Dorie Morgan’s Rising Up
Navigating Twenty-Something Suburban Life
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Archive of "challenges" Category
Working Questions: Bullies
Sitting in my cube last week, I started thinking about workplace bullies. Who are these people? What are they trying to compensate for in their own lives? Do they enjoy their attitudes or do they just not realize they are miserable? Who told them this was appropriate behavior? How do they justify treating their colleagues in such a toxic way? Did anyone ever tell them that you get more bees with honey?
I also started wondering: are the workplace bullies we encounter as adults the same bullies we encountered on the playground? Is it once a bully, always a bully? Or does something snap? Does a nerdy kid have a moment of “I’m not going to take this anymore” and just swing too far in the opposite direction?
Does the workplace bully just think they are practicing tough love?
Thoughts? Opinions?
Save New Beginnings
Bensalem School District wants to cancel New Beginnings, a program geared towards helping teenage moms get their high school degrees and learn how to care for their children. I don’t live in Bensalem but this drives me nuts – the New Beginnings program is a great example of being proactive with a community problem. Run by Patti Pearson, New Beginnings has a 90% graduation rate for its program participants.
What I love most this program is that it breaks the cycle. By supporting these young women in difficult circumstances, New Beginnings give their children a better chance in life. Patti’s love for the young women she works with is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
The other thing I love about this program is that it is the community that solves the problem. Instead of waiting for the federal or state governement to step in and save the day, Bensalem School District took charge. These women were part of the community and were given resources to not onlyhelp themselves but ultimately contribute towards the community.
Please check out the following post by Kathrin Ivanovic at The Diversity Projekt. If you are able to help support this important program, it would be greatly appreciated.
Leave Your Politics Out Of Hunger
On Monday, I went to an event at the United Christian Church focusing on solving hunger. It sounded like a great idea. How can you go wrong with a title like “Beyond Charity: solving the problem of food insecurity and hunger in Bucks County”?
The answer is far more easily than I expected.
I’m not a liberal by any account. I hate the idea of a huge federal government. I voted for Bob Barr. But I do care about my community. Brian and I give to several non-profits every year, even if that means we go without when it comes time to buy new clothes for work or skip date night. We believe in community as a means to better the world we live in.
With that being said, I wasn’t surprised when I got to this event and it was filled with social workers and advocates. But I was surprised when the first person spoke, Robin Stelly of Penn Action, mentioned how difficult it was to find a location for the event. She talked about churches and community centers not wanting to host the event because of political concerns.
I was confused. How are there political concerns with solving hunger in Bucks County? Hunger seems like a pretty straight forward issue: we weren’t going to be discussing gay marriage or abortion or stem cell research.
And then Joel Berg got up. Berg is a national leader in the field hunger and food security and recently published a book “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” He started his talk/book reading with a rehashing of his recent visit to Alaska and how he “battled” Sarah Palin. Then he started referring to Palin as the “Alaskan Bear” and how he made her back down.
This struck me as odd. And inappropriate. While I may not agree with Sarah Palin’s political beliefs, I do believe that we have the right to free speech and she has the right to run for office. We do not need to compare our fellow man to an animal when our fellow man has a different opinion. We also do not need to “battle” over ideas – this is not Gladiators. Whatever happened to having a calm, rational discussion of ideas?
Next Berg moved onto slurs against Libertarians. Later he told us that even if the conservatives are lying, liberals do not need to stoop to their levels. He ranted against individuals who disagreed with or had concerns over the Obama budget.
The message I got from Berg was that if you did not agree with his extreme liberal ideology, you were heartless.
It was hard to pick out solutions for hunger from Berg’s talk that were separate from his pro-government perspective.
The last straw for me was when Berg made fun of bloggers for asking questions about bailout money and the use of welfare and food programs. While only a passing snarky moment for him, it stuck with me. Here was a man in front of us who was not interested in having a discussion about solutions. He was only interested in being right. He was not interested in real questions.But I do need to mention how impressed I was with Joseph Quattrocchi of Pennsylvania Hunger Action Center and Jonathan Na of the Bucks County Opportunity Council. These men were able to provide a realistic and startling look at what hunger means in Pennsylvania as well as discuss what is being done already and how we, as a community, can contribute to solve the hunger problem.
“Food Insecurity” does not mean much to a woman who doesn’t know how she will feed her kids today. To her, she is starving. Not in the trite way we lament an hour before dinner but actually starving. She will choose to continue her hunger to feed her children. She might not be aware of food programs that are available at her children’s school or she may be too embarrassed to ask for help. She may not have transportation to get to a food bank.
