What Amy and Jeff Learned about Collaboration (from Jeff’s POV, but Amy Helped Write It)

Amy growled at me. Last evening. I think she had a right to, and this was not the first time we have sat down to practice for a musical number, and I have left feeling picked on and offended. I’ve been learning to play the banjo, and I still don’t play very well, but we were going to play a duet in church, me on banjo, Amy on flute and mandolin, and both of us on vocals. I was forgetting the words to “For the Beauty of the Earth” and the chords, coming in late, starting early, starting on the wrong beat, and I wasn’t communicating very well, and it was messing her up. And so she growled. And glared. So I got frustrated and clamped my mouth shut. Just got really quiet. Just like that one time. And the time before that. And that other time.

I’m sure you can see that that’s a pattern.

My outward reaction to my inward frustrations over my lack of skill mirrors my reaction to the perceived slight from my wife. She was reacting to my initial frustrated silence, and then I reacted to her irritation in a way that not only compounded the situation but my silence was actually both the cause and the effect of this conflict. An effect to which she reacted. And so the spiral descended.  

One thing I learned early on about writing curriculum vitae and resumes is the value of the words collaborative and collaboration. It’s one thing to say you accomplished something grand on your own; employers look at individual achievements and begin to make notes about the potential value of a worker’s motivation, ambition, and drive to succeed. However, if you can say that same grand thing was collaborative, that you managed to work with someone to accomplish it, then a potential employer will have the same kind of thoughts about your motivation, ambition, and drive, but with the knowledge that you can put aside differences, egoism, narcissism, and problem solve within a group dynamic for the good of the task and the good of the group (“What if none of us goes for the blonde?”). If you know how to collaborate right, you can probably lead by example, delegate effectively, and receive correction and instruction gracefully.

Oh, and let’s not forget that accomplishing goals as a node in a larger social network is hard; some people always want to lead, and others always want to follow, but a truly collaborative mind thinks adaptively and accepts a more fluid role in a group environment, thoroughly willing to lead, but eager to follow.

What I have just described, the ideal collaborator, is facilitated by negotiated roles, proper attitudes, and work ethic, but these social relationships with their tricky dynamics and shared objectives are rarely ideal. Some people can collaborate really well with certain people because their shared strengths complement each other so well, but that doesn’t mean they can collaborate with just anyone. If you have two people who are really good at the same set of tasks, but can’t negotiate their individual roles in completing the tasks, then you have conflict. If you have people who don’t do their job right, and others who don’t forgive easily, you have conflict. If you are tired and the baby won’t go to sleep, you’ll get conflict. If you want to discuss a problem and your husband won’t talk about it, you get conflict. If your wife is hungry and you need to talk about something that’s bugging you, trust me, you’ll get conflict.

Contrary to popular belief, not all conflict is avoidable. Also contrary to popular belief, conflict is an inherent by-product of group dynamics. Interaction between individuals with divergent personalities, cultural backgrounds, and training will almost always bring about some kind of conflict, to a greater or lesser degree. It’s really natural to have conflict. What’s more, conflict can be educational. My ability to play my D7s with Amy’s accompaniment encountered my expectations for myself and revealed an underlying conflict.

How we dealt with it revealed some of the mechanisms that Amy and I employ to cope with conflict in this very particular situation in which we prepare to play music for an audience. When I was a kid and then a teenager, I had a terrible temper. For example, I would frequently fly off the handle when my brother presented me with a range of inflammatory stimuli from teasing me in front of his friends to a humiliating loss on the basketball court. Those situations created conflict, and to cope with it I got angry and reacted. I later learned to control my anger, but I really only traded coping mechanisms; instead of becoming vocal with my fury, I would become silent, and this is a learned pattern of behavior I have followed ever since. These kinds of patterns are difficult to break out of; there’s a reason they’re called patterns, after all. And we all have them, we are often aware that we have them, and we generally know that we need to—and can—do better. Yet, conflict arises, and we resort to those negative coping mechanisms, those ingrained behaviors, for no other reason than that’s how we’ve taught ourselves to act in the presence of certain conditions and stimuli.

And one of the most frustrating parts of the things I’ve written is that they are mostly intuitive. Most people know they deal with conflict in potentially negative ways, and they also realize that it’s difficult to curb their behavioral patterns. I know I do these things, and I expect myself to be better than I am. How can I cultivate healthy coping mechanisms for the conflicts I encounter on an almost daily basis?

