Convince Me Not

My guy comes with an instruction manual. It’s verbal. It’s a blessing. It goes something like this:

“Don’t try to convince me.”

And this is the most significant, life- and relationship-changing advice anyone has ever given me.

But he had to tell me twice. I didn’t really get it the first time, because getting it would have required some hard work.

As in, changing my ways.

Because I have spent half my life convincing men. And with this much experience, a skilled tongue and an inborn facility with language, I know I’m pretty good at it. I can almost always get the man in my sights to do what I want.

And this, dearest darlingest reader, is a terrible skill to have.

Inveterate partner-convincing is both the product of and root conditions necessary for insecurity. It is also very closely related to The Shit Test, which can be a useful pre-relationship filter but, later,  is a relationship-fracturing device.

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say I want something. Let’s say that something is a trip to Cuba. Let’s say my partner doesn’t want to go to Cuba. He’s not opposed to Cuba, per se, it’s just that this year he wants to go to Vienna. But I want to go to Cuba. And so I mount a campaign. I talk and I talk and I talk. I talk about the classic cars (oh, he LIKES classic cars), the dancing (he likes dancing), the gorgeous Cuban women (perhaps uniquely amongst heterosexual males, he likes gorgeous women), the language, the culture, the pictures of Che EVERYWHERE (he likes Che and wonders when there will be an epic movie already). And then I find a screaming, smoking hot travel deal wherein the travel agent and Castro himself will pool their pennies to pay us to travel to Cuba. That’s how the universe works. God and Castro are insisting we go to Cuba. We’ve got to go. I mean, what would Che say if we said no?

My guy is convinced. We’ll go to Cuba. You’d think I’d be happy, right? I got my way.

But the entire time we’re there, I will worry that he’s not having a good time. I will worry that secretly he wants to be in Vienna. When we are driving some rustic, ancient Cadillac through Havana, I’ll worry that secretly he’d rather be on a train on the outskirts of Vienna. When we’re drinking mojitos I’ll suspect he’s craving coffees with whipped cream and liqueur. When we’re at a salsa club I’ll wonder if he’d rather be waltzing.

And so I’ll shit-test him. I’ll set conversational traps designed to get him to reveal the hidden depths of his resentment and his covert eagerness to be out of Cuba and away from this woman who makes him do things he doesn’t want to do.

That’s where convincing lands me. In a staked pit of insecurity.

And that’s just a vacation. Imagine the results when I apply my dubious art of convincing to commitment, marriage, mortgages and babies.

When I convince my partner to do something, I deny myself the certainty that he chose it. That he chose me. That he chose this thing we’re doing – a movie, a vacation, a happily-ever-after – because he wants it too.

The sweetest moments in the history of my love with my loverloverman are the moments when he said or did something incredible that I did not see coming. I did not engineer those moments or those words. I did not prompt them or bait them. They surprised me.

And when that happens – and it does, over and over again – I feel secure. I stop laying traps. I stop wondering if he’s ensnared by my powers of convincing and trust that he’s here because he loves me.

Learning this – not just knowing it on an intellectual level, but knowing it on a cellular level – has changed the way I walk in the world.

Now, when I want something – whether it be commitment or Cuba – I tell him what it means to me and then I give him the space to give it to me when he’s ready. When I don’t like something, instead of marshalling the evidence and structuring my unassailable case – you know, convincing him to stop that shit – I simply tell him how I feel. I tell him I don’t like something, it hurts me, and I leave it at that. I walk away from the issue and the wannabe argument for a couple of days.

And I trust. I trust that his heart is good and that his conscience is even better.

And I know both of these things are true.

And here’s what else I know:

You don’t have to convince the right man to do the right thing. That’s who he is. That’s what he does.

And what I’ve learned in love also applies to business: you don’t have to convince your people to be there with you. If you’ve got a skill and can help people, you don’t have to lay traps (aka conventional sales pages, gimmicky offers, false discounts, faux scarcity, fake prices – $99.99 isn’t fooling anyone) to catch ’em and keep ’em.

In matters of business and the heart, you don’t have to be a lonely hunter.

You can be a loving, vegan, stiff-spined social justice mystic. You can be an everyday Gandhi. You can be the change you want to see in the world.

(Or in your bedroom, at a coffee shop in Vienna, in your workshop or at a conference table.)

You don’t have to convince. You just have to ask. Then be patient. Trust.

