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Sitting in our downtown theater last night, I watched several kids I know performing – being brave up there, singing, playing instruments, smiling big or looking a little shy. And all of the kids I knew were from divorced families. Two in particular are sweethearts who I’ve known since they were in preschool. Their dad is AWOL these days. Literally. Their mom thinks she knows where he is but they don’t have a phone number, and they recently heard that he was in town for a celebration but didn’t call them. Wow. Wow. Can you imagine being that dad? Not vaguely. But I can imagine being those kids. As they sang and danced last night, they were the Whole, Beautiful people they are – the people their mom has worked so hard to help them become. But surely there’s a hole somewhere, a pocket that needs mending, that’s been left from their father’s neglect. It makes me want to hold them. To heap their mama with praise and love – she deserves much. And him? I go from wanting to shake the Devil out of him to trying to find the compassion to understand what kind of sickness or incompleteness – what large hole lives in him that makes this neglect possible.
I was at Kmart the other night, checking out the electronic section to see just how much I can’t afford the DS that tops Thomas’ holiday wish list. (When I told the kids that I couldn’t get them very much this year, they were super understanding and sweet; then Thomas nodded and said, “Besides, Santa will bring everything.”) What was this speaker for your phone? And this wire for … what? And this handheld thingy? As the rap played on the speakers, I felt incredibly out of it. Dumb even.
But more is making me feel out of it than that. There’s this other thing that reoccurs to me every now and then, something odd and unlikely and a little, well, off-color. Plainly, it’s whether to shave or wax the netherland. The bush. You know – down there. This conundrum – to do or not – came up a year ago when I was having coffee with a fellow divorcing single mom who was starting to date. She was seeing men and women, here and away from town. She was adventurous. It turns out that one of her first questions upon reentering the dating game had been to an old friend — now a gynecologist: “So, tell me, what’s going on down there these days for most women?” Most women, her friend told her, are shaving. Or waxing.
I tell this to C. And he tells me about a night of friendly drinking and gossip with a group of women friends and one other guy. “All hippies and lesbians,” he says, describing the group. The other man, out of nowhere, says how he misses “bushes.” To which all of the women, in unison, say “Ewwwww! That’s gross. Those are gross!”
I look things up on the Internet and find most women – younger women, it seems – saying about the same thing. Then, on a feminist web site, I find “Am I Weird Because I Have Pubic Hair?”
To which I want to scream: Why do we have to tweeze our eyebrows (if done professionally, around $15); get pedicures ($25 – mind you, these are the most conservative numbers possible); dye our hair to make it blonder or less gray or more raven-like — just to make it something it’s not ($40); go to yoga and/or the gym and/or pilates and/or… in order to stay toned ($50/mo) … and now we ALSO have to either pay someone $40 every six to eight weeks – or deal with the itchy scratchy unpleasantness of shaving -in order to look … what? Younger? More “with it”?
As someone who is broke, as someone who turned on her computer more times than she cares to remember to find an unwanted hardcore pornographic image – one of those images that was supposed to be sexy but could easily have done double duty in medical textbook – filling her screen, as a woman with a daughter, as a card carrying feminist, as someone who is just about officially “middle aged” …. for all of this and then some, I’m bothered. And out of it.
*****
“I love David Byrne,” I write to C., not exactly apropos of this issue – the Bush Issue. … And yet kind of. David Byrne seems to me to be someone who has always been out of it – sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Someone who isn’t wearing the right glasses at the right time or the right shoes. Someone who probably hasn’t checked into the electronic section at Kmart lately, especially the section appealing to the Transformers crowd. And yet he’s hip. He has been. He still is. And his “I don’t give a fuck what anyone else thinks” shrug works.
I’m adopting it. For all of me. For “down there” and up here. For now and for later. For me at 43 and for me at 67. For me in love and sexual and for me hanging out with herself reading books and eating chocolates. For me naked in front of others and for me naked in front of my own mirror. For me at the doctor and for me in front of my kids. My bush. My shrug.
