Confessions of a Plant Killer

I planted these previously healthy salvia on Saturday. That's right, two days ago. It's no wonder I often think I'd have been better off getting a condo instead of a house with a yard.

Dear HTT, I work full-time, take care of a house and two small children, and I'm exhausted!!

Dear HTT,

After working from home for the past six years (five telecommuting, one running [okay, more like stumbling] my own company), I've rejoined the 9 to 5 working world. I get up early, take a shower, put on actual clothes rather than running pants and a stretched-out t-shirt, get my 5-year-old girl and 3-year-old boy ready for school, put on MAKEUP and CURL MY HAIR (every day I'm saying!), go to work, deal with all the ridiculous little office personality crap all day and work every second (there is definitely no Internet surfing time at this place--I'm not even allowed phone calls or personal email), go home, cobble together some kind of dinner for the kids (typical dinner: veggie and fruit tray from Food Lion to pick at, slice of American cheese, watered-down juice), and fall asleep on the couch at about 8:00pm while my husband puts the kids to bed.

Here's my question. How do people who work in an office all day every week have any kind of life? I don't exercise, I gobble down fast food most of the time for lunch, I'm too tired to read my email at home and only occasionally look at it on the weekend. I don't talk to or see my friends or extended family. Sex is a distant memory. I usually sleep most of the day on Saturdays and spend Sunday desperately trying to get ahead of the laundry. I have not seen the bottom of the hampers since I started this job at the beginning of February. To further complicate matters, every other week is a deadline week, and I have to work late (alone, as my boss prefers to go out drinking with friends and everybody else is a sales rep) every day, not even getting to see my kids at all before they go to bed.

How can I balance work and having a life? I actually like the task part of my job and am good at it, and the location is perfect -- 2 minutes from my house. My husband has a good job, but it won't pay all the bills, especially because we ran up an extra $15,000 in credit card debt during the year I was trying to run my own business. I eat a lot of chocolate to try to fight getting depressed, and that's just making my clothes smaller... along with the junk food. What I really want is to be a stay-at-home mom and take care of the house and maybe do some freelance web design on the side. Way on the side. Practically falling off the edge of the side, if you know what I mean. I want to spend quality time with my kids and husband, help provide a healthy lifestyle for them, walk my dogs, see my friends, have a clean house and no piles of dirty laundry, actually go to a movie once in a while, etc etc etc.

Can you help me?

Signed,
Tired and Whiny In Cary


Dear Tired,

Wow. I feel spectacularly unqualified to answer your question. I have no idea how families with small children and two working parents manage. I’m only responsible for me, and sometimes I still feel overwhelmed by how much effort it takes to keep life on track. But I have given work-life balance a lot of thought over the years, so let’s see if I can ask a few questions and maybe offer some suggestions.

Is it possible you’ve got some perfectionist tendencies? If so, maybe you’re being too hard on yourself about your housekeeping, the meals you serve, and the state of your laundry pile. Try to figure out what you can let slide a little without beating yourself up about it. Most small kids I know aren’t clamoring for fancy meals, so if you’re meeting their nutritional needs, I wouldn’t sweat it that you didn’t whip up something from Martha Stewart’s recipe collection. If the family has enough clothes to last for a few days, take the dogs for a walk if you want, even if the hamper isn’t empty. Something’s got to give.

Are you getting enough help? From all the articles I’ve read, it seems that mothers generally still do more than their fair share of the house and kid duties. I don’t know your husband, so I don’t mean to sully his good name. Just asking.

(As an aside, I think it’s hilarious that this article in the Wall Street Journal crows over the results of a research study that showed that women underestimate the amount of time that men spend on housework. Women reported that their male partners did 33% of household chores, but when the researchers tracked men’s actual housework time it amounted to a whopping 39%. Excuse them for being off by six percent!!)

I know you have bills to pay, but can a compromise be struck? Can you do some part-time work instead of the full-time grind? And while it sounds like you enjoy your work tasks, it also seems that the working conditions leave something to be desired. Do you think a job search might be in order?

And now I’m getting into dangerous waters because, let me be clear, I am no budget guru and am definitely not one to be giving financial advice. But I can recommend a book I once read called “Your Money or Your Life,” which discusses the true costs of working (commuting, clothes, daycare, meals bought rather than fixed, job-related illness, stress-induced spending, etc.) and challenges readers to think about their purchases in terms of how many “life hours” they cost you. I guess what I’m trying to get around to, delicately, is this: is there room in your budget to cut back in order to pay off your debt more quickly? Will you be able to afford to quit working, or work less, once you do? I can tolerate just about anything if I’ve got a plan and an end in sight.

You need some support. Do you know other moms who work full time? How do they do it? Can they offer any advice? (I might fancy myself an advice columnist, but I also know when I'm out of my league!) And finally, are you depressed? O.K., clearly you're depressed and stressed out, and you have every right to be. But situational depression aside, do you think there’s something deeper going on?

