I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places (14 page)

And I've come to realize that every time I say no to someone else, I am saying yes to myself.

What am I talking about?

Let me explain, because if I have any accumulated wisdom in all these decades, it is this:

You need to protect the candle.

What does that mean?

Here's where I got the image, and it's not overly impressive. It's not from great literature, but from old-fashioned scary movies.

Remember those movies, where the family is in the dark mansion at night and they hear a noise, and it's in Victorian times, so there's no electricity. In the next scene, a beautiful woman with a long braid and wearing a cotton nightgown will invariably grab a candle, light it, and walk around the house in the dark, cupping her slim, elegant hand in front of the candle's flame.

Think Nicole Kidman during a power outage.

She cups the candle for obvious reasons, so the candle won't blow out, since it's a fragile thing and could be extinguished by the slightest breeze, not to mention some terrifying ghost.

And for some reason, as my writing career progressed, I began to feel the squeeze of lots of obligations and requests, barking like dogs in the yard.

I'm not complaining, because I know how lucky I am, but truth is I think my life is exactly like yours in this respect.

You might have a job that you need to do, or you have a child you want to devote time to, or an elderly parent that needs your attention. Or you simply want to set fifteen minutes aside every day to do yoga, start your own book, or cook an incredibly complicated French recipe.

In the lives of modern women, there is a constant tension between the things we want to do and the things we ought to do, and it's impossible to balance these things.

Especially when, at least in my case, I've spent a lifetime confusing the things I want to do with what other people want me to do.

I'm a people-pleaser, from birth.

But as time wore on, and my nerves got more frayed than they needed to be, I thought as many people as I pleased, I really never got to please myself.

To do whatever I wanted to do.

Even if what I wanted to do was clear my head and write my book, which is my actual job.

People who don't work at home don't get that home is work.

And finally, after decades of this madness, I came to the realization:

I have to protect my candle.

My candle was the stories I wanted to tell, in my books.

And what I started to do was to say no to anything that wasn't those things.

My image at all times was the woman in the nightgown with the long braid, cupping her hand in front of her flickering candle.

And even though it sounds simple to say no, it wasn't, not for me.

People asked repeatedly, which I came to realize was pressure.

Others became angry at me when I said no.

I lost a few acquaintances, and one or two friends.

I missed out on some boring parties, and some great ones.

But the more I protected my candle, so that I spent my energy and time on what I loved, the happier and happier I got.

You may be more enlightened than I, in which case you might be rolling your eyes by now.

But if you're like me, I hope you take my advice, because it is the only thing I know for sure:

Protect your candle.

And what is your candle?

Whatever you want to do.

Trying tai chi.

Reading a novel.

Writing a novel.

Learning Spanish.

Watching
Real Housewives
.

Sunbathing.

Whatever you want, it's completely up to you.

Something you love.

And then, make that the thing you say yes to, every time.

If you have to do a job that isn't your candle, give time to your candle every day.

Protect that time like a maniac.

Put your hand in front of the flame and don't let anybody blow your candle out.

Give yourself the permission to say no to the requests of others.

To disappoint them.

To even make them angry.

If they get mad at you because you did something else that you wanted to do more, you don't need them in your life.

And the interesting thing is that the more things you say no to, you feel that you are paring your life down, but you'll be expanding it, because the time you give yourself allows you to grow in new directions, which arise organically from something you truly love to do.

And in time, you may come to the same realization that I did recently.

Which is that the candle isn't a project at all.

The candle is you.

 

Unhappy Madison

Lisa

It has come to this:

I love golf.

The only problem is, golf doesn't love me.

So I picked up the phone, called a bunch of golf courses, and finally found an instructor who would take me as a beginner.

He had no idea how much of a beginner I was.

Until I showed up the first day, and he had to unwrap the cellophane off the putter, which I had missed.

And since then, I've made every mistake in the book.

My first lesson set the tone, because when I was getting ready at home that morning, I had the first question every woman has:

What to wear?

I had been working and hadn't had a chance to go buy golf clothes, but I figured, how different could golf clothes be from normal clothes?

Answer: Different.

For example, it was a sweltering ninety degrees outside, so I put on a nice pink tank top, gray gym shorts, and running sneakers.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I drove to the golf club and parked at the appointed place, which turned out to be the driving range. I got out of the car, grabbed my bag of clubs, and hoisted them over my shoulder, then surveyed the crowd lined up at the driving tees.

I was the only woman.

I was also the only tank top.

Gym shorts.

And running shoes.

My instructor turned out to be a handsome young golf pro named John, who flashed me a friendly smile, introduced himself, and shook my hand.

To which I replied, “Am I dressed funny, or is it just that I have ovaries?”

He wasn't sure whether or not to laugh, because he wasn't used to me yet. He answered, “You might want to get a pair of golf sneakers.”

“Okay, will do.”

“Also, please don't take this the wrong way, but your shorts are too short.”

I felt my face flush. It had been a long time since I felt like a whore in public.

Maybe since hot pants.

Please tell me you remember hot pants.

