GET RICH

In memory of Sweet Adeline, please send the sisters to Aquae Sulis

Sweet Adeline was the daughter of immigrants, the wife of a career Army officer, and the mother of three girls—Konnie, Barbara, and me.

She enjoyed the military wife life, with its interesting duty stations and sophisticated social life. After Dad died, she continued to enjoy life as much as she could without him, and had a busy social life in Carlsbad, California (home of her widow years).

 

Mom loved “cultured” experiences: Ritz Carlton high tea; Irish country house hotel; La Costa spa days. She was always coifed, manicured, and well-dressed, make up in order, even if just going to the corner store. Even in her last days, she never missed her beauty salon appointment.

 

Sweet Adeline feared her girls would lose touch with each other after her death. She and her sister had parted after their own mother’s death, and Adeline didn’t want the same thing for us.

 

After Mom died, we ensured that we would stay in touch, and also honor her memory, by taking a spa break at a different place every year. The annual Sweet Adeline Spa Week has become a sister tradition…until this year.

 

The 2009 Spa Week is in jeopardy. All three of us are seeing bad effects from the dicey economy, and it looks like our tradition may die due to lack of funds.

 

Or perhaps not.

 

If we win the Homeaway Getaway Contest, we will go to Bath, England, Aquae Sulis to ancient Romans. We will stay in the Beau Nash apartment in an elegant Georgian townhouse.

 

We will visit the new spa, enjoying thermal waters that Romans once took advantage of. We will “take the waters” and have high tea at the Pump Room, with the ghost of Jane Austen in attendance. And we will shop in wonderful stores in the city center and dine on world cuisines in smart Bath restaurants.

I can’t think of a better way to keep our homage to Sweet Adeline going than sending the sisters  to Aquae Sulis! And you can do it by voting for us in the Homeaway Getaway contest. Vote for us today!

Another factory irregular relationship

Cal and I had a shouting match today over the stupidest thing.

I arrived home from a business trip on Sunday night, lugged my bags out of the back of the SUV--and didn't close the hatchback. You would think that a fancy schmancy Acura MDX, which has all kinds of little luxe features, would have a time limit set on the light that comes on when the hatch is open.

But no.

Forty-eight hours later, Cal went out to start the car...and the battery was dead. ARRGH! The day was already full of odd glitches for me, so I figured that the moon must be in a weird place relative to my astrological sign and sort of shrugged it off. The Scarlett O'Hara in me said I'd worry about it tomorrow.

Not Cal. He went and got his little electric charging gizmo from the storage shed, and spent the next I-don't-know-how-many hours strategizing how to get enough power into the battery to turn the engine over.

I guess I should have known that he had some weird energy on the issue when I told him last night that, push come to shove, I could always call AAA. I mean, what do I pay my annual dues for if not this exact kind of situation? Good heavens--the way he went on, you would have thought I had personally insulted the boy with the suggestion. So strange.

Today, after 12 hours on the charger, the car still didn't start. I had the bright idea to call a neighbor to see if he had jumper cables. And, bless his heart, he did one better: He drove down with his mega-charger, connected the clamps to the battery terminals, and switched it on. In about 10 seconds, my motor was idling to perfection.

But the scene between the phone call with my neighbor and his arrival in my driveway was surreal. I'm not sure exactly what happened, and I don't want to make it all out to be Cal, but we ended up in a shouting match, where, in his upset, he said one of the things that really puts me over the edge:

"Trish, what is WRONG with you?"

i don't know about you, but that kind of question (and others like it) never fails to set me off. I blew a gasket and told him (screamed at him, actually) to just leave me alone, that I would handle the thing myself. Which I did.

And in true southern boy (or many boy) fashion, when I came back inside after thanking my kind neighbor, Cal acted as if nothing had happened. He avoids conflict-related conversation as if it were oral acid, and no way was he going to go back to analyze our conversation.

I'm still stumped about why he had to turn a fairly simple problem into something of Mount Everest proportions. There's more to the story about being with Cal than I can write here. I'll fill in gaps over time.

Bottom line is that today's experience has got me wondering why I keep being in factory irregular relationships...and whether there is such a thing as "regular" ones. 

