A Tale of Two Gulfs

The only good news about the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico is that it's drowning out the news of Lindsay Lohan's latest scandal.

It's impossible to ignore the news of the oil that's gushing into the Gulf, destroying habitats, wildlife and industry. It reminds me of how I felt watching another debacle unfolding in another Gulf, when the Iraq War was spinning more and more out of control. In the Persian Gulf the world watched the destruction of a country and peoples' lives. In the Gulf of Mexico we're witnessing nothing less than the destruction of an ecosystem.

Another aspect of this debacle is the blame game alternating with denials of responsibility. The problem, as it was in Iraq, is there was no exit strategy. In Iraq speak, the oil would be greeted with debit cards at the pump. It would all be good. So here's the thing--while it's possible to drill a mile deep, it seems to have never occurred to the various engineers involved that they would need to have several back-ups in place in the event of a worst-case scenario.

There's plenty of blame to go around, and it's not just oil executives, engineers, the Coast Guard and government bureaucrats who are responsible. I was driving around town doing some errands, listening to news about the oil spill and getting more and more depressed. I noticed I was low on gas, so I pulled into a Diamond Shamrock (there's no way I'll ever buy gas from a BP station again). That's when it hit me that I'm responsible, too. I'm one of the hundreds of millions of people in the developed world who is addicted to oil.

Time to do my grocery shopping by rickshaw. Time to take the bus to Boulder. Time to start bugging state government to get off the dime and build that light rail system already.

And another thing--please don't tell me that the same people who put astronauts on the moon can't figure out how to stop this oil from gushing. Or that the public isn't willing to help. There are people who can no longer fish for a living along the Louisiana coast just standing by to help BP, the Coast Guard and the government clean up the mess. So far no one's taken them up on their offer. Maybe they're concerned about the liability involved in allowing citizen volunteers to do the work.

If this oil spill isn't a message from God telling the USA to rally together, I don't know what is.
I've been praying that this disaster forces BP to morph into an engineering company in charge of cleaning up other environmental disasters. Or better yet, that this is the environmental disaster to end all environmental disasters. This isn't just about what God does. We can't afford the psychological warfare that opposing parties (and I'm not just talking Democrats and Republicans in Congress) have indulged in for far too long. I pray that people will tire of the blame game and actually start thinking about how to solve this problem. And then get to work.

Strange Parallel

Yesterday I attended a Liz Ryan Career Altitude workshop. If you live in the greater Denver area, I highly recommend it. It was like a getting customized career advice rolled into a two-hour therapy session--exactly what's needed for a job seeker looking to reclaim her mojo.

Among the many things we discussed was putting the focus NOT on what you've done and how great you are at doing it, but instead on how what you've done is going to help your future employer.

I paraphrase Liz here: "Diana, you know how when you go on a first date with a guy, and all he wants to talk about is how great he is and all the great things he's done? And what a turn-off that is?"

I haven't dated in twenty-three years, so I only vaguely recall. "Well, I'd excuse myself to go to the bathroom and never come back."

Liz persisted. "OK. So what if you went out with someone who says to you, 'I don't mean to be creepy or anything, but has anyone ever told you have beautiful eyes? And only the most brilliant things ever issue forth from your lips?' " (OK, I added the part about the brilliant things.)

"I have to pee, but I'm not going anywhere," I said.

Bingo! The take-home message, whether it's romantic courtship or career courtship: Figure out what they want, and be the one to bring it to them.

Transitions

My 18-year-old son is graduating from high school on Saturday, and he'll be attending the University of Northern Colorado in the fall. In between he'll go to Peru with his Spanish teacher and some of the other students in his class.

When I mentioned his graduation in a Liz Ryan Career Altitude workshop yesterday (more on that in another post), one of the other participants said, "Congratulations on your graduation, too!"

Gulp. I hadn't thought of it this way. You see, it's mostly been all about him and my other son.

As big a transition as this is for him, it's big for me, too. Having only ever worked part-time since he was born, and then staying home for the last ten years to raise him and my other son, I've devoted more of my time and energy--not to mention my sense of self--to raising them than the average bear. Some might say I'm a fool. I say it's only proper that I did it this way.

