As we pass the 2nd anniversary of Mom’s passing, I’ve been sitting with a good friend who has recently lost her mother, discussing grief and the process of grieving.
In some ways, it’s not a simple thing, not an easy progression of steps, nor a checklist you can tick off one bit at a time and arrive at an end.
In other ways, it really is quite simple to understand the gauntlet once you’ve gone through it.
“I was fine at her memorial. I was smiling and talking to people. It didn’t look like her. It didn’t feel like she was gone.”
Yes. I remember that feeling of surreal unreality.
“I’ve cried every day since burying her. I still can’t go into the same stores that I used to shop.”
Me neither. I’d run, crying, out of a grocery store because the memories were just too much. It wasn’t even one that we visited together. It was the visceral memory of a childhood habit that gripped my heart and wouldn’t let go.
“I keep asking myself why I didn’t take her to X, why did I choose to do Y instead of Z? Why didn’t I ..”
I’ve second guessed every decision I made in the last twelve years. Constantly. I’m convinced that I was the worst daughter ever because the end, ultimate, result was that she died, never having recovered from her illness.
You could float on the sea of “if onlys” and “what ifs” that we create, in our grief, treading and retreading our memories.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20.
But is it really? Is it really so much clearer now that events have irrevocably transpired?
A truth I’ve had to learn is that the other choice always seems like it would have been better only because I already know the outcome of the choices I did make. I have no idea what would have happened had I gone somewhere else for undergrad, if I had pursued a Masters or Doctorate. Maybe I would have had to drop out and be even less prepared to do the basics of supporting the family.
There’s a song by Little Texas that gets me EVERY time I hear it.
That knowledge doesn’t stop me feeling bone-deep regret for not pursuing a white collar profession where I could have earned enough to buy her health insurance outright (even though that would have taken years), or for being angry with her, not just her disease, as she became more ill and less mentally competent. I couldn’t take the step back at the time, it was easier to be angry than to accept and understand that I was losing her.
What might have been
In the aftermath, even after nominally accepting that I, mostly, did the best I could, and failed, I wonder what could have been done differently. And I wonder how much of my choices, and non-choices, affected this family.
Before carrying me to term, Mom had a few miscarriages.
What would have happened if I hadn’t been the one to make it?
What if my brother had a brother like he wanted?
Or what if he had grown up as an only child, with all the attention he clearly needed, without a “weak” (but meaner than a pit of crocs) little sister to take care of and be bitten for his efforts?
What if he hadn’t had me to practice his machinations and manipulations on?
What if he didn’t have a “follower” sibling with my personality and strong inclinations to academic achievement to contend with and push against in his attempts to lead me? Would he have actually reached to do something with his abilities instead of playing the comparison game and not even trying?
It’s part of the family lore that after a few days (or weeks, I forget) of getting to know me, my sibling picked me up and suggested they return to the hospital to trade me in for a better model. Unfortunately for him, hospitals didn’t accept returns at the time or I’m sure he would have just taken me himself. Kids feel that sort of thing all the time, but I wonder whether they all really would have been better off without me?
Without an extra mouth to feed, a second child to clothe, educate and worry about, would my parents have been less stressed, and more able to save? Did their circumstances dictate the outcome, or would their actions have been much the same?
Would my sibling have been the productive citizen and son that my parents prayed for? Would he have learned to use his copious people skills and talents towards a job or career, would he have felt the unbearable weight of responsibility that I grew up with, or would that still have eluded him?
Was it my fault, my existing, that played a key role in his failure to thrive? Is his failure to find a niche where he would excel attributable to my combative and competitive nature?
These are intertwined but I can’t help but realize that, like the butterfly flapping its wings, my very existence changed things.
Was it for the better?
I can’t know. I do know that as the surviving fetus, as the kid who did come along second, eventually, whatever ill my coming boded, I always felt a pressing weight. I knew fairly early on about Mom’s miscarriages. I know about the bigger than usual gap in years between my sibling and myself. Where other kids were two years apart like clockwork, we were about 3 years apart and, oh, the strength of will it must have taken for her not to smother me mid-scream in the first nine months I spent crying my lungs out.
