictures in later, even years later if I need to.
3. Handle the immediate priorities. Yes, I would love to write a novel. Really, really, really. But the immediate priority right now is to earn enough money to put a downpayment on a house and bankroll Mr. MoneyDummy's grad school program, so that needs to be where my focus is. I'd love to do more, to be more, to "pursue my passion," but sometimes you just have to grind.
4. Let the rest go. For three years, I've had this fantasy that someday I'll have time to really make www.moneydummy.net a "real blog." To do the networking and the guest posting and stats analysis and the template development that makes blogs "big." Ain't gonna happen. It hurts to let go of that idea, but seriously, it's time to let it go. There are plenty of huge, wonderful personal finance blogs out there, but mint ewill not be one of them. And I shall be fine with that.

Sign One of a Miserable Mom Job: Three Ways to Overcome Mom Anonymity

I enjoy reading business management books, and I've begun to realize that many of them are surprisingly relevant to being a Stay-At-Home mother. Most recently I read The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for mangers (and their employees). I was surprised by how much the content applied to the burnout that many mothers report; maybe this is because mothers are both their managers and their employees. In other words, mothers both create the environment in which they will perform their tasks (making them managers), and then they perform their tasks in it (making them employees).

One of the signs of a miserable job is anonymity. The idea is that when employees lose their sense of identity and instead feel like mere phone-callers, cashiers, salesmen, data-crunchers, or servers they become miserable and, correspondingly, less productive.

 That sound familiar to anyone? Anyone ever feel like they're merely washers, cleaners, cookers, diaper changers, and nursers? When you and your spouse have a moment to talk together, do you suddenly find that you have no idea what to talk about besides the children? When people ask you what your hobbies and interests are, do you have a hard time remembering? I know I do. I know lots of other parents worry about the same thing.

The book suggests that managers find out what their employees are interested in and talk to them about it, to know about their families and their talents, to find out what makes their employees people, not just workers. So how can mothers implement this idea in their own lives?

I've noticed a few things that have helped me combat the SAHM anonymity syndrome:

• Read, watch, or listen to something that enriches you and gives you something to talk about. Listen to a great podcast, read an educational book, watch . . . something interesting and informative. I listen to the Dave Ramsey podcast and just about any podcast by LearnOutLoud.com. I try to read at least a little non-fiction every day. After I finish my current book, I'm going to start in on my husband's economics textbook. The point is that in order to remain vital, alive, and interesting, we need to continuously take in things that challenge and interest us. Too many mothers neglect this.
• Do something creative and uniquely yours. Remember those old hobbies you used to have? Remember how you used to write or paint or garden or take photos? Start doing a little, tiny bit of that. For me, this is blogging and noveling. I do the blogging mostly to discipline my thinking and to get social contact, but the noveling is just to keep my creative muscle alive. I only write for about fifteen minutes a day. Do I think I'm going to write and publish a novel in fifteen minutes a day? Not a chance. But I'm keeping my creative muscles alive so that I remain strong, vital, and interesting to myself and others.
• Pick something non-kid related to talk about with your spouse. Many stay-at-home-parents report feeling like they're no longer interesting to their spouses because their spouses are in the workplace growing and being challenged while the stay-at-home parent is doing the same stagnating things over and over again every day. Even worse, some working parents begin to treat the stay-at-home parent as though they really are becoming less interesting. In order to combat this, pick something non kid-related to talk to your spouse about when he or she comes home. Form an opinion on an MSN article; find out about a news issue; tell about a project you're working on.

If anonymity makes people miserable in a place in which they spend eight hours a day, it's no wonder that mothers who begin to feel anonymous in their own homes report huge incidences of depression, hopelessness, and sadness. It's vital for SAHMs to combat this, and the three ideas above are a good place to start.

What about you? Have you struggled with feeling "anonymous" in your home, and how have you successfully combated it?

Anger: The Most Reliable Signal to Change

I need to start recognizing anger as a helpful cue for action, rather than an unpleasant experience.

What about you? Are there situations that make you angry that you need to change?

I've been reading Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, a book which argues that emotions are the result of our behaviors and our thoughts, and that if we want to change undesirable emotions like depression, anger, fear, or unreasonable guilt, we can do so by recognizing and changing the thoughts and behaviors that contribute to those emotions. The way I just summarized it makes it sound simplistic, but the book itself is actually quite effective; I've already seen some benefits from it.

But one of the most interesting sections is on anger. The book talks about maladaptive anger vs. adaptive anger. In other words, when something "bad" happens, a person can feel anger that compels her to take constructive action as opposed to anger that makes her take non-productive or even destructive actions.

As I read, I recognized some examples from my own life.

Scenario: After college, the restaurant at which Hubs worked was bought by a new owner. The owner promised Hubs an official management promotion in a few months, if he could just "keep things going," for a while. Hubs worked his guts out managing the store, only to learn that the owner's actual plan had been to keep Hubs on as a stop-gap until he could get his own son trained. He then made his son the manager.

Maladaptive Anger: Because Hubs couldn't take it out on his manager, he took it out on himself, brooding, eating unhealthy food, hating himself, and staying up until four in the morning playing video games.

Adaptive Anger: After a few weeks he realized that he simply didn't have to do this any more, so he quit and found another job within a week.

Scenario: Three or four times a week, hubs would spend grocery money on convenience store Diet Cokes (which I think are a colossal waste of money) because he insists that he must have cold Cokes.

