Only What We Can Handle

I know we must play the hand we are dealt, and admittedly I have been dealt a pretty sweet hand - great parents, solid education, excellent health - perfect kids.  I have no complaints.  But I often wonder how true it is that we are only given what we can handle - if that's the case the universe must not think I'm your go-to-gal if it all goes to shit.  A couple months ago my preschooler broke his femur.  He required surgery and for the better part of seven weeks he had to stay off his feet completely. I held it together pretty well as I tried to take care of him while still working from home. But there were moments - more than I care to admit - that I really lost it. Moments when I could not imagine how I would handle a predicament any worse.

This past Friday evening we had dinner with a couple of friends we had not seen in several years. Their lifestyle had been drastically transformed from a lucrative real estate deal a few years ago. So the new fortunate trajectory of their lives, summers in Park City, affluent social circles, many holidays abroad, caused us to drift apart. Then last summer they under went another lifestyle change - a new, less celebratory trajectory. Mic had a biking accident and broke his neck.

I consider myself a pretty open-minded person who is not adverse to the unknown or things that are different, but I have to admit that this dinner had me very anxious.  Mic is a no nonsense guy - not the most emotional person - some even refer to him as an incredibly likable, well,  asshole. He's aggressive, tells it like it is and is one of the most driven people I have ever met - but you can't help but adore the guy - he's kind and funny and would do anything for you.  My trepidation about the meeting had more to do with what his personality transformation may have been more so than his physical one.  Would our dinner conversation leave me (as just about all conversations with him had) wanting to punch him in the face?  His physical being was going to be different, but what about the person - the elements of him that make us love him, yes and the ones that make us roll our eyes and shake our heads.  Would they still be there?  If they were gone how on earth was I going to hold it together? He, nor his wife, needed to deal with someone throwing a weepy pity party. I felt very guilty about my anxiety.  I felt like I was being incredibly self-centered, but just wanted it to "be OK."

With the nice Philly spring weather comes unbearable down-town traffic so when we arrived at the restaurant Mic and Karen were already seated. I took a deep breath and looked up only to see Mic - sitting there as people do when they are waiting for tardy dinner companions. It was Mic. The same old Mic and the only thing jarring about was him was his hair was long-ish.  That was it. I was comforted by the fact that I almost teased him about his hair, but I held back - I didn't want to get too ahead of myself.  The strides he has made are incredible. He put his glasses on to the read the menu - took them off, put them back on. He drank his usual spirit of choice from a stemmed wine glass with championship precision and grace. He ate oysters unassisted and ordered his duck extra crispy, devouring every last bit. We joked, we reminisced, we played the "how old are the kids now" game. Mic interrupted Karen over and over and she gave him a piece of her mind, as always.  Big steps, small steps - Life goes on.

With Mic and Karen's front row seat through the labyrinth of the health care system has given them a very unique, very real perspective on how broken it is. Even with their "gold-plated insurance policy" there have been pitfalls and frustrating stall tactics and unreasonable restrictions.  Our politics are very different.  Mic is a die-hard Republican - I'm a bleeding heart liberal.  By the time dessert arrived we were in the throws of a heated political discussion.  And much to my heart's content - I wanted to sock him one.  As always Mic was a little more than I could handle... thank God.

Peggy Olson or Betty Draper?

I am very picky about the TV I watch.  And I don't mean that it has to be narrated by someone named Attenborough (but you can't ever go wrong with Sir David).  I mean it has to make me think about it even when I'm not watching it.  One of those shows is Mad Men - whether it is chuckling about a clever Roger Sterling-ism or frankly just thinking about Roger Sterling at all - I think about that dysfunctional ad agency even when I am not watching. Yes, I know ladies, Don Draper is handsome, but Roger Sterling is sexy - I will tackle that monumental difference another day.

I  find myself thinking about Peggy more than any other. I don't think there is another character whose arc I have loved watching more than that of Ms. Peggy Olson. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's cautiously ambitious copywriter never disappoints.  She has allowed me a front row seat to the construction of this career path I tread on so carelessly.  I have watched each of her missteps and tumbles, each of her triumphs and sacrifices like a mini history of the working woman that could be titled "Wanna know whose shoulders you are standing on, Ms. 401K?"