When is a high school reunion more like a family reunion?

When it is a Livorno American High School reunion.

I had the great good fortune to be a military brat. The traveling and new experiences from an early age have informed my views as an adult, which is a good thing.

I had even greater good fortune in spending my last two years of high school (in the early 70s) in small coastal town in Italy near a small military base. I attended Livorno American High School, comprised at the time of around 185 students grades 7 through 12.

My graduating class was 21 people.

I could go on and on about those days, going through our teenage years in Italy while still connected to the American culture through the US Dependents school system. We were quite a mixture--some had roots in Italy through one or both parents. Others, like me, were being brought up within the "Fortress" of the American military. But we all shared a unique experience called LAHS, and we were like family to each other.

At the time we graduated, none of us gave much thought to staying in touch or worried about seeing each other again. We each had our own dreams to fulfill, and we more or less scattered to the four winds. It wasn't until some years later that we began to itch to reconnect, and, fortunately, some of the group took action.

The first all-year LAHS reunion was in 1989, thanks to Pat Kirylo (from my grad class) and James (Randy) Rosseau (of the class right behind us). Alums from as early as 1958 attended the reunion, and it was great to reconnect with my friends from high school. Since then, there have been various reunions, the most recent being this past weekend in Alexandria, Virginia. Which is where I am sitting as I write this.

It was a great weekend. I got to see classmates I hadn't seen since we graduated, and I got to reconnect with people I had seen in '89. We seemed a bit mellower this time (the effects of aging, I guess), but still bound to one another by the experience we shared.

It was like being with family, even down to some of the dysfunctional behaviors that inevitably crop up when family gets together. I love these people, with whom I shared an experience that is hard to describe to anyone else. And I am looking forward to more get togethers in the future.

Please don't help. Instead, be supportive.

Within the past month, I have had three different women help me, and all of them really pissed me off.

Every single one of them was sincere in their desire to take care of me. One followed me out of a room I left so that I wouldn't get upset in public; instead of lessening attention on me, her coming after me increased the attention. And she (again, in her attempt to be useful) intruded upon me when she wasn't welcome.

Another was in the same group, and she did the same thing--intruded upon me without my permission. Her type of help was more codependent that the first woman. She want to "handle" me, fix me, tell me what I need to do. I could barely keep my temper.

The third was the other day on the phone. A fairly new friend who I felt a connection to. I shared my experience at the presentation workshop with her, and went on to attempt to share the insights I had gained from it, how I was using the experience to learn. Instead of listening to me and acknowledging my insights, she proceeded to confer her own insights onto me, giving me advice that I hadn't asked for. I ended the conversation feeling angry and disconnected.

Why do so many women take it upon themselves to help others? Helping without permission is intrusive and inappropriate. It is caregiving gone astray.

Helping is not empowering. It is belittling, reducing the person being helped to child status, or at least to "less than" status--less than the person helping.

Yes, I know that people who help don't believe that they are belittling. And I know that they really do (mostly) seek to contribute. But helping isn't the way...

Supporting is the way. Supporting someone is empowering them. It is giving them space, listening (really listening) to them, offering the silence in which they can find their own answers. To use my own experiences as an example, Woman #1 should have stayed in her seat and let me go, given me space to work through my upset so that I could quietly come back and join the group without any further ripples. Woman #2 should have simply left me alone completely; she had nothing of value to contribute nor could she give me a nurturing silence. Woman #3 should have gotten out of the way and listened to what I was saying rather than overlaying my own insights with her (in her opinion) superior judgement.

How do we know what to do to support somone? Easy:

1. Don't offer any insights, opinions, advice or feedback unless asked to do so. I promise, I (and I'm betting pretty much everybody else, including you) am able to work through my own learning and growth experiences, and I just need you to listen and engage me in an interested but not advisory capacity. If I want your input, I will ask you for it. Promise.
2. OK, so there may be times when I am so in the midst of things I can't see straight, and I don't think to ask you. If that's the case, and you really do believe that you have something supportive to offer me, ASK ME FOR PERMISSION FIRST. Trust me to know whether I can absorb what you have to say. I may not be in a place where I can really hear you, and will only resent your input.

