There's always some reason to feel not good enough

First of all, I want to thank you all for your kind words yesterday. I know I've said it before, but it always helps to know you aren't the only one who feels that way.

I want to give two shout-outs to yesterday's commenters:

First, to Andrea, who said I inspired her to write a blog! So after you're done reading this, read Andrea's blog!

Second, to Emily, who said some very sweet stuff and who brilliantly said: "I feel like I don't have the right to complain bc I just have one [child] and feel, not "mom enough". Emily, you put into words exactly how I feel. I feel like I'm not in the mom club because I'm not frazzled and being tugged at by multiple little beings all day (unless you count the cat).

But Emily's comment, and the post she commented on, made me think about how it's not just about the kid; I have always thought I wasn't good enough. Like, it goes way back.

Yes, I got straight A's in high school, but I told myself that it was because I didn't go to a very good high school. (And I realize some people from my HS read this blog, and don't be offended because those were the words of a crazy person, and Bulldogs rule!)

Then in college I graduated with highest honors, but I downplayed it by saying it was only a second-tier state school, not like the crazy-hard prestigious school my friend and chief competitor attended. This inadequacy was largely influenced by that friend saying that she graduated with a poor GPA because the classes at her school were so hard, and that at her college the average grade people get is a C. Let me note that the average grade is always a C in any class, but that knowledge didn't stop me from feeling pathetic about my accomplishments. I figured I'd probably get a C in a class at a good college. (And again, college classmates, don't listen to me. Go Gauchos!)

Out in the real world, accomplishments are harder to quantify, but I still managed to find a way to downplay all of my achievements. Or to flat-out beat myself up for some minor shortcoming. When I was a teacher, hoo boy, there were opportunities up the wazoo to feel like crap. You take the collective thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of a class of irrational children, their parents, administrators, and the community at large, and you're always going to find something that went wrong.

I went to work in the private sector after that, and the drama died way down, thank God, but at that point I started to feel like I hadn't done enough because I wasn't popping out the kids yet. I'm not allowed to feel tired or stressed or frazzled. I'm not a mom yet. When I'm a mom, I'll get it.

Except, now I'm a mom, and I feel not good enough because I only have one kid. Other moms are always saying, "Oh, you just wait 'til you have two, it makes having one look like a walk in the park." And honestly, I don't feel like I am walking in any park. I feel like this is hard. With one. And no job. But I'm not allowed to complain.

And if I'm not going to pop out another kid, shouldn't I at least be working? Shouldn't I have some fabulous, write-my-own-ticket, SAHM/WAHM/PT hybrid career cobbled together? The kind that makes me creatively fulfilled and basking in the glow of work-life balance? (Even though I know that kind of balance is a myth, at least in terms of its ability to exist every single minute of every single day.)

Shouldn't I, if I'm only going to have one kid, be giving him undivided attention day in and day out, playing with him? Doing flashcards with him? Feeding him all organic, healthful, homemade food? Shouldn't my house be cleaner? Shouldn't I have enough energy to stay awake to watch one TV show with my husband? (Though, in my defense, who wouldn't fall asleep during an endless stream of shows about poker?)

Shouldn't my house be cleaner? Shouldn't my laundry be done? Shouldn't I ...

It could go on forever. And no matter what I do, it won't be good enough. When I worked part-time, I felt like I wasn't good enough because I didn't work full-time. I know I could have another kid and I'd still feel inadequate. I know because people I know who seem to be doing it all, the multiple kids and the career and the whatever, and they still tell me they feel like they aren't doing enough.

Thanks a lot, Society. I'm blaming my problems on you.

And while I can't so much give up my tendency to feel inadequate in the blink of an eye, I do think I've reached a big step in terms of my awareness of this tendency. It occurs to me that I'm so overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I feel like I should do, that I just don't do anything. If I'm never going to do enough, why do anything at all?

Yes, I dream of having this fulfilling career as some kind of writer, but what do I ever write? (I mean, besides this blog?) I am a writer for Technorati, but until today I hadn't written anything in 2011. I see other opportunities to write, like this one, and I am just too overwhelmed to try. Where will that get me? It won't get me where I feel like I should be, because where I feel like I should be is impossible to get to. Even if I get there, I will tell myself I need to get farther.

