22 Acres of Trees

Twenty-two acres of trees. I set down the chain saw and stretch my arms, aching from the weight and vibration. I look across the meadow at the solid wall of green on the other side. It’s lovely and verdant, but still foreign to these Texas eyes that long for big horizons. It seems that my little chain saw and I cannot keep up with the deadfall. Every winter the snow and ice and wind bring down a few trees. If they’re in the woods they can just lie, but if they fall in my meadow or yard or pasture, they have to be cut up and stacked for firewood. It’s an endless job.

After decades of suburbia and a career in IT, this new life I’ve chosen is a dream come true, but like all dreams, it’s a little weird. The structure I became so accustomed to, that chafed me, has fallen away. No more project plans, Gantt charts, weekly status meetings. No more project charters, kick offs, milestones, or releases. No more quarterly reviews or annual budget planning. No more hours spent in unproductive meetings.

Sweat trickles from my hair into my eyes, despite my baseball cap. I take off my hat and wipe my forehead with the back of my work glove. My eyes track the flight of my resident hawk, hunting mice in the meadow. It swoops, dives, misses, returns to its tree with empty claws to wait and watch and try again. I consider taking a break, going inside to dry my sweat and chug some iced tea. I check my chain saw bar oil level, see that it’s sufficient, start it up again. This hackberry is surprisingly tough to cut. The clear white wood is dense, as tenacious in death as a hackberry tree is in life, sprouting anywhere and everywhere you don’t want it to grow, filling fencerows and popping up between the tomatoes or the zinnias.

The last project before I gave notice was the final straw. Twenty years’ experience, a senior consultant, and I was scanning lines of Java code trying to pull a list of data fields to create a data mapping schema, work any software developer could have done faster and better. It was just one absurdity too many. In the midst of a pandemic, with my garden wilting and my horses nickering and my chickens clucking just outside my window, trying to make sense of lines of poorly written, uncommented code in between hours of mandatory team meetings, my mind rebelled.

Years of helping client companies succeed. Years of activism and marching to help make my state a better place to live. Years of sacrifice and work to raise and support my children. My dreams stored in a dusty shoebox in the corner of the closet. It doesn’t do to dwell on could haves. Life is the art of the possible. The smell of dirt, the sharp flavor of a fresh tomato, the mellow sweetness of a horse’s breath, the quiet of a country gloaming, starry nights, drinking morning coffee on my porch looking across my own land, not waking each morning to a day of Zoom and dread, longed for freedom from the life that had chosen me. The personal is political. What good to save the world if I couldn’t save myself?

This dark fantasy we’re sold, that we can work hard and reinvent our lives. And I worked so hard. I finally had a little to show for it, at least, and I grasped at that straw like a drowning woman clutches the watery weeds.

There are seasons here in Virginia, each in their turn. It rains and snows and shines and blows. The flowers bloom and fade. The bees buzz busily all over the barnyard. The horses shed and grow sleek and then sweat and swat the flies and grumble. I wake up each morning and look across the foggy meadow to spot the deer before they disappear into the woods, brew coffee, dress, write, work, read the news, watch the world spinning closer to disaster, watch the abandoned farmhouses on the road to town crumbling a little more with every rain, every season, watch my bank account dwindle like the old lichen-covered rail fence.

There is beauty, and good crumbly soil, and okra to make gumbo, but is there joy, in a world devoted to trauma and death? I write, but can my words make anyone see? I march and organize and write postcards and knock on doors, but can I shift the trajectory of a world going mad? I hug my children, but can I build them a future worth living in? I meet my friends for a drink, but can we laugh with real joy? I can make really good pickles. I can brush this horse and rasp her hooves and clean her stall. I can cut this firewood and stack it neatly against the coming winter. I can pull the endless weeds that sprout between the tomato plants. I talk to the bunny that lives in the barnyard. It twitches its pink ears, unafraid, then lopes lazily away. Bound to clover patch and meadow, a short life and the endless demands of reproduction, it is still more free than I. No one demands more than it can do or charges it rent for its space on this earth. Only humans do that.

Gate Crashing

When I moved to Houston after college, my grandma, a true Yellow Dog Democrat, told me “You’ve got some cousins in Houston. They’re Republicans, but they’re still kin.”

Grandma was big on family and dragging me to meet relatives I had little interest in and nothing in common with. I didn’t pursue an introduction to these Republican cousins.

A few years rolled by and Grandmother passed at the ripe old age of 90. We drove to Missouri in a snowstorm to bury her ashes next to her husband in Mexico Missouri. My oldest child was a new baby, wrapped in blankets and understanding nothing except the discomfort of a long car trip. We left her in the car as we hurriedly placed Grandma’s urn in the tiny prepared grave and dropped red rose petals over the black ceramic. George read a Bible passage quickly, we murmured “amen” and then hustled back into the warm car for the long drive back to Houston

Some weeks later my mom called to tell me she’d gotten an invitation to a birthday party for Grandmother’s cousin, Margaret Hotze, in the mail, and did I want to go crash the party with her? These Republican cousins were rich, after all, and might throw a good bash. Amused, I said sure why not.

So Mom and George drove down to Houston. I put on a LBD that I bought from Target for $15, a pair of rhinestone earrings, and some strappy high heels. That’s as posh as I get. Dan stayed home with the baby. And off we went to the Houston Club. Mom showed her invitation at the door and we sauntered in.

There were crowds of people holding champagne glasses, talking in groups. They looked dour and expensive. There were a fair number of Catholic priests or bishops or whatnot, all in the collars and embroidered frocks or whatever they’re called. They looked dour too. One I remember as clearly as yesterday because he looked exactly like Frollo in Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame. No lie. I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise.

“This is creepy,” I told Mom bluntly.

