Tag: empty nest

I’ll Just Wear My Feet

For most of my adult life I’ve worn high heeled shoes.  In fact, I would get so many comments on that fact that I used to joke that I had Barbie doll feet, so they weren’t capable of going flat.  When I do wear flats, I feel like I’m walking funny.  My friend mimicked my flat shoe walk one time and it wasn’t cute.  Can you say “quack, quack”?

As I’m getting older though, the heels that I wear are definitely more of the wedge variety.  I’m in awe of the women who can walk around in the spiked heels without grimaces on their faces.  When the Taylor Swift concert was over the other night, we saw many women carrying their spiked heels as they hobbled out to their cars.  Our Uber driver commented on the fact that he’s never seen women make it through any wedding without losing their heels for the comfort of their feet. He’s right.  I’ve come home from more than one wedding or Christmas party and dumped my shoes into the garbage can before I even walked through the door to my house, vowing never to wear those shiny, pointy, expensive little torture devices strapped to nails, ever again.

When I was a teenager, I babysat for a little girl who when I would tell her to put her shoes on, she would politely say, “No thank you.  I’ll just wear my feet.”  She was on to something.  I love walking around in my bare feet.  I’m pretty sure that is mostly what nature intended.  I’m pretty sure that our feet weren’t designed to sustain the pressure of a 4 ton elephant standing on them.  Our feet don’t look anything like elephant feet.

I’m pretty sure down the line, high heeled shoes are going to be in the history books of shameful practices imposed on women, like the Chinese foot binding.  I don’t think high heels are necessarily imposed on us, though.  We like how we look when walk in them.  We like the extra height and the extra wiggle it gives to our rears.  Today’s feminism seems to be very much a Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan oriented feminism. It says I’ll look as sexy as I want to look, but while I’m wearing these 4″ heels and long, fake eyelashes, I will also run this organization like nobody’s business, I will tell this news story and interview this sports star with “no hold back” brazenness,  and I’ll stand up for my personal space and dignity with a big black #.  You can look, but don’t touch boys, unless I say you can.

As an older, more conservative woman, I have to admit that I have mixed feelings on my perceptions of today’s feminism.  Having a loving husband and three kind sons, makes me more sensitive to the male point of view than I have ever been in my life and I don’t want my daughter to think that her value comes from her looks.  That being said, when I’m not just “wearing my feet”, I love strapping on a new pair of gorgeous, girly, glittery, elevated shoes in anticipation of good times ahead.  I’m not even sure that there is any kind of statement or meaning or manipulation tied to wearing them, at least consciously.   I think it is just a matter of feeling fine and knowing that I can take them off whenever I want.

FTF

FTF – Favorite Things Friday!  Were you thinking it meant something dirty??  There are so many acronyms these days.  Thank goodness for being able to google the Urban Dictionary or I may not be able to communicate with my kids in text form.   On a different note,  I saw this quote on one of those funny napkins yesterday:

“This salad tastes like I’d rather be fat.”

I don’t think that salads were created for Fridays.  Friday is all about letting loose, letting your hair down, and “sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy”!  My favorite days are days when everyone is really happy and Friday has the best chance for being that day! 🙂  On to favorite things:

The Daily Skimm – A good friend from college recommended this daily email service and for me, it is the perfect amount of daily news.  I avoid watching the news like the plague. (especially these days – it’s just all too depressing)  This gives the highlights of the major headlines of the day without going into too much detail. The summaries are light and funny and include links if you want to go into a particular news story at a deeper level. So, I am able to remain informed without getting too obsessed and too downhearted.  My husband and I have a daily morning routine, in which I read The Daily Skimm aloud to both of us while he is getting ready for work.  It’s a daily moment that I treasure.   Here is a link to join, if you are interested:  http://www.theskimm.com/?r=fdfcd0ab

Spirituality and Health Magazine – I discovered this wonderful publication when I had a job merchandising magazines.  (btw, that was the best part time job ever- it was like getting paid to exercise and read!  LOL) I love the articles, ideas and book suggestions in this magazine.  Mostly though, like most of the magazines I subscribe to, I have one feature that I turn to first and is probably the primary reason why I subscribe to the magazine.  That feature in this magazine is a monthly column by Rabbi Rami Shapiro called Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler that I think is just great.  The author is a very wise, insightful man and his answers to questions always make me think and reflect.  Rami Shapiro is also the author of several books.

