"WHEN WOMEN SUPPORT EACH OTHER, INCREDIBLE THINGS HAPPEN."

A few days ago, I posted a quote that read, "When women support each other, incredible things happen." Author, unknown.

It generated a lot of likes, but it got me thinking, when it comes down to it, I wonder how many of us are practicing what we preach? We live in an era of alleged “girl power.” We’re all marching for it and buying the t-shirts, but where’s the beef, so to speak, of this sentiment? In day to day life, are we holding one another up? Are we celebrating one another's successes?

Aside from a very select group of self assured friends, I'm not feeling it. I don't even know if I'm doing it.

What I'm seeing, in my world, are a lot of women going it alone, afraid to share their inner demons, not wanting to be a burden, and therefore not having the energy to be supportive to others, except through a sporadic thumbs up to an Instagram or Facebook post. There’s an unprecedented independence amongst our generation. Are we afraid of being perceived as weak or inept? Do we just plain not know how to reach out?

A friend can act as a caliper by which to measure our own challenges. Someone in your tribe has suffered similar strife or been privy to others who have, and their outside, dispassionate perspective can often be the clearest. Looking to peers for judgment and guidance, or allowing help when I'm ready to throw my hands up in the air, has proven to be incredibly instrumental for me. I tend towards self-reliance, but in recent years, I’ve allowed the personal vulnerability of asking for help or opinions, or just someone to vent to. My life operates more smoothly because of it. My marriage is stronger, because I have people to help me gauge the fine line of my own bullshit.

When we’re lost in our own worlds, alone and grappling with life stressors, can we even feel joy for other women’s accomplishments? Does the mirror that holds up reflect back an uncomfortable inadequacy? When we see another woman tapping into her own personal power and purpose, how do we feel about ourselves? Get real for a minute. Realize that there are times when your own perceived deficits are keeping you from being truly supportive. Allow yourself to notice that exists within you. It's there for most of us. Don’t shame it away; it's normal, human. We relate other’s experiences back to our own, and if there is an emotion of lacking within us, it may be inhibitory to our ability to truly extol others. When I'm suffering a scarcity in the fulfillment department, seeing others thriving can sometimes create a twinge of jealousy. That's a subtle tap on the shoulder for me, a reminder that it's time to search out more purpose in my life.

On paper, we’re all hardcore feminists, but it's time to ante up and legitimate those claims in our day to day dealings with one another.

-Do for others, even when you don't feel like it, or don't think you have the time. I've come to realize that being “busy” is a bullshit excuse that lends itself to a feeling of importance. I've used it plenty. But really, it’s just a matter of priorities. We’ve got the time, how do we want to spend it. 

-Ask questions. Really get in there. Border on being nosy. If you've pushed too far, it will be immediately apparent, but there's a good chance you'll open up a dialogue that needed to be spoken. Women need to talk. We need to share, it’s cathartic. It's how we learn about ourselves. Saying words aloud is so much more powerful than just thinking them. Not only does asking pointed questions lend itself to intimate communication, but it sends the message that you care, and you're willing to be there when they do need to talk. 

-If your friend is looking particularly lovely one day, tell her! Every. Damn. Time. Don't hold praise in. It may seem trivial, but no one is immune to the power of flattery. We can ride the wave of an off handed, seemingly minuscule compliment, for weeks or sometimes years to come. I still have little one liners, from decades ago, tucked away in my brain, that bring a smile to my face.

-If a friend or acquaintance has pulled off something that you know was a challenge, bask in their glory with them! Celebrate them, and use it as inspiration for yourself, instead of as a means for self judgment.

-Chances are, your peers have more insight than you think they do. Don't be obtuse and believe that you're the end all, be all for every obstacle in your life. Ask for help, ask for guidance, ask to talk. Humans want to feel useful. It bonds us to one another. We’re losing our sense of community in this digital world full of cyber friends. Work on cultivating your tribe and becoming part of other’s tribes. The seeds you plant will grow into trees with roots that bind and commingle in ways that hold firm in the strongest of storms.

