What Would The Talking Heads Say?

Probably exactly what I'm thinking to myself right now: How did I get here?

A little over a year ago my husband and I were living in a small Chicago condo with our energetic black lab/pitbull mix.  Life was pretty simple.  We both worked downtown all day and spent our evenings together watching TV, whipping up dinner and keeping the dog entertained.  We usually went out for dinner on the weekends and caught up with friends.  No muss.  No fuss.

But there was a quiet hum in the background of our life as we discussed our future with increasing frequency.  We wanted to start a family.  Oh sure, you can be a family with two people and a dog; but we wanted the whole kit and caboodle including a house, a yard and kids.

So we began "making plays" as my husband, who is prone to sports analogies, said at the time.  We wanted to get out of Chicago and escape to someplace slower-paced with a lower cost of living and  with room for us to stretch our legs.  But we also didn't want to be too far from family and friends.  Milwaukee was the obvious solution.  Moving to Milwaukee would put us closer to his family (though a bit further from mine) and we would be just a short hour and a half drive to Chicago.  He began looking for jobs.  I began lobbying for a transfer to my company's Milwaukee office.

Things didn't go exactly according to our obsessively-thought-out plan, but we did move to Milwaukee on our designated timeframe (both of us with jobs).  We moved into a rented house - a garage! a yard! a basement! - and found tenants for our Chicago condo.  A week later, we found out I was pregnant.  And a few short weeks later at the doctor's office we found out it was twins.  Major curveball.

The seven months of my pregnancy flew by, despite being on doctor-imposed "house arrest" for over two months and another two weeks of full-blown bed rest before our little girls arrived.  They were seven weeks early and spent the first five weeks of their tiny lives in the hospital's NICU.  Luckily, they were healthy and began to thrive almost immediately.  In the meantime, we ran out of room in our little rental house and went looking for a more permanent solution.  We bought a classic colonial in the Milwaukee suburbs - an attached garage! a big yard! a semi-finished basement! - and moved in a week before I went back to work.  Upon my return to the workforce I began working from home and we hired a nanny.  And then we breathed a collective sigh of relief.

We put the tumult of the previous year behind us and prepared to gratefully settle in to our new life.  My new life isn't as sexy as my old city life in Chicago.  We rarely go out to eat.  I don't remember the last time I went to a yoga class.  There was a three week stretch right after we moved in when I didn't unpack my shoes; I didn't leave the house and only wore my slippers.  

There's little doubt that I'm still settling in to this new life and learning what it means to be a mom.  But I love it.  It's totally different from anything I've done before and I have a lot to learn about being happy in my new situation, but I smile every day and I'm so grateful that our big plans have worked out to this point.

Obama's Bad Week

It’s been a rough week for the Obama administration, struck with a trifecta of bad PR.  First, the Benghazi attack fallout continues to buzz about the president like a pesky, persistent bug.  Then, the revelation that the Justice Department went to extraordinary lengths to collect the phone records of AP journalists as part of the DOJ’s investigation into last year’s leak of classified information regarding a terror plot.   Perhaps the most irksome story for the admin is the IRS’s targeting of groups with conservative-sounding names under pressure from George Soros-funded affiliates.  

And just when Obama was looking forward to his weekend and thinking about cleaning up his clubs, CNN reports that the U.S. Marshals Service, which runs the Witness Security Program, has lost track of two participants in the program.  Oh, and by the way, these guys are identified by the Marshals as “known or suspected terrorists”.  

At this point, even John Boehner is offering Obama a pull from his whiskey bottle.

When Being Identical Doesn't Mean Being the Same

Look up ‘identical’ and you’ll find meanings such as “being the same”, “similar in every detail”, “exactly alike”, “alike in every way”.  What you won’t find are the exact same words repeated in each place you look.  While all the meanings are the same, the words that are used are slightly different. They aren’t carbon copies.  

My identical twin girls also can’t be defined in exactly the same way as one another.  They look very much alike – and, yes, we still color in M’s big toe with permanent marker, just in case – but they are two different people.  And they’re changing every day, further defining themselves as individuals who started from the same mold but who will mold each other as they grow and will take different shapes along the way.