I asked my kids this last night as we drove home on a slick and black November evening. I’d been hoping for one of those effervescent, magical kid comments. Like an art teacher friend who asked elementary students where the light came from in a particular Goya painting. “From a window that you can’t quite see,” said some. A few of the older kids were able to talk about perspective and provide a direction from which the light emanated. But a six-year old said simply, “From God.”
Well, my six-year old said nothing quite so soulful. “When you think someone is hot,” said Thomas from the backseat. He was snuggling with his lamb blanket and looked about three in my rearview mirror, but his words belied the little boy he has become of late. We were passing the parking lot where I drop them off for two weeks every summer to go to a day camp out on a farm with animals and art. That camp, to my mind, is love.
On my way to them last night I’d seen a buck dead in the road. The traffic was all backed up. It was a windy road that ends with a traffic light and it was hard to imagine that anyone had been going fast enough to collide with the animal, much less kill it. I was stuck right next to it for several minutes, the lights from another car lighting up its face as though on a Hollywood set. Its eyes were wide open. “What is this?” it seemed to be asking, trying to understand its fate.
What is love?
I knew that at that exact moment, a dear friend was sitting in his office where he works as a therapist and explaining to a mother–a woman I imagined to be about my age–that her teenaged son has schizophrenia. I couldn’t even imagine how she must feel, what was going through her mind and heart. Instead, I focused on C. and the task ahead of him. The care I knew he was showing just now, but also the way in which his heart was surely breaking. I would have given anything to be invisibly holding his hand right then.
What is love?
“Ok, so yeah, you usually think someone is ‘hot’ when you’re in love, but you can love plenty of people and things and even ideas without thinking they’re hot. You love Django, right?” I ask my kids, “but probably not Syrup,” the neighbor’s cat. My kids both get this. “So why is this? And how do you know? What do you feel inside of you when you love someone or something?”
I can hear some real digesting of ideas going on back there. Why on this dark night as they cup little bits of the banana bread I baked for them am I asking them this? I know I won’t really get an answer, but I wait to be surprised. I want them to consider this, even if for a few minutes. What is love?
My capacity for love grows with age. It expands and can fill me with a grace and purpose that amazes me. There are days, too, when the source seems to be blocked – as though my access to a higher power has been cemented over. My absolute terror over money, especially, and my anger at Alex, can block it out as certainly as a tornado sky kills the sun. But yesterday, the love kept burbling to the surface at unexpected times. During a meeting as I watched a group of colleagues who were trying so hard to do the right thing in an issue involving race and gender. As I navigated my way around that giant animal in the road, its life just ended. As I thought about C. and the news, such immense and life-altering news, that had been his to discover and his to share. As I picked up my children up from their nature-outing van, holding them against me in the park where just weeks ago I’d been able to see them, and where now they were dark figures, pressing leaves and rocks into my gloved hands. I held Bea so tightly that I think I startled her, but then Thomas joined us, hugging me from behind. Two little people with backpacks and lunch sacks, muddy boots and winter coats. One mother seemingly alone and yet so enormous.
I love that I have a best friend who helps women write their stories – stories of abuse, stories of ridicule, stories of physical strength, stories that heal – every year and produces them on V-Day.
I love being able to call a friend and say, “Help me find a place to stay in SF!” and she finds me not one but 8 places to stay! And when I ask coyly, “Now how about a date…” she comes up with that, too.
I love having a Roller Derby queen for a friend who went with me to get my tattoo and talked to the woman tattoo artist the entire time while I concentrated on my breathing. And I love that I can call this same woman and ask her for a bikini waxing reference.
I love having a friend in Ohio who I’ve never met who writes me long emails about her and me and our kids and our exes and our spiritual paths and our heart longing. She reminds me of the scene in “Julie and Julia” when Julia and Simone are at the train station in Boston awaiting pick up from Julia’s best friend and Julia admits they’ve never met – just been long, fast pen pals. And that’s all that really matters.