SpiritCups by Capital Cups – Over the many years of school/sports fundraising for my four kids, I have cringed at some of the items we were supposed to pimp to our family, friends and neighbors.  Usually my husband and I decided to just take “the hit” ourselves because we couldn’t look ourselves in the mirror asking our loved ones to buy filthy expensive wrapping paper that tore the minute you touched it.  However, being mostly past the fundraising years, this is an item that I would actively look for a cute, sporty looking kid in the neighborhood with a clipboard and uniform, to sell to me.  The cups we have purchased from this company are all decked out in our favorite teams’ logos and they last FOREVER!  These are our go-to daily cups for everything we drink.  They are dishwasher safe and unbreakable.  My eldest son quit playing football when he was about 12 and we still have the cups that we purchased from his Pop Warner days and they are still in good shape.  He’s 22 now.  I’m not sure if you can purchase them just as a consumer, but if you are in charge of some fundraising, look into selling these cups.  They are great!!

I’ll end on a Friday quote I saw recently:

There’s just one legitimate synonym for Friday: boom shakalaka!

Thanks, as always for reading and sharing my day!

Faking Smiles

I mentioned recently that one of my favorite things is my daily meditation book, Meditations for People Who Worry by Anne Wilson Schaef.  Yesterday’s meditation talked about bad moods.  The timing was uncanny because Tuesday I was in a rotten mood for no particularly good reason.  Sometimes bad moods just happen.  A friend of mine recently shared the quote, “Was it a bad day?  Or was it a bad 5 minutes that you milked all day?”  Tuesday I was a milkmaid.

In the meditation, Schaef talks about how “catchy” bad moods can be for the people around us.  It is so true.  How many times have you walked into a store, or a restaurant, or a salon and just felt the negative energy in the air?  You feel yourself being repulsed and you don’t even know why.  In an ideal world, we all have the healthy boundaries to say that the other person’s lousy mood is all about them.  It doesn’t have anything to do with us and we remain our happy little Pollyanna selves.  That is correct in theory, but most of us have a little sponginess in us that soaks some of that negativity right up.  Schaef says that when we are in a bad mood (it happens), it is our responsibility to own it and to warn others of our mental state.  She says to kindly assure others around us that our mood state is “ours” and it has nothing to do with them.  Let them know that we need a little space, which most people are happy to give to people in crummy moods.  Even if we know someone’s bad mood isn’t related to our doings, angry, grumpy people aren’t the most fun people to be around.   She says that this “warning device” is the best for all parties involved.  Of course, when you are in a really bad mood you can always take the more selfish advice of Bill Watterson (creator of the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes): “Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around.”  That could be more fun.

 

Charmed, I’m Sure

Years ago I worked for a small “mom and pop” company.  Every morning when I would walk through the door, the owner would warmly and happily exclaim, “There she is!”  That greeting always made me feel so welcome and special. After decades, I got reunited with a childhood friend.  One of the first things she reminisced about was the nickname my father had given to her.  She said it had always touched her and she’d never forget it. One time I was staying with a friend at her home.  Back then I thought Diet Coke was the “Breakfast of Champions.”  I’ve matured a little since then, but I’ll never forget opening my guest room door in the morning and seeing a cold, frosty Diet Coke waiting for me right outside the door.  There was a skylight there and the sunlight was beaming on the Diet Coke, like it had been sent from Heaven.  In a way, it had been. When my beloved grandmother died, a fellow soccer dad sent me a kind sympathy card with a lovely poem enclosed.  The poem touched me so much that I have included it in every sympathy card I have ever sent since (unfortunately too many to count).  I have heard that the poem has been read in many funerals.

Kathleen Winsor said that “Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.”  When I started looking up information about charm one of the first articles to pop up had a title that was something to the effect of “20 Signs that You are a Charming Person Without Being Aware.”  I think that is the essence of charm right there.  It is genuine, sincere kindness with no ulterior motives attached.  A truly, naturally charming person is unaware of how much they have elevated the person they have touched.  Like H. Jackson Brown said, “People may not exactly remember what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.”

