Be the Neighbor You Wish You Had

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Write the book you want to read.

Build the company you want to work for.

Be the neighborhood you wish you had.

Last time we got together with our neighbors, I told them how I’d been bragging about how awesome they are. We frequently have happy hour on my driveway, cookouts in our adjoining backyards, and cornhole games that get a little too competitive.

Last Friday I was talking about the camaraderie in our neighborhood with a colleague in New York City and she said, “I wish we had that.”

My book club ladies all echo the same sentiment. We all know people who won’t let their kids play outside unsupervised.

Then it occurred to me: I built this.

It started with me sitting outside with Hollie and beckoning my next-door neighbors over whenever they were outside. Then we started inviting people who walked by up on to the driveway for a game. When the kids found a new friend, I walked over to the friend’s house and invited the mom over for wine.

When it was time to go home, the neighbor parents walked over and collected their children and we chatted for a few minutes.

It seems obvious to me now that you would introduce yourself to the people your kid knows but, really, how many people do that? I don’t know any of the moms at the dance studio. Admittedly I haven’t invested in them at all.

But I did invest in my neighbors. I got to know them: which ones are Clemson fans and which ones are Gamecocks, which kid belongs to what adult, where the house is, what they do for a living, if and when they’re home in the afternoon or over the weekend.

Knowing my neighbors keeps my kid safer.

Not safe. She’s safe because she’s been taught how to spot danger, how to stay with others, and how to find help when she needs it.

So Long, Brando

I loved my Miata.

It was little, sporty, quick, and an obvious declaration that it was just me and Charlie against the world. So in 2007 when we found out we were expecting Hollie, the first thing that had to go was the Miata. It was no longer just us.

Most newly-pregnant families will recognize that alien feeling of knowing someone else is going to show up and be around for a while. Those of us who’ve been parents for a while might forget what it felt like to be “expecting.”

It felt miserable.

I put off selling the Miata for four months after we found out. Denial, certainly.

Charlie even sent me pictures of Miatas that came to Discount Tire with baby seats in the front seat. As much as we knew expansion was upon us, the confines of our duality were very hard to break.

Enter Brando. The 2008 Honda CRV had a stubborn under bite look to it. I liked the leather seats, the sunroof, and the gas mileage. I hated the mini-van feel of the arm rests, the windshield, and the tailgate.

Even so, Brando was a good car. 

We called him Marlon Brando as a nod to the underbite and he took Hollie and me over 180,000 miles. Our most recent road trip was to Florida and try as he might, Brando couldn’t get the A/C to work more than 30% of the time.

So it was time. The guy at Carmax said, “This is a good car. Why are you selling?”

I took a long look at Brando — 180,000 miles to Clemson for ball games, to Northern Virginia to visit family, to Florence to see my Nana every week until she died. The Clemson Love sticker with the tiger paw “o” and the orange palmetto tree sticker in the back windshield. The fray on the passenger armrest, the middle console compartment that had been stuffed with crap for so long I hadn’t opened it in years.

Eight years with Brando.

“Call it a mid life crisis,” I said

The Worst Day of Someone Else's Life

The first thought I had when I woke was “Today is going to be the worst day of someone’s life. But it’s not mine.”

We buried a man that day. I knew from the minute I woke that the depth of suffering I would witness would astonish me. I’d truthfully never seen anything like that.

The only funeral I had attended before that was the one for Charlie’s grandmother. It was a modest affair, she was an old woman with few friends and a very small family.

I missed my own grandmother’s funeral. I was in Hawaii.

But here I was, at the service of a man I’d known only by association, a good friend to my father-in-law. Through the service I thought mostly about his daughter who is not much older than me. I thought about losing your father. About losing my own father.

This is the worst day of her life so far, I kept thinking.

I have a friend whose kid has neuroblastoma and my friend writes frequently of the worst days as he experiences them. When they go in for treatments, he knows they’ll be tough and the poor boy will suffer and watching your kid suffer is the worst kind of Hell.