“Food Insecurity” is just one of those terms we slap on a problem to make it sound nicer, maybe not so bad. For 12% of the US in 2007, it meant something very different.
10 weeks later: I cry
My grandfather once tried to teach me not to cry.
“Doie”, using his childhood nickname for me, “when you are dead and gone, you are just that. Dead and gone. Crying won’t bring you back so don’t cry when I’m gone.”
Of course, I cried when he was gone. And he was right. Crying did not raise him from the dead, nor did it further cement him in my mind.
All crying did was make my eyes burn until I was all cried out. Or maybe I was just so dehydrated, my body found it to be physically impossible to cry any more.
Either way, I didn’t really cry for six weeks even though I needed to cry. Sometimes a single sob would escape my mouth but I could not sustain it. There were no more tears to give.
I couldn’t cry if my life depended on it. I wanted to cry, I just couldn’t remember how to do it.
I didn’t cry when I read his obituary in the local newspaper and saw my name on the list of his survivors. And I didn’t feel like I was surviving.
I didn’t cry when my fingers touched the laminated prayer card I kept in my purse that my mother gave me before the memorial service.
I didn’t cry when we divided his belongings amongst us, looking like vultures but feeling like the desperate who needed to cling to a memory.
Instead, I finally cried in a mall food court like a raving lunatic on a beautiful , sunny Saturday afternoon. I cried so hard, I freaked out a little boy in a Little League uniform at the table next to me. He, in turn, burst into tears and spilled his chocolate milk all over himself.
No one else seemed to notice. No one else seemed to care.
He still didn’t come back even though my mouth tasted like a peculiar form of grief I had not discovered earlier.
Time had moved forward as time often does. While physically, I moved forward, emotionally, I stopped on February 19th. Since then, I merely went through the motions. It was all just make believe.
Sitting in a consumer wasteland, the truth of the matter was realized.
Honey do? Honey Don’t.
In my head, I know “Honey Do” lists are one of the worst things ever.
Partially because no one tells you to create “Honey Do” lists when they give you unsolicited marriage advice during an engagement and early days of marriage. People told me to not let myself go or to never go to bed angry or always tell each other our story of us. No one ever said “create a laundry list of tasks you’d like your spouse to complete and pass it along whenever possible”.
The other reason I know that my “Honey Do” lists are horrible is because whenever I attempt to give one to Brian the response is usually something along the lines of “I refuse to submit to your unreasonable list of demands”. And while I did not think my lists were unreasonable, I have to respect Brian’s desire to not receive those lists.
Lately, I’ve been sending him renovation lists which are remarkably similar to Honey Do’s but usually include items such as “build and install custom kitchen cabinets”, “obtain 4 quotes from heating and oil specialists” or “remove wall that is visually displeasing to my eyes”. Since he is a contractor, none of these requests are particularly unreasonable but would probably be entertaining to outsiders if the list fell out of his pocket.
But with work slowing down (okay, screeching to a bitter and painful stop) in the construction industry, I’ve started sending Honey Do lists to him again. Because on the days he is a stay at home husband, I can’t come home and do everything. That’s not to say that he doesn’t do things around the house to begin with but it just really sucks to come home and have to cook dinner when someone else was home from work for the day.
The recession is redefining our gender roles within our marriage. Which is entertaining because we previously believed that our gender roles were much more fluid than they actually were. And that was a surprise.
We also didn’t expect that I would be the primary source of income. Or rather the steady source of income. When work is available, my husband makes considerably more money than I do. I’ve got to admit, it was a terrible blow to my ego when we first were married and I was very angry about. Now the roles have been reversed and I still don’t like it.
So I cope by making lists. Lists about laundry and lists about cleaning and lists about how someone other than me should be spending his time. I hope that wall is out when I get home.
We are the lucky ones
I usually don’t like to blog about the recession – it seems pointless to me. My husband and I aren’t really that special as far as an economic example. We both have jobs, we have no kids, I have student loans, and we just bought a house. Sure there are differences between our situation and our friends’ situations but in most cases the similarities are greater than the differences.
And besides, usually the recession doesn’t hit too close to home.
Brian and I are the lucky ones. I work in pharmaceuticals and while there have been some layoffs in the industry, I don’t need to worry about it too much. Brian has much less job security than I do though. Why? He is a finish carpenter. He doesn’t work unless you want to build or remodel.
We’ve been lucky though. Most days there is work for him. Most of the time, he can bring home a full paycheck. And on the days there is no work available for him, we try to remember that we’ve been given the blessing of an extra day to work on our home.
