The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (26 page)

These memories are potent, and one of her favorite pictures is a photograph of twenty people from four generations of her family sitting around her childhood dinner table. It reminds her that a big meal is the central part of the family. She thinks about how her father always treated her mother sweetly, always complimented her on the amazing food she prepared. Tom is now treating her the same way.

Gina needs to sit down at the kitchen table with Tom—but not over a plate of pasta—and hash out her feelings, explaining to him that when he focuses only on food she feels less like his bride and more like his mother.

The key process here is “too much of a good thing is a bad thing”—she can love the tradition of putting a great meal on the table, but she doesn’t have to do it every night. Maybe one night he makes dinner, or they go out. But she has to express how she’s feeling before she gets fed up
and throws the pot of Bolognese sauce at him.

Tom is shocked when she starts the conversation, saying he didn’t know she felt so strongly about this. To him, she had always initiated the dinner conversation, practically first thing every morning, as in, “What would you like tonight? I have to know before I go to the store.” Then he felt as if he was paying attention to her by calling in the afternoon and checking on how she was doing. It was meant to be loving, not bossy, he explains. Gina’s relieved but also a bit nervous about being thought of as less than the perfect wife. She says, “Don’t tell your mother. She’ll think I’m lazy or not good enough for you.” But by realizing that she brought this dynamic to her marriage as surely as she carried her recipe book into their home, she can put the cookbook away for a night and pick up a take-out menu.

Catherine adds that once you have expressed your feelings, you have to stand by your words and convictions. Don’t slip back by dint of habit but respect your limits and follow through with your resolutions. It’s easy to fall into old patterns, but your frustration will ultimately return, so you have to be willing to be a little uncomfortable until you establish new routines.

Her pearl: You’re not your mother. Be authentic, true to you.

Sandy is a retired high school principal who now teaches English as a second language at a community college. She loves her work and is very
busy running an organization she started that mentors schoolchildren around the city. She also always has had full responsibility for her household, since her husband, Glenn, owns a construction company and spends more time on the site than he does at home. When Glenn is home, he spends a lot of time watching TV, reading the newspaper, and asking Sandy where he left his glasses.

He can’t make himself dinner, and Sandy can’t even send him to the store for salad dressing or a ripe tomato, because she knows he’ll get the wrong thing. It’s learned helplessness, and Sandy knows she is complicit in it. “Glenn’s a great husband, father, and now grandfather, but he doesn’t—and never has—done much around the house.” This always irritated Sandy, and now Glenn is starting to feel agitated as well, because Sandy’s not home as much, since she has become the go-to babysitter for her grandchildren. Now Glenn is getting grumpy.

“It’s as if he’s in competition with our grandkids, vying for my time and attention. Maybe I’ve overindulged him as a traditional wife, but we are both in good health and have a lot of years ahead of us, God willing, so we are going to have to make some changes if our marriage is to survive.”

Catherine would suggest that although Sandy’s main complaint about Glenn is that he is too dependent on her, she has allowed this to happen. Now she wants to change the dynamic, but she first may need to visit some other rooms, since this pattern started when she was a child who loved to be needed. Her primary relationship growing up was with her mother and was fraught with overdependence, since her mother was needy and controlling, and the way Sandy dealt with it was to comply in order to defuse the tension and keep the peace.

But Sandy’s also having issues with the fact that at sixty she’s feeling young, fit, and healthy, whereas Glenn is becoming stagnant, more set in his ways, and happy to stay home all the time. If it were up to him, he would leave the house only to play golf.

Sandy’s urge is to go off to see those two adorable “little people” who are her grandchildren, and she feels she is missing their most important years. “I want them to know me and rely on me.” She explains that Glenn
is the love of her life and her life partner…but she wants an equal partner. A grown-up who can take care of himself. She needs to drag him into the kitchen and have a conversation with him about whether he prefers a stack of take-out menus or a freezer full of entrées. Or he can make a few dinner dates with his pals at the club, because if she is free to go have “fun,” so is he.

Catherine says Sandy has to acknowledge that she is enabling Glenn’s dependency, since for forty years she has enjoyed being needed by him. The key process here is “too much of a good thing is a bad thing,” since she taught him a form of learned helplessness. She colluded with him in perpetuating the idea that he couldn’t do anything for himself around the house.

We’d add this pearl: If you want to stop a spouse from acting like a baby, stop babysitting him.

Brenda is an executive recruiter who never got less than an A-in school. She took time off after her second child was born ten years ago, and she spends an extraordinary amount of time socializing, entertaining, and yes, cleaning house. She doesn’t even mind that her friends call her a neat freak. “I don’t think that it’s anything to be embarrassed about. What’s so wrong about liking to have my home looking beautiful? Part of it is that we don’t live in a mansion, so small spaces get easily cluttered.”

The other part, she admits, is that cleaning gives her a reassuring illusion of control over her world. “I clean before I do anything. I can’t sit down and read a book or the paper when there’s a mess. So this means some days I get to the end of the day and realize I haven’t done anything but chores, and then I get resentful because my husband comes home and doesn’t help.”

She is trying to relax a bit, but it’s not easy. “I’ve definitely become more relaxed, but I’m one of those 300 percent people, and anything I do becomes my identity. So when I used to work, I was a raging maniac. Now that I’m home, I’m totally controlling about the house.” She is also controlling about everyone who lives there, and she’s driving her family crazy.