-Angi

MARRIAGE ISN'T FAIR, AND IT SHOULDN'T BE.

Marriage isn't fair, and it shouldn't be. Say what? 

After kids enter the picture, the marital relationship undergoes a natural and substantial shift. Mom is good at some stuff. Dad is good at some stuff, but those stuffs are usually different. 

Sometimes Mom's strengths are required more than Dad's, like when there's a newborn in the house. It's just par for the course that your husband is kinda out of the loop, for several months, especially if you're nursing. Not to say that my husband didn't clock a lot of hours rocking and singing colicky babies to sleep, but I did the heavy lifting during the first year of all three kid's lives. I had the uterus and the boobs. My fate was sealed.

Even still, there was resentment. I knew on a rational level that none of this was my husband's fault (or was it?), but watching him lost in peaceful slumber, on the other side of the bed, while a baby slept on my face, got to me. Curse words were mumbled in his direction from time to time, or maybe every time.

There are plenty of moments when his strengths out shadow mine, like in Every. Single. Emergency. I'm howling on the side line, and he's the force of calm, cool, and collected. Or, when the babes are sick, he's the one on graveyard shift, sleeping on their bedroom floors, administering medicine, and taking temperatures all night long, because I'm a useless lump after 7:30 p.m. He's also the voice of reason when I'm too indulgent with the kids or have gotten into the habit of lazy discipline, because I've taken leave to my mental happy place and have lost awareness of the children playing with swords in the corner. He gives me subtle nudges when I'm overexplaining, or showing the kids real life brain surgeries on YouTube. Yeah, that happened last week. Regrettable.

There will be seasons when one person is doing more, because their strengths are required. Not to say that the partner should straight up bow out, but it's just not their time to shine. Acknowledging and honoring one another's strong suits, while viewing the inequity as natural, can help to allay resentment. We've taken on these rolls in our households because we're good at them. Part of being a mom means multitasking and storing mass quantities of small bits of information, pertaining to each child's life. Most dad's can remember every line from every movie made in the 80's, but birthdays elude them. Your kid has to go to somebody to watch The Goonies with. That's a skill set in and of itself. 

The best thing we can do for one another is to show appreciation, all the time, even when you just want to linger in a lil' bit of bitter. If you're anything like me, appreciation means just as much, if not more than a helping hand. When I know I'm handling something, and handling it well, I'm fine with my husband stepping off. But, I still want to be acknowledged. Over the years, I've come to notice that gratitude is most scarce when I'm not practicing what I preach. It's easy to lose cognizance of  what your partner is up to around the house when you're sulking about a lack of recognition. 

Praise well and praise often, because you get what you give. I'm learning that if I want my husband to shift his behavior, I first need to mend my own. It takes humility to pull it off, and some tongue biting, but it's got about a hundred percent success rate. Appreciation is cyclical. So, maybe tomorrow morning you should make him a couple eggs and some coffee, or throw a love note his way. You never know, you might come home to folded laundry.

-Angi

HOW SPIRITUALITY STOPPED ME FROM BEING A VICTIM.

I was angsty as a teenager, prone to fluctuating moods, crying, and emotional outbursts. I pity my parents, but it's standard teenage stuff for some. If Emo had been a thing in the 90’s, I'd have been the poster child. All I needed were chin length bangs to hide my tears behind and a black section at Wet Seal.

I'd grown up Catholic, but after years of catechism and mostly consistent church going, it still didn't resonate. It was the judgment thing for me. And the burn in fiery hell thing.

I started reading books on spirituality when I was 19. That's when my mind, effectively, got blown open, and those books have shaped my life and thought processes. Forever.

