It’s been a year since my first posting on SubStack and I thank you all for joining me on my weekly quest to replace the word Nice with the word Kind. I will be on assignment overseas until July, so I am reposting some of my early musings. Enjoy!
As you read today’s reposting, I will be in Istanbul.
Please share with anyone you know who needs a giggle!
Perfect is a word that should be saved to describe newborns and certain kisses…those rare moments, as precious as a psalm, that take us by surprise and awaken us.
People are not perfect. Not even close. Yet females are prodded toward that hopeless pedestal for a lifetime. It’s a recipe for inflated expectations and plunging disappointment as women drive themselves into the ground trying to juggle jobs, home, and family, all while projecting a perky exterior.
Just the phrase having it all makes me want to take a nap. Only in America would anyone presume to have it all. How about having enough or, as I prefer to say, enough already.
Among the privileged, the pursuit of perfection can become competitive. The holiday letter becomes the holiday brochure.
When Johnny isn’t volunteering at the soup kitchen, he enjoys being captain of the football team and head of the debate team. Our little princess, Ariel, lost her first tooth before her sixth birthday, which we are told is quite rare. She is the top reader in her Montessori group and shows proficiency at coloring inside the lines. John Sr. got another promotion, so we are off to Hawaii for Christmas!
As a young parent, I was stunned to learn that a sort of birthday party competition had replaced the usual cake and ice cream affair. Pony rides, bouncy things, magic shows, limo rides. Geez.
Well, let me share that even at the ultimate toddler party, at least one kid will throw up. Three will cry because they assumed that the gift they brought was for them, not the wretched birthday girl. Somebody will pin the tail on the wrong ass, and the only way out is to laugh. All that really matters are the cupcakes.
People who covet a pedestal exude a sort of desperation. Nice girls need a place to park their potential, their ambition and their boredom. Some channel it into sanctimony. It’s a strange sort of elitism, rooted in the need to feel special. If you regularly moan about how busy or stressed you are, knock it off. We’re all busy. It’s not a contest.
The desperation to claim some modicum of specialness was brought home to me one evening, while watching a beauty pageant.
As a contestant belted out a tortured rendition of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables, a little factoid popped up on the screen stating (and I am not making this up!) “Her dog has met the President.”
Women hold up half the sky, the saying goes. Half the sky, my ass. Women keep trying to hold up the whole sky. The dirty little secret is that the sky is not falling. Too often women are self-appointed mediators, mentors, fetchers and shleppers, janitors and laundresses. They saddle themselves with the ridiculous notion that unless they do everything, and do it perfectly, their little worlds will stop spinning.
As we slog toward perfection, women find themselves apologizing one hundred times a day, even to inanimate objects. ‘Oh, sorry!’ as we trip over the vacuum cleaner and apologize to the coffee table.
I attended a women’s conference where hundreds of participants were asked to write down the five most important people in their lives. Only two women included their own names.
If you make your bed at the hotel, apologize to the cleaning crew because your house is dirty, prepare meals for your partner whenever you go out of town, step out of the express line at the grocery store because you’re concerned that the 12 pack of soda might count as 12 items, or find yourself reading an article called 50 Kwick Meals You Can Make With Your Waffle Iron, it may be time for an intervention.
It’s just a matter of which winter of discontent will freeze the honey that is supposed to be flowing through our veins, causing the nicicles, one by one, to fracture and fall.
Then suddenly we feel lighter and less resentful as we stop participating in the fiction that a good woman is one who sacrifices everything, works herself to the bone, and needs no recognition.
As they say in Al-anon, “If you don’t like being a doormat, then get off the floor.”
Love this!
So darn true and well stated. Love these posts.