The two weddings were actually for one couple. The bride is Christian and her family is from Ireland, and the groom is Hindu and his family is from India. What an incredible blending of cultures and traditions. The Hindu ceremony was first and entirely in Sanskrit so my understanding was limited to the visual symbolism which was incredibly rich and colorful.

The Christian wedding was much more familiar. I was struck not only by the differences in the ceremonies and celebrations, but more surprisingly by the similarities. Both began with family members escorting the bride, the groom (or both) to a sacred place in front of the assembled guests. There, the couple publicly declared their devotion to each other, and the guests were drawn into the ceremony to support and bless the couple in their new life.

Sometimes during wedding ceremonies, I notice married couples of a certain age connect eyes as if to say, “They have no idea…” and ruefully smile at what the future may hold for the couple. I was a bridesmaid in the early 70s at a wedding where the Carpenters’ song, “We’ve only just begun” was sung. (click here for lyrics).

Such hope — such optimism. This particular couple parted ways after a series of job losses, miscarriages and life threatening illnesses exhausted their stamina to sustain a marriage. Every couple faces troubles though. Even so, during the exchanging of vows, I’ll see long-married couples briefly squeeze each others’ hands or lean into each other, glad they’ve had a partner through the years and grateful they’re still together despite…

Lately, when I go to weddings, I’ll start envisioning ceremonies that haven’t even happened yet — those of my daughters. I’m in no hurry to marry them off, but I do hope they’ll have life partners and that years from now, they’ll look at their partners, squeeze their hands and be grateful they’re still together despite…

As a small child, growing up in Grand Island Nebraska, I wasn’t really aware I was a girl. My dad coached basketball and baseball, and the only way he knew how to play with his kids was to play ball. I could hit pop flies and field grounders with the best of them. My older brother was required to let me tag along with him and his friends so my early years were a blur of sandlot ball, cowboys and Indians, war, king of the hill and various other blood sports. As long as I could keep up, and I could, my gender didn’t seem to matter. At recess, I was picked first for teams, and I had a collection of baseball cards that could have funded my retirement if my basset hound hadn’t eaten them.

But then, just as I entered adolescence, we moved to Lincoln, Nebraska and everything changed. I made friends, but they played games like hopscotch, Chinese jump rope, and jacks. Boring! Around this time, my mother sat me down for “The Talk.” I’m sure she was hoping for a mother-daughter bonding moment, but I started crying. I said, “You have got to be kidding! Every month?!

As I entered Junior High, (we didn’t have middle school), I became disoriented. Everything I was good at was no longer valued. I was a good athlete; I was smart, and I wasn’t silly. I don’t think I’d ever giggled in my life. These traits were not what led to success as a teenage girl in the late 60’s. I didn’t know how to flirt, wear make up or navigate in a world where popularity was everything and the path to it ever shifting.

From my vantage point, boys had it easier. They just had to become more of what they already were. Become bigger, stronger athletes; get smarter and more educated; and, act more mature rather than less. And when they got mad, they could act mad and get it over with.

I entered adolescence confident, competent, and centered, and exited with a distorted body image, disordered eating patterns, and damning misperceptions of my self worth. Each of you here experienced your own journey through  adolescence and I’m sure if we talked for more than a few minutes, you’d fess up to your own insecurities, doubts and guilt. I’d like to think things have changed. After all I was a teenager in the late 60s and early 70’s. But judging from the list of books published on this topic, if anything, the culture has become more poisonous, the weapons more sophisticated and the stakes even higher.

Listen to these titles: Of course, there’s the classic, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Queen Bees and Wanna Bees: Helping your daughter survive cliques, gossip, boyfriends and other realities of adolescence.

Odd Girl Out: the hidden culture of aggression in girls

And the one that lays it all out: Mean Chicks, Cliques, and Dirty Tricks. And it’s not as though we suddenly turn into Mother Teresa when we get a diploma. Now there’s a new book: Mean Girls Grown Up: Adult Women who are still Queen Bees, Middle Bees and Afraid to Bees

This isn’t who we were “Meant to Be”. This isn’t who our daughters want to be. And this isn’t who men want for colleagues, wives, and daughters. But until, we as women commit to stopping this cycle of hurting each other we will never step into the power that is ours in the numbers we deserve. If we won’t do it for ourselves, we owe it to our daughters and sons to do it for them so that all women and men can reach their full potential and be partners in the challenges that face us. So the next time you hear someone being a Queen Bee, Wanna Be or Afraid to Be, interrupt their thinking and help them see who they’re Meant to Be.

After I read the first few chapters on the plane back to Omaha, I put down the book and started to write. I recently helped move my daughter to Chicago to start graduate school. Her father, boyfriend and boyfriend’s brother hauled the physical trappings of her life up the three story walkup. After the two men in her life said their good byes, she and I settled into a week of “setting up her new life.”