Bill, Brenda’s husband, has never cared about neatness. He walks into the house, drops his coat on the back of a chair in the living room and gets newsprint on the sofa’s yellow upholstery when he reads the paper. “I have asked him to hang up his coat, and not leave newspapers on the couch. But he cannot seem to remember this. He says that he works hard all day and doesn’t want to be ‘working’ when he gets home. He basically says that he won’t help! I’m not asking that he clean the toilet, or even the dishes, but just hang up your damn coat!”

One night, they had a bigger fight than usual about a late fee on a bill, and she made a sarcastic reference to his giant pile of mail on the desk. “He told me that his desk was off-limits, then screamed, ‘I don’t work for you!’ He slept on the couch that night.”

Catherine says Brenda is treating her family like the staff she used to employ, and they are ready to quit! She grades everything in her life—how the house looks, how her kids are acting, how her body looks, and how her husband is doing at work.

From Brenda’s point of view, her family isn’t making the grade. But they don’t seem to care, and that bothers her even more. At times her husband will make a mess or let the kids watch TV on a school night, and she thinks this is his way of undermining her parenting and house-running philosophy.

Catherine thinks these two may have some bigger problems that have
been swept under the living room rug. They need to sprint to the kitchen table and talk. Brenda needs to understand that she is overinvested in how her house looks because it represents her ego. She needs to “let go” of her grading system and realize that her family members aren’t extensions of her. That is where the problem really lies—in the bathroom. Brenda is a narcissist, since she sees everyone in her personal sphere as a reflection of herself. But the truth is she is only in charge of herself.

She is so busy keeping everything tucked in that she isn’t enjoying the unmade bed, or the creative mess that is part of raising kids in a busy world. So the question is: Once she gets to the kitchen table with her husband, what’s reasonable? Can she ask that they clean up on a Sunday night and at least get organized before the work week begins? Or is it fair to ask that the kids make their beds and keep their rooms relatively neat most of the time? One sock out of place shouldn’t mean an F.

Brenda needs to express herself directly and respectfully and “ask” but not demand that things get a little better. It’s not “my way or the highway” when you’re dealing with a spouse and kids. To express herself and how she’s feeling, she doesn’t need to act bossy. Not “Clean up your mess!” but “I’d love it if you could put away your things.”

Brenda and Bill had that conversation at the kitchen table, which led her to realize that to change the outcome she had to first change herself, as in A + B = C. She can tell herself,
This is pass/fail, not a graded honors course in AP Neatness.

Overachiever or not, she isn’t achieving the desired result of a happy home. “I promised Bill I’d try to relax on the clean-freakiness, and to stop nagging, and he offered to put his clothes away.” So now when the messes happen she tries to take a deep breath and tell herself she can always clean it up tomorrow, or later tonight, when everyone’s asleep.

“This little piece of paper kicks my ass every day. I never want to go to sleep because I don’t have my work done. And I wake up and think, OMG, I have so much to do! I know the day will go well if I can knock off like six out of eight, but sometimes I don’t even get half of it done. I even put some things on my list that are already done so I can cross them off. It feels like a cheat, but I like the look of the list that’s partly conquered.”

When asked what kind of things are on her list, Pauline answers, “Anything and everything that occurs to me that I have to do or want to do. Things like writing this article I have in mind, reading the newspapers, working out, cooking for the shelter, shopping for the house, errands like getting the old lamp I found at the flea market rewired, getting to the library at school to read to the kids for an hour, making my hubby a special dinner, etc., etc., etc.”

She sounds invigorated as she reels off her list, her eyes bright with excitement at the idea of achieving it all. “I try to keep it a mix of big things, little things, long-term plans, and short-term things, easy stuff to get done. Then if I don’t do something I feel so inadequate.”

But while she can expect to get a workout in or that lamp to the electrician’s, she may not knock off the 2,500-word article for the newspaper, and she certainly can’t cook every night and get to the school to help out, and make time for her workout. The mix of big and little may make her feel important and busy, but it’s also part of what’s tripping her up, and she has to recognize that she’s in a pattern of overstriving and under-delivering.

And one thing is missing from her list: a breather. Without time for reflection, you’re a hamster on a wheel, going nowhere. You never evolve.

And just like a hamster that is always in motion, just going around
and around for the joy of the motion is an end unto itself. There is something soothing about the movement, even as it occurs to her it’s an artificial sense of accomplishment.

Catherine says Pauline is exhibiting the “manic defense.” It’s a way of constantly moving so you don’t have to look at the bigger questions. If you stay in motion, you don’t have a chance to sit still and figure out what’s actually bothering you. You feel like you’re being productive, and you can fool yourself into thinking that you would have felt even better if you’d gotten more done. But the truth is the opposite. Having more time to think—and appreciate the moment—would have made what you
did
accomplish feel more meaningful.

Catherine would advise Pauline to get to a quiet place, a personal space, where she can figure out what she’s running away from. Is she happily married? Is her writing career stalling? Pauline isn’t actually enjoying the activities she does manage to cross off the to-do list, and Catherine thinks it’s because she’s trying to do everything but not sensing a greater purpose in any of it. This is what the Tenth Room is for: thinking and deciding what’s important to you. Setting your priorities, finding your passions and purpose.