Perfection and Control: No Can Do with Joanne Greene

Speaker 1: 0:06

Do you feel overlooked and invisible because you're an older woman? Have you had those age jump days when you look in the mirror and swear that you're looking at your mother? Do you feel the clock ticking and wonder whether you have enough time to check off all the items on your bucket list? Hello, I'm Jane Leder and I'm the host of Older Women and Friends, a podcast about and four older women that kick stereotypes to the curb. We older women are the keepers of stories, and guests on Older Women and Friends share their stories about love, loss, dreams, friendships. But let's not kid ourselves Aging can be a messy, complex affair. But older women have been around the block a few times and learned a thing or two, and this podcast celebrates their lessons. So put in your earbuds and join me on Older Women and Friends.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Joanne Green never saw creative writing in her future. She thought she was going to be an actress, and she studied theater at Northwestern University. But she didn't become an actress. No, she chose radio and TV instead. Joanne hosted and produced award-winning feminist and other features and talk shows for decades, and she did that while, like many women, balancing a crazy busy life as a mother or wife and a volunteer. But what she considered her perfect life collapsed the day she was hit by a car while crossing on foot. But I'll let her tell you her story about challenges, loss and letting go. Joanne, how are you.

Speaker 2: 2:02

I am doing great, Jane, and I'm thrilled to be here with you.

Speaker 1: 2:05

I'm delighted to have you here. So I think what we should do is, if you don't mind, I'd love to have you read the first three paragraphs of the first page of the first chapter of this book.

Speaker 2: 2:21

Chapter one. As I step into the crosswalk, there's a sudden deafening sound, an explosion maybe. Then I'm airborne, thrown onto the hood of a car. What the hell? I silently scream to the universe or God, or no one. Seriously, all I can hear is an ear-splitting cacophony. All I feel is wild, uncontrolled movement. Stop the car, step the car. The car is catapulted down North San Pedro Road, my head banging against its windshield. I slip off the hood onto the ground alive. I can't move, can't speak. I lift my head and blink my eyes. A few times Things come into focus To my right, people crowd the sidewalk staring at me with their mouths open in horror, like in Monk's painting. I hear someone yelling oh my God, oh my God. I slowly turn my head in the direction of the sound but see nameless faces. Cars are turned in different directions, people are running toward me. I'm lying splayed in the middle of the street and feel my short cotton print dress hiked up, naked thighs on display, like that matters. I keep blinking, but the scene doesn't change.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Wow, pretty powerful. I have to just say as an aside that my husband picked up the book that was sitting on the shelf in the bathroom and he went oh my god, are you going to have her as a guest? That's unbelievable, I can't believe. Is she okay? So the first question obviously is were you okay, not?

Speaker 2: 3:51

initially I had four pelvic fractures and all of the soft tissue on the right side of my body was crushed and that takes longer to heal, actually, than the broken bones. And then there was my psyche, which was definitely damaged, but I made a complete recovery on all fronts, only to then face a cancer diagnosis. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Speaker 1: 4:14

Oh, you are getting ahead of yourself. That was question number 32. I'm fine, I'm really fine. I'm fine, dammit, I'm fine. Let's take a little trip back to your childhood and, if you can just describe yourself as a kid, and a little bit about the family dynamics.

Speaker 2: 4:37

So I was the oops baby. My mother was pregnant at my brother's bar mitzvah to give you a sense of how oops my parents are, both in their 40s. They had a 13 year old and an eight year old. I was second generation American. My grandparents came over from somewhere in the pale of settlement and we lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, right outside of Boston, in a little community where everyone knew everyone.

Speaker 2: 5:07

And I was different than my siblings. They were both very linear people, math majors, if you can imagine this. Even my sister in the 60s and I was a creative kid all over the map, never colored in the lines, staged plays in my backyard and raised money for the Jimmy fund, which was children's cancer research in Boston. And then the 60s came along and I fancied myself a hippie and that was completely an aftermath of my family and I went off to school in Chicago at the age of 17, waving goodbye because my parents said I could go a thousand miles away and no further. I found the school the good school that was a thousand miles away, and went.

