Portrait of a (pseudo) Lady

Okay so I realize that it's been a while since I've posted and I probably have absolutely no leg to stand on to complain but do you see the big ADVERTISEMENT at the top of this page?!? URGH. It used to be free to host the LJ here but now you either have to pay for your site OR they run big advertising headlines across the top.

It's almost enough to make a girl shell out for cyberspace rights. I'll have to talk to the hubby about that.

Anyway, a quick rundown update of what's been going on in MandyLand since last I updated the poor neglected LJ. I'm still working at the ol' accounting firm, still living in Tulsa and still happily married. Really the only new things that would remotely qualify as LJ-worthy are the following:

1) We put our house on the market and are attempting to sell it (apparently at the worst time in history to sell it) to move back to Norman and buy a Craftsman bungalow we can pour lots of money and time into.

2) We added to our four-legged family with the addition of a kitten named Olivia. She is adorable and her big brothers are both completely besotted with her.

And, literally, that's pretty much it. Other than that things are just trucking along the way they are known to do - work, eat, sleep, eat, work, eat, sleep. With some Rangers baseball and the occasional movie thrown in for spice.

Hopefully it won't be too long until I can get that advertisement off the top of this page. But I just had to grouse about it so that you would know I didn't enjoy having it there. I think it's important to the integrity of the LJ that advertisements be restricted. Guess that's their way of getting you to give them your money!

Sigh. The tyranny of capitalism knows no bounds if not even the LJ is safe...

Alright so last time it was Des Moines and now we're headed west - to Phoenix. Some highlights of my 'culinary adventure' in the Sun State:

Padre's: This place bills itself as 'modern Mexican' and it is fabulous. The lazy enchiladas are a tasty blend of cheeses wrapped in soft corn tortillas and smothered in a sweet'n'spicy green chile salsa. A glass of the Lagaria Pinot Grigio is the perfect compliment. One thing I'd pass on - the fried ice cream. The ice cream is tasty but the fried outside was not and by that point you're so full anyway the additional food just makes your stomach uncomfortable.

Pizzeria Bianco: When you call ahead and there's a 2 1/2 hour wait for a party of 5 you can think two things. Either the place is ridiculously overrated OR it's going to be the gastronomical experience of a lifetime. When the rest of the group ditched, I only had to wait 1 1/2 hours for a seat at the restaurant bar of this intimate pizzeria with the wood fire stove in the back corner. I fully intended to save some of my pizza for the ditchers - but not a single bite remained. The Margherita pizza with fresh mozzarella (made daily) and fresh basil (picked daily) and a light, slightly sweet tomato sauce, was probably the best pizza I've ever had. You wait in another building - the actual bar - and a glass of Olivet Lane Chardonnay and a good book passed the time just fine. A glass of a Pinot Grigio whose name I can't remember (for shame!), the good company of the pizza-loving strangers around me and the warm, yeasty crust... I completely understand the wait. And I would wait again.

Check back - I have one more night to find something else yummy...

You know, this is actually a really harsh reality for me. I’m one of those people – I tend to trust everybody. I help everybody. I do what I can for everybody. (Not to say I’m the best person; it’s just a habit, bred in me by my everything-to-everyone father.)

So when people suck – openly, without remorse, straight to my face – it’s jarring. I’m surprised and bitterly disappointed.

I struggle with this because part of me realizes that you shouldn’t help people with conditions. If you just want to genuinely do what you can, then you do that regardless of whether or not that person will ever do anything for you in return. But I guess that the idea of reciprocity is just ingrained in me alongside my need to help – because regardless of whether or not I should expect a return on my investment, I do.

It’s most upsetting when people that you thought appreciated your assistance just ignore that you are now the one in need of help. As if they never even heard you voice your problem. What is that even about? Do they not appreciate all that I’ve ever tried to do for them? Or do they appreciate and yet have no intention of reciprocating regardless? And can you really appreciate someone’s help without feeling some need to reciprocate? And am I being completely selfish to expect anything in return or any appreciation in the first place?

If I seem upset it’s because I am. I’m still in the early moments after this has just happened and I’m almost frustrated to the point of tears. I don’t understand. Why do I always end up feeling used?

This has been a problem for me in the past or it might not be such an upsetting thing for me today. I have often discovered that my being ‘nice’ was really my being USED without that aspect of it being admitted to my face. But this felt like it was straight up, in your face, “Thanks for your help yesterday, but you’re on your own today.”