I can start by looking at the person next to me.

When it came our turn during church, Amy went and gave Max to Sister Rasmussen, and I set up the chairs and the music stand. We got our instruments out, Amy with her mandolin and flute, I with my banjo. Amy counted off, and sure enough problems arose. I had trouble with my D7s, for starters, and Amy was having problems sound quality and resonance on the mandolin. Then, when we were supposed to start singing the first verse, I started in on the second verse instead. I corrected myself halfway through the first verse, but I was embarrassed. But something happened. Something different than the last time. And the time before. And that other time. Instead of our mistakes pitting us against each other, throwing off our flow, our failings were synched together, moving us in the same direction. I glanced over at Amy, sitting there playing. This time, the Amy-bear didn’t growl and glare. She just smiled, and we kept playing. 

And you know what? We sounded pretty good together.   

Serving Mothers Glorifies God

Jeff and I spoke in our Sacrament Meeting (ie our worship service) today for Mother's Day. I went first and selfishly took up most of the time (ok, all of it), so he only gave a portion of his talk. Although what he said was powerful and sweet, I wanted him to have a venue to share what he worked so hard on. So, in honor of our mother's here are his thoughts: 

First of all, Happy Mother’s Day. It’s really a pleasure to speak on this particular holiday because, first, this year my wife, Amy, is a mother for the first time. Max came along and changed our lives, and we both feel like completely different kinds of people than we were even a few months ago, as most people do, I imagine, when faced with caring for a little lump with an often piercing wail and a limited but specific range of needs and wants that require attention regardless of the time of day (or night). It’s been life-altering in a way that may sound cliché, but only because we lack the proper terminology for describing all of the distinct aspects, mental, physical, spiritual, of this process, which is simultaneously common or communal and subjective, individualized, unique, and extremely personal. Because of these experiences, mothers embody, figuratively and literally, all that cannot be explained about these kinds of experiences, and so we celebrate.

Second, this day is special because, let’s face it, even if you aren’t a mom, I imagine you have had one at some time or another who was primarily responsible for getting you here, and that’s also a reason to celebrate. It’s not like a birthday where we, for the most part, celebrate the wrong person, using cake and candles and presents to say, “Way to be born!” to people who physically did absolutely nothing to get themselves here. My wife has an uncle who takes flowers to his mother on his birthday to celebrate the person to whom the day signifies more than just “I made it here! Aren’t you proud of me!” but also a lot of love, pain, and fulfillment in providing a physical body for one of Heavenly Father’s children, and I don’t mean fulfillment simply in an obligatory “I have a role that I have fulfilled because I am a woman” kind of way, but in the sense that one receives a kind of beautiful satisfaction and sense of one’s own strength and individual ability as a woman in God’s kingdom. At least on Mother’s Day, we are all in agreement, in thought and in deed, and mothers are brought to the forefront as objects of our praise, admiration, and gratitude.

In his novel Ninety-Three, Victor Hugo depicts a scene in which French soldiers encounter a woman, a widow, whose husband had been killed three days prior and who has two children, but little or nothing to feed them. Hugo writes, “The eldest of the children…said, ‘I am hungry.’ The sergeant took a bit of regulation bread from his pocket, and handed it to the mother. She broke the bread into two fragments, and gave them both to her children, who ate them with avidity.

“‘She has kept none for herself,’ grumbled the sergeant.”

“Because she is not hungry,’ said a soldier.”

“‘Because she is a mother,’ said the sergeant.” (16)

In this scene, which Jeffrey R. Holland has quoted in General Conference, we witness an exchange that in some ways feels like an allusion to the words of James 1:27: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.” But it is what comes after that initial bit of charity, given in the form of “regulation bread” that is, to me, most noteworthy. First, the woman, who is starving herself, eats none of the bread, but divides it among her two hungry children, it appears, as a near reflex. The sergeant, seeing her self-denial, grumbles. The soldier and he offer their interpretations of the act, the soldier suggesting that she does because she isn’t actually hungry, while the sergeant remarks that she does it because “she is a mother.” In the context of this scene, neither remark is intended positively and instead serve to diminish the magnitude of this act. The soldier’s remark dissolves any hint of sacrifice on the mother’s part, implying that if she were hungry, she would have eaten some first. The sergeant’s comment, that “she is a mother,” is not a kind of admiration for this mother, but is instead a kind of grumbling judgment or second-guessing of her act of devotion to her children. He sees the mother’s act as a weakness or lack of control; she cannot do otherwise because of what she is. Why he grumbles and how he means “Because she is a mother” is not clear, but it does give us something to contemplate.

