Here are a handful of things a woman might do that could get her labeled as “difficult”:
Refuse to smile when someone tells her she would look prettier that way
Ask for what she wants
Insist on equal treatment
Express an unpopular opinion (or even a popular one in the wrong company)
Say she isn’t interested in sex at the moment
Request help around the house or with the children
Believe it should be her body and her choice
Put herself first or make herself a priority
Know her worth
Expect appropriate acknowledgment and compensation for a job well done
Go against social norms, especially regarding appearance, career choice, or motherhood
Exhibit her anger, disappointment, or sadness
Call herself a feminist
Clap back against a cat call or other uninvited advance from an unknown male
There are, I’m certain, many other things a woman might do that could get her branded as difficult. It’s not just men who would label a self-assured or successful woman difficult. Sometimes women will cast other women in that same light because they are so accustomed to societal norms they don’t see the inherent sexism in them.
I have been labeled difficult plenty of times. It used to bother me. Now I simply see it as my duty. I’m not saying we need to smash the patriarchy to smithereens, but I think we’d do a lot better as a species if we allowed the world to become more balanced. Too much of any one thing is never a good idea, especially if that one thing is testosterone.
My husband and I are finally finishing Season Two of The Morning Show. Reflecting on the beginning of the pandemic as I watch this show, it’s crazy to think of where we were two years ago. How little we knew about Covid-19. How terrifying it seemed. How quickly we pivoted and changed the way we educate children, shop, and work. How we started sewing masks, stockpiling toilet paper, having video chats with family. It seems so normal now. At the time, though, it was all new.
We moved across town four months into the pandemic. Our oldest graduated high school in a single person ceremony, with a graduation address delivered remotely by one of his favorite teachers in May of 2020. Our youngest spent the 2020-2021 school year going back and forth between in-person learning and video classes. We took my mother-in-law, who had been in an independent living facility, out of that living situation, and she began splitting time between a basement apartment in our home and a townhome next door to my sister-in-law. My husband has been working from home for two years. He has been back into his office three days in that time. Everything is different now. Even as we hit pockets of time when it almost feels we’re back in 2019, our world has been changed permanently.
It’s simultaneously impressive and depressing what we humans are capable of. The good and the bad we’ve seen over the past two years has been something else. We got sick, but created a vaccine. We left the office, but kept the economy going. We did our jobs from home while helping our kids complete their lessons. If you had told me in December 2019 that we would be living through a worldwide pandemic in 2020, I would have rolled my eyes. I couldn’t have imagined what that would be like. If you’d told me then that I’d daily be checking Covid cases on a map on The New York Times web site, I would have laughed. If you’d told me that people would attack each other or be pulled off airplanes because of paper masks or the lack thereof, I would have thought you were crazy. It has been a wild ride.
The world is funny. Not funny, haha, but funny the way we hairless monkeys get ourselves into and out of trouble on an endless loop. We really are something else.
It took me far too long to grasp the truth of this statement, and it took even longer for me to comprehend that just because someone is in your life because of a blood relation or an obligation doesn’t mean they will look out for you. Sometimes it’s a shock to discover how easily someone I trusted and believed in can turn on me to protect their own ego. There are people in my life, in my circle even, who have their own agendas when it comes to me and who I am. I know them like the back of my hand because I was them. I came from them. I know what resides in their hearts, and I let them stick around anyway. I keep them around not because I feel obligated to but because they remind me where I came from and what I’ve worked so hard to overcome. They illuminate my personal growth. Their presence in my life is a continual, flashing neon sign highlighting what I don’t want to be. The difference between the old me and the new me is that the new me knows the weakest links in my circle and doesn’t put any stock in their world view. The new me trusts my judgment and my heart. I’ve strengthened my ability to look out for myself. I know there are some people in my life who are definitely not in my corner, but it is precisely through their lack of support, forgiveness, and common kindness that I gain a little more wisdom about myself. Every time they test me and prove they are not in my corner, it hurts less and less and I feel stronger and stronger about who I am.
