Heyyyyyyy girrrrrl.... Women in Leadership

I recently presented at a Women in Leadership conference.  I've presented enough now that I don't get  terribly nervous; I prepare, I review, I gather myself, and I go do it.  It's fine. Fun. I really like it.

But this time, I was really, really nervous.

Why, though?  This was supposed to be my tribe.  The group most welcoming and forgiving.  Being surrounded by my own kind should have given me a sense of you-can't-mess-this-up, a confidence so strong I could almost touch it.

Instead, I wondered if I should have found the time to get some gel nails. Why I hadn't gotten my hair done?  I wished I'd picked a different outfit.  Was my mascara smeared?  Had I even remembered to put it on?  What about deodorant? I wished I looked more put together, calmer, less oh-my-god-where-are-my-keys and more I-have-this-all-figured-out.

The source of my anxiety wasn't in dispute: I didn't want to let them down.

Because, I mean, what could I say?  What hadn't these women already heard, felt, dealt with, considered, read?  I could talk about all the versions of mental illness I'd grappled with in my life, but they'd probably already lived through their own versions of that story, and besides, this presentation wasn't about me:  It was about them.  Okay, then.  Maybe I could give them a giant pep talk about being a woman in leadership.  The problem with that approach?  I was actually feeling pretty crappy and lonely as a female leader right then, and I didn't want to be inauthentic or dishonest.  So.  Perhaps I could just bust on men.  That was easy, and seemed something I could get away with:  Empowering women by diminishing men.  But—ugh!— I didn't want to do that, either, because I don't believe women should think about their place in the world in terms of the men in it.

What, then?

I thought about the well-adopted myth that women who live or work in close quarters will find their menstrual cycles begin to sync.  I've always loved this idea.  In college, in a house on Locust Street, my five female roommates and I would do the eye-roll-giggle, conspiratorial and team-like, at how we all seemed to get our periods at around the same time.  It felt good to think of our bodies working together, talking to one another without our knowledge, lockstep and moving forward together.  It was comforting and safe, a biological nod to our one-ness.  Here's the problem:  It's not true.  Turns out the statistical likelihood of some sort of menstrual cross-over, in the course of twenty-some-odd days, with a group of women, is why it feels we're all doing it together.  But that's all it is.  A feeling. "Period Drama," Act 4 of this episode of This American Life, explains all of this.  Give it a listen if you don't believe me.

So that's what I talked about with these women.  Not about our menstrual cycles, exactly, but instead about how it feels when women come together, not as verified by science, but as a product of being ourselves and believing we are better together.  About having an unspoken alliance and loyalty to one another.  About lifting one another up instead of tearing at the throats and jugulars of other women.  How competition between women can kill our best parts and leave us diminished, lonely, and without a safety net.

In the end, despite all the pre-angsting, the presentation was probably one of my best.  My message felt delivered and received, the intent achieved:  We, as women, collectively, have a choice.  We can choose toxicity or we can choose positivity.  With one another, I mean.  Hey, girls.  Hey:  We don't have to feed into stereotypes created for us, about us.  We can work together to be our very best versions of the women we are.

So let's do that.  K?

Teaching, Time, and Water in a Sieve

"Time flies."  The nurse shook her head and locked eyes with the infant I held in my arms.  She was finalizing paperwork to discharge me from the hospital.  I couldn't wait to start my new life with my husband and my perfectly perfect, brand new baby boy.  Time's not flying, I thought.  It's just getting started.

"I know, I know," I said, sick to death of hearing it.  "Everyone tells me, 'Don't blink!  It'll be over before you know it!' "

"Actually, you don't know. You can't know until you experience it."  She scrawled her signature on the last form. "My kids are forty and forty-two."  She seemed edgy.  Bitter?  Resentful?  I wondered, subconsciously, as I often do around testy people, if there was anything I could say or do to make her feel better.

"But you're so proud of them, right?" I tried.  "I mean, I'm sure you miss them being so little, but I bet there are wonderful things about being a Mom to grownups.  Right?"

She stared at me.  Not kindly, either.  "It's not about what I miss or what I like.  It's about the passage of time.  You can't stop it or catch it.  It's like water in a sieve."

She looked down again at the tiny human in my arms, and her expression softened a little.  "Well, let's get you home." She stood and helped me into a wheelchair.  Wordlessly, she pushed us out of the room, down the elavator, and into the soft spring air to my husband's waiting truck.

It took years figure out what she was saying to me.  It took getting dunked into the everyday work of being a parent to really understand the elusiveness of time.

The days have been long—sometimes painfully so—but oh, oh how quickly the years are going.  I've been marveling as my children turn into real humans.  My friends tell me this is just the beginning; they say it'll just be a minute until I'm an empty nester and I won't know what happened.

Why, then, do days sometimes seem like an endless slog of sameness, in spite of what will, someday, feel like rapid change?

A friend of mine has taught sixth grade for over twenty years.  A few months ago, over a cup of coffee, she mused, "I spend my days with people who are always the exact same age.  It's like time stands still in my classroom."  Ahhhh, yes, I thought, struck: There it is.  Time stands still for teachers, who work with young people in the beginnings of their lives, day after day after day, and those students stay the same age.  Then, if we're parents, we go home and contend with the unexpected marvel of our own little people turning into bigger and bigger people. This is the quandary of educators, especially if we haven't changed jobs or grade levels much.  It's why time is such a fickle thing for us.  That's why we can say, with a completely straight face, "This week flew!" and then, in the next breath, "God, this week seemed to take ten days." And we are precisely, exactly correct in saying both.

The nurse was right.  It isn't only about what we love, hate, dread, desire, aspire, or regret, or what we miss when it's gone.  It's also about capturing time when we can, and about understanding that it's immeasurable.  We can't control time and we certainly can't change how it feels as it flows by.  And we don't know until we experience the elusiveness of it.  Like water in a sieve.