فصل 10

CHAPTER 10

The Lie

I SHOULD BE FURTHER ALONG BY NOW

Last week I sat around with a group of women enjoying a glass of wine and a chat. The women around me were all ages, came from different cities, and had various backgrounds. Some had families, some didn’t, but all of them were what I would describe as successful. The topic of age came up and whether or not we liked to celebrate our birthdays and the passing of another year. The general consensus was definitely not.

This threw me for a loop.

I’m one of those people who loves her own birthday. I plan it months in advance and make long lists of things I want to do (wear sweatpants all day!) or what I want to eat (spinach artichoke dip with a funfetti cake for dessert!). I look forward to it with the same childlike glee as I did as a third grader. It’s not just the actual celebration I like either; I wear each passing year with pride, and I truly don’t care what age I am one way or another.

I know that women don’t like growing older. That cliché has been around for as long as we’ve recorded history, I’m sure. But I had never really asked anyone why they felt that way. So I asked this group of ladies. I wanted to know what they disliked so much about growing older. The answer, at its core, was the same for every single person.

I expected some reference to looking older or even feeling older physically. I’d always assumed it had to do with lost youth, and maybe for certain people that’s true. But this group’s issue with passing time wasn’t about what was happening.

They disliked growing older because of what wasn’t happening.

You see, they’d all made plans. As little girls or adolescents or women in their early twenties, they’d made all sorts of them. Little plans and big plans and grandiose shoot-for-the-moon plans that they assumed would have been accomplished long before now. And while they had checked many things off their list, there were still those nagging few . . . the hanging chads of wishes and dreams that still hadn’t come to fruition. So, for them, birthdays served as a reminder of all the things they hadn’t achieved.

For some, they fell short of a career or financial goal. Others wanted to be married or have children. They had set themselves on some sort of course long ago, and each year they didn’t reach that preconceived destination was a harsh reminder of the promises they were breaking to themselves.

Who hasn’t fallen for this lie? I can’t count the number of times in my life when I’ve beaten myself up because I thought my goals had expiration dates. (As a sidenote What a downer attitude about a day that is supposed to be filled with buttercream icing!) But, ladies, we need to recognize that this mentality doesn’t do any of us any good. We’re focusing all of our attention on the absence of something.

Imagine a little baby taking her first step. She’s joyful and chubby and she’s been balancing in place without holding on to the coffee table for weeks now. Finally, finally, she takes her first coltish stumble from the relative safety of the side table, then wobbles across the perils of the living room rug to grasp the edge of the sofa. She gets there and looks up at you with elation and pride and so much excitement. Now imagine you give her a quick, brittle smile and demand, “Yes, Chloe, that’s fine, but why aren’t you running by now?”

Can you imagine the dismay that baby girl would feel? What kind of parent has that kind of reaction to a child who’s just learning to do something new? It would be unheard of for a mother to react so harshly, to judge a baby on what she hasn’t yet had the time or life experience to figure out. And yet . . . and yet we do it to ourselves all the time.

Our own negative self-talk can be more damaging than the emotional abuse heaped on us by a hateful parent. It’s also far more insidious because there’s nobody there to stop it, since we rarely even realize it’s happening. Beating ourselves up about all the things we think we’re doing wrong becomes a litany of white noise. Eventually we don’t even hear it anymore.

And for what? Because you thought you’d be partner at your firm by forty? Because you can’t believe how much weight you’ve gained since having kids? Because your sister is already married and you’re not even dating anyone? Because you dropped out of college and didn’t get your degree? And you’re thinking with every passing hour and day and week that it’s too late?

I call bull crap.

God has perfect timing. If you aren’t of a similar faith, think of it as everything happening exactly when it’s supposed to. You look at your life and the eight things you thought you’d have accomplished by thirty-five and feel depressed. But maybe it’s just that you don’t have enough life experience yet. You’re like the baby who’s balancing in the middle of the room on chubby baby thighs—maybe you have to get your bearings for a while longer.

Or maybe that goal wasn’t ever meant to be yours. Maybe you are destined for something so much cooler, which won’t come until five years down the road. Maybe you have to walk through this space you’re in to be ready for that. Nothing is wasted. Every single moment is preparing you for the next. But whether or not you choose to see this time as something wonderful—the time when God is stretching you and growing you or maybe forging you in fires hotter than you think you can withstand—all of it is growing you for the person you’re becoming, for a future you can’t even imagine.

When I decided to try and get pregnant for the first time, I thought I’d snap my fingers and be expecting the next minute. It took eight months to conceive. Eight months of hoping, eight months of crying every time I got my period, eight months of trying not to be jealous of the women around me who were pregnant, eight months of being sad when it didn’t happen the way I thought it should.

The morning I finally took a test that showed me two pink lines, I ran over to the mirror to look at my face. I kept thinking, I never want to forget how I looked when I found out I would be a mother. I can still see myself in that mirror, wide-eyed and filled with shock and wonder.

Jackson Cage Hollis was born on January 30, 2007, and he is one of the greatest joys in my life. He loves computer games, cooking with me, and wears a stack of rainbow-colored rubber bracelets on his right wrist at all times because “they’re cool, Mom, that’s why.” Guys, if I had gotten pregnant at any point during those eight months of trying, I wouldn’t have had Jackson.

God has perfect timing.

I used to dream of being the biggest event planner in Los Angeles. I wanted a big staff and a fancy office and the highest-paying clients in town. Year after year I kept thinking, This is the year I’ll need a staff of twenty. This is the year I’ll produce the Governor’s Ball. This is the year I’ll bring home a million dollars. (I’m a dreamer, you’ll recall.) And every year we grew but not as big as I hoped, and I’d feel so depressed that I wasn’t as successful as I wanted to be.

