The Underachiever's Career Guide

This week's Girl Talk Thursday topic: When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? 

I've always been an animal lover.  When I was growing up, we always had a family dog.  When I was 7 or so, my parents bought me a chinchilla--and with heavy persuasion from my brother who was deep into the Lord of the Rings series at the time, I named it Frodo.  When Frodo passed away, I got a grey, fluffy, lop-eared rabbit (this time I wasn't going to bow down to my brother, and oh-so-creatively named it 'Fluff'; so there!).  I had a ten-gallon fish tank in my bedroom.  I dreamed of animals and every creative writing piece written during my elementary years had the basic premise of a girl who found a rock (or other object) and spit on it (or it got rained on), and it turned into some fluffy creature.  Magic!  You'd think after that brilliance, my career aspirations would certainly involve writing, but I wanted to be a veterinarian.

Once junior high and high school came around, anatomy piqued my interest.  The teacher in my high school's Anatomy class took a small group of students with the highest grades each year to see an autopsy, and I made sure I was part of that group even though my grades weren't the highest--I can be...persuasive, when I care about something.  The stress of helping someone who was alive but sick or in an emergency didn't appeal to me, but I loved the idea of finding out why someone had died (and then going to court to testify in front of a rapturous jury; that sounded awesome).  I took another Anatomy class while in college, and it was the only undergraduate program in the country at that time that had six whole cadavers to study each semester, just like in medical school.  I loved the class, but I got a D.  Do you know how many veins and arteries and nerves and lymph nodes are running up through your armpit?  It's like a crazy 16-lane highway traffic jam in there.  I can show you where your anatomical snuffbox is, though. 

You see, I'm an underachiever. When I was young, I learned how to play the game and get great grades by doing the bare minimum.  It worked pretty damn well for me in my youth, but it didn't go over very well when I got to a college that had higher academic standards than the good ol' Dade County Public School system.  Thomas Jefferson was a student at my college, and I'd bet he wouldn't be pleased to know I was lowering the school's reputation.  My sincere apologies, Thomas--founding fathers deserve more than that.  So, my career choices of veterinarian or medical examiner hit a brick wall when I realized veterinarians were like, doctors, but for animals. And being a doctor meant going to medical school. And medical school seemed like an awful lot of...work.

At this time, I had read a lot of true crime stories and I really, really wanted to be a Profiler for the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit.  I scored a few days' externship at the FBI training facility in Quantico, and yes, it was even cooler than you'd imagine.  They had a whole fake street set up with a bank, pool hall, apartment building and the like to practice skills.  The only gun I've ever shot in my life was blanks from the FBI's Glock that we used to practice clearing rooms that day (think sliding slowly with your back pressed against a wall, looking quickly around the corner with a pointed gun, the whole bit).  This was it; I thought.  I'm going to be an FBI agent.  But then I heard about that pesky lie detector test part of the interview, the one where they ask you if you've smoked pot more than 10 times in your life.  Ten?  Um, who can answer that truthfully and be in the FBI??  I'm not going to come out and admit any drug use right here, but let's just say that I'm a terrible liar.  So I didn't bother applying.

I managed to graduate college in four years, albeit with terrible grades.  Hah!  Who cares, I thought--my dad (a Dartmouth grad with less-than-perfect grades) told me that people only cared about your college grades when you were looking for your first job.  It wasn't like I was going to go to grad school!  And then I applied to grad school (my job as an Activities Director at a nursing home was the best I could do with my undergraduate degree in Psychology, and I lasted there a month before wanting to poke my eyes out).  Luckily for me, I'm a good test-taker, which balanced out my mediocre grades and a law school took a chance on me.  I figured my talent in persuasion could be put to some use.

Fast forward a few years, and my underachiever self who couldn't fathom the thought of medical school had a law degree.  And had been the Managing Editor of a law journal.  And had one baby and was pregnant with the other while studying for (and passing the first time, to my mom's shock and amazement!) the Bar exam.  All while fixing up an old house in a developing neighborhood (okay, it was a total shithole in the 'hood, complete with a neighborhood prostitute and crack house). 

I may be an underachiever, but I certainly am an adept multi-tasker.  And my evolutionary biology-minded friend recently described my underachieving nature as something to the extent of 'a wise evolutionary strategy because of the effective use of energy and resources'.  Sounds good to me!