Speaker 1: 5:52

What was your relationship like with your parents? Let's start with your mother.

Speaker 2: 5:57

Challenging. I felt like I was being criticized and corrected all the time. My mom did not understand an imaginative, creative child. When I would talk about my imaginary friends, she would tell me to stop it. You know that's not real and your dad.

Speaker 2: 6:13

My dad had a neurological disorder from the time that I was about five. They thought it was a brain tumor. It wasn't. There was really no treatment for it and it was degenerative cognitively, physically, emotionally, everything. So, while my dad I'm actually a lot like my dad in many ways and he is the parent that would have understood me and encouraged me, but he was so compromised during much of my childhood and he passed away when I was 26.

Speaker 1: 6:42

Oh, I'm so sorry. So was that one of the family secrets? I know you write about family secrets and your tendency, or your ex tendency, to share too much to overshare. What kind of family secrets are we talking about?

Speaker 2: 7:00

Oh, my brother flunked out of college. Nobody said that really happened. I was anorexic at the end of high school. Beginning of college, Nobody could know that we don't have mental illness in our family, those kinds of things. My mother had a brother. She and her two sisters were not speaking to him in my childhood but nobody ever mentioned that he existed and it wasn't until I was nine years old that I found out that my mom had a brother and I had these three cousins who lived an hour away in Providence, Rhode Island, things like that.

Speaker 1: 7:35

You mentioned, or you write, and I'm going to quote, that keeping busy has always been my default to avoid a downward spiral. Can you give us an example of a stressful or unhappy time when you were unable to look at the issues head on, or should we just go straight to the accident? Oh, there are so many options here.

Speaker 2: 7:57

I would say that I kept my anxiety which was probably the primary thing I was trying to avoid at bay by just being a person in constant motion, and I would go and feel safer if I thought I was in control. And I say now if I thought I was in control, because I think that control is an illusion. We think we're in control, we're not necessarily in control. I always felt safer if I was behind the wheel, driving things like that. I would try to orchestrate whatever was happening around me in all scenarios. I think I don't like being on boards, but I don't mind being the chair of the board. Does that make any sense?

Speaker 1: 8:41

Of course it does. You're talking to somebody else who is a little bit of a control freak. We are sisters in that regard, no doubt about it. We'll talk about a crazy situation over which you are, over which you were not in control. Your sister had cancer, your mother had a torrent of health problems, and I believe that by that time both of your sons were teenagers Can you tell me, and don't figure, they weren't easy, oh really.

Speaker 1: 9:12

Turn, mine was just a breeze. Was that one of the times in which you said, man, I got to keep busy? Or maybe were you even conscious of doing this? I will share a quick story.

Speaker 2: 9:25

I had a little rash on my hand and I went to my doctor, who was a wonderful woman, very wise, and she said to me yeah, I don't worry about the rash, I'll give you some cream. But what I want to talk to you about is the fact that you're depressed. I said, oh, but that's because my sister's now stage four ovarian cancer. My mom's got these different issues, so that's why she goes. No, that's not exactly. Yes, that's true, those things are happening and those are some circumstances. But here's what I have learned Many women through the years brush things under the rug and we learn how to step over them and go around them.

Speaker 2: 10:05

And right about in midlife, in perimenopause, when you have less and less estrogen, you have fewer and fewer resources, particularly high achieving women start tripping over those things that they have put under the rug and you are now at that moment where your kids are launching, your mom and sister are both looking at the end of life and you don't have the resources to fully deal with this. So all the coping mechanisms that you've used to keep it at bay all these years, it's tougher and tougher. So I believe that you need to go into therapy and I believe you could use some antidepressant, and this was a shock to me, an absolute shock. However, I did exactly what she said and she was right and you're all better.

Speaker 1: 10:54

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 10:56

I've never had a problem since.

