The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (23 page)

“It’s like I do something that drives guys away. Maybe I’m too needy or available, because after a while they don’t want to marry me!” Andrea is like so many women who seem independent, but once they’re in a relationship they lose their identity and it becomes all about the guy. Men experience her as desperate, and this pushes them away. What is sad is that Andrea is a woman of substance. She is smart and has many
talents and lots of creative energy, but once she is comfortably ensconced in a relationship, she “forgets” herself.

Catherine says Andrea is regressing, reliving her childhood emotional patterns. When she finds herself in a relationship that is comfortable and consistent, she relates it to when she was a young girl and her father always treated her like daddy’s little princess. He took care of her and made her feel special and doted on her, so now a male admirer finds himself thrust into the role of “daddy” when he wasn’t prepared to be that for her. She never did find a partner who would be both boyfriend and father, and that’s where the breakdown happened.

Until Andrea understands that no man will replace her beloved father, who dotes on her still, she will be unable to come to a relationship on adult terms and not as a needy child. Her arrested development is something that can be worked through. The key process here is to understand how her past (basement) is intruding on her present (bedroom) and to decide to make some changes in her inner self-image. Once she does this for herself (like not hanging out with much younger people in bars) and finds a peer group who share her interests in writing and moviemaking, she will start to rebuild her own life from the inside out. Only then can she truly grow up enough to have an adult-style relationship.

When someone is regressing they first have to recognize what they’re doing and decide whether they want to do it differently. The pearl: “Go or grow” means go along with the status quo and keep repeating your patterns for the rest of your life, or grow up and find a new future with an appropriate partner.

Here is a great thought to take into the bedroom, straight from one of Catherine’s favorite poets, Rilke:

We’d say: Marriage is a choice, and you choose to stay married by sharing your life with (but not giving your entire being over to) this one special person. Sex can be loving, powerful, fun, playful, stress-relieving, hot, or just ho-hum. As with any other form of self-expression, there’s a range of styles, and it’s up to you how it plays out.

You have the power to control or change how you feel in bed—attractive, desirable, or not so much. It’s nice to hear from someone else that you look amazing, but it has an impact only if you believe it yourself, and when you do, it’s an affirmation of how you’re feeling. (If you don’t believe it, no amount of flattery will penetrate your self-critical bubble.) So the attraction that others are radiating in your direction is actually the reflection of how you feel inside.

Others can compliment you and even complement you. But again, the only person who completes you is you.

Can’t Stand the Heat? Must Be in the Kitchen.

I
love doing some chores, not others. Changing sheets, no; folding
laundry, yes. Cooking, no; baking, yes. Unloading the dishwasher, no; loading it, yes. When I fold laundry I look at the person’s item, say, my son’s T-shirt with the logo from his favorite surf shop or band, and I feel closer to him. I lovingly turn it right-side out, then smooth and square it off, as if it were new, and stack it like you see at the store. It’s my way of showing him I am there for him. Then I get to my T-shirt and it’s inside out and I barely want to bother pulling the sleeves back through the right way. It’s not that I don’t love myself, but I don’t need to show it to myself. One woman told me that she folds her kids’ clothes and her husband’s, but leaves her own stack of clean clothes in the garage out back where the washer/dryer is. One day she realized she had to run naked from the waist down, from her house out through the backyard, to get some pants. In that moment she thought, I quit work to raise my kids and I’m glad I did, but I was great at my job and I’m only so-so at being a domestic goddess. There are things that remind us every day that we aren’t perfect. While that’s okay, when the neighbors look out their window and see a white-tailed mom dashing for clothes, it drives the point home. We always want to do better, especially if someone else is watching!

For me that means ordering in less and trying to make dinner a couple of nights a week. My kids know that the doorbell rings and it means dinner (like actual Pavlovian pups, trained that the bell brings food). My mother was a great cook, but not me, I just can’t get it together on a weeknight to
get to the store and find the ingredients and whip up a tasty and healthy dinner at the end of a long day. I wish I could.

Still, my kids are healthy, and now they are teaching themselves to make the basics: scrambled eggs and toast, spaghetti and tomato sauce. And of course they are aces with the phone and a stack of take-out menus. Living in the city makes that an option, thank goodness. But the kitchen in this emotional house isn’t only about food: The most important thing happening here is emotional nourishment and the “coming together” of the family several times a day. Plus, this is where the division of labor in the household takes place. All those dishes to unload!

And then there’s the iconic kitchen table, where we find ourselves having the “real” conversations of the family. The business of who’s doing what at work and at school during the tricky teenage years of peer relationships, bad behavior, meanness, and the like. We tend to really get into it at the kitchen table since it’s intimate and informal, and unlike in the family room, we’re facing one another. Sometimes we’ll hold a “family meeting” to make a big decision, like where to go for a vacation, and we always know that means taking seats around the table: I have mine, my husband has his, and the kids have theirs. We never sit in one another’s seats, even when the other person isn’t around.