I had held off writing about that week because deep in my soul, I knew it was an incredibly important experience, and I didn’t know how to write about it so I’ve been tiptoeing around the edges, the images, the words, the looks. She and I weren’t alone that week. My mother’s spirit was there also.

My mother died of cancer when I was 21. When I graduated from college and moved to Omaha to teach high school English at the age of 22, my mother wasn’t there. I set up my small apartment kitchen by myself, killed the cockroaches that the last tenant left behind, and kept my large malamute by my side as the big bad city of Omaha scared me.

This was the first in a series of passages my mother missed. She wasn’t there when I married, gave birth to my beautiful daughters or lost my son. When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2005, my biggest fear was not of pain or disfigurement, it was of not being around for my daughters’ passages. Thankfully, my outcome has been different from my mother’s.

And here I was, getting to be with my daughter as she started this exciting (and scary) chapter of her life. As she and I assembled various purchases from IKEA (what a great store), I watched her face pucker in concentration as she maneuvered the electric drill. In a flash, I was watching the nine year old Alise assemble a Barbie van on Christmas Eve for her little sister. Staying up late was her consolation for finding out Mom and Dad left the presents, ate the cookies and drank the milk.

We went shopping on Michigan Avenue, and her delight in pretty clothes and skirts that twirl had not changed in 20 years. We shared a bed in her one bedroom apartment, and I must admit I didn’t sleep well. I’d wake and watch her sleeping and remember all the times I’d watched her sleep over the years. I remember when she was a few months old and had her first cold. I got out my copy of Dr. Spock’s Infant and Child Care and looked up “colds.” Right near that entry was one for cystic fibrosis. The symptoms of cystic fibrosis sounded eerily like Alise’s. Dr. Spock mentioned that the skin of babies with cystic fibrosis tasted salty. So you guessed it. I quietly went to her crib, listened to her congested baby breathing and leaned over — and — licked her arm. It was just one in a long line of weird things I’ve done to protect, hover, and worry about my girls.

One time when I was very pregnant with Alise, I began to worry about this whole giving birth experience. I had a very wise Lamaze teacher. She was an obstetrical nurse and a mother of 11. I remember telling her that “I don’t really understand how this giving birth thing works.” She smiled and told me, “You have to remember that motherhood is a series of letting go. The first letting go is to let that baby be born.” I did, but it took 24 hours of hard labor to convince my body to let her go. Today, when I’m tempted to put a protective bubble around both my daughters, I try to remember that every step towards independence is just one more in a series of letting go.

1. Many people face scenarios where they feel that their personal values don’t necessarily have a place in the corporate culture at work. How do you maintain a balance between personal values and corporate values?
2. Have the two ever been in conflict for you and what would you suggest to help women express their personal values in the corporate/business world?

Sometimes when I speak to groups, I feel like a fraud. I say all the right things and say them articulately, but often, I have a hard a time following my own advice. For example, my answer to the first question was this:

1. “First, you need to be clear on your personal values. If you wait until you’re in the heat of the moment, and faced with an ethical decision, it will be more painful than it needs to be. It helps if your organization has published its corporate values. Then if you see instances where you don’t think these values are being adhered to, you have a place to start a conversation.”

Keep reading. Here was my answer to the second question.

2. “Anyone who has been in the working world for any length of time has faced situations where they’ve faced an ethical dilemma. Before you go rushing in and declaring everyone involved to be a criminal, check:

• Do you know the whole story?
• Are you making assumptions about other people’s motives?
• Are you feeling a tad bit self-righteous?

Then:

• Ask questions, rather than pronounce judgment
• Approach like a scientist rather than a vigilante
• Realize that there is such a thing as humane implementation. (Ford pardoning Nixon)
• Realize there is a middle ground between silence and violence

Don’t:

• Go underground and join the complainers.
• Jump down people’s throats.
• Drop out say “I don’t do politics.”

Pretty good advice if I do say so myself. Now, if only I could follow it. In the past few months, I can think of examples when I’ve violated every single piece of advice listed. What gives? The same thing that causes me to blow my diet, sleep in instead of work out, and watch another rerun of Law and Order instead of writing performance appraisals. Knowing what to do and doing it are worlds apart. So if you catch me not walking my talk, lovingly call me on it and remember: I am a work in progress. Please excuse the mess.

I’m really excited by the feedback I’ve been getting and appreciate you spreading the word if you’re enjoying the posts.

Thanks so much,

Pam

Not surprisingly, I switched my major to English. Not much changed other than the machete was replaced by a red pen. I had one professor who marked out every sentence that did not develop, illustrate or elaborate on the thesis. A five page essay easily became one page under the blood-colored red pen. The familiar excuse, “I know what I want to write, but just can’t find the right words,” fell on deaf ears. The red-pen wielding professor would simply respond, “Then you don’t know what you want to write. Fuzzy writing is indicative of fuzzy thinking.”

