I am a prickly pear

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Summer Social Life

At long last, I am listening (with great pleasure) to Ina Garten’s memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens. The whole book is fascinating and enjoyable, but one part so far that’s stood out to me was about entertaining. Ina is talking about how she loves to entertain – and she shares a lot of fun “lessons learned” over time, like don’t make individual omelets for every person at the dinner party – and at one point, she mentions that she spends the day after entertaining lying on the couch, exhausted, swearing she will never have another dinner party again. Relatable much??? If even The Ina Garten gets worn out by entertaining, well, that makes me feel a little better about how I feel about having guests. 

At the ripe old age of 44, I continue to struggle with the conflicting desire to be social and be solitary. Specifically, I would really, really like to be the type of person who entertains… but entertaining stresses me the eff out. 

We have a great house for entertaining. We have a great outdoor space. We have plenty of room for people. What we don’t have is ease and comfort with bringing people together. 

My husband and I have family friends who are exactly what I would like to be, in terms of hosts. They seem to always be hosting parties or get-togethers. They do marshmallow roasts and pizza nights and cookie baking parties. They host an annual Christmas celebration. They invite us over frequently, often the day before or day of the event, and I don’t know if we’re an afterthought or if they simply decide in the moment that they’re having people over that evening. When we do go – and we always say yes or no, not maybe – there are typically several other families there as well, who come and go at varying times. There’s always an abundance of food, drink options, children running in and out and around the house. The hosts often cook while we’re there, assembling pizzas, grilling meat, making sauce on the stove while guests chat at them from the other side of their kitchen island. It’s chaotic and noisy and people always seem to have a good time.

I could never. It’s just not in my nature. Spontaneity is not my strong suit in general, but when it comes to having people over to my house… no. And so very MANY people? Just. No. 

A few weeks ago, my husband and I made an attempt at semi-spontaneity. We invited friends over for snacks and drinks; they accepted. “Snacks and drinks” is my idea of easy, because – as I have posted before – I fret intensely and at length about what to feed people. We picked up some beer and a bottle of margarita mix. We bought a bunch of fruits and veggies, cheese, crackers, deli meat. I washed all the veggies in advance and then put together a couple of trays with everything on it so that the food would be ready to go when our guests arrived. I did a quick tidy of the house. And then the friends didn’t come over. 

It was FINE. We had Snack Dinner, just the three of us, and watched a movie. But it was kind of a letdown. (Maybe “snacks and drinks” doesn’t sound like enough of a plan to be worthwhile?)

This kind of thing happens, I know it does. I’ve read many articles and memes and blog posts about how millennials and successive generations don’t RSVP and opt out of things at the last minute. I also know that things happen; things come up, kids get crabby, the dog tracks poop through the house and suddenly your Saturday is spent deep cleaning the carpet. 

We had a similar thing happen last weekend. My husband asked if a friend might want to bring his family over to swim, and the friend said yes. We bought food that would be good to eat by the pool, washed and prepped veggies and fruits, cleaned the pool, etc. And then they didn’t respond when my husband reached out. 

This most recent disappointment, I think, was because we tried too hard to be too spontaneous. Saying, “Hey, why don’t you come over this weekend to swim?” is fine, but my husband’s approach was to get in the pool and then text the friend and say, “we’re in the pool, come over” while my approach was to pick a day and time in advance so everyone can PLAN. We ended up doing a hybrid of these things, where he reached out the morning of and said, “we plan on hopping in the pool around X time, so come on over.” The friend got back to my husband several hours after X time, and said, “Oh, hey, we ended up doing something else.” Which is FINE, I get it, but also we sat around all day not knowing if or when they would show up. I think that could have been avoided if we’d had specific plans. 

I hope this doesn’t come across as complaining. (Truthfully, I was relieved, in both instances, that the plans didn’t pan out.) I am using these two examples to show how impossible it feels to invite people over. You plan, and it doesn’t work out. You try to be spontaneous, and it doesn’t work out. Or sometimes it DOES work out and there’s a flurry of planning and prepping and cleaning and the stress of having people in my space and do they think my house is clean enough and is the food I made good enough and is everyone having fun and why does every word that comes out of my mouth sound stupid and are they staying too long/long enough etc. etc. etc. 

