To Live One Day Over
My sister and I are very close. We’ve laughed, cried and shared life’s triumphs and tragedies as only sisters who are also best friends can. We’re “Irish twins” – just sixteen months apart – so it always surprises me when we discover we have differing memories of the same event. Even more surprising are the rare occasions when one of us doesn’t recall an incident that hangs heavily in the other’s memory.
Each year at Christmas, we treat ourselves to a long conversation, since we don’t get together for this holiday. This year, I asked her, “If you could go back and live one day over, which day would you pick?”
Neither of us could choose only one day. We started sharing favorite memories, some overlapping, others not…the choral concerts and plays…Halloween costumes and ice skating on frozen ponds…swimming lessons, camping stories, tea parties, favorite pets….
In the magic of the moment, ghosts of the past danced to life, and I was sitting on Dad’s lap as he read the Sunday comics to me and baking Christmas cookies with Mom once again.
At one point, Ellen said, “I wish I could go back and see Mom and Dad all dressed up to go out.” And there they were in the space between us, Mom young and lovely in her favorite turquoise dress and crystals, her mink stole wrapped around her shoulders, and Dad so handsome in his suit, wearing his favorite striped tie. For a moment, I could almost smell his aftershave -Old Spice – that he wore when going out.
The conversation was rich in treasured memories of days we’d want to relive, to cherish once again. But we each also had a “do-over” day…a day of regret hidden deep in our memory. A day we’d relive to retract the unkind or angry words that happened between us and our father before he died, suddenly and unexpectedly, when she was thirteen and I, fourteen.
The wonderful thing about sharing all of the memories, including our one “do-over” day that neither knew haunted the other, is that they helped give perspective. I know I was able to forgive myself in realizing that one hurtful sentence was but a grain of sand in a lifetime of loving Dad. He knew we loved him.
Dedicated to my sister, my friend.
Random Acts of Kindness: Nothing and Everything
Have you ever had someone do something for you that meant everything to you…an unexpected kindness that touched you deeply?
I’ve experienced many, but two that come to mind immediately are both distant and recent.
Eleven years ago, when my husband and I returned from China with our adopted twin daughters and he had to return to work, both girls were ill with ear infections that the medications didn’t seem to touch. After one daughter vomited all over the three of us and a pile of clean laundry, I called Lorna, a neighbor, for advice. She volunteered to accompany me – a novice mother – to the pediatrician with my daughters. As if that wasn’t enough, she mentioned it to another neighbor, Carol, who showed up at my door that evening with homemade spaghetti and meat sauce, Italian bread, salad and dessert. I was so touched, I almost wept.
Although I thanked them, I don’t think they could ever realize what their kindness meant to me that day when I was exhausted, frazzled, ill myself (as it turned out), and insecure in my new role as mother of twins.
Then recently, when I returned to my car in a hotel parking lot after a meeting, my passenger side window had been smashed in for the GPS that I’d neglected to remove. Although there was really no harm – other than having to drive home in 40° weather with a wind tunnel running through the car – the sense of violation was very upsetting. That day, my friend Debra, came to my rescue. Not only did she wait with me while I called the police, she offered to treat me to dinner at the hotel while I contacted the insurance company.
If you asked any of these women about their actions, I’m sure they’d dismiss their kindness as, “Oh, it was nothing.” But to me, at that moment, it meant everything.
On this first day of 2012, remember to pass on kindness. To you a random act of kindness may be no more that something you’d do for any friend or perhaps even a stranger. To them, it may mean everything.
What random act of kindness have you been shown that meant everything to you?
Wings, Not Shackles
I worked at one company for many years. For the majority of that time – particularly under one exceptional president – I felt I could accomplish anything I set out to do. He encouraged and empowered employees to try new things, in a way that no other boss ever had. Those who showed initiative could expand their skill sets geometrically, and creativity was not only a welcome guest, it was rewarded.
