On Mother’s Day especially, the ideal of perfection in mothering is written on many Mother’s Day Cards.  Mothers are endlessly patient; always know what their children need; give cheerfully without asking for anything in return; never seem to need space, and so on.  The mother on the cover of Time glares out from the magazine stand and Time says, “Are you Mom enough?  Can you do THIS?”  I imagine her next move is to do gymnastics while nursing… We are meant to believe that she’s judging us, but my guess is that she is, like the rest of us, scrambling to live up to her own ideal of the perfect mommy.

The problem with the ideal of the perfect mother is that behavior gets split into extremes: perfect is good and acceptable while human is bad and unacceptable.  This leads us to hide or bury our humanness in the shadows, separated from the rest of reality.  The unspoken message we give to our children by burying humanness in favor of the ideal is that it is also not okay for them to be perfect.  Unspoken messages are the most powerful ones, and the most confusing, especially if we say something completely different with our words.  So, today for Mother’s Day, I ask all mothers this: Are you human enough?  What ideal are you trying to meet that is keeping you from being real with yourself and your children?  What have you pushed into the shadows for fear that you won’t be the perfect mom?  Shine some light onto those human parts, admit that you will never be perfect, and neither will the woman on Time, your own mother, the your kids’ friends’ mothers, or any mother that has ever lived.

So I tried to break it down further. I told her that everybody does things we dislike, but those same people also do things that we like. If we decide that somebody is bad because we don’t like something they did, then we won’t be able to see the fun things they do, the things we like.  Then when we are with this person, we can’t have fun because we’re waiting for them to do what we don’t like.  Also, if someone IS what we don’t like, then they can’t change, and we are stuck feeling yucky with this person who won’t stop doing what we don’t like.

I don’t know whether she absorbed any of this, but it did get me thinking about how, as adults, we can act just like toddlers in this very way; labeling people based on actions that we dislike. Once we label someone, it is very difficult to see beyond that label. Our experience becomes limited by the label we give, and all future interactions are seen through the filter of the label, furthering our intolerance of that person and heightening our feelings of annoyance.  In addition to this, we unconsciously disallow ourselves from doing anything that would cause us to be like “that person,” since we’re behaving as if actions make an identity.

As an alternative to labeling, I am trying to teach my daughter to say things such as, “I don’t like it when you ask me so many why questions,” rather than, “I don’t like you because you are a Why-er.”  This is a good thing to try as an adult, as well.  We can notice when we label our friends, family, co-workers as if their actions make them permanently and hopelessly a certain kind of person.  The partner who didn’t hear what we said because they were distracted isn’t necessarily a bad listener.  What if we say, “I don’t like it when you can’t hear me because you are distracted,” rather than, “You are a bad listener”?   The odds of this person changing their behavior will increase dramatically if we can name the behavior rather than label the person, and this opens our world up to enjoyable, satisfying possibilities.  Take away the labels and you’ll find movement in all of your relationships.

In addition to our recent three-month slog through the germs, our infant son has decided recently that sleeping is not something we do at night. I have not met with this new development gracefully. In fact, there have been many nights in which I’ve ranted and cussed about it to my husband at some ungodly hour, which turns out to not be helpful to anyone involved.

Recently, during one of these screamy wakey nights, I remembered something that I read in a book about Buddhism some years ago. It said that in any situation you dislike, you cause yourself much more suffering by wishing things were different than how they are at present. That night I realized that I was making things much worse by holding onto the idea that my son should be sleeping and that I should be as well. I had not accepted that I was, in fact, awake and that my son was not going to suddenly allow me to sleep.

The moment I accepted this fact, everything changed. I relaxed a little. I was no longer busy trying to change the truth of the matter. I made the statement to myself that I was indeed awake and that I might be for a while, and that there was no other reality than that. I’m not saying that I suddenly handled my son’s sleep issues gracefully. It was still loud and screamy and frustrating, but fractionally less so than it had been when I was wishing things were different.

My anger was replaced by two things: compassion and a slight bit of clarity. I felt compassion toward my son and recognized that he wasn’t screaming with the sole intent of keeping us awake. He really wanted help with something and his only way of saying so was to scream. I went into problem-solving mode and was able to help him eventually calm down enough until he could sleep. While I did not get a full night’s sleep, and probably won’t for a long time, I no longer feel tense and angry when he wakes up crying. I’m learning that the quality of sleep, no matter how scarce, is much better when I am not feeling anger and tension during the waking hours.