It always seemed like I lost the genetic lottery: as the scrawny, untalented (no eye for art, terrible ear for music, only Doggle matches my astounding level of clumsiness), not terribly smart, really a bit of drifter with no dreams, youngest child, I only knew that I had to compensate and overcompensate to justify having made it.
The ghosts of those other babies, the ones my parents never met, haunted me a little. What could they have done with the gift of life? Would they have had the talent? Would they have inherited Mom’s gift with numbers, Dad’s ability to dream for the future? Would he or she, or they, have been the charmers, able to mingle and make friends everywhere they went? I certainly didn’t get any of that, so was that lost with them, leaving me with only remnants of determination and a strange love of containers to work with?
Sometimes it feels like all I have are questions, a sense of those nearly siblings’ unfulfilled potential, the uncomfortable prickles of something like guilt.
Without dwelling on the macabre, there are some studies that suggest that the influence of a sibling, past a certain point in life, is a stronger force in the development of an individual than even that of a parent. Anecdotally, I could see this. I learned from my parents, authoritatively, but I viscerally reacted to my sibling. At a much deeper level, I absorbed what I know of human nature from my interactions with him, by growing up next to him, and observing his experiences. By following my big brother. And I can’t know how my existence, my following, and my watching affected him. A bit like Schrodinger’s Cat, I guess.
Having made it this far, it feels like it’s my job to make good, to redeem the family name. I can’t change the past, I can only work toward the future.
I try not to think about
What might have been
‘Cause that was then
And we have taken different roads
We can’t go back again
There’s no use giving in
And there’s no way to know
What might have been
Our favorite guesting ritual is cooking a meal for our hosts.
There’s always a bit of shuffling figuring out what to make and cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen but cooking a nice meal for hardworking (often parent) friends and cleaning up for them’s a nice way to give them a bit of a break and thank them at the same time.
For our new parent friends especially, going out is not so much the fun and easy time that it used to be. Depending on the age of the kids, and the parenting style, they’re generally on the hook for crying, projectile food, running, screaming… all ingredients for a good time, right? It’s just easier to eat at home and weird as it is, PiC and I always enjoy a good ramble through the grocery stores wherever we travel.
Grocery shopping in Hawaii was one hell of an eye-opener.
The ingredients for a basic taco night for four adults and 1 child, which probably would have cost about $30 even here in the Bay Area, was a shocking $60. Granted, I wasn’t buying on sale cycles like normal, and didn’t have any coupons either but still, I’m certain we could manage turkey tacos for less than that on the mainland.
That included: 2 lbs of ground turkey, taco seasoning, hard taco shells, tortillas, onions, 5 avocados for guacamole, 2 limes, 1 bag of chips, a few tomatos, and shredded cheese.
I walked the rest of the produce section and aisles to get a feel for the rest of the store and it was equally scary.
Milk is consistently expensive, running between $9-10 per gallon; kale cost 3x more than I would normally pay (between $1-2 per bundle on the mainland; $5 on the island); bananas that are usually between 29-79 cents per pound were $2.49/lb. Apples were nearly $4/lb; and cereal ran $7-9/box.
We often joke that we can’t afford to feed another mouth around here, PiC snacks enough for three and meals that would serve 4-6 don’t last past the first sitdown, so paradisiacal as Hawaii is, we couldn’t even afford to feed ourselves there!
We’re so spoiled by how reasonable food prices are, even in the Bay Area, and especially in Southern California.
1. PiC and I had a mini rant about Walmart the other day, on the heels of the blowup about their Ohio store’s doing a food drive for their own employees, when we saw a Walmart commercial advertising their “opportunities”. The spokespeople for Walmart would have you believe that the fact that the company culture supports “associates” and takes care of them during the holidays doesn’t highlight the fact that a company could actually “take care of” their employees by paying them living wages and that’s where their responsibilities lay.
