In less stressful news, yesterday was a day that I was also dealing with some personal stuff; the nature of the stuff is personal. What I do want to share though is that I went way outside of my comfort zone and did something that was hard for me to even imagine and well…I don’t think it went too well. Oh, on the surface it didn’t look too bad but in reflecting on the event late last night, if it was not a complete flop, it also wasn’t a complete success.

I am type A in many ways so failure and not getting my way is hard to swallow, or rather it used to be. Early this morning, I was prepared to start wallowing in my sorrows for probably making myself look like a fool and it hit me. Sometimes it’s not about the win, the success, the goal or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes it’s about the fact you made the effort and won’t look back with regret. This issue or thing as we will call it was creating some major disharmony here in BGIM land so I needed to face it and while it didn’t go as planned, the fact I did it lowered the tensions greatly.

Failure is not always bad, hell sometimes it’s good because it can teach us a lot. Sure I knew that in theory but application and theory are two different things. As for the thing in question, it didn’t go as I wanted and it still could but at this point I am ready to lay it to rest and move on. It’s a new year, try something new, be bold, be daring and if you fail, so what! At least you tried.

The question was simple but oddly enough one with no easy answer, where do I see myself professionally in 5, 10 years? Good question. I realized as I typed my reply back that wow, I must seem like a slacker to the highest degree. The truth is I stopped making professional goals a while back. To go back in history, it is rooted in a less than stellar past decade and the fact that most goals I set for myself, I have met and exceeded.

Ten years ago, my professional goals included getting my master’s degree and becoming the Executive Director of a non-profit organization. Well I accomplished that and even more, I have actually been the Executive Director of two agencies, launched a stable part time freelance career that includes a mix of writing what I love as well as what I excel at professionally. I admit sometimes running a small agency I don’t always feel like a serious non-profit player but in the past year I have been approached several times about positions at organizations far larger than the one I head up. In each instance I have decided the time was not right to move on, but the fact that my efforts to grow a truly small agency that was limited in scope to a full service agency on hopes, prayers and glue is being noticed by others is an honor. Though when I think back to my time in graduate school, the same strategies that work in small organizations can and do work in larger ones too; I know I have the skills to lead a 3 million dollar plus agency just as well as I can lead one that exists on under $100,000. The thing is I enjoy working at the smaller one more, I also think that smaller agencies tend to be neglected or ignored; people forget that we all start small.  That means businesses, non-profit agencies and people!

So when I think of where I want to be in 5 or 10 years, the answer is I don’t know. I sacrificed a lot to make my goals professionally considering that when most were adjusting to college life at 18, I was married and getting ready for my next role of Mom. When others were graduating at 21 and thinking how great it was to be legal, I was doing the single Mom and poverty shuffle. So having started the professional rat race late and with baggage, I had to work at a far more rapid pace than others. I did not have the benefit of great connections to assist me. I had the gift of gab with a dash of charm thrown in and that has served me well. Sometimes I have been underestimated because of who I am…woe to such people, that’s all I will say on that.

Yet in the past year, it hit me that I am no longer interested in meeting goals, I am interested in enjoying this ride we call life. I suffer from what many suffer from who lose parents early in life; part of me wonders seriously will I live to be older than my mom? I am 11 years younger than the age she was when she died. She died at 50 and the gift of many years is a mixed bag on my Mom’s side, hell her Dad died at 54 and she beat him out by checking out at 50. So I am cautiously optimistic that I will be here a real long time but I also know life is what it is…so my desires are to be present in my life daily. To not get too caught up on that treadmill of work and minutia that at times keeps us too busy to really enjoy each day we are blessed with. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my work, if I didn’t I would have moved on almost certainly but unlike years ago when professional success was truly a goal, it’s less of a goal.

My goals if I were to label them as such are to be joyful, to be open, and to be abundant and a few other items that are a bit too personal to share. Needless to say they keep me busy since I find daily, I don’t quite make the mark. I probably am a tad bit of an underachiever but that’s okay, the world is big enough for all types.

One of the biggest adjustments that frankly I never thought about prior to moving to Maine and landing in a city of 16,000 folks is how important it is to buy local. Frankly buying local is great regardless of if you are in a big city or small hamlet; it’s just that in small places like where I live the impact of folks supporting their local shops really makes a difference.