Dale Carnegie has a famous, often repeated saying, “To be interesting, be interested.”  When someone describes a charming person, they often say that the person made them feel like they were the only person in the room, even if the room was a stadium full of people.  I remember a friend telling me about going to an event to see the Dalai Lama.  It was a stadium event, and it was sold out.  She said that the Dalai’s presence was so calm, peaceful, loving and tranquil that she had to look around herself more than once, to make sure that she wasn’t the only person present.

In today’s world with so many different information outlets and media content, it seems like everyone is scrambling for their “15 Minutes of Fame.”  My son often repeats the saying that never before have lives so unlived, been so well-documented.  I sometimes feel a bit precious writing this blog.   I think that is why charm is such a warm, special quality.  The enthusiasm, sincerity and attention is all directed at others, which is such a rarity in a selfie obsessed time period.  Like all traits, charm can be used for good or for bad, depending on the intentions of the charmer.  Nonetheless, when it is used for good, it is a quality that is a difference maker in people’s lives and experiences, sometimes in ways that create lifetime memories and feelings that will never be forgotten.

Musings on Parenting

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

The above poem by Kahlil Gibran has always resonated with me when it comes to parenting.  Receiving compliments on my children has always rung false to me and it’s not because I don’t think they are amazing people.  I, like most mothers, think that my four children are the most incredible people on the face of this earth.  When I do receive compliments, I have a pat answer.  “Thank you.  God figured we couldn’t handle much.”  My children have been easy to raise, kind and understanding, and full of life.  If my husband and I gave them a stable and peaceful environment in which to bloom, which I hope we have, then maybe we deserve a compliment for that, but overall they are blooming into the interesting, talented and lively people that they are because that is the seeds that were implanted into them by forces much greater than I.   They are part of this unfolding Universe, part of God’s plan and my only job is to get out of the way and let Divinity take its course.  This is especially true now that they are embarking into their own adulthoods.

Years ago I read an article about Paloma Picasso.  I cut out the part she wrote about being a parent.  She said, “I don’t think the parent and child should be so intimate that it becomes a jail for the child.  I’ve tried to help my children become themselves.”  So the other day, when talking on the phone to my son who has moved out into his independent adult life, he kindly asked me what I had been up to since he’d been gone.  I proudly mentioned that I had started blogging.  I wanted him to feel comfort that I was branching out, listening to my own deep longings and taking brave new steps into new avenues of my own life.  I wanted him to feel as secure about me being okay and energized and positive, as I feel about him and his experiencing of his new journey.

One of my favorite books of all time, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching talks about the Empty Nest this way:

The “empty nest syndrome”

should never bother

parents of the Tao.

Of course we’ll miss our children

But all of their lives we have helped them

embrace life and welcome change.

We have learned to do the same.

New moments await us.

Our nest

and theirs,

is never empty.

I couldn’t say it better.

Finders Keepers

Recently, right before my son moved out to his new adult life, I lost two “good” pieces of jewelry on two separate occasions.  Now these weren’t “insurable” items or family heirlooms, but they weren’t Forever 21 clearance items either. (Now on an aside, I love all of my jewelry and much like one of my favorite fashion icons, Iris Apfel, a 97 year old fashion maven, I might even like some of my faux pieces better than my real pieces.)  Anyway, I was driven to distraction trying to find these items.  Unfortunately, in the process of looking for the jewelry, I did not find the pieces I was looking for, but what I did find was a whole herd of dust bunnies and several items that should have been donated to Goodwill eons ago.

Now, I’m always looking for the meaning of “why things happen”.  I was incredibly intent of finding the jewelry and I had such a laser focus on that intent that it certainly kept me from thinking about the idea that my son was leaving our nest, never to return to it again, as a child.  It was certainly easier to vent all of my frustration on the helplessness of not knowing where the jewelry had gone to, then to face my intense feelings of loss of the only structure that our nucleus family had ever known.  I was also admonishing myself for my carelessness for not appreciating my items like I should have and perhaps even taking them for granted.  Did I wear them as many times as I could have or did I assume they would always be available to me whenever I wanted them to be?  You see where these analogies are going.