You don’t need me to tell you this, but I will anyway. You deserve to have more fun in the one life you’ve got.

Good luck, my friend.
HTT

Who names these roads?

We've all seen some funny street names around here, like Jones Sausage Road in Raleigh, which also used to boast a Jackass Road. Today, I was in a northern Durham neighborhood and was compelled to take this picture. I'm just saying.

Back in the saddle, and "HTT, my friend 'found' herself and has become annoying about it"

So, I took a few days off. The film festival was generally amazing, but it turns out my attendance didn't leave much time for blogging or advice giving. Then, I lost power for about a day and a half because of the crazy wind storm. I had to toss the contents of my fridge, but after watching four days' worth of films about man's inhumanity to man (to say nothing of news coverage about Virginia Tech), I was able to keep the loss of a few Lean Cuisines and frozen fruit bars in perspective.

On to my next letter....


Dear HTT,

I have a good friend who has become involved in a series of time-consuming, expensive workshops designed to teach her, as she puts it, how to make her dreams reality. I'll admit she has dramatically adjusted her outlook on life, becoming more direct about asking for what she wants but also revealing a lack of self-confidence I hadn't noticed before. When she doesn't get what she asks for, or when people simply treat her badly, she blames herself for not expressing her needs clearly enough.

One evening, in a state of what sounded like manic giddiness, she phoned to tell me she wanted me to take the same workshops. I declined (for the second time that week) and she pushed: "What's standing in the way of you realizing your dreams?" It was hard for me to say, but I told her I missed her and thought poorly of the workshops. She tried recruiting several friends in our circle, even offering to loan everyone the money for the fees. No one obliged, and once the series ended, she stopped recruiting.

Fast forward a few months. I'm making an effort to pretend she didn't violate our friendship (it felt like she did, anyway; did she?) and am having a hard time with her newfound directness. She recently emailed a large group of friends to reschedule a gathering she had organized ("Check your schedules for next month. I'm going to the mountains instead!"). I probably wouldn't have minded had she softened the request with a simple "sorry, this is the only weekend we could go"; instead, she softened it with "Please join us!" Surely it wouldn't be hard for me to tell her when I'm free next month, but I'm finding myself trying to concoct reasons that I'm busy every weekend. Any suggestions on how I might overcome my annoyance, accept her new happy self for who she is, and move on?

--Anti-dreamer

Dear Anti,

At one time or another, most of us enthusiastically proselytize about something, whether it’s an author we love, a cause we support, or the best nachos in town (The Federal). So, I can’t fault your friend for extending the initial invitation. The workshops changed her life. She wanted her friends to benefit from them as well. Fine.

But she continued pushing after you declined. Not fine. I imagine also that you bristled when she chalked up your disinclination to attend the workshops to some deficiency on your part. I would have.

And while I’m fueling the fire, I’ll add that I find it annoying when people self-actualize at the expense of good manners, as your friend did in cancelling your gathering. I had an acquaintance who frequently cancelled plans at the last minute, with no apology, on the grounds that she “needed to take care of herself.” It’s not like she had a dialysis appointment.

So, what to do depends on your capacity to forget and forgive. If you can let go of any lingering bitterness about your friend’s recruiting tactics, just focus on the present. If she does something that upsets you, talk to her. But leave her self-actualization out of it, even if you think her new philosophy might be a cause of her behavior. You aren’t going to win by likening the workshops to a cult or suggesting that they had a detrimental effect on her personality. She feels strongly that they helped her and could take your criticism as sour grapes or a lack of enlightenment.

If you remain upset about the way she pushed the boundaries of your friendship (and yes, I think she did do so), you might just have to air those grievances too. Again, I’d be careful not to criticize the workshops themselves, but instead address how you felt pressured by her insistence that you attend.

Depending on how long ago she finished the workshops, it could be that time will mellow the way she applies what she learned. For now, maybe some distance between you wouldn’t be a bad idea. If you don’t want to go to the rescheduled gathering, don’t make excuses about it. Just follow her model of directness and say, “why don’t you schedule it without me this time, and I’ll make the next one.”

Finally, since you and your other friends declined her invitation, your friend is sure to sense your disapproval. Whatever discussion you have with her will be better received if you can truly imagine ways the workshops—despite what you think of them personally—may have helped her.

Take care,
HTT

Full Frame Day 1

T and I at Full Frame.



This was the first day of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. I skipped the late movie on the theory that you have to pace yourself; I think 12 hours at the festival on the first day are plenty!