“We’re definitely in enemy territory here,” she said blithely. “Let’s get some champagne.”

The long serving table was loaded with champagne flutes, silver bowls of caviar, and piles of assorted hors d'oeuvres. We drank and grazed a bit to the tunes of a 12-piece band. I watched the matrons and dowagers of Houston society sparkle and strut in their Neiman Marcus finery and decided that my $15 dress, with me in it, was definitely a cut above them all.

“That’s Margaret over there,” Mom said. “Put down your plate and let’s go introduce ourselves.”

“If we must,” I sighed. But I hung on to my wine glass.

Margaret stood to one side of the room, with her carefully styled gray hair and glittering evening gown, looking like any other 70-year-old rich white woman trying to impress. Next to her stood her son Steven in his tux, jowly and non-descript. They looked us over, saw nothing to impress them, shook hands with barely concealed disinterest, and that was that.

Meanwhile George was chafing to hit the dance floor. I know fuck all about ballroom dancing, but he led me through the steps well enough that it was a pretty good fake. The band, happy to see someone actually dancing, stepped it up a notch, and soon we were twirling and laughing like hyenas.

After eating, drinking, and dancing, there didn’t seem much point to sticking around. It’s not like there were any interesting conversations happening, no spicy game of Cards Against Humanity going on in the corner, nobody starting a Conga line, and my feet hurt. So we slid out into the thick Houston night air and headed back to the car.

That was the first and last time I ever saw any of my Republican cousins, although they just can’t seem to stay out of the news. Margaret ran for office and lost. She’s long since passed away. Her son Steven, medical quack and hate-monger, gets described in the media as a “mega donor” but he might soon be described as a “felon” and about time, too.

For fun, I used to donate every year to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Steven’s name, using his medical clinic’s address for the SPLC to send their newsletters to. Maybe he saw them and wondered who the hell sent them and why. I’m sure he doesn’t remember the long-legged woman in the cheap black dress who crashed his little Nuremberg Rally at the Houston Club. But then again, I’m not the one who’s been charged with assault.

My baby is 27 now, but I still have the LBD and it still looks great on me. Just saying.

Mother's Day Musings

She’d been through psychotherapy as a young adult. Got cured of her neuroses, she said, and graduated, very proud of the gold star of mental health that she claimed.

I wasn’t so sure. I was very young, but most adults I knew didn’t have long, silently mouthed conversations with themselves in the car, complete with head wags and hand gestures. Just who was she talking to? Running errands together was always so weird and uncomfortable. And then there was the compulsive nail biting, frantically chewing half of her nails away, and the random floods of tears. You just never knew when Mom was going to start crying about something.

But she was totally sane. She said so. Said that the reason I turned out “better” than my sister was because she’d gone through therapy. My big sister, my best friend, who I loved and admired, and who had a learning disability that I never knew about until years later.

What Mom did do with her therapy experience was turn it into a weapon. Normal kid stuff that I did, like arguing with my sister or being a bit sassy or even just a quiet mood, would trigger an inquisition. She would probe my feelings, asking leading questions, always herding me in the direction of admitting to a rage towards her that I didn’t know I felt, followed by a tearful confession on my part and a generous forgiveness on her part. Terrified of her disapproval, I was left after each of these sessions feeling like a terrible person full of dark feelings that I needed to work constantly to overcome. Small wonder that Little Women, with its prevailing theme of self-mastery over base and sinful human nature, was my favorite book.

But as I become a young teen, things started to change. Not just because of my parents’ divorce when I was 12 nor even my father’s death when I was 14. I think the first crack in the darknesss was Jennifer. The first day of 7^th grade in a new school I walked into the science lab and looked around. Each table had two seats, and most of the kids in the class had already paired up with friends from 6^th grade. A girl with very curly brown hair and glasses glanced at me, saw my hesitation, and called “Would you like to sit with me?” Gratefully I slid into the empty seat. That was, and remains to this day, Jennifer - the kind of person who just saves a stranger on a Monday morning as easily as breathing. We became friends, and a whole group of cool band kids that Jennifer knew also became my friends, and for the first time in my young life I felt supported, accepted, normal.

There were sleepovers and birthday parties and youth group at the church and movie nights and all the things teenagers do with their friends. School became a refuge, the place where I began to discover that I had power and talent and worth. The ability to run longer and faster in PE class. The ability to make beautiful music in orchestra. The ability to write in English class. The ability to have real conversations, to laugh spontaneously, to dance, to enjoy a moment in the moment, unfettered.

At home, things got worse. I couldn’t keep pretending to be the broken child playing to my mother’s emotional blackmail. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I would say. “I need you to stay out of my head,” I told her. She reacted with rage. Once she even slapped me across the face. I was tall and strong. I knew I could hit her back harder. I didn’t. On that occasion I left home for several days to stay with a friend. I left a note taped to a chair in the middle of my room. She claimed I hadn’t, pretended to have never seen it. I didn’t have a name for that, but I knew she was lying, because when I got home the note was gone and the chair had been moved.

One day, after a particularly nasty fight, I sat alone on my grandmother’s couch, sobbing. I don’t remember what the fight was about. I do remember telling her “We’re not going to agree about this. But I respect you anyway. I need to know that you respect me as a person too, even when we disagree.” She looked at me with that little twisted smile that she had and said nothing. I looked at her face and realized she was mocking me, enjoying the pain she was causing me. To this day I remember the agonizing shock of understanding that I felt in that moment. Alone, I grieved bitterly for what I didn’t have and never had, a mother who loved and protected me. I was on the edge of despair, powerless. But after a while I stopped crying and had a long conversation with myself. I was 15, I told myself, and although it seemed like forever until 18, it really wasn’t. I’d be an adult soon. I would be free. I breathed. For a moment I could see freedom like a shining promise, a promise that gave me the courage to move forward with new strength and the dignity of purpose. I had only the vaguest idea what adulthood was actually like, but I knew it had to be better.

