Thanks to everyone who came to the Mark Horn Tarot + Kabbalah workshop—that was fun! You can find the video here. Mark will be hosting a workshop on a five card spread on June 8th ($25) on his website—you can register here. Meanwhile, he’s offered to come back to Pulling the Thread to teach us a three card spread, so stay tuned.
New York City friends: I’ll be in conversation with the inimitable Dr. Robin Berzin at Parsley Health in New York City on Wednesday, May 1 at 6:30pm. The title of the event: “Sick & Obedient or Healthy & Rebellious?: How Expectations on Women Affect Our Health.” You can buy a ticket HERE.
I had the chance to spend an hour with Anne Lamott a few months ago, a podcast guest who has been at the top of my wish list since I started podcasting six years ago. It was as wonderful as I thought it would be, even though I was a bit nervous, which is rare for me. Anne is the type of writer who says the things out loud—the things we can barely admit to ourselves, and so before we chatted, I imagined that if she felt put upon by having to do the interview (not uncommon when you’re fatigued on book press) she might say it. And then we would need to sit there and just blink at each other over Zoom. These are the types of things I feel bad about: Putting people out, inconveniencing them, wanting something from them that maybe they’re loathe to give. In this case, I wanted Anne Lamott’s time, and energy, and attention, and even her affection. (She was generous with all four, and we had some good laughs.)
But oh, that quiet wanting. Someone once said to me that I’m the type of person who refuses to sit at a table unless I feel explicitly invited, and this is true—not only because I love to spend time alone (which includes eating solo at bars when I travel), but also because I don’t want to impose. To impose feels like death. The relative exile I choose instead is very comfortable, but I’ve always wondered whether I’ve trained myself for this preference, and am actually lonely and don’t know how to identify it.
If you’ve ever read Anne’s books, you know her mom, whom she writes about with some frequency. In one of her books, I’m not sure which, Anne writes about how her mother always took the broken egg, or the mangled piece of cake, or the dregs. She’d serve everyone else and take what was left, establishing the same pattern in Anne. This is a familiar position, one that I learned from my mom as well. I don’t share it with my husband, nor my dad. I mean, sure, I steal some of my kids’ curly fries, but I mostly wait until everyone is done until I go in for the clean-up. My husband, meanwhile, sharks all their food—I hear frequent plaintive cries that their ice cream has disappeared from the top drawer in the freezer. The truth is, I abstain, but obviously I want to join him—and I’m often flash furious that he feels no compunction whatsoever to restrain himself. In some ways, that oxygen mask goes on him first, without fail.
In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Anne Lamott writes, “We humans screw up; that is our nature. Francis Spufford wrote in his book, Unapologetic that the human propensity is to fuck things up. There is a flaw in our genetic and social coding, which is why we keep kicking up errors in the form of damage to our relationships, to ourselves, and to the planet. Most of the blame goes to the ego, protecting and promoting itself without a thought for the neighbor, the community, the divine. It is always trying to get away with more, while obsessing about how unfair it is that others get away with so much. It’s the part of me that always wants the bigger cookie and glares at someone else if they take it before I can. It’s the part of me that would have me pushing aside women even older than I am to get to the Titanic lifeboats.” (p. 81-82)
This part made me laugh because me too, Anne, me too. I can feel myself glare as a type. The dual tides of restraint and desire run amok in me.
We talked about this section in our podcast conversation. I asked Anne to tell me what the right move would have been for her mother, and how her parenting could have patterned Anne in a different way, one where she looked after herself first—or at least ensured that her needs were met. I asked her about whether women really should serve others first, and whether this whole paradigm isn’t messed up. She didn’t dunk this ball like I expected her to. Instead, she offered that there was real love and beauty in her mother’s restraint, and that the whole thing is actually a paradox—because giving and serving love specifically, is the greatest gift. That no, her mother shouldn’t have necessarily scarfed the best piece of cake, even if she might have deserved it, because she seemed to get more from giving.
It’s a quandary, no? I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the weeks since we spoke, turning it over in my mind, trying to understand exactly what Anne meant. And I think I finally get it. In our upside-down world, a patriarchal world that valorizes the masculine and devalues the feminine, we’re missing the point that women do it right. We’re the ones to watch. Rather than behaving like men, as we’re all subtly encouraged to do, the world would be mightily improved if everyone could be more like us.
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
4/18: Hitting the road with poet Joy Sullivan
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
4/11: The unbearable beams of love with Anne Lamott
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
4/4: Understanding the Drama Triangle with Courtney Smith
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
3/28: The collective power of teenage girls with Mattie Kahn
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
3/21: Breaking family patterns with Vienna Pharaon
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
3/14: The upsides of menopause with Lisa Mosconi, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
3/7: On the scientific and the spiritual with Jeffrey Kripal, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/29: Five things I’ve been thinking about (Solo Episode)
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/22: The basics of Spiral Dynamics with Nicole Churchill
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/15: On being “Basic” with Kate Kennedy
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/8: On maintaining sexual desire with Emily Nagoski PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/1: On the essential nature of relational conflict with John & Julie Gottman, PhDs
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
THE LATEST POSTS:
On Beauty: Do You Feel Invisible?
The Cosmic Egg: We are Missing THE Story
Intergenerational Anxiety: Understanding which Part is Ours
One Thing We Need to Learn: A Few Notes on Andrew Huberman
You Have to Start Where You Are
Synchronicity & Fate: Signs are Signs, But They Still Require Discernment
PART 4: The Achilles Heel of Women
PART 3: Who Gets to Be an Expert?
PART 2: The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity
PART 1: Ending the “Manel”—Doing this Requires Understanding Ourselves
My Baby-Thin Skin: The Shame of “Disappointing” People and Our Doubled Selves
What Size Are Your Shoes? And More Pointedly, is Your Life Governed by Fear?
If You Build It, They Will Come: Maybe?
Entering the Wilderness: Embracing All that’s Not Human
Accepting Responsibility: Growing Up is Hard
Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
I loved this part of the podcast when you discussed the idea of moms getting the leftovers or the cracked egg. It made me think about my upbringing and what my cousins and I called “The mom piece of cake.” I’m Albanian, and I have a large family. Guests often came over, and my job as a young girl was to make coffee/tea and to take out cake and fruit for the company. Everyone knows the first slice of cake that gets cut is always the messiest and ugliest. Whenever I cut the first ugly piece of cake, I would say to myself, “That’s ok, that’s the mom piece.” That's the piece that would go to my mom. There was comfort in knowing I could give my mom the imperfect piece. In the performative task of serving our company - which came with a lot of pressure - the mom piece was my safe place.
"The relative exile I choose instead is very comfortable, but I’ve always wondered whether I’ve trained myself for this preference, and am actually lonely and don’t know how to identify it. " - Oof, that one hit hard.