Be Careful What you Wish For; Christmas 2011

I remember being in love with the Christmas season many years ago. More than in love; passionately, head-over-heels buzzy, fanatically frantic, Lady GaGa “Bad Romance”, 12-Step program addicted to this season. This included the requisite Christmas Eve rush to the mall just to be among the other last-minute lunatics who enjoyed the manic marathon of midnight shopping. Then I’d be up to all hours wrapping gifts just so I could present each loved one with a tag, bag, bow and a story. Not a Christmas story, but a shopping story of the critical consideration invested into that elusive “perfect gift”….all to prove how much you mean to me.

If only I’d taken all that energy and funneled it into building a multi-million dollar empire! Imagine the gifts I’d be able to shower my loved ones with now! But, alas, hind sight is twenty-twenty. No regrets about how I spent Christmas’ past, or any other season for that matter. As I get older I actually get better at being able to look back and understand I was right where I was supposed to be, when I was meant to be there, my entire life. There were lessons to be learned, big and small, all year round. Thank goodness a lot of them have stuck. But even so, there are many more I continue to learn, and learn again. With some, it’s starting to feel like I could teach the course.

Just in time for the season of wishes, wants, intentions and resolutions, I’ve found an unwelcome re-realization coming about in my life that I felt important to share. And, for those of you who know about my personal circumstances over the past two and a half years, you’ll probably find this both humorous and hypocritical. After all the crying, hand-wringing, complaining, supporting, anxious days, weeks and months of teetering on the brink of financial crisis, my husband finally received an offer and accepted a full-time job. This well-deserved turn of events follows a grueling 30 months of unemployment, the last six without any support from the government. And despite how positively this new stability will impact our financial lives, I’m genuinely….well….sad.

The sense of abundance and relief felt after so many months of barely scraping by was sweet and overwhelmingly joyful….for about 2 days. But then the subway-train like screech of metal on metal braking resounded deeply in my head for the week following. That was the sound of the life to which I’d grown accustomed coming to a complete stop. I was finally going to get what I’d wished for, and I realized I wasn’t sure I wanted it anymore.

Not wanting, but needing this stability, is a simple reality of our situation. Intellectually, rationally, emotionally, we all know this. But it doesn’t change the fact that our two children have had two at-home parents for almost three years, and neither of them recalls clearly a time when both of us weren’t there when they got on or off the school bus. Despite the fact that we’ve explained many times how very unique and special our arrangement, educating them on how few families enjoy this privilege… the true understanding of our good fortune won’t be realized until a few weeks into this new arrangement. And I dread the transition on so many levels, for so many reasons, I can’t even begin to explain it in one blog post. But I will say this; I’m losing my right arm, left leg, grocery runner, gardener, laundry service, and lunch companion. Worse, the kids are losing their summer weekday beach-buddy, winter-break sledding Sherpa, kitchen-table tutor, fake wrestling coach and short-order breakfast cook…well, Monday through Friday anyways.

While self-employed, I tend to work very long hours and the busiest part of my day tends to run between 2:00 and 6:00 p.m. When I have west coast clients, I will work as late as 9:00 p.m., even on those days that start around 5:30 a.m. EST. I have been able to work as many as fifteen hours a day, take few breaks yet still manage to throw dinner together and help put the kids to bed. However, most of the shopping, housework, childcare and general home maintenance has fallen onto my husband’s plate. So, as you can guess, things just got a little bit harder. Or, a lot harder…yea, I’m thinking the latter.

Admittedly, we had actively hoped, prayed and waited very patiently for this day to come. If you’re not a religious person, you may still have appreciation for the system of setting universal intention and receiving blessings. I can tell you it works, but not always the way you anticipate, and often not so literally. In our case, we got pretty much what we wished for, and the timing is (for better or worse) what it is. But that there was ever a time when I didn’t completely value the consistency of my husband’s presence, the investment of time he made every day in home-making, or didn’t weigh properly the advantages to having my partner here against a steady paycheck and benefits is just unthinkable now. I’ll even go so far as to say that the major reason most families don’t have this lifestyle isn’t because they don’t want it, or they think it’s unhealthy, it’s because it just isn’t affordable.

I used to complain that I wanted him to have a job so we could have a “healthy separation” and so we would enjoy each other more. Believing the old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder. When I think about those complaints now, I hear a woman struggling to maintain a safe personal distance so she can maximize her earning potential without distraction…and who enjoyed her solitude perhaps a little too much.

At the height of our too-close-for-comfort arrangement, it seemed we were taking each other for granted a bit, and there was no consistency to our communication regardless of how much time we spent together. Well, maybe that was true for the first year, but we finally found a rhythm and rhyme to our days. By the following summer, we had settled into the new arrangement and I began to wonder how anyone runs a household without this kind of daily, hands-on management from both partners. Oddly, we still struggled to find downtime most weekends despite all of the “found” hours during the week.

Now the countdown back to “normalcy” has begun. We are less than one week away from Shawn’s return to the 9-5 grind. We are both, decidedly, resignedly, plodding through this week trying to think about all of the things we wanted to accomplish before next week’s arrival. Now, ironically, we are wishing for more time as a two parent household. And I’m trying every day to peek around the corner and rediscover all the bright sides to our old/new arrangement.

So what’s the lesson here? Well, that’s obvious. This holiday season…when someone asks what you really want during this season of hopes, expectations and gift giving/receiving, consider this; is what you are wishing for something that will make you truly happier? Or, would you be trading in one set of problems for another? Are there things you can afford to live without, but want just because you’ve set up an expectation for yourself and now don’t want to compromise? Does purchasing a brand new car, getting a dog or upgrading to a bigger house mean owning and enjoying them? Perhaps wonderful to have at first, bringing a few months of joy to your life, but eventually, will they own you? Will they take up even more time that you really don’t have, or result in a financial burden that cannot be easily sustained through lean times? That’s the problem with consumerism and modern conveniences, it doesn’t always make your life better or easier…like the advertisers would have you believe.

As to our lifestyles, I wonder how many of us really think about the trade-offs of our hyper-active, overly-committed, achievement-oriented tread-mill of existence. Is this making us happier? I wonder if you sat still long enough, cleared your calendar, sat quietly without distraction, what would you find? Or, more curiously, what would find you?

It took a great effort for me to slow down over the past two plus years, both physically and mentally. It took a very, very long time to get used to, and accept graciously the deepening quiet of my mind. I learned a lot about what’s normal and healthy for me, and the truth about how much I really can handle. I’m now to a point where my mind and my body work together to tell me when I’m taking on too much. And I’ve learned a few valuable lessons about how not to get caught up in the vicious cycle of churn and burn…in particular when someone else wants to man the controls.

Making a daily effort to keep these things in check means being very honest with myself and others, particularly as it relates to work, social commitments and volunteering. Call me a miser, but I’m kind of cheap about how I spend my time and energy. I won’t be using it to chase down all the sales at the mall this year. Who needs that when you have the Internet? (I LOVE online shopping!!)

Instead of wishing for what you want this year, maybe wish for what you need. Figuring that part out shouldn’t be too difficult. We all know what we really need…and we can have it…so long as we’re courageous enough to ask for, and accept it…with love.

In closing…and it deserves repeating…Be careful what you wish for this year, because you just might get it.

Wishing you a joyous, slow-paced, environmentally sensitive, memorable and warm Holiday Season!

(P.S., Check out the Super Tuscan’s right now (Italy). I had a really wonderful red at Stockholders in Weymouth, MA this past weekend. For $8.00 a glass, it was an absolute gem!)

K-