My Catholic friends have always suggested to turn to St. Anthony to ask for his help to intercede with God when you lose items.  Now, I’m not Catholic so I had to Google the appropriate way to officially ask for St. Anthony’s help.  I looked up the prayer and it essentially said something to the affect of please help me to find my items, but if it is not God’s will to find the items, please give me total peace with that fact.  Now, in my desperation, I was wondering if it was okay to cross out the last part of the prayer, because in my mind, the only way I was going to have peace was if I found my jewelry.  Nonetheless, I prayed the whole prayer and I did not find my jewelry.  And I did not find peace right away, but surprisingly, I came to peace about the losses much more quickly than I thought I would.  Sometimes I Thank God for Unanswered Prayers has always been one of my favorite country songs and I think it applies here.

I often lecture my family about the dangers of getting too attached to “things.”  “We are not even going to leave this world with our bodies!” is a statement I’ve been known to say more than a few times.  For the record, that goes over like a lead balloon.  Thanks, Debbie Downer, any other uplifting anecdotes you’d like to pass on while we eat our dessert???  The truth is, I haven’t found a better way to say it, but the “things” in life are temporary and fleeting.  Change is always happening and the suffering occurs when we can’t make peace with this fact.  A lot of spiritual teachers (and marketing experts, for that matter) like to say that when we want something or someone, it’s not really the item that we want, it is the feeling that we believe we will get if we possess that thing.  I believed that I would feel extreme “relief” if I found my jewelry and obviously, I was looking for “relief” from a lot of the tumult that was swirling around in my heart.  And a lot of that tumult had nothing to do with my jewelry.

Native Americans were very thankful to the buffalo that they consumed.  They used every part of the buffalo and thanked it profusely for it’s blessing and it’s sacrifice.  Marie Kondo, the Japanese organization guru says that when you know that it is time to give up an item, you thank it for what it has brought to you and ask it to bless someone else.  I am thankful for my jewelry, for the times I felt lovely wearing the pieces, but I think I may even be more thankful for the loss of the items, because the lessons I gleaned from the losses will stay with me forever.  I hope that wherever they are now, they are blessing someone else in all of the best ways possible.

Thank You for Your Patience

It is a very strange feeling questioning yourself when you write a text to your adult child.  There has been this shift in the relationship where “bossy mommy” probably isn’t going to fly anymore.  There is a certain unsaid understanding that when a parent is paying the bills, the scales are tipped to the parents having a certain level of control.  My son is paying his own bills now.  He no longer relies on me for anything.  I’m not supposed to spout my advice unless he asks me for it.  I understand that on a logical level and I want to have a great adult relationship with him and my other children, so a lot of times I have to just sit on my hands and wisely choose not to write a text. When I do write a text to him, I find myself editing it, contemplating it, getting feedback on it, almost as if we were two people in a new relationship.

A college friend once told me that I apologize too much.  She said that instead of saying, “I’m sorry.”  I should say, “Thank you for your patience with my . . . .”  So, yesterday, I just couldn’t help myself.  Bossy Mommy took over the reigns and she felt it was necessary to text her adult son that he should probably get his dry cleaning done for a big business trip that he has coming up.  Ugh.  Now I think there was actually a struggle going on between Bossy Mommy and Mature Detached Mother, so the text came out garbled and ridiculous.  Autocorrect was having a field day.  I almost felt the need to tell him to please not send the text to that segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live where Jimmy reads outrageous texts from parents to their young adult kids. And everyone laughs hysterically.  All that I can say is that the final text to my son from me was, “Thank you for your patience with my need to still parent you.”

And he answered, “I love you, Mom.”

 

 

Good Grief

Obviously when a child leaves the nest it’s inevitable that you will go through the process of some grieving.  Grief.  It’s a word, a process, an experience that we all want to avoid.  In fact, I’m sure a lot of my readers right now are going, “Okay, time to X out of this page.”  My husband likes to say that no one gets to middle age without going through at least one “major biggie.”  And most of us have gone through more than one “biggie” by this time in our lives.  Grief is an obvious outcome when we lose someone we love deeply or a long term relationship ends.  There are a lot of support systems out there to help us with that expected type of grief journey.  In fact, even when our aged, grumpy old man of a dog died last year at the ripe old age of at least 15 (he was a rescue, so his age was sort of up in the air), my vet handed us a 20 page booklet on how to deal with the grief of the loss of a pet.

