Returned

The kids and I have just returned from a trip that was supposed to be a long weekend in northern Michigan but instead morphed into several days thanks to (1.) confusion over the kind of coolant to add to my car and, honestly, confusion over whether or not my car even REQUIRED coolant (it did not, as it turned out, $200 later) and (2.) unpredictable winter weather. We had a wonderful time – my mom and I took the kids ice skating for the first time, which was treacherous but ultimately rewarding, and our whole family went sledding.  We visited partly to break up the monotony of an extended business trip Sam is currently taking, and we returned to Toledo grateful to be in our own home while a little saddened by the lack of snow. Winter has very little point, in my book, if there isn’t any snow.

While we were there, one of my parents’ friends passed away. She had been exceedingly ill and it wasn’t unexpected, but it was sad nonetheless. My father particularly doesn’t handle this kind of news well since so often the people passing away are his age or, often, younger.

“It seems like we are losing people right and left,” he said, his head in his hands. I don’t really know how to act in these circumstances because he is correct – he is losing friends right and left. I generally don’t say much and give him room to just be, eventually joining him to watch Jeopardy or a college basketball game. At seventy-three, my dad is as passionate about the things he loves as he ever was – great novels, hunting, gardening, fishing – but he is slowing down at a remarkable rate, almost to the point of concern. I spoke with my mom a little bit about it and she agreed he sleeps more and moves less than he used to, and sometimes she is worried, but I am actually equally aware of the changes in her. She tells the same stories over and over again and seems exceedingly quick to anger. Ten, or even five years ago, I would have pushed both of them about these changes -pointing out to my dad that Bernie Sanders is older than he is and look, he’s running for President! Or I would have gently guided my mom toward a neurological exam. What I’ve learned over the years, though, is that they need me to remain their daughter much more than they need me to be their doctor, and until I notice something really troubling – so dramatically out of character that I need to talk about it with my brother – I am going to let them be.

Our relocation to Toledo means I now only live half a day’s distance from them, and this has been a huge gift. I can be present in a way I haven’t been for over a decade.

On the whole, I’m feeling increasingly positive about things. My eyes have completely healed from their freak allergic reaction to my contact lenses, and while I will never be able to wear contacts for 12 + hours a day like I was so stupidly doing, by summer I should be able to wear them for outdoor activities, wrestling with Duncan and driving. I will never take my sight for granted again. I have organized my resume, updated my linked in account, and have embarked on an exciting writing project with my brother – more on that coming very soon! I *think* I’ve also found a way to tackle a book I’ve been hoping to write, and my goal this month is to submit one of my poems to a literary journal.

The move from Pittsburgh rocked me to my core, no doubt. Having two such small children made it worse, I think – their needs had to continuously come before my own. But here we are, nearly at the end of the first month of a new year, and a sense of normalcy is emerging. I can’t say it hurts that Duncan is days away from  turning two years old. The other morning he walked up to me with some request or another and I looked at him and said “You can get that yourself. Once my babies turn two, I get to start reading the paper again.” He looked up at me with those big brown eyes of his, flashed his dimples in the way that slays me every time, and went and had his sister do his bidding instead.

And so it goes.

staying at home

I’ve been thinking a lot about work, and what I’m going to do about it, this week. I know I wrote in an earlier post that I have a ton of different writing projects I am lining up and working on, and that remains true – what also remains true is my lack of interest in considering writing my only work. Since I was a little girl, I’ve always dedicated time to writing – it keeps the voices in my head at bay and my “what if” nature quietly in check. Certainly, I am spending more time at it now than I previously was able to, and I’m excited about the myriad possibilities before me, but I am not in a place – and probably never will be – where it is my income. And I am fine with that – there is still joy in it for me, and for that I am so grateful.

