Week 1: Hamilton and a Weekend Wisconsin Wedding
I was a latecomer to the Hamilton phenomenon. I liked it. I listened when I had time, but my obsession didn’t grow until I played it for the kids. They started asking me questions and I started really listening. The more I listened the more I thought about it, which meant I had to listen more. We had some great friends helping answer questions and feed the love (one who even brought us gifts from Philly!) We started discussing who we felt like we most related to in the musical and it became painfully obvious, I was Aaron Burr. I am a very private person. I like to keep people at a distance. Burr’s famous line in the musical (in case you haven’t listened) is “Talk Less, Smile More”. I loved this. I get tired of all the nonsensical, repetitive yelling in the world. Perhaps it is the introvert in me. Perhaps I’m just sick of the hurtful way people can treat each other when they are trying to prove they are right. The more I listened to Burr sing about waiting for things to come his way or how he wanted to be where things were happening, the more I considered his fear. He was afraid of losing. I am afraid of judgment. I am afraid of offending people with my opinions and my actions. I fear most of all hurting people with my words.
Words have the power to set a movement alight or crush someone to pieces. I have a certain reverence for words and I am careful with them. Too careful, I think. On the other hand, people like Hamilton drive me crazy and have bundles of my respect all at the same time. He spoke and wrote and stood for his beliefs. His words inspired, and lead people to a new America. They gave him opportunities to climb the political ladder. His words, however, were also his demise. He was able to give them power over his fear and circumstance, but without reigning them in with a little diplomacy, they also lead to his downfall. A balance lies somewhere between these two. One in which Hamilton wouldn’t have pissed off everyone around him and where Burr wouldn’t end up the narrator in someone else’s play.
This weekend we took a trip to Wisconsin for a family wedding. Just a few years ago, this wouldn’t have been a consideration. We were cloaked in “busy” and wading through “too much baggage” after so many trips, which left us laden with contempt and exhaustion. One year, Jeff and I looked around and saw us running ourselves ragged trying to attend to every family event, every catastrophe, every bump in the road for the people around us. It was exhausting. We were scheduling around everyone else and when something fell through for them, it threw our entire packed calendar off. So in that moment when we finally took a step back to observe this, we saw us breaking all of our own rules. We weren’t being intentional in life or parenting. We weren’t writing the story of our family, our life. We were jumping from one thing to the next, barely staying afloat. We weren’t happy. We weren’t considering what was best for us. This shift was difficult for me. It feels selfish to worry about myself first. I have always tried to put others’ needs ahead of my own. But then Jillian Michaels’s daily post-workout words kept ringing in my ears saying in order to take care of others, I needed to take care of myself. Crap. That hit me as so true. It’s like the air masks that drop down during a plane crash. You can’t save the person next to you if you’re dead. This revelation was even more than survival though. It was taking control back. It was about our family and what we wanted to teach our kids. This was when things started to fall in to place for us. We started planning adventures, which helped us learn and experience new and different things. We started making our schedule first and letting others know they were welcome to join us. We made family time a priority and involved cooking, exercising, and reading as a family again. Our weekend trip to Wisconsin was beautiful. We could have missed autumn changing that landscape into a multi-colored spectacle. We could have missed spending time with people we love. We could have missed witnessing new love and love shared for a lifetime. We didn’t get to as many weddings as we would have liked this year, but this one worked with our time.
We continue to find balance with how we spend our time. (I could really use a nap.) We continue to find ways for some of us to lay aside fear and speak up more, and for others to involve a little diplomacy. But now, we do it on our terms. We put ourselves back into the narrative.