As uncertain a time as this is for me, I'm finding that there's something else underlying it--pride in a job well-done. Joy, too, much to my surprise. That in itself may be my biggest accomplishment. Because during these years of staying at home I knew what some people think about stay-at-home moms--we're a spoiled, lazy, unambitious lot. All too often I bought into that, self-critical critter that I am. I often wondered if this was as good as it was going to get for me.

It's not like I've been monitoring the soap opera chat rooms--not that there's anything wrong with that. The thing is, I've had a job for the last ten years, and I daresay it's one that would have driven a lot of other people completely crazy. (Since I went into this enterprise already halfway there, I'm proud to say my sanity is as intact as it ever was.) Not everyone can keep house, run a small-scale cookie factory, juggle several volunteer jobs, care for the neighbor's macaw when they're in Scandinavia, bake a killer loaf of challah bread, write one of the two novels I worked on in the last decade, and cook wholesome dinners every night. And this would be what I did in a day, twisting and turning time to suit the peculiar rhythms of a housewife's day.

So now that my time as the main keeper of the hearth turns into something else, I'm going to allow myself to be proud of the fact that it's all been worth it. My 18-year-old is a caring, talented young man. I've still got my twelve-year-old at home. I figure he'll be my little boy for another few months, until the puberty fairy comes to visit.

To those of you in transition, I wish you the same pride in accomplishment.

Woody's Words on Worth

There's a poster of Woody Guthrie's song "Born to Win" that hangs over the family computer. The words are worth sharing.

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.

I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most by all sorts of folks just about like you.

I could hire out to the other side, the big money side and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyway.

Maternal CEO

A woman I met at a networking event told me an interviewer asked her about a one-year gap in her resume. She explained she had stayed at home for a year with her children during a rough patch in their development.

"You must not really need a job then," he replied, shuffling some papers on his desk. Interview over.

Excuse me!?! Of all the things he could have asked to determine her eligibility for the job, he picked a gotcha question like that? Doesn't she get to decide whether she needs a job or not?

And anyway, he's wrong on both counts. She doesn't really need a job working for a retro-guy like him.

I can only imagine the scorn he would have for me, someone who chose to raise her own kids for the last ten years.

But I know for sure what I would have said to him. "Mister, I've had a job for the last ten years--raising my kids. Now I've got a question for you. Are you implying that raising kids is a hobby?"

Out of curiosity I googled "stay at home mom estimated salary." The best hit was mom.salary.com. It helps you tally up all your duties as mom (I prefer Maternal CEO to Roseanne Barr's domestic goddess). Mine came up to nearly $65,000 annually! It would have been more in years past. When my kids were younger, I did more housework than I do now, because I've taught them to do chores. (There was no designation on the website for life skills instructor. That would have boosted my salary big time!) I also used to do more janitorial work back when I hosted a weekly Cub Scout den meeting here. And I definitely did more nursing work when they were little. With my college-bound senior I've done college advising and career counseling, but those categories were also missing on mom.salary.com.

Why, I've practically worked my way out of a job! That's why I'm seeking work outside the home.








mom.salary.com

Raccoon Resurrection

It isn't every day that I get to take a baby raccoon to the animal ER.

I had just arrived for my volunteer shift at Greenwood Rehabilitation Center when the tech came in cradling a baby raccoon named Addie. She was in really bad shape, and she needed to go to the hospital immediately.

Yesterday was May 12, and it was snowing. Yes, snowing. (This could be another whole blog post, but I digress.) The animal hospital was 20 miles away in Boulder. I tucked Addie, who was wrapped in a hand towel, inside my jacket. Her body felt stiff, but she was still breathing. As I drove I could feel where her warmth met mine. Every once in a while she'd stir and trill weakly, but for the most part she was unnervingly still. So still, that at a stop light not far from the vet's office I was sure she had passed away.

"Never underestimate the will to live." An emergency room physician who is in my book group had made this point during our discussion earlier this week.

Addie may not have had much more than that going for her. By the time the vet took her temperature, it was 93 degrees, well below normal for a raccoon, and startling because she had been in an incubator all night long. Because she had been refusing food for the last couple of days, she was also severely dehydrated.

Before warming her, the vet gave her subcutaneous fluids. The entire time the needle was inserted in her ruff, she howled as only a baby raccoon can. Once we got her under the warming blanket, she spent most of the next ten minutes trying to escape, rooting and trilling. She was good to go.