I love knowing B. out in LA who meets with Major Media Moguls but does so with complete humble goodness and a vision for how we can use media to make the lives of women and girls better.
I love having a friend just down the block who is more than willing to come over with a mirror and speculum to check me out if need be. And that I could call this same Kick Ass Gyrl when another friend was having domestic violence issues.
I love having another friend down my block who can lend me frocks and lace and lipstick and pour through Anthropolgie catalogues with me and tread in the world of all things lovely. And it somehow pleases me all the more that her partner is a she and that gender politics work in such deliriously unexpected, sweet ways.
I love my friend K. and her Q. and her amulet of Love and her Faith.
I love my friend C. and our Power Circle of Divorcing Mamadom — you take my kids today; I’ll take yours tomorrow. You cry on my shoulder today; I’ll cry on yours tomorrow. So looking forward to the burn…
I love knowing that capes WILL be made – thanks to the enthusiasm of S. and M. and others who will be coming into our circle – I feel your movement and the swish swish of yards of red material!
I love that I have therapist friends – so many of them – who are helping women live their dreams every day and dig down deep into themselves for strength.
I love the opportunity to be part of dreams and planning via a group of international women, starting today!
I love that my dear old friend in Brooklyn is nursing her baby this morning and still getting the hang of the baby thing, and that when I told her that if she “just got through the first 8 weeks,” she’d be fine, she moaned in utter exasperation: EIGHT WEEKS?!
I love that my new friend J. in LA is seeing auras and becoming curious about the world beyond.
I love my friend E. who is traveling with her dear dear partner, husband, and lover S. as he sips in these last beautiful fall days of his life. (I do, however, completely, utterly loathe cancer for taking him.)
I love my daughter, who at eight, is discovering personhood and womanhood in her tiny, yet ever-expanding orbit.
I love my friends who are midwives and doulas, who crouch and instruct and massage and breathe and catch the babies and believe in the mamas and bring LIFE forth!
I love the yogis in my life who practice with me and open their bodies and spirits again and again to the joyful play that has helped me become a grown up like few other practices in my life. Thank you for Tuesday heart opening with R. and E. and the talk that extends afterward, talks that started back in junior high when we first met.
I love me and my goddess self and her fearless depths, even in the face of financial stipulations and tax returns and lost library books. She who is limitless in love. She who has been here all along and will see me through.
If you have twenty minutes and need to dive more deeply into the goddess power, watch Eve Ensler’s TED talk. I’ve watched it so many times and am still riveted.
I keep having an image of me hanging off a cliff. I have a rope and those special spidey power shoes, so I’m safeish, but I’m really not used to hanging off a cliff. I’ve gotten better at it over the past year, and even found some smallish comfort zone, but it’s just not my natural space. I’m gwetting tired and, frankly, bored. But the top of the cliff is just right there – ugh, canalmostreach it. Almost it.
Breathe. Keep hanging. The rope’s got you. Now, before you can stand at the top and look out at where you’ve been and where you’re going, keep your wits about you. Pull the latest version of the stipulation out of your back pocket–yeah, you too can reach it, pal — just do it! –then let your lawyer know how it looks. Call the accountant and ask that question that’s been sitting in your frontal lobe for nearly a month. Go ahead and pay your bills for this month, including the mortgage that just went up by$50 and is now seriously off the charts ridiculous, trusting that they will get paid again next month even if you don’t know how. Apply for the jobs that you can apply for; sure, they don’t excite you, but neither did that boulder that fell on your back last spring. When the money heebie jeebies come up at 3:33 am or while walking the dog this morning, do what your friend C. says, and just check in with your body, sit with the heebies and see all the ways in which they’re about so much more than money. In fact, they’re not really about the money at all (or so he says, and I believe him in my gut but head hasn’t quite figured it out yet).
