Month: September 2018

Thinking About Work and Being In Between

By / September 20, 2018

Being self employed gets inside your head. It pervades your thoughts and decisions. There is this constant awareness of time, that time not spent on business tasks equals income that won’t arrive. The correlation is not one to one, hours are not created equal. Some hours and tasks are more profitable than others. Unfortunately which hours and tasks are the profitable ones can often only be seen in retrospect. Work is survival, and that gets repeatedly pressed upon the mind of a self employed person.

I’m thinking about this as Howard and I are currently living an in-between space. We’ve left home for a two week trip, which puts us outside our regular business and leisure activities, and we’ve not yet fully entered the conference or recording sessions, both of which are another set of familiar business and leisure activities. We found ourselves with five hours to fill and nothing routine to put into them. It is in such spaces that we unfold our thoughts and have conversations we otherwise would not have. Those conversations are part of why taking trips together is so valuable. We have to remember who we are when we aren’t working, and sometimes the only way for us to not be working is to enter a space where work isn’t possible. Even though being unable to work is inherently anxious for us.

The other reason I’m thinking about the pervasiveness of work, is that the our websites are down this morning. (I’m actually typing this offline and will only be able to post it once the sites are back up.) It is no doubt a small problem, easily fixed once our web guy (who lives in New Zealand) wakes up and checks his email. Outage used to send us into panic. Lack of update felt like imminent doom, the inevitable death of our business. Back then we weren’t able to interrogate our anxieties as well as we do now. Also, we now have years of evidence that an outage blip isn’t going to do long term damage. We aren’t panicked and yet there is still anxiety, this ambient sense that if we don’t properly serve our audience, that audience will vanish and all our resources along with it. Our most common antidote to anxiety is to get back to work…which is difficult when we reside in the between space where we’ve deliberately made work hard to do.

In the between spaces, I ask myself questions about why I’m doing the work that I do and whether I like doing it. I ponder what work I would choose to do if money were not an issue. Where would I spend my efforts if I knew that the bills would always be paid. These are useful questions, not to make me dissatisfied with the life I have now, but to remember what small adjustment I should make in my daily efforts so that at future times when I enter an in between space, I can be glad about the changes I see.

Travel Begins

By / September 19, 2018

Today was the beginning of two weeks of travel which will include a tour of NASA and the fourth Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat which takes place on a cruise ship. The trip began early this morning with transit via shuttle, plane, and car. Now we’ve settled into the Houston hotel where we’ll stay until we board the ship on Sunday. I will have significant hosting and conference work to do, but the spaces in between, I’ll get to write. I’ll get to unfold my creative brain and let it consider long slow thoughts instead of using it up on the logistics tasks required to run house, family, and business.

I’ve never been to Houston before. It feels like a cross between Florida, California, and the deep south. I haven’t been here long enough to think of it except in reference to pieces of other places that I have been. However one thing I do notice is the flatness of the horizon. I’ve lived for the last 25 years in a place where the landscape goes vertical only a few miles from my house. I’ve been to other states with flat horizons, but either I was surrounded by tall buildings, or other obstructions. Here I can see the tall buildings of downtown from fifty miles away. My brain keeps trying to parse the flat horizon as ocean. I guess that is the only flat horizon referent that my brain has stored.

Tonight is for unwinding and travel recovery. Tomorrow we have work to do.

Unexpected Pain in Parenting

By / September 6, 2018

He stood tall and straight when he said it, eyes clear and meeting mine. So different from the past five years or more of hunched shoulders, eyes averted, mumbled words. I’ve been waiting so long to see him take control of his life, step out and take flight. So why did it feel like a stabbing wound when he told me that my house wasn’t home for him anymore, that our family fit uncomfortably, chafing when he spent too long with us. He needed to step out, build his own space, make his own family.

This has always been the endgame of parenting. I knew even when they were babes in arms that someday they would step away from the family I created and create a new one of their own. Children are supposed to want to do things differently than their parents did.
And yet. It is a rejection. I spent two decades building a house and a family. I put myself into it body and soul. I sacrificed so much for it. And one by one my children will tell me that they don’t want it anymore.

He was not mean when he said these things to me. He was trying to be the opposite. He chose his words carefully. It was a conversation about him and his bright plans for the future, a future he can finally see and that he wants to reach for. He was choosing to share this piece of his mind and heart with me. He didn’t have to. He could have just stepped out and away. But he wanted me to know that he loves his family, he always will. He wanted me to know that stepping away was about grabbing his own life. He wanted me to be a part of this shift in his focus. I am invited to participate in this transition, but only as an observer.

So strange to be crying with grief over exactly the thing that I spent months and years crying over because it wasn’t happening.

I finally understand the urge to corner young parents and tell them to enjoy their children while they’re young. But there isn’t any point in pressing this thought on unsuspecting parents who would likely only be frustrated that I don’t understand why they aren’t savoring the particular moment they are in. The hard truth is that even if you savor every moment of your child’s growing up years, you still end up grieving at some point, even if nothing goes wrong. The person a child is at 10 is different then who they were at 3. I watched every bit of the transition, but sometimes there comes a day when I suddenly realize that the three-year-old is gone and I miss that little person, even if they are sitting right next to me transformed into an older person. Sad if they’re failing to launch. Sad when they do launch. And feeling a bit ridiculous for falling into this cliche.

I did my best not to cry in front of my son. I had to go home and unpack why I was crying since it was not a simple case of hurt feelings. He hadn’t said or done anything wrong, the opposite in fact. Yet it caused me grief, which is mine to manage without imposing it on him or making him feel like he should choose differently. He needs room to fly without me in the way.