What Downton Abbey Can Teach Us About Effective Communication.

And we're off! Downton Abbey season 4. Everyone is looking refreshed. The men look thinner and even the older ladies' faces more pert. I don't know what benefits get written into the contracts after a series hits it big like this but let's just say everyone looks more awake, even playing sad people in mourning. I also love how the season opens on Valentine's Day. Reminds me of that season of Mad Men that did the same. Inbuilt drama always, on Valentine's Day.

Initial observations.
(1)
I love watching the clothing that everyone wears evolve. We have gone from the Edwardian era to the beginning of the '20's and we can already see the jaunty turns of flapper fashion working their way into the evening wardrobes of people like Lady Mary and Lady Edith. With the men I see more subtle shifts but of course Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess looks appropriately steeped in traditional garb suited to her.

(2)
Hello! Lord and Lady Grantham are sleeping in the same bed. Yoo-hoo, did anyone else notice this? Where have I been...did this start last season (I admittedly missed an episode or two). I always thought they slept alone - or was "sleeping in my dressing room" just a euphemism for "being in the doghouse"? Doesn't Lord Grantham look like a cardboard cutout sitting there? Strange. I guess everyone is just swimming with the tide of the times.

(3)
I am awash in the lush detail of the costumes and set design. I die for "period dramas" and thought, when I discovered Downton Abbey in its lull between seasons 1 and 2 that I would be among a very small cadre of nerds watching this show. Imagine! A PBS Masterpiece Theatre show garnering such a wide swath of the American audience! So great - now we're all in this together. Never mind that my husband just about fell asleep watching hour 2 of the premiere with me.

(4)
I love that Mary and Matthew's baby is named George. How fitting, given the little prince born in England last summer. Do you think that was a shout out to the Royals?

(5)
Speaking of George, don't you love how no one gives much of a look to the kids until it's time to throw Nanny (Wicked Witch of the) West out on her ear? That was a close call.

(5)
All this wariness and hullaballoo about electricity. So funny that Ivy is afraid of the blender.

(6)
Mr. Barrow is Templeton the Rat of Downton. His deviant, self-serving behavior is kind of fun to watch and it's in rare form in this episode.

(7)
Love that dinner gong.

(8)
Who is King Knut?

Alright. Glad to see Mary breaking out of her mourning clothes and getting a little more informed. Michelle Dockery played the deadness of her new widow depression perfectly though did anyone else chuckle at how even with her voice seeming one register lower, her depressive demeanor is not much different than what we knew to be her "normal" state of being? She's so deliciously melancholy and snarky.

Mary's life has largely been the pivot on which a lot of the action in the series turns. But boy she can't catch much of a break - remember her first fiancee was killed on the Titanic in the very first episode? And then Mr. Pamuk, the GQ cover model of a "house guest" who died in her bed? Who's next? At least now she is a recognized half owner of the estate. Didn't you love the chit chat with Thomas about selling off the farmers' land as she stood on the hill overlooking her inheritance? I enjoyed that.

What I love about this drama is how much anger and vitriol surfaces with beautifully British turns of phrase. In Mary's pulling up Carson's indiscretion by saying,

"Carson, this is my fault. I'm afraid I may have encouraged you to feel you have the right to address me in this way...I'm sorry you feel entitled to overstep the mark. We're old friends, and as I said I'm sure this lapse is as much my fault as yours..."

I need to remember how to put people in their place Mary style when next needed.

Also to be noted is how much goes unsaid. I mean, the amount of deception and running around taking place at Downton! From Lord Grantham kissing the staff girl to dragging a dead body around the corridors in seasons past?!

Another very telling line about what fabulous communicators the Granthams and co. are: Violet's line as she shepherds Mary through the machinations of her inheritance:

"There can be too much truth in any relationship."

Really, now! I loved the sparkle in her eye as she said that. It about sums up half the interactions in this series. But that's what makes drama! Leave it to Fellowes and the other writers to give Maggie Smith understated zingers like this. That was a great line.

My other favorite line was

"What the --- " when Jimmy sees Rose dressed as a staff worker to meet the Dance Hall guy who schlepped all the way in from town on foot to see if "she's alright." Got to keep an eye on that one.

Until next week...

One of My Days As a Mother, in Action Verbs.

Career coaches are constantly droning on about how our resumes will be stronger if we use active language to convey the responsibilities of our varied job histories. In thinking about the treacherous terrain of forming a coherent resume / CV in the year ahead, I give you this. I had better duck; here come the herds of headhunters I knew would be a'comin'!


Executed.
New Year's plan for maximum efficiency and productivity by determining annual goals.


Procured.

• Discount vouchers for child's life-sustaining medicine (cost will soon go up due to ACA-Obamacare). 
• Healthy food from grocery store.