This lesson can be applied to many areas in life. No matter what you are going through, if you are holding onto an idea of what it “should” be rather than dealing with what it is, then you are suffering more than necessary. This doesn’t mean that accepting the truth will release you from all suffering, but it does mean that your suffering will be reduced if you are not fighting the truth of the situation, and your energy will be freed up to tackle whatever needs tackling.

You may also find this post interesting:

The Dishwasher of Inevitability

Everyone that you have ever had a relationship with has contributed to your experience of the world, which makes life more interesting and fills it with more depth. Some of these relationships may have ended on a sour note, and some of them are still going on happily but all have influenced your life in some way. These influences helped make you the person you are today.

Here is a fun exercise to try: pick one or a few people from each decade that you have been alive. It could be someone you met once, or someone that was always there. Think of something that they did or said that positively influenced you. (I say positively, because this is meant to be a fun exercise). It could be in a seemingly small way, or in a much larger way. Take note of how this memory still impacts you today. For example, I will never forget being silently terrified on a plane when I was five, when a flight attendant smilingly gave me ice cream with a cherry on top. His action taught me that kindness can greatly reduce suffering, and even more than three decades later, I know this with all of my heart. This knowledge contributes to my emotional resilience and to my willingness to try to help ease suffering in others.

The people in this exercise helped to make you who you are. Whether they are still in your life, or even still alive, you carry a piece of them around with you every time you do whatever it is that they inspired in you. The converse is also true: by sharing your world, you have inspired others and contributed to who they are. Going forward with this knowledge, how would you like to influence the world that you continue to share with others?

Sometimes, it is scary to tell your partner that you want something.  Doing so is not a guarantee that you will get the thing you want, but it is the best way to deepen your relationship.  By telling your partner that you want something specific, especially a vulnerable specific something, you invite them to see into your inner world, and this is where intimacy lies.  You are also inviting your partner to tell you what they want.  If they accept this invitation to intimacy, this allows you to see into their inner world.  Saying that you want to have a romantic Valentine’s Day can be scary because it reveals something vulnerable about yourself; however,  if you do, you increase your chance for romance, even if it doesn’t take place on Valentine’s Day, even if no flowers, dinner, or lovemaking occur.

You increase your chance for romance because you increase the chance for truth between you and your partner.  Your partner might have a very good reason to want to lay low on Valentine’s Day.  It could be there was an emotionally painful series of Valentine’s Days in the past that created some dark associations with the traditional rituals that come with this holiday.  This is quite common, actually.  Now the two of you have an opportunity to compromise, and to come up with your very own definition of romance, your very own way of celebrating your love.  You now know much more about each other than you did before the conversation arose, and you both can decide if you would like to go deeper into gaining knowledge of each other.  To me, this revealing and discovering of each other fills  any gesture that you exchange on Valentine’s Day or any other day with authentic romance.

Other posts you might find interesting:

Hollywood’s Version of Love isn’t Very Truthful

Mind-Reading, Guessing Games and Communication Breakdowns in Relationship

Being Truthful in Relationships Means Sometimes Saying What People Don’t Want to Hear

Today I offer an experiment.  As you go about your daily tasks, build in some micro-moments to ask yourself the following questions:

What is important in this moment?

Why is this thing important?

What is not important in this moment?

What is getting more of my attention right now: the important thing or the unimportant one?

If I am focusing on something unimportant, why?

How can I switch my focus and attend to what is important in this moment?

A good time for building in the micro-moments is when you are feeling tense.  Tension usually points to a need to bring focus to your state of mind.  Just now, I did my own experiment.  I often write blog posts while my infant son entertains himself nearby.  A few minutes ago, I noticed myself getting tense, trying to type faster while my son started to grump.  What was important was attending to his needs.  It was important because I am committed to being his mother more than to being a blogger.  In the moment he was fussing, the blog post was not important.  I confess that for a moment, I was giving the blog more attention than my son, which was making me tense.  The reason I gave the blog post more attention was that I have an arbitrary desire to complete posts in one sitting.  I switched my focus to my son and we played together.  I was rewarded with the most adorable smiles and coos and giggles.  These moments don’t last long in a baby’s life, and I am happy to say that I was right there for that particular one.  Now he is back to entertaining himself, and I am able to finish this post, but with much less tension.  Try this experiment on yourself today, and see what importance awaits your attention.