Laxative Guilt

This is my first contribution to Girl Talk Thursday--I hope to make a habit out of it. If it's anything like my desire to make exercise a habit, I will participate three times a year.  Tops.  This week's topic is Parental Punishments--what did you endure, hate, and would use now?

I'm not looking to open a can of worms here, but I'll come right out and say that this household is a no-spanking zone.  I personally don't believe in spanking as a principle, but also because if I allow myself to hit my children when I am angry, I would hit them HARD.  Where do you draw the line?  I stop myself at a firm grasping of an arm and speaking in a low, serious tone to tell them I mean business.  What 'business' is, I'm not quite sure--hey, aren't we all winging it here?  But it's usually enough to make them quit whatever they are doing.

I only recall being spanked once as a child, after my brother Matt and I repeatedly crank-called 911 while we were supposedly under my father's watchful eye.  I (allegedly) asked the 911 operator out on a date (I was not more than 6 at the time).  Man, would I love to go back in time and hear the conversation that undoubtedly occurred between my parents that day!  Anyway, I scarcely remember the spanking, but what stuck with me was the appropriately-placed guilt.  My parents never used overdone, Catholic guilt as a parenting technique (my Mom is Jewish, which is a whole different breed of guilt, and my dad is an athiest)--this was smooth and effective...laxative guilt, one might say.  Mom and Dad pulled out the "someone may have died because they had a real emergency and called 911 but you were tying up the phone line" story.  At that age, I didn't know that the 911 system was likely, and hopefully, more sophisticated than one guy sitting on a ratty brown office chair with the foam stuffing poking out, answering one rotary-dial telephone, even if this was Tallahassee in the early 80s.  I did feel appropriately terrible, although (again, allegedly) my first draft of my apology letter to the police contained a statement along the lines of "My brother made me do it".  Needless to say, I got my first lesson in revision that day.

This laxative guilt was used throughout my teenage years as well.  I am a terrible liar (thus narrowing my career options with my law degree), so it was clear when I was hiding something.  During those years, my parents' stock line after a lie was "It's going to take a long time to build back the trust".  And it was devastating, knowing that my parents viewed me as some shifty person they couldn't quite trust.  I must have subconsciously filed that line in my parenting lobe, because I totally have used that one.  Another one I use that channels my parents is "Did Daddy already give you an answer?  Because we don't shop around for answers in this family."  Mmmmhmmmm...pure gold.  I'm sure as the boys get older and we're faced with new struggles, I'll be rooting around in my subconscious for more.

Sam and I, thankfully, are virtually totally aligned in our parenting styles.  The one method he has used that I vehemently oppose is "The Pinch", something he learned from his own childhood.  When he acted up during dinner or couldn't get his act together in the car as a child, he would get a firm pinch on the leg.  When we had it out over this, Sam agreed that when he was being his best parenting self, he would not choose this option to change our children's behavior, that it was more of a last ditch effort, I've-had-it-up-to-here kind of thing.  That parenting method has since been discontinued in our household, thanks in part to a couple of great parenting books (and in part to, shall we say nicely, a verbally persuasive wife).

I'm not a parenting book type of person really, but I have to say that I am reading a book now that has helped immensely in my goal of being my best parenting self--Buddhism for Mothers, by Sarah Napthali.
Ladies, check it out from your local libraries because this one is worth reading.  I am no Buddhist, but incorporating some of these ideas into my every day life has made such a difference in my well-being, and given me a new perspective on interacting with my children.  Sam didn't know I was reading it, but noticed the way I diffused a situation was particularly calm and productive.  Mothers with more than one child may notice that something that worked fine with the first just doesn't work with the second or third.  Timeouts are perfect for Jackson--we send him up to his room to cool off for a couple of minutes, and then one of us goes up and has a great conversation about how he could have handled the situation differently, and how he could make it right.  With Alex, removing him from an argument with a timeout only escalated the situation, leaving him furiously kicking his door and screaming.  It took many agonizing tries and late-night parenting discussions before we adopted a strategy that is helping him slowly learn to put his emotions into words.  It sure is a team effort to parent consciously, learning to switch our pitch depending on the batter, but here's hoping it will pay off in the long run.