In the past decade, Southern Maine has seen a great deal of growth with big box stores setting up and frankly it’s a battle for the souls of shoppers. When we first moved here, the only big box store within a 10 minute driving distance was Wal-Mart. If you wanted Target, that meant traveling to New Hampshire or heading over to the Maine Mall area, the state’s largest mall/shopping experience. Now we have Target, Kohl’s TJ. Maxx, Panera, Starbucks and others just mere minutes away. The impact of these stores opening up have hit Main Street hard, and truthfully it sucks, hell it sucks monkey balls but sadly Main Street and small mom and pop shops need to stop blaming others for their demise and look inward.

As much as I have tried in the past decade to support the local Mom and Pop operations because they are my neighbors, our kids go to chorus together, whatever the reason, I just can’t do it anymore. I am tired of rewarding people for half assed attempts. My biggest pet peeve with small locally owned shops is that in 2012, many of them operate as if this were 1984. I am sooo tired of hours that don’t jive with real life in the 2000’s…I know you want Sunday off but today is my day to get shit done. Also do you really think closing at 5:30pm on the weekday is a grand idea? I don’t. Even in Maine people are commuting further distances which means the days of being able to pop by your quaint little shop at 5pm are ridiculous. Most folks I know in Maine who are not self-employed or in a position to work from home, basically haul ass for work. I have a friend who traveled daily from Wells, ME to Boston 5 days a week until she took early retirement at 59. As you can imagine she rarely shopped local, the shops were never open when she was able to shop.

I hesitate to write this because I know many professionally and personally who are truly gung ho about buying local and ya know what, it’s great but again why reward mediocrity? I have a confession…when I want a splurge breakfast, I mean a caloric splurge, my new favorite place is IHOP. Freaked me the hell out since I had been on the outs with IHOP since my Mom’s death, see the last meal my Mom had before she essentially spent the last 6 weeks of her life in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities was IHOP. Her last outside meal was IHOP pancakes and strawberries….so yeah; it was a bad association thing.

Anyway some weeks ago with the College kid home we needed a place to eat breakfast at 1 in the afternoon and I will be damned IHOP came through in a clutch. The cinnastack pancakes are my new guilty pleasure, they make shredded hash browns not the home fries most local joints in Maine prepare and every time I go there, the meal is the same. Let me repeat that the meal is the same. No wild variations, no showing up at the door and seeing the sign saying closed today. Nope when I have a hankering IHOP makes me happy and I don’t have to spend damn near twenty bucks on my breakfast alone. Helloooo, breakfast is typically a cheap meal but many local places in Maine, if they are good at what they do, they charge insane prices. People are you aware of what people actually earn here?

Oh I have tried so hard to love the local, non-chain, non-big box styled places in my town (note, I really do dig most of the stuff in Portland compared to where I actually live) but the truth is the love is just not there. I am tired of being asked to support businesses that don’t support me, the consumer. I admit that I would hate for Southern Maine to start looking like the real ugly parts of MA which are like loaded down with chain restaurants and shops but maybe a little change is good.

I constantly hear talk of what can be done to get people to not go to the big box and chain places, well my two cent opinion is maybe you need to change the way you operate. Sure I get it that staffing is costly but maybe running a shop with no outside help is not realistic unless you plan on living and breathing that business. I have never seen a big box store closed on Mondays (normal in Maine for locally owned restaurants) or closed for vacation. Also I need local folks to embrace technology, seriously you need websites that provide real information and are updated often. I know, I know….but still it is 2012.

So yeah I am a buy local dropout, now if I spend my dollars with locally owned shops it’s because they offer me value. In these trying times I want and need to know that my dollars are valued.

I have actually spent most of my adult life married, while the first marriage fizzled when my son was thirteen months old; it actually took years to have the union legally ended due to our inability to agree on anything. So by the time I was legally free of husband number one, I was actually already planning the upcoming union to the current Mr. BGIM. I imagine that sounds bad to some but life is messy like that.