Speaking of which, calmly but repeatedly ask Alex for the money he owes you. He’s over there hanging off his own cliff and he can surely just toss you the wad of cash, which you can then catch in your teeth because you’ve gotten pretty dang amazing at such no-handed feats. While you’re at it, politely ask him – again – to stop taking food from your house; he can buy his own flour and cinammon and maple syrup… Stay focused. Just a little bit farther to go. Think how good it will be to sit at the top and breathe and look around for a while. But don’t get too cocky. See that cliff over there? It’s next.
That’s how the short story of my evening would begin – with that line hollered, no yodeled in desperation through the quiet of an Iowa evening.
But let me begin before it got so desperate. I’m at a BBQ with my kids and seven other families. Seven other intact families. (This is not entirely different from the notion of the intact hymen – pure, unbroken.) I’m proudly sporting my new tattoo, flaking skin and all (purdy, I know), and not caring one wit that I’m the only one drinking the sangrias I brought. This is a squeaky clean crowd, but nice, and I’m generally feel pretty ok with myself. I’d already tested the single-chick-at-the-family-event waters this morning, after all. My neighbors had a party for their 2-year old’s birthday. Pinatta. Juice boxes. Sagging diapers. Baby slings sported by both mothers and fathers. And every which way I looked, cute little intact families. And me: that spunky lady from next next door. (This is who I’ll play in the After-School Special: That Spunky Lady Next Door.)
But that was then. This is now. I’m sitting in a lawn chair, sipping my third sangria, and thinking, “Maybe I’ll blow this popsicle stand for something really exciting. Something sweaty and au natural.” I pull the hostess aside: ”Mind if I leave Bea and Thomas here while I go mow my lawn?”
I’m having a party myself tomorrow – a party that was “inspired” by my mother’s complaint of how lonely she’ll be on the 4th … Since my dad died, holidays make her weepy. Despite the fact, that my friends could care less, I know that she’d be horrified if my lawn was all scraggly ass for the occasion. Given that my yard is already full of stuff that is weird or unkempt or just plain wrong — Exhibit A being the giant treehouse that Alex built and which my mother assures me is not up to city code — I think a little mowing might help to mellow her. Being a good daughter really blows sometimes.
I schlep the mower out of the garage, knocking over two bikes and a sled in the process. Start ‘er up. Round and round we go. And then she dies. I fill her with gas. Round twice. Then fizzle. I’ve been wondering about the oil. I don’t really get the whole oil thing, but I vaguely recall that there’s an unopened can in the laundry room, of all places, so I seek it out. I’m also aware of the sound of laughing and talking coming from the screened porch of one of my more capable lesbian neighbors. No doubt, she and a friend are watching me struggle and thinking, “Why doesn’t she just push the da-da-da button?” (You know, that magic button that if I were A) a man, or B) a butch lesbian I’d know about. But I’m not so I don’t.)
The oil is added. It smokes a bit as I pour it in, which seems weird, but I ignore it. She starts again. We get round less than half this time. Dead. Goddammit. Deep breath. Not a big deal. I push the mower under the treehouse and tell myself that I’ll figure it out tomorrow morning. You know – tomorrow morning when I’ll be cooking for the party, cleaning up, buying ice, clipping flowers for a bouquet, setting out napkins, walking the dog, encouraging the kids not to kill each other but, rather, to help me out. Really I’ll figure it out then.
I’ll spare you the rest of the evening — the brass corn cob (if you live in Iowa, you have such things) that fell directly on the boniest part of my ankle. The scream I unveiled at Bea when she didn’t heed my repeated request to get off the top bunk while we were trying to change the sheets. Her ensuing tears. My immediate guilt. The way the plastic Roman shade went flying off its brackets and how I couldn’t figure out how to put it back on but instead rolled it up and stuck it in the closet, thinking, “I’ll deal with it later.” Or how just as I stubbed my toe on the lower bunk, Thomas came hurtling out of the bathroom, screaming because he’d seen a moth “as big as a bat!” Oh yeah, I still haven’t bought the foam to stick under the window AC units … I’ll do it tomorrow. Or the next day.