They say that there are five stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.  The annoying thing about these stages is that they are not linear; you get to be-bop back and forth between them.  Just when you think you are past one of these stages, something sets you back and you feel like you are at the beginning of it all over again.  Grief is a lonely emotion.  I’m sure that my husband and I are both grieving the fact that our nucleus family will never be the same structure that is has been for the past 22 years, but we are grieving it in different ways and be-bopping through the stages at different paces and tempos.  Loving friends and family can empathize and support us through our grief, but their loving energies and prayers are just good sustenance in our backpacks as we travel this road by ourselves, individually.

I used to feel guilty about grieving.  A lot of the times, the things that you grieve are also tied into exciting, happy new beginnings.  I’m truly thrilled for son’s new opportunities and for the space that has been created in my life because he has moved on with his life.  Every time that we moved to a new town, we grieved for our friends and neighbors, our jobs and our homes and the memories that would now be part of our past, but at the same time we were very excited for the newness of a new place, and for the experiences and people that would come with that new place.  Grief can be major or minor.  Heck, I grieved when my favorite perfume was discontinued and I could no longer even find it even on ebay!

One year one of my children’s yearbooks had a quote that said something to the affect that we grieve our moments in time because there is a deep understanding in us that the person we are right now in this time and place will never be the same person again.  Even if we try to duplicate the experience, it can’t be the same because we aren’t the same person anymore.  We are constantly changing due to our experiences and growth.  So in this sense, we even grieve a former version of our own selves.

Grief is a multi-layered experience.  When we are grieving someone or something, we often find old remnants of previous grieving that we thought we had already accepted.  What a lovely surprise! Ha!  I think the older I get, I have learned to stop labeling things as much as I used to do.  Grief just is.  We want to think of it is “bad” or “negative”, but it really isn’t either of those things.  It’s just one of those aspects of us that proves to ourselves that we are deeply alive.  I would definitely rather feel than to be numb. Why would I want to cut off the experience of feeling all of those times of pride, excitement, happiness, joy, peace, contentment, wonder, and mostly deep, deep love to avoid going through the pain of grief??  My son’s venturing out into the world towards his own adult adventures has sparked every emotion in me that I ever knew that I had, and if I accept this process and I allow this process instead of resisting it, I will come out the other end of it stronger and wiser than I have ever been before.

 

The Grind

I’m going to the dentist today.  Obviously, I’m not excited about that fact.  I didn’t put an exclamation point on that sentence.  Yay!  I’m going to the dentist today!  I have to get a crown because my back molar chipped.  My dentist insists that this is because I refuse to buy an expensive, bulky mouth guard to sleep with every night to protect my pearlies as I grind away at my teeth at night.  I insist that those high priced hunks of rubber are only going to add to my dust collector collection, as I won’t be able to sleep with wax lips in my mouth.

For years, my dentist and I have had a love/hate relationship.  He thinks I’m stubborn and foolish but he loves me because I’m the one who has made sure that all six members of the family have seen him regularly for seven years.  I say, “Here I am, your favorite, know-it-all patient!” and he says, “Great to see you, my retirement savings have just gone up.”  He has taken the impacted wisdom teeth out of the jaws of our two older boys, and created the beautiful smiles, with years of pricey orthodontics, for our two younger children.  He has filled fillings, created crowns and lectured all of us to do a better job with flossing.  (As much as I have tried to “walk the talk” and be a good example to our children, this is an area where I may have fallen a wee bit short.)  My dentist knows my family and due to the fact that dentists mostly can only “talk at” you, I feel like I know his family and their adventures, too.

Which brings me to the sad part because today I am going to see a dentist I have never seen before. Our dentist has retired from this practice.  While I understand that change is the only constant in life, it’s hard when the foundation people of your community start leaving and moving on. We have had to move our family for better job opportunities a couple of times over the years and I always enjoyed the excitement and novelty of exploring a new town.  However, to make sure that the family feels secure and safe, there are some staple professional people you pick out when you first move and you make them “your own.”  I remember being truly surprised when my eldest son got his “college shots” at the pediatrician and we were told that he would need to find an “adult doctor” now.  What?!? Why?!?  There is nothing disturbing about seeing a 6’2″ man with a beard waiting in the waiting room, watching Dora the Explorer with the other kids.   Where are his Teddy Grahams for being a good boy?!?  There have been a couple of occasions where three or maybe even four of our kids have even had the same teacher.  My daughter recently told me that one of these teachers said that she was his favorite out of all of our family’s kids.  I am pretty sure that he said that to all of our kids, but I kept that to myself.