Currently, I guess, I am a stay at home mom. Well, there’s no guessing about it. My kids go to school a couple of days a week but Duncan is with me for five of the seven, Evangeline for four of them. This time with them has been a gift – it’s given them time to develop their brother/sister relationship instead of spending the majority of time in separate daycare classrooms, and it’s given me time to get to know them individually on a level that frankly, I didn’t before. It’s also been really, really hard. It might have been easier in Pittsburgh where I had a strong network of mom friends but here, because my oldest isn’t yet in kindergarten, I don’t have a support network or tribe to rely on, or any other mom friends to talk to. Right now I desperately miss having co-workers to talk to in the morning, and big ideas to discuss.

But, of course, when I was working I longed for the kind of time I have now. I don’t have to worry about vacation time or checking my email at night while the kids sleep. In my old position every vacation I took for five straight years was interrupted by a crisis back at work – I never took a vacation where I didn’t routinely check work email while I was away. That was difficult for me.

I think part of the reason I don’t ultimately want to remain at home is because, a part from cooking, very little of what it entails interests me. The kids are great but, as Sam pointed out last night, I’m not particularly crafty (although we have done some crafts!) and I’m not fascinated by interior design or home repair projects or any of the like. I basically see everything but the kids, and maybe cooking, as a big impediment to writing or, if I’m not writing, being out in the world. And since that is the case, I should probably, aside from spending time with the kids, be writing OR out in the world, not staring in despair at our bedroom because I just don’t want to paint it.

I recently attended a dinner party with Sam – it was great fun even though I was recovering from food poisoning because, PEOPLE. Several of the women were stay at home moms and several of the women held high-level jobs throughout the city. I enjoyed talking with all of them (PEOPLE) and never had an answer when they asked me whether I planned to continue staying at home or whether I was looking for work. You can’t really answer BOTH to that kind of question, but it’s where my heart is right now. I want to stay home and drink coffee and snuggle my kids under warm blankets while Sesame Street plays in the background and watch my husband emerge from our bedroom, all suited up and ready to tackle the day but I also want to wear my own suit and greet morning co-workers and talk about women’s health issues, and I want to spend time writing all the things I want to write and by the way, I would also like to audition for some plays again someday please and thank you. And also cook delicious meals but never ever again google “how to clean marble.”

The internet has become such a stratifying place when it comes to working moms versus stay-at-home moms. Popular websites publish completely shitty articles like “Things Working Moms Will Never Understand” and “Why I don’t hire moms” and all sorts of similar junk and it’s all so stupid. It’s ALL difficult to figure out. (I have two more minutes to write. I have no idea how I am going to wrap this up). We are all just trying to do the best we can, working or not, partnered or not, parents or not. The either/or of our situations is a society construct, and not true to how we really exist in the world, but yet we abide by it, making it so difficult to answer questions like whether we “work” or not – whether we want to “work” or not. Oh, but while I am here, let’s settle one thing once and for all…stay at home moms ARE working. And there is no income for scrubbing yogurt that has solidified into the crevice of the floor with a toothbrush because you ignored it for days in favor of keeping your toddler from killing himself because he climbs the china cabinet every time you blink. Not that I would know anything about that.

Winter

Winter arrived yesterday, bringing its full Arctic glory to Ohio. Extremely cold air and just enough snow to play outside with Evangeline for an hour. She spent much of that time making obstacle courses in the snow for us, and I spent much of that time standing by the bank of pine trees in our back yard, just breathing the Midwestern winter in. Winter is in my bones, and I remembered so many winters when I was a child, playing in the snow, ice skating, skiing – it’s a season I embrace, although with a little less enthusiasm now that I have little kids and hats and mittens keep getting lost and the younger one absolutely hates his winter coat.

Last night Duncan was coughing in his sleep, hard enough that I ended up going into his room to help him prop up his pillow. This was a difficult decision because he is a light sleeper and any appearance I make in his room signals to his baby brain it’s time to get up for the day. This was the case last night as well and he repaid my concern by taking nearly two hours to go to back to sleep, during which he repeatedly tried to drive me like I am a car and escape his room to wake up his sister. I eventually got him settled and went back to bed.

