The Glad Hand

I have always been much better at giving than receiving. It is easier to give a donation than to ask for one. It is easier to give someone a ride to the airport than ask for one. Asking for help has always left me feeling vulnerable, a state of being I am not particularly comfortable with. (I think I have blogged about this before...)

But lately, I have had so much on my plate, I have had no choice but to ask for help. My family (mom, dad, and sister) do so much for me it is almost overwhelming. But lately, I have asked others for help. I asked a number of friends to donate and support the Big Brothers Big Sisters auction. They did. (You made it happen!) I asked 6 Par Farmer to help me paint our new shoppe, because I had 10 million other things to do. He took charge of the project and with very little help from me, got it done. (For those of you who are dying of suspense to see the new shoppe, we will see you at the holiday party on the 18th!)

And yesterday, probably due to my never ending to-do list, I was battling a cold that left me with no energy. I had a trunk show planned at a good friend's house and the idea of packing all of the trunks over there and being bubbly sounded like an impossibility. Cancelling was not an option. The show must go on. And then I remembered my ace in the hole: The Lioness! My right hand woman who is always helpful to me and very good at helping spread the Bon Lemon love.

At the 11th hour, The Lioness happily agreed to do the trunk show at my friend's house (her first in-home trunk show). She got glowing reviews from the guests and it sounds like she had a great time too. Yippee!

The moral of the story today is: It is okay to ask for help. People want to help you, but you have to give them the opportunity. I picked up this porcelain "glad hand" from a curio shoppe in Magnolia. I thought it would be a good display piece for Bon Lemon. But then today, it took on a whole new meaning. When asking for help, we should receive it with a glad hand.

Because of The Lioness, today, I am feeling better. Because of a huge team of organizers and supporters, the Big Brothers Big Sisters auction I helped with raised over $130,000. (Woo hoo!) Thanks to some crucial support, Bon Lemon is ready to charge ahead with our expansion. Thanks to 6 Par Farmer, the office is painted. Thanks to my dad, the shelves and tables are almost complete. Thanks to a special group of individuals, I am blessed with supportive and loving friends. Thanks to a thoughtful gift giver, I received a leopard print santa hat in the mail that made me smile. Thanks to my sister, I know that I will be supported 100% no matter what weird/interesting/off-the-wall thing I get myself involved in. I could go on and on all day. My glad hands are full.

Thank you to everyone who helps make my life that much better.

Love is Pretty

A friend of mine posted a link to a blog about love a few days ago. Ever since, I have been thinking about it. It included a toast the author had made to her brother and his new wife at their wedding. I have included it in full, because it resonated with me. It is from www.amidprivilege.com.

"My advice is this. I believe that these days we have two dominant models for love. In the first, we yearn for a shiny object we do not have, thinking it will make us also shiny. In the second, we partner for the long term, and we compromise. We concede and make do. In the first model, we are always yearning, always lacking something. In the second, we are often resentful, over the years.

There is another model I think we can look to, the archetype for how the human creature loves, the love of a parent for their newborn baby. We love to take care of our babies. We don’t think of our love as a burden. In fact, we feel privileged to be given the gift of caring for that new person. When our baby does well, we take that as our own success.

I believe it’s so easy to love a baby because their new life from the universe is so closely with them. Hovering, almost. So come to your loved one newly born, if we can call it that. See your loved one as newborn.

This is different from babies in that we have to be prepared for our children to leave us. They may not, but we have to be prepared. We don’t have to leave our partners. So don’t. Stay. Stay and take care of each other.

It’s a gift to have the chance to care for another person."

Through a host of experiences in the last couple of years, I have spent many hours thinking about love. Giving love. Receiving love. And letting love go. In that time, I relied on my loving family for support. I met a best friend. I surrounded myself with stimulating like minds. I fell head over heels, "how did I live before you," in love for the first time. And then. My relationship with my best friend floated away. The like minds now lived in different states. And my true, mad, deep love became my gut wrenching, sleepless, lonely pain. The love I had evaporated. I wasn't sure why. And I wasn't sure how to fix it.

I thought maybe all love was pain. I thought maybe I deserved these obstacles, because I had such a damn perfect childhood. I thought a lot about love. Shiny love. And compromise. I spent seven weeks in Europe by myself not speaking with anyone, working on farms, and eating meals alone. I spent many more weeks drinking wine, watching The Notebook (or depending on the day listening to Pearl Jam/Tracy Chapman/Band of Horses), and crying in the privacy of my own home. I was trying to make sense of what love meant and whether I wanted any part of it.

Through this process, I learned very little about what love is. I learned a lot about what love is not. I spent a number of years focusing on that. Using the "not" as my barometer. The blog post from amidprivilege.com made the ramifications of my semantic error quite glaring. And it provided a third option for love, which was inspiring, because I too had seen love as either exciting and unstable or reliable and boring.

My lesson for this week is to choose those I love wisely. Surround myself with those who give and receive love and manifest it in ways that are inteligible to me. For me that means support, sensitivity, communication, affection, creativity, thought, effort, reliability, honesty, integrity, and (oh shoot, I am a bit demanding, aren't I?) And then my opportunity will be to love those people as I will love my almost born niece Maebel. And that will be my privilege.

P.S. If you aren't pictured in my little collage, it isn't because I don't love you. It is because you weren't on my fridge. Send me a picture.

P.P.S. Yes, 6 Par Farmer did cut that picture out in the shape of a heart and send it to me. Yes, that is pretty stinking cute. And no, I do not always treat him like a perfect newborn. But I am trying to get better. :)