About this time Mom, who had been hunting for a boyfriend since my dad died, started dating a guy named George. George was nice enough. He lived in Fort Worth and he had been my mother’s friend’s lover. Carolee was married to an asexual man (although we didn’t really have words for that then) and was dissatisfied. George was happy to step in and provide for her needs, no strings attached. But I guess the bloom had worn off the relationship, so Carolee fixed George up with Mom. Mom was very proud of her acquisition, making it a point to chase Kit and me out of the house so that they could have “couple time.” Which was annoying when I had homework to do. But George was a bit of a playboy and Mom wanted to get married and have someone take care of her, so when the house across the street from George’s came on the market, she decided to buy it so she could be closer to him.

We had a nice little house in Denton, just down the street from Grandmother. I was very happy in Denton schools. I had zero interest in moving to Fort Worth just as I was about to start my junior year, and I thought chasing George down by moving across the street from him was plain dumb. I told Mom that in no uncertain terms. I realized later that probably sealed my doom. It’s not an accident that when Kit was 16, my parents moved and took her out of the school she loved too. I reluctantly packed my stuff and relocated to east Fort Worth.

In August, the guy I had started dating that spring, Charlie, asked me if I wanted to move in with him. I’d met Charlie through my friend Liz. It never occurred to me that a 23 year old pursing a 16 year old was problematic. None of the guys my own age had ever shown any interest in me. I was flattered. And although I wasn’t in love with him then or ever, I went through the motions and accepted his attentions. I didn’t know what love was or was supposed to feel like anyway. The only relationship advice I ever got was my grandmother asking abruptly one day if I was on the pill. But Charlie’s boss at the bakery had offered him cheap rent on a duplex on the north side of Denton. I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

I had to leave my horse behind in Fort Worth. I never saw her again. Mom sold her and Kit’s horse to a friend of hers with a farm in Jasper Texas.

I finished high school in Denton, lying to the school officials for two years, faking Mom’s signature on every document, and crossing the stage in 1985 wearing purple and gold. I’d gone to prom. I’d taken the honors classes. I’d made As. I’d managed to evade the school counselors and the social workers for two years, and finally I had the freedom I’d dreamed of.

By December, I’d said goodbye to Charlie and sold my ragged little Ford Pinto and given away my viola and joined the Army.

Most people wouldn’t describe basic training and AIT as freedom, but I can’t remember ever being happier than I was then. I was learning in great gulps, and growing strong, and paying my own way for the first time in my life, and traveling, and no drill sergeant could suppress the buoyancy I felt.

I lost everything to become me. With the perspective of age, I mourn what was lost, but I couldn’t have made any other choice and kept my sanity. Now, in my 50s, I have horses again. And I’m making music again with a cheap student fiddle. And I don’t talk to  my mother at all any more. That’s another story to tell.

She broke a lot of the people in her life. But she didn’t break me. I was saved by the Army and by a girl named Jennifer.

The Yarn Barn

Grandmother Vinita’s house in Denton wasn’t anything like storybook grandmothers’ houses. Sure, it was a Victorian house, but in a severe Greek Revival style. No fancy gables or porches or columns. The interior, despite soaring 12-foot ceilings, enormous windows, and wide plank wooden floors blackened with age, was cluttered and uncomfortable. She only ever heated or cooled one room, her “dining” room that was really her “everything” room. Every other room in the house was either freezing cold or brutally hot, depending on the season. The fact that all the windows were painted shut didn’t help. Except for a box of Lincoln Logs, there were no toys, puzzles, or children’s books in the house. Just heavy, ornate walnut furniture, uncomfortable narrow beds, and so much stuff.

There were a few entertainments to be found by a creative and restless child. The incredibly heavy cannonball on the hearth was a challenge to be hefted by my skinny arms. A trunk full of old curtains became queen’s robes for draping and swishing. The dried stalks of the daylilies in the yard were short-lived swords for dueling with my sister. A wooden swing hanging from a backyard tree challenged us to soar high enough to touch the eaves of the house with our toes. Kit could manage it; my short legs couldn't quite reach.

But the best entertainment was the jack loom that occupied one corner of the dining room. If Grandmother was working on a project, I could sit next to her on the bench and help by throwing the shuttle across to her and pulling the beater against the fabric to tighten the cloth. They rhythmic percussion of the weaving and the intoxicating smell and texture of the wool made me forget the heat and discomfort.

The loom was fed by an enormous collection of yarn that Grandmother kept in a backyard shed called the Yarn Barn. The Yarn Barn was about the size of a one-car garage, and it was lined with shelves overflowing with yarn of every type and color. And when I say overflowing, I mean it was a disastrous mess. Skeins of yarn, balls of yarn, wads of yarn, boxes of yarn, bags of yarn, on the shelves, spilling off the shelves, on the table in the middle of the shed. One hot summer day, my sister and I decided we would organize it. We were bored to madness or we never would have contemplated such folly.

It took us about three days. Sorting, untangling, and balling yarn using the yarn swift clamped to the table. We organized yarn by type and color. We got everything off the floor and onto shelves or into containers. We discarded the useless little bits and ends of yarn. We dusted and swept every corner of that shed. When we showed off the result to Grandmother, she was truly surprised and pleased, but it didn’t take many months before she stirred it all back up into a complete mess again.