We’ve heard the horror stories. We had a friend who kept showing up at job sites and asking if there was any work available. He had great carpentry skills but was usually find work as a punch out guy or a paint and spackle bitch. We know another guy who took a huge pay cut just to stay with the home builder he had worked for. It helped him survive the layoff but it certainly didn’t help him pay child support.
The faces at the job sites are changing. Everyone is just trying to get by and many of the builders are just trying to keep their doors open. Supervisors are doing the work usually reserved for day laborers.
This past week, there were three horrible days when there was no work for Brian. The first day wasn’t so bad. The second day was concerning and annoying. The third day had my stomach in a knot: how were we going to pay the mortgage? What cuts can we make to our budget? Is the peanut butter I purchase for his lunch every day too expensive?
I also knew I was being ridiculous.
By Friday morning, I was a wreck. Was this a sign of things to come? Would I become the primary breadwinner in our family? Had the recession finally hit our home?
Fortunately there was work for Brian. And my sanity quickly returned as I heard the news. I could have danced around the office in joy. Once again, we were blessed.
When times are good, it can be so easy for this carpenter’s wife to forget what the bad looks like. When people are buying new homes or remodeling their old homes, my husband makes considerably more money than I do. He makes a family’s life better by changing the space they live in, transforming it into something truly beautiful.
But when the economic climate changes, our lifestyle changes very quickly. Even when we are the lucky ones.
This past week was a reminder, while we don’t have to make any major changes to the way we live right now, this is the time to start cutting back a bit. Do we really need to spend this much money on a gift? Why do I think I need new clothes? How can I save money at the grocery store? Why do we have so many online game accounts anyway?
So far, the biggest changes we have had to make involve changing our remodeling schedule for the house. While we had hoped to put in new windows this spring (the current windows are ancient), we’ll have to wait until 2010. After all, there are 20 windows that need replacing. That could easily cost us four thousand dollars to do the job properly. We’re going to wait a little longer to build our master bedroom suite but that’s okay. Keeping a roof over our heads is far more important.
We’ve also had to rethink about how we want to vacation. While we had been hoping that 2009 would be a big vacation year, we just can’t spend money that way right now. And if at the last minute, there was work available for Brian, we would have to take advantage of the available work. We’ll probably go camping this year (while I have separation anxiety from my laptop until it fully sinks in that I’ll be able to catch up on my reading list).
Navigating a recession and keeping your sanity means you need to stay focused on what you have and what you can do. I have a husband who loves me. I have a roof over my head. I have a good life. I can feel grateful for what I have. I can make wise choices with the things entrusted to my care. I can keep my eyes on what is coming over the horizon.
Change is always coming. What “this too shall pass” really means is cherish it while you have it. Even if it is unpleasant.
Creating Personal Guidance Documents
“So what is your plan?”
Such a simple question, posed by a loving husband who wants to see me do well in our life together but still one of the harder questions he has posed to me as of late.
What the hell is my plan anyway?
I know there is something to be said for going with the flowing and not wanting a plan. Flexibility is awesome and I really admire the people who can be spontaneous and still smell like roses.
I also know myself and therefore I know that I am not one of those people. If I am going to pay my bills on time, if I am going to see my family, if I am going to shave my legs on a regular basis, I need a plan just like I need oxygen. No plan is not acceptable. I won’t have a fresh, rose-like smell. (Side note: I used to think I was one of the spontaneous people when I was younger but the truth is that I was a complete wreck and it was a miracle I managed to stay in school.)
And it feels ridiculous to say it but I have to turn back to my guidance document of 2009, my New Year’s Resolution. And since my New Year’s Resolution was set quarterly goals, it was time to move down to the next tier of documents. My quarterly goals are the Standard Operating Procedures for where I am today.
If my plan is to pay off my consumer debt during the first quarter of the year, then I need to make a list of simple steps I can take to do just that. I need to cut make on dinners out. I need to stop purchasing books. I need to make more than the minimum payment on my credit cards.
If my plan is to move into my home, I would need to make a different list. I would need to paint the rooms. I would need to get estimates on carpet installation. I would need to box my belongings. I would need to transport my belongings from one location to the house I call my home.
You can do this with any goal or desire. If you think of your New Year’s Resolution as a guidance document for the year, you then need to think of the next step down as a procedure to accomplish the principles set forth in your guidance document. And in order for those procedures to be effective, you will also need good work orders or protocols to ensure their proper execution.
Self Knowledge Comes In Waves
Charlotte called me out again last night on my lack of “no” saying abilities in the midst of a rant about people asking me to do inappropriate things. Which sucked because she was completely right – people do ask me to do inappropriate things on a regular basis, probably because there is a good chance that I won’t say yes but I won’t say no and I’ll do what needs to get done anyway because I cannot handle the incompetence that surrounds me.