I could go into the nitty gritty of my spiritual beliefs, but that's not the important part of my mental transformation. What happens after we die doesn't have a whole hell of a lot of impact on how we live today, no pun intended. It's intriguing and esoteric, to say the least, and it's safe to say that it's the greatest mystery of our species, but laboring over those metaphysical "what ifs" can take away from the importance of how we operate in the now.

There were things that happened to me, during that period in time, that spoke to my soul. Sounds cheesy, but I can think of no better way to say it. I felt like the Universe had laid a path out before me, and as long as I kept on it, new steps would always appear in front of me just as I became ready, in the form of books. Each that I read referenced the last somewhere within its pages. It was a spiritual puzzle, tailor made for me. I began having peak experiences (ethereal, transcendent, out of body moments), on the regular, another cue that I was heading in the right direction. Guidance seemed to float into my lap. One time, when still testing the whole thing out, I asked for the meaning of the word zeitgeist. The following day, three professors wrote it on the board and defined it. What the? I couldn't deny the synchronicities. The framework had been laid for my world, and that intricate web of thoughts, ideas, and beliefs saved me from the victim mentality that many of us masquerade behind for the duration of our lives. Life wasn't just happening to me, it was happening FOR me.

Every experience and perceived wronging is an opportunity for growth, a chance to remember that I'm responsible for how I react to each moment. I got my power back, I no longer had to lay the blame on an elusive “other”.

This shift in ideology took some getting used to. Culpability requires personal action. It's effortless to roll with “everything happens for a reason,” and just let it end there, helplessly accepting your fate, which I did for several years, post "spiritual awakening", in the name of the “greater plan” at work. My ideas were growing, but I wasn't.

The moment I absorbed that my experiences are calls to action is when the true expansion of self began.

I seek out the lesson, but more importantly, I search my emotions for my ego’s reaction to my feelings. If I'm having negative mental responses to someone or something, it’s on me to explore what fear or inadequacy they are triggering within me. Same fight with your husband all the time? Never seem to get ahead at work? Always have friends with drama? Do you always have drama? Always broke? Are your kids disrespectful? You. You. You. That's all on you. You may not be able to directly change any of those situations, but you have one hundred percent of the control when it comes to morphing how you experience them, and it's inevitable that when you do that, change occurs. The Universe places people and situations into our lives who will mirror back to us all of our ineffective ways of being, in an effort to remind us that we’ve got work to do. It starts as a gentle knocking, but you'll eventually get your door pounded in if you don't take heed.

When your friend says she can't help you because she’s too busy, you can call her a selfish bitch and reminisce on everything you've ever done for her when you just didn't have time, slowly building judgment and resentment, or you can dig a little deeper, and ask yourself what's really making you feel like shit in this situation. Did a wound reopen, a feeling of not being good enough? A fear of rejection, or that you aren't loveable? Same thing when your husband doesn't notice your new hair or the clean house. It all comes back to the reflection you're desperately trying not to see in that mirror we talked about earlier.

A steady diet of fear and judgment isn't going to feed your soul, but shame isn't going to provide sustenance either. Responsibility. That's the ticket. When you remember the power that you wield, that's when you take the reins. When you find the gift in each annoyance, each challenge, that's when your life becomes your own, no longer subjugated to a fate driven, anger laced experience.

I don't really care how you get there. It's your path, and whatever speaks to you will also lay the steps of progress before you, but you have to be willing to look for them, sometimes in very uncomfortable places.

In case you're interested or still searching for a path that feels right, I'll include some of the books that have transcended my experience of this world.

“The Seat of The Soul” Gary Zukav

“Through Time into Healing” Brian L. Weiss

“The Four Agreements” Don Miguel Ruiz

“The Happiness Project” Gretchen Rubin

“Conversations with God” Neale Donald Walsch

“The Code of the Extraordinary Mind” Vishen Lakhiani

“Ego is the Enemy” Ryan Holiday

“The Obstacle is the Way” Ryan Holiday

-Angi

PARENTING WITH RESPECT TO GROW YOUR RELATIONSHIPS.