I toyed with the idea of moving my alarm clock later but it is that kind of decision, I think, that has kept me from achieving some of the goals I am aiming for in 2016. I keep waiting for things to “settle down” – for the kids to sleep perfectly and consistently, for all of us to be healthy, for the minor crises that have plagued us since we moved here to stop – and I’ve come to the realization that, as a grown up, none of this is going to stop. The night before last Evangeline woke from a nightmare and begged me to sleep with her, so I spent hours with her freezing feet tucked into my back. Recently she has been diagnosed with a minor health condition – nothing to be alarmed about but something that will require management – and I realized, all of this would have happened in Pittsburgh, but I would have been working full-time. At least right now, at this particular time in my life, I can give her care my full attention, and if both my kids keep me up at night I can sleep during Duncan’s nap time. None of this is the end of the world, and sleep loss and, well, life? They aren’t things to fear.

So I woke up to the bitterly dark morning and came here to type for half an hour before the rest of my family wakes up. My goals for the month include finally updating my resume and all my subsequent social media profiles, reviewing my old writing projects to see if there is anything I want to continue to work on, and starting to write again. I have a memoir-y type book bouncing around in my head, as well as at least one hundred other ideas (incidentally, I think it’s on the floor of my son’s room where I write my best work…in my head, rubbing his back). I am also going to look toward teaching some courses at the local universities as an adjunct, and follow what interests me here in Toledo.

Happy Monday, world.

My Kitchen Year – Ruth Reichl

I certainly didn’t intend for Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year to be the first book I blog about in the new year. I had really hoped, after seeing my dad devour it over Christmas, to start the year off with Stephen King’s Revival. I think starting the year off with the right book is, for me, as important as going to the gym and starting diets is for others. But, as seems to be the case ever since moving to Toledo, fate has had other plans, and I haven’t been able to get to a bookstore or library yet. I couldn’t just dive into any fiction, though, so I was delighted to discover the cookbook I received for Christmas is basically a memoir, with recipes included.

I am not particularly fascinated by cooking. Oh, I read food blogs for recipe ideas and I like good food – I’m no longer the girl who will wax poetic about a sandwich from subway – but generally speaking I am happier if someone else is willing to prepare meals for me. For years Sam was the primary cook in our house while I tackled the grocery shopping, but since his job keeps him out so many nights I’ve had to assume the majority of the cooking duties, and by now even I am bored with my handful of chicken, pasta and seafood dishes. In thinking about the new year, while I am mostly avoiding resolutions this go-around and instead sticking to a few key words to keep in mind, I did realize I wanted to become fearless in the kitchen. I don’t particularly need to be known for my cooking – it’s not an ego thing – but I would like to feed my family and myself better.

My Kitchen Year was a great place to start. While I am never going to be the type of person to write haikus about eggplant, Reichl’s book really spoke to me. Born from notes and recipes she began cooking after “Gourmet” magazine – she was its editor in chief – was abruptly discontinued, Reichl takes us through her year of recovery as she tries to figure out what to do next with her life. While I didn’t lose my job back in Pittsburgh, I continuously struggled with feeling successful in my career and now that I am currently without a job, I find myself still struggling with the aftermath of what I can only think of as that particular failure of mine, even though it wasn’t exactly that. I’ve always liked the length of a year as a frame for nonfiction, and Reichl’s book does a beautiful job of demonstrating how long – and how short – a year really is.

Her recipes alternate between the straight forward and the exotic, and there are a few I can’t even imagine trying – tomatoes and cream, for one. But enough of them spoke to me that I know I’ll be trying them this month, if not this week, including her recipe for one of my favorite meals, polla alla diavola – and I am pretty sure I am going to serve her giant chocolate cake the same night.

I loved Reichl’s voice in this book – it is always interesting to learn from people who have followed their passion from a young age, I think – and she discusses her recovery really forced me to examine my own life.

