100happydays

An ordinary year

January 4, 2016 By Carrie Lamanna

Today is my birthday, so for me January fourth always seems more like the start to the new year than January first. When everyone else is making resolutions and posting their word for the year, I’m still ruminating and planning. Today I am ready to share the results. Well, I’m not really ready, but then I never feel ready to take any big step in my life—I just have to force myself to do it anyway and pray I don’t fall on my ass.

This year a friend sent me a digital bundle of good stuff from Danielle LaPorte that included the audio version of her book, The Desire Map. In it she tells the story of her first conversation with SARK. Danielle asks her for some wisdom and SARK’s reply is

No more striving

Now, I don’t get worked up about most of this self-improvement stuff. In fact, I can be pretty cynical. But this statement stopped me in my tracks and led me to the conclusion Danielle’s book was something more than self-improvement. You see, I’ve been striving my whole life. From the moment I was cognizant of comparison and social approval, I have been striving. Get the grade. Win the prize. Be the chosen one. Be the best. Striving got me a Ph.D. and a good job and a nice house. It also got me a truckload of anxiety and a therapist. I had never learned how to do something simply because it fulfilled an internal need or desire—just because it made me happy. I think you can see the problem here.

So during my culturally mandated new year reflection period I tried to come up with my word for the year and all the other markers I’m properly participating in the self-care movement, but I kept coming back to those three words

No. More. Striving.

So that’s it, I decided. I need three words, not one. I had turned a self-care exercise into a rule to follow. And I was done with that. No more following arbitrary rules to prove I was part of Team Winning. No more striving.

So what does it mean to stop striving? For me it means I have stopped doing things just to prove to others that I am successful because I need to start defining success from the inside out. External cultural markers of success will never make me happy if I don’t believe in my own self-worth and if those achievements aren’t what I truly desire. Here’s what I mean.

A year and a half ago I participated in the 100 Happy Days challenge, and it worked. I posted my Instagram photos every day for 100 days, and it really did help me focus on the positive things in my life instead of my habit of focusing on the negative. Then this spring a friend challenged me to do it again, and I jumped at the offer. It helped me stop being so self-critical last time (at least for a while), so why not do it again?

The second time around, however, it felt false, like I was trying to project a false image of my life, quite literally. The purpose shifted from an internal goal to an external one. Instead of helping me focus on the positive, the purpose was now to convince the world the my life was all unicorns and rainbows. I felt like a fraud, and worse I felt I was contributing to the loads of online cropped and filtered snapshots of bliss designed to make others feel inferior. So I started taking photos of the messy and dirty (again quite literally) parts of my life to see what that looked like. But I never posted them. Until now.

This year my plan is to stop striving and have an ordinary year. Instead of just posting photos of my successes, I’m including my not so shining moments too because that’s what an ordinary life looks like. Sometimes the bathroom is clean, the laundry is folded, the checkbook is balanced, and the kids are well-behaved. But most of the time life looks more like the photos below, and we try to hide that away so no one will know we’re a fuck-up. Spoiler alert: we’re all fuck-ups. And it’s OK because we keep picking up the pieces and keep moving forward having a little fun along the way—because life is beautiful even when it’s a wreck.

So this year you can look forward to more photos like this here on my blog and on my social media accounts. You have been warned. If you have made it this far and want to join me in my little revolution, I’ll be using the hashtag #anordinaryyear

the dirty soap dish in my bathroom — This is the soap dish in my bathroom. It hadn’t been cleaned in months.

The dirty sink in my bathroom. — The bathroom sink. It’s disgusting, but it matches the soap dish.

The Christmas pillow on my couch in June — What’s wrong with this lovely Christmas pillow? This photo was taken in June. I finally got all the Christmas decorations put away in August.

My half grown out pedicure — I have a cabinet full of nail polish, but this is what my feet look like most of the time.

piles of laundry in my living room — This is what the living room looks like most of the time. In fact, this is a good day.

My daughter's crazy messy room — And finally, this is what my daughter’s room looks like right now. I’m not sure even the Container Store can help me.

