Dorie Morgan’s Rising Up
Navigating Twenty-Something Suburban Life
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Archive of "relationships" Category
College stole my interns - I want them back
I hate to say it, but summer is over. Retail stores have Back-to-School displays that are thoroughly picked over. Even the school buses in my township have been doing dry runs before classes start on Tuesday. Even the trees look tired from being leafy and green for so long.
And as my friend Carmella pointed out, Starbucks will be selling Pumpkin Spice Lattes on next Tuesday. Nothing says “fall” quite like pumpkins.
Summer is gone and autumn is here. And the call of autumn took the interns away and back to college.
I miss the interns already. We had really great interns this summer.
And it is a little tempting to say “have a great semester, give us a call sometime” and then never talk to those interns again. Why? Because we’re busy. But we are all so busy so really, that’s not an excuse anymore. The people who are really busy and successful still make time to connect with other people.
But those interns are more than just transient people who come for a summer to work. Those interns are the people who will someday shape the industry you work in and the world you live in.
Think about it this way: Your interns just went back to college. Chances are those interns are talking about their internship experiences with professors and advisors. Maybe they are even talking to their friends who would be looking internships next summer. If this summer’s intern was great, wouldn’t you want them to pass along the names of other people who might be great as well?
But think further down the line too. Someday that intern is going to graduate and with graduation comes the need for a job. Do you want that recent grad (who was a great intern) going to your biggest competitor and working for them? Probably not. If you think like I do, I’d rather they come back and work for me.
Just because the internship is formally over does not mean that you end the conversations. This is the time where you step up the effort to develop a mentoring relationship even more.
So how do you accomplish this?
- Let your intern know that you would like to mentor them. Not everyone knows how to ask for a mentor. By letting them know that you are interested in building that relationship, you let them know that you value their contributions and think they have potential. It is also incredibly exciting when someone you respect approaches you about building that relationship.
- Talk to your intern about the classes they are taking and organizations they are joining. It doesn’t always have to be over the phone – email works great too. But don’t forget to take the conversation off the internet and into real life at least once a month.
- Encourage your intern to start blogging. And stay in the blogging conversation with them. Leave comments on their page or have them guest post on your blog. Or better yet, do both!
There’s no reason to forget about interns just because they are gone. This is part of networking, part of building your business and part of building your brand.
Babies? Maybe Later
After nine months of trying, my best friend is finally pregnant. Thank God. I’ll miss calling her weekly and starting the conversation with “so, are you knocked up yet?” but it is a small price to pay for her happiness. She’s wanted a baby for a while now.
Brian’s older sister is pregnant too. She’s due in October and expecting a little girl. She started trying around the same time my best friend did but things worked out a little faster. I have to admit, I’m looking forward to being an aunt again.
Even our next door neighbors at the new house have a new baby boy. I think their six year old daughter was confused when her brother turned out to be a baby and not a kid her age to play with. She also wants to know when Brian and I will be having babies because “there aren’t enough kids around here”.
It seems like there are babies everywhere. I guess it is a side effect of actually being an adult now.
I’ve always wanted to have a big family. I may not have dreamt about being a bride when I was a little girl but I dreamt about being a mom. I am an only child so I used to daydream about a house filled with chaos and madness and kids everywhere. The idea of a big family still sounds very appealing. But when the 6 year old asked me about having kids, I froze.
I am not ready to be a mom.
I am not ready to give up my freedom.
I am not ready to stop being selfish.
And I don’t think I should be making babies until I’m ready to put a child first. As an educated person who understands how babies are made and can take the necessary steps to avoid premature baby making, having a child before I’m ready is just irresponsible.
The downside to this line of thought is that I keep hearing that there is no “right time” to have a kid. Because children are messy and inconvenient. They say things that make the neighbors cringe. Kids are expensive.