The part that hurts is that I can’t seem to figure out how to balance my wish to help people with my desire to not end up feeling like a dishrag. How can you walk the line? How can I help as I want to without feeling so crappy later?

POSTSCRIPT
So after a day of thinking about this off and on, I decided that I have really only two options. The reality is that there will always be people out there who don't really appreciate anything. Or they do but they don't show it the way that I would. SO my options are as follows:

1) stop helping anyone in order to not feel crappy when I find those people, or

2) continue to help and stop worrying about anything being reciprocated.

Since I know, for a fact, that there are also wonderful people who make me feel appreciated and make me glad that I was able to help them, I choose to get on with the helping and forget all this mess. I'm sure I'll be upset again in the future but, I'm going to try to remind myself that I don't help for those that don't appreciate it, but for those that do. And since you can't distinguish which a person is until you've helped them - that's what I'm going to continue to do.

It seems like it would be so easy. People that you talk to everyday, who have known you forever, or who should just plain know better - who seem to have developed a view of who you are that just doesn't make any sense. They say things about your personality, your dreams or your values that ring astonishingly false and you feel... angry.

How could you know me so well and yet not know me at all?

I realize that this misunderstanding is part of life - that we are all externally different than what we internally see (because the dialogue in our brain is, sometimes sadly and sometimes mercifully, private). But it frustrates me all the same when someone pigeonholes me with such confidence, and I know in my heart that they're dead wrong.

The difficult part of this for me is actually two-fold: 1) I feel guilty - like maybe they're right, and 2) I feel like the time spent with them has been wasted if they're not.

The truth is - in the instances of which I'm speaking - I know they aren't right. And it frustrates me so much because then - all the time I have spent has been a complete and utter waste.

I wish that people would work harder to understand the whole of a person and not a few experiences with them. I wish that people would work harder to appreciate differences in others, rather than disparage them.

I wish that people could see who I am, rather than who they think me to be.

Last week, a friend of my parents was diagnosed, quite suddenly, with Legionnaire's disease, a severe lung infection much like pneumonia.

Yesterday she lost her fight with that infection.

I never had the chance to meet her, but I feel sorrow all the same. In my mind's eye I see her family, caught completely unaware and aching with loss. I hear the sadness in my parent's words and my heart longs to fill a friend-shaped hole that will forever remain empty.

As I have thought over her passing these last 36 hours, it has brought an urgent thought to my mind. A rush of desire to love life and all that I find in it, and to speak that love to those I meet. To share happiness, joy, beauty, comfort. To say all of the things that well up inside of me and give voice to the dreams of my heart without hesitation. To never take one single moment as just another in a long line of many, but as an independent and important opportunity to live.

I find comfort in the fact that she was surrounded by her family and friends, those who loved her and spent her last days hands lifted to heavens asking for his intervention. But I find it important that those of us who were touched, however briefly, by her story should take something from it. She has lost the opportunity to love and cherish those she cared for so deeply - do not waste the moments that remain to you.

It is easy for us to focus on gratitude for material things - food to eat, a bed to sleep in, a roof over our heads during a storm. But what of all of the immaterial things that make up the true fabric of your personal story? The memories and the moments spent with those who matter most.

Cherish them. So that they will have those moments to cherish should you someday leave them.

This week, on my encouragement, my husband is taking a step towards a very large personal dream. I have done my best to push and prod at the right times, to give space and silence at others. I have worked hard to give him this opportunity and to listen to him talk about all the little nuances of it that I only half understand.

But now I am afraid.

The largest part of my place in all of this (as well as his) lies ahead. This week he will have to go out and give everything he has to make the most of this tiny sliver of an opportunity. He has practiced, he has prepared and we have kitted him out with the tools of his chosen trade to the extent our finances have allowed.

And I am afraid.

He has talent, and I know this. I would not have encouraged him to pursue this as far as I have if I did not believe he had the ability to see it through. But I am afraid. Circumstances are out of our hands and it is always possible that a dream will fall flat in reality.

If he ends up disappointed this week... I am afraid I will be downtrodden at the time when I need to be of most use to him. I have faith in him but not faith in fate and I worry that I will have led the man that I love into heartbreak.

