not enough hours in the day

Since I have gone back to work, I feel there are not enough hours in the day to run the house, do laundry, be an involved parent for the children, grocery shop, cook etc. Since I have gone back to work I feel I need a nice fifties housewife who keeps the house clean and waits for the children with milk and chocolate chip cookies after they come out of school at times that I can't be there because a meeting is running late. I feel terribly torn about it all and I wonder if working mothers out there feel the same splitness: when I am at work I think of my children and when I am at home with the children I think of work. I think, I believe men don't experience this kind of guilt because they're better at compartmentalizing. All this requires, I am afraid, that I want to let go a little, that is not want it all careerwise so I can mean more to my children as they grow up. This is hard because after five years of fulltime motherhood I worked hard to get back to a career but now that I am there the view is not as good as I thought it would be. I'm contemplating scaling down my ambitions and do the right thing. At the same time I agonize whether that is the right thing?! I want to know if there are mothers out there who feel the same way. Anyone?!

Inez

Friends

Lynn Ruth, when I was in my teens I wanted to be everyone's friend and have as many friends as possible. In my twenties I realized that having a few good friends is a very special thing. Now that I have almost hit 40, I have become way more laidback and realize life is not supposed to be a popularity contest. The number of real friends, that is, the people I could call in the middle of the night because of an emergency, I can probably count on one hand, two hands at the most. I don't find this disillusioning -- on the contrary: there is something profoundly satisfying about deep friendships and they nourish the gaps where other more shallow friends might be. Americans are quick to call someone a friend-- in Holland we make a distinction between "kennis" (acquaintance) and (vriend) "friend". When you call someone a friend, you have been to their house and you've laughed and cried with them. All the rest are acquaintances. In a sense this distinction is more accurate.

So don't feel bad about losing the potential friend, i.e. the woman who ripped you off. She was never your friend to begin with and you're better off without her and her tricks. Your friend, Inez.

JUSTICE

I won the case! I got my judgment and the woman who refused to pay what she promised for my Toyota station wagon owes me the balance plus court costs.
And yet I do not feel victorious. I feel that I trusted and gave of myself to someone who was not worthy of the love I tried to lavish on her. I feel that the "good deal" I offered with a sale $2000 below blue book value and a no interest payment plan with no restrictions on frequency or amount was misplaced. I trusted someone who stepped on me, lied about me and fought to take advantagae of me.
I have a friend who says, you have to trust to discover if someone is trustworthy.
Is it worth the price?
Yes, I won a judgment. But I learned an evil lesson as well. When it comes to business, no one is your friend; and if you think you are HIS friend you are a fool.
It is a horrifying lesson, one that violates my fundamental belief in the innate goodness of mankind.
I am happy I stood up for my rights because they have been validated. I am delighted I won the case. I am destroyed because I thought I had a friend I did not have.

CHOOSING

I share your frustration Inez. I know that to write, and that is my passion, I must be alone, in a quiet place. I must try to penetrate what I really think and feel beneath and beyond my actions. What motivates me? What are my true beliefs and how are they colored by prejudices I think are fact?
Yet to make my writing communicate...and that, after all is the purpose of writing, I need to pull out of myself and connect with others. I need to experience and grapple with other mind-sets and know that their value is equal to my own.
I have found that I cannot map out each day in advance because if I say, "All right. Today, only writing. " or "Today, no phone calls." I miss that exhilarating and accidental moment when suddenly everything I have been groping to express becomes clear.
I think that this push-pull conflict of solitude vs. socialization is the writer's dilemma. Let me share what happened when I did not succumb to it. When I got out of the hospital, in my late thirties, I did nothing but write and paint. I thought it would be heaven, but indeed it was not. I wrote the same story with different characters every day. I painted the same picture with different colors every night. Oh, I THOUGHT they were different but their esssence was the same.
Perhaps a writer must nourish his talent much as he does a plant. It must be fed and it must be stimulated to grow new foliage. It cannot lie dormant in the same soil with no water or food. It will wither and die if it does.
I am not sure if this helps, Inez. I am not even sure that it is a correct assumption.
But for me as I fight to find time to write thoughtful meaningful prose or paint pictures that have more to say than the image on the canvas, this has helped me realize that every sentence I write is only the tip of my own personal iceberg. I must live fully to write completely. Only then will my prose SAY anything to someone else. And too, every finished painting is far more than the few hours it takes to place paint on a ground. It is the life I am living, the angers, the joys, the melding of my experiences into an artistic result.