The thing about marriage or unions is that when we are partnered with someone especially when it was supposed to be a lifetime deal, that relationship is a part of who we are. Sure we strive not to lose ourselves because well it’s not all that happy to do so but the person who shares your life is a huge part of your world. Much like when you become a parent, kids too take over your life.

So when love goes a tad sour like that jug of milk from two weeks ago, it is hard to not discuss it at some point. I mean sure you might be having some issues but when the issues rise to the level that someone needs to leave the house, it becomes hard to not share it with the world and sometimes the ensuing messiness that happens in the aftermath.

Queen of the mom bloggers, Dooce recently revealed that she and her husband have separated and while I have yet to see anyone speak nasty about the split, some have questioned whether or not she gave us more than we (the reading public) needed to know. I have seen many a reference to oversharing, call me crazy but anyone with the guts to share publicly about mental health issues probably is someone who is okay with sharing the general messiness of life. Part of Dooce’s success frankly is because she does share, most of us don’t, so when we read the parts that Dooce is comfortable giving it feels like overkill. Yet is it really overkill?

Now if you have a certain type of job or lifestyle, maybe there is a thing as too much sharing, hell I have been accused of oversharing on this blog. Yet you can trust that for what I do feel comfortable putting out for public consumption, there is more that I know is no one’s business. In the case of bloggers who rise to prominence by sharing their lives with us, not sharing actually is a lot harder to do. The thing is in the case of Dooce, she and her husband built their media empire, so it makes sense based off what they both have publicly shared that they reached the point they needed to tell the world they are taking a break. I imagine that behind the scenes long before they made the announcement that they were separating that there was plenty we will never know. Thus making claims of oversharing seem strange to say the least, yes in the post she wrote informing us they were separating she made reference to possible suicidal ideation but even that doesn’t seem terribly strange for someone who publicly has admitted struggling with mental health issues to the brink of hospitalization. I read her entire post less as a cry for help but more like, here I am.

Sure we live in a time when it appears that everyone is blabbing their business and yes those of us who blog often do share, but I believe in most instances we do know the line between what is fit for public consumption and what is not. The flip side for many of us who do share publicly is that often times we share because it keeps us honest and authentic. Personally the older I get, the more comfortable I get in my skin, the less I care about the judgment of others yet I do know that holding back can be hazardous to me in numerous ways.

So the next time you wonder is So and So oversharing, think more deeply….look none of us want to know the details of last night’s orgy yet truthful sharing about real life shit should never be made to feel dirty.

PS: I won’t bug you daily about this, but do consider helping send this blogger to a few conferences this year. Read more here, to date I’ve raised $100 in donations and still have a way to go. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

I have shared with regular readers in the past that it was mere months after turning 30, that my beloved mother was diagnosed with cancer. To add insult to injury, she died 6 weeks after my 31^st birthday.  If that wasn’t enough my 32^nd year brought a second chance at motherhood but also brought the deaths of my grandmother and a dear family friend effectively turning me into the matriarch of my family at 32. And people wonder why I often sound so much older than my actual years, losing the elders in your family and essentially become one of the elders before you are 35 will age you.  Being left with a father who is at times almost childlike when you need a parent, makes you grow up very fast when you realize you are home, that never again will you play the role of child.

Enough with the sad tales though, while I am busy enjoying this weekend and basically being the queen of the manor I was reminded yet again this weekend how the real lives we lead these days while different than 10-15 years ago is very much real life. I am speaking of those online/offline connections or what some think of as real life and online…no more do I confuse the two because at least for me they are all my real life.

Last night one of my very real friends, my dearest and closest friend in Maine surprised little ole me with a surprise party that featured some good twitter pals. I was surprised yet honored, my friend knows that I have a love-hate thing with my birthday and in recent years have talked of doing some special but I never get around to it. So you can only imagine my surprise when I found out what was up….twitter pals, you know the pretend friends actually left their houses on a cold blustery night to hang out with me. I chuckled to myself and thought of those I know who refer to online life as not real. Nope, all those around the table were very real.

The villages that we form in 2012 may not come from the traditional forms of village that we are accustomed to, but the digital village can allow us to make a new village if we are open to it.  A village that is just as real and supportive as the villages of yesterday, sure there may be some fakers in the digital village but the offline village has been known to have a few deceptive souls too.

