CurrentMom

Having a Sister Sure Makes Me Happier

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Truth Tuesday

Having a sister makes you happier. That was the first line of an essay by Deborah Tannen that I recently read in the New York Times. The essay was called Why Sisterly Chats Make People Happier and was prompted by an article with that first sentence as the headline.

It was also the findings of a study conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University as part of the Flourishing Families project. Research proves it, that sister makes you a happier person, but that's not really news to me.

My sister and I are three years and 705 miles apart. We've been three years apart since the day I was born, but we've only been 705 miles apart--or some variation thereof--since the day she went to college. That was twenty years, three husbands (one hers, two mine), one divorce (mine), three weddings (one hers, two mine) and five children (two hers, three mine) ago. Between us that's more apartments, moving boxes, email addresses and phone numbers than I can remember.

When my first child was born, my sister drove four hours each way on a Sunday just to meet her.

When her first child was born, I packed up my toddler and lugged her through two airports just to spend a weekend with the new baby.

When my second child was born, my sister couldn't come to meet him right away and when her second child was born, I couldn't manage lugging two children on a airplane to visit.

Our twenty years and 705 miles have been filled with periods of long silence and times of intense closeness that has morphed into something in between the two.

It's brought us to a place where we know that we are the only ones who truly understand each other from a historical perspective. My brother-in-law may know my sister better on a day-to-day basis than I do, but I understand why she is who she is and she gets why I am who I am.

We share an upbringing. We have shared memories. We make associations and react to things the same way. Of particular interest to me about the Brigham Young study was that the finding were that having a sister makes you happier as an adolescent. For me that's pretty far from true; it's only as an adult that I've really appreciated my sister.

Giving Thanks: Sweet Potato Casserole Recipe

Meal Monday

This Thanksgiving I was thankful for something I hadn't anticipated.

The unthinkable happened: My kids ate vegetables. It was the first time they knowingly allowed a vegetable prepared by me past their lips in the last year. To use hockey parlance, I put one past the goalie. I was beginning to think they'd go off to college before I'd see this day.

True, only two out of three triplets actually ate—or, should I (very proudly) say, devoured—the sweet potatoes.

I allowed them to spoon-feed themselves, which often results in successful eating. The Dude immediately dug in with gusto. Golden globs of yam covered his cheeks as he shoveled the stuff into his mouth with a seriousness of purpose.

Initially Zeke was more interested in playing with his spoon—something that my independent little guy now recognizes as something that "big boys" use. But the Z-man has a sweet tooth. I was convinced that if he got the tiniest taste he'd gobble them up. And after I shoved a spoonful in his mouth, he did. The result: orange war paint on the face. 

Bitty, however, wouldn't bite. Considering the girl was the only one who ate turkey, I let it slide.

Washington's Focus on Workplace Flexibility

Startup Sunday

I'm looking forward to the start of the workweek tomorrow more than I usually do. No, it's not because I've been trapped at home with my family for five days. We actually had a lovely Thanksgiving celebration with plenty of child care help from grandparents, aunts and uncles, so I’m not as burned out as I often am following a vacation.

No, tomorrow is exciting for me because it's the beginning of Focus on Workplace Flexibility, a conference I'll be attending here in Washington D.C. that spotlights the advances in work-life balance, the challenges and the distance yet to cover. The Georgetown University-sponsored event springs out of the first-ever White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility, which I attended earlier this year.

Not only are some of the world's smartest minds on workplace issues speaking (I'm not exaggerating), the Focus on Workplace Flexibility program promises to bring together leaders from the private sector, academia, government and labor to debate the very real issues that arise when we start to discuss workplace flexibility. For instance, my recent Fiscal Times article about workplace tension over holiday time off (and CNN appearance about the story) highlighted the zero-sum reality that many workplaces confront. Someone needs to cover the unpopular weekend, late-night and holiday shifts; how do employers handle scheduling in a way that is fair to all employees and meets the business needs?

In an ideal world, employers and workers could arrive at a solution to any scheduling dilemma that is a win for both parties. Indeed, as pointed out by Rex Flexibility (a new personification of workplace flexibility) 88 percent of managers overseeing employees with flexible work arrangements report no negative impact on their ability to supervise.