What I think would be WORSE would be to have spontaneous plans and not be prepared. Okay, I wrote that sentence, read it, thought THAT IS RIDICULOUS you cannot be prepared to be spontaneous, deleted it, then put it back. Because that is my problem in a nutshell. I don’t typically have things on hand to be able to be truly spontaneous. Do you? Like, if you were at your kids’ baseball game and you ran into friends, could you say, “Hey, come back with us to our house!” and then have them over without any sort of pre-planning? I don’t think I would have food. I mean, today I do, but that’s because I have all the veggies and deli meat and cheese we bought for our failed spontaneous swim day. That’s not normal. Or, on a normal week, I might have a bag of cut-up cauliflower and a pint of tomatoes and a pint of blueberries… but that doesn’t seem like enough to feed people if they randomly show up at your house. 

Jill linked to a post by Katherine Goldstein about “deep casual hosting” that I read with keen interest. The article gives eight tips for how you can entertain while spending more time on connection and less time on preparation. I love that framing. That is, after all, WHY I want to entertain. I want to spend time with dear friends, deepen friendships, and create new relationships. Does a part of me want people to comment, after the fact, about how beautiful my home is or how delicious the meal was? Of course. But when I think about what I really want people to think and feel after they spend time with me, I’d much prefer they say, “Suzanne and Husband make us feel so welcome and comfortable.” One of the most complimentary things I feel about a person is that they are easy to be around, and I don’t think I am particularly easy to be around. Something to strive for.

Goldstein’s most appealing and simultaneously most terrifying suggestion is the one to embrace last minute invitations. The idea is that people will have a more concrete idea of their plans at the last minute, and that the spontaneity of the ask will set a low bar for expectations. Goldstein also mentions a bonus, which is that your friends may feel less intimidated about reciprocating. 

A friend I haven’t seen in ages texted me one Thursday saying, “Hey, I know it’s last minute, but are you free this weekend?” We were free on Saturday, and asked her and her spouse to come over. Because it was such a quick ask and because we’d had plans on the Friday night, I felt zero pressure to do anything. We drank wine and chatted and then the guys went and picked up takeout and it was very low-stress and simple and enjoyable. In retrospect, it feels like it worked out because we’d had plans the night before, so the house was cleaner than usual, and because they are already very good friends whom I don’t feel the need to impress. But maybe it worked out because that’s the ideal way to entertain. 

The thing is, I don’t know that I can engineer future experiences to happen in the same way, because a) the exact confluence of factors that made it so seamless may never happen again and b) trying to engineer a similar outcome is the same as planning which is the very thing that causes stress.

Yet I keep coming back to that same ridiculous thought: how can I plan to be spontaneous? Surely there are ways to do that. Keeping my house tidy enough that I won’t be embarrassed by guests is one strategy. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just neat enough. But what about the food? Goldstein’s tip is to keep it simple; she focuses on making more of what she’s going to cook anyway. What does that MEAN? Does that mean running into a friend at camp and saying, “Hey, come over tomorrow night” and then going out and buying more of the ingredients for tomorrow’s dinner, whatever it was going to be? I have no trouble ordering pizza or picking up sandwiches or whatever once in a while, but I also don’t want to do that on the regular. I have some “go-to” meals I feel fairly comfortable serving to guests, but I also get tired of them and don’t want to serve them every time. My freezer is full of ingredients, but that requires work (not to mention creativity) which seems antithetical to “deep casual hosting.” And also I hate cooking in front of people; now THAT’S stressful. 

And what about the guests who DO expect a more elevated experience? One friend and his husband are always putting on elaborate dinner parties, where they assign seating and make gourmet food… He’s assured me he doesn’t expect the same thing, but… is that really true? Or what about my parents and my in-laws and their friends, whom we occasionally entertain? Maybe “deep casual hosting” doesn’t have to extend to Every Single Time You Have Someone Over??? 

As usual, I am wildly overthinking this. There’s nothing to be done, I don’t think, aside from being an entirely different person. 