Now, when someone challenges an idea at work, I try to remember that honest questions sharpen and improve the final result. Plus, they’re easier to face than a machete or red pen.

This paradox is evident in all of our lives, but especially in the lives of women. It’s a continual balancing act — the desire for intimacy vs. the need for boundaries. As girls, we’re raised to value relationships and to value intimacy in those relationships. When we open ourselves to intimacy, we make ourselves vulnerable, which opens us to hurt, which causes us to erect walls, which because we value intimacy makes us want to tear down. How exhausting!!

I know that in all my important relationships I sometimes am unclear about where I end and others begin. For example, in the case of my mother, who died from cancer at her age 46 and my age 21, I carried her in my head for years, her opinions becoming mine. In the case of my daughters, if I was cold, I made them wear a sweater (literally and metaphorically). Keep this up, and before long, you feel responsible for the whole world and only too willing to shoulder the blame when something or someone is not working.

So, how to balance the need for intimacy and boundaries. Erecting walls and tearing them down are both good things to do as long as we’re conscious of what we’re walling out and what we’re allowing in. Again, Frost said it better — “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.”

Ladies, you know what I’m talking about. Think back to when you were 15. Did you like yourself? Were you too fat, too flat, too plain, too tall, too smart (yes it was very possible to be too smart)? Were you convinced when a group of girls was gathered together that they were talking about you? Did you spend hours deciphering comments and looks from other girls to determine if you were “in” or “out”? We competed with each other for boys, for attention, for popularity, for a place on the cheerleading squad. And we didn’t always play fair. Our weapons weren’t fists and shouts, but looks and innuendos and sly compliments that were insults in disguise. I don’t know many women who escaped from adolescence with their self-esteem intact. And it’s worse today with so many new weapons to choose from: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.

Why am I writing about this now when my own teenage angst is as faded as the bellbottom jeans I used to wear? Everyday, I work with, know and meet scores of talented women who limit their potential and engage in destructive behaviors that would be familiar to any middle-schooler. It’s well documented that women often behave poorly towards other women in the workplace. Under-cutting, back-stabbing, glory-hogging are just grown-up versions of teenage aggression. Research suggests that as girls we had no acceptable outlets for anger, such as shouting or fisticuffs, and so subverted our anger into more covert, socially acceptable means.

Whatever the reason, the workplace is tough enough. We all want meaningful work, a supportive environment, and appropriate recognition and rewards. Let’s not make it harder on ourselves or each other. Growing old is not a choice. Growing up is and it’s a choice we owe ourselves and each other.

The Boys of Summer

The frayed, sepia-toned photo is twice as long as it is tall. In it, a group of young men in matching baseball uniforms, with well-worn gloves, kneel or stand, all looking off to their left at something not caught by the camera lens. In the corner of the photo, in faded pencil, is written, “Summer of ‘46.” Most of these young men were newly-returned from Europe, Africa, the South Pacific where their eyes saw things they’ll rarely speak of over the next 60 years.

What catches their attention off camera? Is it a pretty girl; did the photographer tell them all to look to their left, or are they gazing into their future not knowing that some day they’ll be called “The Greatest Generation”? One of these chiseled-jawed young men is my father (the one in the satin jacket); two others are my uncles, and the team manager in the back row is my grandfather. I saw this photo for the first time at a family reunion recently. My grandfather has been gone over 30 years, but the three young men are now in their 80s, with fading memories, and creaking knees. Up into their 70s, they still played baseball at our family reunions, a nostalgic tribute to by-gone days and former glories.

These three young men all led good lives, married, raised families and contributed to their communities. I can’t help wondering though what future they were envisioning when that photo was snapped in the summer of ‘46. All would face the celebrations, tragedies, and daily disappointments that we call the human condition. Those of us who are their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren can only hope that we’ll do as well.

When faced with difficult situations, our primal urge is fight or flight. Rarely in today’s world does either of these reactions work. Grief ignored does not vanish. Problems not addressed reappear.

So in addition to fight or flight, let’s add “fully face.” The area I see all three reactions is when managers address or fail to address people issues. We’ve all heard about getting the right people in the right seats and getting the wrong people off the bus. These truths have become axiomatic, yet it doesn’t mean they’re easy to implement.

So managers avoid the tough discussions (flight) hoping the situation will miraculously improve. When it doesn’t, managers get angry (fight) and the poor employees’ head is left spinning.

In reality, if people are on the wrong seat or the wrong bus, deep down they know it and are probably unhappy. Having the realistic discussion (fully facing) can be a relief to the employee and the manager because when the truth is faced, options appear. “The best way out is always through.”