Why is it that we accept that changes in our own lives are inevitable but feel angry and confused and bewildered when others go on with their changes in their lives?  Why does it feel insulting when one of our long time neighbors move?  Why do we understand that our kids are growing up but feel utterly bewildered when we get Christmas cards portraying previous members of our kids’ play groups in graduation robes and wedding gowns??  It’s like we want to explore and grow and learn, but we need everything else around us to remain the same, to be our “rocks of stability.”  I think it’s like when my kids first started to crawl and to then walk and then to run.  They always crawled, walked and ran back to me to make sure that I was still there, holding their security blankets to melt back into when they got tired.

I’m sure that the new dentist will be a nice, competent person and I sure that I will continue to be lectured on mouth guards and gum disease.  I’m sure that we will all be okay and adjust accordingly.  We’ll keep smiling.  Life goes on, even though one of our “rocks of stability” has become a rolling stone.

Awkward Stage

A couple of weeks ago, I took my eldest son and my daughter who is my youngest child to lunch (I call them my Alpha and my Omega).  We went to a restaurant I had never been to before that is known for its nightly shows and bands.  When I asked our waiter what show he would recommend, he looked at me and without a stutter he said, “Oh, definitely Throwback Thursday.  My mom loves that show.”  Ouch.

Now, he was right.  I am definitely old enough to be his mom.  And I love 80s/90s music, because that’s the music I was brought up on, but ugh, I didn’t want him to notice that fact.  I didn’t want him to look at me and think “Throwback.”

I think that I’m at that awkward stage of my Second Half of Adulting.  It’s similar to the one I went through in my First Half of Adulting, when I was just a preteen.  That first awkward stage involved being stuck between being a kid and being a young adult.  The big dilemma at that stage was, “Do I still want to play with my toys or do I want to kiss boys?”  The second awkward stage is coming to the acceptance that the stuff that I like is starting to be considered a little “outdated”, but not old enough to be considered “retro and cool.”  The second awkward stage is the awakening to the fact that I’m not necessarily part of the mover/shaker crowd anymore.  The marketers and the trend watchers are more interested in what my kids are buying and doing than in me anymore.  And there’s a conflict because I’m not sure I want to move out of the First Half of Adulting.  I still have two kids at home and unfortunately, retirement seems quite far away, but I’m starting to not fit in with the First Halfers anymore either.

It’s subtle changes you notice when you are moving out of your First Half of Adulting. It’s like when you see the Barbie you played with as a kid, now in the window of an antiques store, or you start realizing that you don’t really know who 85% of the people on the cover of the gossip magazines are anymore.  The frequency of being called “Ma’am” goes up a notch.  Last year I had a part-time job where I shared a cubicle area with a couple of millennial women.  We were talking about weekend plans and I said that my husband and I were going to Hall and Oates.  My coworker said, “Oh cool, is that an island?”

The Second Half of Adulting is still new to me.  So, it’s hard to “own it” with confidence.  I know that my husband and I could not pull off Hipster with any kind of grace.  Tattoos, nose piercings, pink streaked hair, woolly beards and beanies aren’t part of our middle aged comfort zone.  But at the same token, I’m not ready to shop for retirement communities yet, either.  It’s funny how life cycles around.  I never dreamed I’d have to go through another “awkward stage” but I guess these are the stages in life that you must go through to figure out what you really want next.  You get so uncomfortable with being uncomfortable, that you finally accept your new role, your new place in society with confidence.  You’re the “record player” now because you’re cool again.  And you never stopped being a record player, it’s just that you’ve stopped apologizing for being a record player and you’ve stopped trying to turn into Spotify.   With your new self confidence and self worth, people remember that you’ve always been pretty amazing and that that you still have an important role to play, it’s just shifted a little. And maybe that’s not so bad.