It's like the Olympic motto is constantly running through my subconscious: Citius, Altius, Fortius.

Faster, higher, stronger.

But yesterday it occurred to me that I don't have to do everything. I just have to do something.

The first something I decided to do was restart Weight Watchers. In a way, my weight loss predicament is sort of a metaphor for my overall frustrations. I have so far to go with my weight loss, I figure why bother at all? Except, doesn't it feel better to be at least trying to do something than to sit around and feel angry?

Thus far, my current Weight Watchers foray has included looking up information on the new program (because, dammit, they changed it a lot) and the meeting schedule. I haven't really officially started yet, because I just decided to yesterday, and today's meeting schedule didn't work for me. But really, I'm gonna go tomorrow. Really, I promise.

I also did sit down and write that article for Technorati. I wrote an article about a study that found that antidepressants are over-prescribed. Not surprisingly, I was unhappy about the message this study sends.

You can read my Technorati article here.

But first go read Andrea's blog!

Life Angst

Remember on Sunday when I said I was going to make a list of all my instances of mom guilt?

It started out well. Sunday was the usual guilt: foods I let my kid eat, chores left undone, time spent on the Internet. And Monday I just had one item on the list, again something food-related.

Tuesday, to save time, I just wrote everything.

Yeah.

I skimped on my workout at the gym. For lunch I just ate a bag of cut-up cheese left over from the playdate, and my kid ate a Lunchable. I know, a Lunchable. The horror!

He followed up this episode of great nutrition with a dump-all-his-toys-on-the-floor session. I went up to my bed and read a book for awhile, not in a relaxing, indulgent I-Deserve-This way, but more of an oh-how-am-I-going-to-fill-four-more-boring-hours-oh-I'll-just-read-this-book kind of way. And of course while I was doing this Nathan watched TV. Yay me.

We went to Target. That featured such greatest hits as I spend too much money, when I don't even have a job and what the heck is the point of my life anyway? And Oh crap, I let my kid wander away again in a store.

I made pancakes and an omelet for dinner. My kid ate in front of the TV. Again.

Of course I should focus on the positive. Nobody was starving. My kid has fun toys to play with. At least I made it to the gym at all. And at the end of the day, I read my kid three library books, and we talked about the plot and the letters and he counted stuff and ... yeah, but he's not reading chapter books like So-and-So's kid, and Such-and-Such reads her kid books for an hour, and ... OMG I suck, blah blah blah negative.

And you know how it goes with the negative emotions. They snowball. And soon we're into I have no purpose to my life I'm just a mom with one kid and no job, I'm fat and I'm not a good wife/friend/mother/daughter/human.

Now it's officially A Funk.

I want to say it's just a mom thing. The world doesn't respect me! I have no purpose, by Society's standards. How am I supposed to find fulfillment in wiping my kid's butt and emptying the dishwasher and folding laundry (loads and loads of laundry, OMG the laundry)?

But it isn't just a mom thing. Funks aren't just mom-specific. I could have a totally different life and still struggle to see the point sometimes. That's life. You do what you gotta do, and sometimes what you gotta do is boring and monotonous.

It isn't just a mom thing. It's a human thing. And yes, motherhood is the context in which I'm currently experiencing my own personal funk, and that brings with it certain challenges. For example, please for the love of God can you spend half an hour where you're not 5 inches from my face?

But the bottom line is that I can't change motherhood or society or the monotony of laundry. All I can change is myself.

Except I'm at a loss. Ultimately I know my biggest enemy is that voice in my head that says You will never be good enough. You have to do more and be more and be exhausted and frazzled ... and even then you are not good enough. You are not good enough until you have achieved personal and professional success and you are physically fit and have fulfilling hobbies ... and even if you were to somehow achieve these nebulous goals, whatever that means, you will still not be good enough.

I'd like to just say, "Goodbye, Voice! You are done! Don't let the door hit you on the way out!" But of course it's not that easy.