Anyway time to get back to my weekend, relaxation, relaxation and more relaxation….oh and crafting duty with the six year old tomorrow.

PS: I do accept gifts, or better yet donate to help a blogger catch a few conferences this year.

PSS: No pressure

I had my firstborn in 1992 and while I would never have used the words attachment parenting to describe my parenting style with him, I actually practiced some of the principles of attachment parenting as described by API. We did co-sleep, not when he was an infant but actually in his toddler and preschool years when my finances as a then single Mama meant we could only have one bedroom. While I did spank a few times because that’s what my parents did to me, I quickly honored my sense that it didn’t feel right and stopped early on. Despite the fact that I shared custody with my ex-spouse and at times we lived 1100 miles away from each other and that there were significant periods of time when my son was with his Dad in Maine before I moved here, I always did what I could to ensure connection. Now at almost 20, my son will call me from college for heart to heart talks and when he is home, we will often stay up late talking and sharing. I admit I have a lot of regrets but in the end, he is a young man who is comfortable in his truth. As a parent, that is the end goal to raise kids who become adults who are well adjusted and comfortable being themselves and living their truth.

That said, by the time 2004 rolled around and I found myself pregnant again, thanks to a pesky midwife, I discovered the formal attachment parenting practice and well in a strange state, no mother, sister or aunts to guide me and no close friends nearby I fell in love with attachment parenting. The problem is at that point in time the attachment parenting that was being peddled in most books, parenting groups and forums no longer resembled the true principles of attachment parenting. Gone was the principle of balance, instead it was and remains common to hear stories of moms so steeped in attachment parenting that even taking a 15 minute shower is too much. Somehow to be an attachment parent means to  never honor one’s self as an adult.

Attachment parenting as currently practiced by many is about breastfeeding (never mind that even the API acknowledges and supports attached bottled feeding, in other words hold the baby while feeding him! I bottled fed my firstborn and always held him), family bed and basically denying yourself as a woman and your partner. Too many times a frazzled Mom will ask advice of other AP moms around sex, since let’s face it if the kiddos are in your bed, gone are the long luxurious lovemaking sessions. Yet too many times that same Mama is told the baby is a baby and that you can have sex in other places, bathroom, and laundry room, wherever. It’s true you can have quickies wherever you grab them but the reality is if you spend the first 2-5 years of your kid’s life only focused on your child, it’s hard to step back into being a couple.

Shit…life happens and in order for any relationship to thrive and truly be stable it needs attention. The API page actually states “Create a support network, set realistic goals, put people before things, and don’t be afraid to say “no”. Recognize individual needs within the family and meet them to the greatest extent possible without compromising your physical and emotional health. Be creative, have fun with parenting, and take time to care for yourself.” The sad truth though is that most practitioners of attachment parenting don’t do this and frankly attachment parenting is hurting families, let’s be honest it’s just killing the couple. I know because I speak from experience, my husband and I stopped sleeping in the bed together for three years following the birth of the girl child. Oh, it started so innocently but it turned out three in the bed was a crowd, then after the first 18 months my mental state was trashed from barely sleeping. It worked well for the girl child and for our nursing relationship but she was three years old before she would sleep alone without one of us with her. At 18 months, the man took over so I could sleep but because she was still nursing and nursed until I decided to wean her at three and a half; it still meant waking up at least 2x a night for nursing.

Damn near 4 years of no sleep, no true lovemaking and no time sans child unless we were working which while there was a period of time we used day care by and large our method of childcare was the tag team method. Great for saving money but bad for allowing us time for true connection as a couple.

Until recently I thought maybe we were just screwed up and had done something wrong, but in the past couple of years I have noticed that most of my friends who are divorcing and separating were also practitioners of attachment parenting. Now maybe they too just had fucked up relationships that had reached the end of their natural cycle, after all sometimes relationships end. Thing is almost every couple I know that has split up lived exactly as we did, little alone time, kid pretty much became the focus of their lives outside of maybe their paying jobs. By the time the kid hits that 4-6 mark and starts needing the parents a little less, the parents emerge from the AP cloud, looking at each other going dude, who the fuck are you.