I’m tired. Dead tired. Sangria anyone?
I sat on a bench outside the library today as my kids played and read an article in a recent issue of O! Magazine, “Why Women Are Leaving Men for Other Women.” The title is a bit misleading (what’s new from mainstream mags?), as most of the women in the piece are already separated from men before settling in with a female partner, but it was still interesting food for thought. Most of the women shared that an emotional connection with someone who is respectful, trusting, and caring is more important to them than towing the traditional line. Oh, and the sex ain’t bad either.
There’s been a fair amount of research lately on what women want from a sexual relationship. It turns out that women are much more fluid than men in their sexuality. A potential partner’s whole person – personality, spirituality, ethics, looks, intellect… – affects a woman’s desire much more than a man’s. Thus, it’s more possible for women to, umm, flow (?) between partners of different genders.
The Oprah article and my memory of the NYTimes article had me thinking as I sat on that bench that my options are more plentiful than they first appear. It also reminded me of something that my friend K., a married lesbian, said recently of my current state: ”It is sort of exciting that you get another chance to find someone now that you’re older and really know what you want.”
On most days, finding a partner feels more like an impossible hurdle than an opportunity, but I know what she means. In fact, last summer, I totally agreed with her and felt certain that I’d find that person. Now, after asking about several men in town, only to be answered: “married”, “gay”, or “Ewwwww! You do NOT want to go there,” I’m less certain. There was the tryst-gone-sour with the friend earlier in this spring. And more recently, a crush on a roller derby queen, who is sexy but so clearly my antithesis that it’s humorously wrong in ways that extend way beyond my four decades of heterosexuality. But truly? It’s been very very dry on my sexual/relationship horizon. I’m in the desert with no body in sight.
So what do I want? I actually know pretty clearly. Last summer, as I was leaving Alex, I wrote a lot about this – made lists and diagrams. My standards are high, but not outlandish. Part of what was so appealing about Other Guy was that he fit so many of the qualifications – if you don’t include honesty, that is.
Returning now to the list and the diagrams, I decided to speak them aloud; to see how these qualities sound when taken off the page. Just what is it I am seeking in the person with whom I’d like to join lives? What does this person sound like and feel like when described? After I spoke it, I sat in silence, realizing that there is only one person I know in my current life who comes close. And she’s a she. She also lives on a coast with a busy life and multiple suitors. The interesting thing is that none of that feels like a deal breaker to me, nor does the thought of her make go weak-kneed. When I think of her, I smile. And I feel sure about what an amazing person she is. For now, that’s plenty.
I’ve been interviewing women for a project about single mothers. I started the project because I feel like I’ve joined a totally unheralded and misunderstood group of women who moonlight as superheroes. Seriously, almost every single mama I know kicks ass. I am proud to be in this new fold, but I’m also sick sick sick of how the media uses “single mom” as an expletive, i.e., an US magazine cover recently announced “Anniston to become SINGLE MOM.” It could have said Anniston to become Polish or retarded or to lose a limb … or fill in the blank with any other harangued and poorly labeled group.
In doing the project, I’ve heard so many stories of people staying in relationships out of fear of what others would think. Families, mainly. But also kids and even friends. When Alex and I separated several years ago, many of our friends sided with him. That’s not what they said they were doing, but it was pretty evident. Invitations stopped coming my way and run-ins at the grocery store that would have been a 5-10 minute talk in the past became the briefest waves. I pained over what these people thought. Recently, I re-met a woman I’d seen a few times at parties with this particular group of friends, and she told me they’d unfriended her in just the same way, “like toxic waste,” she said.