A small sacred space: 100 happy days, day 50

July 3, 2014 By Carrie Lamanna

“First, what you call your life is not yours at all—not yours to plan, manipulate, or control, at least not very often. That’s a staggering realization. I was humiliated to see that the maturity and serenity I thought I had achieved was simply the result of having things my way all the time. If life wasn’t mine, what was it?” —Karen Maezen Miller

It is day 50 of my 100 Happy Days and that seemed like a pretty good reason to get back to blogging again. To be honest, this first month of summer has been hard, full of self-inflicted wounds. Even though at age 40 I should (and do) know better, I told myself that this was the summer I was finally going to get my shit together. I was going to clean and organize all the things, meditate every day, exercise, keep the weeds out of the garden, bake cookies, and take my happy and stylishly dressed children to all the right yuppie-mommy activities.

I love this fantasy version of my life, but who am I kidding. It’s a good day if I get a shower by noon and get my daughter to swim class without one or both of us having a major meltdown. I am not one of those highly efficient mommies who get up at 5:00 am to do yoga, meditate, shower, and eat breakfast all before the kids get up. And what I am slowly learning is that those mommies don’t really exist. They are a fantasy too, or more like a nightmare. I forget and think they are real people and that I should be measuring myself by the standard they set. That standard is my self-inflicted wound.

In her book Momma Zen, Karen Maezen Miller describes the bond she develops with another new mother as they admit their fears of inadequacy and their secret hatred of those imagined perfect mothers:

Underlying our friendship was that sense, the certain fear, that all around us were better mothers who were thin and groomed, confident and competent. These mothers had resolved all the questions about feeding and sleeping, poop and potty training, preschool and playmates, teething and talking, paper or plastic, that kept us forever unsteady. They had happy, textbook, gifted babies. These were mothers with a method. They were doing all the right things. They were on all the right waiting lists. They could shower, style their hair, and dress in their cute prepregnancy clothes every day before breakfast. They shaved their legs, and they had sex with their husbands. More than that, they wanted to have sex with their husbands.

They had birthed not just a child but a fully formed ideology of parenthood. It made things look easy, and it made things right.

We imagined legions of these super mothers, and we admired them from a distance. Yet privately we despised them. We had been blindsided by how difficult motherhood was. In our hushed confessions and brutal self-appraisals, we revealed how very different, diminished, and isolated we thought were were. We were the Other Mothers, whose daily blunders and emotional upheavals qualified us for charter admission into the Other Mothers Club.

Of course, we are all Other Mothers. None of us lives up to the rules set by the baby books or the images on the pages of parenting magazines. Those are fantasies of perfection not real-life standards to live up to.

To hell with standards. I don’t need cultural standards. I need understanding. I need to be understanding and gentle with myself.

So, as I look back over the first half of my 100 Happy Days photos, I am choosing to focus on the imperfection, the messiness, that surrounds those little moments of joy because the beauty of life is in the contrasts. I am learning that happiness comes from stopping to notice the fleeting moments in each day when everything comes together and then moving on without judgement when they fall apart again. That is what is powerful about taking these photos every day. I stop, notice the beautiful moment starting me in the face, and then continue on, made stronger by the noticing. I’m not sure why it works, but it does. That brief moment of attention leads to more patience and grace with the messiness of life. It’s helping me see the value in small things like the meditation and prayer space I have in my tiny sun porch. To get to that corner I may have to step over the toys and books my children have strewn around it, and I may not get there every day—certainly not at 5:00 am—but it is there waiting for me, and when I’m there I am the standard.

100 happy days—day 7

May 21, 2014 By Carrie Lamanna

Today, upon coming home, I threw over all the things that needed doing for one hour in the garden. My patient, long-suffering garden. She has been calling me for weeks. Luring me with the promise of cool, damp dirt between my fingers.

Things are growing, wild and untended. They want me not to tame them, to reign them in, but to tend them, to care for them in their wildness. To allow the leaves and branches to wind into my hair as I lovingly prune back old growth and clear space so that they may grow with even greater fecundity.

And so I did.

In one small corner of my garden, I cleared space and placed the leaves and dead branches in the compost so they might soon feed new growth.

And then it rained.
A slow, steady, soaking rain.

And watching from the window, I longed to return and lie among the flowers, in that freshly cleared space. To let the water wash over me, nourishing the roots I longed to send out like runners, creeping along the surface of that cool, damp soil.

100 happy days—days 5 & 6

May 20, 2014 By Carrie Lamanna

Yesterday and today were the last maddening days of the semester. It is always like this. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth until the grades are submitted.

Grades.
the bane of my academic life
the reason I will stop teaching
and the moment I will start
learning

Today I posted my grades. And I am happy the task is complete, but not that it had to be done.