Sometimes, it’s best to cut and run from people who have been hurting you from time immemorial. It can be life saving, even. Sometimes, though, it’s not a bad idea to let some people who don’t deserve to stick around, well, stick around. Sometimes it’s the people who aren’t in your corner who make you see and appreciate those who are. And what a glorious day it is when, through the actions of the people who aren’t looking out for your best interests, you realize that at long last you are and now you are finally, solidly in your own corner.
I saw this quote recently, and it struck a chord with me. Not just because people from my childhood on have sized me up, rated and assessed me according to their standards, and then expected me to fit in that neat little box for the rest of forever. If I grew or changed, they became disoriented in our relationship. Some adjusted, although in most cases we simply parted ways. I know this is a human condition. I know I too have sized people up, assigned labels, and lived in that fabricated paradigm with them, never acknowledging they might be more than I have given them credit for. Never once thinking perhaps the terms I ascribed to them were placed there via my own filters and were, at their kindest, a little biased, and at their most abhorrent, completely unfair.
It’s what we do as humans. We look at others hoping to find similarities. We look for our people. When we run across someone who doesn’t fit our prescribed guidelines, we pack them up and place them in the box we’ve determined they belong in. We are often wrong because, although we may have asked some initial questions, we usually haven’t conducted important follow-up inquiries to get beyond the superficial. We stick to the surface. We may half hear one part of a response to a question we’ve asked and suddenly we’re off to the races on judgment. If this pattern were an Olympic event, I would be in gold medal contention. At the very least, I’d probably make the podium.
In my world, I am working to be, as Ted Lasso reminds us, curious and not judgmental. Holy hell is that a hard road to walk after a lifetime of judging that began when I was but a wee Polish-Catholic girl. I will keep on working at it, though, because I can’t expect people to accept the ways in which I have changed unless I am willing to view them through a different lens as well. This ability, to allow others to grow and develop in ways that suit their goals and lives, is one I work on constantly. I do this because I don’t want to grow apart from the people I care about. My sons are clearly much more than I have decided they are, and I have to work to remind myself of that. They deserve their own chance to define themselves without my input. So, I am trying to be curious, to observe, to ask questions, and to apologize when I haven’t allowed them enough room to challenge their perceptions of themselves, to reach outside of their past behaviors, likes, and wishes and stretch.
Take a minute to reflect on how you measure people. Are you taking their measurements every time you meet them to determine how they are different and how you can fit into their new schema or are you expecting them to fit into the same outfit you gave them a decade ago? In what ways have you limited a relationship by neither admitting your own growth or acknowledging someone else’s?
On Wednesday nights, our neighborhood coffee shop/bar/gathering space hosts DJ Trivia. We have gone a couple times with some of our awesome neighbors. This week, none of our neighbors were available to join the festivities. We thought about skipping out too but, with Joe home from college and Luke without homework before spring break, we decided we had enough of a team with just the four of us. The boys were so not thrilled that we were dragging them along that Luke decided the only appropriate team name was Two Willing Participants since they didn’t want to be there.
We got through the first round with all the possible points, but it’s the easy round. We clinched the bonus question because of my gift with lyrics. Who knew that my brain would pull Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar On Me out of its cobwebby recesses? I haven’t willingly listened to that song since, well, ever. Anyhoo, we struggled the second round and ended with 20 out of 40 points and didn’t even dare take a stab at the bonus question. We were sitting in 6th place out of 7 teams, and our confidence was flagging. Somehow, though, we rallied in the third round, scoring 60 out of 80. Luke knew the bonus question about the alloy of copper and tin (it’s bronze), and we were right back in it. Suddenly, we were sitting in third, which meant we were in prize territory.