Saw some great films today. Not a lot of laughs in this bunch, though:

(1) An elderly couple recounted what they had experienced during Katrina.
(2) Some evacuees from Chernobyl returned for the first time to their town, which has been deserted for 20 years and is still highly radioactive. Lots of haunting images of the town and of the inside (!) of the destroyed reactor itself.
(3) A look at homosexuality and Christianity--several people described their experiences coming out in very religious families. This one was uplifting, at least, because families featured in the film came to accept their children and, in fact, became activists for acceptance in the Church.
(4) A long, graphic, and depressing film about abortion. Much discussion of radical pro-lifers and murders of abortion providers. The film was not, however, just a pro-choice screed--the director didn't shy away from showing several aborted fetuses. The visuals left me shaken, despite my own firm pro-choice stance.
(5) A story of a 400-person human-pyramid-building team in Catalonia. This was a fun one, but it made my palms sweat out of nerves as small children climbed to the top of these three-story human towers. No wonder Europeans think we're wimps for wearing bicycle helmets!

HTT, our bar is well stocked and now some of our guests think we're lushes!

Dear HTT,

My husband and I have a well-stocked bar. Nothing to compare with what you'd find in a drinking establishment, but a greater variety of liquors than we usually find at the homes of our friends.

The sitch is that we like to entertain, and we like being the type of hosts that can offer our guests a variety of drink options, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. Aside from drinking with friends, we seldom drink ourselves.

Recently, on several occasions, guests to our home have made comments that suggested it was weird that we had so much stuff. My husband's boss' wife specifically asked me how often my husband and I make drinks for ourselves, and it was said in a way that it was clear that she was wondering if either of us had a drinking problem. A full bar doesn't mean that she's going to find a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey next to the toilet, but apparently some people think this way.

And it seems now we've become the booze couple: At pot-luck functions hosted by other people, we're getting asked to bring the alcohol instead of food, despite the fact that I am an excellent cook (you've had the cheesy potatoes). Can you offer any advice? Should I just ignore this?

Wrong Message in the Bottles


Dear Wrong Message,

How odd that the effort you’ve made to be considerate hosts has somehow cast you in a suspicious light! If your refrigerator were equally well stocked, and I suspect it is, would people wonder if you were binge eaters?

I, myself, am not terribly adept at hosting parties, at least not without weeks of advance planning. Well, I can whip up a party-music playlist like nobody’s business, but I do not have a well-stocked bar. I have a creaky, plastic lazy Susan in a corner kitchen cabinet with several dusty, half-full bottles of no-name brandy from the last time I made sangria. There’s some decent gin in the freezer, but rarely any tonic or lime, so unless you’re pretty hardcore, you’re out of luck there. At best, I might have a bottle of wine (red only) and a few stray beers in the fridge. (I don’t drink beer, so these are leftovers from six packs brought by friends who know I’m no hostess.)

In general, people just don’t throw parties like they used to. Think about all those classic movies; homes always seemed to be equipped with a bar…an actual piece of furniture dedicated to liquor and elegant stemware. You wouldn’t see Cary Grant breezing into a friend’s place with case of Yuengling in tow.

So, I’m guessing that your friends are simply unaccustomed to people who take pains to accommodate their guests to the extent that you do. It’s unfortunate that some of your visitors think you might be in need of an intervention and a 12-step program, but you’ve handled things just right. When people comment on your bar, continue to make off-hand pleasantries about how you like to be good hosts, rather than launching into any more lengthy, apologetic explanation. If repeat guests don’t get the hint, start offering them nothing but Diet Cheerwine and tap water. That’ll show them!

As for the potlucks: next time someone asks you to bring a bottle of hooch, why don’t you say something along the lines of “Oh, gosh, I’ve been dying to try out this new recipe for crab dip. Would you mind terribly if I brought that instead?” Or, “Back in North Carolina, I was famous for my cheesy potatoes, and I’d love for y’all to try them as well and let me know what you think.”

You can have me over for a drink any time!

HTT

Family Reunion Part Deux

For years, every time I visited my mother in Sarasota, she'd suggest--like many good Floridian hosts do--visiting a theme park, and I'd assure her that I'd rather poke my own eyeballs out. Sarasota is a lovely city, and there is plenty of fun to be had there: botanical gardens, museums, the beach, pools, some great used-book stores and thrift shops, movies, boat rides on the bay, and John Ringling's beautiful Gothic mansion. I don't need to be flung against a bunch of strangers in a giant, spinning tea cup.

So, when my brother mentioned his proposal to my mom, her FIRST words were "And what was your sister's reaction?" When he confessed that it had been tepid at best, mom recommended that we all go on a cruise instead.

I briefly wondered if they were running a good cop / bad cop scam on me. Because normally, I wouldn't be all that jazzed over the idea of going on a cruise with my whole family, but compared to Disney World it sounds like heaven. At least on a big ship, I can find a secluded lounge chair somewhere; order some tall, fruity, rum-based beverages; and read a good book.