Wedding Soup for the Solo

We frequently have working lunches, snacks, desserts, and occasional drinks (although recently it seems between diets, babies, and prohibitions I am the only one that participates in the drink) at work. My team's theory is that food and beverage are perfect facilitators to any brainstorm, discussion or debate. Without a hint of crankiness and while adding to our energy reserves, we efficiently complete strategic plans, budgets, educational sessions, information architecture sketches, and brand audits.

There are times though, especially over really sweet icing or salty popcorn, that the snacks take us on tangents and lead us off topic. For instance, we reached a stale mate on strategy the other day over Moondance Diner's lethal sweet potato chips and shifting the conversation toward Cristine's 5-pound recipient of said chips. The December due date was the starting point, and from there this tangent led to an off topic debate of birthing best practices. As a non-subject matter expert, I took a back seat on this one.

The thing that interested me though, were the proud assertions of mothers that had done it au natural. In a way, they held themselves to a higher standard. They would say they had "done it all by themselves!" Those that used drugs were less eager to say, "Well, me and Mr. Epidural really knocked our little tot out of the womb!" But debates followed over which way was better.  

And the thing is, without any understanding of pregnancy, except for perhaps the feeling I get when I've eaten too much of my Aunt Dee-Dee's boiled cabbage on Saint Patrick's Day, I sided with the non-drug-users. I belonged in the camp of folks who prefer the solo job. And it's probably because I find more pride in a job that I complete from start to finish alone, than one where I need help.

This feeling could be a product of my childhood and my parent's encouragement to try it alone. When I was young, my best projects surfaced when I took the training wheels off, and said, I'm doing this one all by myself. I got to put the skills I had developed to the test and add my personal creativity to the process and product. A great example of this - building sandcastles.

We were a sandcastle family - every beach vacation involved a sandcastle. My Dad was a master of moving, placing, and sculpting sand into royal palaces. I watched his craftsmanship with an eager eye, anticipating the day when I could be such a builder.

I remember reaching the age when I started to create my own castles. It was right around the time when my parents started encouraging us to work without their help. My castles were hybrid models, fusing the skills I had developed from my Dad with my creativity. They had many parts and usually involved big chateaus, motes around them, interlocking canals branching off the motes, and clusters of village houses exposing the polar disparity of wealth in my make believe Venice of Nantucket, Bald Head Island, Kiawah Island or Hilton Head.

I would begin my work alone, make it to the stage where the castle, mote and preliminary extended city plan were complete, and then without fail I would get requests from neighbors on the beach to help out. As awful as it sounds, I would deny them the opportunity to work on my project. I kept any help I obtained in the family - and they had specific duties. My brother was the master damn builder and my sister was the resident artist adding decorative elements to the city plan.

When the moment came to ask my Dad to finish up the chapter of his book and come look ... I couldn't wait to say, "Look what I DID, Dad!" Praise followed. And I entered cloud nine.

Sandcastle building is only one example. You can apply the same story of solo workmanship to Christmas cookie preparation, monologues or solo dances on the stage, homework, and even housework.

Maybe it was in college, around the time when I learned that I was a better assister than goal scorer on the lacrosse field, but at some point I started to accept that as the projects got bigger and the stakes got higher, I needed a partner in crime or two to create a better product. At work, I wouldn't have been able to achieve 90% of my successes without a team of strategic partners, contributors, editors, and approvers. When I ran 26.2 miles a couple weeks ago, I wouldn't have been able to cross the finish line had my family not been there and The Boyfriend not run the last 2 miles with me.

So, while Cristine and the team mulled over her decision to go it alone or not, I started thinking about my own big decision making over the next year. I won't need any epidurals to get through what linens to use, what songs to pick, who will make the final cut on the guest list, or whether to insert tap dancing into any part of the wedding, but these decisions could get painful.

After her wedding, my sister proudly got to say, "my wedding was beautiful and I did it all by myself!" That ruffled some of the parental feathers, but her point was that she did it without outside counsel. Like the sandcastles, we kept the planning and development of the wedding inside the family.

Like other big projects I won't be able to do the wedding planning alone, but like my sister it looks like we are keeping the planning in the family; I will need the jet setting parents, the nah-sayers, the etiquette experts, my bevy of bridesmaids, and of course The Boyfriend to make this grand event a success. But no outside counsel to taint the experience.

So last night, I started ... and I leveraged the Communications Team rule of reason: I made a mean Italian Wedding Soup, facilitated our first wedding brainstorm with the soon to be renamed Boyfriend, and made headway on the best strategic plan ever.

Lo.