Speaker 1: 10:58

So let's talk about getting better and let's talk about the process of you healing. Can you give us a little more background? How long were you in the hospital? What could you do or could not do when you got home? What was the length of your recovery?

Speaker 2: 11:13

I was in the hospital for five days, largely because they couldn't control the internal bleeding and my vitals kept plummeting and they kept prepping me for surgery. But they didn't want to do surgery because with pelvic fractures they wouldn't and there were multiple fractures. They wouldn't know where the blood was coming from. It would be a surgery would might have been necessary, but it wouldn't have been a good solution. In any case I didn't need surgery. I went home after five days. I was a wreck. We had a rented hospital bed and a wheelchair and created a ramp so I could be wheeled outside.

Speaker 2: 11:46

Sometimes I couldn't do anything for myself at all. I was completely dependent upon my husband who, although a wonderful human being and completely rose to the occasion, had never really taken care of anyone in that way, and thankfully he worked from home and was in business for himself. So he because I pretty much took up all of his time and I needed everything. I needed physical therapy but couldn't even do that at the beginning. I needed help going to the bathroom. I needed help with medication management. The pain was horrible. I was having debilitating flashbacks. The complete recovery took a year and a half, but I was getting around and doing some things a couple months after the accident with a walker.

Speaker 1: 12:35

I know it's very sexy. Let me just oh, yeah, it is. I know I just posted something about that, but that's another story you wrote. I hate waiting. I said that very devilishly, if that's a word. I can't imagine that having to wait to recuperate was something that came easily to you. What are you starting to learn at that particular time, when you apparently are completely out of control? There's not a damn thing you can do. What's going on in your mind? Are you flipping out, or was this the beginning of an interesting transition?

Speaker 2: 13:17

More the latter. I am a survivor. I think many of us are. We can pull from our DNA. We can pull from our past.

Speaker 2: 13:25

There were a few things I did that enabled me to get through these, the absolute toughest times. One was gratitude, counting one's blessings and, crazily enough, a number of the things that I ended up doing that were so helpful were things my mom had always said, and I had rolled my eyes. Counting your blessings is key. If you are feeling sorry for yourself and you are focused on how lucky you are. It absolutely counteracts the negative feelings. It'll win out every time. That's one thing. Another thing was I can do. This became my mantra, and even at the beginning, when I wasn't sure it was true, I just kept saying it to myself you can do this, I can do this, I can do this, and over time it built up my confidence and my feeling of being powerful and that I was going to be able to do this.

Speaker 2: 14:23

A third one was this, too, shall pass. Whatever I'm feeling at this moment is this moment. It's not forever. It's not even going to be the same an hour from now or even maybe five minutes from now. Feel it through, feel the fear, feel the pain, feel the sorrow, feel the loss, feel the grief, feel the lack of independence, feel the helplessness, and then move beyond that and then take the next step. And it worked. It really worked, and I got to say this too shall pass is also true for the good times.

Speaker 2: 15:01

I'm in a really good period right now. My life is awesome right now, and this isn't going to last either. I had COVID a couple of weeks ago, first time in this entire three and a half year fiasco, and I used all these techniques. Even when I tested negative for two days and then rebounded because of the Pax Lovid or just because of the virus itself. I had to cancel a speaking engagement because I was still testing positive and I was like all right, this is okay, life will be great again next week, or maybe it'll take two weeks, and it did.

Speaker 1: 15:38

And life is great again. You have to just savor those good minutes. I like to divide my life, or anybody's life, into different components your love life, your life as a parent, your creative slash, professional life. And I always say that if two out of the three are going well, hey, things are rocking, it is excellent. But you got to grab it, you got to be grateful for it because, as you say, the next day, the next minute, things can just hit the skid.

Speaker 2: 16:10

So I and will, and will, and will, and will. It's not a maybe they will. Right now, my children and my grandchildren are all happy and thriving. This is a moment because, as they say, you're only as happy as your least happy child.

Speaker 1: 16:27

Oh interesting, I've never heard that before.

Speaker 2: 16:30

I don't know who they are, but somebody said that I can't claim credit.

