My grandson is here and my heart swells and warmth moves in to every cell of me when I hold him. In a few hours, I'll be leaving him to go back home. Home to the little city that I love. Where we can walk 4 blocks and reach the school, the community pool, the park and baseball field, the Senior Center and community garden. Where the drama that is almost a daily occurrence here in M-town doesn't exist.

Yet....

I have loved being with my daughter these past few weeks. Helping her settle in, encouraging her and supporting her as she figures out who she is as a mother (and she's awesome by the way). Perhaps if we lived in the same city it wouldn't be as special.

My heart hurts at having to leave and at the same time, I miss my life back home.

A letter to him

I hate you. Not for anything that you've done, but for all the things that you will do. All the promises you will not keep. All the lies you'll tell. All the heartache you will cause. Today, you bow your head while holding her hand and you vow to be there for her and for your son. You even ask God to help you be a good father. But you won't be. You can't be. You haven't had enough life yourself and the life you have had has been fatherless. There is nothing for you to work from. And so -- when things get hard -- you'll act the only way you know how. Even you won't like the things you do. You'll tell her you're sorry and that you don't know why you do those things and you'll mean it. In spite of your best intentions, though, nothing will change. Not for a very long time.

And for that, I hate you.

Networking

While I'm here in M-town, I'm staying with a couple who were 'MY' couple a couple of years ago. The relationship has changed over the years - both mine with them and their's with one another - but we are still very close. We still consider one another family and I have no qualms about squatting at their house for ... oh, say 3-4 weeks at a time. Odd? Maybe.

Then there's the fact that last night, I slept in the bed with my ex-husband's wife. Ex-husband was sent to sleep elsewhere while she and I polished off a bottle of Shiraz and watched "Seven Pounds" on the bedroom tele. She even lent me her favorite linen pajama pants. When my son walked through the bedroom this morning, he shook his head and said, "Now this just ain't right".

My husband's ex-wife and the guy I came very close to marrying were both at our wedding. All in all, there were probably a dozen people at our wedding that we'd been naked with and we still cared enough about to have them share our wedding day with us.

I have a large network of people that I love and trust in my life. Some of them, I've been intimate with in the past. Some of them, I'm still intimate with. Some of them I've never been intimate with and won't be. Are there blurred lines? Probably. I don't think it's unhealthy. I guess I'm good at navigating changing relationship parameters and keeping the parts that are good even when other parts have to go. I totally get how strange it seems to some people, but I have to say it's one of the parts of my life that I feel best about. There's a lot of love in my life.

me

I've been pondering a thought the last few days about how our own unresolved issues impact our parenting style. It didn't start off that way, but it makes me think of my mother. More and more I'm realizing that the things that she did or did not do as a parent were a result of her own inner turmoil much more than they were a result of how she felt about her children. Her whole life was in pursuit of getting her own needs met - many of which were leftover from the pain of her childhood and probably subconscious. And even though her actions hurt and damaged me, I was inconsequential. She didn't (and doesn't) intentionally do things to hurt me. It's all about trying to meet the needs of those unresolved issues. I guess that unless you make a conscious decision to do something different, you're pretty much always going to parent as a wounded child.

It occurs to me that you can't NOT bring all of who you are - all of your life experiences - to the table as a parent. Good and bad. Maybe the trick is to be self-aware and stop for a moment to evaluate where things are coming from. Is it about guiding and teaching the child something that they need to learn to be whole and functional people in the world? I realize that is my parenting philosophy and it may not be everyone's.

I think I'll track this for a while when I get home and evaluate how often my parenting decisions are aligned with my philosophy.

In line with the other odd things I've been doing lately, I went to play pool with my son, his girlfriend and my first husband. Odd because as a married couple, we never went to shoot pool once. He's a funny guy and a hell of a father.

I did something odd today - I checked my daughter's cervix. I was all clinical and logical about it - "Oh, no problem, I can do this." - but the truth is that it is far different when it is your child's vagina that you are elbow deep in. And the os was to the side which took me a minute to figure out. At first I thought there was a lip on one side but not the other. Then I realized that it was tilted to the right. Having not ever felt or seen her cervix before, I don't know if it was because her baby's head is at an odd angle or if she's built that way. And while I was trying to figure out exactly what I was feeling, I was having a mild panic attack about how strange it was that I was doing it. So apparently there are things in this world that freak me out - even if I fake like I'm all cool, calm and collected.

Speaking of cervices, go check out the Beautiful Cervix Project. It's an awesome site and if I had the right equipment, I'd participate.

May Day

A good day to kick off the new blog, don't you think? I do.

So I'm sitting 700 miles from my 'home' and wondering if it's bad that I don't miss my husband and children. As of today, it's been a week since I've seen them and there are two more weeks before I go home. Frankly, I'm kind of digging it. No one cares when I come and go. No one asks me for anything except if I want to go sing Karaoke at the girl bar or go for Monster Margaritas at Los Pilares. I get to hang out with my grown children (which is much more fun than hanging out with my ungrown children but no less expensive) and appreciate their 'grown-ness'.

I am DIGGING this.

And, I'm daydreaming about how to make this a regular part of my life. The University here has the PhD program that I want. My grown kids are here and soon my grandchild will be here. But I don't want to walk away from my wonderful little town and the life that I made there. Is that selfish of me? Can a person straddle that line or am I trying to have my cake and eat it too? And if I am, is that a bad thing?

Do you suppose it's okay for a manager to say this to a person?

"You can use your talents like Ghandi, or you can use them like Hitler."

It seems a very unfortunate choice of words at best and a maliciously cruel choice of words if the person they are speaking to happens to belong to one of the categories of people that were targeted in the holocaust. Which the person on the receiving end of this comment was. Was the manager just oblivious to the objectionable nature of her words? Or was she trying to tell her report exactly what how she felt?

Dressed for Success

A friend and I were having lunch yesterday and I was able to articulate something that had been bopping around in my head for a while. It feeds in to why I resent Corporate America so much.

Here's my beef. Development. Seems harmless enough, right? Organizations should want employees to develop. But why does it seem like 'development opportunities' are frequently aimed at turning me in to a clone of my manager? Or my manager's manager? I did my annual performance self-review today and I realized for the first time that one of the items that I am rated on is 'Professional Appearance'. The decription of the item says something like "dresses to make a good impression" and my manager rates me on that as part of my annual eval.

What. The. Fuck?

First of all, I would like to see the study that correlated dress with performance. Secondly, measuring dress is subjective and potentially discriminatory. What if I wear ethnic or religious dress to work? Is that 'professional'? What if I'm FTM trandgender and my manager thinks I should wear a skirt and heels?

I realize that I'm probably not going to ever find a company that doesn't have issues. I also realize what a pain in the ass I am to manage because shit like this bugs me. If it doesn't fly all over my values, I usually let it go. Like the Christmas Tree in the lobby of HR, this one seriously irks me.

The Disconnect

Corporate America's definition of leadership: Getting the people who report to you to do the behaviors that need to be done in order for the organization to be more profitable.

My definiation of leadership: Acting in a way that challenges those around you to grow and become more effective people.

Corporate America's definition of development: Teaching people to be more like the status quo.

My definition of development: Teaching people to become more themselves.

Corporate America's definition of success: Making more money, moving up the ladder and becoming a manager.

My definition of success: Knowing that I bring the best of who I am to every aspect of my work.

This is why I don't belong.