I know that I have helped other people in my life...meaning that I intruded with my person or my advice when neither was what was needed. I have worked hard over the past decade or so to change that, trying to remember to step back and give the hurting person space to heal themselves. It's hard though. The female urge to help is something we are taught as we grow up, or it may even be hardwired into us.But helping isn't...um...helpful.

The next time you want to help someone (husband, child, friend, stranger), consciously step back and work on being supportive. Listen, offer space and silence, and be ready to provide input when invited to do so.

I'd love to hear your ideas on this topic...please share your own experiences as helper/helpee, supporter/supportee.

Please don’t be fooled by my hard candy coating…

You have likely heard the term “steel magnolia.” It is a metaphor used to describe a certain type of woman, often from the Southern U.S., who appears delicate and fragile but is in fact tough as nails.

I’m the opposite, and I’m not sure what metaphor fits. I have a hard candy coating that surrounds an abundance of marshmallow. My natural outward appearance is one of toughness, self-sufficiency, and great self-confidence. A “take no shit” kind of broad. On the inside, I am a huge softie, very aware of the impact I have on others and the impact they have on me.

I was in a great course last week. We were each videotaped giving a five-minute talk follow by five more minutes of question and answer. Then, after two days of being instructed how to give powerful presentations, we got to watch our videos and self-critique along with the course leader. The course leader is a friend, a business-associate-to-be, who has amazing rapport with everyone he interacts with. I watch him in admiration—he can connect with the surliest person, softening them up and enrolling them into participation.

It came as quite a surprise, therefore, when he blasted me during my video critique.

To be fair, the video was ghastly. I walked around in the front of the room like an automaton spewing out a pre-programmed monolog. I had absolutely no connection with the audience. The questions I asked were rhetorical and I rushed on without giving them time to answer. The question and answer portion was even worse, I think. Pretending to understand what people were asking, blustering through my responses. It was terrible.

Still, I was stunned when the course leader kept pounding on me, and allowed one of the course participants to do likewise. He kept rewinding sections of the Q&A, three or four times in one instance, so that we could keep on watching and remarking on how badly I handled thing. Pointed out loudly how stupid I had made well-educated people feel.

Finally, he ended up telling me that I should just keep doing my talks on video rather than in person, the implication being that I was so disconnected to my audience that there is no hope for me.

I left the hot seat, and kept it together long enough to get out of the room. I was so hurt and angry I couldn’t think straight—the only clear idea was to get myself away from the group long enough to calm down and get control of my face and feelings.

As I stood outside in the cool air, several thoughts managed to surface through the chaos. First, I had to acknowledge that part of my feelings were my own, not caused by anyone else. I didn’t need someone to point out how distant I was from my audience—I could see it clearly, and it devastated me. Second, I knew for certain that the course leader had not intended to be so over the top; in fact, the more I thought about it, the more I suspected that he behaved the way he did because he thought I could take it and not have a problem. He thought he knew me and could count on me not to be fazed by such strong feedback.

The course leader talked to me after the session and apologized. It was obvious to him that I was very upset, and he was both surprised and chagrined. When we talked further, my suspicion was confirmed: He had assumed, from what he knew of me, that he didn’t have to wear kid gloves and could really dig into the video playback to underscore all the common mistakes presenters make.

I have received this kind of feedback in various forms all of my adult life. Described once by a person who worked under me by several tiers as an “ax lady” (when he was expressing his surprise that I’m not the way he thought I was at all). Told “Gee, and I thought that you always have it so together” by a friend to whom I had gone for some moral support.

Like a steel magnolia, my hard candy/marshmallow combination is not a put-on. I’m not projecting some false persona to the world at large. I am sincere in my interactions, authentic in my responses—but apparently I don’t show (or people don’t bother to look for) the marshmallow part of the picture.

Why do people make this mistake with me so often? I will think more about this over time and share any more insights that hit me. For now, I offer my story to think about for yourself.

If you are being authentic with the people you encounter every day, are they seeing all of you? If not, why not?

I would love to hear about any insights you have.

My Back Pages

"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

Bob Dylan wrote and (sort of) sang it, The Byrds made it popular, but I prefer the Dick Gaughan version of same. Great song...amazing that Dylan wrote it in his 20s. Makes way more sense to me these days. In fact, My Back Pages is the theme song for my 50s.

