Y I Love the Y

(Sorry about the title - I just couldn't resist the pun.)

When I was younger, the only thing I knew about the YMCA was the song, which I heard mainly at the roller rink. A couple of years ago I was complaining to a friend about how hard it was to exercise as a mom with young children, and she suggested that I join our local Y primarily because they offer childcare while you work out.

The Y has come to be one of my favorite places. This is why:

1. They take my kids away from me for up to 2 hours a day. If this doesn't sound like a reason to love a place, you either 1) don't have kids, or 2) are Super Mom. (If you are Super Mom, then my blog is probably not going to be of much interest to you. Move along.)

2. They take my kids away from me for up to 2 hours a day. Oh, did I already say that? Ha, ha, just kidding then. What I meant was, my kids get to do interesting things with other people that they don't get to do at home. The folks staffing the kid places at the Y are super nice (OK, with one exception, but we try to avoid her), and my kids love going there to play. Plus they get to play with other kids, something that preschoolers don't get to do very often. I could write a whole post (maybe I will) about how unhealthy I think it is for kids to be stuck in a house with one and the same adult day in and day out. It takes a village.

3. I get to think as I walk around the track. I like to think.

4. Working out is my anti-depressant. Seriously! I read an article somewhere (and I never remember where I read anything, so don't count on me to cite my sources) that said that exercise had proven at least as effective as anti-depressant drugs. (Granted, I read another article - somewhere - that said that anti-depressants fared no better than placebos in multiple studies, but that, too, is another post.) For me, exercise is the one thing that makes the biggest and most immediate difference in my ability to deal with stress.

5. The Y parking lot is one of three places in my city where I may actually stumble upon another car with an Obama bumper sticker. (The other two places are: the faculty parking lot at the university, and the ELCA parking lot.) Obama bumper stickers make me happy. I live in a state where people with Obama stickers are known to honk and wave ecstatically at each other when they drive by each other; it's that rare and exciting of an encounter for us. Unfortunately, even the Y has its fair share of Rand Paul bumper stickers. (Insert Roll of the Eyes - is there an emoticon for that?)

6. Along similar lines, the Y is one of the few places around here where I can see a whole bunch of different skin colors and hear a bunch of different languages in the same room. Disclosure: I don't live in NYC, OK? We take what we can get around here.

7. The people at the Y noticed when I cut my hair. Awww!

P.S. You're right, Mr. Hecker, blogging is a little bit addictive!

The Curse of the Protestant Work Ethic

For me, it started in college. At some point I realized that my daily schedule was jam-packed if not overflowing. College is a wonderful time, but it's the first time I remember seriously running around like a chicken with my head cut off. (My memories of high school, in contrast, are dim but less hectic; for one, I spent a lot of time writing stories on the computer in the basement.) And I certainly wasn't the only one. Everyone I knew was also running around like a chicken with their head cut off too. But here's the really disturbing part: I also realized that we LIKED it that way. In fact, if life slowed down to anything less than break-neck speed, we immediately began to feel the horrible, sinking guilt of, what was it? ... Unproductiveness?

I don't know who to blame exactly. I think it's an American cultural value, and the precise source of a cultural value is very hard to pinpoint. It's not that anyone explicitly taught me "You have to get a million things done every day or you're worthless." It's not that I feel pressure from anyone in particular or the fear of disappointing anyone - anyone, that is, other than myself. I don't even compare my own productivity to others' (at least not that I'm aware of). So I don't know who came up with this rule or who is enforcing it, but let me tell you, I bear the burden of it every single day.

Let me give you an example. I had an absolutely great day a few weeks ago. First, I got up at an insanely early hour (note: I am NOT a morning person), went to an all-day class, came home and took the kids to a friend's birthday party, came home and mowed the lawn, got the kids a bath and tucked into bed, and then did some work on the computer after that. At the end of the day even I was surprised at how much I had gotten done that day, and it felt SO GOOD. There is little that can put me in a better mood than that feeling of "Wow, I got a lot done today!"

It's just that the standards for achieving that feeling are so high. I often feel as thought it is not time that I lack but discipline, that I should be getting more done, that I could be getting more done, if I could just keep myself on track all day long. But what I don't know and can't tell, because I'm so blinded by the cloud of my own cultural biases, is whether my discipline is the real problem, or my standards.

There was a time in my life when I got a break from those standards; I lived in Africa for seven years. Africans, as you probably know, live life at a different pace. I don't think anyone could objectively call Africans lazy - though some do, and some are, but if we want to eliminate all ambiguity, let's limit the discussion to African women. African women do not have a lazy bone in their bodies. (My most cherished compliment from my husband is when he tells me that I have worked like an African woman.) African women work hard all day long, but even without the convenience of washing machines, microwaves, or pre-made jars of spaghetti sauce, they still seem to have plenty of time for relaxing and socializing (though, granted, even in their relaxing and socializing, they may still be "working," i.e. braiding someone's hair). There is nothing frenetic about an African woman.

Some Americans may find this pace of life intolerable. For me it was a blessing. I could go through the day, get done what got done, and just enjoy living. It wasn't that I didn't work; I did a lot of work. But the bar for what constituted "enough work" was relaxed and reinforced by the whole society around me. If anything, I got made fun of for working too hard, and it wasn't really meant as a compliment.