On the way home, Addie wouldn't stay tucked inside my jacket. The last thing I needed was a sick baby raccoon crawling underneath one of the seats in the car, so I held her firmly against my heartbeat (what baby doesn't like that?) with one hand, and steered and shifted with the other. That was probably as unsafe as driving while cellphoning. (Note to self: Bring a carrier the next time I go to the animal ER.)

As I write this, I'm not sure if Addie made it. But with that kind of will to live, who knows? She may be one of those raccoon juvenile delinquents the center keeps on site until October, when they can be released to a wild food supply.

When I first told my husband Don I'd be feeding baby squirrels and raccoons, he snorted. "Why does the world need more squirrels? We've got too many of them in our back yard as it is."

Turns out he's far from alone in expressing squirro-cidal tendencies. When my friend Jo heard I was caring for raccoons, she shook her head in disgust. Raccoons are a scourge in the downtown Boulder neighborhood where she lives. They're like gangsters. "What? You don't like it when I eat your garbage and strew the rest on your lawn? What are you gonna do about it?"

I'm aware of how aggressive and destructive urban raccoons can be. But I don't think that means abandoned or orphaned litters of raccoons, squirrels, fox or bunnies should automatically be euthanized just because they may grow up to be nuisances. I wouldn't volunteer there if the center sorted animals by some arbitrary worthiness to live. There are all kinds of people who happen upon wildlife in a bad way and feel compelled to help. After all, a litter of newborn raccoons didn't ask to be abandoned in a chimney. You'd have to be the Grinch not to respond to the sound of baby raccoons crying for their mother.

I have a name for people who climb on the roof of a complete stranger's house to rescue live baby raccoons. Don and Jo might call them crazy. I call them Menschkins. Menschkins are the kind of people who drive around with the bumpersticker "God bless everyone. No exceptions." That goes for baby raccoons as well as people who come to eat at soup kitchens. And yes, even for those who have had bad experiences with raccoons and would rather see them all exterminated.

People who answer the cries of baby raccoons by calling wildlife rehabilitators are the hands of God, as surely as the rehabilitators themselves are. These are the same people who are at this very moment cleaning the oil from sea creatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

In case you think it was I who turned the nice turn of phrase about Menschkins being the hands of God, I'm here to tell you I totally ripped off the great St. Teresa of Avila. All props to her and her poem, "You Are Christ's Hands."

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours, no feet but yours.

Yours are the eyes through which look out
Christ's compassion to the world.

Yours are the feet with which he is
to go about doing good.

Yours are the hands with which he is
to bless us now.

How do you value yourself?

"How you make your money is not your life."

That's one example of the wise counsel Johnna Baroso, the speaker at a career networking group I attend, offered in her talk "From Laid Off to Living: Building on Change."

Johnna has started companies. She's been an employee who's been laid off. She's written a book with the same title as her talk on Tuesday. So she knows what from the job market. Her take on lifetime employment: Let it go. It ain't coming back. If Toyota can't offer lifetime employment, it's gone forever. The way most companies handle lay-offs is similar to a bad break-up--you go from a close and mutually fruitful association to persona non grata. Not only do you lose your income and whatever identity you invest in your work, you also lose the friends who still work there.

What Johnna and other employment experts are urging companies to do in the New Economic Reality is to develop and articulate a clear lay-off policy. When HR reps sit down with new employees, they still will describe salary and benefits packages and also say, "This is the process our company has devised in the event we need to lay you off."

That is most certainly not what we want to hear as we're preparing to accept a job offer. But we're all adults here. Making such a statement means the company has thought through a way to shrink their workforces, and I would hope more humanely than the current "Up in the Air" mode. I hope progressive companies consider profits AND people and figure out how they're going to treat their employees in the best of times as well as the worse. Downsizing is never fun, but there's no need to make matters worse with the current bad break-up model. Because when businesses do start hiring, they need a workforce that in good shape psychologically and ready to work.

Until that happens, each of us is going to need to redefine the meaning of net worth. If the new reality is, as Johnna Baroso says, that how we make our money is not our life, then what we have in our bank accounts or our home's value does not determine our net worth. Over the last ten years during my time in the Land of Stay At Home Moms, I've reassessed how I value myself. I'd like to share some tips on keeping myself relevant as I did the sacred work of raising my sons. It definitely applies to job hunters or anyone who is in a life transition.