And once a child arrives, you can never go back to not being a parent. It is one of the most permanent changes you can make. (At least if you are a woman. In the case of my birth father, it didn’t seem to slow him down.) Children change priorities. They change your life.
And that change is appealing, but not yet. There is so much I want to do with my life before I start to worry about the dangers of vaccinating children and start to focus on providing my children with a strong start in life. I want to travel, to write a book, to actually finish renovating my house. I want to be a wife and appreciate my time with my husband. I want to see what I can accomplish in my career. I want to be able to take off on a weekend trip on a moment’s notice and not worry about tracking down a babysitter.
I told my new 6 year old friend that there would not be any babies anytime soon but my nieces and nephew would come to visit. And in typically 6 year old fashion, she quickly moved onto the next topic that interested her. It was adorable.
Here’s what I’m ready for – I am ready to be the favorite aunt. I’m ready to do the fun things with kids and not worry if the homework is done or if they are behaving correctly. I’m ready to rediscover the world through the eyes of my niece but I am not ready to rediscover the world through the eyes of my daughter.
I really thought someone would have shot me
Preemptive apology for the disjointed nature of this post.
Last Thursday my grandfather fell at his nursing home and broke his hip. On Friday, he had surgery to replace that hip. On Sunday, he woke up seemed very confused by me. Yesterday (Tuesday), he finally woke up and knew who people were.
It has been a rough couple of days to say the least.
Partially because we weren’t sure he was going to make it. Partially because we were afraid he would make it. And so we sat in hospital chairs, murmuring back and forth that everything was going to be okay.
I did a lot of writing since Thursday, but all of it was intensely personal. I thought about posting it but I realized that if I got one negative comment on what I wrote, I would be devastated. And if I can’t handle the criticism for what I write, I shouldn’t be sharing.
But yesterday, my grandfather woke up. And this time he knew who I was.
It is really hard to see him like this. Because this is so different from the way he lived his life. And when the person you respect most in the world looks at you and says “I really thought someone would have shot me before I got to this point”, it can break your heart.
After I fed my grandfather dinner last night and left the hospital, I started wondering about how you measure lifelong success. Or if you can even measure it at all. In the twilight of life, what are the markers of success that really matter?
My grandfather wrote a list of things to be included in his eulogy in 1985 when he retired from his career. I was three years old at the time. He ended it with a statement about spending his retirement with his granddaughter and living happily ever after. Twenty three years later: Did he really live happily ever after?
If we look at the 1985 list of accomplishments and then ask the question “was this life successful”, I think it is easy to come to the conclusion, that yes it was. But when we move forward over twenty years and ask the same question, reaching the same conclusion becomes complicated.
The last twenty years have been stagnant.
And maybe that’s what he really wanted.
But it seems at conflict with the first sixty-five years of life. And I have a hard time believing someone worked so hard for 65 years just to let it all go so quickly.
Maybe the apathy is a symptom of a larger problem that I am just not seeing.
I think this is so disconcerting to me is because I see a lot of my grandfather in me. And I fear living my twilight years in the same condition that he has lived his.
I would hope that I would keep growing and changing well into retirement. I would hope that I would continue to do one thing that terrifies me each day until I die.
So now I’m left with questions. How do I live my life? Do I need to change the way I live now in order to ensure my own happiness sixty years from now? Will the decisions I make today impact my ability to die with dignity?
A mentor for my marriage will matter more
I suck at finding mentors. I hate asking people to mentor me. I don’t know how to do it without it becoming awkward. And I secretly fear that the person I’m asking will laugh and say no.
When I was in college, it was so much easier. The theatre association I joined assigned every new member a mentor, it was just up to you to maintain the relationship. When I joined my sorority, you picked your big and your big then mentored you through out your Greek Life experience (and I still go to my big when I’m mulling over major life decisions, Thanks Michelle!). When I was elected president of my chapter, there was an alumnae member just waiting to be my advisor. Everything was provided for me.