I had such a lack of appreciation for the working women in their 50s and 60s I encountered when I entered the workplace in the mid 90s.  They must have chuckled to themselves and thought "dear you don't know how good you have it and, by the way, you're welcome."  I didn't pay much attention to them.  I had very little appreciation for what they had seen, the battles they knowingly or perhaps unwittingly fought for me so I could flippantly ask myself  "gee, what do I want be when I grow up?"

The single most important thing for the advancement of women has been our proliferation into the workforce. I would even go so far to say that without working women there would have been no Roe v. Wade. Working has enabled women to define their place in this man's world - the bitter potion needed to transform ourselves into the fighting machines we need to be to achieve everything else from this day forward.

There has been much talk lately about stay at home moms and working moms - and oh wait all moms are working moms.  Sure.  Have it your way.  All moms are working moms.  But can we please stop already with "it's the hardest job in the world?"  It's not. Seal Team 6 - that job is hard - see the difference? Here is another hard truth - some moms have one job, moms that work outside the home have two.  I am a work-outside-of-the-home-mom or whatever phraseology I am supposed to use so I don't hurt someone's feelings.  And to be honest I am not working so "all women can have the right to choose to stay at home."  I'm not - stay at home moms make me scratch my head in bewilderment. In the non-car-elevator-having real world the majority of women have no choice - they must work to ensure the security and stability of their families.  Those moms that get to "not work outside the home" - good for you, thank your hard-working partners - often.  But please do not compare your one job to my two, or, for some woman, three. Or even more. We live in different worlds.

If it weren't for all the Peggy Olsons women could aspire to be nothing more than a Betty Draper, I mean Betty Francis. And that's not much of a life worth having...if you ask me. So thank you Ms. Olson. Where we would be without all of you I just can't imagine...

A Guy's Girl in a Girl's Girl World

"Are you a guy's girl or a girl's girl?"  I heard this statement uttered not long ago on one of those abysmal reality shows that I watch when no one is looking. It was really the first time I had heard that phrase uttered and yet I instantly knew what the bimbo in the couture t-shirt meant. Once again a "meaning of life" moment came to me from an unlikely source. The answer?  I am a guy's girl. The question?  Why do I find interacting with women so difficult?

Now contrary to what you might think, being a guy's girl does not mean that men want to be around you more than women want to be around you  - although that may end up being the case.  It has more to do with who you prefer to be around.  Ask yourself this - you have signed up for a professional training class of some sort and there are two tables each with just one seat remaining.  One is a table of men, the other is a table of women.  At which table would you prefer to take your seat?  Not the one at which you may actually sit, but the one at which you would rather be for the next 7 hours?  If you said the guys' table, then you are a guy's girl, even if some unidentified social pressure leads you to plop down with the gaggle of gals. Let's face it, that unidentified social pressure is wanting to be accepted by other women.

Now it seems simple right?  All the guy's girls should be friends and all the girl's girls should be friends.  However, we don't necessarily wear lapel pins or have a secret hand shake.  Besides, all the guy's girls want to be hanging out with men anyway.  So by definition guy's girls repel each other - at least at first.  This does not mean that guy's girls don't have female friends.  I would venture to say that I probably have just as many as any other 40 year old.  What I don't have are enjoyable cocktail party experiences.  I, for the life of me, cannot pull off small talk with another woman. I can't get much mileage out of talking about my children - it's just not me to talk about how wonderful motherhood is or which park has the best jungle gym. I am also the only woman you will ever meet that doesn't fuss over shoes.  However, put me with a stranger of the male variety and I am perfectly comfortable talking about the weather... or my kids, or even shoes.