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Insecurity

I am having an attack of insecurity. There are (currently) four things I can blame, I think: 1. My husband is on call, and when he is on call we spend less time together and I feel ignored and needy. 2. My primary client, for the first time ever, returned a project to me and asked me to redo it. Not minor edits, but a complete redo because I had so completely missed the mark. 3. I have been ordering cute bikinis from amazon because the summery weather (which has since retreated) has me dreaming of time by the pool, and NOT A ONE has looked remotely reasonable on me and only emphasizes the weird shape of my hips and thighs. 4. My poor kid is homesick for our old house and cannot fall asleep (it is currently 1:11 in the morning egads) and I cannot help her feel better (which I know isn’t always the goal! she should feel her feelings!) or help her fall asleep.

To sum up: I am unlovable, my work performance sucks, I look terrible in a bathing suit and probably in all clothing, and I am a terrible mother.

Should I perhaps be focusing on the fact that my husband is lovely and warm and attentive 6/7 of the time, and that he is not ignoring me but is instead focusing all his energy on the very difficult work of keeping dangerously sick people alive? Should I perhaps be remembering that this client mostly asks for very small edits, if any, and also it seems statistically improbable that I would write exactly what they want every single time and also one miss does not negate all the hits, nor does it preclude me from writing well in the future? Should I perhaps stop pressing my finger into the tender bruise of body imperfection when I have a perfectly good, rear-end covering skirted suit already? Should I perhaps recall the many, many nights when I was a child that I cried myself to sleep over something or other and the many, many nights as a child and an adult when I couldn’t sleep and how none of those nights had anything to do with my parents or their parenting ability?

Should does not equal AM DOING, let me tell you that.  

Insecurity can REALLY spiral if I let it get going, so I have been reading articles titled “Top Ten Things Therapists Recommend You Do When You’re Feeling Insecure!” and “How to Conquer Feelings of Insecurity.” The thing is that I know how to stop feeling insecure. I mean, I am aware of the techniques. But most of them are long-term kinds of things (replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk; focus on your strengths; talk to a therapist) and I am working on those things, but I want a quick fix. Is there a quick fix for feeling insecure?

What I really want is to say something negative about myself and have someone refute it with convincing evidence backed by reliable sources. My husband is not good at providing reassurance of this type; he is impatient with insecurity and seems to operate under the belief that there is no need to tell a person something that they should already know about themselves. (I also worry that, if I am too insecure around him, he will stop wanting to be married to me how’s THAT for insecurity catastrophizing, hmmm?????)

Reassurance is best sought from friends, I find. But it’s too late to call or text any of my analog-world friends, so I am writing to you. This makes it sound like I am demanding compliments, which I am not because that would be embarrassing and stupid. (Also, you aren’t married to me, you don’t know my work writing and you don’t know what I look like in a bikini, so, lovely and brilliant as you are, you cannot possibly make an honest evaluation of any of those things.) What I’m hoping for, I guess, is commiseration and solidarity. I would also accept The Key to Real Confidence, if you have it.

Do you ever feel insecure? If so, what do you do when you feel that way? My negative self-talk is so loud right now, even my strategies for combatting it (talking out loud to myself; pretending my concerns belong to my best friend and saying to myself what I would say to her; referring to myself as honey and acknowledging that my feelings are valid) are inaudible over the din. 

Gah. Being a person is so stupid and exhausting sometimes.

Well, I suppose the next best thing to writing a blog post about it is going to sleep. Sleep helps most things. 

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Five for Friday

It’s Friday! We are chugging right along through November. Here are five things I’m thinking about today. 