Then my little blog—which was only ever supposed to be a marketing tool for the events company—started to grow a fan base, and I absolutely loved testing out recipes for them or talking about how to decorate a living room. Eventually the site became my full-time business, and a college dropout without any knowledge of tech or digital media found herself running a lifestyle media company with fans in the millions. Beyond that, this work is so much more fun and gratifying than the events ever were. If I’d had the biggest events company in LA with the staff and the millions, I wouldn’t have had time to write the little blog that would eventually become my career and change the trajectory of my life completely.

God has perfect timing.

Dave and I walked through a long adoption journey. Nearly five years ago we started the process to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia. After mountains of paperwork and nearly a year of filing and preparing and getting fingerprints done for the hundredth time, we were officially vetted and waiting for a match. Two years of waiting later, the adoption program in Ethiopia imploded and we found out that continuing to wait for a match was futile. We had to mourn the loss of the life, and the daughter, we had imagined for ourselves.

We started over. We decided to adopt through foster care in LA County because we recognized that the need was great. During that journey we took in two little girls through foster care, and I sobbed for weeks after they had to leave us. Two months later we got a call about newborn twin girls that would be ours. We brought them home from the hospital at six days old, we named them, and I experienced a love that can’t properly be explained. Unbeknownst to us, their biological father decided he wanted them, and five weeks later the babies I thought were my daughters were taken back.

I wasn’t sure how to think or feel, and I truly didn’t know if I had it in me to try again for adoption. I knew I was letting my fear control me, that the worry about giving my heart away again only to have it stomped on kept me from taking a next step. In the midst of such heartache, it’s hard not to worry. I cried so many tears, thinking, Lord, why would you put this desire on my heart if it wasn’t ever going to come true? And, God, if we try again, you’re not actually sending my heart out to be slaughtered, right? Because this process with court dates and bio parents and doctor visits and trauma and the Department of Child and Family Services—that was already hard enough . . . You’re not going to eviscerate us at the end of this, right? Right?!

Amid these fearful thoughts, I heard him ask me, Do you have faith in my plan or not?

That is what it boils down to faith. The belief that your life will unfold as it was meant to, even when it unfolds into something painful and difficult to navigate. Do I believe he has a plan? Absolutely. I’ve seen the proof of it too many times to consider anything else. That means I have to hold on to that belief even when the process isn’t simple or easy or safe.

I could make a list for you all day. I could point out a hundred different moments in my life when I thought I should have something and was so upset about not getting it, only to discover in retrospect that it wasn’t ever meant to be mine. Looking back, I think that was the case with my daughter. The other girls were only meant to be ours for a little while—and for whatever reason, we were only meant to be theirs for a short time. We were a part of each other’s journey, a stop along the way to the ultimate destination, even if we won’t be there to see each other reach it.

As I sit editing this chapter, my daughter is asleep in a bouncy seat on the kitchen table next to my computer. Just five months after the twins left, five months after I could not imagine trying to adopt again, we were matched with her first-mom through independent adoption. That season was filled with anxiety. I was so terrified of the things that could go wrong—that had gone wrong in the past—that I could hardly function. But what came out of the experience was a relationship with both Noah and her first family that is so special it could only have been crafted by the divine. And yet again I am reminded that God has perfect timing.

If you have a goal, that’s fantastic! I am one of the most motivated people you will ever meet, and my list of life goals is nine miles long. But I’ve learned that along with my list of goals, I have to give myself some grace. Being married by twenty-five, pregnant at thirty, and the president of my division before I turned forty are just arbitrary numbers. Because guess what? None of those preconceived notions or plans for myself worked out. Marriage and babies came way earlier than I thought . . . and career success came way later. Turns out, the most beautiful things in my life were never on my to-do list.

Today there may be items on your to-do list, but you also have a long list of things you have achieved. You’ve already done little things and big things . . . goals you accomplished years ago that are on someone else’s bucket list. Focus on what you have done. Pay attention to the tiny steps you took across the living room carpet on wobbly legs. Celebrate the small moments. They’re sacred, even if they aren’t stepping stones to something else. Nothing is more important than today.

God has perfect timing, and it’s highly possible that by not being where you thought you should be, you will end up exactly where you’re meant to go.

THINGS THAT HELPED ME . . .

1. Making a list. Seriously. List out everything you’ve accomplished to date. In fact, write yourself a letter about your tenacity! I took a workshop with Elizabeth Gilbert last year, and she asked us to do this—to speak from the part of ourselves that has achieved so much, that refused to back down. You want to see a room full of people sobbing? Ask them to do this task. When you force yourself to admit to all the things you have accomplished, you’ll realize that it’s wrong to be so hard on yourself for all the things you haven’t.

2. Talking to someone. Many times we don’t admit to the way we’re feeling because we’re too embarrassed. But when you have someone you can talk to, who will listen to you say, “I feel worthless because I’m not a rock star by now,” then you can experience the balm of their validation. “Are you kidding me right now?!” they’ll say. “Look at all the rad things you’ve done! You are amazing. Stop being so hard on yourself!” Remember, when you keep silent, you give those lies power.

3. Setting goals, not time limits. I love goals. They can help you become your best self . . . but big dreams shouldn’t have expiration dates. As long as you’re working toward the things you hope to accomplish, it shouldn’t matter if it takes you a month or a decade.