Grandmother sold her house years ago and moved first to a retirement community, which she hated, then to a small house in Fort Worth near my mom. Most of the fabulous furniture and interesting collectibles were sold too. Even now, having spent my adult life in the low quality tract or manufactured homes that are all my "professional salary" can aspire to, I regret the loss of that house. I miss the wavy handmade glass of the windows, the detail of the woodwork, the red hand-printed wallpaper in the entry, the pegged oak floors. I drove by with my kids years later. It had been converted to an architect's office. The green front yard is a parking lot. The banks of daylilies are gone. The shutters on the front of the house are ripped away. The homes on either side are office buildings now too. I stopped and went in to say hello. They allowed me to wander around the house. The yarn barn is still there, used to store blueprints, still shabby and still smelling strongly of wool. I stood there, sniffing, and the past seemed so far away and so near.

Going to the Movies

Some things that seem quite trivial on the surface stick with you over time, like those little burrs from wild carrots that embed themselves into the hems of your clothes and persist to annoy you at unexpected moments weeks or even months later. Sooner or later, you sit down and pick that damned seedpod out of the threads of the fabric and think to yourself, how did this tiny thing survive five trips through the laundry?  So you get out a magnifying glass or a microscope and take a closer look to see what made it stick so well.

This memory is a burr.

When I was a child, the only way to see a movie was to go to a theater. We didn’t go often because money was always tight, or at least Mom said it was whenever we asked for anything. Usually we got to go see the animated Disney features when they came to the local theater though. Mom had promised to take us to see Aristocats, and we were crazy excited. We’d seen the trailer and memorized the “We are Siamese” song, which we sang loudly, bouncing in the back seat of the Torino, as we headed to the theater for the matinee.

Of course we were running late. We were always running late. It is a constant of all of my memories, this lateness. I have no doubt that Mom was late to her own birth and will be late to her own funeral. The poor organist will keel over from exhaustion waiting for her.

Anyway, there we were, in the car, our excitement chilling as Mom got more stressed and angry, checking her watch and muttering to herself. Finally we pulled into the theater parking lot, a good quarter hour past the start of the matinee.

“Well, what do you want to do?” Mom asked, turning back to look at us. “Should we stay for the more expensive show later, or go home?”

Kit and I knew damned well that this was a trap. We’d sprung a thousand such before. We stared at each other with apprehension, our eyes speaking paragraphs. Ask Mom, who was always pinching pennies, to spend more money? Risky move. Ask her to go back home after she swore and swerved through Dallas Saturday traffic to get here? Probably dangerous. Sit there forever and say nothing? Tempting, but unfortunately not an option.

“Let’s go home,” Kit said.

Mom started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. She was furious. Every angle of her body and the grip of her hands on the steering wheel was angry. On the way home, she berated us for wasting her time, making her drive all that way for nothing. We cringed in the back seat as the waves of her rage washed over us, saying nothing, our stomachs tight with anxiety, not daring to look at each other lest we burst into tears. Once again, we had failed the test. We always failed. We tried so hard, but somehow it never worked.

The Weirdness of Body

 “For we are like waves whose existence is motion.”

On Boxing Day, I was bucked off a very tall horse and suffered a compression fracture of my T12 vertebrae. I knew as soon as I hit the ground, a relatively minor bump, that something was just not right. My sprogling anxiously asked “are you okay?” expecting the usual answer “I’m fine.” But I wasn’t. I lay on the soft grass, looking up at the sky for a few minutes, then rolled carefully onto my side and levered myself up. Pleased to discover that I could, in fact, walk, I hobbled to the house, but back pain drove me to the couch, where I texted my husband from a prone position, suggesting that he might want to leave work early.

After a night in the Farmville Virginia emergency room (itself an experience worthy of a long blog post), I was fitted with a back brace and sent home.  A follow-up visit confirmed the diagnosis with the order to remain in the brace for 8 weeks and then “take it easy.” When I asked the doctor if I could walk on my treadmill in the meantime, he just gave me that look and said “no, I don’t recommend that.” Sigh.

I’m on week 7 of my enforced rest, and in that time I’ve gained 5 pounds. I wasn’t exactly a world-class athlete, but I lead a pretty active life, running a little hobby farm, taking care of 5 horses, and exercising regularly in the form of yoga, running, rowing, walking, and bicycling. Typically after a few hours spent on inside activities, I’m stir-crazy and ready to go cut fire wood, shovel manure, haul trash to the dump, or any of the other hundreds of things that always need doing around a scruffy 36 acre rural property. Now, when I can’t stand sitting at the computer or puttering around the house trying to tidy things without bending, I just prowl restlessly from window to window, looking out at meadow and garden.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that when I wake up in the morning, my breasts are tender and heavy. I haven’t been wearing bras with my back brace because that’s just too many layers and too much pressure on my skin. I’m fairly small-chested so it’s not a big problem to forgo the support, but these oddly puffy lumps on my chest are uncomfortable.

“Ah, perimenopause,” my friends reassure me. Although I’m that age, I’ve never had any of the other symptoms generally associated with the change of life. So, being me, I lie in bed at night (flat on my back with a pillow under my knees, as recommended by my doctor), hugging the heating pad that relaxes my angry back muscles, pushing the very persistent cat off my chest and Googling.

Of course, what I find is contradictory or fluffy or hidden behind paywalls (where real science is archived as dense PDFs in subscription-based academic ivory towers). But, piecing together bad reporting, filtering out woo-woo bullshit, and applying my own experience of a lifetime in a female body, I stumble towards some insights about estrogen and testosterone. Aerobic exercise and weight loss are associated with lower estrogen levels in women, so it would make sense that a sudden lack of aerobic exercise and weight gain would increase estrogen levels as well. Estrogen is the stuff HRT for post-menopausal women is supposed to put back in you, and it’s known to help make your vagina all moist and receptive as well as to combat bone loss. It seems to make your breasts act weird too. But honest web sites admit that it seems to have no impact on “sexual desire.” Those who tout it as a cure for sexual dysfunction in older women are pretty much admitting so long as you can have sex without pain, it doesn’t matter if you actually want it. Women have testosterone too. And we have more of it if we do resistance exercise, weight-lifting, muscle-building stuff. Unlike estrogen, increased testosterone is known to increase sexual appetite.