The final round is fill-in-the-blank questions rather than multiple choice. We got the first two fairly easily, but missed the next two. We were somehow still in third place as we waded into the final bonus round, called the Do Or Die Dare round. We strategized how to play it and decided it was go big or go home. If we got the question right, we would double our entire score and could finish in a higher place, or at least hold on to third and win a prize. And then, as if the gods were on our side, the title of the bonus round question hit the screen. The title was Fun With Flags. We all looked at Joe. This was our Slumdog Millionaire moment. Joe has long been a fan of geography and flags. He’s a regular vexillologist. In his senior year, he had to give a 45-minute presentation on a topic of his choice. The title of the presentation he shared with his classmates? Fun With Flags. I shit you not.
Yeah…I know that flag
Steve pushed himself back from the table with a “this is it” flourish of glee. A flag appeared on the trivia screens. Joe looked at it for a nanosecond, leaned forward, and said quietly with the utmost confidence, “Uzbekistan.” I grabbed the paper and wrote it down. We handed it to the DJ judge in five seconds flat while the rest of the tables sat hemming and hawing and conjecturing. It appeared no one wanted to risk all their points with an answer. Finally, a representative from the Vandalay Industries team stood up and walked to submit their answer. We all knew Joe had provided the right answer. Not because any of us had a clue about the flag of Uzbekistan but because Joe. The DJ did all the tabulating and then announced that only two answers had been submitted for the Do or Die Dare and only one of those was right. The correct answer was Uzbekistan.
Yeah, baby!
The DJ read off the name of the third place winner. We smiled. Second place went to the team that often wins each week, Hot Fuzz. The room was dead silent. Someone had pulled off an upset. The DJ put our team name on the screen, and we high-fived all around while Hot Fuzz looked over at us like we’d just kicked their puppy. Two Willing Participants won largely due to the efforts of its two unwilling team participants, and the coveted $25 brewery gift card and bragging rights for the week were ours. It was positively glorious.
A member of Team Hot Fuzz, still flabbergasted by their unexpected loss, shouted over to Joe to inquire how he knew the answer to the flag question so quickly. To which Joe replied, “I have the flags of the world memorized. It’s a good party trick.” This twenty year old kid just ruined their evening, and I couldn’t have been any prouder. It made all the hours I’ve spent quizzing Joe on flags and listening to him prattle on about the poorly designed ones totally worth it.
Joe with his personal Uzbekistan flag at home after our win
I guess there are a few lessons to be learned from our trivia evening. First, never, ever assume something you are asked to do (like attend a trivia night with your parents) will be a waste of time because you never know what you might learn about yourself or others. Second, if you encourage your child’s obsessions, they might pay off. Third, if you’re going to trivia night, take Joe and Luke with you. Their arcane knowledge about flags or every letter of the Greek alphabet or the names of Roman emperors might be just what you need to humble Hot Fuzz. And finally, if your kid wants to collect flags, let him.
Yesterday I posted about a pair of Betsey Johnson, ruby red, rhinestone-bedazzled, four-inch heeled pumps. My son spotted them and pointed them out to me while we were in DSW looking for summer shoes for our upcoming cruise. I tried them on because I had to. I mean, is it even possible to walk past these stunners without at least being curious if they could change your life or transport you to Kansas if you click your heels three times? Oh…and did I mention they also come in silver (and green and blue too)? Fabulous.
As a rule, I do not blog about things like shoes because I am not exactly a fashionista. I fall solidly in the fashion category “trying not to dress like my grandma but definitely not wearing crop tops either.” So it’s surprising that I am writing about shoes two days in a row. But I got a lot of feedback from friends and fellow bloggers about these shoes today. All the comments said I should “buy the shoes.”
So, I think I will take some time to go back to DSW and try them out again. If I get them, they would be a splurge on something that will mostly live on a shelf in my closet. They won’t be alone, though. They will join these lovelies, both of which have been worn a couple times at most. I can’t bring myself to part with them because they make me happy and remind me that I am (or at least have been on occasion) a little more than a typical suburban housewife. Sometimes I am a little sassy.