But now, I have to find my own mentors. And I don’t know where to begin. I really don’t have a mentor for my career or a mentor for blogging.
I’m more concerned though about finding a mentor for my marriage. Because, at the end of the day, I will only be married once. Making this work, and in a healthy way, is so important. I won’t get another shot at a happy marriage but there will always be a second chance with my career.
There are a few reasons why finding a couple to mentor my marriage is so hard.
- So many marriages end in divorce. And so many marriages end after the kids have already grown and left the house. I don’t want to be mentored by someone whose marriage is falling apart but at the same time, you don’t really know if a marriage is successful until one of its partners has died.
- We would have to find a couple that would be beneficial for both of us. This mentoring relationship wouldn’t just be about me and the mentor but me, my husband and the mentoring couple. Just thinking about establishing a relationship makes me realize just how different Brian and I truly are.
- My husband and I are Christians. Brian has a Pentecostal upbringing whereas I have a Presbyterian past. But here’s where it gets complicated: I broke away from the church for years (hello sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll). It took a long time for me to come back to the church and when I did, I discovered it was really difficult for me to relate to other Christians. Brian, on the other hand, has no past like that to deal with and address. My past is just as much a part of my marriage as the present we now share. We encounter very few Christian couples who understand what that sort of past really means.
With that being said, not having a mentor is just not a good idea. But I’m not quite sure where I am supposed to go next. And when something is so important, how do you establish criteria without crippling yourself in the process? It almost feels more difficult than the decision to become a married couple.
Where do you find your best mentors? And how do you establish that relationship once you have realized the potential?
Falling in love with fiction
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around. ~David Lodge
I haven’t been blogging as frequently as I want to because I fell deeply in love with Twilight last week. Translation: In the last eight days, I’ve read the first three books twice. And flagged my favorite sections with post-it notes and gone back and reread those sections.
It’s like book crack and now I need rehab.
I should have realized I had a problem when I tried to convince my husband to drive me to all of the places I needed to go so I could read. But I didn’t realize it then. No, it wasn’t until I was sitting an exceptionally long red light thinking about getting the books from the back seat that I realized I had a problem.
I’m okay with my obsessive book tendencies. This isn’t so different from when I was a kid – I realized when I was about 7 years old that I could hide in the bathroom to read because no one would bother me there (my mother must have been convinced that I had intestinal problems for years when really, I was sitting behind the bathroom door with my nose in a book). I also kept a night light in my room until I was twelve so I could read at night when everyone thought I was asleep. It was a sad night when it was finally discovered that I was always so tired from reading well into the early morning hours.
So last week, I let my whole life fall by the wayside so I could read Twilight with desperate need. My husband was confused by it. He’s not a reader. The more I consumed of each book, the more annoyed he became (the ride to Sam’s club may have pushed him over the edge). And the more annoyed he became, the more I grew in love with the characters.
It was so easy to fall in love with the characters too. Why? Losing yourself in the fantasy of a fictional man is effortless. Books don’t write about how he leaves dishes in the sink, the toilet seat up or that he thought it was a great idea to start making fun of your mother’s cooking at the last family reunion. Books are about the desire, the urges, the emotions that are not dirtied by day to day living.
In a book, we never get to the part of the story where the woman loses interest in sex and the man can’t get it up in a moment’s notice. Or if we do get to that point in the story, it’s because we started there and we then discover how something sparked passion again. In a book, we feel the initial passion for the first time and we remember the passion that may have waned in our own lives.
All of this got me thinking: If someone were to write about my life with Brian, where would be the part where our “story” would be “over”? The beginning part of our story is easy. We meet. I avoid him. I realize I’m falling for him. We go on one date. His mother dies. We court. We decide to get married. My parents flip out. I cry. Nine months later, I finally become Mrs. Morgan.
