Amanda Dickson

This is my Papa.  That’s what I call him.  That’s what my little boys call him, too.  Papa . . . as in “Watch me, Papa!  Watch me.”

We sat yesterday on the couch together, the couch in the living room where no one ever sits.  We sat next to each other while the little boys played Star Wars downstairs and the girls were in their rooms.  We talked about life, about love, about letting go of resentment and pain and fear.  We have always had these “heart level conversations,” as we referred to them, from the time I was very young.  And yes, I know how truly rare and wonderful that is.

To be able to talk with your father about the deepest feelings of your heart.  To be able to tell him you’re afraid your life doesn’t have meaning, you’re afraid you’re not a good mother, you’re afraid you might be the gullible twit people say you are . . . and to have him hold your hand and say, “Well, let’s talk about that.”  It’s a magical thing.

When my father is here, or when I’m in his house on the hill in Pennsylvania, or when we’re somewhere else altogether, we are always at home.  Home is where our two hearts meet.  Home is where his shining blue eyes meet my playful blue ones, and we tear up with love for each other. 

We talked about Aiden the other day, my youngest son.  I told Papa, “He is so loving in his nature, so easy to love.”  Papa replied, “Just like you.”

I am a father’s daughter, a Papa’s girl, the product of a man who always made me feel like loving me was a privilege.  I love you, Papa.  From your youngest and most needy daughter,

Amanda

Do you have a friend you can tell anything to?  I mean anything.  The worst, most despicable, selfish, ugly parts of you, the ones you thought you’d have to take to the grave before you met her.  I am so blessed to have a friend like that, a woman I can lay it all out in front of.  And she listens.  Sometimes she gasps.  But she never drops my heart.

I am feeling particularly grateful for her this week.  Sometimes she texts me at just the moment when I feel like I might fall apart, and I wonder how she knew I needed her at that precise moment.  Sometimes I walk into her office and the expression on my face makes her get up and shut the door behind me.  Sometimes, if I start crying minutes before I have to be somebody, she’ll turn into an emotional aerobics instructor, “OK, and lift, lift it up, and breathe, breathe it out.  Again.  Lift, lift it up, way up here, and then breathe, good girl.”  I laugh through my tears.  And she never lets me leave her office before my mascara is fixed.

I don’t know if the love I give her is half as good as the love she gives me.  I am not a very good friend.  I have a history of putting work and family and every other thing first and friends last.  But this friend of mine?  She is me, only petite, and her face is the one my heavy heart longs to see some days.

Wonder if she’s in her office now?

She was the voice of my youthful longing, the one who helped me feel like I wasn’t going insane up in my bedroom with the ivy covered windows and the exposed radiator.  I loved Carly.  I loved her wide smile on album covers.  I loved her hippy purses and floppy hats.  I loved that she married James Taylor and mourned when they got divorced.

I haven’t thought of her in a long time.  The only music I listen to lately is something fast enough to keep me running.  But I noticed today when I was checking the rundown that sweet Carly turns 65 today.  And I stopped.  I want to think of her, to remember what she gave me 30 years ago, and what she gives me still.

She gave me Boys in the Trees . . . “Do you go to them or do you let them come to you? Do you stand in back afraid that you’ll intrude? Deny yourself and hope someone will see . . .”  And she gave me Coming Around Again. . . “I know nothing stays the same, but if you`re willing to play the game, it`s coming around again. So don`t mind if I fall apart
there`s more room in a broken heart . . .”  And she gave me the anthem of all of us who had our hearts broken by HIM . . . “You`re so vain, you probably think this song is about you. You`re so vain. I`ll bet you think this song is about you
Don`t you? Don`t You?”

I miss my sister.  I miss singing to Carly with her.  I miss the way the willow trees would rub up against my sister’s window.  I miss reading The Secret Garden and dreaming about the boy down the street.  But I don’t miss Carly any more.  She’s right here.

In my ipod.