Now, I know from personal experience that to chase a dream and fail is far better than to never chase at all, because you have the memory and the pride of the pursuit, if not the prize.

But that does not make the experience less painful and of all the things in this life that I would most avoid it would be to cause him pain.

If you think of me this week, send up wishes of success for my husband. I would give almost anything I have if only this week would turn out to be what I know he has been dreaming of.

I miss dancing. I was never a really great dancer technically, but I just loved it. It was such an emotional release for me. I could put so much of myself and my feelings in the movement and I miss that outlet.

I've thought about trying to get back into dancing but there's a fear there that I won't be able to get back to even what I was, and certainly not anything better. I know part of it is just fear, part of it is not wanting to pay for classes and part of it is not wanting to fit my post-college body into spandex.

But mostly I think it's just fear. I remember dancing with a fondness and I watch dancers with a rekindling of passion that I would hate to lose should a return to dance be a disappointment. As I age I know that I am improving by leaps and bounds mentally and emotionally but physically that is just not the case.

But I listen to beautiful music and I close my eyes and I see the movement and I feel the joy in it and I want to pull out my lyrical shoes and find my way onto the floor. We'll see. Maybe eventually I'll find the courage to get myself back out there and stop letting the fear keep me closed off in this body.

Maybe.

I have long been a person of very intense, very focused emotions. Perhaps one of the feelings I have the most experience with is that of being a disappointment. Of being less-than-expected. Of being different-than-desired. There have been many times in my life where I have not fulfilled someone else's dream of me, and they have been all too happy to point it out.

It is difficult to acknowledge our own failures, but even more so when they are not failures in our own eyes. There have been many times where I felt that I was right where I needed to be, that my actions were right and the intentions were good. But it was not enough. It was not another's idea of right and good and therefore it was wrong and bad.

It is so hard when you think you're on point and someone else doesn't - who is right? Who decides what the appropriate action should have been and who should get the blame for the unmet expectations?

For the longest time I solved this problem by just trying to fit the expectations, to mold myself to the communicated ideal. But a few years ago I found relationships that made me feel like more than I had ever been. In those sweet moments of acceptance, I was enough just how I was.

Those relationships have spoiled me and these days I'm just no good at trying to please people like I used to. I want to be me - warts and disappointments and failures and all. I'm not perfect and could never be - but I shouldn't have to be in order to be loved and accepted.

This shift in my perspective has caused a few issues with those who think that I should try harder, be more, give more. But I disagree with them and who is to say who is right? I don't want to have to always BE MORE or GIVE MORE or try so dang hard. Love and friendship aren't easy but they shouldn't leave me so torturous and broken either.

What I realized at some point is that when you give over to someone else's expectations, you lose yourself in their idea of your life and you cease to live. You are no longer you but an extension of them, an extension of something that they find useful to themselves.

It is a difficult transition because you want those relationships to be good and positive and strong, but what I have learned is that a one-sided relationship only appears to be those things and is, in reality, none of them. A relationship that is only maintained by the constant kowtowing of one person is not a relationship at all - it is servitude.

Not that I can say I am always perfect in relationships but I think that I have learned I have too often been too quick to please and lost myself in the process. I don't want to purposefully frustrate people, but I don't want to have to always bend until I break in order to keep the peace.

I just hope that someday new bridges can be built that allow us to meet more in the middle and a relationship can begin that is built on mutual love and respect and acceptance. Some days I fear it is an impossible dream... but I hold on to it anyway.

Last weekend my husband and I traveled down to Dallas to help my parents settle into their new house. We found ourselves building furniture for my brother's bedroom while my mother and her parent's looked on. At one point, after several pieces had been troublesome only to reveal themselves attached backwards, my husband was annoyed. I was no longer helping but instead was relegated to staying out of his way and handing him anything out of his direct reach.

As he grumped through the rest of the wall unit, my mom jokingly observed "I think we're putting your marital bliss to the test here, Mandy."

This comment launched my grandfather into a story about the first months of his marriage to my grandmother. Apparently at one point he asked her to mow the lawn one day while he was at work. He came home that afternoon to a wife beyond annoyed because she had been unable to get the lawn mower started. When she went to show him, she pulled the cord so hard in her anger that the mower finally roared to life.

My grandfather is, to this day, still quite amused at the mental image of her standing over the noisy mower, vowing never to even attempt to mow the lawn again.