The Africans are not the only ones in on the secret. Take the Europeans, for example. What do they get? A 35-hour work week and 5 weeks of vacation per year for starters? Now maybe you're reading this through the lenses of your own cultural biases and feeling the twinge that I feel even just writing it, the twinge of the Yeah-But, as in "Yeah, it would be nice to relax a little but I would feel too guilty - gotta get back to work!" Or worse yet (let's be honest) the "Yeah, that must be nice for them, but our work ethic is what makes us the greatest country on earth."

The greatest country on earth. Yeah, OK, whatever. But are we happy this way? Maybe you are; I leave open the possibility that it's just me and I'm just crazy. But you know, I belong to a small group full of moms just like me, and what do I hear from them every single week? "I'm so busy / I'm so stressed out / I just can't keep up with it all / I'm losing my mind." Funny I never heard that from the African women. I heard many other woes ("So-and-so is sick / So-and-so died...") but never "I'm losing my mind." Maybe, just maybe, there is really something to say for simplicity.

I would love to go there, but I don't really know how. I don't know where this oppressive mindset comes from or how it rules over me; it feels like it's self-inflicted. There is enough freedom in American society that if I wanted to live at a slower pace, I probably could. But I can't seem to let myself. I keep striving (mostly in vain) after the elusive "Wow, I got a lot done today!"

I would love to read your comments.

The Psychological Toll of the Economic Downturn

So I got the dreaded call too. I, like every American, had watched as the economy crumbled around us and jobs started dropping like flies. I, like every American, felt sorry for those who were laid off - pity mixed with fear - that lurking question, "What if it happens to me?" I worried about the future and made contingency plans and held my breath.

But as Wall Street slowed its stomach-turning roller coaster ride and the freefall stabilized and Obama got elected (Hope!) and the weeks turned into months turned into years and disaster never struck, I forgot my earlier fears. I teach at a university, and enrollments were only going up (thanks to all the newly unemployed going back to school). In fact, my director even surprised me with the news that, thanks to a sudden and completely unexpected restructuring of my faculty line, I was going to get a reduction in course load, new administrative responsibilities, and a 20% raise. Wow!

Until, just as suddenly, I wasn't. The director had spoken too soon (a grave miscalculation on his part, for which I forgive him, only because he is an entirely impossible person to hate), and the dean had refused to approve my new status because I lack a PhD. (A PhD. was never required for my faculty line before.) In fact, because I lack a PhD., my contract would not be renewed after this year. Instead of a promotion, I was essentially handed a pink slip.

Oddly enough, I am thankful for the chance to experience the emotions that came rushing in with that dreaded phone call because I had always wondered, watching it happen to others, how it felt. So if it hasn't happened to you, let me tell you how it feels: First, panic. Panic floods in and shuts down all other systems. I spent the first half an hour clutching myself and crying, "I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared - what am I going to do?" Particularly because I support a family, and without my income we could not afford to keep our house, for example. I also don't have the kind of job that is available on every street corner, and I kind of lucked out to land it in the first place. I could not, at least not under the ocean of panic, even think of where else I could go.

The panic, which was like being trapped inside a very bad dream that you wish you could wake yourself up from but can't, eventually subsided into action. I couldn't sleep the first night. I lay awake in bed until I finally had to get up and just DO SOMETHING. (So I applied to grad school. In one night. Seriously!) I started casting the net - grad school, job sites, explore, explore, explore the options. As long as I was doing, I could hold the panic at bay.

As a side note, our house was already on the market. Let me just say that it's a lot more fun to put your house on the market because you want to buy a bigger house. It's a lot less fun to keep your house on the market because you don't know where you will be a year from now and might have to move your family of 5 into your parents' basement.

So now we come to where I feel the psychological toll of the economic downturn the most: the MISERABLE housing market, and the ego-bruising job market. I feel like I'm trying to do the two hardest things to do in America right now: sell my house and find a job. Me and 50 billion other people. So there is just way too much competition out there.

Psychologically, no matter what you tell yourself, when nobody wants to buy your darling, dearly beloved house, it does something to you. I've done everything I know to do. I listed it, I fixed it up, I staged it, I hold open houses almost every week. Hardly anyone even comes to look at it, much less make an offer. Not to mention I'm still addicted to looking at other people's houses that I wish I could buy but can't.

OK, so whatever. Even worse is the job search. So far I've been lucky. Much luckier than I expected to be. I've applied to probably 20-25 jobs in 2 months and gotten 5 interviews. I got one job already (a part-time job online that hasn't started yet), and two more good possibilities. So really, I don't mean to complain; it could be A LOT worse. All I'm trying to say is that putting yourself out there on the job market is really grueling. You basically go before someone and say, "Look at me, judge me, am I good enough?" and they say, "Uh ... no, sorry, you're not." Or they say nothing at all which means, "Uh, you are so not good enough that we don't even have time to acknowledge you." And this, mind you, is when you're stretching yourself to be your very, very best to convince them that you're good enough. So no matter how much you try to tell yourself that the rejection is not personal, uh, it is.

We Americans bank a lot of our self-esteem on 1) our material possessions and 2) our career success. I think there are a lot of hurting people out there today because they have lost both of these. There is a strong case to be made for re-evaluating where our sense of worth comes from, yes, absolutely. But the hurt is still there and it is real.

What I guess we have to do, besides just SURVIVE it, is try and find a way to turn it into something positive, like a chance to take a new direction, to make new priorities, to have more compassion for the disadvantaged because none of us is quite the master of our own fate that we'd like to think we are.