Maybe this is yet another one of those cases where awareness is the first step to solving a problem. Maybe now I know that I have set the bar so high for myself that I'm afraid to do anything, because I know it won't be enough.

Which brings to, I need to do something. But what? Get a job? Go back to school? Find some new creative outlet? Go on a diet? Do volunteer work?

For now I will just go empty the dishwasher.

I always feel like I should end the serious posts with some pithy epiphany about a silver lining. Something like Oh I know I am so lucky and blessed and blah blah blah we should all have such problems. (See, eloquent, right?) But all of that is becoming so dumb and trite. And while it is, of course, true that these are the Problems of the Problem-less, sometimes the optimistic conclusion kind of undermines the gravity of the rest of the post.

So, this is the end of my post. I have some thinking to do.

The Happiness Project

You might recall that I said on Sunday that my goal for the week was to do one small thing each day to bring joy into the drab days of winter. So it only made sense that I would photograph one of these daily moments of happiness, post the photographs on my blog, and link up to The Happiness Project at Leigh vs. Laundry.

For my own personal happiness project, I hosted a Valentine's Day-themed playdate yesterday. (I know, I've said in the past that I hate the term playdate, but I use it anyway because if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.) Hosting the playdate was part of my effort to be a better friend, as I mentioned in this post.

Now, normally when I have people over, I don't do much preparation beyond basic housecleaning and procuring snacks. But I thought my guests deserved a little beauty and happiness in their lives too, so I went all-out (by my standards) and created a theme party.

I made cupcakes:

Reminiscent of the book Pinkalicious


Yeah, my playdates have wine. Unfortunately I only have three wine glasses.

And if you have wine, you have to have cheese, right?


And then I thought I'd better have something vaguely healthful, so I cut up some fruit and made it with the World's Most Awesome Fruit Dip. It's 1 part sour cream and one part marshmallow cream.

100 parts awesome!

Oh yeah, and there were some kids there, too. Now, normally I'm not that mom who sets up organized activities for playdates, but since this playdate had a wide range of kid demographics (4 boys, 2 girls, ranging in age from 13 months to 7 years), I set up a Valentine-making craft:

It was a hit! Not with my own personal kid, of course, because he just wanted to run around like a loon the whole time.

There were giant snowflakes falling gently outside my window, a soothing classical music CD playing, and the scent of Mrs. Meyer's lavender cleaner. All in all, a perfect winter tableau.

Super Cookies!

Based on my stellar cookie-baking performance at Hanukkah, gym partner Amy asked me to bring cookies to her Super Bowl party. I think it's funny how people get so excited over these cookies, like it's an old family recipe or something. Like, yeah, so my grandma was working late one night at the Toll House Inn, when a big brick of chocolate accidentally fell into cookie batter and broke into little pieces, and a classic recipe was born.

I decided to go with the M&M and chocolate-chip cookies again. I bought two large bags of M&Ms, with the intent of baking one batch with Packers green M&Ms and one batch with Steelers brown and yellow M&Ms. (I know the Steelers are really black and yellow, but of course the standard bag of M&Ms doesn't contain black ones.)

I had my family separate the M&Ms.

Fun and educational sorting activity!

I saved the red ones for Valentine's Day. I used the blues and oranges to make an honorary Bears bowl:


The remaining M&Ms went into the cookies:


It turns out my cookies ended up predicting the outcome of the game, because the green ones were way more popular.

But all cookies are good dipped in a chocolate martini:

Blurry cell phone picture, to simulate your vision after downing one of these bad boys.

SuperIma Sunday Check-In

It's time again for Leigh Ann's SuperIma Sunday Check-In!