Once again, I hate it when she is right. Which happens to be all the time. (Or at least enough of the time to know that it is more often than when I am right.)
While I know that its good that I have friends who are smarter than me in some respects, who know themselves and have the confidence to say something to me when I’m doing something dumb, it can be irritating. Maybe I do want to make bad decisions. After all, I’m only 26 and while I’m married, I don’t have any kids. Maybe I should try to do as much dumb decision as humanly possibly before there are children in the hopes that I can get it all out of my system.
And then it hits me like a freight train: this is what living in community really looks like. Having crazy friends who are smarter and wiser and more mature than you are call you out on the things that will ultimately hurt you and hurt your growth.
Along with that freight train comes the knowledge that my desire to make stupid decisions prior to baby making has nothing to do with what I think it is all about. There is no lifetime maximum pay out on stupid decisions. Potentially, I could make stupid decisions all day, every day until the day I leave this earth. My desire to make stupid decisions, however fleeting or dominant that desire may be, has everything to do with me wanting a free pass at life.
I don’t know that wanting a free pass at life is necessarily a bad thing, but I do know that actively pursuing that desire is ultimately destructive in the end. That free pass would strip away the vibrant colors that come with learning how to make good decisions. That free pass does not exist in the ways we hope it would.
This wave of self awareness is overwhelming.
But I have friends like Charlotte who encourage me to be in community but not let myself turn into the community’s bitch. And in order for that community to thrive, the burden of responsibility does not need to fall on a small handful of individuals. The burden of responsibility does not need to fall on me (even if I secretly want it to fall solely on me).
My plan to just say yes to things to the things I love instead of wasting energy on saying no to the things that drain me might just be a failure. And that’s okay. As always, it is finding that balance between extremes, that sweet spot that healthy and sane and rational.
I still have a very long way to go.
My job isn’t the problem
I was chatting with my friend Charlotte the other day after a meeting out by our cars in freezing cold December weather. Mainly because I can’t find any other time to talk to my friends than standing outside our respective vehicles before I take off for another meeting or obligation. I’ve been operating this way for months now.
I started joking to her about it. “Charlotte, if only I didn’t have this job! It takes up all of my time!” Except I wasn’t really joking because lately I’ve been wishing I was a trophy wife (sometimes, I dream that Brian makes way more money that he does just so I can be one of the women at the gym who goes there at nine in the morning and then meets with girlfriends for lunch) and I was really hoping she would just laugh at me.
But in typical fashion, she had to go and say something profound when I didn’t want her to say anything profound. I just wanted her to agree with me.
“Dorie, it’s not your job that’s the problem. It’s your extracurricular activities.”
Of course, to really make her point, she started making a verbal list of things that I do outside of work and I couldn’t stop myself from calling out “Don’t forget about my blog!” like a complete crazy woman.
My first instinct was to tell her that I’m not in high school anymore and these “extracurricular activities” are my just my life but suddenly, I felt like I was seventeen again, with a jam packed schedule.
And she was right. I’ve been going at the same breakneck pace since I was 14. The only thing that has ever really slowed me down for anything length of time were two car accidents. Even when I had mono when I was 16, I still did all of my after school activities (I was physically unable to convince myself to stop even though I needed to sleep for 16 hours a day).
School and work were just things that kept me from doing what I really wanted. My unbalanced, unhinged life strikes yet again.
I can’t blame my level of stress on anything I want but it doesn’t change the fact that while I can say no to other people, I am not capable of saying no to myself. I’m not capable of saying to myself “I’m just too busy today; I need to restructure my priorities”. Instead, I focus on fitting in a meeting at six in the morning for coffee because I can’t say no to the chance to see a friend.
Most of us are not independently wealthy. Most of us will have to work for most of our lifetimes and will be on a budget during the times we are not working – whether it is on vacation or maternity leave. Work is rarely optional so you can’t blame your job for very long during your periods (or seasons) of unbalanced/unhinged living.
I still hate to cut back and while I know tough choices are a key part of adult living, it is still difficult.
A few minutes later in the conversation, Char overwhelmed me again with another question: “Can you honestly say that all of your extracurriculars bring you joy?”
Maybe. Maybe not.
I know that doing laundry doesn’t bring me joy but I also know that not going to work naked does bring me joy. And brings my husband joy when I’m not going to work without my clothes. Maybe a lack joy isn’t enough of a reason to not do something but something that should fall into how we place our priorities.