2. For a good part of my childhood, my parents were small business owners who took very little salary for themselves, but paid their employees both as decent salaries as they could afford and Christmas bonuses. Admittedly this wasn’t the best financial decision they could have made for our family in the short term, but if health problems hadn’t prevented them from continuing to run the business, we would have slowly built up enough savings to make it worth it in the long run. In the meantime, we knew our employees were able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. And as crap as it made my 20s, and as much as I would have made some minor changes to how things were run if I had a more active hand in business decisions (yeah because I was all of 9 years old. totally plausible), I’m comfortable with knowing our employees didn’t have to struggle just to feed and clothe their families, they just had to do a good job while they were with us.
3. Abby’s ruminations on J.Money and his thoughts on Tom Corley and Linda Tirado’s Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense remind me that people who have always had enough to eat, money for a rainy day, and a support network find it much harder to understand the decisions that poor people make, that seem to obviously be bad choices, but in reality, many of them aren’t really choices at all. I’ve been there, and remember the things that burned in my gut much like shame when I had to make those “stupid decisions” because I didn’t have the cash to make the smart one.
Note: I never smoked, drank or did drugs to get by but damn if I didn’t understand the desire, at times. I never gave up because I had my parents to support, while I wouldn’t call it hope, I never acknowledged that not fighting was an option. Still, when I was affected by THEIR bad decisions, that really sucked too.
A. You don’t have float money. You have exactly “enough” to get by from day to day which means if there’s a sale at the grocery store on pasta, you don’t have the extra $5-10 to buy enough to last you until the next sale cycle. So you buy off sale cycle, you only buy enough for today and tomorrow or even just right now. You resort to super cheap, filling, but super unhealthy fast foods, compromising your health. I used to buy a 99 cent corndog for lunch/dinner on days that I didn’t have food to bring from home and I had to run from school to work. It was the cheapest thing I could get, and I guarantee that was not a healthy choice. But I loved corndogs and it was a dollar for a few minutes of “happy” and food on any given 14-hour day. Or you can’t fill your car up with enough gas to last the week, you can put in $5 for now, and milk that until you hit E and then have to pay whatever price-gauge is at the next station. Also you buy cheap stuff because you can’t afford the higher quality stuff. So it breaks or falls apart, and you have to buy it again. And again. And again.
B. You don’t have time. You can work enough to pay the bills but then you don’t have time (or money) to go to school so you can stop working a dead end job without any hope of advancement or decent working conditions. Or you can work less, and struggle to pay all the bills in any given month. So you pay what you can, week to week, day to day. Bills slip, and it only takes one late fee to really screw up what you thought you were going to be able to clear that month.
C. *Observed: You don’t have hope. So you make stupid decisions like buying crap you don’t need, because your luck is crap anyway. After all, you scrimped, saved, and did without and where’s that gotten you? Nowhere. So you also think that luck has more to do with your life and what happens than what you do (I saw this develop in more than one family member, my incredibly strong, adaptive, and hardworking mom included.)
Confession: I had hope for several years, then I gave that up and just relied on gritting it out.
D. You live in the short term. Today’s work, tomorrow’s bills: rent, utilities, food, gas. Saving for a rainy day doesn’t exist when every day seems like one, saving for retirement sure doesn’t exist. You have to be willing AND physically able to find ways to squeeze every last penny out of every last opportunity: overtime, credit card rewards (without ever paying interest or late fees), loyalty programs. This takes time, which you don’t have, and attention which you don’t have.
That’s definitely only scratching the surface.
I made it out of there by working my ass off, taking every scrap of overtime available ever, and by good luck and good fortune. I was fortunate enough to be employed by the people I worked for: whether they were good people or not was irrelevant, the fact that I was able to make it work so that I could claw my way out of debt and to build up savings was a blessing.
I was fortunate enough to gain the respect of good people who would vouch for me when I needed it.
I was fortunate enough to become friends with people who had retired from super high income, high powered careers who were willing to advise me and help me make the hard professional decisions as a neophyte to the business world. My parents were decidedly blue collar, working class folks who didn’t know enough about today’s world to help. They could only listen and try to help guide.
I was fortunate enough to have just enough brainpower to plan a career path, at least somewhat vaguely, and not just focus on the immediate horizon.
I was fortunate enough to have discovered Fatwallet’s Grocery and Finance Forums in the early years. They taught me to save every scrap, every penny, that I possibly could, while trying to generate a little extra creative income AND to think about the future.
