monthly meeting around our kitchen tables to share our lives and to support and encourage one another. These kitchen-table conversations were always therapeutic and inspiring. Our conversations gave us hope and inner strength. We knew that together, as friends, we would never walk alone.
Kitchen-Table Friends
Word spread about our kitchen-table conversations. We were asked to speak at conferences and to women's groups. We titled our talk “Survive and Thrive: Ten Turbo-Charged Tips for Women in Transition” and guessed that maybe thirty people might show up for the conversation.
Over 400 women came to our first session, forcing the fire marshals to lock the doors! We told our stories that day. Women lined up to talk with us. They shared their own personal versions of “survive-and-thrive” lives. Weeks later, we were encouraged to write a book. More conference organizers asked us to speak. We used the idea of writing a book as an excuse to continue our monthly meetings, yet wrote not a single word.
In fact, we continued to meet for over a decade before we put one word onto paper for that imaginary book we told everyone we were writing! We talked about losing businesses, losing husbands, and wanting to lose husbands. We talked about building careers, building families, and building on our fragile networking skills. We talked about finding our self-esteem, finding our paths, even finding new mates. We talked about challenges, taking risks, and taking a chance on love again. We talked candidly about near financial ruin, actual financial ruin, and avoiding financial ruin. We talked about our children, our co-workers, our colleagues, and our sex lives. We left no topic unexplored.
We encouraged one another through the numerous transitions we were experiencing. We even gave ourselves a name—Women in Transition, WIT for short—noting that we would truly need our collective wit to navigate through these tricky times. In time, our meetings took the form of what we envisioned as a quilting circle in the Wild West. Yet the fabric we wove at our meetings was the fabric of our lives.
We learned many lessons in our decades-long friendship. We learned that we had been fooled. We had convinced ourselves that, if we could manage our schedules, break through the glass ceiling, spend quality time with our families, bring home the bacon (and fry it up in a pan) while bouncing children on our hips and creating warm and loving relationships with our husbands, in-laws, and colleagues, somehow, some way, we would be rewarded with the problem-free lives that had eluded us. We were wrong.
Surviving and Thriving
From kitchen conversations to the thousands of conversations we've had with women all over the world, we learned that the problem-free life we sought was worse than just an illusion. It was a life-depleting myth to which too many have fallen victim. A woman's life is about much more than success, having it all, or the elusive balance we all seek (and may find). It is about more than seeking perfection or conquering the world (although you may). It is about more than gritting your teeth and making it through (no matter how). It is about surviving and thriving.
For us, surviving and thriving meant reinventing and rebuilding, and realizing that success is never final and failure is never fatal. It meant putting our best foot forward and walking into a future we had designed. All too often, the tiny voice inside us revealed that, although we might look like pillars of success on the outside, our teenagers were out of control, our jobs could end tomorrow, and our spouses, colleagues, and bosses were often untruthful, selfish, unfaithful, had died, or were just plain stupid.
Surviving and thriving meant taking what life offered up while searching for the opportunities, the joy, and the compassion in less-than-pleasant and always less-than-perfect circumstances. Together, we would navigate through some tricky times.
So, How's Your Life?
Our collective lives have been filled with more transitions than we thought possible. Transitions are an important part of the fabric of every woman's life. They affect us individually, but also have a ripple effect on our families. Transitions can build our characters and turn us into wise women, or they can leave us feeling depressed and alone. Successful transitions can make us strong—ready to extend a helpful hand to other women—or they can make us fearful of what lies ahead.
We offer this book as a road map of sorts for life's transitions. It contains the many lessons we've learned on how to ride the tidal waves of change that often engulf women. We've boiled those lessons down into sixty imperatives for surviving the vicissitudes of life and thriving despite them. Along the way, we have been honored to meet many magnificent and brave women whose stories of challenge, resilience, and triumph we include as examples of hope for all of us. This book is a literary kitchen table, where we invite you to pull up a chair and join us so you don't have to go through life alone. We hope this inspiring circle of women gives you hope, insight, and inspiration to deal with your own challenges and changes.
Education is not enough if it's not accompanied by action. With that in mind, each section in our book ends with suggested action plans and tools to help you implement them. We call this section the WIT Kit, and we hope you find these insights valuable. More important, we hope you'll be motivated to adapt them and apply them in your own lives, where they can produce real-world results.
We know you're busy. We know you're probably running from the minute you wake until bedtime. But we also know that taking time to follow up on the recommendations found in the WIT Kit can make the difference between merely surviving what life throws at you and thriving despite what life throws at you.
Some of the actions described in the WIT Kit take only a few minutes. Some involve more time and planning. All of them can help. If you feel as if life is dragging you down, these actions can help you keep your head above water. They can help you create a higher quality of life for yourself and your loved ones—now, not someday.
Deborah Collins Stephens
Michealene Cristini Risley
Jackie Speier
Jan Yanehiro
San Francisco, California, July 2018
FOREWORD
There are fifteen people in the world who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. Rita Moreno is one of them. Former President Barack Obama referred to Rita, the only Latina to win the awards, as a trailblazer with the courage to break through barriers and forge new paths. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said: “When I was younger, I idolized Rita Moreno. I still do.”
Rita is a role model for millennials and an icon of inspiration for all generations. Today, at eighty-six, with retirement not in her DNA, Rita has a hit television show—One Day at a Time—and even more awards: a Kennedy Center honor, honors from the ACLU and Ellis Island for her work in civil rights, along with cover stories in Time, Newsweek, Glamour, and the Today show. Her path to fame and success has not been an easy one, however. Rita has lived most every lesson in this book and come out the other side stronger, wiser, and more accomplished. Here, in her own words, is how she describes the journey.
Just Deal with It
When I first read This Is Not