Women think of debt like cellulite.  They don’t really know where it comes from or how to get rid of it, and they’re too embarrassed to ask anybody. 

This is my experience.  We women start to tune out whenever anyone starts talking about 401k’s or small and large caps or, heaven forbid, bonds!  We know we need to get our financial houses in order.  We worry about it constantly, sometimes to the point of affecting our health (and certainly our mood), but we don’t want to ask the wrong question in front of the wrong person.  We don’t want to feel stupid.

Introducing Imagine a Happier You.  Imagine a Happier You is a new website created by the Deseret Media Companies.  My CEO, a man named Mark Willes, decided that he wanted to use the resources of DMC (KSL TV and Radio, the Deseret News, Deseret Book, Deseret Digital Media and El Observador) to serve women, so he gathered women from each division and charged us with coming up with an idea that would help the women of Utah.  Imagine a Happier You is that idea.

We thought we’d address the issue of women and money first.  This year, we’re connecting women with resources to help them better manage their money.  And here’s the fun part.  We’re looking for three participants, women who are in a big, hairy financial mess (for whatever reason) and are willing to have experts help them out of that mess . . . in public.  We will follow these three women as they get out of debt or learn to budget or save for retirement.  They’ll blog regularly.  We’ll chat with them on the website.  I’ll do stories about them on KSL.  We’ll cheer for them as they get out of debt just like we do for the participants who lose weight on The Biggest Loser.

So – if money is an issue in your life (and isn’t it for so many of us?), whether your problems are large or small, log onto Imagine a Happier You and sign up, or start commenting, or just read.  I’ll be there.  And we’ll get some financial peace of mind together.

I read the epilogue first.  Gail Miller talks about her life with Larry, their falling in love, their struggles as a young family.  What I wish I could ask her, if we could ever spend an hour together, is “Was he too driven?  If you could have changed him (which we all know you couldn’t) would you rather he had spent more time with the family and less time being so driven – or would that have made him someone else?”  This is the question that haunts me in my own life. 

I, too, am driven.  I am nowhere near as successful as Larry H. Miller, not financially or in any other way, but I am driven.  As soon as I finish a book, I start plotting the next one.  As soon as I get off the air in the morning, I start thinking about the next day’s show, or that afternoon’s speech, or some other project.  When I’m lying in bed sleepless, I’m trying to think of a topic I could write a bestseller on, or maybe some form of passive income that would help my family.  My brain never shuts off. 

This drive, which feels quite normal to me if not pain-free, is a burden to my family.  I know it is.  My husband misses me, sometimes even when I’m in the room.  He misses my focus – on him and on the children.  My children may miss me too, but they have only ever known this me, so I’m not sure they can miss what they’ve never had.  I am pondering lately how much of my drive toward providing for the family, toward writing and broadcasting and producing, may be driving me away from my family.  Or is this just who I am – and they love me exactly as I am, maybe even because of who I am?

This is my question.  I wonder if it was ever Larry’s.  I wonder if Gail ever asked this question about her driven husband, her magnificent, powerful, yet humble driven husband.  Maybe there are some answers in Larry’s words.  I’m back to the book now.  The Foreward, by John Stockton.

Not this too!  Now I find out that my granola is making me fat.  Forget that I keep chocolates at my desk and hardly ever partake.  Forget that I haven’t had a Wendy’s double since I was pregnant with Aiden.  I am trying so hard to force my body into not looking its age.  But granola! Come on.

I read this morning that granola has so much sugar, so many calories, that it’s making us fat.  So I checked.  I keep granola at my desk and eat some with yogurt (plain, for crying out loud) every morning.  Yep.  270 calories for a serving size, which is 1/3 cup.  Both of those numbers made me gasp.  So, basically, I’m eating 1000 calories of granola every morning.  No wonder.  I can’t elliptical that much granola off my thighs. 