Speaker 1: 16:33

So then I'm in real trouble because I haven't, only so I don't have any more eggs in the basket. You've talked about control, you've talked about impatience, you've talked about being forced to slow down, and I guess I'm curious, because you did say that the techniques that you develop, they're ones that you continue to practice to this day. Has that always worked out well and been easy for you? And I'm asking because I think we all come to these grand realizations and we put them into practice, and then something else happens and we forget, and for a minute we're starting from ground zero, and I'm just wondering what your experience has been.

Speaker 2: 17:17

Not working at a job has definitely improved my ability to control my time and prioritize self-care. For instance, I didn't used to be able to meditate I'd have monkey mind, my mind would just go. And the reason they call it a practice is because nobody can do it when they first start out, particularly those of us who live in this culture and this society where we're getting bombarded with information and sensory input all the time. But I have practiced and practiced and now I can meditate, and even just five or 10 minutes can make a very big difference. I do yoga, I take walks, I notice beauty, I take time to appreciate the flowers, I take time to pat every dog that I see.

Speaker 2: 18:09

I'm a dog fanatic and also I love children and so I say hi to all of them. I don't ever regret a momentary connection with another human being, so I try to build that into my life. I like checking in on people and having multiple little connections texts, phone calls, emails. That's part of the juice that gives me motivation to go on and makes me feel whole and makes me feel good. Part of it is just getting older and knowing oneself and accepting oneself Also nap.

Speaker 1: 18:48

You nap? Oh, take a little siesta.

Speaker 2: 18:52

And let me tell you it is glorious.

Speaker 1: 18:56

Ah, actually I think maybe that's something I will do later today. It sounds glorious. So you know, a lot of people say and I think you wrote it too that you now look at your accident as a gift, and I hear that a lot from people who are cancer survivors, for example.

Speaker 2: 19:15

Oh yeah, I'm glad too.

Speaker 1: 19:16

And you're the. Oh yes, you mentioned that initially. I was going to bring it up as question. I think I said 32. So just tell us a little bit you are diagnosed with Routine cancer no symptoms.

Speaker 2: 19:29

routine colonoscopy at 60. My routine colonoscopy at 50 showed nothing, no polyps. 10 years, you're good to go. I went in for this at 60. They said I think we saw this, it's probably, and I was just incredulous. I thought I would for sure get breast cancer or ovarian cancer like everybody else in my family. But no, and it ended up. I call it my month with cancer because between from the diagnosis until the all clear was exactly one month and I had what's called a colectomy eight inches of colon removed. And that was it, nothing else. I'm fine, no further treatment, no radiation, no chemo, and I'm good to go.

Speaker 1: 20:15

So very fortunate. Were you walking down the hospitals doing any self-talking? Like I can do it, I can do it. In other words, I know when I go to get a mammogram, for example, it's like I can do it, and if I get bad news, it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay. I'm just wondering the kind of self-talk that you had to indulge in.

Speaker 2: 20:38

Well, I had the help of my family members my husband and my two sons. My husband got me a special night shirt for the hospital that was literally just a semicolon, because that's what I was going to have. He then also got me a Wonder Woman bathrobe. My son got me a hat. That was a panda. Anyway, walking down the halls in the hospital, I was wearing my semicolon, wearing my Wonder Woman bathrobe, wearing the panda hat and entertaining the troops. Yes, I was worried. I, of course, did not think it was going to be stage one. I thought it was going to be at least stage two and maybe stage three. I had visions of myself leaning over the toilet with no hair and all of that, but that's not what happened. And then there was a whole other chapter, but I don't want to do a spoiler alert because-.

Speaker 1: 21:27

No, no spoiler alert, because we want people there's another whole big scare that happened.

Speaker 2: 21:31

That ended up with a good result, but that one was super scary and I did a lot of self-talk with that one. It's been a good lie, I'm very lucky.