Of course, if your estrogen is relatively low and your testosterone is relatively high, you’re unlikely to conceive. But unless you’re trying to get pregnant, you probably don’t care. However, to read the online literature, you’d think that lower estrogen and higher testosterone is the worst thing that could happen to a girl. But that hasn’t been my experience.

I’ll define “fit” for me as being near my ideal weight and regularly doing both aerobic and resistance-type activities. When I’ve been at my fittest was when I was in the Army or when I was in training for specific events or goals and really putting a lot of time and effort into working out. (I was aiming for a job as a fire-fighter once, but that’s a whole other story.) Being made the way I am, which is kind of long and lean by nature, I don’t build a lot of muscle bulk even when I’m lifting regularly, but I do get a little more defined.

When I’m fit: 

• My energy levels are naturally high. I’m goofy and exuberant. I wake up ready to go. Exercise energizes me further instead of exhausting me. I chase the dog. I skip to the mailbox. I turn a flip on the playscape at the park.
• I can do more stuff. Stack the hay, haul the manure, take the chain saw to the dead tree in the yard, build flower beds, carry the feed sacks, move the furniture. I feel capable and independent.
• I stress less. I can deal with the challenges of my day with more grace. I can let out my frustrations by pumping iron or I can sort through a confused tangle of feelings while I run, letting my thoughts flow as they will in a moving meditation.
• I eat better. The more I work out, the more my body tells me what it wants, and it wants healthy food. I won’t even crave the sweets or the chips or the extra beer.
• I sleep better. When I go to bed, my body is physically tired from my day’s workout and I relax easily.
• I glow. Lots of aerobic exercise brings blood and nutrients to my skin, which is more elastic and has good color.
• I feel sexier. Whether this is just the inevitable result of all of the above, or an additional hormonal benefit, I can’t be sure, but the effect is real.

If fitness feels so great, why are women in our society actively discouraged from pursuing it? My years spent in rural, conservative communities gave me plenty of opportunity to observe the cult of domesticity, or the cult of the womanly woman, or the cult of traditional gender roles, or whatever you want to call it. It’s very real and it very much discourages girls and women from athletic activities. Whether we’re told it’s man’s work when we pitch in to help unload the lumber, or the teacher asks for boys to volunteer for a physical task, or the local cops harass the jogging or bicycling woman, or the girl is told that boys don’t like big muscles, or the woman is criticized for wearing a tank top, or the other women in your yoga class complain that you’re too thin, there are a thousand micro- and macro-aggressions designed to steal and shame our bodily joy. Is it any wonder that obesity is far more prevalent in women? Is it any wonder that twice as many women as men suffer from depression? 

Every time I get online, I’m pummeled by images and ads of women who look nothing like me. They are either bone thin waifs without any muscle at all, or they are hyper-curvaceous cartoons of women with enormous hips and eyelashes and cinched-down wasp waists. They droop weakly or they pose provocatively. Even on LinkedIn, lawyers and engineers and consultants post selfies with lots of makeup and cleavage and short skirts to draw attention to their assets. I don’t see in any of it what I know, the self-assured power of a strong body, needing no validation, needing nothing other than its own joyous animal energy.

Today I put on my galoshes and walked all the way to my mailbox and back. It’s a little more than half a mile. That’s the furthest I’ve walked since I broke my back. When my brace comes off, my self-prescribed physical therapy will include daily walking and light weights, working back up to what my body can be, rediscovering the pleasure of doing and breathing and stretching, finding my own beauty not in cosmetics or clothes or the admiration of others, but in pure sweaty motion.

Coaching Coaches Who Coach Coaches

Hanging out on Linkedin is always a mistake. Twenty minutes of scrolling and reading and I lose all hope for the future of humanity. Is this what end-stage capitalism looks like? Does anyone actually make or do anything remotely useful anymore?

I’ve seen an ever-increasing number of people who call themselves coaches or consultants prowling the timeline or hitting my DMs with sales pitches. Who are these people, and what are they selling? Well, in truth, they’re selling nothing. They’ve turned themselves into a product and they are selling some of their time to people who must be truly desperate or truly gullible. Coaches for job seekers. Coaches for salespeople. Coaches for HR professionals. Coaches for dressing professionally. Coaches for acquiring that magical sauce called “executive presence.” Coaches for successfully using social media. Coaches for women who lack confidence. Coaches for coaches, even. And my favorite most recent DM "a coach for busy moms who want to lose 20 pounds." 

Some of their marketing techniques are a little sketchy. For example, a woman who seems to be building a nice business being an HR consultant and author posts multiple times a day, all variations on the same formula, and none of it particularly deep or insightful. Mostly it’s “be nice to people, give people a chance, don’t judge a book by its cover.” Or it’s a picture of her in makeup and suit, making a big presentation somewhere. And then another person, a woman with no picture and a rather vague profile, immediately reposts her content. Every time. Like that’s totally legit.

Another one of these folks is a guy who proposes to help “build your personal brand on Linkedin.” He seems to spend most of his time making pithy, positive, happy comments on the posts of other influencers. He doesn’t comment on my posts because I don’t have enough followers to be useful to him. He always agrees with great enthusiasm with whatever has been posted without ever actually adding any ideas or facts to the conversation.

I don’t understand why people give these folks money, sign up for their webinars, or schedule them to speak at their events. Declaring yourself an expert on social media doesn’t make it so. Publishing a book isn’t really that impressive an accomplishment either. I’ve read a lot of absolute rubbish books in the name of better business processes and self-help. Which reminds me of this other “coach” I found who actually “helps busy professionals get the most out of self-help books.” I shit you not. The most use I've ever gotten out of a self-help book is kindling for my woodstove. 