For too long I’d been waiting for the wonderful. But there is so much joy in everyday occurrences: a butterfly in the sun, the first crisp bite of an apple, the rich aroma of roasting meat. Maybe I had to break my foot to open my eyes, but I finally understood why cooking means so much to me. In a world filled with no, it is my yes.

This passage echoes one of the sermons my minister gave at East Liberty Presbyterian Church last year before I moved…something along the lines of carrying and raising Jesus despite the hardships, prejudices and hate was Mary’s yes to God. Ever since that sermon I’ve been contemplating what my “yes” to God should be and coming up without any answers, but as I’ve perused job openings in my field I’ve realized a couple of things: 1. My children are one of my “yes”s to God, and 2. the best thing I can do is return to my roots, to what I did for decades until I had my babies – reading, writing, maybe a little bit of theater. More on the career later – I am nearly ending my thirty minutes in this space for the day – but before I leae I will share this: last night I roasted a leg of lamb for the first time, using my favorite Mark Bittman recipe. In the past I always waited for Sam or his dad to make me this dish but last night I made it all by myself and served it, and it was wonderful. I didn’t find anything sublime or therapeutic about getting the spice rub all over my hands – frankly that was a little disgusting – but I did it. I fed myself, fed my family and took a tiny step toward being my own kind of fearless.

#AMonthofFaves – My Reading Year

For the first post in #AMonthofFaves, bloggers are taking a look at their reading year and discussing all things bookish – how many books they read, genre breakdowns, books that moved them, books they hated – admittedly, I kept much better track of the books I read, and participated in more challenges and reading discussions, before I had kids. This year has been particularly difficult in terms of reading since our relocation to Toledo and everything that has happened since (including a very recent ER trip for my husband due to an undiagnosed allergy). I’ve done an awful job even of updating my “reading” widget on the sidebar.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading – frankly, reading and exercise are the two things that sustain me through good times and bad. So, my reading year. I gravitated toward large books – books I could lose myself in for days, or even weeks, at a time. I began the year reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, a book I was so moved by I actually did blog about it! This book broke my heart time and time again but the conclusion was so exquisite – so perfectly perfect and satisfying, that it was really hard to follow up with another book! I chose the second book in the Outlander trilogy – Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon, and while I wasn’t sure at the beginning if it was going to be as strong as the first book, I didn’t need to worry. It was wonderful to spend time with Claire and Jamie as a married couple, and even though the second installment wasn’t quite as action packed as the first book, it was still remarkably engaging. It’s now a tradition for me to spend part of my January with Claire and Jamie and I’m looking forward to the third book in early 2016.

After Dragonfly in Amber Sam began interviewing with his current employer, and my reading was somewhat hit or miss for a long time as I prepared my kids for the relocation. I read Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please on my tablet and really enjoyed learning more about her – she is fierce and mighty – and I read a couple of mindless murder mysteries as well. Since I’ve been in Toledo, I’ve immersed myself in the first two books of Gregory Isle’s trilogy about the long history of racial violence in the deep south, Natchez Burning and The Bone Tree, breaking them up with Meg Wolitzer’s The Ten Year Nap. Isle’s novels have fully engrossed me, and, on top of my utterly predictable obsession with the music from the new play “Hamilton,” have reignited my old love of American history.

Over the course of my life, I’ve found that some of the books I remember the most clearly are the ones I read during periods of illness and recovery, and this continues to hold true. I read Natchez Burning while I was quite ill mid-fall with bronchitis, and every detail of the book remains so clear to me. I wonder if it’s because I read more slowly or intentionally? Or do I limit other distractions? I’m not sure, but it would be great to have the same kind of experience with the books I read while entirely well.