Relationships need attention, kids need attention and love and respect but so do parents. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon this book and plowed through it over the past few days that it started to dawn on me that this seemingly great way to parent may be having serious repercussions. The author in the first half of the book describes couples who often after the kids arrival are basically cordial comrades, low conflict-low stress somewhat melancholy arrangements where on the surface things seem fine but below the couple is not really a couple. In many cases the kids arrival especially in families where there was intense focused parenting turned couples from being couples to two people with a shared goal of raising a kid. Not that there is anything even wrong with that but for most of us that is not what we signed up for.

However we have let a parenting style be taken out of context and reduced it down to a few trendy sound bites that frankly suck. Being an attachment parent does not and should not mean you as a parent forgo your own needs…remember on the plane when the flight attendant instructs that in the case of an emergency you put on your own mask before you assist anyone else. We need to bring that piece about balance back into attachment parenting and quickly. Showers and sex are needs that should be met if they are desired; otherwise the way things are going now, attachment parenting is no longer good because it does not benefit the family as a whole. Families are made of parts and babies and kids are an important part but they are a part and all parts deserved to be looked after.

1. Hot water, nothing feels better on a cold morning than a hot shower followed by great smelling lotion to slather on to keep the dry skin at bay. Today’s lotion is a warm vanilla sugar.

2. Hot coffee made with love, need I say more.

3. A cheery six year old greeting me at the bottom of the stairs, how can I not smile?

4. Raisin Bran with ice cold milk

5. A true partner who is willing to color outside the lines with me and throw caution to the wind.

Such simple things make up for a lack of sleep, that said old friend, sleep I would love it if you came back.

In addition to the love for all things princess, my girl has been asking more and more about love and the idea of falling in love and all that romantic junk. Which having sat and watched a few shows that are marketed to kids today, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Needless to say, I am once again back to the delicious to me idea of just pulling the plug on the TV, but that’s a story for another time.

Love… from the time we are little kids we hear about this concept, this thing, this emotion.  We spend so much of our resources seeking it, but what does it really mean? Love has so many faces that it reveals to us, it’s the pure love a mother has when meeting her baby for the first time after giving birth. Love is what allows us to tell adult kids we will help them financially when we really want to tell them, screw you! Love is what makes you throw all caution to the wind and start planning a wedding to someone you have only been dating two months. Love is what keeps a couple together when the unthinkable happens.

In our culture we love the concept of love; half the songs ever written seem to be about love. We are told all we need is love, hell if you are a rap mogul named Jay-Z, mere hours after your wife gives birth to your firstborn you pen a song proclaiming your love to your child for all to hear. Love when it works is amazing but frankly what about when love no longer works?

Love sometimes simply stops, sometimes love becomes distorted and becomes a passionate hate that can destroy all. Sometimes love simply is not enough and when love ceases to fill our cup to the top, that is the hardest of all in a society that indoctrinates us from an early age that love is what we need.

I am convinced that we have it half right, love is important, we do need love but the most important love will not and cannot come from a charming Prince or Princess. The love we need most is love of self and that is the type of love I would like to see peddled, a love that keeps us happy and content with ourselves no matter what. When you have love of self and are confident and secure in that love, you can face down anything and anyone and emerge intact unlike this sappy sweet love the media sells us that says we are not complete unless we have a partner.

It seems that the Girl Scouts of the Colorado has allowed transgender children to participate and some are none too pleased about it. One young lady going so far as to make and release a video encouraging us to boycott the annual Girl Scout sales until the Girl Scouts reverse their decision. As you can imagine both sides are heated and passionate about this issue; even in my own personal online circle, tensions are running high on this issue.

Frankly can I just say that any type of bigotry sucks, too often bigotry is rooted in a fixed value system often handed down to us by our parents and others. Of course we have those who use their faith and religious beliefs as a reason to mistreat others. Having spent a fair number of years as an Evangelical Christian, I know in my early years I had a lot of so-called beliefs that I believed in until a number of years ago when I asked myself why I believed those things.