They also cannot be defined in relation to one another.  Hubby and I have made a commitment to not fall into the twin trap of assigning character traits based on behaviors we maybe wouldn’t have noticed if we didn’t have a ready side-by-side comparison.

In the first few weeks after we brought them home A had a few nights where she was fussier and more difficult to put to bed than M was.  It would have been very easy to label her “the difficult one” or “the strong-willed one”.  But if we had done that, might we have treated her differently? And I don’t mean differently from her sister; I mean differently from how we would have treated her had she not had those fussy nights.  And then, does giving her that label become a self-fulfilling prophecy? If you label the behavior, doesn’t it become easier to spot? So we’ve worked hard not to pigeon-hole our girls into some convenient set of adjectives.  Fast forward a few months and I wouldn’t say that A is the fussier baby.  In fact, the last couple of days, M has been a bit on the sensitive side and more difficult to soothe than normal.  A, on the other hand, has been pretty laid back.  We can put her in her crib wide awake and she’ll fall asleep without our help.  I don’t think this means that M is the needy one and A is the self-sufficient one.  I wouldn’t make those assignations to my baby if I only had one, would I? Of course not.  I’d say, “She’s going through a fussy stage,” or “She’s been very easy to please lately.  I sure hope it lasts!”  That’s just the way they happen to be right now.  

So we’ll continue to watch them develop into the adorable little people they’re becoming and we’ll try to see them for who they are, not for who they aren’t (their twin sister).  But we’ll also keep the Sharpie handy for M’s big toe.  You know, just in case. 

(March 2013)

In Defense of Abercrombie & Fitch (kind of)

I have never considered myself an Abercrombie & Fitch customer.  I think I’ve owned two or three A&F items in my life and one of those was a pair of socks.  All were gifts.  I have never been a part of A&F’s demographic.  Not due to my size, but due to my place in the social strata.  I was never an outsider; far from it.  But I was also never a part of the core group of “cool” kids either.  I hovered on their fringes, occasionally embraced as a part of the group, but never really belonging completely.  Admittedly, I put A&F clothes on my Christmas list for several years in a row while I was in my late teens and in their target demographic.  Occasionally I got a sweater (or the aforementioned socks).  My parents, rightly, recognized that A&F was an over-priced brand with very little of value to offer their daughter.  

Fast forward fifteen years or so and, like so many others who have read the comments made by the CEO of A&F, I am repulsed by the brand and what it unabashedly proclaims to represent.  It is exclusionary and judgmental.  It values superficiality in its most obvious forms – a slim build and a pretty face.  It is vapidity with a logo.  And yet this is an essay in defense of the company and its brand.  

I think we can all agree that CEO Mike Jeffries is the douchebag to end all douchebags.  His shallow and cruel statements this week reveal that much; but I would argue that he also has a laser-like focus on his core market.  The insipid Trixies and Chads who tote Daddy’s credit card into the pulse-pounding, cologne-soaked A&F storefronts are often the most exclusionary, judgmental, shallow and cruel kids in school.  Jeffries understands this and he understands them.  He said horrible things, but he was honest and he nailed the mentality of his target market.  He recognizes that the cache of the A&F brand is in its exclusivity and any attempt to reach outside of that core erodes the value of the brand.  

John Deere doesn’t market to white collar Wall Street.  FUBU doesn’t market to rich white kids.  Rolex doesn’t market to blue collar workers.  These brands know who their target markets are and so do we; they just don’t have a CEO who unapologetically and publicly tells us who their products aren’t intended for.

Ultimately, I believe Mike Jeffries erred by being so forthright.  Media firestorms are often good for brands (in the long run), but in this case he has put his target market in the unfortunate position of having to defend their buying decision.  This puts the cool kids in unfamiliar territory.  The cool kids don’t defend their choices, because they’ve never had to.  You don’t get to be one of the cool kids by going out on a limb.  You conform.  You play it safe.  If your A&F emblazoned t-shirt is no longer a safe choice, do you wear it? Do you buy another one? Perhaps not.