I left shortly after a new CEO arrived. After working with a boss who gave employees wings, it was difficult to work for one who methodically clipped them and applied shackles.
In thinking about this topic, I recently asked Nate, a friend who works for a public television station and clearly enjoys his job, what gets him jazzed about it. A huge grin lit up his face and he shared that he loves coming to work every day.
“No two days are the same and I get to use my creativity every day.”
We talked about the fact that, although the manager of the station sets parameters and guidelines for employees, he doesn’t watch over their shoulders, micromanaging every move.
“[The Station Manager] trusts us to get the work done, and we do. That kind of trust makes you feel like it’s your company and you work harder. You protect it as if it’s your own and you always give your best.”
As the economy starts to correct and more employment options open up, what are you doing to inspire, encourage and empower your employees to make sure you’ll retain those who need to use their wings to be happy?
Why I Love Seth Godin
In an inbox typically overflowing with emails, one of the few I seek out each day is the one from Seth Godin sharing his most recent blog update.
Why am I addicted to his posts? Because in three to six short paragraphs, he doesn’t just encourage me to think outside the box, he inspires me to step outside and laugh at the box that someone else created and I’ve taken for granted.
Whether he’s writing “Why Ask Why,” pointing out the importance of the precocious question-askers in every school and each company (Is there a misunderstood child lurking somewhere in his background who turned his passion for questioning into a career?), sharing advice to take action first, worry about approval later, or challenging us to choose between frustration or change, Seth inspires.
Rarely a post passes that is not relevant in some way, whether the concept he writes about is applied to his topic or another of my choosing.
Thanks, Seth, for the encouragement to always question the status quo. It’s already enhanced my life.
12 Adoption Tips for November, National Adoption Month
My husband and I are adoptive parents. We met, courted and married in a mere 10 months.
Getting pregnant proved not so easy. After a year of anticipation, and because our time clock was on the 11th hour, we consulted a fertility specialist. We were soon told our only option was an egg donor. We chose to pursue adoption instead.
There were hiccups along the way – paperwork and adoption delays - but just over 2 years after we had begun the adoption process, we flew to China to pick up our amazing 9-month old twin daughters.
Nicole and Danielle, age 14 months, with Mommy
Last week, our beautiful, funny, smart, sweet little daughters turned 10 years old. They are our sunflowers and we agree it has been a most amazing journey.
Danielle and Nicole, Age 7
Because November is adoption month, I wanted to share the following advice for those of you considering adoption, in the hopes that you will decide to welcome a parentless child into your home, giving him or her a Forever Family. It will be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life.
- Begin by reading several books about adoption - Most adoption books will walk you though many of the things you’ll want to consider (whether it’s right for you; the determinations you’ll need to make about adoption choices; how to choose an adoption facilitator, etc.). Most offer a list of resources, but I have provided some below as well.
- Attend a workshop offered by an organization that provides comprehensive adoption information. (In New York State, the Adoptive Parents Committee offers a wonderful one-day conference each November. This year it’s on November 22 in Brooklyn, NY) Many adoption agencies offer informational sessions as well. Your state agency that handles adoption (see resources below) may be able to provide additional resources for workshops.
- Speak with other adoptive parents to explore their experiences. Every adoption is unique. By hearing many stories, you’ll have a better idea of what to expect.
- Investigate agencies and attorneys who handle adoption and get references. Decide whether you want to work with an agency or an adoption attorney. Do due diligence on the adoption organizations you are considering. Have there been any complaints registered about them? Do they have age or financial parameters that might be restrictive? Do they handle the type of adoptions you are considering?
- Investigate your state’s requirements. Each state has unique requirements. The Child Welfare Information Gateway offers links to each state’s department that handles adoption.
- Start making decisions about the direction you want to take. Do you want an open adoption where the birthparents can remain in the child’s life? (For international adoptions, this may not be possible) Do you want a domestic or international adoption? Do you want a single child or would you welcome a sibling group? Is an infant or older child right for you? Is a child with special needs right for your family? Will your age limit which agencies and/or countries you can work with?