Trust yourself. Trust your love. Trust that you’ve picked the right passion, the right partner and the right people.

March 28, 2011 | filed under: Uncategorized

46 people have we need you too.

mothersisterdaughterfriend: Woman.

Rumour has it that pregnancy and childbirth produce hormones that make you emotional.

I hereby officially confirm this rumour.

After the birth of my daughter, I wept during MADD commercials and nature programs; spent hours worshipping my sleeping baby whose birth was a cosmic event that would, hands-down, outshadow the second coming of Christ if I believed in that sort of thing and oh, I do; was suddenly overwhelmingly in love with my partner and ignored the all medical advice about waiting six weeks to have sex; and almost french-kissed the convenience store clerk for telling me he liked my hair.

And I fell in love with my mother.

When I saw my beloved, magnificent, miracle-baby in my mother’s arms, the fraught kaleidoscope of mother-daugther angst cleared to reveal a truth that levelled me. The way I overwhelmingly love, adore, fear, and worship my daughter, how I know that she is the best of me and more, is the way my mother loves me.

I am that loved. I am that loved.

—————-

Woman is not synonymous with mother; we women don’t have to be mothers to be “real” mothersisterdaughterfriends.

But we all have mothers. And many of us have, as I wrote, fraught relationships with them.

And, oftentimes, the tangled roots of our maternal relationships aren’t personal - aren’t always about the you and the me of our unique mother-daughter dyads - so much as cultural.

We are trained to dismiss and disparage our mothers, to distance ourselves from feminine power and wisdom and intimacy. As young children we wriggle out of their arms and refuse their good-bye kisses at school lest they embarass us in front of our classmates. As teens we make her drive us to the movies…but insist at being dropped down the block so no one can see her.

Good for her for driving right up to the box office and honking merrily as she drives away in her oversized Caprice.

(For some reason in this memory she’s wearing a burgandy velour housedress, but that can’t be right unless she was far more mischievious than I gave her credit for.)

And we’ve set up processes of distancing ourselves from our mothers as rites of passage and signifiers of adulthood.

———————-

Someone – possibly Gandhi – said that a nation’s greatness can be measured not by a tally of its exports or the strength of its economy but by the way it treats its weakest members. To some that means animals, children, or the elderly.

It certainly doesn’t mean mothers. They aren’t weak. We all know the power of our mothers and if we are lucky – and so many of us are - we can close our eyes, go to the golden days of four and five, and in that halcyon glow of a happy childhood remembered know that Mother was our sunshine. The centre of it all.

But it should mean mothers. One of the ways we can judge a culture is by the respect it accords its mothers.

Think, for a moment, about the bigdaddy (ahem) of all curse words: “mothafucka”.

That this is a slur is revealing: we, as a culture, believe it is degrading to make love to a woman who has borne children. A mother (apparently) isn’t a sex object; and if a woman isn’t a sex object, then, in the calculus of a capitalist patriarchal pyramid, her value - her cultural currency and capital - is diminished.

The more recent “MILF” suggests the same thing: surprise that a momma is desireable.

And this, in turn, reveals what – even now – are the functions of ‘woman’: to be sexed unmothers or unsexed mothers.

And so, when we are young woman – wanting to be recognized as adult women, wanting to be desired, wanting to step into the power of our sexuality, wanting wanting wanting – we push away our mothers. We struggle to identify with everything not-her even as her blood pumps through our veins and her eyes stare at us in the mirror. We reject her and our relationship with her to embrace culturally-prescribed, competitive, each-woman-for-herself, fuck-me femininity.

Or maybe that was just me.

————————–

I wish, when I was a girl, a teenager, and a young woman, that I had sidestepped the mother-hating of eighties sitcoms and movies; therapized, socially-sanctioned blame-the mothering; and misogynist cultural dictates that I must not be like my mother and so must denigrate her and distance myself from her. I wish that I had let my defiant sneer unbend into a smile. I wish I had delighted in and adored my mother the way my girls celebrate me.

That celebration was her due. It was her due as an unappreciated mother and that we don’t pay tribute more than one hallmarked day a year speaks volumes about how our culture (de)values women, children…and mothers.

I spent a long time making my mother into my Other instead of my sister.

And my mother is my sister. She’s yours too. We are women, we are all in this together, and what we ought to be teaching ourselves, each other and the world is this:

We are that loved. We are that loved.

March 8, 2011 | filed under: Family

13 people have we need you too.