Speaker 1: 21:42

I won't see this happen or that happen, but it's okay, because I did this or I did that, I get it. I get it. And I think we're more and more aware of that kind of talk the older we get for sure. So I think maybe my last question, because time runs very quickly, particularly when I'm speaking to an interesting person, and that is what propelled you to write the book. And interestingly, and I will just share this, this is not told chronologically. She does not start from the first page, which is the accident, and then go blip. She starts at the crucial event and then it's very free, associative in a way. So you do run back and forth between present and past. I thought that was a very interesting technique. I enjoyed it, it was good. So my question is that at the end of this process and as an author I get it and I know how much time and energy and sweat and tears go into a book what did you come away with?

Speaker 2: 22:54

I was shocked that I had the attention span to embark upon and complete a project that was this voluminous, required so much rewriting. My career was in radio, where bam I was on the air every half hour with another newscast and it didn't have to be perfect, because it was literally in the air and then gone and then I was on to the next one, and short essays is really my wheelhouse. I have a podcast right now called In this Story with Joanne Green, where I share micro-essays. They are between three and five minutes in length and they're set to music, and that's where I'm comfortable.

Speaker 2: 23:36

Writing a book was a very big lift for me, and so I think it's not something that I'll do again, unless it's a compilation of essays, because that's really much more comfortable for me. But I felt that I needed to do this for a couple different reasons One, to share what I learned. Two, because I'm, with this last person surviving in my family and I wanted to capture stories about my sister and my brother and my parents to share with their children and grandchildren and hopefully soon to be great grandchildren, because I know it's going in that direction. The first great-grandchild is engaged in getting married, so who knows what happens?

Speaker 1: 24:19

Wow.

Speaker 2: 24:20

But I wanted to capture all of that and have it live longer than I will have it outlive me, these stories. And so initially I was writing just for friends and family. But at some point along the way, as I learned more and more about the craft of writing a memoir which was very different than the kind of writing I had done all my life I said why don't I just make this as good as I can make it and have higher editors and teachers and writing coaches and just keep making it better until I'm actually proud of it? And that's what happened, and I'm very proud of it now.

Speaker 1: 24:58

And you should be, and I want people to know that. Obviously the book is available on Amazon and I'm assuming that every other site where one may purchase a book it's, by accident, a memoir of letting go. And, joanne, where are some other places where listeners can go if they want more information about you?

Speaker 2: 25:23

I wanted to just mention that it's also an audiobook.

Speaker 2: 25:26

Many of us like to listen to our books these days while we're walking or driving around or whatever. So it is an audiobook and it's available in all the places where one gets audiobooks. I only know about Audible, but I know that Apple, I think, also has a platform for audiobooks. So it's available everywhere and if you want to support your local independent bookseller, they can order it. And it's distributed by PGW, which is Publishers Group West, a division of Ingram, so it's widely available. I would ask people to go to my website it's Joanne j-o-a-n-e-green-g-r-e-e-n-ecom and sign up for my newsletter, which, if you scroll all the way down on the homepage, you can sign up for my newsletter and that will tell you if I'm going to be doing a speaking engagement or if, for instance, there is a podcast I'm going to be appearing on and how did they get to the very interesting podcast that you talked about a few minutes ago?

Speaker 2: 26:30

It's on all the podcast platforms. It's called In this Story with Joanne Green, and if you follow it, then you will get each new episode, which is every other week on a Friday, and those new episodes will just come right directly to you.

Speaker 1: 26:48

This has been a blast. I'm so happy to have met you and to be able to have shared this experience with you. Thank you a lot.

Speaker 2: 26:58

I will write back to anyone who writes to me and you can get to me through the website. Thank you so much, jane, and thanks for doing this podcast. It's great.

Speaker 1: 27:07

Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Older Women and Friends Speaking of friends. Please tell yours about this podcast and if you'd like to contact me with comments or suggestions, you can email me at olderwomenandfriendspodcastcom. And while you're at it, please take a few minutes to write a review. It's really easy. Go to Apple Podcast type in older women and friends, scroll down the page and click on Reviews. Until next time.