If I were going to hire someone to coach me, I would want to be sure that person had walked the path I’m on, had succeeded, had overcome obstacles, had relevant and actionable insights to share. But honestly, that's about as likely as my hiring a butler. 

Are all consultants shysters? I’ve been a consultant. I was the kind of consultant who came in and interviewed stakeholders, wrote the requirements, facilitated the scrum meetings, groomed the backlog, and tested the code. I tried to create things of value, actual things that other people actually used. Sometimes even customers.

Coaching is like consulting without actual deliverables. It’s play money. Like crypto. Or NFTs. But that’s a whole other topic. It smells like the death throes of an economy. People just exchanging money for nothing and calling it business.

These coaches are eager to connect with you and anybody else on Linkedin. But they’re not going to buy anything from you, or repost your articles, so don’t bother trying that. This is not a two-way street.

Facebook Turtles All The Way Down

I use an ad blocker on my laptop. It can’t filter Facebook’s “sponsored posts” in my newsfeed, but when I’m visiting FB via Chrome, I don’t have a big proliferation of ads. Using the FB app on my phone, however, is an entirely different experience. Every third “post” is an ad, and they’re quite intrusive. I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking ALL of them. For the past 3-4 days, I’ve been getting the exact same ad (same picture, same copy) because no matter how many times I block it, it just instantly rebrands itself under another name and pushes the ad at me again.

The product in question is an overpriced laundry basket with a turtle on the side with the compelling copy “Love it. Order Here.” Facebook has decided since I’m a female over the age of 34, I must really be excited about laundry baskets I guess.

I noticed that the links served up in these ads were all “Rebrandly,” so I spent some time on Google to learn more. Rebrandly advertises themselves as a URL shortening and link management service.  It sounds innocuous enough, but the questionable deluge of spam for junk products tells another story.

I Googled rebranding and found lots of friendly, helpful articles about legitimate rebranding techniques to use when you change your company name or want to launch a new brand under your existing company umbrella.

Next I searched on how to dodge ad-blockers. Again, totally legitimate advice on providing quality branded content, native advertising, and other techniques that any company that’s serious about their marketing ought to be doing.

Clearly there’s an ugly underbelly of social media advertising that just isn’t getting media attention. I figure there’s one of three dynamics going on here.

1. The retailer has paid a sketchy social media marketing firm to get them as many impressions as possible and doesn’t really care how it’s done.
2. The retailer has purposefully chosen this questionable marketing technique figuring that if they flood people with ads, sooner or later enough of them will click through and buy that it’s worth the money.
3. The advertiser isn’t a retail company at all. They’re just an affiliate site getting paid by clicks not conversions, so they’ll do anything to get clicks no matter how low the quality.

What depresses me is that FB clearly has no safeguards in place to prevent this type of spamming, utterly disregarding the quality of user experience so that they can maximize advertising profit. Even if you block these advertisers, you will see their ads again. On occasion I’ve even clicked to the advertiser's FB profile, reported it as a fake, and subsequently blocked it. The fact that FB gives you no mechanism for blocking a page unless you report it is problematic too. Their arguments that they have algorithms to prevent harmful targeting practices are obviously completely hollow. Without regulation, they will do NOTHING that would remove even one ad from your feed, and they’ll continue to make it as difficult as possible for users to influence their own experience.

So, as a business owner, when FB prompts me to pay to boost a post, I just laugh. As if boosting a handful of posts would allow me to compete with the spam turtles? As if I want to be just one more ad that frustrated users automatically block because they’re so fucking sick of the spam?

You've Never Been Beautiful

A couple of years ago, when I was still in communication with my increasingly toxic and dysfunctional mother, I posted a selfie on Facebook. 

Selfies get a bad rap. We’re labelled vain, attention seeking, or shallow for taking and posting them. But in a world where women over age 50 are considered well past their prime, invisible, and probably shopping for Depends and compression hose; documenting and celebrating my middle-aged face and body feels affirming, positive, maybe even a little revolutionary.

And because I have the right kinds of friends, there was the usual scattering of likes and “you’re so beautiful” comments. My mom jumped on to the thread with her predictably joy-killing vibe. “You’re kind of cute, but you’ve never been beautiful,” she commented.

My friends reacted with shock and horror. Some of them knew she was my mother. Some of them just thought she was a random rude person hanging out on my timeline. I laughed and deleted her comment and all of their offended responses.

The funny thing is, I look a lot like my mother. Just as my youngest child looks a lot like me. So when my mother says “you’re not beautiful” she’s saying “I’m not beautiful.” Her red hair, freckles, and cute little round nose come from her father’s side. When I say “her father” I mean the man who impregnated my grandmother, a man whose name I do not know, a man who vanished into the past when my grandmother refused to leave her husband to go with him. But my brunette grandmother with the aquiline nose and her dark-haired, patrician husband never would have produced a child together who looked like my mother, who carried in every flaming red hair on her head the evidence of her mother’s guilt.

My mother was a toddler when my grandmother’s husband volunteered for the Army and went to war. He didn’t need to. He was over-age and had a good career with the phone company. He had to get waivers in order to be allowed to join up. He went off to serve in northern Africa. I don’t know if he wrote her tender letters or any letters at all. But at the end of the war, he came home, a stranger in a dark uniform, resumed his career as an engineer, and spent the last nine years of his life looking for the bottom of the cocktail glass. I have a picture taken on a winter’s day; he still in uniform and my mother standing next to him in a snowy suburban yard, neither of them smiling. I have no pictures from my mother’s childhood of her smiling. I’m not sure she knew how.

