Tag Archives: loving yourself

Goals, Outcomes, and Daffodils

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daffodils in snow

As I left my office yesterday afternoon to walk to the car, my heart was equal parts heavy and joyful.  Heavy for a friend whose life is in a tangle right now.  She’s sad and confused and overwhelmed.  I remember those sunless days in my own past and ache for her.  I know she’ll figure it out and find herself on the other side of this, but right now she has no place to rest.  The path ahead seems so long and dark and she’s having a hard time believing that she will find her way.

The other part of my heart was joyful, because yesterday I reached a goal I had set for myself a few months back.  February 4th marks the one year anniversary of Baddest Mother Ever.  I wanted to reach 100,000 page views on the site in that first year.  That happened yesterday!  Thank you so much for reading and sharing and building this community.  I feel great joy that I have stuck with this and it is growing.

These are the thoughts that were on my mind when I looked down into the snow and saw green shoots of daffodils peeking up into the frigid air.  Those shoots took me right back to a time in my life when I had no idea what my future would look like.  My birthday is in late October, right around the time you plant spring bulbs so that they can sleep through the winter and surprise you in the spring.  I got a big bag of daffodil bulbs from my mom for a birthday present about a month after Fartbuster came home with lipstick on his collar that first time.  I hadn’t told anyone about our situation because I was ashamed of my husband’s behavior.  One bright Sunday afternoon, I took my bag of bulbs and a trowel out to the backyard and started planting them around the pine trees and along the fence.  On my own and with time to think, my thoughts gravitated back to our marriage, my trust in him, and whether we would ever get back on track and feel normal again.  With each bulb that I tucked into the earth, I wondered, “Will I still be living here to see these come up in the spring?  Will I be married?  Will we make it?”

I tried to bury my fear and sadness with the bulbs.  I committed to a goal–I would be in that house in the spring to watch these flowers bloom.

Well, I reached my goal–I was in that house in the spring when the daffodils bloomed, but Fartbuster wasn’t there.  My marriage was gone.  That’s the difference between a goal and an outcome.  A goal is a milestone along the path.  An outcome is the result of all those goals…with a measure of dumb luck thrown in.  So yes, I reached my goal of seeing the daffodils bloom, but the outcome wasn’t what I had imagined.  Simply achieving the goal didn’t predict the outcome.

We don’t always get to control the outcome.  We control the goals.  I planted the daffodils at just the right depth and I added bone meal.  I tucked them into the warming red dirt and I covered them with a layer of pine straw.  But that’s as far as I could influence the outcome.  Floods or freezes or insects could have taken it from there and the outcome would have been out of my hands.  Same thing with my marriage to Fartbuster.  My goals, like going to counseling and working on my own self, were reached.  Instead of saving my marriage, I saved my self.

So if you’re walking briskly through the cold wind, with your chin tucked to your chest, look around for that little shoot of green.  That daffodil has something to tell you.

Fartbuster’s Worst Fear

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ordinaryAbout a week after Fartbuster and I separated, he came by the house one night so we could talk.  It had been a rough day for me.  I had spent the afternoon at a funeral for the husband of a coworker.  He had died too young after a grueling dose of stomach cancer.  During the service, I stared at my wedding ring (I hadn’t told anyone that we were living apart yet) and wondered what would become of my life, who would cry for me.  That evening, I was overwrought and wrung out and completely used up–so what BETTER time to hash things out with my wayward husband?  

So there we met, leaning against the counters in our kitchen.  My kitchen.  The kitchen.  Whatever.  And Fartbuster was telling me all about the book he was reading–Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game.”  In great detail.  Greeeeeeaaaat detail.  Exhaustive detail. I’m leaning against the counter and listening to him go on and on about this esoteric novel that he probably read because no one else wanted to and it’s as if I finally SEE him for who he really is–someone who thinks he’ll be OK as long as he’s smart.  Someone who thinks he’s really special because he’s smart.  Someone who desperately needs a pat on the head as he hears, “Gosh, you’re smart!”  That had been my job for ten years.  

The Glass Bead Game is about the life of a young man who has been raised to be a member of the intellectual elite who goes on a quest to understand other forms of living.  So it got Fartbuster thinking about Who He Wanted to Be.  (And as a sidenote:  remember that Who He WAS at this juncture was a barely employed man with a pregnant girlfriend that his patient and confused wife didn’t know about.)  

Finally, he finishes going on about the book.  He looks over at me and asks, “What’s your biggest fear in life?’

I considered it for a few moments and reflected back on how I had spent my emotional afternoon.  “I think my biggest fear is not being loved.  If I woke up in the morning and couldn’t think of anyone who gave a shit about me–that would be my worst nightmare.”  

He nodded without saying anything.  

“What’s yours?” I asked from my side of our kitchen.

He scrunched up his mouth, rubbed his beard and proclaimed, “Being ordinary.  Y’know–wife, kids, house in the suburbs and a job.”  

I stared at the pattern in the linoleum to give him time to elaborate.  He added, “I want to do something bigger than that, something important.”  

Our suburban kitchen ticked with the quiet that hung between us.  In our time together, even though I read books just as fancy as the ones he read, I had always been the more practical of the two of us.  I like a good Nobel Prize winner myself, but I also believe in paying the light bill.  And that part of me had about had enough of making a life with Peter Pan.

“You call that ‘ordinary,’ but I went to a funeral today for one of the most ordinary men you’d ever care to meet.  Husband, father, grandfather.  Truck driver.  House in the country.  Watched Nascar.  Went to church on Sunday.  He was also 15 years sober and helped a lot of other people fight that battle.  He was loved deeply and irreplaceable to his wife and daughter.  He was funny.  He was kind.  A hundred people stood out there in the sunshine this afternoon and mourned the fact that he had passed.  Just an ordinary guy.”  

Fartbuster shrugged and I didn’t push it.  

Well, if you’ve been reading here for a while, you know how the story turned out.  I don’t talk much about how and where Fartbuster is today, but let me assure you…

  1. Wife
  2. Kid
  3. Job
  4. House in the suburbs

Thank my lucky stars that I got out of that marriage with my self intact, if somewhat tattered.  I became a person I loved, then I found someone to love.  Then I did it all again and again and again.  My life keeps getting bigger since that time.  

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I found this quote about ordinariness and love.  Reading it makes me feel a bit smug, because not too many years after Fartbuster placed me in the “ordinary” column, I went to Paris on my own and I found Oscar Wilde’s tombstone.  I put on my brightest red lipstick and I kissed the memorial, leaving my mark.  It was one of those moments when I looked back across what my life had become, back to that night in our kitchen.  Ordinary?  Hardly.  Loved?  Certainly.  

In the words of Mr. Wilde:   “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”  

wilde