At any rate, this pretty well summarizes my bookish year! I didn’t read a lot, but I read great books, and reading remains one of the constants in my life – I am so grateful for it. And I’m moderately hopeful for a bit more reading in 2016, so if you have any suggestions for me, be sure to let me know!

resuscitation

I’m trying something new on the blogging front. It has been fairly difficult trying to fit in blogging – or any of my creative work – into our new lives, mainly because caring for the kids takes up so much time and when I’m not with them I’m doing things like trying to locate Duncan’s birth certificate or convince Ohio to give me a driver’s license. For half a second I contemplated ending this blog – many of my writing ideas aren’t for this space anymore – but I’ve been doing this too long, enjoy reading other blogs too much, and still believe in it as a relevant form of communication to quit. So instead of waiting to blog until I have a specific topic in mind, I’m going to try a technique one of my favorite bloggers ( and set a side a certain period of time a few times a week to write in this space. My goal is to start writing three times a week, for a half hour at a time. I will probably be a lot more about my daily life, responses to news, searching for work, parenting and writing

But, before I start that! To get used to blogging and participating in the blogging community again, I am going to participate in #AMONTHOFFAVES, hosted by Tanya Price at Girlxoxo.com, Traveling with T and Estella’s Revenge. It just looks like such a fun way to return to blogging, engage in the community and meet some new bloggers. December should be fun.

In the meantime, if you live in the United States, have a terrific Thanksgiving holiday and, if you celebrate Christmas, a prayerful beginning of Advent. I look forward to talking a lot more in December and the coming year.

traveling

The problem with going so long between posts is, of course, that I run the risk of only ever publishing updates – longish recaps of where we were and where we are, completely disregarding the books I’ve read, the thoughts I’ve had, how the kids are, etc. I haven’t been posting as often as I had hoped partly because we’ve had a lot of family obligations that have kept me in northern Michigan, and whenever I am in Toledo I’m dealing with physicals for the kids or the DMV or car insurance companies. Since moving, I haven’t really made any friends or been much of a social partner for Sam – I’ve allowed myself a few months cushion to embrace my inner introvert mostly because I believe once I start accepting invitations and meeting people my social life is going to snowball. So I’ve stayed home most nights while Sam works rigorous hours, watching The Voice, reading novels and just generally enjoying my own company.

I arrived home from my last trip yesterday, however, recognizing it was time for this period of quiet to end. I’ve been present for Sam in a lot of ways – most importantly, of course, by caring almost full-time for our children so he can establish himself in his new job. I pay our bills and keep the house moderately clean – I secured a rental house for the winter and have handled all the communication with our realtors back in Pittsburgh. I haven’t, however, joined him during any of his evenings out and I haven’t made any attempts to establish friends or community here in Toledo, and it’s definitely time for that to change, for my children as well as for Sam. And for myself as well, of course.

My main goal is to establish work for myself that can be done around Sam’s schedule. I can’t keep the same kind of hours I did before and while I remain extremely interested in promoting women’s health issues, I am not interested in pursuing another corporate job to do so. I have a thousand different writing projects in mind, and I think I could potentially make a good living between balancing freelance PR work, community college teaching, and writing. Sometimes I feel a little bit like a failure since I won’t be returning to a corporate office job but I don’t want to so I’m not sure why I feel that way. What I would like is to earn enough of a living by the time Duncan enters kindergarten that I could support us if anything happened to Sam. In that way, my job in Pittsburgh was a comfort to me and while that security isn’t everything, it’s something, and it’s important to me.

I hope this is the last “catch-up” post that I write – that I am able now to dive into subject matter now and talk about working, writing, parenting, reading, fashion, maybe (hopefully) teaching and a few minor lifestyle items. I think it’s safe to say this won’t be turning solely into a parenting blog now that I stay at home – not once have I been motivated to capture perfectly-lit photos of my children in order to post them on this blog and share something insightful and/or meaningful. My children are brutes – delightful brutes, but brutes – and staying at home is alternately hella hard and absolutely wonderful. So for now I sign off with hope, that I will be here again soon, writing about the Wolitzer novel I’m reading. Thanks for sticking around – eventually it will be worth your while.