Speaking from a Christian perspective, there is nothing Jesus ever said that tells us to hate anyone…period. In fact Jesus spoke words of love, from a Christian perspective the whole premise for the existence of Jesus even coming to be is that we are all sinners and none of us can meet the gold standards of the 613 Mosaic laws and that Jesus was the one who could. Faith in him and belief that he is the Son of God who died on the cross and rose again and now sits at the right hand of God is the foundation of modern Christianity. Jesus though never told us to do much of anything but to love and be helpful and yes I am summarizing. It was Paul formerly Saul who did much of the church building and rule writing and while he may have been inspired by God, fact is Paul was a human who may or may not have had an agenda.

In these modern times we have a lot of folks who take their truth and use it as a tool to mistreat others. It wasn’t that long ago the bible was a tool used to justify mistreatment of people who looked like me. Now we have folks using it as a tool to tell others who they should or should not marry and of course telling people what is right or wrong. Frankly I am a big believer that if Jesus came down and walked in our midst he’d be none too happy about all the things done in his name.

Back to the Colorado situation, frankly I think we are scared by what we don’t understand and when we don’t understand it and it doesn’t square with our reality we fear it. Until a few years ago, I never knew many trans people but I actually made the acquaintance of a trans woman who did school me and gave me some food for thought. At the end of the day, she is woman just as I am a woman. I recently read Chaz Bono’s book talking about his journey to manhood and it gave me pause. To know who you are but to not be accepted because of another’s “truth” is not something anyone should have to go through. As for the Girl Scouts I applaud them for their stance. Frankly none of us should play the genital police and if a girl wants to join the Girl Scouts I say let her, her path and journey to girlhood is none of my business nor is it yours. As for me, I will buy a few more boxes of thin mints this year and hope my waistline doesn’t expand too much.

Last night I was at a work related meeting and the matter of this little ole blog came up, I generally don’t scream it from the roof tops that I blog, on the other hand I don’t hide it. Anyway someone who was not in the know asked the title of the blog and someone who was in the know replied “Its Black Girl in Maine”. The person not in the know gave that nervous chuckle and asked “Really” and the person in the know said “Yep” I do know that the person in the know aka one of my seven bosses does read my work and that at least one of my other bosses is aware of my work as she came to hear me speak several months ago.

Well after the meeting I made a random throw away tweet about the exchange and a well-meaning tweep suggested I put my blog on private which I know many people would do. After all for many of us these digital spaces can be deeply personal and do we really need or want people we know professionally being able to access our thoughts? In many cases the answer is no.

Funny thing is just a little while ago; I was catching up on some blog reading and read this amazing post. I have been a follower of Eren’s work for a while, always loving the visuals on her former blog The Vintage Chica. Eren had stopped blogging for a while and I was sad to see her go, figuring she had gone the way of a few of my other favorite bloggers, lost forever. No, it seems Eren regrouped and came back with a new blog, one that is raw and honest and this post just puts it all out there. It doesn’t get much more honest than admitting your spouse is dealing with mental illness, your marriage is in trouble and that you have a kid with issues. Funny thing is I could have written that post, all except for 1-2 details, hell I consider myself honest but even I have limits. Oh, I have danced around the issues but I suppose I am not ready to just lay them bare in this space.

In reading her post though, it made me think about my own writing and how I strive for honesty, yet even within my openness I have my barriers and limits. Yet in choosing the things that I have shared publically, I am often asked why? Well the simple why is at almost 39 years of age, why not? I am not a kid anymore and frankly life is simply easier when I am honest. I admit there are times I will share something in this space and have second thoughts but really being an open book is simply easier for me. My choice to be so open has resulted in professional opportunities and while I am sure there could be a backlash none of what I share anywhere impacts my work for either my employers or my clients. As someone who struggles with anxiety issues, I need my plate to be light and being myself whether in a digital capacity or face to face keeps the anxiety down. I spent a lot of years carrying a lot of secrets and when I decided that load was too heavy and decided to lighten it by being consistent across the board, it made a difference.

For some people they will never need nor feel the need to be open and that’s cool but I think for some of us the façade of being what we are not becomes such a burden that in being honest it means being open. If there is pushback at a certain point in life as an adult you are willing to accept that. I think part of getting older is simply not giving a shit as much; it’s the part of being almost middle aged that is really starting to resonate deeply with me. That frankly if being me is bothersome to someone that they simply don’t need to be in my world.

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