What other pleasures will I have to give up?  I’ve already given up so many.  Donuts and pizza and hamburgers and . . . The only ones I’ve kept are Wheat  Thins and granola.  Now, I’m down to Wheat Thins. 

Don’t say it.  I know, crackers are terrible, too.

I used to dread Mother’s Day.   In between the ages of, oh, I’d say 20 and 40, it was a bittersweet holiday.  And I find now, at 46, that it still is.

I had my first child at 41.  In the years before Ethan was born, I felt so awkward and empty on this day.  If people wished me Happy Mother’s Day, I felt like I didn’t deserve it.  I wondered if I should correct them, or just say “thank you.”  I usually went with the latter, and then cried somewhere privately later.  After I got married, I became a step-mother.  I fantasized that my ready-made family would recognize me on this day, that even though I am not their mother, they would want to say “Happy Mother’s Day” to me just to be kind.  I rationalized that I do mother them in so many ways, that mother is both a noun and a verb.  I love them.  I cook for them, sit next to them at the doctor, pay their health insurance, hate anyone who hurts them and love anyone who treats them with kindness and dignity.  But my fantasies never came true.  The day would come. I’d get my hopes up.  And then it would pass.

After I became a mother, I realized that the pain around this day was so tatooed on my heart, it was hard to give up.  My husband would give me flowers, help the little boys make a card for me, and it all felt like a day I had built up far too much in my mind, a day that could never erase the pain of two decades.

My husband gets nervous now when Mother’s Day is coming.  He knows my step-kids will ignore me.  He knows I’ll miss my own mother terribly, who I lost a year and a half ago.  He knows I’ll feel insecure and unworthy and empty – when I so clearly shouldn’t.  He knows feelings don’t respond to logic.

Breathe.  I know I have a lot of learning to do on this issue.  I am so blessed in so many ways, with two little boys who love me more than I deserve, with three step-kids who I usually just call my kids because I love them like a crazy woman, with a husband who is, truly and simply, the best man I know.  I have the memory of a mother who was that rare combination of strength and beauty, a woman who taught me I didn’t have to be a shrinking violet to be feminine.  And I have you, my friends, who I share this magical, ever-changing, messy life with.

Forgive me for my weakness.  These tears are not of sadness, now.  They’re of gratitude.

Happy Mother’s Day.

I was getting ready for an appearance on Studio 5 yesterday to talk about “finding balance.”  Just as I’m headed downstairs, I bounce the question off some friends in the elevator.  “How do you find balance?”  I ask.  Emily Watts (author and speaker extraordinaire) says, “We don’t need balance. We need priorities.”

That stopped me cold.  Is she right?

When you have a new baby, there’s no balance.  It’s all about the baby.  The baby is the priority.  And that’s as it should be.  When you’re caring for a troubled friend, and she desperately needs you, the friend is the priority.  And that’s as it should be.  When you’re sick and your body needs rest and healing, then your body becomes the priority, like it or not.  And that’s as it should be.

Until it’s not.

It seems to me at some point, balance must become the priority.  We can single out certain people or areas of our lives to focus our energy and attention on until the other areas of our lives begin to suffer, and then we must right the ship.  If we ignore our bodies for too long, they will demand our attention through sickness or collapse.  If we ignore our spouses for too long, they will get our attention through argument or pleading . . . or worse.  If we ignore our children . . . well . . . hopefully we never ignore our chidren.

I know when I am out of balance when I start binging – binge eating, binge working, binge shopping.  I’m not smart enough to pick up the subtle clues of being slightly out of balance.  I have to wait until I’m way into over-do-it land before I get it.  It takes pain to wake me up to the need for balance.  And when I wake up, I breathe and begin to focus my attention on whatever was being ignored – be it a relationship or my health or the house or whatever. 

Today? When my work is done, I will not find more projects to begin or advance.  Work has been a priority all week.  It’s time to lay it down and pick up my sons, one at a time, and swing them around the room until they yell “Stop!  Mama!  Stop!” . . . but don’t mean it.