It’s as if we are all at our posts, playing our roles. I call it my kitchen cabinet (like the president has) since each of us offers advice and an honest point of view to the others. (I like it when the kids offer up their worldview and a real discussion ensues.) Most of the time it all works out and we sit down to dinner and have a family gathering, conversation, or meeting. But when I get peeved over the little things: snacks left out to rot or the dishes on the table, or the dishwasher full and clean (my least favorite sight), I get crabby and nag at someone to “Puleeeeaaaasssse” help a little more around the house!

When it’s going well, the kitchen is usually a place for me to come together with my daughter and bake something: cookies or brownies or a special dessert for a Saturday night dinner party. Baking tells me that this is the best time in the kitchen, since it basically says, “I choose to be here with my daughter, spending time on a chore that doesn’t really need to get done but is a nice diversion while we talk and share the details of our
lives.” Silly conversation leads to emotional connection, and for us it usually takes place over a bowl of unbaked cookie dough. Even at a fast-paced breakfast before school, in just a few found moments, we’ll connect in the kitchen, have an abbreviated conversation, and touch base before racing off again. And it’s through these casual, often mumbled conversations over coffee and cereal that we “feed” one another emotionally.

The kitchen is where Mom used to rule supreme, but now families are more complicated, and chances are she’s working, so in the morning everyone is whirling around, fending for themselves because the school bus is about to roll up and the train is about to leave the station.

The kitchen is not always a tranquil space. It can be full of frantic, fraught exchanges—Did you walk the dog? Who’s picking up Suzie from practice? How late are you working?—and in the evening, there’s dinner to make, homework to oversee, and laundry to fold, because it’s also the family work space.

Even if you live by yourself, the kitchen can be the heart of your house. It’s where the pictures on the fridge remind you of loved ones; it’s where the stack of bills and that list of important numbers remind you that you have pressing responsibilities. It’s the organizational center of your “emotional” house.

For our purposes, the most important piece of furniture in this room is the kitchen table, because that’s where the family talks about fundamental issues, such as the division of labor, finances, and respect for one another. This is where you share the minutiae of the day or, if necessary, have it out. Maybe you don’t have a kitchen table—you hash things out over the kitchen counter, or somewhere else. In our discussion, the “kitchen table” is just a concept; it’s where your family connects and where you learn what matters most to them. And to yourself, in terms of time and how you spend it.

“I chose this. I love what I do and I’m lucky I get to stay at home. My mom thought it was her job, and hers alone, to take care of the household. My dad had to get up and go to work and that was that generation. But now it’s different and most women work. I used to, but when I had my first son, Jack, I quit. Steve, my husband, never touched a wet diaper or wore the BabyBjörn. To this day, Steve will come home and expect dinner whenever he walks in, even at 9:30. I always have a sarcastic retort and say, ‘Oh, you can’t warm it up yourself?’ But then I do it. I really don’t mind. But then he leaves his dish on the table and it kills me. That’s what we are trying to teach our kids, ‘Put your dishes in the sink,’ so when I ask, ‘Steve, did you forget something?’ he will put it in the sink and say, ‘I was about to!’ but I swear if I hadn’t said anything it would be encrusted on the table the next morning.

“Finances are at the root of our major arguments. Even if it’s couched in the kids’ sports or school. I never tell him he should make more money, but I would like to. For me, there are no pay raises, bonuses, or reviews of a mother’s work. You mostly get people complaining or bitching about how they can’t find their (fill in the blank) soccer socks, printout, or phone! No one ever tells you what a good job you’re doing.

“If my husband comes in and comments about the messy house I get crazy. I feel like he walks in and is immediately negative. I say to him, ‘I don’t criticize your work.’ But I’m more sensitive, and I take it personally. I want him to be supplying praise. I want to give him a list of what to say: ‘You’re such a good mom, cook, friend.’ ‘You look great.’ It’s like he needs a script.”

Meanwhile, Tracy cleans up the dog throw-up in the laundry room and brings the dry clothes to the TV area to see if Steve can help her fold them, and he asks her to move them, since she is now blocking his view. He can’t find the car keys, or his sneakers, or the food in the fridge. It’s as if she has to do everything for him. He’s learned to depend on her. As the
firstborn in her family, she is a giver, and as the last born in his family, he’s used to being given to, and it’s a pattern they have grown up with all their lives. But now it’s time for a change, since her older son, Jack, is ten and her younger one, Sam, is seven and she is eager to ask them to help out more. And maybe Steve too.

