That Woman Is A Success...

When I was a senior in high school, I gave a speech to the Women's Executive Club in Charlotte about my mom.  I remember I quoted a poem in the speech -- "That Woman is a Success."  I searched for it online recently to no avail.  But as I recall, it was anodyne stuff to put it mildly. 

But the purpose of my oratory wasn't actually to consider what "success" meant.  I wrote the speech quite simply to defend my working mother.  To say to a room full of women who I wanted to nod in approval, "my mother worked and I am ok.  I survived.  I am not developmentally challenged."  Such was my feminism at the time -- self-righteous and sure.  And I carried that self-righteous feminism with me through law school and into a certain feminism professor’s buzzsaw.  Shortly after law school and that buzzsaw, I had my doubts that feminism meant women should do what men do and that women are just like men are.  I became even more convinced that wasn't true when I had babies and I witnessed something I'd denied for most of my life-- that women and men are fundamentally different in some ways.  And they are most different in how they parent.  Or that, at least, has been my experience.

I used to opine about the three prongs to my "successful" existence.  I think in the 90s and inspired by my legal training, my three prongs had two sub-prongs.  I don't remember the sub-prongs any more, but I do always remember my three passions.  They are just as Betrand Russell said they were for him:  

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

 I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

 Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

 This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

I have sought love first and with the greatest degree of difficulty in my life.  Having supportive, communicative, loving relationships is surely how I find most of my sense of "success" (and my sense of failure when I screw up).  I did not know unconditional, throw-yourself-in-front-of-a-train love until my son Ben was born, and that brought with it an even deeper sense of commitment and even deeper guilt on dark days when I feel I am not giving my sons my all.  I find "love" the hardest thing to "work" on too, especially in a happy marriage.  We fall into patterns and routines, and usually we don't ask ourselves: "Am I loving this person the best way I can?" "How can I communicate better?"  "How can I allay fears?"  Challenging ourselves in these ways is difficult stuff and for the most part we avoid doing it.

My other two passions are the search for knowledge and the search for ways to alleviate others' pain.  Those play themselves out in many ways, but mostly they play an important role in why I am a U.S. diplomat ... because it gives me a sense that I am becoming more knowledgeable and acquiring experiences and that I am helping others.  I strive and fail mightily in these categories too of course. 

In my job, I see my achievement orientation and my competitive spirit.  I don't like it most of the time, but I see it.  I note with interest how I will send home to my parents news of some success at work and purr like a cat being rubbed when they praise me.  I know too that I felt "successful" when I had a very good job in the Department two years ago and that work was something I wanted others to know about me ... much like I want people to know I'm a lawyer.  Why is that important?  Why is other people's recognition of some outward "success" important to me?  I don't know.  My parents were valedictorians and my grandmother wanted me to be President.  It's in my genes I suppose.  Most days I think that I am more moved by the drive to learn and help than by the baser desires to please, achieve, and "win"... but I'd be lying if I said those baser desires weren't there pushing me on like a Chinese mother.  Making me burn my candle at every conceivable end.  Making me sleep with my Blackberry on my chest.

I once asked a woman I admire how you can "have it all."  She had the best answer.  She said "you can't...not at the same time."  Something always has to give.  When you give in one place, you have less capacity to give in another.  It is the sickening zero sum reality of modern, exhausted living.  When you perform some promotion-inspiring feat, you often miss bath-time.  When you stay up making a project and cupcakes for your child's 100th day of school and go with him to celebrate, you miss that conference call your boss wanted you to attend.  If you stay home with your children as your life's work, you think working moms' lives are glamorous.  If you work, you deeply envy a mother's time to watch the daily miracles in her child's life. 

In short, only you can define what your passions are and how you pursue them.  Even if you haven't assigned them in prongs and subprongs, you know what they are.  And only your tummy (that wonderful place where the wisdom of your head and the passion of your heart meet) can tell you in what measure to pursue your various passions.  Know this too -- no matter what you decide, you will always feel that you are not giving something or someone enough of you.

So my definition of success is this: 

·         Knowing what passions will govern your life and pursuing them with energy and focus (not just going through the motions or leading a life of quiet desperation).

·         Pursuing your passions with balance and the knowledge that excess in one requires loss in another, thus causing a never-ending, constantly shifting pursuit to be disciplined enough to give and do what you can when you can.

·         Forgiving yourself for the days and the moments when you fail to find balance, or when you fancy that someone's life is choiceless unlike yours and so much easier, or when you judge another, or worse yourself, for not getting the balance just right. 

If you can walk this path and keep getting better at it, you are a success.