  1. Falling Back: Changing the clocks has messed me up. I hate it so much. I mean, I guess I don’t mind driving to school in the daylight again. But give it a few weeks and we’ll be back to driving in the darkness. In the meantime, I am going to bed at a NEW normal time and waking up at the OLD normal time, which means I am getting less sleep than I was before. Plus I am still waking up each morning at three or four, full of existential dread. GOOD TIMES. My poor kid is so far on the exact same page. Why could she not have inherited her father’s ability to sleep anytime, anywhere? We are both wandering around, exhausted and cranky. She keeps draping herself over furniture and moaning about how tiiiiiiirrrrred she is. I cannot stop yawning. People keep talking about how maybe this will be the last year of Daylight Savings Time! And I keep thinking, yeah, sure, whatever. But I also think it’s kind of amazing that we all collectively (except Arizona and Hawaii, I think?) agreed to just move everything back or forth an hour twice a year. That’s BONKERS. I feel like there’s no agreement on ANYTHING AT ALL, and yet we all do this???? No thank you. I would like to abstain. 
  2. Flu Shot: I finally got my flu shot. I was at the pharmacy and thought to ask if they administer flu shots; this is a newish-to-me pharmacy, and I’d always gotten my flu shot at Walgreens. We no longer live within walking distance of a Walgreens, so I’ve been putting off the flu shot until I had a reason to be near one. Anyway, I realize this is a very long and circuitous way to the point that yes, the current pharmacy DOES offer flu shots. The pharmacist came around the counter which was the first difference between it and Walgreens; there, you wait until the pharmacist calls you back, and you go into a little room with a door. This pharmacist was a cheery woman who seemed impossibly young. She was much friendlier than the old pharmacist, whose entire body seemed weighted down with regret and drudgery. And then she gave me the shot right there in the middle of the pharmacy! There was another client, sitting behind me, while I stood at the checkout counter. It was a tiny bit alarming. She was very sweet, but then asked me what I did for work. I told her I work from home and she gasped and said, “Well why are you even getting a flu shot?!” That threw me, I’ll admit. My answer in the moment was that I have a young child, but also… shouldn’t everyone get a flu shot? You can get the flu at the grocery store. She then chatted with me for a few minutes about having kids (she has a baby). It was a very pleasant interaction but also kind of weird. 
  3. Flannel Time: We have reached the flannel sheets portion of the year. I don’t normally love flannel sheets, because I sleep hot. But our regular sheets are feeling a little chilly lately. I’m a little apprehensive though because our house heats very unevenly. The house will get colder and colder until you’re shivering even under the covers – I have been wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt to bed, when I much prefer a T-shirt – and then the furnace will decide it’s time to take action and it will WHOOSH to life and churn out an intense fog of heat so that you’re kicking off the covers and stripping off layers – and then it will turn off, exhausted by its efforts, and the cycle begins again. Will flannel sheets be pleasant or unbearable? Time will tell.
  4. Forwarding: We continue to receive mail for the previous owners. It’s not quite at the level it was – at first, we got boxes and season tickets to sports games and multiple cases of wine in addition to catalogs and letters and paychecks and things. But we still get some mail. We have been here since September 1. Is it time to start writing “return to sender” on the mail we receive? Obviously the nice thing to do is to keep holding the mail for the previous owners, and texting them occasionally, and asking them what they’d like us to do with it. (They always come to pick it up, and have ignored my suggestion that we could drop it at their new house.) I keep thinking about how mortified I was to learn, from the people who bought our old house, that they’d been receiving mail for us. My husband had been so diligent about setting up mail forwarding and systematically going through all of our bills and regular mailings to make sure our address was changed. And yet some things slipped past the gate. I also keep thinking about how, at our old house, we continued to get mail for the previous owners even though we’d lived there for twelve years. Not a lot of mail, but one or two pieces a year even at the end. Is mail forwarding really that tough? Are we all really that unclear about ALL the places that have our address?
  5. Fear of Friendliness: I saw one of our new neighbors outside and said hello and asked if she worked from home. When she said she was home most days, I said I was too and would she want to get a coffee sometime? She said sure. But now that I’ve made the overture, I don’t know what to do! Do I… have her over for coffee? I don’t actually know how to make coffee (although my husband could probably teach me). And if she comes for coffee, do I need to offer food as well? What do people eat? Do I live on this planet because I don’t feel like it. Do I suggest going for a walk? What if we have nothing to talk about? What’s a normal thing for people to do when they are trying to get to know other people? While I really, truly would love to get to know my new neighbors, I am kind of berating myself for suggesting anything. I know it wasn’t, like, set in stone or anything, and we could probably just never follow up. But… I want to follow up. Even if I also vehemently do NOT want to follow up. 

That’s it for today, Internet. What are you thinking about on this fall Friday?

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here.