Good Luck to Everyone Out There

Did you hear the interview with "international supermodel" Carmen Dell'orefice on NPR Weekend Edition Sunday this morning?

Ms. Dell'orefice, 78, lost her life's savings in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi-scheme last year. She's far from what I would think of as the "women upon whom the current economic crisis is falling", but her discussion of the emotional side of the dealing with her loss is, well, relate-able!

She says: "I've never put my lifestyle and what I need to live on in anyone else's hands. I know that this is my responsibility and my choices....But this [current loss involving what she thought were personal friends]!....My own self-confidence on what judgement didn't I exercise and what did I miss, it really shook my self-esteem for a long-time."

As I shift through the wheat of defining success for our little family with the chaff of the "woulda, shoulda, coulda" of the past decade, I am living daily in the zone of shaky confidence in my judgement. I question the very values upon which my husband and I have made financial and life decisions over these past years. Believe it or not (I remember how long you've known me), I've never thought of myself as a "keeping up with the Joneses" type of mentality. But I now must admit that how my family "looked" from the outside has been deeply important to me, to us.

It felt like our motivation was to create a safe place for our family. But now, with so much stripped away, I realize that for me "safety" was demonstrated in material and consumer values -- things, brands, a certain type of house, certain lifestyle commitments that require special equipment and lots of fees, certain places to belong. It felt like we were just working hard so that our family could get our little piece of the prosperity pie, buy the things that "we needed", and then we'd have a safe place to work on values and character.

Surprise! Values don't wait. Character doesn't wait. Time doesn't wait. And, as people who live in a comfortable, charming, beautiful and cozy corner of an growing, optimistic state in the most-affluent society of the world (and probably the history of the world), I realize that we have a good serving of the prosperity pie every morning that we wake up.

There is nothing else out there to gain. It -- safety, prosperity, success -- is all right here. I'd like to think that we are in process of making new choices and strengthening values around what we have. But, given that it felt like my motivation was appropriate in the past, my confidence for these steps is, well, lacking.

You can listen to Ms. Dell'orefice's interview at www.npr.org.

And, I pass on her closing words, "Good luck to everyone out there and their ongoing lives. It's going to be tough."

Broadening the Conversation

Over the past several months, I’ve been deeply concerned how the economic crisis is falling onto the shoulders of women, the shoulders of women I know. Actually, it's gotten pretty heavy on my own shoulders! The women I know are carrying more responsibility than ever -- for family, for finances, navigating career transitions due to family demands, and new responsibilities for their parents.

I've tried to be very frank about my own family's struggles with friends, because, right now, what good can it do for any of us to be pretending it's all going smoothly. Through some honest and candid discussions, I've realized that many of us don’t feel “safe” in the midst of our new economic reality. We are working really hard to feel “safe” and at the same time feeling uncertain as to whether "safety" is even something that we, who were set into the world in the early 80's, is even something we are supposed to expect from our partners. On top of it all, what really saddens me is seeing so many women that I know, admire, and love who are just so hard on themselves. As if we are standing alone in a room full of successfully safe women.

I truly believe that we are in a sea-change as a culture. In the years since you and I first met in our freshman dormitory (remember Page Hall?), it is as if the American Dream has become a toxic mixture of insatiable consumerism and prosperity-based Christianity. It is a paradigm that has left people lost, bereft, broke, fat, lonely, exhausted, sick.

The other thing that has been going through my mind is, "What is worth fighting for? What should I protecting in my life?" When I boil it down, the thing to fight for in this world for me right now is the shelter and peace of my family.

I want to speak to that in this blog, speak for and with the women we know how are Sort of a “stop the madness”, let’s quit talking about how we are going to balance it all and, instead, start fighting for, protecting, that which is truly precious, letting the rest of the balls fall. Fighting for our families, our sanity, peace, health, love, connections between people we love. Our souls.

I think of us at 19 sitting in our dorm rooms trying to make sense of where were going to fit into the world. It was all so “out there”, so much to discover. I wanted so much, wanted to ‘break out’, connect, find a home. We thought that we had such a better handle on the world than our mothers did, than our parents. Over the years, you and I have been through explorations of love, materialism and asceticism, desire, disappointment, pregnancies, parents, siblings, children, success, failure, faith, weight highs and lows (more highs for me!), moving, setting out in new directions because it was “going to be good”. We are now the age that our mothers were when we met. I am fascinated by all that has happened from there to here. I'm so curious as to where “here” leads to.

We came of age in the Reagan era. I think I bought so completely into the Lady Diana, big shoulder, Nordstrom, dress-for-success, IBM, big city, movie celebrity, upwardly mobile, Martha Stewart, executive, do-it-all, buy more, Pottery Barn homes and Baby Gap maternity thing. (You haven’t seemed so vulnerable to all that.) I scoffed at the values of my grandparents and parents who were cheap, bargain, low-aspiration, humble. Scoffed at the “granolas” who preferred Birkenstocks to Ferragamos. Bought the SUV, etc., etc., etc. Now I look at how our generation has wasted two decades in which we could have made a difference. Now I look at our children: What world are they headed into? How do we prepare them? What world do we try and shape for them? What is worth fighting for for them?

So, are you interested in expanding our conversation beyond obesity? I’m not sure if all the above is just a distraction from “the real issue” of healthy weight for my children, or a way to get to the real issues that manifest themselves in extra weight. But I'm interested in exploring it.

What about you? Are you willing to join me in "Page Hall" once again to continue the discussion on how we fit into the world?

A Pause Explained and a New Jumping Off Point

It's been months since I've posted, and mostly it's because I went through a miserable patch of pain that had me limiting every single activity except sitting on the couch and watching tv. This condition I had, known as Frozen Shoulder or Adhesive Capsulitis, was caused by poor ergonomic setup during computer use, so I avoided the computer whenever possible.

The good news is I came out of it like a bat out of hell. Once the pain was gone and my energy and stamina were back, even though I'm significantly limited in my shoulder mobility, I wanted to do everything and be everywhere at once. This also limited my computer time.

Another post-limiting development is that I am beginning to back away from concerns about my own child's obesity. I still wish I had intervened earlier and knew then what I know now, but there's only so much I can say about that. My child is not at a "normal" weight now, but he just looks like a 12 year-old linebacker with a deep voice and a soft moustache you can see in some lights. He is big. He is muscular. His belly is kind of big too but he is mighty. We went kayaking last weekend (see boy in striped shorts in picture to the left), even though my shoulder doesn't work (see: Bat Out of Hell energy) and he kayaked circles around me. This is because of the intense swim workouts as well as his body's natural tendency to be big and muscular.

He says there's nothing he can do about his weight. I don't agree. But at this point it's up to him. I do encourage him away from certain food choices and toward others, and he actually appreciates this. But he likes to eat--particularly simple carbs, he's a big guy, and I think, hope and pray he'll be okay. I know the odds are against his not being overweight as an adult. I wonder if the genetic cards were already stacked against him. I look forward to more research coming out about that. I also hope that as he matures he becomes more interested in his own health. Being such a good swimmer has been great for his self respect. So even though he's not at the "right" weight, I think he's a lot better off than he was this time last year, when he was just getting ready for camp.

Jan, too, is thinking less about childhood obesity. She's thinking about large, far-reaching issues and I look forward to discussing them here. I am going to let her articulate the reason for the blog title change because she explained it to me in an email so brilliantly.