Normally my work takes me to big cities for small amounts of time, and it's always so hard to leave you behind. So when the opportunity came to speak at a work conference in Florida, I thought it would be a nice change of pace. In fact, I even thought I would run a little experiment this time around and bring you on the trip, along with our nanny so that we could get a chance to do something new together. The work hours were still there of course, but being able to take you to the pool in the evenings, and on long strolls around the Magic Kingdom property are something I'll never forget. I know we won't have the opportunity to travel this way very often, so I enjoyed every minute.
Sometimes when I travel for work, the destinations seems elusive---how much can you really learn about a place between the airport, the hotel and your work site? But with you, we did go out and about at least a little bit, and you made me see things that I probably wouldn't have otherwise noticed at all. When your father asked how Disney was, I said it was funny to me. Everyone is happy, everything is clean, and everything almost struck me as artificial, like a utopia. And he astutely asked me, "isn't that why people go there?". And he's right. People come to Disney for the magical experience and for a chance to have a glimpse of life where everything is in its most perfect form. The street isn't dirty . . . the waitress isn't rude . . . the Boardwalk is just as you remember it from the pictures. All the characters that you know and love from your imagination could actually pop up at any moment, and everything in your imagination suddenly becomes real. When I thought about it that way, I realized it was a gift to have a bit of that magic, especially with you. So with that in mind, here are a few of the things that I learned from our trip that I hope you remember:
Wear sunscreen . . . lots of it. You probably don't need me to tell you that you have your mother's skin. And that means sunburns and that Florida sun stops for no one! Wear it, put on more than you think you need, and put it on more often than you think you need. You'll thank me one day.
And wear a hat too . . . See above. I know you don't like it, please just wear it. I promise one day you will think hats are cool.
You can never have too many swimsuits. Specifically, swimsuit bottoms. If there's one thing that drives me crazy during vacation days, it's having a wet swimsuit on or having to put a wet swimsuit back on a different day. One of the best luxuries of vacation is having a nice dry suit to put on every time you need it, even if you're just about to jump into the water. Keep an eye out for end of season sales and stock up---you'll be glad you have extra.
It's nice to believe in magic. Part of being a child is believing in magic and in the power of your imagination. Part of being an adult is appreciating those that still do. Real life gives us plenty of opportunities to see just how real it can be, so protect that part of your world that is full of wonder, happiness, awe and possibility.
What She Taught Me:
If you happen to be born under a Czar in Russia, it is best to die under the first black President of the United States.
The most memorable path from Odessa to New York is via Ellis Island.
If you marry young and wrong, fix it. Then marry again, older, and get it right.
Go to summer camp, work at summer camp, send your kids to summer camp.
Work very hard in noble, middle-class professions, but have manners like you are from Old Money.
Speak your mind early, often and even, maybe especially, when your speech fails you.
No excuses---maintain your hair, makeup and nails. In a pinch, lipstick in a bright hue and clip on earrings will suffice.
Read voraciously, talk about books constantly, engage politically and do the New York Times Crossword Puzzle as far into the week as you can manage. Obviously Sunday is the pinnacle.
Be unabashed in your pride and boasting when it comes to your family and your own significant accomplishments.
Make your marriage a true love affair, canonize your husband and keep his memory alive during all the years he misses.
Venerate the country you live in and be passionate about preserving its loftiest ideals.
Women can and should be controversial, if at all possible.
Be grateful about the opportunities in your life, whether they came to you by chance or by your own toiling.
Listen to music, play music, make your children play music.
It is totally acceptable to embellish when you are singing the praises of your family, even if a few of your grandchildren somehow end up with promotions along the way.
The Sweet and Low and all the other accouterments on the table at a restaurant are there for the taking. Fill up your purse, sister. Fill it up.
I thought I was kind, loving, thoughtful, non-judgmental, accepting, patient, and knew how to put up with someone’s ups and downs over and over and over, without turning my back on them. I gave so much of myself to my relationships. I thought I was doing my part.
But during that marriage, I realized there was something really wrong with the way I loved.
It was subtle and beneath the surface. But oh so crucial.
I was too often basing my self-worth, my well-being and my happiness on my partner.