Negotiated.
Numerous sibling squabbles with patience, guidance with a startling degree of newfound equanimity.


Organized.

• Sorted, hung and contained clean clothing of family after folding three loads of laundry post-holiday vacation, washed in hot water to incinerate any last shred of lurking Norovirus. 
• My neglected manuscript, so as to begin concentrating on the piece as a whole (to edit).

Produced.
Three empty laundry baskets and delivered them to the laundry room.


Prepared.
After school snacks for hungry children who will arrive home in 3.5 hours.


Handled.
Call to pest control service after observing tiny jagged bite marks in plastic top of hot chocolate tin housed in lower kitchen cupboard this morning while preparing breakfast.


Navigated.

• Maze of voice mail tree when trying to contact said pest control service. 
• Three-tiered, staggered and color-coded complexities of the after school pick up car line.

Assessed.
Sizes of outgrown clothing for children, determined which pieces can be justifiably reused next season for younger sibling who will surely perform the "seasonal moan" about hand-me-downs.


Archived.
Holiday greeting cards received this year because even though most didn't bother to write a handwritten note on back I cannot in good conscience throw out photos of peoples' children and / or families.


Documented.
Already long-forgotten gifts kids received mostly from grandparents this Xmas, in preparation for supervising their pained writing of robotic thank you notes this week.


Administered.
Morning and evening doses of C2's daily life-sustaining medicines.


Monitored.

• Condition of car battery in sub-zero weather resulting from historic North American "Polar Vortex". 
• Alarm clock hawkishly at 5:30AM to determine whether kids' school had been delayed due to cold weather (school was on). 
• How much of C1's medicines are left before I must call in a refill to the pharmacy.

Assisted.

• In morning shoe tying debacle, sock finding and knit hat- and mitten-remembering on way out the door to school.
• In poetry memorization homework for C2.

Evaluated.

• Need for new furniture slipcover which likely succumbed to scissor puncture created by crafty children doing art projects in prohibited zone (on sofa).
• Reupholstery of living room chairs (decision = Yes).

Coordinated.
Dermatology and orthodontic appointments for C1 to minimize hours spent out of school.


Cooked.
Nutritious dinner for family of four who have wildly disparate notions of "what tastes good."


Drove.
(Logistical management). Met -- with seasoned precision -- deadline for morning drop off and afternoon pick up of C1 & C2 despite perplexing, sheep-like convoy of almost identical minivans driven by shivering, sleep-deprived parents.


Cleaned.

• Remnants of last evening's knitting and art projects left by kids in common living space.
• Kitchen (scrubbed extra due to possible presence of aforementioned mouse).

Purchased.
Long promised overpriced bedding set for C1's room after securing post-holiday sale bargain price.


Managed.
To find time to write this post, perhaps the most victorious achievement of all previously documented.

Our Stuff, Ourselves: More on the Culture of Fridges.

So today I was into my third day of tackling a project that's been ongoing since last December: dealing with sorting items that were displaced to our indoor sunroom (main level) when we had to clear them from our attic to prepare for re-insulation.

Talk about exchanging the solution of one problem for a florid new one. A new problem which feels uncannily like plumbing the recesses of your mind, to look squarely at the very things you try not to think about. It is a psychological clean out, if you will, of my family's relationship to our things. So here is my screed on "stuff" (I warned you. You may want to sit down with a cup of tea to read this one, it's long).

In another post, I mentioned reading an article which led me to a book which has now led me to a three part mini series on YouTube related to the book and the "mass abundance of the middle class." Please watch it but make sure to catch your jaw as it drops. It was a moment of hard reckoning for me. Because I was afraid of the feeling that it was only too easy to slide down a slippery slope into the same kind of reckless overconsumption that was evidenced there.

Nothing like the show Hoarders, mind you, (which I think is a disgusting spectacle to distract us from the more common effects overconsumption has on our lives), but that's what hit home. These were just mothers like me who were trying to successfully juggle the myriad elements of their and their family's daily lives, but were becoming buried under to the point that they've sacrificed the right to a clean, orderly and peaceful home. That's exactly what the book Life at Home in the 21st Century examines. No one starts out wanting or intending to be a slave to stuff. So how does it happen?

From what I can glean from the videos, it's the cheap over-availability of material goods that is largely the culprit. Add to that an organizing culture that has sprung into action to be a band aid on the broken arm of hyper consumerism and you have this perfect storm of people who are slaves to their stuff. I was particularly heartened, validated and irritated by the statement that it's mostly mothers (or perhaps we should say the parent at home in charge of the management of stuff) whose cortisol spikes the most upon gazing at clutter. I think I can relate.