I never met the grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-uncles of my maternal line. They died before I was born. My grandmother, always old to my eyes, never again to my knowledge had nor sought romance in her life. She lived long and alone, occupying herself with career and hobbies and travel and friends. And I was raised by a woman who hated her body that was shaped like mine, who cut her beautiful red hair into an unflattering bob or pulled it back into a plain ponytail, who wore matronly dresses or boxy suits or chambray shirts, and who was constantly dieting and failing to lose weight. She dressed me in shabby hand-me-downs, jerked my strawberry blonde hair into braids so tight they made my head hurt, and sent me to school in boxy brown loafers and ridiculous pinafores covered by an ugly brown corduroy coat. Never mind that everyone else was wearing bell bottoms and rainbow striped tee-shirts.

I wasn’t ugly. But I sure felt ugly. I look back at the pictures and see a sweet, perfect, heart-shaped face, pale and lightly freckled, surrounded by a halo of blonde hair. I see my young body, strong and lithe, graceful in every pose. But I felt none of those things that I see now. And when puberty hit, with all of its longings and weirdness, my insecurities made me grateful for any attention, even from a guy who was wrong in every way. Luckily, I outgrew that phase and outgrew him and found the confidence and strength in adulthood that I’d never imagined I’d possess.

When I look at my child, now grown to an adult, I see in their bright red hair and the shape of their face and the sprinkling of freckles on their pale arms my own youthful beauty, the beauty I never knew I had. And I see my mother’s face as it should have been, with smiles and laughter and confidence. I want them to know how amazing they are. Every morning, when I kiss them awake, I tell them they’re beautiful. Every day, when they haul the wood or carry the hay or dig up a flower bed, I remind them that they are strong. And I hope that when they look in the mirror and see my eyes looking back at them, they see the love in those blue eyes. And beauty.

Purple Flowers

We all have that one project that we look back on with nostalgia. Maybe it was the interesting work, or the good people, or even just the place we were. It’s the sort of memories that keeps consultants going through the bad times.

It was a very short project – only six weeks. And it was in Los Angeles. I’d never actually been to Los Angeles before. Flying in for that first week I had a window seat, which is my preference. I watched the desert pass under the plane. I love the desert landscape, the way that ancient volcanos and lava flows and the slow erosion of the land is all clearly visible without the screen of greenery that obscures the geology in more verdant landscapes. Then suddenly there were the folds of mountains, sprinkled with snow and the green fuzz of vegetation. A little further and Los Angeles revealed itself, a sprawling city under a haze of bright purple blossoms. No one told me that the city would be smothered in flowers.

The project was for a public entity that needed to replace or upgrade their telephony management system and knew that they needed to document their current state processes before they could make a good software choice.

True confessions – I didn’t know jack about telephone technology before I started the project. But I do know how to talk to all kinds of people and find stuff out.

Luckily, the client, knowing that the compressed time frame would be a challenge, had already not only requested the necessary building and network access for me, but had scheduled meetings for me with the key stakeholders I’d need to interview. It’s the only project I’ve ever worked on where the client was so proactive and prepared. Also, they gave me a corner office with a conference table since they knew I’d have to meet with so many folks. Wow.

But the most memorable part of the project wasn’t the stakeholders or the office or even the fascinating exploration of telephony technology (I got them to take me down into the basement and show me all the copper). It was Los Angeles.

It wasn’t a cheap part of town, if there is one. I stayed in a $300 a night hotel. For the last three weeks I managed to switch to a rather nasty AirBnB to save money. I definitely preferred the hotel, which had free wine in the lobby and a lovely restaurant with a panoramic view of the western hills. Oh well, the things we do to stay on budget.

I chose not to rent a car, because obviously. So the first week, I got on Craigslist and found a graduating college senior who was selling a bicycle for $50. I bought it. It was a rusty mess but it took me all over town. I rode it to the office and back, out to Santa Monica, and around town in search of cheap food. And everywhere I walked or pedaled, the jacaranda blossoms fell on my head and on the sidewalk, turning from a cloud of purple overhead to a slippery pile of purple underfoot.

I made the rookie mistake of biking all the way down Sunset Blvd. to the beach. Halfway along you lose both sidewalk and shoulder and the cars go speeding around those blind turns and you begin to wish you’d updated your will. After walking for a spell in the sand and dining on a burger at the pier, I rode back up Wilshire, which was less scenic but a lot less terrifying. As I pedaled along, slow and tired, I passed a barbershop where some older black men sat out front playing checkers. I waved and they called out pleasantries as I went by.

Friends told me to check out the “cemetery of the stars” so with a little help from Google maps I located it and visited it during a lunch hour. It felt odd to be a tourist at the tiny, intimate, extremely well-tended cemetery. I walked slowly reading headstones. Farrah Fawcett, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe (her marker covered with lipstick kisses), and Rodney Dangerfield. His marker read simply “There Goes the Neighborhood” and I tossed back my head and laughed.

The best was the weekend that my youngest flew out to join me. Renee had never flown by themselves and it was a bit of an ordeal for them. Luckily since they were a minor, I was able to go to the gate to meet them. I rented a tiny car so that we could get around more easily. We drove out past Marina Del Rey, and Renee raised an eyebrow at me, having just finished reading All the President’s Men. The two things Renee wanted to do were tour the Getty and go hiking in the hills. It made for a wonderful but exhausting weekend. Do you have any idea how big the Getty is? And how hard all those miles of white marble floors are? Not to mention how overwhelming it is to consume that much art in one day? You can’t process it all. It’s like trying to watch a movie in fast-forward.