In other words, if he did not feel loving for a day or a week or a month or a year, I felt a sting. I took his behavior personally. And over time, my own sense of peace & wellness began to hang by a thread. I would begin to question every bit of goodness that I had in me as it seemed it wasn't good enough for him. I would even try to become a woman that he might love. I tried to be someone different than I was. Essentially, I was relying on him to hand to me approval, happiness, worth. I was waiting for him to love me, so I could feel whole again. Do any of you love in this way? I have noticed that it is so common . . . perhaps it is even the norm.
Discovering this about myself has been one of the biggest life changers for me. Every single day I am thankful for that experience and that I became aware that there was such a better way to live and a better way to show love. It’s completely different. And it’s so beautiful to me that I even started a blog called A BLOG ABOUT LOVE. :)
And so, today I’ll pass along three ways I love differently . . . these made all the difference to me in my life then, as my 1st marriage was ending, and now, in my new, wonderful marriage:
-I take responsibility for my own self-worth and my own happiness. I do not hand this over to anyone else to provide this for me, as it’s not their job. So no matter how much I “love” someone, my self-worth and happiness is not dependent on them, their moods, or their behavior. This lovingly relieves them of any pressure; it relieves them of the duty of being responsible for my happiness. One really beautiful side effect? I get to still have self worth and wellness and offer someone the best of myself, even if they are not having a good day.
-I have learned how to be at peace with my trials. In fact, I embrace them. I see them as a great opportunity to learn. I view everything life throws at me, good and bad, as an opportunity to grow. It’s really wonderful to learn how to do this. And my motivation for doing this is love for my spouse and love for myself. There’s nothing more wonderful than a partner who is full of positive energy and at peace with their lives, even in the face of a trial.
-I don’t view marriage as a place to get my needs fulfilled; I see it as a sacred place to carry out my own development as a person. It’s a place to develop the attributes of love, kindness, hope, charity, etc. These are the virtues I already want to develop in this lifetime. And what a perfect place to develop them . . . in a marriage, with a man that I already want to love in the best way possible.
Over the years, have any of you learned some ways to love in a healthier way? I’d love to hear.
My online world is composed of sub-worlds—primarily the universes of Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, and Tumblr. Twitter is my favorite of these worlds, and the most carefully and heavily curated of all of them. For the past few years, I've followed less than 100 accounts, and my Following list is ever-changing, week to week—a flow of information, ideas, and chatter that mirrors my interests. Indeed, I could be less rigid about it all, follow more handles, and use Twitter lists to filter my feed. But I don't want to.
And that's the wonderful but also odd and fascinating thing about Twitter, or really anything else on my Internet: I am the creator of this world.
On Twitter, I talk to friends, and also strangers who have become friends, as well as strangers who remain strangers—avatars kept at a distance because, well, that's how the Internet works. I use Twitter less as a social space and more as a network built on ideas, but there's a stream within Twitter, my Favorites, that I use in a specific way. While liking on Facebook, Instagram, and WordPress; favoriting on YouTube and Flickr; and clicking the ♥ on Tumblr are generally actions for someone else, favoriting tweets is a different process. I compile and save juicy, intriguing mental bits primarily from people I don't know, and personas whose identities are a mystery:
We all have different reasons for favoriting a tweet. It may be practical (saving a link to an article to read later), or swift and silent acknowledgement: you have nothing left to say to someone, but still want to nod.
For me, favoriting tweets is less about someone else and more about me. I don't view this list of favorites as a stagnant archive or Twitter backwater, but rather an active, evolving place that reveals my headspace. While some tweets I favorite are clear, complete thoughts, I notice most favorited tweets are fragmented and ambiguous, and I wonder if the people who write these tweets ponder why I favorited them, especially inside jokes and ones not meant to be understood. But that's the beauty of it: I sift through these mental bits, interpreting and appropriating them as I please. Plucking from this mind and that one, creating meaning and context, compiling a public list that only makes sense to me.
But as I peruse these favorited tweets, I notice many are negative, even contemptuous. And I wonder: Am I really the mean-spirited, pessimistic person reflected in these tweets? Where are the tweets about rainbows and unicorns, about love and hope, about the good in this world?