Among the things stored in the many clear plastic bins I had initially planned to neatly catalog each time we sent something upward for safe keeping, were baby items, maternity clothes, old yearbooks, papers, and other memorabilia. It didn't go as well as I planned. Life happened, and organization took a back seat.

How much time do you spend tidying, cleaning, organizing, managing, or otherwise "churning" your family's stuff? How much proportionally do you feel is manageable or even justified? Since when does being a stay at home parent entail this never ending wrestling with things?

Maybe that's why people don't seem to understand what it is we "homemakers" do all day. I offer you this assertion to think about: all the overwhelm is because management of a household in the 21st century is more now than it's ever been, because many of us haven't realized that stuff is the problem, not the solution. Some people head out to the mall just to escape their stuff. And they buy more stuff. How's that for irony? Oh yes, we have all the modern conveniences, which just frees up our time to either buy junk or spend a disproportionate amount of time wrestling with and containing it.

We over parent, over schedule, over buy and over organize all the over buying. We are in a hyper mode on all counts. Then cooking nutritious MEALS, which is more nourishing to our loved ones than any amount of material junk we could buy them, falls by the wayside and we use frozen convenience foods more often than we'd like, saving ourselves a mere (gulp) 12 minutes of time per meal.

These are anthropologists who studied these families! I think their methods and their findings are worth paying attention to. I am fascinated because learning about this book has allowed me to push off some of the guilt I have about how darn difficult it is to maintain a house to the standards that are comfortable for me. As the person in charge of the stuff, and a busy mom with busy kids, the buck stops with me, so I am facing the fact I always knew: it's hard because there's too much stuff. As the man in the video mentioned earlier says, there are no inbuilt intuitive mechanisms and rituals for letting go of what comes into our homes. The weekly garbage pickup isn't enough. We need to get as comfortable with releasing as we are with consuming. And once we've done that, we will be of clearer mind to consider carefully what we purchase and bring into our home.

Stored maternity clothes: "just in case" 

Remember how a carefully considered look at the reality of the typical life of the 1950's housewife made us realize that the whole extreme happy homemaker facade was a construct to keep women at home so the men returning from the war had jobs to come home to? Ironically, I think the American pastime of being "a collector" hit its heyday around this time. What on earth does that have to tell us?

I think spikes in the cultural push to over consume coincide with an at home work force that gets pressed down disproportionately. What kind of forehead slapping will we do in 30 years when someone surmises that all the stuff and subsequent organizing of stuff and the industries around containerizing (is that really a word?) and "professional organizers" was just another way to keep overwhelmed homemakers from realizing their potential? Women can't do a lot of things if they are in a self-imposed gerbil mill of organizing work (I won't even call it housework because it has gone far beyond that).

Our aspirational culture that is built around selling us goods has a lot to do with the simultaneous guilt that arises from overconsumption and its close cousin, chronic disorganization. It's a perfect storm to literally set us up in a situation where it's almost impossible to win. We go to a big box organizing store (you know the one) and see the closets set up with five dresses on display to send you the message you should get this closet and you will be more organized. No! You should have five dresses. THAT is the solution. Stop buying or even looking at those magazines in the grocery checkout that show you images of perfectly organized homes. You won't have one until you stop buying junk.

The famous ELFA closet. source: www.containerstore.com

Modern suburban houses are built bigger to accommodate all the things we own and we in turn feel every square inch must be filled to capacity in order to make all the space worth having. I love you, my sweet urban house from 1925 with hardly any closets and tiny rooms.

Some of these organizing experts make me really wonder. Maybe they have so much time to organize because they've made a business out of presenting us with neatly prepped and primped examples of what things should look like. Another reason I have gotten rid of magazines and catalogs - they just train us to set crazily unrealistic goals. Not to mention they encourage us to solve the problem of clutter by buying more containers to store it all in. I really like Alejandra's tips but I can't escape the nagging feeling that the operative word in the phrase "organizing stuff" is "stuff." I just don't have more time to spend printing out labels and organizing things to that degree. Do you?

The lines on this container top look like prison bars!

This web site brings me hope. I love Leo Babauta, he's an inspiration and a smart guy. It's time for us all to really think about what good all these things do us and how much we can realistically use or even deal with.

A major clean out will bring the stumbling blocks of guilt, re-assessment of how you've spent money, and nostalgia but those are the signs you are making progress. I have to remember this. You do too.

My house is not going to magically sprout more closets and even if it did, I'm not sure I'd want more space because inventorying the items from the attic makes me realize not only did I forget half of what was up there, most of it I haven't interacted with in years and would be happy to have gone from our lives. I don't need more closets or ways to organize...I need less stuff! Few things in my life have made me more attuned to the extreme value of time than being a parent.