You don't? Well, they looked like a satiny version of my gym shorts, which I don't think were that short, reaching the middle of my thigh. Showing off my upper thigh isn't on the agenda, unless one of your favorite foods is cottage cheese.

“Really?” I asked him, dry-mouthed with embarrassment. “These are normal gym shorts.”

“Yes, but golf shorts should go to your knee.”

“Oy,” I said.

Which is a lot more polite than, “Are you freaking kidding me?”

John cleared his throat. “Also, if you're going to wear a sleeveless shirt, it has to have a collar. If it doesn't have a collar, it has to have sleeves.”

“So a tank top is a no-go?”

“Correct.”

“Can I stay even though I'm dressed wrong?”

“Of course. You didn't know. Just next time, it would be great if you dressed appropriately.” John gestured to my golf bag. “I can carry that for you.”

“That's okay,” I said, because I was Making A Point. Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I can't carry my own bag.

“You sure?” John asked.

“Yes, no worries.”

By the way, I always say “no worries” when I really mean the exact opposite.

I wish there were an expression for women like me, which would probably be, “Worries.”

Anyway, John took off across the beautiful green grass, and I quickened my pace to keep up.

John said over his shoulder, “Please don't run, it tears up the grass.”

“Oh, oops!”

So I felt not only like a whore, but I felt like a stupid whore.

“Also,” John said gently, “lower your voice.”

“Sorry.”

Well, you get the idea.

I was a golf virgin, but somehow I ended up feeling like a stupid,
loud
whore.

But that was then and this is now.

John turned out to be the nicest guy in the world, in addition to being a superb instructor. I am loving golf, even though I've had only five lessons.

Which is four more than you need to figure out that golf is an impossibly difficult game.

Even for a well-dressed woman, like me.

 

Breaking and Renter-ing

Francesca

I always feel like a creeper in a rental house. Unlike the pristine blankness of a hotel room, a rental house is covered in proof of someone else's ownership. Just walking around the rooms feels like snooping. You're sleeping in someone else's bedsheets, browsing someone else's books, eating someone else's leftovers.

You're like a benevolent burglar.

Which is part of the fun!

As long as the house doesn't fight back.

The week of July Fourth, four friends and I stayed in a house that seemed booby-trapped. The house used everything short of poltergeists to communicate hostility to our being there.

My friend's boss had rented the house and was letting her use it for a week as a work perk. When we first arrived, we saw a note he'd left for us:

“Glass table broke. Service guy coming to clean this afternoon. Wear shoes on deck.”

We looked outside. “Broke” wasn't the right word. The glass table had exploded. A layer of glass shards blanketed the wooden deck like snow.

Sharp, dangerous, foot-slicing snow.

The beautiful deck we couldn't walk on and the inviting pool with broken glass on the bottom

There were even pieces glittering at the bottom of the pool.

We opened the sliding door to get a better look and heard a
beep
.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Oh, it says, ‘child-safe alarm.'” My friend peered at a small box by the door. “I guess to alert parents if the kid goes out to the pool alone.”

I nodded. “Smart.”

Then a siren pierced the air with a wail so loud we ducked for cover.

The beep was the warning; the siren was the alarm.

Mercifully, we closed the door and it silenced. But it took trial and earsplitting error to figure out how the alarm system worked:

If you opened any of the three doors leading to the back, you had ten seconds to exit and close the door again, or the siren would go off. And the kicker?

The doors locked automatically behind you.

An alarm system that forces you to keep an un-air-conditioned house hermetically sealed in July
and
forces you to lock yourself out?

Not smart.

The alarm struck me as more anti lawsuit than anti drowning.

We couldn't live with this all week, so we set about figuring out how to disable it without permanent damage. My friend has a head for engineering, so she performed surgery to the back of it.

It was like the game Operation, with a more annoying penalty sound.

On Independence Day, two of my friends, including our host, left for a thirty-mile bike ride. Exercising my American right not to exercise on vacation, I stayed back, along with the other two. We had heard of a lawn party nearby and decided to check it out.

We were in the car ready to go when my guy friend realized he forgot something. He jogged back to the house while we waited. A minute later, we heard the burglar alarm go off.

It was a tremendous sound from halfway down the driveway. We ran to the house to help, and at the front door, it was deafening.

Our poor guy friend clutched his ear with one hand while frantically pushing buttons with the other.

If the security system was like the one I grew up with, the next step was a call from the alarm company that we'd have to answer and explain it was a false alarm or the cops would come. I ran into the house to look for the house phone, but we'd been using our cells all week, I had no idea where they kept the actual telephone. God knows I couldn't hear it ring.

By now, the blaring alarm was causing brain damage. We bailed and ran out of the house.

As soon as we landed on the lawn, the alarm finally stopped.

“I swore I got the code right,” my guy friend said.

“What do we do now, will the police come?” asked another. We weren't afraid of arrest, but we didn't want to get our host in trouble with her boss.

I had the idea that we should call the security company and report the false alarm, you know, “get ahead of it.”

I saw that on
Scandal.

I found the little lawn sign from the company and Googled the main number.