In astrology, it's said that an eclipse is looked upon as a turning point. Where I live, we had almost one hundred percent totality. Our most amazing friends drove 11 hours to witness this phenomenon and stayed with us for a few days. They have four children, whom Mom homeschools, ranging in age from four to eleven. These kids are something to behold, full of smiles, confidence, and endless pleases and thank yous. They are constantly drawing, reading, playing games, or generally being delightful. And that's just the kids. I haven't even gotten started on their parents.

Mama is ethereal, she has a gentle way about her and a humble, witty, refreshingly honest sense of humor. She effortlessly floats from child to child, sitting down to draw with one or play cards with another. They arrived with a slew of library books, and she very naturally expanded upon the lessons within, craftily turning it into a teaching moment. None of it felt hurried or like a chore. She was one hundred percent engaged, and this wasn't even homeschool, it was vacation. 

Dad handles the kids with an uncommon level of patience. He is gentle in his reprimands, which surface more like empathetic chats. When the kids talk to him, he's all ears, there's no half listening or hurrying the conversation along. He injects subtle humor, which remanifests in the kids and how they communicate with others.

All across the board, major parenting inspiration. Goals, people.

Now, I'm going to have to get really transparent about how witnessing all of that made me feel as a parent. In two words, inadequate and ashamed. While I could have internalized these sensations, I chose to instead use them as a tool to explore my own parenting.

What I realized is that I'm spending a whole lot of time wiping down countertops and making things clean, at the expense of my children. I really had to sit back and ask myself, "Am I wiping countertops for four hours per day (exaggerated for dramatic effect) because I'm a neat freak, or am I endlessly cleaning because it's an excuse to not engage?" Then, I have to follow that up with, "Do I not want to engage, or do I not know how to?" This leads me further in, "Am I afraid to engage?" "Is my need for perfection or, more accurately, my fear of a lack thereof, keeping me from checking in?" I also noticed an underlying fear of changing and what that might entail.

For me, it all comes back to that vulnerability. It's diffusive. If my image doesn't project like I've got it all together, then what will people think of me? More importantly, what will I think of me? Will I feel weak, not good enough, not worthy? 

We both know that no one really cares about my house being tidy or meticulously decorated. Sure, they notice, but it's probably not a major factor in whether or not I'm considered likeable. The only person who is judging me is ME.

And, watching this family interact, I was judging myself, hard. But, this judgment felt like it had merit. It reminded me that my current parenting priorities aren't very authentic. They're coming from a place of feeling like I'm not enough. A place where I have to control my environment to feel adequate. And, some of it isn't about vulnerability at all, but is born out of a simple need for an example of how to be a more present parent.

Witnessing their profound relationships with one another checked me out of that irrationality and offered me a model, both things I sorely needed. I realized that in an attempt to maintain "perfect" order, I'm impatient. I half listen to the words coming out of my children's mouths. I often respond hastily, because the laundry ain't gonna do itself. Ultimately, wether it's inadvertent or not, my children aren't feeling respected. That plays out in their treatment towards one another and their treatment towards my husband and I. I'm falling short in some really important ways. It's likely that many of us are, for varying reasons. We're tired, and we're busy. It takes a lot of extra effort to be mindful under those circumstances. It's easy to get lost in our phones and our televisions. 

Now isn't the time to languish in guilt. That's not why life presented me with this beautiful family for four days. This was an opportunity, a gift to reassess how I'm operating. And, I have it on good authority that it took effort and self evaluation for these parents to evolve into the stellar force that they've come to be.

A light has shown in a darkness, and I'm forever changed. This isn't the type of thing where you go on a diet and then eat a cupcake two days in, reasoning that you'll start again on Monday. This is my family. There is absolutely no excuse worthy of failure or transgressions. These little souls are going to be part of our lives, as children, for a very limited time. I can probably keep my sparkly countertops and still be far more present with my children. Showing your children the same deference that you desire of them takes no extra time, just more focus. Commingling with them, in their individual activities sporadically throughout the day, equates to the laundry hanging out in the basket for an extra hour or two. 