Is it silly to spend money on something you will hardly use? If it is, I have a house full of silly things. I rarely use the Pottery Barn appetizer plates with 1960s cocktail recipes on them that we received as a gift from friends years ago, but I still like them and so they live in our cupboard. We have an Instapot that has only ever cooked eggs, maybe three times. We have a collection of 1980s-era beverage glasses from Burger King with Star Wars characters on them too, but I am not parting with those. If I got rid of everything in our home that is not used daily or even regularly, we could downsize to a 1000 square foot apartment with two-bedrooms (I need the extra closet for my awesome shoes). So, what would be the harm in buying a pair of ruby slippers that make me smile and feel a little feisty? Worst case scenario is that someday I pass them along in pristine condition to some other woman who would get to live out her Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz magic.
Sometimes I think too much. Sometimes it’s best to stop thinking and buy the damn shoes.
I was this many days old when I learned it is actually Daylight Saving Time and not Daylight Savings Time. Live and learn. I think the entire concept of daylight saving is ludicrous. You’re not saving daylight. You’re switching when it is daylight. It’s not as if we hit 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and suddenly the sun starts offering up more sun for us to tuck away in our piggy banks and save for a rainy day. Ridiculous!
There is debate to be had about whether it’s better to have a sunnier morning or a sunnier evening. In Arizona, where they don’t observe this daylight saving nonsense, summer makes hella more sense with an earlier sunrise time (when it’s still somewhat bearable outside) and an earlier sunset time (when the temperature is hovering somewhere just below Hades hot). When we lived there, I didn’t enjoy waking up at 5 to get in a walk before it got so hot the soles of my shoes warped, but I sure did enjoy sitting on a hose-misted patio in the moonlight when it was still 95 out but felt much more pleasant without the sun’s brutal rays.
I’m not sure which time I would prefer we stick with but, good goddammit, I really wish we would stick with one. I would not miss this heartless, exhausting, spring-forward nightmare. I mean, going to bed when you are not yet sleepy and waking up a full hour before it makes any sense to be awake is vicious and unnecessary. And yet we repeat this stupidity annually.
Adjusting to our oldest going off to college has been a journey, but it hasn’t been as horrible as I imagined it would be. Yeah. I was pretty sad for the first month he was gone last year, but then he made friends and my sadness was replaced with comfort that he was not alone. Later, as his grades came in and we realized he was holding his own, I began to feel even better. This year, he started dating a friend he made during his first semester last year, and that too added some peace of mind because I know he is happy. Next year, his brother will be joining him. Although I will be without both of them, they will be together, and I can’t think of anything that makes my momma heart happier than thinking about them starting their own lives separately but still together.
I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster lately. I have worked so hard to determine my boundaries, to believe in my agency in my life, and to have faith that I can move beyond the things that have held me back. One day I am 100% confident I am on the right path. The next day I am terrified about my ability to do the most basic things to move myself forward. And on top of all this, my emotions are raw, and I can cry about anything at any moment. I’ve never been like this before. I used to feel in control of my path and my heart. These days, I am a bag of mixed nuts. I feel like a train wreck, but in the best way. I’m embracing the uncertainty of it all. I’m feeling every feeling. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I’m laughing. I’m crying. I hopped on this ride, and I’m here for it.
“The key to being happy is knowing you have the power to choose what to accept and what to let go.” ~Dodinsky
I am working on this now as part of my experiment with boundaries. There are things I have chosen in my life that have not been making me happy. So now it’s time to choose happiness over obligation, over fear, over what others think is right. For some people, choosing happiness is easy. I struggled to recognize what happiness was. What I choose to accept now is that I get to choose. It’s not about what others think is right for me or what others want for me. Now I get to choose what I want for myself.
I’m excited to get my life on track. My life. Not the life others chose for me.
Live Now and Zen 