Category: Women

I always hear the expression, is it a full moon today?  It’s usually an expression of someone who is having a bad day or dealing with nutty people with attitudes.  Well I work with the public, so, let me tell you, if it wasn’t a full moon last night, it probably should have been.

I won’t bore you with the details of my day, just the high points.  I had a candle party today.  Well, sort of a party.  Our bank allows employees to have a party of sorts of the break room during lunch.  I had a candle party.  Not many showed up, but it should be enough to make a decent showing.

The home party biz is an odd thing.  I can speak from experience because I’ve been one of those ladies.  I used to sell jewelry on the side.  Daytime banker nighttime jeweler.  Cute, I know.  The company I worked for was what I call, one of the good ones.  However, I sometimes wonder at the personalities that this kind of business draws.  To be a salesman, whether you are selling electronics or make-up, all have to have a level of confidence that some people shrink from.  When I see someone take on the knock-down-drag-out world of home party sales that can’t say hello to you without looking at their hands, I cringe.  I give them two weeks and a huge dent in their bank account from all the supplies they had to order.

The real hard sellers are the ones that get others like me to do this.  I was told I had the “gift” to recruit others to sell.  I was already using that gift to get people to take out mortgages and buy annuities.  I was replete of the energy to add to my plate.  Selling the bling was not that hard.  Most ladies like jewelry, selling the biz was not my cup of tea.  I was successful as a jewelry lady, my life changed suddenly, so I had to let it go.

I guess the moral of this rambling post is for you to choose your career wisely, don’t let it choose you.  If you are going to be a Mary Kay lady, be the pinkest and most Mary Kayer you can be.  If you are going to sell jewelry, be a perky jewelry lady.  I could go on.

Today it was candles for me.  In the less than correct vernacular of the folks, “I love me some candles!”

I have been reading “The Best Yes” by Lysa TerKeurst.   She is an author after my own heart.  She likes to communicate in a conversational style, as I do  But what really struck me was the almost revolutionary idea of The Best Yes.   I won’t steal her thunder, but the basic premise is that it is ok to say no and that most women in our world, Christian and otherwise, think you are being unkind by doing so.  This book is published by Moody Publishers, so it is a Christian slant, but even if you aren’t Christian you could get a great deal out of this book.

Here are some take-aways from the book that I found interesting.  She talks a great deal about how non-working mothers find it necessary to make their working counterparts feel less than what they are.  Lysa will be the first to say that most of her reactions to these less than tactful women was her own hang-ups making her feel bad.  But I was ready to drive to wherever these women were, after reading some of it, and give them a piece of my mind.  If you read my blog, you know I have never had children. I saw myself in some of Lysa’s struggles.  I couldn’t understand the parts about the judgmental mothers looking down on her working self or asking her children “Does it make you sad when Mommy goes to work?”  That one made my head want to explode, by the way.  But what I can compare to what she was going through is the idea of the Mother and Non-mother in Christian circles.  I know I have written about this here before, but I think it bears mentioning again.

Judgmental people make, again, my head want to explode.  In Evangelical circles two things are looked down on, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly.  One is a working mother and the other is someone who isn’t a mother at all.  One of the reasons I am not a mother is because I knew I would never have a child raised in daycare or by a babysitter.  So I waited and waited and found myself too old and too sick to have any children.  Lysa says in her book that our choices lead us where we will go.  I have made a slew of bad choices and I can’t blame the judgey lady at the church pot-luck for all of them.  But it did make my life different.  The Bible states that a woman is to be a wife and a mother (in that order).  Christian friends assume you didn’t become a mother because you couldn’t, physically.  But that isn’t the case with me.  I truly never wanted children, and when my heart started to change, it was too late.  My husband and I do not have the means or the patience for adoption, so here we are.

But I digress.  Lysa made some excellent points about saying no that were very freeing to me.  I suggest you read her book.  You can read it via Kindle, or purchase it.

So back to the take-aways, in my own words.

1.  It is ok to say no to even good things, if they aren’t the best things.
2.  Just because you don’t have a house full of children you still have priorities and needs for your  family that need to be met.  So don’t allow people to guilt you into saying yes just because you have no children and you must have “oodles” of time.  (That wasn’t specifically in her book)
3.  People who guilt you into saying yes will eventually find a way to be unhappy with you anyway, so don’t worry about making them unhappy by saying no.
4.  People can take advantage of people pleasers.  Lysa is one and her chapter on this made me roll at times.  Her and I are so similar.  We need to grill out sometime.
5,  God know what is best for you, and when asked will help find what that is.
6.  Saying yes depends a great deal on what season of life you are in.

There are so many more, but I won’t steal you the joy of reading this book.

Let me end this blog by saying that I admire stay-at-home mothers, working mothers, women with no biological children and those with lots of people who have they have made their children.

So what I learned from Lysa’s book was when to say Yes, when to say no, and sometimes when to just shut up.  I don’t want to be one of those people pushing a pleasers buttons either.  Now go over to Amazon.com and get this book. It will be well worth it.

Since this in on the internet, persons reading this could be from all over the globe.  Well, in the midwest United States, we have a little thing called Longenberger basket bingo.  For the uninitiated, Longenberger baskets are a high quality basket created by the Longenberger company.  Local organizations have bingos, where the prizes are these highly sought after baskets.  These are usually fundraisers for schools, or not-for-profits in all shapes and sizes.   Last night, my friend, her grandson and I entered the world of competitive basket bingo.Don’t snicker.  These ladies take this stuff seriously!  We sat behind a table of ladies who, when they heard an announcement of the next bingo coming up, sponsored by another organization, reached into their handbags (properly emblazoned by bingo labels or Longenberger symbols) and eagerly wrote down the next date and time.  Some even brought out the blackberry.   Longenberger ladies are high tech too, don’t you know.

Around us sat several people in differing degrees of indoctrination.  Let me preface by saying that the organization sponsoring this was our local universities student association.   To our right was a table of college age young men, who, either there at their girlfriends urging, or by a professors, groaned and yelled out with the best of us when their letter and number was called-or was not.  This made my friends grandson happy, as he was afraid he would be the only boy.  Not so, young man!  Then there were the other table of ladies that had a bingo marker for each color the rainbow and probably had that lucky troll doll in their purse to ask for the right number.  Those of you that watched Rosanne in the 80s will understand that reference.
Floating around, selling raffle tickets and selling snacks were college girls and boys that I knew were thinking to themselves.  “Man, I hope I don’t get this old and boring!”  They’ll learn.  For the lure of the Longenberger will get them someday too.

My friend and I go to one of these at least once a year.  One, there isn’t much to do in our town on a work night, and two, its just fun.   Well this time, to my friend’s delight, she actually won something.  As did I!

It was raining cats and dogs outside, it was close to freezing in temperature, but it was warm and happy inside next to the warmth of a hand made basket.

Doesn’t get any better than that, does it?