But in the real world, staffs are stretched thin by layoffs and right-sizing. In the real world, the immediate need to cover a shift or meet a production deadline often outweighs the long-term benefit to the organization of happy, productive workers who are able to meet their personal needs. (Also from Rex: employees without flexibility are most likely to miss work, at an annual cost to business of up to $2,000 per worker.) It's no simple matter to get managers and organizations to focus on long-term benefits over immediate need: the world financial crisis in 2008, at heart, was caused by financiers who put short-term gain ahead of long-term risk. As a journalist who's been covering work-life issues for nearly a decade, I have seen theory collide with reality multiple times -- usually to the employees' detriment.

Life and Death and Trees - Thanksgiving Blessings

Sharing Saturday

It has been a year since my neighbor's husband died very young and very suddenly – I wrote about it in one of my first Current Mom posts. Since that time, she has cycled through a year of firsts – first Christmas without him, first New Year's, first spring break, first first day of school, first Halloween.  Anyone who has been through mourning knows about all those milestones in the first year.

In this same year my family has also cycled through many events, but with our own twists – first summer at sleep away camp, first day of middle school. A teenager who seems to be regaining his footing in the world.  A 4^th grader who is learning to play sax. Aging parents, a great new job, a vacation in the beautiful mountains of West Virginia with close friends.

And the beat goes on. Our lives purr ahead, whether we are ready for it or not.

My neighbor told me that at a memorial service that was recently held for her husband, she wanted the focus to be on the future. She talked about the community that has supported her and her family though this hard year – hardly a day went by for six months without a meal showing up on her doorstep, often with wine, flowers, a notecard.

One of the most wonderful things a friend did for her was to plant a new garden, with gorgeous shrubbery surrounding their house. Now when she looks out her window, she sees plants and flowers that remind her of her husband, remind her of both the happy and the sad times, and offer her a moment to reflect on the beauty of the world around her, as well as the future.

Blessings.

Intergenerational Thanksgiving Thoughts

Fatherhood Friday

On this Black Friday, I've been pondering a usual topic of interest: intergenerational relationships. In fact, this has been on my mind for the past few weeks in a much broader context than family and holidays. But first, let's stick with Thanksgiving.

In what perhaps is a testament to having very low expectations and then quite happily exceeding them, I really was not looking forward to Thanksgiving this year. Flying from the Midwest to the East Coast with two young children (one in a stroller) in the Year of the TSA Grope seemed less adventurous and more stress-inducing. Gladly, the airport experience on both ends of the flight couldn't have been any smoother. 

This was indeed an auspicious beginning to Thanksgiving, where we got together with four generations of family and extended family. The best part about it was seeing my kids and my sister's kids spending time with their great-grandmother.

As I watched them it got me thinking about the various generations and the hope that each generation has that the next lives a better economic life. For my grandmother's generation - the Greatest Generation - there seems to be little doubt that they made the sacrifices and accomplishments that allowed their kids, the Baby Boomers, to do so. Some of the Greatest Generation efforts trickled on down one more generation to Gen X, and while some of the next generation (my kids' generation) has some opportunity before them, it seems that I'm hearing all the time how for the first time ever Americans are NOT confident that the next generation will live a better life than the one before it.

Notice that I didn't say that the Baby Boomers created a better economic world for their kids. While they certainly made significant contributions to improve the well-being of the country and planet, I feel like the younger generations (X, Y and beyond) have in some ways been sacrificed by them in their selfish pursuit of economic success.

All of the policies and tax structures seem in place to ensure their perpetual growth. Two examples. The first is Social Security. There is general agreement that changes will need to be made - a combination of increasing taxes and decreasing benefits. Well, guess whose taxes are going up and whose benefits are going down? Its not the Boomers. If you read between the lines of any prescriptions being discussed, the real pain will come after the Boomers have maxed the system and left their kids to pay the bills.

The other is the mortgage deduction. President Obama's debt reduction taskforce recently came out with a number of recommendations. There's a lot of things for a lot of people not to like in their, and I'm glad that at the very least the conversation has started. The piece that irked me was the reduction or phasing out of the mortgage deduction. If followed through, there was one generation that would have benefited completely from it: the Baby Boomers. But for those of us at the beginning or middle of home ownership - Gen X & Gen Y -  the Boomers are willing to take that benefit away. So that their social security doesn't get reduced.

Its obviously more complex than that (for example, personal benefit aside I think there are merits to discussing the impact of the mortgage deduction) but the fact is I feel like we're in the middle of an unprecedented transfer of wealth. We've always had wealth transfers, but I'm not aware of any time where its been so overwhelmingly from our youngest to our oldest.

Photo credit: sessionsimpressions.blogspot.com