My grandmother simply shrugged and said "Well mowing the lawn wasn't in the vows. I didn't promise to do THAT."

This exchange got me thinking about all of the things that married life does actually entail that are never mentioned before or during the hoopla of your wedding day. Even in today's jaded world where much of the pre-marital counseling centers around the reality of day-to-day married life and bringing your love-high down to earth, there are numerous things that no one ever mentions. To name a few:

1) For those who go the traditional route of sharing a home and a bed - you might be sharing more of that bed than you ever would have agreed to. The longer my husband and I are married the more of my side of the bed he seems to think he is now entitled to. And if Daly or Ralph wants to nap with us - I might as well just go sleep on the couch.

2) All of the times Colin complained about his roommate's bad habits (i.e. leaving cabinet doors open in the kitchen) I never dreamed he was actually the culprit. I have now hit my head on those open cabinet doors often enough to have learned better.

3) If both partners are always selfless, you'll never get anywhere. Have you ever thought of the logistical nightmare it would be if both you AND your significant other spent every waking moment trying to make the other happy? Would anyone ever actually BE happy? No. Marriage is not actually about continual selflessness, although that always sounds nice when people talk about it. In practice, one person is selfless while the other gets to be selfish and then you trade off. If not, neither of you would ever actually get anything you want - you'd be too busy trying to give the other person what they wanted while they were busy trying to deny they wanted it in order to give you what you wanted. (What a MESS!)

4) You will go to bed angry and, sometimes, you will wake up even angrier. Think about trying to hash out an argument at 2am when you both have to work in the morning. At that point you're so pissed that you're still arguing you'll never come to a consensus. Give up the ghost and go to bed - but don't expect to wake up to roses in the morning. Love isn't about never fighting or about always giving in with some beautiful gesture - it's about always knowing that you'll make up at some point in the somewhat-immediate future and there won't be any residual crap left over to deal with weeks later.

5) Your goals won't always be the same. It sounds lovely to think that you'll find someone who will always want exactly what you want but I'm not sure I believe that's ever the case. (Maybe - I can't rule out aberrations but I just think it is probably quite rare.) I think one of the more beautiful aspects of marriage is the level of necessary compromise and the love in that compromise. Oftentimes you have to say "I will do this now, if you will do X later." But the compromises are big things - where to live, where to work, when to have children or get pets. To know that someone loves you enough to compromise on the big things is the beauty and the power of commitment.

I think marriage has been wonderful and interesting and has stretched and pulled me in all sorts of directions. I know I'm a better person for it - and we're just now 18 months in. I can't imagine what kind of person I will be 20 years from now.

Regardless, it might not be a good thing that no one warns you about all that marriage really entails - for certainly far fewer individuals would speak those vows if everything were written in, laundry, lawn-mowing and all.

-- Winston Churchill, circa 1940

I find this quote strikes close to the heart for me. It describes what I have always felt in my heart about myself - that I have nothing to offer but my work. Nothing but doing this and doing that and striving to exceed all expectations. That was it. That was all I had to give.

I'm not sure what it is that really made me feel that way but it is a difficult mindset to change. For the last several years I have tried to shift my personal estimation of my own self-worth to factors beyond my exertions on someone else's behalf. Surely there was something more to me than just what I could DO. What about all that I just AM?

But in pondering this quote over the past few days, perhaps the line between those two things is not as distinct as I would like to think. Part of who I am, is all that I do.

One of the few things that I remember from the dress rehearsal for our wedding is something that Colin said. They put us on the spot and asked us what it is that we love about each other (in front of a room full of people). And he said something like "Her focus is always on what she can do for someone else and, the majority of the time, that someone else seems to be me. Her ability to give of herself to others is what I love most."

Perhaps my focus should not be on the things that I do, so much as why I do them. I truly have nothing to offer but the blood in my veins, the work of my hands, the tears running down my face and the sweat pouring from my forehead. Nothing. That truly is the sum total of what I can GIVE to someone else and it is how I direct those resources that speaks volumes about who I am as a person.

Not to imply that it is always saying something nice - because it certainly isn't. But I think that should be my focus, more than on changing how I view myself in terms of what I do versus who I am and other questions that don't have concrete answers. Perhaps I should focus instead on just making my actions convey something positive more often than they don't.