I was fortunate enough to always have been able to pay the internet bill: the source of my inspiration, ideas, and money blogs that taught me things that FW hadn’t. For all the crap that the internet represents, it was an amazing resource.
While we all have culpability in the choices we make, it’s far too simplistic for people to say: being poor is your choice.
And this is why SingleMa’s post on giving always resonates with me. People may not have given me money, my path may not have been smooth, but at every step of the way, while I struggled and fought for what I needed, I was given a helping hand by people who had zero obligation to do so, whether they knew they were helping me or not.
I’m not normally much of a Halloween person but this year I had high hopes of dressing up my victim … Doggle, and taking him either trick or treating or to a good friend’s house to play. Instead, we’re sadly in Southern California to lend a dear friend moral support and planning support. Her elderly mother, weighed down by a series of illnesses and then a serious fall breaking her hip, simply couldn’t bounce back and I’m grieved to say we lost her. I don’t care how old you are, losing a beloved parent is never easy.
***
This month has been busy as all get out and I’m rather glad it’s coming to an end, or I would be if that wasn’t rapidly pushing us toward a conclusion I’m not ready for (the end of the year). Which means that we have to make the most of this trip down south for wedding stuff as well as life stuff.
We need to (deep breath):
Visit friend with a new baby,
Visit friend who lost her mother,
Meet the photographer,
See the venue for the first time & figure out if anything else needs doing,
Deliver any wedding stuff that we don’t need here so we’re not transporting a moving van’s worth of frippery the weekend of,
Buy suits for PiC and my dad,
Buy or rent a traditional dress for me,
Attend a wedding,
Attend a family dinner, Oh and WORK.
Talk about your last minute trips!
We decided this would happen only 2 days before and it was a flurry getting ready! (I thought it was wise to start preparing by doing seven loads of laundry…..)
I booked three hotels because it’s a long stinking drive down to SoCal, and if we want to be convenient to certain people without spending 2 hours in traffic either way, it’s a hotel or bust.
Booked 1 hotel for 50% off. Yay for catching billing errors from our last visit and their profuse apologies = savings: ~$100 or less. Includes breakfast or lunch.
Booked 1 hotel with SPG points: 7,000 points + $50 pet fee instead of spending $200.
Booked 1 hotel for cash: $120 + $100 pet fee. Occasionally this fee is waived so we’re hoping for the best.
We’re also renting a car for the week. We’d normally take the Dog Chariot but we need more room for transport of several cases of things and we need to keep the mileage on our personal vehicles low since we get a major discount on the insurance. I booked a week-long rental on Carrentals.com using ebates (3% back): $273.
The funny thing is, if I rented the same car from Tuesday through Sunday, it would have been billed at a MUCH higher per day rate and the total estimate was nearly $600. !!!
In total, this near-week long trip will cost about $800 in travel;
probably another few hundred on wedding clothes that are meant to be rewearable for years after this;
and miscellaneous costs for food.
[insert aggrieved face here] Staying home is so much cheaper.
***
On the bright side, we’ve decided to put about $20K toward principle on the mortgage. We’d squirreled away cash for a re-finance but thanks to some legal mumbo-jumbo with the HOA we can’t at the moment. Might as well put it to work reducing the mortgage, then!
Also, made a dinner at home for friends this weekend. Not counting the cost of garlic or butter, I think we managed to feed four for about $20: Roast chicken, mashed potatoes w/onions & garlic, braised bok choy, and roasted beets. Unfortunately for a cooking-for-guests night, I wasn’t terribly impressed with what I turned out. PiC loved it but I’m convinced he’s far too kind when I cook.
PiC and I have a new tradition of sorts, a weekly dinner with one singlet friend, and a every couple of months dinner with another singlet* friend. Both are friends from years back, Ye Olden Youth Dayes. I don’t know if it’s weird that we never tried to seek out couple friends specifically now that we’re married but it’s just never been a priority. A friend’s a friend, whether single or doubled up. And I like that, paired or not, our friends feel comfortable with us, paired or not.