The next day, hiking up in the hills, was a welcome respite. The city, full of little bungalows and carefully manicured gardens full of exotic plants, lacks life. There are few birds, few squirrels, no sweet smell of untended nature. But get up above the city, and the hills are full of wildlife and flowers of exquisite, unexpected beauty, and the golden warm smell that means California to me. We wandered for hours, not quite sure where we were going, but reluctant to turn back. To compensate for having to return to the sterile streets of the city, I took Renee to my favorite little Italian spot for some really kick-ass risotto. And then it was time to see them to their plane and wave goodbye for another week.

And the project? It was a success. I worked long hours and barely finished, but in the end I had a solid ecosystem map, a complete set of process flows, an issues list, and a very pretty little presentation to show. It was a satisfying conclusion, but there’s something about such a short project that leaves you feeling disoriented. Just as soon as you’ve found your way around, figured out who the players are, and really gotten your teeth into the problems, you’re flying home and wondering what they’re going to do with all your hard work. Not that I wanted to keep flying to the west coast every week. That part was exhausting, and I’ve got nothing good to say about the LA airport. I left the keys to the bike with the receptionist and told her to do whatever she wanted with it. It wasn’t worth trying to sell again.

The Agility Monster

Being on the first team of a big international company to go Agile was exciting.

They were building a brand-new application that was going to, among other things, allow them to finally retire a very outdated legacy system that was causing a lot of operational and technical problems. The team was strong and talented. The director was young and progressive and had the cutest British accent. One of the members of our consulting team was an Agile coach. And there were several other senior-level analysts and product managers on board.

Establishing Agile practices at the team level wasn’t too bad. We had a team room, met every day, turned the projector on, and talked through our tasks and issues just like an Agile team should. We were co-located and cooperative and enthusiastic. Or at least, not hostile. The developers, like code-slingers everywhere, had a “well here’s another new thing” attitude, but so long as they were able to build good code and do interesting work, they were satisfied.

The mid-level management folks were less happy. Some of the more astute realized that Agile meant the lines were being re-drawn and they didn’t see themselves in the new organizational geometry. Some of them bailed. Some of them adjusted and found new roles within the evolving landscape.

Months went by. Our team worked hard to stay one step ahead of the developers. It was a bit like being a detective, finding the systems and processes and teams that would be impacted in the future by the work we were doing. As our director said, we were in charge of “kicking over the rocks and seeing what was living underneath.” Slowly the application grew and went in front of user groups for demonstrations and feedback and refinement. It was an Agile success story.

So….

Like I said, it was a really big company. And more and more teams started switching to Agile. It became official. It become canon. It became a juggernaut.

The heart of Agile is small, self-directed, responsive teams. The heart of big corporations is standardization, measurement, and control. Rock, meet hard place. Now, there are folks who will tell you that scaling Agile is totally do-able. There are books and classes and certifications and conferences, oh my.

What everyone is really doing is trying to fit Agile into American corporate culture. It doesn’t work. What you end up with is chunky waterfall with a fancy new lexicon to describe the same old shit.  Nobody really wants to go back to the excesses of waterfall. The long planning cycles, the analysis paralysis, the heavy change management processes, the piles of documentation. So, why don’t we Agile better? How did something so simple, so radical, and so intuitive get so fucked up?

I’m not the person with the answers, but I can share a few examples that might shed some light on how it goes sideways.

Standardization – Imagine an organization with many Agile teams working in different business areas on different applications in different states or continents. Now, tell all of those teams that they must use the exact same structure and standards for their product backlogs, that they must build complicated and time-consuming dashboards and reports for management to track the details of their sprint activity, and that they must participate in multiple meetings every week outside of their regular team activities. This breaks the concept of “self-organizing” teams. You don’t trust your Agile teams to organize and manage themselves and their work to accomplish a goal.

Budgeting – Instead of funding Agile teams, you organize your entire budgeting process around projects. Say for the next year you have 30 possible projects. You’ll probably fund about 5-6 of them, but you require the IT organization to submit sizing and budget estimates for all of them so that you can evaluate them. This means that your Agile teams will have to drop their planned sprint work for several sprints while they analyze, document, and size the proposed projects. Later, when you evaluate the performance of your Agile teams, you notice that their velocity has slipped significantly, so you institute more controls and standardization to track and measure their performance. If you want your Agile teams to be productive, you need to change your corporate governance processes to align with Agile principles. Agile that is confined to IT will never truly succeed.

Starving IT – You think of software developers and IT as a cost center to be minimized as much as possible. You pay on the lowest end of the scale and utilize offshoring and contractors as much as possible. Slinging code isn’t a skill set you consider core to your company. Sure, turnover is pretty high, but you have standards and processes in place to ensure the less experienced folks don’t get too far off the rails. For Agile teams to be productive and maintain consistent velocity, they need to be able to gain expertise in the business and technical domain they work in, as well as to develop strong working relationships and trust within the team. This is impossible to do if the team is constantly churning and your most experienced people are leaving for better pay elsewhere.

Too Much Complexity – You’re a big company, and over the years you’ve added many off-the-shelf and bespoke software applications, with layers of services to connect them all. Because you engaged in rampant customization, any change to your ecosystem causes reverberations across multiple domains and applications. Any project you undertake impacts so many domains that 10+ Agile teams are involved in weeks if not months of development and testing. And regression testing? Well that’s a whole other story. If product teams spend a significant amount of their time supporting projects from other domains that have significant impact on them but do not provide noticeable benefit to their user groups, they won’t have the time to actually address their own backlogs. They spend all their time dog-paddling, and eventually, frustrated because they can’t build anything of quality and impact, they leave.

So, is there a lesson in all of this? I don’t know. Maybe that you can’t start transformation at the bottom. Maybe that American business culture is its own worst enemy. Or maybe that I just got too cynical to keep on pretending that with the right training and the right coach, miracles can happen. Folks tell me that Agile works pretty well at small tech companies with collaborative, forward-thinking leadership. I don’t know. Those aren't the ones who call in consultants to fix their shit.