Last week's goals:

• Finish reading a book: Did it! I read Mudbound by Hilary Jordan. As I said, I picked it because it's the "One City, One Story" selection for my hometown of Pasadena, CA. Dude, heavy. So heavy. Such horrible, horrible racism and tragedy. Following it up with a recommendation from my mom for a guaranteed light-hearted, clear-the-palate romp, Easily Amused by Karen McQuestion.
• Do cardio 6x: Well, as predicted, the blizzard kind of derailed this goal. I was stuck at home for two days due to snow, so I only got 4x of cardio done. I'm still calling it a victory, though, because (1) I can't control the weather, and (2) I still did a lot of shoveling on the days I was home, and I think that burns something like 9,000 calories per hour. (Possible exaggeration for calorie-burning rate, fairly accurate estimate for this week's calorie-consumption rate.)
  

This week's goals:

• Each day, do some small thing to bring joy to an otherwise blah winter day. This does not count exercise, because I think exercise is important for beating the winter blues, and I'm still going to do it (okay, Mom?), but I'm not sure exercise is an activity that brings me great pleasure. I want to try to do something pretty and happy each day. I got a jump on this yesterday when I made a trip to Walgreen's to get these adorable Sally Hansen stick-on nail polish decals that Ashley recommended:
  
  
  The calendar says winter, but my adorable butterfly nails say spring!

You guys, they were so incredibly easy to apply! And I mean, if you know me IRL, you know that I have the shakiest hands ever, like to the point that people are often asking me if I'm okay. I was skeptical about my ability to apply these, but it was actually really easy and quick! The kit was $10. The decals dry instantly, and promise to last for 10 days! (Thus far Ashley confirms no chipping after about a week.) And they have a variety of colors, including your standard solids, plus flowers, animal prints, and pink camo. Yay for inexpensive nail happiness!

Okay, so that was yesterday's happy thing. Today I'm making cookies for a Super Bowl party, and I'm gonna mix in M&Ms in the various team colors. Tomorrow I'm making my house all pretty and good-smelling, and making fun snacks, for a playdate/wine-drinking event I'm hosting as part of my effort to see other human beings during winter.

[BTW the above is supposed to be indented to match with the other bullet-point stuff, and the fact that it isn't bothers me, but I can't figure out how to do it.]

• My second goal is HUGE. Leigh Ann wants you to set a goal for something you're going to give up, and this week I'm giving up mom guilt. Okay, so mom guilt isn't the kind of thing you can give up cold turkey in a week. But, I think if I stop and make myself aware of all the stupid little guilty things that are eating me up all day, every day, that will be a good first step to eradicating (some) mom guilt. And I know there are some people who say guilt is a good thing because it forces us to correct our negative behaviors, but I mean, come on, there is good guilt and just totally unnecessary guilt. If I accidentally left my kid at a gas station and drove all the way home without realizing it, the guilt I felt about that would be healthy because it might force me to pay better attention to his whereabouts in the future. (Note: The previous incident did not actually happen.) However, I cannot be beating myself up for every little parenting misstep day in and day out, such as Why don't I have a better policy for the amount of fruit snacks my kid is allowed to consume in a day? So, starting with the fruit snack thing (which happened this morning) and ending God-knows-where, I'm making a list of the things I feel guilty about. The list will be called the Guilt Graveyard (term borrowed from the way-too-sparkly iVillage). After all, isn't awareness the first step to overcoming a problem?
  

Insert Title Here

Let me start by noting, once again, that I have no real problems. I have a loving family and a roof over my head, and we all have our health.

(Oh no, oh no, OH NO, my hypochondriac self is freaking out that I said the thing about our health. Knock on wood, KNOCK ON WOOD, for effing crying out loud knock on every piece of wood in my house!)

But, strictly in the category of Not Real Problems, I've had a little bit of a tough week. I wronged somebody, and then somebody insulted me, and then the issue came up with the trainer that I'm sort of fat. It's been kind of an ego-bruising week.

So I was super-duper excited when the director of the Tonys show e-mailed me and thanked me again for writing the script, and said that multiple people asked her if I had trained with The Second City. And she (the director) said I just have a Second City vibe.

Anyway, she said I should audition for the next community theater show, which is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I wasn't really going to audition, seeing as I don't think of myself as an actress. Also I thought most of the cast would be children and I would feel incredibly tall among them. But then she said that she wants all the non-dwarf parts to be played by adults, so I think I might give it a shot.