We are all so close together now

As it turns out, moving is no joke, but you probably already knew that. The last month has been out of control – within the last four weeks I ended my job with the hospital system I worked with for over eight years, packed the marginal amount of stuff I could manage in addition to the children and our dog, and joined Sam in a two-bedroom apartment in Toledo, Ohio. Our dog promptly grew critically ill from a wicked virus he picked up at the kennel where we boarded him – twice I drove to the emergency veterinary hospital prepared to put him down – more on that whole story later. It took a little over a week for Skylar to heal, and as soon as I brought him home Evangeline and I immediately departed for Colorado for a week to celebrate my brother’s wedding. The trip turned out to be a much-needed buffer between our relocation and actually living in Toledo, and I fell madly in love with Colorado. It is my experience that like people, you can’t have too many places to love. If we are lucky, life is long and wide and you don’t know where it will take you.

The apartment we moved into is the opposite of the house we left behind – one floor of modernity that has benefits and drawbacks. Benefits include an incredible easiness to clean – I feel like a housekeeper extraordinaire! There is storage here so I can put things away. For every nook I clean, there isn’t a cranny leaking century-old coal dust onto the floor. If Duncan races into another room my heart rate remains the same because there are no stairs for him to topple down (he long ago figured out the secret to baby gates) and the amenities of living in a complex designed mostly for doctors and lawyers and such to wait out relocation can’t be beat – a large pool that Evangeline prefers I refer to as azul and parks for kids, a park for the dog. But it’s small, and after our entire family life spent a house with many cavernous rooms, we are all getting to know one another a lot better. Duncan and Evangeline are sharing a room, which they enjoy but is a little trying for me. Evangeline is a hard sleeper but Duncan likes to wake up in the middle of the night and chatter – no problem when he was in his own room in his own bed but a habit my daughter finds trying, understandably so. They are working it out. On the occasions when Sam’s snoring grows too much for me to bear, or if I’m racked with insomnia, there aren’t the two extra rooms for me to escape to with my pillow and book, just the living room couch which is comfortable but not the same. And this situation is fine for me, but Evangeline was the one who alerted me to the fact that if one of them gets sick, there isn’t the “extra” room for them to sleep in with me, which I am sure I’ll miss mid-winter.

Truthfully, though, while part of my heart broke off and shattered the day I left my church and my friends behind in Pittsburgh, I don’t miss living in a city. The first time I took the kids out for ice cream and we sat on park benches looking at trees instead of concrete I knew we had made the right decision. Don’t get me wrong – Pittsburgh is a wonderful city, and a great one to raise a family – there was so much I loved and will continue to love about it, but I wasn’t born and raised there and I feel much more peaceful returning to the Great Lakes region. I’ll return to Pittsburgh a couple of times a year to visit my friends and their families and stock up on homemade pasta and prosciutto – Pittsburgh will always have a huge part of my heart, but Michigan IS my heart and to be so near again? Well, I’m home.

I have so much I want to talk about! My transition (for a while, anyway) to a stay at home mom and how I totally underestimated the snack preparation involved in staying at home, and rededicating myself to a reading, writing and teaching kind of life (what even WAS that corporate detour? Okay, not really – I loved my job for a long time and have a lot to say about it, actually) and the limbo living between Pittsburgh and Ohio, but there is time to discuss all of this. I mainly wanted to say hello, revive my blog posting and start putting my fingers to keys again. I am going to finally get with the times and probably create a Facebook page for this blog, but in the meantime you can reach me through this blog or on twitter at CPMcCrimmon or on Instagram at bookgirl1977.

chaos

I sat down last night last week to write something considerate and profound about where my family and I are in our lives right now and managed, I think, one good sentence on the subject. The truth is we are not in a considerate or profound state – we are the midst of chaos, because we have made the decision to move to Ohio so my husband can take a great job. For the length of time this transition took to come to fruition, we’ve had to move shockingly fast since ever, making decisions quickly and with authority. My last day of work? August 21st (I actually gave four week’s notice). The kids’ last day of daycare? August 28th. Our beloved house here in Pittsburgh is on the market and we’ve secured a short-term lease on a pet-friendly apartment in Ohio. I can’t spend any time thinking how our poor dog is going to adjust or I get heart palpitations – I think this will be worse for him than our children, who are young and will benefit enormously from our relocation.