Once again, I find that I don’t have anymore answers but more things to take into consideration.
Life with Don
I keep finding posts and articles about Gen Y and moving back home stumble flash across my browser and I think it’s time I say something about it. Mostly in the form of a confession.
Brian and I have spent the first 18 months of our marriage living with my father-in-law, Don. I usually try to avoid saying it flat out but I know I’ve alluded to it in the past in both comments and posts.My name is Dorie, I’m 26 and I’m a boomerang kid.
I moved back home follow graduation. Which was horrible. I am convinced that the only way possible for my mother and me to function as rational people is for us to live in different zip codes. Life post graduation in my childhood bedroom was mind numbingly horrible. We fought constantly, I tried to be drunk for as much of it as humanly possible and I was stuck. It’s a miracle anyone survived.
Then I met Brian, we decided to get married and I moved into his father’s house. Most women fear moving from their father’s house and directly into their husband’s house. Brian and I were flat broke and that wasn’t an option.
We spent the first six months on a futon on the floor of his high school bedroom. For the last year, we’ve actually had a bed to sleep on. It was by no means comfortable living but we did it.
Part of the weirdness comes from the fact that I run my late mother-in-law’s household. It’s her organizational systems that I maintain. I cook in her kitchen. I use her washer and dryer for the household’s laundry. It kind of feels like limbo. Because it is limbo.
So why did we do it?
1. Housing in Lower Bucks County is really expensive. A one bedroom apartment in the bad part of town will set you back at least eight hundred dollars a month. For about four hundred dollars more, we could get a mortgage. Since we were committed to the Philadelphia area, why rent when we could buy?
2. We could not afford to buy a house right away. We did not have enough money for a down payment. It took about a year for us to save enough money for a down payment. Had we been renting, we calculate it would have taken 3 to 4 years to save enough money.
3. We wanted a place we could stay rent free while we renovated a home. Brian is a carpenter. It made sense to get a handyman’s special.
4. Nine months before our wedding, Brian’s mom passed away. Moving was just too painful.
Now that our time in Brian’s childhood home is wrapping up, I catch myself reflecting on the time. There are a lot of pros and a lot of cons too.
Pro: It taught us how to fight. Having someone else in the house to hear it when we were disagreeing helped us to stay kind to each other. Because it’s one thing to have in-laws. It’s a whole different thing to have your spouse’s family hear your disagreements. The upside is that we’re pretty good with disagreeing without yelling.
Con: Sometimes you just want a good fight with no one listening. Sometimes I want to rant and rave like an absolute lunatic and not have my father-in-law listening to my insanity.
Pro: It’s broken down the typical “in-law” issues. Brian’s dad isn’t just “my father-in-law” but Don. He’s a real three dimensional person, not just someone to deal with at family functions. These living arrangements have connected me to Brian’s family in ways our marriage couldn’t do by itself.
Con: It makes it harder to be “Dorie” in terms other than “Brian and Dorie”. Limited living space a couple means that there is also limited space for me to still be home but alone. For the first 6 months, we were literally on top of each other because our “bed” was so small. We now live in two rooms but it can still be a challenge.
Pro: We didn’t have to buy what was available. We were able to be fussy about the house we purchased because we didn’t have to worry about when a lease would be up. We also were able to start our renovations without having live in construction or pay rent. It took a lot of pressure off.
Con: Sometimes it took a little too much pressure off us. To the point of becoming lazy. It becomes easier to say “no, I won’t work on the house today because it is raining” instead of saying “I have to move in a month, I have to get to work”.
Pro: We were able to save a ton of money. We were able to have money for a down payment for our home and still have money left over for renovations. I won’t say we are rolling in cash but we are able to get by today without too much panic.
Con: Sometimes it was really tempting to spend that money. Sometimes we were able to practice self control, other times we just couldn’t do it. While I may have loved coming home some days to random jewelry surprises (“Hello Sapphires, I love the way you look on me too”), it did not help our plan to put money aside.
Overall, living with Brian’s dad has been very good for us but I’m not sure I would recommend it to anyone else. If you do find yourself in a situation where you are married and living at home, set some ground rules first and get those rules in writing. Some questions you should ask:
1. Are we expected to pay rent? How much? What day should I give you money?
2. What household responsibilities are we responsible for?
3. What household errands are we responsible for?
4. What are your responsibilities are you response for as the home owner?
5. How will we handle the holiday seasons?
6. What are restrictions for having guests over?Treat everything like it is a business arrangement. It may sound impersonal but it is a key part of maintaining a functioning family in an awkward situation.
And don’t forget to make an exit plan too!
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