 Maladaptive Anger: Each time I saw the Cokes, I would sigh loudly, turning my head away to let him know that I was severely disappointed in him, and was exercising great, Saint-like restraint in not saying anything. If he didn't look appropriately guilty, I'd then move on to mentioning that each carbonated, kidney-shredding drink he bought was--literally--flushing away enough money to buy two pounds of chicken or four kiwis or a pound of baby carrots for our children.

Adaptive Anger: I finally realized that he wasn't going to stop drinking Coke, and that since it's his greatest vice, I could live with it. Then I started keeping cans of Coke in the fridge so that I never had to hear him say, "I need a cold Coke" ever again.

Scenario: There was a tear in my toddler's story book, and every time he opened the book, he would try to lift up the tear to see what was underneath it. Of course, every time he did this, the tear got worse, and the sound drove me crazy. For some reason, it made me so angry that he couldn't just learn not to lift up that stupid tear! Could he not see that he was making it worse?! And I was really sick of having to stop my chore time in order to stop him from doing something that he should know not to do.

Maladaptive Anger: "What in the world are you thinking? Can't you see that you're tearing your book? Do you care about your things at all? No, stop. You can't have this any more." And I would put the book on the bookshelf, where it would sit until the next day, when the whole thing would start over.

Adaptive Anger: I finally got so sick of hearing that stupid book rip further every single morning that I stopped my morning housecleaning routine, which was inevitably when the tearing happened, and taped the bejeezus out of that book right then and there. Worked like a charm. Happy kids, no more torn books. No more interrupted chore times.

Those examples are very illustrative, but as I thought I wondered why humans have to go through so much maladaptive anger in order to reach adaptive anger. Why did Hubs spend four weeks in self-hatred before he quit? Why did I let the book get torn so many times before I taped it? Why did I let so many dollars leave my wallet before I started taking the simple action of putting sodas in the freezer? The answer is: inertia. It's hard to change direction, to quit your job, to stop your chore-routine, to develop a new habit. It's even harder to recognize that you need to change direction. Wouldn't it be great if there were some kind of signal, some kind of cue we could use to recognize that something needed to change? And then I realized: that's what anger is, or at least what it could be, what it should be. Anger is a sign that I have an opportunity to change something.

That's wonderful! It's exciting! It's like a new secret weapon!

 I've already used it several times this morning. While I was working on a project, my son, who had been eating barbecue potato chips, came and stuck his greasy, salt covered fingers in my face. I felt a flare of irritation. Now, ordinarily, I would have said tersely, "Mommy's working right now," and moved his hands away. He would then have climbed all over me, smearing his greasy fingers on my shirt, or on the couch. I would eventually have said, "Oh for the love of Pete. Are you crazy?" and wiped his hands off. But only after I'd been shoving his hands out of my face for several minutes, and the couch and my shirt had been stained. But this time, as soon as I felt that flare or irritation, I stopped and said, "What is my opportunity for change here?" I stopped what I was doing, took him downstairs, and wiped off his fingers. Then I took the chips away. Voila. No mess. No fuss. And the minute I took action, I no longer felt anger. And all because I recognized that anger is a cue to take action for change. I'm very excited about this.

So what about you? Are there situations in your life, either temporary, like a tearing book, or long-term, like chronic injustice in a job, that make you angry? Is that anger a cue that you need to change something?

I Don't Care About Deserving. I Care About Consequences

It seems like I often hear people telling other people (or themselves) not to think about consequences, but instead to focus on what they "deserve." There are extreme examples, of course. The sub-prime disaster occurred because too many people were thinking about the fact that they "deserved" nice homes and not thinking about what would happen when the terms of those loans adjusted, or what the long-term consequences of paying on a 9% mortgage for 30 years would be. There are more subtle examples, though, like when someone at a party or on a commercial tells you to take a break from your diet because you "deserve" a treat. Or those times when my husband tells me not to worry about doing the dishes because I "deserve" to relax. These comments puzzle me. What matters is not what a person "deserves," what matters is what they ultimately get as a result of their actions.

Is my body going to say, "Hey! It's Christmas and everybody deserves a few treats at Christmas. We're not going to count this chocolate cake as caloric intake." Or maybe magic kitchen elves will creep through my window and wash my dishes during the night so that I can have the relaxing night I "deserve," and still avoid the consequence of awakening to a messy kitchen in the morning. And don't even get me started on the gambling commercials which try to tell people that they "deserve" a night at the casino.
   
I'm convinced that many people make decisions that others view as extreme and sacrificial because they're ignoring what they "deserve," and instead have a razor-sharp focus on what they want. They know that they want a size four pants size, and that whether or not they deserve chocolate, they won't get what they want if they eat that chocolate. Sure I want to sit down and put my feet up after I've cooked dinner, brushed two little sets of teeth, read two stories, and tucked two little boys in bed, and some people would say that I even deserve to relax. But more than that, I want to wake up to a clean kitchen, so at eight-thirty at night I turn on my Ipod, schlep into my kitchen, and start filling the sink. Because ultimately, I want a clean kitchen more than I want to relax.

Here's my suggestion: instead of telling each other and ourselves what we deserve, we need to start focusing on the consequences that we and each other need. Next time I'm tempted to tell my mom that she "deserves" to sit down and relax after making Sunday dinner, I'm going to get up and help her clean it all up so that she actually can sit down and relax without having to accept the consequences of a dirty kitchen. I'm going to make it so that she doesn't have to sacrifice quite so much to achieve what she wants. That's helping; that's support; that's what we as a society need, and what we actually deserve.