I keep thinking of myself as being in profound states (I’m currently reading The Evening Star and it’s easy to adapt one of the lead female character’s voices (Aurora’s) as my own – I alternate between what I think of as a profound state of grief (over leaving my wonderful network of friends and the house I brought both of my babies home from the hospital) and profound elation (I no longer have to worry about sending my kids to private school – public school is an actual, awesome option for us!) to profound glee – we are returning to the true mid-west, with wide open skies, endless Great Lakes and a sun that shines more than the 57 days a year it does here in Pittsburgh. Not that much more, but still.

But mostly, I’m addled. And when I’m not addled, I’m overwhelmed. I started a running program to help manage my stress, and I hate running, but it takes less time than a yoga or dance class. There are countless things to do, from retrieving my kids’ vaccination records to retrieving my dog’s vaccination records. Security deposits are needed here, there and everywhere. We make huge, significant decisions and then backtrack, revising. The only sure things right now are that Sam’s start date is in less than two weeks, my brother is getting married in Colorado in three, we have a home to sell in order to buy a new one.

There’s so much to write about here…how I feel about pausing my career, what I’ll miss in Pittsburgh, my hopes for the future. Once questions I’ve seen asked on many blogs over the last few months is “and, what about this blog?” It seems like a lot of bloggers are thinking over whether or not they want to continue blogging. My hope for this space is that I will blog more frequently – indeed, my hope for myself is that I will write more frequently and possibly even manage a successful freelance and adjunct career, at least for a few years. I’m still trying to digest what this move means for me, but I do know one thing – I am grateful for this pause. We have one year before Evangeline begins kindergarten and we are irrevocably tied to a school schedule – I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep E out of some kind of school in Ohio but I have titled this year our Year of Adventures – I’ve bought us a journal and everything. I have been blessed with time, and Sam has been blessed with his dream job – my main goal is not to waste the opportunity.

So, darling readers, I hope to be with you MORE, not less. And I hope you’ll continue blogging, too. Writing and reading blogs is one of my most favorite things.

More soon,
C

working with and learning from those infamous millenials

Even though I worked for three years after college before returning to graduate school, I consider my career really beginning when I was 26 or so, after graduate school when I took a position as a science writer with a cancer hospital in Michigan. For the last seven and a half years I’ve worked in public relations for a different hospital, and truthfully I really couldn’t pinpoint when I first began hearing the term “Millenial” with any regularity. All I know is that for a while I was early in my career and now I’m smack-dab in the middle of my life, career included, and at some point the tale end of the Gen X generation to which I was born stopped being troublesome and irksome and instead became rattled by the Millenials joining the work force. To be fair, not that many joined – thanks to a rotten economy and people who hung onto their jobs much, much longer than they intended (my senior year in college I decided to postpone applying to graduate school to become a professor but all the profs i worked with encouraged me to, eventually, pursue my Ph.D. – loads of us will be retiring, they said. Lots of jobs opening up, they said. I am forever grateful I ignored them in this one instance!) but the ones that did join us in the working world? Whoa, Nelly.

I am trying to avoid saying something trite like there is a fundamental difference between people who grew up with smart technology and those of us who did not but, truly, there is a fundamental difference between people who grew up with smart technology and those of us who did not! I realize, of course, that every generation feels this way – my dad often marvels at how much change his parents witnessed – everything from the early days of the automobile to television to landing a man on the moon – imagine! There is nothing spectacular happening here, nothing that generations of workers haven’t discussed to the nth degree – I spend a goodly portion of my days convincing people with archaic views of PR that a press release isn’t really their best strategy in getting their message across, for instance. But the way Millenials think and approach the world is very different than how I grew up and how I started working and it’s taken some adjustment on my part to realize just how creative, engaged and valuable these younger workers can be.