doing it all

While I do not want to take away from Lynn Ruth's busy life elixir, I've been having the uncomfortable feeling lately that my generation (baby boomers) does not want to miss out on anything, does not want its children to miss out on anything and thus becomes overextended in many ways. Some of us have lost the drive to do one thing particularly well, and that means dropping other things. I find myself making choices, I have too many choices, and I have not found out which ones are the best for me. I'm drawn to writing and becoming better as a writer by writing more but I sometimes resent the time and isolation this requires when I have to be a mother, partner, housekeeper and employee at UC Berkeley. I also find writing, however great the highs are, self-indulgent at times, taking time away from the connecting that Lynn Ruth talked about. I let things go to do the things I do better, but I'm still running out of time. I see others who do it all and wonder whether they are more perfect or more dysfunctional. We're a spoiled generation and I fear our kids will be even more so, having us as role models. Realistically I don't think we can have it all and I wish more of my peers realized this, if only to downshift, to take a step back...and take a real vacation from who(m) we're trying to be.

VACATIONS

I have never taken a real vacation and I am almost 72 years old. I think that is because I never want to escape from what I do. It would be a different story and I would have a different attitude if I worked for someone else who orchestrated eight or ten hours of my day. As it is I have been the conductor of my own symphony of life since I was 36 years old. The music I hear and do, be it dissonant or harmonic, is my very own and thus I love creating it. I never ever NEED to escape it. So it is that when I go away I do the same things I do here in Pacifica. I paint a picture. I write a story. I tell a joke and I connect with others.
There you have it: the essence of my definition of what The Good Life contains: connection. We all need a variety of other people's threads that we weave together to make our passage here on earth and beyond colorful, interesting and amusing to us.
When it stops being thus, it is time to go to another world, another planet, another kind of being.

TIME

It seems that living my life has a frenetic quality that accelerates with age. I cannot pack enough things I want to do in between the things I must do each day. I sometimes think it is that urgency that gives me the enthusiasm and the drive to live each moment as fully as I can. I have many more placid friends and sometimes I envy them as they stroll aimlessly through their days. I would love that sense that tomorrow is empty and can be filled at my leisure. Instead I keep thinking: one more telehone call, one more story, one more dance ....one more joke.
Perhaps this is my way of trying to do what I am here for: to live...and to do this completely. Then again it may be because I am an obsessive compulsive.
Either way, it makes everything very interesting, very exciting and most important: fun.

Vacation in Colorado ending

This is our last day in Vail and we've had a glorious time. When we lived in Denver we'd go op to the mountains now and then and enjoy it, but now that we live in California, it seems Colorado has gained in beauty, which it has not of course: we're just not used to seeing it anymore so it's newer, better and more beautiful.

Vacation is a funny thing-- another invention of our consumer society that we're all supposed to have to enjoy life. I have seen many families around us, sitting down for lunch and dinner, utterly bored with each other and not having a good time. Even our own children seem jaded by the luxury hotels and the meals they get served. This is not what vacation is supposed to be like. I'm seriously contemplating taking my kids on a survival trip next summer, just so they realize how lucky they are.

And we're dreading the 17-hour car drive back. Harder this time because the vacation has ended. Oh well, life is good, too without vacation. Lynn Ruth is about to take off for Europe. Hope we can hear her stories from Edinburgh and elsewhere. For whoever is reading this: enjoy your summer, vacation or not. Make the best of every day and life may actually be worth living...

Lynn Ruth: where are you?

We're in Colorado this week: visiting old friends in Denver and seeing the majesty of the great American West: Utah and now Colorado. Snobs in Europe bash America for having no "culture, museums, history" but when you see these mountains, the red rocks, the picture perfect skies you don't need all that Old World stuffiness, for the American West is one big great open air Museum and if you can't appreciate that kind of beauty, you're blind.

And...about mixing business with pleasure. Jon had to make a conference call from the hotelroom. Right in the middle of the call Caroline picks up the phone in the bathroom (toilet flushing) and yells to her brother: "Hey William, check this out, they even have a phone in the bathroom here." The other people on the call are probably still wondering whose little girl that was, because Jon broke off the connection, utterly embarrassed.