Reconsider normal

There might be other ways of doing things

Families are their own little cultures. We see what the people around us do and we absorb it, but we often don’t really think through what’s going on.

I’ve seen this in my own life with pickles (of all things). No one in my family ate pickles growing up, so they were never in the house. When a pickle spear came with a hamburger somebody ordered in a restaurant, it would stay on the plate. So in my mind pickles were things one just didn’t eat. Perhaps they were decorative — kind of like the tassel on the toothpick that’s sometimes holding the hamburger together.

Now, I wasn’t the most adventurous eater as a kid, so it’s possible I wouldn’t have liked pickles then, but as an adult I eat most things. Eventually I got around to trying a pickle and I was like hey, pretty tasty. I don’t necessarily seek them out, but I’ll eat a juicy one in a restaurant.

What it means to be responsible

Of course, pickles aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. But sometimes the family lessons we grow up with are more consequential in terms of how we spend our time. For instance, when I was writing I Know How She Does It, which is a book about how professional women spend their time, I learned that a number of women learned from their own mothers that a responsible working mother should spend all Sunday afternoon cooking dinners for the upcoming week. Never mind that other family members might also be capable of cooking, or that it takes more time to thaw a frozen lasagna on Wednesday than it does to cook a piece of salmon and open a bagged salad. People were completely convinced that this is what they were supposed to do.

People have their stories with work too — like if you want to advance in your career, you should always be at your desk when your boss walks in. That’s what your well-to-do uncle told you when you were growing up, and so that is what you believe ambitious people do. We don’t consider that maybe the boss is showing up early to get some quiet time at the office and is actually miffed that anyone else is there!

Choose your assumptions

We all have our stories. We all have different ideas of what is normal — which is perfectly normal. But I think it’s wise in life to think about what we think is normal, and to decide if those assumptions are really serving our lives.

So as you go about your day, think about why you do what you do. Really anything can be explored, from why your showers take the length of time they do, to what you eat for breakfast, to how you respond to a kid’s disagreement with you, to where you take your vacations to how you spend your evening leisure time. A good way to identify stories that might be guiding behaviors is to listen to your self talk. If someone asked you why you are doing what you are doing, how would you explain it? Listen to your answer. If you don’t really have an answer, that’s interesting to know! If it contains words like “well, everybody knows that…” or “you can’t just do x…” or “well, I’ve just always…” or anything along those lines, then we’ve got a narrative.

And maybe the story really works for you. Maybe it is true. But maybe you’re just automatically passing by a food at the grocery store because you never ate it growing up — and it might be really tasty. Or maybe you’ve never considered trying an activity because you don’t know anyone else who’s done it. That doesn’t mean it might not be a fun way to spend a weekend. I never went to amusement parks growing up, so it took me a long time to try my first roller coaster. I still don’t leap at the daredevil ones, but some of the mild ones are pretty exciting. Or maybe, more consequentially, you’re not getting the childcare or household help you need to make life sustainable because in your mind normal people don’t do that.

Well, the world has a lot of people. None of us is really normal when you think about it. So spend some time thinking about what you consider normal, and whether it is, in fact, the way things need to be. If so, great. But you might try a roller coaster, or a pickle, or maybe come into work at a different time, and see what happens.