I mean, it was a little disconcerting at first. For so long my colleagues and I were considered the younger employees – the workers who needed guidance and mentoring. I was incredibly fortunate that my first supervisor was a woman in her early thirties with impeccable professionalism combined with a very realistic approach to working in the 21st century – her father was quite ill while we worked together but she managed to attend every single one of his radiation treatments while still striving and achieving at work. She taught me two fundamental principles that I still think about every day: when working with the doctors and researchers who require our skills, our answer to their requests in always yes. Even if it’s really no, once we return as a team, we will evaluate and work so that they feel they are getting yes from us, even when they aren’t necessarily. Secondly, she always encouraged me to check with myself and make sure I felt I was doing the right thing, all of the time. This hasn’t always had the best consequences…in some ways it’s meant that I’ve worked during my vacation time because news doesn’t really conform to weekends or time off, because it was the right thing to do, or so I felt. When I worked with her I was encouraged to lead projects, take chances and rely on my creativity, and because of her I realized I could balance my own creative work while thriving in the workplace. When I moved jobs, I found myself working with people with more old-fashioned approaches to how a young woman operates in a corporate environment, and it was really tough. For the first time, I found myself not trusting my own judgment, and my value was based less on my creativity and much more on what kind of output I could achieve for the hospital.

And do you know what? This wasn’t a bad thing. I learned how to cooperate with more than one generation, and to adapt my working style to those I was working with. As it turns out, I’m not always right and my instincts aren’t always perfect. My current job is at the kind of place where you earn your seat at the table, and the experience has been invaluable.

That’s sort of how I work – I go along with the work culture I find myself in, generally agreeable and assuming the company knows best, basically. This is mostly because my life goals don’t necessarily align with climbing a corporate ladder but also because it’s my nature – I’m not tremendously assertive but I’m also not passive aggressive.

The biggest shock for me working with Millenials, then – these new shiny younger workers without the original good fortune to graduate into a Clinton economy – was their assertiveness. I don’t know if it’s because they’ve had to fight so hard to get jobs or if it’s a result of the helicopter parenting that came into vogue in the late nineties, but most of the younger women and men I work with don’t give up on their ideas easily, and don’t often defer if they feel passionate about something. I think originally this came across as brash, and, for someone like me, difficult to adjust to after years of listening, learning, respecting my elders and etcetera. For a while my colleagues and I even jokingly referred to the new, younger employees as millenemies, mainly because of the frequency with which they disagreed with us.

The other thing I really had to adjust to is how incorporated work and life are for them. I *thought* my life and my work were pretty interchangeable, what with working in the evenings but never having to worry about taking time off for a dentist appointment, but the younger men and women who work in my office now approach all of this with a mind-boggling flexibility, thinking nothing of taking the morning for a long bike ride but staying up incredibly late to finish a report. I tend to do my best with at least some routine in place that provides something resembling my own time, but Millenials don’t think this way. At all. And it is sort of amazing and visionary and shockingly effective, at least when it comes to work.

In the field of public relations, they are also devastatingly creative. We’ve recently hired a couple of women who are thirty years old, and even though there are only seven years of age between us, their ideas about how to promote medical news and research are completely different than mine. They make sure the work the rest of us do is easily accessible on mobile devices, for one instance. For another, they often dismiss pitching the New York Times in lieu of Reddit or the Huffington Post. They understand how people consume news today – which is less and less with CNN and more often on mobile devices.

Millenials, and the issues they face, remain frequently in the news. Burdened with student loan debt for educations that haven’t fulfilled their promises, often living with their parents and delaying marriage and kids – it hasn’t been an easy beginning for them. It’s a little strange, after being one of the youngest people in the office for so long, to adjust to younger colleagues and admit they have a handle on some of the more innovative and creative approaches to do our job, but hopefully I will continue to learn from them and vice-versa.