But from there, what happens to the story? Does the story go on to talk about my own cancer scare from last year, which ended anticlimactically? (Thank God, there was no tumor.) Or does the story go on to tell about me making sandwiches in the mornings and doing laundry at night? Does the story go on to weave words of how we sit around playing World of Warcraft together while passing a bottle of wine back and forth?
When we fall in love with fiction, whether that is movies, books or any other type of fantasy, do we set expectations for our mates that can never be reached?
There is a very fine line between high expectations and the impossible.
You were a jerk. Let’s fix it.
So maybe after reading last week’s post, you have realized that you are, in fact, the office asshole. Maybe you had no clue before. Maybe you didn’t care before. But now you know and now, you want to do something to fix it.
As I said last time, I’m not sure you can fix it. I wish it was that simple. But every office has at least one person (or more) with the memory of an elephant. Some people will want to forgive and forget and move on with their workday. Other people will remember and be wary. And either way is okay. Much like they could not change the fact that you are/were the office jerk, you can not change how they chose to deal with it.
Step 1: Stop talking about yourself. Adopt a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with your personal life. If they don’t ask, you don’t tell. It really is that simple. You are not as interesting to your cube mate as you are to yourself.
Step 2: Start talking (or at least asking) about other people. Please don’t interpret that as start gossiping though. You’ve spent enough time talking about yourself, now its time to hear about someone else. Ask about what someone’s plans are for the weekend. And then, here’s the hard part, wait until they ask about your plans. If they don’t ask, then refer to Step 1. Mostly likely, the person who is most interesting to the person you are talking to is them self.
Step 3: Take an interest. Sometimes, you have to look out for yourself first. For some of us, that’s next to impossible to learn. But other times, you have to look out for your time first. And for the rest of us, that’s next to impossible to learn. If you have been the office jerk, chances are, you were only looking out for Number 1. So now, you learn how to listen to what projects are on the horizon for your team. And if your team is stuck or struggling, take an interest and offer to help. Don’t offer to help to be the hero and save the day. You are offering to help by saving your team from the tedious. You are showing your team/department/office that you realize you need them.
Step 4: Remember those interns. Maybe you weren’t so nice to those interns before. Now, you have to be. I’ll be honest, I secretly judge most of my coworkers based on how they treat the interns. So take an intern under your wing. Teach that intern something they may not have learned elsewhere. Maybe even pull an intern onto a choice assignment. It will never hurt you to help the low man on the totem pole.
Step 5: Do something nice. Maybe that looks like bringing cupcakes to the office or picking up breakfast for the team. Maybe being nice looks like remembering that someone loves jazz and then letting them know about a music festival they might enjoy. Maybe it is treating someone to lunch. I’m not suggesting you try to buy love (and if you are a jerk, this will only make things worse) but people love to feel like they have been remembered.
Step 6: Apologize. Maybe this is a step reserved for the truly heinous of office assholes but if you are making no progress in improving your office relationships, you may need to acknowledge your previous behavior. It doesn’t need to be anything over the top but it does need to be sincere and to the point. An example: “I realize that for a long time I did not treat the team properly and I need to correct that. What do you think I can do to make the situation better?”
Step 7: Dust off your resume. You may have done too much damage at your place of current employment to correct it. But don’t just hop to a new job and hope everything will be better. You will need to be making an active effort not to repeat the mistakes you made previously. Figure out why you were such a jerk before and then avoid those situations/triggers/whatever that set you off.
What do your coworkers really think of you?
One of the men in my office is a real asshole. He seems to think he’s an authority on everything, even though he complains constantly that he doesn’t know how things work. I’m fairly certain he’s not doing any of the work he’s being paid to complete himself (I keep catching other people’s interns completing his work), but he will always tell you why you are doing your job incorrectly. He’s demeaning to women and treads very closely to the sexual harassment line. Wait a minute, he’s demeaning to everyone. I just have no respect for him.