- Begin collecting your pertinent information. You’ll need things like birth certificates, tax returns, income statements and many more documents. Many need to be notarized or verified in other ways. Be sure to check with the organization you’ll be working with to find out what is required. Get the documents together, organized in one place. Get your home study(s) done early.
- Investigate financial assistance for adoption, if needed. Recognizing that adoption can be a financial strain, some companies offer financial help. Grant funding may also be available (see below).
- Prepare for the wait. Some adoptions move quickly, others, especially international adoptions, can take multiple years. Your adoption facilitator should be able to give you an estimate of how long it will take. But remember, you’re working with a bureacratic process and sometimes delays arise for no apparent reason. Keep yourself busy; read about adoption and adoptive families; Discover what adoptive children experience…But understand that each adoption is unique. You can take guidance from others, but you’ll find your own path that feels right.
- Join an adoptive parents support group. The experience of others who have adopted or are waiting will help answer questions and handle the stress. See ”The Adoption Guide” below.
- Your adoptive child will become your own. If you have any hesitation about adopting because you wonder whether you can love a child you didn’t give birth to, I assure you, your adoptive child will be as much yours as a birth son or daughter. He or she will simply be born of the heart rather than the womb.
- Final Words. No one else can tell you what is right for your family. You will simply know it in your heart. Sometimes when people learn of the adoption, they will comment on how lucky the child is. In truth, you will be the lucky one. Not a day will pass that you will not feel showered with blessings to have your adoptive child in your life.
There are many wonderful and legitimate adoption information resources available online. Here are but a few:
- Adoption.com - Provides adoption information and a listing of organizations that offer adoption information and referrals.
- Adoption Agency Research Questionnaire - A form to download to interview agencies you’re considering for adoption.
- AdoptUSKids – National photolisting site for children awaiting adoption.
- Child Welfare Information Gateway - Provides state by state links for adoption information.
- Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption – Broad information including various types of adoption, financial assistance resources and legislative information.
- Gift of Adoption Funds – Makes grants available to families who may not otherwise be financially able to adopt.
- GuideStar – An online resource to investigate non-profit organization’s financial viability.
- Joint Council on International Children’s Services - Resource for families considering international adoption.
- North American Council on Adoptable Children - Information on adopting waiting children.
- The Adoption Guide - State by State guide on Adoption Parenting Support Groups.
If you know of other great adoption resources, won’t you please share them with our readers? Thank you!
Many thanks for these resources shared by my Readers:
- Shared by Sarah C.: Nov. 14, 2009 - 18th Annual Conference by the Adoption Resource Network at Hillside Children’s Center-Creating Kin: Forever Families Through Adoption. Taking place near Rochester, NY. from 8AM-4PM.
- Shared by Michelle Ashby – A free booklet created by Michelle and her husband to help those who have experienced failed adoptions address and overcome their grief.
12 Things I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known Then
My friend Kathy recently emailed asking me what 2 sentences of advice I would give young women graduating from college. Two? Only two? Which two should I choose? Which two would you offer?
If I could go back and do it all over again, here’s what I wish I’d known:
- Network diversely and religiously.
- Be interested to be interesting.
- Learn beyond your profession – the greatest innovations are born from the collision of two non-related ideas.
- Save as if you’ll never have a spouse.
- How you dress really does matter.
- Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want your grandparents or your grandchildren to find out about.
- Remember that no matter how old a person appears, in her mind, she probably stopped aging in her 20s or 30s.
- Explore family history now. One day, it will be too late to ask all those questions.
- Only date people who practice the golden rule.
- Life is too short to work at a job you hate.
- Travel well and far – it will change your life.
- Start writing on the pages of history now to create the legacy you want to leave behind.
And a few I didn’t need to know but that I want my daughters to know:
- “Too many accessories” shouldn’t include the tattoos on your skin.
- Be cautious what you put online….What happens in cyberspace stays in cyberspace.