“My job starts when I wake up and it ends when I’m putting the last load of laundry in before I go to sleep at the end of the day, like eleven, so the thing about being a mom is the hours suck and there’s zero pay. It’s not like doing brain surgery, but it’s constant. Relentless. When I try to explain that I like things nice for the family, Steve says, ‘Calm down, everything’s fine,’ and that drives me crazy because if I didn’t do it no one would. Yes, I chose my lot in life, and I’m actually quite happy, so why am I complaining so much? What is my problem?”

Clearly, Catherine points out, there are some issues that need to be resolved. Tracy needs to sit down with Steve, not when he’s watching TV, not by piling heaps of laundry on him when he’s relaxing, and not yelling at him to find his own damn sneakers! She needs to calmly tell him how she feels, and that she needs a break. And boy does she ever. But it’s not going to happen because Steve says, “Yes, honey, you need a break.”

The truth is there are lots of rooms involved here: the office, which includes their finances (he bought a motorcycle without telling her and she realized they are not equal partners in the money management side of things), the kid’s room (he isn’t a 50-50 dad, and never has been), and the basement (they each were reared in traditional homes, and he was the baby so was coddled and waited on by his doting mother). The bedroom is involved, since he could tell her she looks pretty, bring her flowers (especially when he asks for a 9:30 dinner and she is ready to put her feet up), and generally show some appreciation for his beautiful and talented wife. But the number one problem is that she isn’t getting any time for herself and she is at her wit’s end, in every room of the house.

Catherine says, “She isn’t getting any time for herself because she isn’t
taking it.
She literally has to be the one who manages this problem as well as she does all the other ones in front of her. She gets the laundry
done and the dinner made and the kids off to school and the dog walked. She simply forgot to put herself on her own to-do list. It’s the “to do” that never gets done. And it’s an epidemic in American households: the overly tired, overwrought, overwhelmed, and “over it” moms who can’t understand how, once they’ve decided to stay home, it takes such a superhuman effort. But they have to be their own champions. It isn’t, as Tracy says, rocket science, but it is human science: The brain and body need a break, to replenish and recharge and relax. If she put an hour of “me time” on her schedule and treated it like a doctor’s appointment for one of her kids, she would be well on her way to solving this.

The other truth is that if she doesn’t, her body will break down, she will get sick or injured or fatigued beyond what is healthy, and she will be forced to take a break because you simply can’t sustain an effort at this pace without time off (either forced or otherwise). We feel strongly that all women have to do this in order to take care of themselves. You have to be whole and strong and healthy in order to take care of those around you. It’s not selfish, it’s self-preservation.

If your family loves you, they will understand. Your job is to explain it to them: This is mom’s time-out. You have to make it real to both you and them.

Remember, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. She is not only hurting herself, she’s doing a disservice to her family, since they will never learn to be independent if she does everything for them.

It’s up to Tracy to ask for the help she needs, to suggest little things the family can do to help her be less harried and worn out. Steve can pick up dinner on the way home some nights, or Tracy can go away for a girls’ weekend, and it will be good for everyone. Things won’t fall apart. It would force Steve to step up and do more. Even just a day at the pool by herself, says Tracy, with a book and some music, is a fantasy at this point. Whenever she goes to the local pool with her kids, she sees it as a harried, hellish experience. But she can empower them to be more self-sufficient: put on their own sunscreen, carry their own towels, bring their own books, toys, and music, so she doesn’t have to be the packer and schlepper and supplier of entertainment.

Tracy needs to create a chores list and sit each person down and discuss it. If they are the dog caretaker that day and the dog pees on the floor, they get to clean that up. If they are the dishwasher that day, they are responsible for loading the dishes and turning on the machine after supper. They can even help fold laundry or sort socks. It can be fun and a time for chatting, depending on how it’s presented and carried out. Maybe each task earns a reward. Extra video game time for the kids, or something they have been badgering Mom for. This is a chance to explain that she is not the maid, and her job is as valuable as Dad’s.

“When they say to me, ‘Well, Dad makes all the money, you don’t work,’ I get furious and say, ‘Listen to me, I have a master’s degree and I choose to stay home. To be with you guys. This
is
work,’ I’ll tell them. ‘And it’s the kind I
want
to do, to be here for you guys, but you can pitch in, because we’re a family and we help each other.’ I never realized how underappreciated I would feel. Some days I just want the good mother’s award.”

Catherine would tell her: Only you can really help yourself in this situation, by feeling good about your choices, appreciating the things you do well, working on things you don’t, and enjoying both as much as possible. It’s nice to have other people’s recognition, but you have to feel it from within and know that you are happy with what you have and do…and not just wait around for the recognition of others. First of all, it may not come (and you may get aggravated waiting for their kudos), and second, by the time you do get it you may be so resentful that you don’t appreciate it when it does come.