People react to divorce from a deep, semi-conscious place. It brings out their own anxieties about their relationships. Any squeaky board they’ve been trying to ignore in their marriage sounds squeakier after talking to you, and chances are they’ll take it out on you. One friend currently going through a divorce who thought that earlier separation from Alex was a bad idea and had a sort of “just suck it up” attitude (my words, not hers) at the time, now admits that my separation made her uneasy; “There was so much in my own marriage that I just wasn’t ready to look at yet.”
Another friend, who I haven’t talked to much in years, gave a totally gut response when she learned that Alex and I were splitting: ”I envy you.”
The essayist Perri Klass admits to this range of emotions regarding others’ divorces: “Oh, I clucked over the divorcing couples, shook my head about the effects on their children, participated in the generally pleasurable buzz of rising gossip–but there were moments too, I think, when I looked at those parents with fascination and fear, wondering whether I was watching just the bravest pioneers, the first to march bravely down a perilous path which would ultimately beckon many of those self-satisfied uxorious cluckers.”
What I’ve learned in a pretty hard way is that others opinions about the most intimate details of your life sting but, ultimately, are fleeting and don’t matter. Not at all. Because the people who are making their opinions known are either too scared or too lacking in empathy to understand the complexities of your life which is yours alone to live.
“I’ve been waiting to so long to realize that I’m amazing. And I really am. Everyone is powerful in their own way, and they’re even more so when they get powerful and start to rock.” 15-year old Laura, from Girls Rock! a documentary.
by Jen Lemen
I have everything I need.
I don’t believe this statement. Why not? A lot comes to mind. I grew up in a house that was fearful. Not over-the-top, puritanical cringing fear – but a low-level anxiety that there wasn’t enough in the bank, that the other shoe could drop at any time. My dad was a fundraiser and worked his way up the ladder from an entry-level job for a small health-related foundation in the late 1960s to the president of a major university foundation. It was his job to be careful, to be a bit fearful. He clenched his teeth to the point that he had to wear a jaw guard. He ironed his shirts until they were crisp, shined his shoes once a month, and soaked and pushed back his cuticles. The current economic crisis would be turning his stomach in knots, if he were still alive.
I’m not sure if my mom is a worrier by nature, but he wore off on her. Now she frets about rotten garbage while on vacation and driving after dark. She suffers from a lack of confidence that is masked by her twin habits of smoking and drinking – three packs a day and two bottles of wine a night. Stripped of these safety mechanisms, she’s scared of her own self – not to mention The World.
There was a lack of love in my family that left me with a gap where a deep-seated surety of self-love should be. My parents loved/love me a lot, I’ve no doubt, but weren’t very good at showing it. They were better at helping me to doubt the ground on which I walked, to believe that it might open up at any moment and I should be ready to fall in.
I sought the love I didn’t get with them in men. No surprise there. I could have done worse than Alex (e.g., abusive, mean spirited, manipulative), but his love never felt like enough either. This was partly because of my own perception, and partly because of his extreme passivity. “I can take it or leave it,” is the approach he’s had toward our marriage, or, “I’m not asking you to leave, but I’m not begging you to stay.” For a long time – too long – this seemed to represent a marriage of equals (as I type this, I realize the huge gap in such a belief). But now it is just so obviously not enough.
I have a friend who believes the Universe brings whatever she needs. “My television broke, and I asked the Universe for a new one, and then next week I found one on the curb.”
I will never have such blind faith in the interconnectivity of all things. There’s some hubris, it seems to me, in taking this line of thinking to the extreme. Where does that put someone who wanted to escape a brutal environment? A hopeless situation? Did he or she just not ask the Universe in the right way?
Still, I want to believe that there will be enough when I most need it. That I won’t fall through a crack in the ground, swallowed whole. I want to believe the sentiments of this lovely painting by Jen Lemen, which seemed waiting just for me when I found it this morning on her blog. Hope, joy, love, wisdom – I possess them all and they will take me far.