What advice would you add?
Au Revoir New York
Written in 2006
I am leaving New York after living here since 1983. My husband and I are moving to Western New York with our young daughters. Some friends question our sanity. Others envy our freedom. Most wonder how I’ll handle the separation from a city that’s been my lifeblood.
I recall the first party I attended here. It was aboard the ship, Peking, anchored in the South Street Seaport. Jazz sizzled on the breeze, you could hear the rustle of people meeting as they ate and drank their way through a sea of acquaintances, and the luminescence of Manhattan at night hung like a canopy overhead.
I thought, “This is what I came to New York for.”
Now, more than twenty years later, I’m heading back to the area in which I grew up, armed with the skills, friends, contacts and experience I’d never have had if I’d stayed there. Hopefully, that will make all the difference.
Oh, but I will miss New York! Already, I feel a sense of loss and mourning for friends and the city we are leaving behind. The last weeks here are teeming with farewell gatherings and promises to keep in touch. When we do reconnect with these friends, we’ll pick up where we left off. The same can’t be said about New York – cities change far more quickly than people.
As we arrange for movers, mail forwarding, electrical, phone and internet service – all the “mundanities” that litter life’s moves – I ponder how one says goodbye to a city.
Strangely, I faced this same question some 25 years ago when I moved back to Rochester from the City of Lights. After one mere year I found it difficult to leave, because Paris is not simply a city – it infuses the soul. Hemingway said, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young [person], then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable Feast.” Hemingway was right.
Preparing to leave Paris, I found myself revisiting the places that had enchanted me while there.
Preparing to leave New York, I feel the same need to make pilgrimages.
Just before leaving, I make one final trip into Manhattan. Allowing extra time between meetings, I visit places I’d missed before. Some favorites…Broadway, Central Park, Lincoln Center, East Sixth Street, The Village…we’ll visit to on our returns to New York. But the true jewels of this city are its gem-sized parks, unique shops and secret rendezvous locations, significant only to the individuals who discover them and make them their own.
My first stop is Bryant Park. Its ivy beds, bistro chairs and grassy lawn always felt like Paris – my Luxembourg Gardens in New York. Since my first discovery of the park, an ivy-covered café has been added, as well as a carousel for children, recalling the gaiety of the puppet theaters in the Jardins du Luxembourg. Missing still are the crèpes and glâces stands dotting the park’s periphery.
Fittingly, as I cross the flagstones toward the twirling carousel, two women behind me converse in French. I sit for a while watching laughing children ride the merry-go-round, but as rain begins to fall, I head to Lord & Taylor for my “95 scent tour” of the perfume, makeup and jewelry counters. The fragrance I associate with Lord & Taylor will forever conjure department store magic as surely as the smell of baking cookies takes me back to my grandmother’s kitchen.
Next, it is time to head downtown for lunch at Les Halles, a wonderfully-French restaurant discovered while attending Baruch. As I meander down Fifth Avenue, again I detect the lilting cadence of French. In front, two men converse in Hebrew. The flower-vendor at the deli shouts in Korean to someone inside. On another corner, I hear the rolling rhythm of Spanish. Surrounding me is a cornucopia of languages that takes me back to my first encounter with Paris and its multi-culture.
I flourished in Paris. That city, with its medley of cuisines, languages, cultures and influences became a springboard encouraging – no – propelling me to move to New York in pursuit of new experiences. Here, I’ve reveled in the feast of the senses that is New York.
But now, I’m leaving. My husband and I make this choice – he with seemingly little reservation, I with much ambivalence – to slow our world so that we can enrich our daughters’ childhoods by spending more time with them and exposing them to experiences the city can’t offer. It feels like the right move – at least, for now.
When I moved here many years ago, my best friend who had arrived before me to study acting said, “Living in New York is a love-hate relationship.” Mostly, I’ve loved it.