I hope you'll take away a few things from this:

1.  If you're going to be your own worst critic, do something about it. Guilt is a useless, fruitless endeavor.

2.  It's worth it to sit back and examine your feelings in reaction to something. Find the opportunity for growth in your experiences. Allow yourself to go deeper. Don't sell the process short by moving on from a little introspection too quickly. 

3.  Remember that most of our faulty methods of operating are coming from a noble place of self protection. Don't be too hard on yourself, but also don't use that as an excuse to stagnate.

4.  Finally, your kids, your marriage- always worth it. Put the work in. Too often these are the people we are the least respectful too and the most indulgent with, yet they love us the most. Don't just be decent, put one another on the pedestal that kind of love deserves.

-Angi

Links to the blogs of Emily, the beautiful creature/mother I'm referencing, below. Learn from her. She's special.

HOW I SAVED MY MARRIAGE AND FOUND MYSELF.

When I met my husband, I was just coming off of a ten year relationship, four of which were spent married. And, when I say just coming off of, I mean the month after. I absolutely wasn't looking for anything serious, and wasn't sure I ever wanted to be married again, but was still fresh in the headspace of operating as a committed, married person. Being in something resembling that felt natural. I made it clear to my now husband, from the onset, that this wasn't going to turn into anything permanent and internally resolved the same. 

He was easy to talk to, understanding, we communicated similarly. Our conversations had depth. He was patient, and he really wanted our relationship to have a legitimate future. This left me with the upper hand, and that's not ever an optimal start. I was selfish, and I felt completely entitled to be so. I was in the process of healing and self discovery, trying to figure out where my blame lay in the dissolution of my marriage, and on a mission to reclaim my confidence and self worth. I couldn't risk failing again. It's easy to get lost in the minutiae when you're in the midst of an emotional battlefield. It's convoluted, and at the end, no one really wants to take the blame or sit around dissecting the ins and outs of something on the verge of being lost. 

I was fragile, but it presented as a lack of empathy and self involvement. Call it self preservation and protection. My now husband was compassionate enough to allow that and maybe a touch naive at the time. He was four years younger than me, idealistic, and inexperienced enough to accept my transgressions in the name of potential love. Pure good. 

It's incredibly difficult to start off on one side and then switch teams, especially when you were your team's biggest fan and greatest advocate. I fought hard to stay on that team. The dynamic of our relationship felt concreted, as did my mindset. I wasn't going to let him in, I couldn't allow myself to be vulnerable. It was too soon, and it didn't feel safe. Little did I know what was to come of our future and how damaging this subconscious choice, for lack of a better word, would become.

Seven months later, I was pregnant. One would think that may have shifted things, but it didn't. How to drop your emotional stance when you'd spent the entire relationship defending and honing it. 

Then there's the issue of believing your own bullshit. 

Don't think that things were ugly. I'm a nurterer by nature. I play the part of wife well. I'm not sure that my now husband even really knew that anything was amiss. I'd been going the motions for years prior, in a dysfunctional marriage, I was pretty adept at it. We married when our son was a year and a half. I knew, in my heart, that something was missing. I would tell myself that he wasn't right for me, we just weren't meant to be, arcane excuses from an ambiguous mind. In reality, he was doing everything right, and by all standards, I should've been madly in love. It took a long while before I was able to acknowledge that the only person who was lacking was me. 