*Singlet denoting the fact that they may not actually be single, but they hang out with us sans partner for these regular shindigs.
We’ve gone out to explore weird little joints, relaxed with easy take out, and experimented with new recipes. The responsibility or privilege of deciding what to do next has been alternated like a hot potato, back and forth, but I always feel like since we’re feeding three in total, two of whom are a couple, isn’t it more fair if we paid 2 times out of 3 outings?
Sounds logical to me, but the singlets we dine with usually gives me an odd look when I venture forth with this theory. Granted, we rarely have terribly expensive meals, ranging from $5-20 per person depending on whether we’ve cooked, did take out or dined out, but it does still feel a bit unfair from my perspective.
:: Am I being overly aware or would you feel the same way? What if you were the single one? What if you were part of the couple?
There’s been a lot of hullaballoo over the Marissa Mayer decision to stop telecommuting as a standard rule. I thought I was done with talking about it and hearing about it but there was something that still got under my skin.
My reaction? That sucks from a work-life perspective but what’s the business decision behind it?
We don’t know. We aren’t privy to how productive their workers are, we aren’t privy to the balance sheet, we can’t see what she’s aiming to do.
Mayer’s decision is based on what she thinks is right for the business.
Right or wrong, she is the CEO. Her job is to make those decisions.
Personally, as an uninformed outsider, I would extrapolate that the Yahoo employees are actually not as productive as they could be. Yahoo’s been failing as a business for years, and that’s indicative of a failure on several levels: their business model doesn’t work, the employees aren’t excelling, the managers are not doing their jobs to ensure productivity in the office or from telecommuters.
Evidence?
Look at how far behind Yahoo’s lagged in maintenance on their existing products, on developing innovative products, on not eating their putative competition’s dust. Can anyone compare Yahoo and Google without laughing?
What does Yahoo excel at? As their consumer, I’d say nothing.
I still (shockingly) use them because I can’t be arsed to transition everything but they don’t excel at search, at mail, or at news. What’s left? They needed a big kick in the pants, or five, because they’re mediocre, or subpar. That’s not a business I’d invest in.
Bottom Line: If it were working for them, why the hell would she change the policy? If it isn’t working for them, then it’s her responsibility to change it. She was hired to turn a company around. She’d better be doing what it takes.
I can’t stand the claims that she’s a disappointment to feminists…
….that she was the Great Freaking Women’s Hope and she owes the employees a nursery because she gets a private one, or that she’s setting the company back to the stone ages.
She leads a business that employs people. It can employ people only so long as the business is successful, and of course it needs people in order to be successful. Circle of life.
Within that circle, employers provide jobs that pay a wage. “Life essential” benefits like health care, dental, and time off would be nice, even expected from this type of company. Perks like gyms, free food, free transit, subsidized or conveniently located childcare, flexible schedules, etc., are even nicer. They are, however, the mark of a company that has both the money and the willingness to provide them. A competitive company will. One that is struggling to survive will pick and choose. (BI notes, btw, she is willing to provide some of those other perks.)
At the end of the day, it’s a job, not a belief system. They have the right and responsibility to run their business best they can, all employees have the right and responsibility to make the best decision for their lives.
A, As a feminist, I’m tired of the focus on her decision as a woman and as a businesswoman, I’m tired of the insistence that all telecommuters are productive because they’ve been doing it so long.
It shouldn’t matter if she’s a man, woman, teal, or an elephant. It’s not her responsibility to prop up a policy that doesn’t work so that employees are happy. It’s her responsibility to take the long-view, make the business work, make it productive and profitable otherwise there won’t be a company.
B, It’s called WORK from home. It’s being available for conference calls, contributing to solutions, brainstorming creatively, creating new solutions, completing projects.
It’s not: work while with your kids, work and play with the dog, or work when someone’s paying attention and then run errands, or work while helping kids with their homework. Believe me, those conference calls where someone’s helping with homework or soothe a crier can suck.
Having childcare, flexible schedules and telecommuting are all different things. Great or very necessary, depending on your life, but they cannot be conflated.
Being able to set your work aside for two hours in the day to pick up the kids, run errands or take multiple breaks throughout the day w/o affecting your work, productivity or reputation: flexible scheduling.