But a fair amount of my favorites are cynical or arrogant in tone, and ultimately depressing: bursts of bleakness, reminders of how harsh this world is. I'm not quite sure what this says about me, or the universe I have created by enmeshing the ideas, hopes, and flaws of others. Curating these tweets into one stream also feels like I'm molding a single being—each click of my mouse a divine action, a step further in shaping an übermind.
And this is why I have grown to love Twitter. In the beginning I ★ed tweets, simply because I liked them, but the process has evolved into something personal, meaningful, and telling of something bigger—how I see the world, how I want it to be, what I accept about myself. I identify with a stranger's struggle, I accept his or her flaws, and in turn I embrace my own.
In a way, my favorited tweets reveal my own ups and downs and struggle to be a" better" person, whatever that may be: a list that somehow captures all of my successes and imperfections—a record of fleeting moments of empathy, of what it means to be human in a big, impersonal world.
The issue of marriage equality is one that's been in the news a lot lately, and therefore at the forefront of my mind. Obama's proclamation that same-sex marriage should be allowed, and then his discussion of his administration's refusal to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is a giant leap forward for both the social view of marriage equality and hopefully for the continuing fight to legalize same-sex marriage. There are two issues at the core of the marriage equality issue that stand out to me at this juncture. The first is that I believe "marriage equality" is a misnomer. The issue is not about who can have a wedding; the issue is the right to family stability. The second is that while fighting on a state-by-state levelmay be necessary at this point in the grand scheme of things, the legacy of the battle should be a federal law that prohibits states from putting the rights of their citizens up for popular vote.
While allowing same-sex couples to marry is framed as a marriage equality issue, it goes well beyond that. This is a family equality issue. There are over 900,000 same-sex couples in this country. I want to give you a statistic about how tall they would all be if we stacked them on top of each other, but that feels degrading and I don't know how tall they all are anyway. In 30 states, these couples are systematically denied rights that heterosexual couples enjoy, like hospital visitation rights, social security benefits, immigration rights, health insurance under their partners' plans, family leave to care for their partners, and rights to partners' pensions in the case of their death. I'm lucky to have found someone to whom I want to be married (and continue to want to be married, nearly 5 years after the fact) who is the opposite gender.
When I said "I do," I really meant for better and for worse so long as we both shall live. I meant that I wanted to become a family with him. Clearly, the most compelling reason for so closely intertwining my life with my husband's is that when it is time to do so, I get to delegate "the talk" with our kids to him, not so much because I don't want to do it, but because I want to laugh at him while he does it. A close second is growing old with him, and building a life with him without worrying about the structural soundness of that life if something should happen to one of us.
Happily ever after aside, I married my husband because heaven forbid anything happens to him, I want to be able to sit in his hospital room outside of visiting hours to hold his hand and whisper to him about our first date and the bike ride we took through the Vietnamese countryside on our honeymoon and about the time that he accidentally left me dead flowers for Mother's Day, but I forgave him because he spent the next fifty years showing me just how important it was to make it right. If it comes to this, I want to have the right to make the decision about when it's time to let go, and then I want to lie with him in his bed and stroke his hair (or his bald head—after all, I promised to love him no matter what) and reassure him that it will all be okay until he is gone and I am alone. And he wants the same from me, and will do the same for me, because we are two grown-ups and we love each other enough to laugh at the other person talking to an awkward teenager about condoms and responsibility and STDs.
Marriage to me, as to most people, is not about the wedding (though weddings are awesome and I cry at every single one I go to), or even about just the two people getting married. It's about the chance to start a family, to blend families, and the security of knowing that if anything happens to me or to my husband, my family, both nuclear and extended, will remain intact. If our kids are still young enough to be living at home (i.e. under 30) if something happens to one of us, marriage is our insurance that their lives will remain as stable as possible amidst the chaos of loss. Because we all know how hard it is to place a 26-year-old Humanities major in an adoptive family.