Case in point. This past weekend I attended a small-ish gathering of a group of people I adore. All of our children are about the same age and all attended daycare together.  There is one couple I do not know very well and I have noticed that the wife never seems to want to be around me - we never exchange hellos or goodbyes and any words we do exchange are very forced.  I don't worry about it too much - not everyone likes everyone.  But I found myself yuckin' it up with her husband. In the pile of toys in the corner we spotted the new and improved EZ Bake Oven. Yep those little fire hazards are still around.  So we started to joke that Top Chef should do a Quick Fire challenge based exclusively on the EZ Bake Oven.  It was a funny, quick conversation that would have been impossible with his better half.

But why would it have been impossible or, at best, excruciating? I am going to go out on a limb and try to solve this mystery.  And yes, brace yourself for one of those "men and women are different" lists. Men are less judgmental.  Men are less guarded. Men have more accessible senses of humor. Men don't overtly compete with each other on the small stuff.  Men just have less interest in bullshit. There is a reason they say that women primp for other women not other men.  Men don't notice the small shit, let alone care.  I was once at one of these gatherings and one of the women not-so-subtly lamented that I was the only woman that had not declared her shoes to be "fabulous."  To which I wanted to reply - "you're wearing shoes?"  But I didn't because I want them to like me. Yeah I am thinking it's a lost cause.

So since most of the men I encounter are married, engaging in too much enjoyable small talk with them would pretty much seal the deal that I won't be buddy-buddy with the Mrs.  So at cocktail parties (with the men off limits and the women impossible to talk to) - I am pretty easy to spot - I am usually the one filling the ice bucket.

Jeremy Wade & the Myth of Getting to Carnegie Hall

"Anyone who tells you there isn't an element of luck is lying."  A very straightforward statement that came flying at me like a curve ball. And it came at me from a very unlikely source - Jeremy Wade the intrepid fisherman of Animal Planet's River Monsters fame. He was answering a question he had easily been asked a hundred times before in one form or another, "What is the secret of your success?"  Fully expecting the answer to be the stock "hard work, years of sacrifice" I was very surprised at the frank admission that comprised part of his answer. Like everything I had seen him do (survive a plane crash in the Amazon, wrestle an enormous sting ray from  the bottom of a river, catch several bull sharks on the end of his line) this answer made me lean forward and pay closer attention to a man that frequently had me peering between my fingers and wondering "does his mother know he does this crazy stuff?"

Having hunkered down in my suburban existence long ago I have accepted that, for the time being, my travel adventures must be had vicariously through the "tell me all about your trip" talks over hastened lunches or the divided attention I might give to one of those "100 places your lame ass will never get to see" travel shows.  That brought me to my accidental stumble onto Mr. Wade. I switched on Animal Planet one random afternoon two years ago and the rest is history that, well, explains why my DVR memory is always near capacity with episodes and specials I refuse to delete.  Simply, he had me at "Hello, I am going to sit in this pool of piranhas to see what happens."

Over and over he has allowed me to be his silent travel companion and, being the nice bloke he is, has let me get away with not having to carry a single bit of gear. I was now able to trek to real places - not the antiseptic "slice of America" resorts scattered across the globe - but other cultures, other worlds, where Jeremy and I were the polite, soft-spoken interlopers.  All the while, I watched this unique man pull fragile monsters from rivers, marvel at them and release them back to the murky depths.

Sometimes what stirs us, what awakens parts of us we did not even know were asleep, can be more unexpected than the realization that we were asleep in the first place. Fish? Not only fish, but fishing?  The thing my aunt used to complain my uncle did too much of?  No. Not the fishing. Not even perhaps the fish. Him. And I don't mean it that way - I don't mean the physical him, although - oh never mind.  I mean the existential him.  I have been told (as I think everyone has) that if you follow your heart and do what you love the money will find you.  Funny, I always hear that from people who seem unbearably miserable with what they are saddled with doing day in and day out.

I don't think Mr. Wade would say that the money found him (although I am quite sure it has).  I'm just not sure the two were even looking for each other. But I do think he would say that by staying true to his passion and being guided by his principles and his own happiness he has had his rendezvous with luck.  And now, millions of people get to see him do what he would be doing anyway, with or without us.  Lucky for me, he lets us watch.