Redefining what it means to Lean In

My iPhone makes me crazy. For days now it’s been warning me I’m close to full storage. That means going through and sending to the cloud anything I want to keep and deleting anything I don’t want to keep.

I use the Voice Notes app for my research interviews and so it’s an easy clean-out. I upload all the recordings to the Dropbox folder for research and delete the file from the phone. This usually buys me about 1GB of space.

Today I found a recording I made back in August that talks about Leaning In having consequences. We’re not taking up less space, it says, we’re pushing something else out of the way.

When we Lean In, something has to bend.

In 2014 and 2015, while I traveled about 30% of the time, Charlie had to bend. He also had to accept occupancy by alternate caregivers for Hollie.

Looking for Disruption in 2016

From the beginning, some 100+ posts ago, this blog has been about life in transition.

Photo by: Naldz Graphics

There was very little transition in 2015 and so fewer blog posts than in the years before.

But right at the end, late December, things began to shift.

Maybe it was test driving a sweet BMW 428i and seeing what I would have to do to afford it. Or maybe it was being offered a job I couldn’t possibly take. Maybe it was drawing nearer to the moving dates of my two best buddies.

For whatever reason, I started feeling the old churning of change. Like I’d been sitting on the top of the ferris wheel and was now slipping into the downward arc.

Choose love, people, for everyone's sake, choose LOVE

My heart has been breaking in my Facebook news feed today.

So many of my “friends” are speaking out against accepting Syrian refugees. They say the refugees threaten our national security. They say we don’t have the resources to sustain them. They say they can’t be trusted. They say our leaders who show compassion are weak.

Then they say we should consider letting in the Syrians if they are Christian.

And my heart hurts.

Where is the love?

Just when I think hatred has been stirred by the fear and that the fear mongers and the haters are winning, I see this beautiful tribute from one victim’s husband and I’m crying.

LOVE.

I remember the families from the Charleston shootings offering forgiveness and LOVE.

LOVE.

Only love is strong enough to combat the hatred ISIS is perpetuating. Not the military, not closing our borders. It’s the worst kind of isolationism to send our troops to kill them and close our doors to their victims.

What the hell is wrong with our world?

Why aren’t we speaking more LOVE?

Only LOVE can save us. Prayer cannot, not when the people praying are also refusing to help. War cannot when the soldiers we send are flushing more victims into the world with nowhere to go. Politics cannot when the criminals are running a help desk and our politicians are tweeting fear and hate.

I tell Hollie constantly, “Speak with love. Act with love. Find the love and let it determine how you respond.”

People are angry. They are afraid. They are being told what we don’t have. But what we do have is love. Find it. Feel it. Give it. It is the one resource which never runs out and is violently contagious. It is the one action we have that is proof of a higher being: the source of love.

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child

A lot of GenXers are loathe to admit we should have been wearing bike helmets as kids. It seems silly to us that our kids see them as essential as a seatbelt in the backseat or hand sanitizer before snack.

When did we get so deliberate in our safety efforts?

While I may forget to remind her about the helmet, I have been very deliberate in a specific realm of Hollie’s life: communication. Charlie and I are really, really good at communication. We expect Hollie to be, too. 

It takes work, though. Especially when she doesn’t always have the vocabulary to express herself.

Hollie and I stood on the stairwell and looked up at the family pictures I’d assembled there.

“What do the words say?” I asked her.

“Caring. Kindness. Love.” She read each one, rolling the syllables over in her mouth. “Honesty. Trust. Integrity.”

“Those are our family values,” I said. “Caring. Kindness. Love. I expect you to treat your friends with those values. Do you understand?”

She nodded. She’s learning. And I’m doing the best I can to teach her. 

So this is an apology to her friends, our neighbors, and any other kids we come in combat with. She’s learning.

I don’t want Hollie to adopt “hug your sibling” apology skills. 

I want her to understand what an apology actually is:

1. acknowledge what you did
2. acknowledge the outcome of that action
3. recognize why the outcome was hurtful or bad
4. demonstrate remorse.

And if she can do one and two but doesn’t think there is a bad or hurtful outcome, then I won’t force her to apologize.