1. Invent places to go, things to do, people to meet. When I quit my editing job ten years ago to stay at home with my then two-year-old, I felt very isolated. There weren't very many women in the same station in life who had, or could, make the choice to stay at home with their kids. A neighbor suggested I check out the local Moms Club. That was great because Patrick and I had somewhere to go a couple of times a week. He could be with kids his age, and I could have adult conversation. Similarly, going to networking events gives me a reason to get up in the morning and allows me to contact people who are also seeking employment.

2. Progress, not perfection. I know people who are a lot more relaxed about reaching their goals than I am. I fall into the category of wanting what I want roughly three days ago. As a result, I feel perpetually frustrated. My advice to you other perfectionists out there: Take a deep breath. To use Johnna's advice, "Trust that there will be movement." In other words, you don't always have to be the one to make things happen. Simply cast the seeds, water them and trust that they'll grow. I take this approach in my running practice. If I set out to do my long run at a certain pace, I've found I'm setting myself for disappointment. If I instead tell myself that I want to run an hour and ten minutes and not worry about how much ground I cover in that time, I'm a lot more satisfied during and after the run.

3. Take some chances. I've found that when I do something I wouldn't ordinarily choose to do it opens up channels of possibility and creativity. A month ago a friend at church asked me if I wanted to learn to run the sound system in our 400-seat sanctuary. You can ask my family about my technical chops, and they'll start to laugh nervously. Ask me to bake a cake, feed your parrot or listen to your problems, and I'm so there. I leave the technical stuff to my husband, who's very, very good at it. But you know what? Running the sound system was so far outside my comfort zone I knew I had to say yes. I've been apprenticing with Richard for a few weeks, and I'll fly solo at the Memorial Day weekend service. At the very least, the experience might be good fodder for a blog post!

4. Care for others. My church, First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ in Boulder, has been such a blessing for me and my family. Apart from the wonderful preaching and teaching we receive and the extended family we've found there, the many opportunities to serve are so important to feeling that we can be a resource to others. If you feel that you're not contributing and therefore not valuable, I encourage you to volunteer. Even if church is not your thing, there are so many organizations in need of volunteer labor. I can guarantee you that you will receive more than you give.

5. Care for yourself. Developing a routine of self-care is so important for people who are in transition. All the years I was at home with my kids, I made a point to get up well before they did to do my spiritual practice, a little yoga or other exercise, or some writing. I would also be showered and dressed before my kids went to school. It kept me linked, on my terms, to the workaday world. Going to networking meetings or to my new volunteer gig at the wildlife rehabilitation center is how I keep myself in a good groove as my new job and I find each other.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. In the future I plan to write about teachers and books that have helped me discover my value.

The Lure of the Blog

Remember those cocktail parties of yore when young professionals would discuss their salaries using terms like "high five figures" or "low six figures"? Though close enough to overhear, I was never anywhere close to earning those kind of salaries. Best to keep my low five figures to myself.

When I left my last editing job ten years ago to raise my kids, I occasionally picked up some writing and editing work that paid at best a couple of hundred dollars. Woo-hoo! Now I was making in the low three figures! Not exactly something to brag about at a party. That was OK. I was working at my pace on a project of my choosing, a novel, maybe even the Great American Novel, that would one day land me a lucrative book deal. My husband would be able to quit his job and get that job at Home Depot he's always wanted. In the meantime I mostly settled for bylines, clips for my portfolio, and the publisher's gratitude.

Then came the Depression Light. And not a book deal in sight--mainly because the book isn't finished. (I've never been any good at endings.) In this time of double-digit unemployment and glacial hiring, the low three figures are beginning to sound pretty good--especially if I can string several of them together. It just so happens that our oldest son is going to college in the fall, and now Mama needs to contribute more than her flexible schedule and homemade cookies. I'm looking for work, whether that means one job, a couple of jobs, odd jobs here and there. I'm making the rounds of networking groups (a shout out to LongsPeakNet!)

Until now I've resisted the Lure of the Blog. Who would want to read the navel-gazing of a middle-aged, middle American mother of two long past her edgy female writer phase? Now I figure, what have I got to lose? I can manage writing a couple of posts a week. I may even be on to something zeitgeisty. I'm hoping you'll let me know!