I am lifting a part of a post I entered on my Success in Sweatpants blog to provide some of my back story here. A lot what I will write about here will refer back to or be rooted in my experiences and the realizations and personal growth that resulted from them. So, here is a portion of my story and timeline:

Sometimes I think I'm a one-off, but then I think, no, that's incredibly egotistic. Born into an Army family that was kind of a mobile "Father Knows Best" in culture, I was introduced to the idea of life beyond the U.S. at the age of 7. Lived in Iran (where my sister married a Persian) as a kid; have also lived in every region of the U.S. and been in every one of the 50 states. Graduated high school from a small American school in a small town in Italy.

Tried to fit into the "way things are supposed to be" once I got out of college, but never succeeded. I hated corporate life, and I still don't have the talent for schmoozing, patience, and savvy politics that are required to make it in that scenario.

My passion for a better world and my love of playing a big game led to my work for Werner Erhard and the est training in the late 70s. I worked in the Philadelphia center (producing events, leading groups, and lots of other intense work), then moved on to the 6-Day course for a season. Met my first husband here, and that's a whole other story.

Based on first husband's promptings, I became a cruising sailor, and stayed tied to the sea by a bowline knot for over 20 years and through 2 more husbands. I can now confidently claim to be the ultimate first mate, after three boys, three boats, and three different cruising experiences (First husband - cocaine/sex addict; second husband - verbally/psychologically abusive; third husband - wonderful person and now just a friend).

The high point of my cruising career was a 3-year cruise on a 36-foot boat from San Diego, through Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. Lots of stories, lots of learning experiences.

Then.....

In 1994, I returned to the States from the Caribbean, ending a sailboat cruising life with my second husband (and ending the marriage as well). I arrived in San Diego with two duffel bags and $1,000 in cash—the sum total of my portfolio. I was four months shy of my 40th birthday.

For the first six months, I didn’t own a car (a difficult thing to be without in Southern California), I bought overripe vegetables at steep discounts from the neighborhood produce stand (I had lots of home canned veggies for a while there), and I used my decrepit laptop computer with a sloooow dial up line to figure out what had happened in cyberspace while I’d been sailing in the tropics.

In 1995, I declared bankruptcy because of outstanding debts left over from my first marriage.

Then things turned around.....

In 2004, after ten years of corporate gigs, I had a decent sized IRA, savings in a money market account, and I bought my very first house.

In 2005, I started 4R Marketing. It was a stretch financially, but I went for it.

In 2006, with the support of a great team, I broke into six figures in company revenue, and in 2007 I increased revenues by another 50%.

This year, I rented my house out and bought a new home in the Texas hill country—my own evidence that the law of attraction works. I’m living the life I used to dream about, and now I’m spinning new dreams to reach for.

In a way, these are sort of credentials. I've been through ups, downs, sides--and want to share my stories in ways that make a DIFFERENCE to the people who read them.

Visiting with the Ex

I am in San Diego this week, partly on business and partly visiting with my newly created ex-husband. Skip and I were together pretty darn close to 14 years, which is a record for me (the only relationship with a male that has been longer has been with Buddy my parrot).

The visit has been cordial, but still tinged with a little caution or constraint. The end of the marriage came very quickly, after several years of struggling to make things work for both of us. Our respective choice of lifestyle (he wants to keep living aboard the sailboat full time, I want to have a home base on land and visit the boat for chunks of time) ended up with such a divergence of preferences that we finally decided to just call it quits and remain friends.

I spent yesterday morning on the boat with him, moving from our old yacht club home to the marina where he now keeps the boat. It was a little surreal for me—the San Diego waterfront was my home base through two marriages and three boats. It was the port I came back to when my second marriage ended in the Caribbean in the middle of a cruise. It’s the place I started and built my first business, where my parents lived and died, and where I had the bulk of my late great corporate career. And now I was seeing it for the last time with the man who had been my partner, friend, and lover for 14 years—who would still be my friend, but who would never again link his arm with mine and say, “Let take it on together, kid!”