While publicly declaring our devotion to each other is important, the stability and rights that our marriage affords our family are more important. I would love my husband if we weren't married; however, I would not have hospital visitation rights, health insurance, the ability to take leave to take care of him if something happens to him, or rights to his pension to provide for our daughter if he dies. And let's not even start with the "different nomenclature for different types of families" thing, because that's just dumb. Seriously, what is the logical and legal basis there? If we're sure enough about our relationships (or our chances of being able to cash in on our wedding for our reality TV show) to get married, our relationships should all be called the same thing in the eyes of the government.
At its core, marriage equality is a civil rights issue. This week has opened discussions about whether same-sex marriage should be an issue left to states, or whether it is a federal issue. My strong conviction that marriage equality needs to be a federal issue stems from my discomfort with states putting the civil rights of a minority up for voter referendum. In each of the 28 states that have put initiatives on the ballot to amend their state's constitution as defining marriage as between a man and a woman, voters have approved the amendment. Regardless of what your view of marriage is, think about the consequences of this precedent. If you are doing something of which a majority does not approve, and you are not a suspect class (i.e. a racial or religious group) under the fourteenth amendment, your rights can be put to the whims and passions of voters in your state. Aziz Ansari has a particularly compelling point on this issue:
By default, everything that the president touches is going to be polarizing; I don't begrudge him hedging his first statements. Working incrementally to change the culture in order to change the politics is the least inflammatory move for Obama to make at this juncture. But this doesn't mean that the rest of us can't work at both state and federal levels to ensure that the rights extended to heterosexual families are also extended to LGBT families. While some argue that anti-miscegenation laws are not a viable parallel for the same-sex marriage debate, the Supreme Court ruling (Loving vs. Virginia) states:
Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.
At the heart of the aforementioned Fourteenth Amendment, in case you haven't caught up on the episodes of Schoolhouse Rock that you have stored on your DVR, is the Equal Protection Clause, stating that "no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." If this isn't relevant, I don't know what is. Marriage is a basic civil right, and under our constitution, we all have equal protection of the law (though sexual orientation is not yet one of the categories of people granted special protection under this amendment). Legislating against same-sex marriage at the state level denies to gay and lesbian families the fundamental rights afforded to straight families. Even more abhorrent is states opening marriage rights to a popular vote. Opening a vote on the rights of a minority to an impassioned majority goes against what our country stands for. Isn't it about time that we set a federal precedent that states should not be allowed to open to referendum the rights of their citizens? This is the crux of why marriage equity is, and must continue to be, a federal issue.
Granted, a federal ruling like Loving may be some years off, as only 17 states had laws on the books opposing interracial marriage when the Loving decision came down. I can see that leaving same-sex marriage to the states (while working to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act) is a powerful incremental tool for change. Public opinion of the issue is changing and continues to change---even Obama calls this a generational issue---and it is tempting to work state-by-state and hope that all states will come to their senses. But let's face it. Those last states aren't going to tip without a push from the federal government. Further, I fundamentally believe that states should be prohibited from putting the civil rights of their citizens up for a vote.* This is why I refuse to believe that pushing for same-sex marriage state-by-state is the end push. After all, legislation is about evolution---evolution of thoughts, ideas, and policy. It is about putting into writing and into law our fundamental beliefs of what is fair, what is right, and what rights and responsibilities we have as citizens of our towns, states, and country.
As a secular and democratic nation, we have built into our governmental structure a tremendous power to evolve, and to plan for evolution. At this juncture in time, we as a nation have an opportunity to decree that no minority should have their civil rights decided by the vote of a majority. This could be the legacy of the movement for marriage equity. There will no doubt be social issues that come to the forefront of American policy in the next 10, 20, 50 years and beyond. When we have seen that leaving civil rights up to state referenda nearly always leaves states on the wrong side of history (see: school integration & women's suffrage), why would we continue to let this be an option? We may not all agree on policy, but we should all be able to agree that this egregious practice needs to stop. A federal ban on civil rights referenda would be a fitting legacy for the marriage equality movement, strengthening our democracy and protecting all families' rights from the whims and passions of the majority.
*If you want to see an exceedingly handsome man who saves people from burning buildings make essentially the same point, you can watch this:
Egypt is a complex place: as a visitor, I found it beautiful but sad, and ever-evolving yet stagnant, post-revolution. I visited in November 2011 for three weeks and barely scratched its surface, but still got a taste of some of its layers and maneuvered parts of the country at varied paces: the street chaos of Cairo; the still, surreal landscape of the Sinai Peninsula, where the desert meets the sea; and the pharaonic temples in Luxor, where tourists and touts mingle among massive ruins under a hot sun.