That the essence of motherhood stems in part from natural tendencies is absolutely accurate, and this woman’s act at least on the surface features characteristics we associate with reflexive action, an action that occurs naturally in her because of a particular stimulus, the way a knee will jerk if you tap it with a hammer. But we also know that human beings are born with fallen natures; we have mortal bodies coupled with eternal spirits, and the fallen part of ourselves is something we must wrestle with, through the positive enactment of agency, throughout this life. This is not a negative; on the contrary, if we do something good, it means we have to overcome the selfish “natural man” part of ourselves in order to do it. Mothers are not exempt from that. Through a repeated pattern of selfless acts, like so many mothers I know, this mother has built a lifestyle of giving, of sacrifice, to the point that her act becomes instantaneous, an act that at one time was a conscious process that has become automatic, she is not at the mercy of her own nature but because she has denied or conquered the animal part of her human nature that would have seen to her own needs first.

In 1 Nephi 5, Sariah “complains” to Lehi, when her sons do not return: “Behold thou hast led us forth from the land of our inheritance, and my sons are no more, and we perish in the wilderness.” Now, I would first like to say that I think it is significant that these lines and those in verse 8 when she bears her testimony that the Lord is in charge and that he did protect their sons from Laban are the only times in The Book of Mormon that Sariah has any quoted dialogue, so I’m pretty sure Nephi felt there was something substantial to learn from this experience. Yes, Sariah does complain, and we admit that. It says so right here. But please can we not consider all the murmuring in the wilderness to be of the same kind? Nephi’s brothers have a pattern of rebellion and throughout these writings, but Nephi gives no indication of a similar pattern for Sariah. He does not depict his mother as an incessant nag. If Hugo’s sergeant had been involved in this story as well, he probably would have said that it was “Because she is a mother” in a way that implies irrationality, uncontrollable emotion, insubordination, and weakness. But this has nothing to do with that. What we can extrapolate from the context of this outburst and apply what we know about mothers, and mothers worrying, and why they worry, and how much they worry, is that this is not the absence of faith so much as the presence of sheer terror and worry and anxiety on behalf of her children, and this is probably not, and this is my opinion of course, the first time she has been subjected to that kind of distress. This is just the latest, I imagine, in a series of sleepless nights. Laman and Lemuel’s complaints are self-serving and self-interested, while Sariah’s come from a place of love, which is why, on the one hand, Lehi corrects them, and on the other hand as Nephi explains, his father “did…comfort my mother Sariah concerning us, while we journeyed in the wilderness up to the land of Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 5:8). He understands that Sariah is not angry at him so much as she is angry at the situation and attempting to process the reasons behind it.

In light of these two examples, I would ask how can we know how to serve mothers, ours or anyone else’s? Hugo demonstrates physical support alone being given, while Lehi looks past what outwardly seems like rebellion and supplies the proper response to Sariah’s pain. Physical and emotional support are both highly important forms of service, and providing one and not the other essentially equates to what Jesus said of the Pharisees, that “ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin and have omitted the weightier matters of the law” (Matthew 23:23). I think the key thing involves cultivating a perspective, a discerning eye, that ability to see needs that are less obvious and fill them. Ever since our little boy was born, my life is filled with opportunities to serve my wife, to sustain her physically and emotionally, to meet her needs and our son’s whether they are glaring or subtle, to understand the pain, tiredness, and discomfort that lies just beyond what the natural eye can perceive. If we really want to build the kingdom of God quickly, we should turn our hearts to our mothers, as well as our fathers, and sustain them in the ways they really need. As I work toward building my own consistent lifestyle of self-sacrifice by overcoming the “natural man,” I hope that I can become that person who loves the mothers in my life in ways they require and not necessarily in the ways I think they need and by really understanding that there is no such thing as an insignificant need.