Not that Skip ever did that, exactly. But for many of the years we were together, he was my steady Eddie. He helped me recreate the way I relate to my finances (though once I decided to go for the really big bucks, his old hippie mentality recoiled). He listened and responded whenever I was having problems at work (which was often). We shared a lot of travel adventures, both on and off the boat. For most of our marriage, I felt a powerful partnership with him.

Things started to go sour when I was laid off the corporate job in 2003. For reasons only he can really validate, Skip began withdrawing his partnership, and it was upsetting for me to watch.   I had different ideas about how to go forward from there than he did, he didn’t like my ideas (though he didn’t say so out loud), and he didn’t have any alternatives to offer. In the absence of the partner I used to count on to help make future plans, I took the reins myself.

Perhaps things would have gone differently if our relationship had not been polyamorous. Both of us had secondary relationships, and for the time that we were aligned on the future, these relationships were honored by each of us and by the other two involved. Starting in 2003, though, when things got challenging for me and Skip, I think that Wanda, Skip’s girlfriend started lobbying in earnest to become Skip’s primary. With Wanda always on hand telling him (either overtly or covertly) that she would do things differently, that she wanted to do the same things he wanted to do, that she was really right person to be his primary relationship, why would Skip try to make things work with me?  Over time, I imagine that he thought more and more often about how much better things would be with Wanda, even while he was telling himself he needed to figure out how to make things work with me.

Well, my momma always told me that things work out for the best. Skip left me and drove straight to Wanda’s front door, and he’s been there ever since. I asked him yesterday if things were working well with her, and he said that, yes, things are pretty good. He is excited that she is avidly interested in going cruising with him, and given the determination she’s shown to nab and keep this relationship, I think she will turn out to be a great cruising partner.

I miss the old pre-Wanda Skip, the one who was willing to work with me to figure out how to solve the challenges that came our way, no matter how thorny. But I think that the new post-Wanda Skip will have a great life, the kind that he really wants, so how can I feel sad about that?

The best part of the whole situation is that I have kept a very dear friend.  This is the first of my three  exes that I even want to maintain contact with, and that’s certainly a sign of progress in my life!!!

Another thing about that chick flick...

I talked yesterday about a movie I saw that really got my goat with regard to the way the young women characters related to having relationships.

But wait, there’s more.

A side plot in the movie was around the protagonist’s relationship with her flighty, over-critical mother.  There had obviously been friction between mother and daughter for years, and the daughter’s inability to forgive her mother was “obviously” blocking her from achieving her full potential.

At one point in the movie, the daughter confronted the mother, saying something like, “It’s your fault I’m like this. Nothing I ever did was good enough for you,” and other accusations in the same vein.

I waited for the mom to turn around and say, “Hold on a minute. I’m willing to talk about this, but don’t put the blame for your lack of results in life all on me. You are almost 30 years old, and have had enough years of adult life to turn around any ill effects from the years you spent under my roof. Take responsibility for your own life.”

She didn’t. She got upset, she got sad. And eventually she ended up apologizing for her bad behavior as a mother. I sighed. I guess the target demographic for this movie didn’t want to have a mother figure pushing back and encouraging a daughter figure to stand on her own two feet.

The more we go through our adult lives blaming someone else for how we are, the more we lose. We lose the opportunity to get free of other peoples’ beliefs and attitudes about us. We lose the opportunity to find our own center and our own strength.

At some point, preferably sooner than later, we have to put responsibility the results we produced or not produced in our lives squarely on our own shoulders.  It may take some time (depending on how entangled our self-image is with how others see us), but it is an accomplishment that will lead to lots of other accomplishments.

Forgive Mom, Dad, sister, brother, aunt, whoever for “what they did to you.” Now that you’re an adult, you do it to yourself—every time. Accept that, and you’ll get rich much sooner!

Watch it if you want, but don't buy into it!

I had an uncharacteristically lazy day not long ago. To give my brain a rest, I plopped down in front of the TV, surfed the channels, and landed on a "young chick flick," a tale targeted to twenty-something XX-chromosome owners. My first reaction to the story line was annoyance, which turned to thoughtfulness as I thought about the subtle and not-so-subtle messages in the characters' interactions.