I wasn't checked in. This manifested in a multitude of ways. It's still difficult for me to believe that he allowed it, but his desire to spare the loss of our family trumped his own needs, and if I'm being honest, my position in the relationship had slowly whittled away at him. I was hard on him, often quick to be dismissive of his needs and opinions. I tried to take charge of things I had no business being a part of, creating a mother/child dynamic around certain issues. I was feisty, always ready with a snide come back. I'd call it a subtle form of depracating, subdued and inconsistent enough to just toe the line, to keep from being completely found out, to keep from having to concede to myself what was happening. All this for the sake of maintaining my upper hand, insulating myself from the pain that true attachment can bring. I didn't want to have to leave someone that I loved again, because we just couldn't work. It was the most difficult, gut wrenching thing I'd ever done. So, in my disjointed emotional brain, the best protection was to not allow that level of attachment. Nonsensical and stupid, at best, and a devastating waste of time, years of potentially meaningful connection squandered. But, as Maya Angelou said, "When you know better, you do better," and I just didn't know any better, yet. 

I can't berate myself for the human action of avoiding pain. I wasn't consciously making the decision to act out these behaviors. That's how powerful the mind is, how immense the influence that fear has on the words coming out of our mouths, fooling us into believing false assumptions. I really didn't see any of it with clarity, and it's hard to share that I didn't begin to until much later. 

I don't want to be dismissive of my responsibility, cavalier about the pain that my husband endured while I meandered through the relationship with blinders on and mercurial emotions. I was aware, on an intuitive level, that I was an asshole, but I didn't know why, and I wasn't sure how to change it, because if I did, I knew, on a deeper level, that I might WANT to check in. I'm not even sure exactly when the realization occurred that I was manifesting the very thing I was most afraid of, a marriage destined to fail. 

The epiphany was the easy part. How to change something that was years in the making, how to turn an entire relational dynamic on its head, now that felt incredibly daunting. The task at hand involved retraining my brain, changing ME. The only tactic that seemed appropriate was deceptively basic;  "fake it til you make it". This was hard because it required, what felt like, a condition of inauthenticity. It also required me to know what the hell a healthy, madly in love wife looked like. From my husband's end, it called for him to endure what resembled a newfangled wife pretending. It all felt, somewhat, like a giant joke, but he's an outstanding human, and we have built an incredible little family, well worth every ounce of effort and temporary make believe. And, let's face it, the prize, unencumbered love... yeah, we're in. 

A metamorphosis of this caliber, demanded acting in extremes, in an attempt to find a reasonable middle, but it was still easier than I thought it would be. I owe most of that to Sean, for never making me feel like a fool, and for always indulging my unremitting need to talk about it, to beat the damn dead horse to smithereens. 

The hard part, as in breaking any habit, is sticking with it. I fell off the wagon any time a stressor entered the picture, a sick kid, a sleepless night, a disagreement. It didn't take much, and I never got back in the saddle as fast as I should have, but I did get back on the horse, and I still get back on that horse. Each time I stay on a little longer. Let me tell you, riding this horse feels pretty damn good, too. Being vulnerable with Sean doesn't scare me. I trust him implicitly. It's more about retraining my brain, breaking that habit of self protection. It has nothing to do with the context of our relationship or my faith in my husband, it never has. It was always me and my stuff, my fears. I can honestly say that I fall in love with him more each day. 

Sharing this isn't just about a fear of vulnerability. We all have ineffective ways of relating to others. Maybe they started in childhood. My vulnerability issues didn't exist solely because of a faulty first marriage. They were there for the duration of the first marriage, and we couldn't work through them. We both struggled with the same fears and personal feelings of inadequacy, and it was just too much for us to recognize and ultimately mend, at that time in our lives. Choosing to acknowledge where you're selling yourself short is daunting, but it's also incredibly liberating and reaps powerful rewards. Retraining the brain is a slow and difficult process that requires constant motivation, awareness, and accountability, over and over again, until the job is done. 

We've got this one life, and we owe it to ourselves to give all that we have to the pursuit of love and connection, because that's what it's all about. Taking a long hard look at our relationships, with a critical eye, and owning our own flawed processes, that prevent true and continued connection, is a journey well worth embarking upon. It's the journey your soul exists for. 

-Angi