At first, I tried to chalk it up to the fact that he’s a baby boomer and I’m a millennial and we just don’t see eye to eye and it must be a communication problem and so on. But then I hit me: He really is just an asshole.
And the rest of the Boomers in the office think he’s an asshole too. And since I really respect and trust those coworkers, I’m okay with writing the guy off all together.
The worst part of it: he doesn’t seem to know that he’s an asshole. Like many other aspects of his work life, he just has no clue. But he can’t be the only one in that boat.
In case you were curious if your co-workers think you’re an asshole, here are a few clues.
You enter conversations that don’t pertain to you. If I’m discussing a situation in a department meeting, and you walk by the room and enter uninvited to tell me your opinion, there’s something wrong. People will ask for your opinion if they think you have some insights or ideas that could help the situation. And if no one asks, you can find a better venue to share your ideas than bursting into a meeting.
You frequently find yourself eating alone. If you are taking lunch at noon and no one else is in the break room with you, there is a problem. Especially if noon used to be the peak lunch hour. Let’s face it: your lunch break is valuable time because it is your time. And when your coworkers start showing that you aren’t wanted during their time, its time to make a change in your behavior.
You tell your coworkers all about you – but you rarely ask your coworkers about them. I work at a small company with a family atmosphere. As a result, I hear a lot about my coworkers personal lives, which is great. It helps me to work more efficiently with my coworkers because I have a greater understanding of where people are coming from. For example, the girl next to me ran a 5k last night and she didn’t do as well as she would have liked. But after telling me about the 5k experience, she asked me about how my night class went last night. Relationships are give and take – no one wants to just hear about how great you are, they want you to ask as well. People will start to avoid you if they think you are only interested in yourself.
You bully the interns. Interns are here to be treated like a second class citizen. Interns are here to learn, to gain work experience and hopefully, make some money. And really, when you treat my intern with a lack of respect, I lose even more respect for you. Why? I don’t want to be around you if you make yourself feel good by treating others poorly and certainly do not want my team to be around you either. And let’s not even get into the fact that I would not want you anywhere near my clients.
Is there anyway to bounce back from this behavior? I’m still not sure. Part of me thinks it just isn’t possible.
Is blood thicker than water?
My mother gives me a lot of unsolicited advice when it comes to married life. I suppose it’s a natural and overwhelming urge for her to pass on these gems of wisdom. Nine times out of ten, I strongly disagree with what she believes to be true, which is making me wonder how I lived in the same house as this woman from birth until adulthood.
Lately, the advice has been relating to interacting with his family. Since I am an only child and an only grandchild (yes, I know I blogged about my cousin last week but she’s actually my step-cousin), I need all the advice I can get when it comes to interacting with siblings. While I spent the first 24 years of my life learning how to be quiet by myself, Brian learned how to survive having 3 older sisters.
When it comes to healthy family relationships, I am in over my head.
So my mom gives me advice to make up for the fact that reproduction is not my family’s strong point. She seems to think that if she passes on enough pieces of truth from her own life, it will make up for some of the confusion in my own life.
But really, her advice is just getting under my skin. “Blood is thicker than water” is her favorite phrase to utter over the phone during my commute home.
The way I catch myself interpreting her advice is that biological family ties will be the bonds that trump all other bonds. I’m not sure that is what she really means but it is what I keep hearing. And in my life, there are so many things wrong with that mentality.
For example: I don’t know who my birth father is. Despite the fact that he was married to my mother when I was both conceived and born, I have not seen him since I was six months old. In my house, we don’t talk about it. I don’t know what he looks like and no one will answer my questions. Which then leaves the question: If blood is truly thicker than water, is the blood flowing through my veins just really crappy? Is it less bonding than other blood?
Take another example: My step dad adopted me when I was thirteen. I’ve called him “Daddy” since the day he married my mother. He gave me away when I married Brian. But despite a slight resemblance, I share no genetic material with the man I identify as my father. There is no “blood” between us. If blood is truly thicker than water, does an adopted child only have a chance at a deep relationship when they grow up and have kids of their own?