Self-discovery is much like a puzzle that we both occupy and that we piece together.  We learn some things more easily than others, and the pieces seem to fall into place naturally.  Artistic expression might come naturally to one person, while another is a born engineer.  Other lessons are more difficult.  We might try to force some pieces into our lives that just don’t fit, because we want them to or because we think they should.  Plenty of people start out on one career path only to discover that they aren’t cut out for it, or that it makes them miserable.  When this happens, we eventually learn about who we are not, which is just as important as learning about who we are.   There are also lessons that require us to try different angles and approaches to find out where the pieces fit.  A person may have several romantic relationships before discovering what they want in a relationship.  We need all of these and more approaches in order to really puzzle our selves together.  Over time, life gets easier because we do these puzzles over and over and we memorize the ways in which we learn.

An ultimatum is a final demand that, if not met, will result in a direct action.  In the case of the relationship ultimatum, the direct action is leaving the relationship.   The word “final” is a crucial part of the definition.  In some relationships, it isn’t clear whether you can move forward with your partner.  You reach a point where it is less important for you to keep the relationship intact than it is for you to live your life a certain way.  You might love your partner dearly, but their behavior hurts the relationship in a way that you no longer wish to tolerate.  If you tell your partner for the first time that their behavior is upsetting, then an ultimatum is not called for.  This is because the ultimatum, as defined above, is a last resort, a final demand.  It is time to resort to a final demand when you have tried everything else.

If you have already asked your partner to change the hurtful behavior, and you are unhappy with the lack of response over time, you might be considering an ultimatum.  You can only give a truthful ultimatum if you are indeed ready to end the relationship.  If you aren’t ready yet, there is no point in rushing things by issuing an ultimatum that you can’t follow through on.  If this is the case, try move your focus from your partner’s behavior to your own.  Issue yourself an ultimatum to change your behavior of accepting poor treatment.  This will help you to gather the courage to leave if necessary.  Once you have that courage, you may no longer be interested in issuing an ultimatum in the first place, because you may simply end the relationship.  But, if you still have such an interest, the time to issue an ultimatum is when you have the courage and means to follow through on it.

Other posts that you might find interesting:

Finding the Courage to Leave a Relationship

A Breakup Disguised as an Ultimatum

There are learned emotional qualities that can be mistaken as part of who we are, too. If you grew up in a dysfunctional environment, you learned certain behaviors and beliefs about yourself in order to survive. You learned them so thoroughly that you grew to believe that they are part of who you are. Maybe you learned to swallow your anger when facing an injustice, because the consequence of speaking up was too dangerous.  Perhaps you learned to hide your pride in any accomplishments because this was considered shameful behavior.  You might have grown to believe that you don’t deserve love.  As an adult, you may be operating as if this is just who you are, not realizing that these are learned behaviors rather than innate traits that cannot be changed.

Just as it is possible to learn a new language, even one where you have to learn to write in the opposite direction, it is also possible to learn new behaviors, even ones that go against the beliefs that you were raised with. The first step is to understand that you learned these behaviors, that you weren’t born with them. It won’t feel natural to learn new and healthier behaviors at first, but with practice you can learn and become fluent in a new emotional language. Learn this new language and a universe will open for you to explore and enjoy.

I once knew an incredibly talented contractor who had recently started his own business.  He often would double book himself because he was too afraid to tell new customers that he wasn’t available when they wanted him to be.   He’d promise to start working on a certain day, and when that day came around, he wouldn’t show up or call.  He’d apologize, make a new promise that he couldn’t keep, and then not show up again.  Needless to say, he lost the trust of his customers and gained a bad reputation, which hurt his business dramatically.  His fear of losing business became reality because he couldn’t follow through on his commitments.  Sadly, if he’d communicated his time limitations, these customers would have waited until he was  available, because his work was very high in quality.  He also would have known that his customers hired him with full knowledge of his limitations, leaving him with nothing to hide.

If you are tempted to hide your limitations from someone because you want to have a chance with them, pause and imagine the future you have to look forward to by doing so.  Perhaps in a job interview, you want to say that you are willing to work weekends or evenings if asked, but deep inside you know that this is not possible.  If you say that you can and you get hired, you’ve already built uncertainty into your job future, because you were dishonest about your capabilities.  If you say you can’t work weekends and you don’t get hired, you’ve saved yourself from a future layoff, which is much worse than not getting hired. If you get hired even though you say you can’t work weekends,  you have built some security into your position.  You know that you were hired, limitations and all.  The knowledge that you have nothing to hide truly enhances your ability to enjoy and grow the relationship you’ve started.  Your future is much clearer when you are honest with yourself and others about your limitations right from the start.