Being able to take your child to the doctor, play with them, help them with their homework, feed them: childcare.
Being able to work with your laptop on your sofa or in bed or at the dining room table instead of in the office: working from home.
These are all good things. They are, however, NOT the same thing. Mayer’s nursery (childcare) = your ability to work from home? False equivalence. She has childcare while she’s at work but that’s not the same as being home to take care of your kids while you’re working.
Working from home also doesn’t confer ability to do everything you wanted to do at home AND work, nor the ability to split yourself in two. If PiC has the day off when I don’t, I still can’t talk or hang out: I’m working. Yes, it saves you a commute, but the trade off is the ease of face to face conversations that resolve issues in two minutes.
Related: the assumptions people make about working from home drives me (and Andrea) insane.
No, I don’t have time to sit and chat on the phone for an hour.
No, I can’t just come and have a 2 hour lunch.
NO, I can’t make your travel arrangements because I’m good at it so I must enjoy doing that instead of my work during my work day. I have work to do! It’s like I’m in an office.
I worked from someone’s home with his children and guess what happened? I had a kid crawl in my lap every twenty minutes, every single time that child could sneak past her caretaker (surprisingly frequently) insisting on having me “Look! Watch! Come!”, and I couldn’t kick her out. She wouldn’t STAY out anyway. Bet your tuchus I wasn’t answering emails.
This is not uncommon. I’ve worked with many parents trying to work while they were caretaking and they were always distracted; all the colleague-parents who worked from home routinely arranged childcare during the day because they couldn’t do both at the same time.
When Doggle was sick, I spent a week looking after him from home. when I was trying to juggle him and work, my productivity was at 25%. When they were divided, it was 100% him for 6 hours and 100% work for 3 hours.
This isn’t to say laziness isn’t present in the office – of course it is. I’ve had coworkers who didn’t work more than 2 hours a day in the office and 0 outside of it. It took a manager really willing to do her job to put an end to that.
Bottom line: Working from home is great but not when you’re distracted. You are productive when you’re working, not when you’re taking care of your personal life, no matter where you are. A business can’t stay in business if they aren’t effectively managing problems.
C, What corporate CEO isn’t privileged? Heck, non-corporate, non-profit CEOs can be too. She chose to exercise her privilege on a nursery. CEOs also have luxury travel options, massive salaries, they have assistants, secretaries and a dozen other services at their beck and call. The fact that she has a nursery may feel like a slap but why aren’t people bitching about those luxuries that other CEOs have? Is the childcare arrangement of any other CEO discussed and held up as a Call to Action? Working dad CEOs aren’t being called out to provide X because they have Y.
Her responsibility at Yahoo is to run Yahoo as well as she can. Her calls may be good, they may be bad, but the focus on motherhood, working womanhood, to fuel the mommy wars, basically, zeroing in on the fact that she’s a woman is GROSS. To quote Allison.
As a feminist, who believes in equal opportunities, not gender-based special treatment, I’m disgusted with that angle.
There’s been a lot of jaw-setting, teeth-gritting as a coping mechanism of late. November’s become my least favorite month. October catches short shrift for being a close neighbor. So while I’ve been searching for a way back, I’ve been just holding on. Holding still and keeping quiet.
The tougher things have been, the more we’ve been eating out. The spending sort of bothered me but I always knew it was really symptomatic of larger problems. Not the fact of eating out itself, but the listlessness with which I went along with it. I’ve always had a line in the sand when it came to the cooking:eating out ratio, both because I don’t like restaurant food that much, and it’s costly. It was fitting that it felt like there was a small turning point with trying a new recipe for the sake of experimenting, for the sake of pulling together the pantry. Baby steps.
Personal Edits: With a search-and-advice assist from @zenvar on Twitter, I soured up some 2% milk with a tsp of vinegar to replace the Greek yogurt that wasn’t on hand, and measured out a Cajun spices mix instead of the dried thyme and chili powder our spice cupboard never has. Surprisingly, we did have breadcrumbs so we didn’t go without a crust, though it wasn’t the fancy sesame seeds.