The protagonist of the story was a woman just shy of her 30th birthday who appeared to be something of a slacker in her life. She had a hard time holding down a job and was sort of floating through life, though she did have a pretty terrific boyfriend. This boyfriend, in fact, proposed to her, but she turned him down because she needed to figure out what she really wanted. She returned home, hooked up with her old best friend, and unearthed a sort of "bucket list" she had written as a teenager-things she wanted to do by the time she was 30. One of the items was to marry her then-boyfriend.

Predictably, the best friend helped our heroine cross off items on the list. Also predictably, the high school boyfriend entered the picture. He was engaged to be married shortly, but sparks flew when he remet our heroine. This set up a set of conflicts for both parties, which were compounded by the presence of his fiancée and her boyfriend, who came to town to renew his suit.

Then came the scene that really annoyed me. The fiancée found a way to have a one-on-one conversation with our heroine and pleaded her case. She wanted her to lay off the old boyfriend and let him go ahead with the marriage. Her reasoning? The heroine was an accomplished person in her own right (as evidenced by all the things she'd recently done), but that the fiancée's only accomplishment was getting engaged to the guy in question.

"I'm nothing without him," she said, and I could feel my blood pressure rise.

What a thing to say! What kind of message was a movie like that sending to the young women who watch this kind of thing all the time?

Our heroine didn't bat an eyelash, didn't stop the fiancée and say something like, "Wait a minute, sister. If that's the way you think, you should seriously think about putting off this wedding until you have more confidence in yourself and your abilities. Entering into a marriage thinking that you can't be complete without the person you are getting hitched to is a recipe for big trouble."

No, the heroine seemed to be of the same mindset. She did "find herself," and part of that finding was deciding to marry her current boyfriend after all. Everybody was happy happy happy.

This kind of message was everywhere I turned as I grew up and it took many many years for me to break free of the notion that being in a relationship/getting married was critical to my survival or to my success in life.

I think that in this world full of misinformation and unsupportive societal "must dos," this is the most debilitating. If more women would take their attention off the men they need, have, or want and put more attention on their own personal development as whole, complete, and worthwhile individuals, there would be far fewer women looking back from middle age and wishing they'd lived a little bit differently.

I retired before I worked--an idea worth considering!

The moment I decided to go bluewater sailboat cruising stands out clearly in my mind. I was standing on a Southern California bluff staring out at the Pacific Ocean, still a little bit in shock. It was the afternoon of my father’s funeral; he had died young at 63, after a brief and losing battle with cancer

I was 29 years old, and had acquired many of my father’s Type A traits. Following his example, I had propelled myself along the rail tracks of the American Dream of professional accomplishment and material acquisition. My husband, Dan, and I owned a very busy and successful contracting company. I enjoyed the work a lot.

Dan, though, had introduced the idea of sailboat cruising to me and had been trying to win me over. We would be reaching a natural stopping point in our projects in about a year, and he advocated getting a boat and taking off then. I was attracted by the idea, being a gypsy and adventurer at heart, but I couldn’t shake the conditioning of my father’s upbringing.

Until today.

As I looked out at the expanse of ocean and felt the sea breeze on my face, I thought about my dad. He was still working when he got sick—a retired career military officer who was now city engineer of a seaside town in San Diego County. He and my mother maintained a 3-bedroom house on an acre of land—space overkill for the two of them, but it was what they’d gotten used to.

My parents had talked a lot in recent years about what they would do when Dad retired once and for all. They made all kinds of plans for the golden years they would spend together. None of those plans would be put into action now.

I thought about what a lottery game life is—how we never can be really sure about the future. The one thing we could be sure of is that every single one of us would eventually “win” this particular lotto.

I don’t want to wait for some far off day that might never come, I thought. If I really want to go cruising, I should do it now.

That was the day I jumped the rails of the American Dream. A little over a year later, Dan and I untied Brandy from her slip in a Kingston, NY marina, and my cruising life officially began. As any life, it’s been full of joys, sorrows, and unexpected twists and turns.

I’ve never regretted the decision made on that California bluff twenty-five years ago. I have had amazing experiences, retiring before I worked. I've returned now, created professional success in the corporate world, and am now doing the same in my own company. I retired before I worked, and I'm glad I did.