Copyright 2006©Carol White Llewellyn
Man’s Oldest Survival Mechanism
Some have suggested man’s oldest survival mechanism is his skill at hunting. Others have stated it’s his ability to adapt. A few credit his “fight or flee” response.
I have finallly figured it out. There’s no doubt that man’s oldest survival mechanism is his tendancy to snore. Here’s how I figured this out.
I’d known Patrick since we were six, which, let’s just say is a long time even in dog years.
When I gave up the joys of retailing and moved from Philadelphia to New York City, he and I roomed together in Astoria.
For a little over a year, Patrick and I shared an affordable little apartment, conveniently located near a good Archie Bunker kind of corner bar, a Greek pizza parlor and a subway stop that offered mostly-quick trips into Manhattan.
Besides sharing an apartment, Patrick and I also shared opposite sides of a bedroom wall.
The one thing that puzzled me about this apartment was why, at night, the rumble and vibrations of the subway resonated so much more.
Did the night air magnify the sound and tremors? Was there less city noise and movement to muffle it? Maybe I simply noticed it more because I was, well, home.
I wondered about this until the first time Patrick fell asleep on the living room couch.
His snoring hit 6.8 on the Richter Scale. The downstairs neighbors asked what construction was being done in the living room. We had to replace or renail seven floor boards the next morning.
Since then, I’ve come to realize snoring is a survival mechanism.
What? You’re skeptical? Just think about it.
Imagine our early ancestors: by day, a silent, stealthy and lethal predator, aggresively tracking down game for the slaughter in order to be welcomed home as the breadwinning hero.
But at night, the tables are turned. The predator becomes the hunted, vulnerable to the marauders of the night who would wrest him, slumbering, from his bedding.
This is when snoring becomes a defensive tool. Just envision a whole encampment of hunters, exhausted from the day’s hunt, groggy from the night’s imbibing, sending out raucous shock waves resonating from their nasal cavities. Why, night predators must have thought the T-Rex still reigned.
Once safely back in the comfort’s of his home, man’s snoring played another important role in his survival…awakening his spouse.
Now she’s been home, sleeping soundly alone for days, weeks, months, maybe even close to a year. Suddenly, he arrives home and with him comes his sonorous snoring threatening to bring the roof down.
She has two choices. Hit him to get him to stop. Or wake him up for a procreative romp in the hay. Which would you choose?
So ladies, the next time your guy’s snoring is keeping you awake and you want to womp him, think about how our female ancestors would have handled this. And remember… if it wasn’t for this early survival mechanism, we might not even be here now!
Copyright 2009©CarolWhiteLlewellyn
How the internet has trained retailers and consumers: serving the bell curve
January 7, 2011 at 10:43 am (Commentary) (Difficult-to-fit sizes, internet shopping, retail shopping, retailing vs. e-tailing)
As a woman who stands 5’11″ in my long, narrow stocking feet, I am at the end of the retail bell curve. When I was younger, I had an easier time shopping for clothing and shoes than I do now. In spite of how uncommon her same height and shoe size was in my mother’s day, she had an easier time shopping than now.
The reason? The internet is training retailers to serve only the center of the bell curve. Those customers who seek the outer limit in terms of size, taste or experience are being trained to shop online.
Once, retail stores had to carry a breadth of products catering to a diversity of clientele. Now, they are able to cut costs by serving only the masses.
Despite understanding this, I admit I am still annoyed when I walk into shoe or clothing stores and ask for tall pants or my size shoe and they say “well, we can order them for you.” Normally, I simply thank them and leave, without voicing, “I can do that for myself and have them delivered to my door rather than your store.”
I return home and order from Amazon, Zappos, Lands End or other e-tailers without having to return, stand in line, wait until my order is found, try the item on in a closet-size fitting room lit for mole rats, and feel awkward if, for some reason, I decide not to purchase it.
The one thing I do miss, however, is the experience of shopping…that sensuous feeling of adventure that comes from touching textures, basking in colors and moving through spaces designed for indulgence of the senses. That cannot be replaced in today’s e-tailing experience.
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