But more troubling, my mom’s advice makes me think of baby boomers and the waves of divorce I have watched my friends survive. Even as adults, the experience of watching their parents divorce has shaken the world they live in. And the shared blood through their children still was not enough to make things work.
If blood truly is thicker than water, how does a marriage survive and thrive? Will sibling relationships always take the cake for closeness?
And then I wonder about my life and my marriage. And I wonder about the world of twenty somethings and their budding marriages. Will our ability to learn from our parents’ mistakes enable us to change the face of American marriage? Could we decide as a generation to make the difference between family and friends irrelevant?
Are you liberated by your marriage?
When Brian and I first decided to get married, I hated my job. Actually, I probably hated 90% of my life but it was easier to focus that energy at hating my job. But I felt stuck. I needed the money too much to quit working but I didn’t really have the time to devote to a job search. And my job made it next to impossible to take time off to interview.
I spent a lot of time crying because of it. But crying didn’t help me at all. It didn’t give me more money. It didn’t help me find a new job. All crying did was make me hate my job even more.
I was stuck. And I got to the point of stuck where I didn’t know how to become unstuck.
But this is where marriage steps in. I’ve been extremely blessed by the support and the liberation that my marriage has given me. Brian picked up my bills so I could quit that god awful job and hunt for something I truly loved. That might not seem like a big deal, but when Sallie Mae owns you to the tune of 1k+ each month, having a stretch of freedom is amazing.
A lot of times, we think of marriage as commitment and divorce as liberation from that commitment. But what if we changed the way we look at marriage? What if we start to think of marriage as opportunity? What if marriage liberates you from your fears? By changing our views of the institution of marriage, are we capable of changing its impact in our lives?
The fear of failure is still there for me but at the same time, its hold isn’t any where near as strong. Brian’s support liberates me to make choices that would be just too risky if I was single. And his support goes beyond financial. The emotional support he provides during times of stress and challenges is far more than what my family is capable of providing to me on a regular basis.
At the end of the day, I’m left with this: If your relationship does not uplift you and support you, why are you in that relationship? And if you are not capable for providing that same support to your partner, why not?
Internal Interviews: Was this really a good idea?
I recently applied for an internal posting within my company and then had the chance to sit around and be paranoid for a while as they decided whether or not I was interview worthy. The whole situation is like dating gone horribly wrong – I’ve already been on this “date” for the last year and a half, I’ve asked to take the next step and the other person is standing there and thinking about it while I feel awkward.
Now that I’m trapped in the internal hiring process, it is really starting to click in my head how many problems really are in this system. I’d love to say that being promoted from within is a win-win situation for everyone but now I’m not entirely sure.
For starters, what is going to happen to your career within the company if you are not selected for the position? Will that be remembered in the future if you apply for other positions? For example, could the ABC department turn you down because if the XYZ department didn’t want you, there must be a reason? The last few days, I’ve been thinking about this like a marriage proposal – does the relationship really survive after a rejected proposal or does it just limp along until someone has the guts to call it quits?
Next problem: I would be moving out of an administrative role but it isn’t unreasonable to think that I could be perceived as the new department’s copy ‘n staple bitch. Would I forever be seen as the coffee girl or could a truly become a vital part of the new department? Would I really be able to make the impact I am capable of making?
Finally, if this new position should work out, I’d be leaving my present boss in a bit of a bind. She would have to cover the work I currently do until they find someone to replace me or I could be expected to cover both positions until someone new could be trained. I really don’t want to leave my current boss in a bad position (I have a really great working relationship with her) but at the same time, I don’t want to put myself in a bad starting position.
My big interview is scheduled for tomorrow so I’m hoping I’ll know by the end of the week how this will pan out for me. Keep your fingers crossed it works out well for me and I’ll keep you posted on the process this week.
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