Ingredients:
Fresh baby spinach (~ 1 lb), blanched
1 cup quinoa to cook, makes 2 cups
1 cup milk/vinegar replacing yogurt
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
3/4 tsp. sea salt
1/2 tsp. ground pepper, used black but white was called for
1/2 tsp. Cajun spices, replacing thyme and chili powder
1 shallot, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Grease a baking pan and line with breadcrumbs.
3. Cook quinoa.
4. Prep an ice bath and boil a pot of water for blanching the spinach. Blanch the spinach to a bright green (no more than 8-10 seconds) and transfer to ice bath, then set aside on a paper towel.
5. Saute garlic, shallots and spices in olive oil until translucent; transfer to a medium sized mixing bowl to be combined with remaining ingredients: spinach, quinoa, milk, eggs, sea salt and pepper.
6. Pour into baking pan and bake until golden brown, up to an hour.
I served this with roasted Lime Chicken thighs and roasted onions. Optional: burning your hair stovetop. But that did add some spice to the night.
PiC loved the pie, calls it a quiche, but I’m on the fence. It’s good, but with a sort of critical taster’s opinion, maybe it could have used double the spices and it’s possible the yogurt was more important than just as a dairy component. Next time!
In my earlier years, my triggers were as easily flipped (though eventually some money followed) to overwork, to overcommit, and to make trade-offs that went against the grain dictated by the myopic “Accountants.” Though in my case, it was more frequently a would-be Creative preoccupied with playing god instead of Accountant, instead of seeing a bigger picture and so utterly failing to make the right decisions to steer the company in a positive and productive direction so that our work would be meaningful, reducing our efforts to nothing more than one sad punchline after another.
Luckily, my clarity came after just a few years and my trajectory wasn’t . Of course, I was bearing the burden of more than just my own ego so I had to snap to, pretty quick.
eemusings is watching herIndian friends live life under a marriageability microscope. My parents didn’t force the matchmaking issue but they definitely asked me to “play along” when their friends did. There was more than one old village acquaintance who’d sidle up and propose a marriage alliance, and more than one awkward meeting with a proposed groom. I tried to be a good sport about it for the most part so endured no end of cackling from my parents over the traps their friends would lay to lure me in as I was notoriously busy and shy to boot. Since they never took it seriously, though, I didn’t worry about being pushed into anything I didn’t feel right about. Maybe it would have been less awkward if it were still a completely accepted practice or totally out of date but in the even more awkward phase of generational and cultural gaps, we just shook our heads and all sort of humored each other.
Speaking of gaps, Vanessa’s Money, Bridget and a few other bloggers had some things to say about the recent post by Shawanda grossly generalizing whether women should work in male-dominated workplaces.
One of the major issues I took with the article was the spurious logic and sweeping generalizations, as evidenced by the lumping in of STEM with blue collar jobs as “dirty,” “physically-demanding” and “masculine” as the reasons given for women choosing not to be in male-dominated professions. As if women don’t already face enough sexism in the workplace generally, women in the sciences, leaving out E on purpose here because I’ve seen many friends succeed in E, face a huge uphill battle with basic sexism, so much so that a recent study shows that there is an inherent bias against hiring and promotion of women by both men and women, all else being equal. Some areas of science are equally represented by men and women, but most areas are still male dominated and patriarchal.
For the record, this isn’t my field but I do see the results of that behavior frequently, I follow bloggers who do work in the sciences and have to deal with it, and it’s horrifying that we continue to have to fight for what I’d consider the right to make basic decisions for ourselves. Why are these questions even being debated on a political stage? /digression. My point is: The well worn mental image that women are delicate, women are weak, women would much prefer not to be taxed, let’s protect the poor little women is still out there.
For people, much less women, to be perpetuating any part of this utter gender-based bullshit on behalf of all women is not just insulting, it’s frustrating considering the kind of opposition we already have to fight. Like Alison said, we have people whispering defeatist messages in our ears at a young age, telling young women to worry about looking too smart, worry more about their appearance and not their accomplishments.
Do we need to keep feeding fuel to these same old fights too? It’s exhausting.