This got me thinking, maybe I should take classes at The Second City. I have always felt like I'm a little too old for that, seeing as all famous Second City alum started there in their early 20s. But, okay, let's get real for a minute. I am not going to be a famous Second City alum. I am just going to be a suburban housewife taking classes for fun. Which then begs the question, is it worth the time and money? It's kind of a major commute, too.

I don't know. I'll think about it.

Maybe I should just get a job instead of draining my husband's income to take a stupid comedy class.

Oh God, it's 1950.

In other news, or possibly the same news, I am bored. I wake up every day wanting something exciting to happen, or wanting to make something exciting happen, and it's like in the dullness of winter I can't think of any ideas. I wouldn't say I'm so much depressed as just frustrated by the monotony.

But, you know, that's life. That's winter.

Books

I'm gonna start with a poem I had to memorize in third grade:

Book Houses
By Annie Fellows Johnston

I always think the cover of a book is like a door,
That opens into someone's house where I've not been before.
A pirate or a fairy queen may lift the latch for me.
I always wonder when I knock what welcome there will be.

And when I find a house that's dull,
I do not often stay.
But when I find one full of friends,
I'm apt to spend the day.

I don't really know why I started with that poem, except that it came to mind when I decided to write about books today. Also I wanted to tell you that I still have that poem memorized, and that it is probably taking up some useful space in my brain that I could use to remember something like where to set the pin on the weight machines at the gym.

Oh, and by the way, greetings from the library! Yes, I know I said I was going to go yesterday, but it turned out that I had to wait until today to rejoin society. I was just too afraid of my sad little compact sedan's ability to navigate partially-plowed streets with giant snow piles.

Not that things are all sunshine and roses on the roads today. It turns out, 8-foot piles of snow really limit visibility. And cars parked on the street have to be way farther from the snow-covered curbs, and so the streets are too narrow.

Anyway ... books!

Recently I tried to read a non-fiction, academic sort of book called Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle. I was thinking the book would discuss the phenomenon of having a lot of "friends" in social media and not a lot of close friends in real life, a phenomenon that was tragically exemplified by the story of a woman who left a suicide note on Facebook and none of her 1,000+ friends helped her. And maybe the book did talk about social media (though not obviously the suicide situation; it was published before that), but I didn't get too far into it. It turns out the book was largely about robots as a substitute for human companionship, and I'm not that interested in robots. (Though the book did include Zhu-Zhu pets in the category of Robots, and we do have a few of the boy-oriented battle hamsters in our house.) Anyway, I found the book too dense and boring for my late-night reading. (I should note that "late-night" for me is now about 9 p.m.)

Another book I'm reading right now is The Fran Leibowitz Reader. Fran Leibowitz was a humor columnist in the 70s and 80s, and my brother and sister-in-law gave me her book because they thought she reminded them of me. Which, I might be a little bit offended by. I'm not a chain-smoking stereotypical New Yorker who goes to discotheques. But Fran is funny, and I'm glad to be introduced to her.

I'm also reading a novel right now called Mudbound by Hilary Jordan. I picked it because it's the official "One City, One Story" book for my hometown of Pasadena, California. You know, where the whole city reads one book and then there are book-related events all over town? My current hometown, or rather the nearest big city, is Chicago, and it looks like they won't pick another book until spring. But I'm gonna read it. I mean, assuming it doesn't look dumb. Who's with me? Anyway, Mudbound is about a woman who gets married and reluctantly moves to a farm with her husband after WWII, and the farm is in Mississippi so all this awful racist stuff happens. It's sort of a cross between Half-Broke Horses and The Help. So far I like it, because historical fiction is my favorite genre, but man, the people in this book are racist. It's almost hard to read, even though it isn't like the author is advocating racism or anything. It's probably fairly accurate in terms of what things were like in rural Mississippi in the 1940s. But Saving Private Ryan is accurate, too, and that doesn't make it pleasant.

Who has some book recommendations for me? I know Leigh Ann recommended Young Adult book Matched, so that might be next for me.

Have a good weekend! Hope you get some reading time!