My first visit to the Middle East and first time navigating in a Muslim country, these weeks were challenging despite exploring with someone who called it home. While I never got used to the ceaseless cacophony of car horns and street noise of Cairo, by the final days I had become comfortable enough to weave through—and walk in front of—moving cars, as everyone else did: becoming one with the traffic, the movement of the city, the chaos itself.
Oddly, as I sift through my photographs six months later, I notice most of my shots capture the quiet moments in between—seconds of stillness and solitude, and of people alone, with their own thoughts, much like me as I wandered and tried to wrap my head around this new place. In this gallery, you'll find images from Cairo, the Sinai Peninsula, and Luxor.
It was a dark and stormy night—no really, it was. Our boutique creative agency YOU + ME* was in need of a retreat/vision quest/mini sabbatical/whatever you want to call it and we decided the perfect location was Salt Lake City in January. We weren’t there to seek inspiration at Sundance or on the slopes (though that would have been a solid plan following the storm that blew through town). Instead, we flew three quarters of the way across the country to attend the Altitude Summit, lovingly referred to as Alt, a design and social media conference that attracts creative powerhouses from all over the country.
If you think boondoggle when you hear conference, it might not be obvious why we expected to forge a bold new path for our business from the lobby of the Grand America Hotel. But forge we did. It was time to step away from the glare of our computer screens and into the warm glow of shiny notebooks and neon pencils. We wanted to liberate our brains from practical matters like business taxes and invoicing systems and let our minds wander toward our biggest dreams and grandest plans. Most importantly, we needed to meaningfully connect—with old pals, new friends, and each other.
Over the course of our four-day trip, we had a blast (um, as you can see), extended our wheelhouse with a few new tricks, and figured out the next step on our never-ending quest to create a business that reflects our values and leads to fulfilling personal and professional lives. We stayed up late into the night discussing the fact that our internet circles are closing, rather than widening, comparing our experiences of the world, and chatting about our desire to connect women to each other in ways that extend beyond what our houses and weddings look like, what we cook for our families, and how we conceive of and present our outer selves. We downed coffee after coffee contemplating the fact that the online world has been one in which women have been framed as tearing each other down rather than building each other up. We lamented the dearth of online content for women that acknowledges that we are more than our outfits, our homes, and our consumption habits.
From that, the Equals Project was born.
And it looks like others have been thinking along the same lines. From the growing "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" movement among bloggers, to the focus on meaningful gatherings in Kinfolk magazine, to people sharing incredibly thoughtful stories online with the sole intention of helping other people achieve happiness, it's clear that the internet is evolving from a place where we store and showcase our (often-unattainable) goals into a place where we can be real, multi-dimensional people. As we slow down and think about what we are really consuming on the internet, it seems as if we as a society are aching for meaning and process, rather than destinations and results. We hope you will find here a collection of stories, discussions, and art from women across the country (and across the world) that compels you to think, contribute your own stories and thoughts, and most of all, to act.
We are more than what we can cook, we are more than what we can create, more than our makeup, our jewelry, our aesthetic tastes. We are people with complex ideas, and conflicting thoughts, who read, travel, discuss, do, and make. We are people who are influenced and inspired by the women who came before us, and we aspire to create something greater than the sum of our parts.
After many months of work, tellingly accompanied by more grins than swear words, it’s finally time for us to make the Equals Project a reality. We still have to pinch ourselves a little bit when we think of the talent, the stories, and the passion found among this amazing group of contributors and collaborators. And we only get more excited when we think of how the Equals Project will be interpreted in print early next year. We've also taken to jumping up and cheering on an hourly basis when we think about kicking off Equals Does, our philanthropic call to action--money is not the only tool for making a difference in the world. In a short while, we’ll be announcing our first project representing Equals Does and featuring a series of inspiring projects that share a similar spirit. If you’re interested in supporting the Equals Project, you’re in luck:
Dearest Clara,
