One of my classmates did a cool thing the other day: brought a small, flowering branch to our Research and Statistics class. It was from a local bush called Sweet Olive which, he told a couple of us during lunch, blooms during sudden changes in temperature. He said the smell, more intensely than any other sensory data, brings back a childhood of happy time spent outside. That reminded me of Proust’s madeleine—the capacity of scent (and for me, music) not just to evoke, but almost to conjure or reinstate the past. This is why I could never really get into Buddhism; because I find the past to be one of the best things in life. Why try to detach from it? Why not just wallow in it?
I remember returning from class one gloomy October day during my sophomore year of college to find my suitemate, Dawn, sitting alone in the dark, listening to music and weeping. I hope it doesn’t ruin this if I say, the music might have been Journey. I must have attempted to console her; she tried to explain to me that one day, I would understand and even welcome the pleasures of melancholy. I think I may have since taken her message a little too far. She also suggested that I would not always feel the need to hide my long brown hair under a hat—which I did for roughly 3 years of college, either a baseball cap or the soft, velvety winter hat given to me by my grandmother, the queen of hats. She was right about that, too. I probably could have learned more from her; but in her wisdom she soon transferred from Colgate to a much more liberal school in Massachusetts, where people probably understood such things automatically.
Anyway, in the car this morning on the way home from Sara’s daycare—where, when I lingered too long, my child ordered me to “leave, mom!” in a tone that made me flash ahead to her teen years—I heard a Don Henley song on the radio that catapulted me back. I somehow drove home but I was not really aware of my current surroundings. Instead, I was in the summer of 1994 when the man I was in love with (my first requited love, which is a powerful thing) had made me a mix-tape—to take the sting out of the fact that he was spending the summer after our Freshman year strolling around Princeton with his long-term girlfriend, and I was spending it working at Drug Fair and DJ’s Fast Pizza, as well as cleaning the 4 litter boxes in my parents’ basement. (I remember counting down—only 64 more litter boxes before I go back to school...) On lunch breaks from Drug Fair, I sat on the bleachers behind the middle school with my Walkman and listened to the tape, which had on it Henley’s “The End of the Innocence”; “Nights in White Satin” ('Cos I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you); Simon and Garfunkel’s suicide-inducing “Scarborough Fair”; and the REM song with the refrain I’m SOORREEE… Oh, the drama. I sat out there crying, my headphones sealing me into a private world in which I was the star—not a minor player relegated to ringing up people’s cigarette purchases or sneezing over cat litter boxes. The songs he gave me, while they did not help me to stop imagining him in bed with her, did help restore me to myself, and that was quite a gift.
Hearing that song today, I felt some tears for him (who I am still in touch with, of course, on Facebook); tears I had thought, 16 or so years ago, would never stop. But they did. And that is the real “end of the innocence”: to become aware that it all passes; a well that seemed inexhaustible goes dry. I used to think love meant marriage and a future. Now I know that if love comes into my life, I can’t assume I know what it means. I should just be thankful for its fleeting presence and the enduring sensory traces it leaves behind, the being happy inside the being sad.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
Life as a pair of pants
My friend Elizabeth told me about a study showing that things which annoy you on a daily basis can cause more mental harm, over time, than larger events such as divorce or job loss. The researchers’ finding was that if a minor annoyance—the broken fridge door, the tree in the yard that blocks light and generates a litter of needles, the paint flaking off the ceiling—is not dealt with, it spreads like a stain, causing mental anguish and slow physical decline. Well, for the past five years, my pants won’t stay up. Maybe this explains…a lot about my recent life.
Let me start at the beginning, during the time when my pants sat cozily at my expanding waist: marriage. Living in small-town Alabama with no access to decent restaurants, my spouse and I cooked pasta, filled our recycling bin with wine bottles, and ate cheese. A lot. I gained 15 pounds, he gained 20, and I hadn’t got the memo telling women that to be fashionable, jeans were now supposed to reveal the butterfly tattoo flowing out of their ass crack. Not only did my jeans button way high up, they were baggy, tenting out around the crotch like those worn on the Northeastern college campuses of my early-1990s youth. I think the intent of this style was to redirect attention from the butt toward the brain, as this was the hopeful early-Clinton era, when egalitarian relationships seemed possible. (Remember?) At any rate, I had no idea that the winds had shifted…until my separation from my husband when, sooner than I’d imagined, I began dating. As well as dropping the 15 pounds from stress and a cross-country move. When I went to the local mall to find some new clothes for my new, uncharted life, I found a curious dichotomy. There were hideous, “sensible” garments meant for folks in my age-range (I was 30), who were clearly perceived as spending all their time in a corporate office or on a golf course—or boat. Alternately, there was Juniors: clothes designed to make teens look like hookers. I didn’t want to appear 53 at 30, so I chose hooker-wear (I chose…the microwave!), and my lower back has been chilly ever since.
As the weather in my Northern town cooled and my pants sexily offered sparse cover, I began dating a 25-year-old—who later became the father of my child, but that’s another story. He told me that in his college classes he often noticed girls, as they rose from their chairs or walked around campus, spastically yanking their pants up in attempt to recapture parts of their lower back/ass that were poofing out. I don’t think he perceived this as flattering. So if this style disaster has been an attempt to please heterosexual men, one might question its success.
When I “became pregnant” a year later, I settled in for 9 months of pants misery. Anyone who has ever enjoyed maternity wear, and the changes of pregnancy, knows what I mean: at a certain point the pants either retreated in horror as they were forced toward my thighs, or, after seeming to fit, loosened and slid toward my enlarged feet. In the last trimester I often felt that I would give my kingdom for a pair of jeans with a zipper . But my post-pregnant era has provided scant relief for the overriding (low-riding) problem of pants designed to punish the fact that most of us, unlike prepubescent girls, have got “back,” and fill our stomachs with good food occasionally. OK, there’s also vanity. I could buy the golfing/ yachting/ office pants and have done with this. But I want to appear as if I have a sexual pulse, which has meant, among other things, never working in an office. I also have a generously-proportioned ass that requires restraint or containment, so baggier or high-waisted pants make it look HUGE. And I don’t have the budget to acquire whatever new styles are available to rich people, which may have moved on from the plumber-crack trend: I’m stuck in thrift stores where the jeans are from at least 5 years ago.
I wrote this because all morning—dropping my kid off at daycare; purchasing an iced coffee; crawling back into bed to stay warm, since New Orleans’ temperature has, in two days, just dropped from 89 to 59 (hi, Fall!)—I’ve been yanking and pulling at the little lip of denim inching down my post-brie-consumption hips…and realizing I don’t have a single pair of pants that gracefully accommodates this ever changing, feast-or-famine portion of the figure which is like a barometer of one’s moods and stance toward life.
Let me start at the beginning, during the time when my pants sat cozily at my expanding waist: marriage. Living in small-town Alabama with no access to decent restaurants, my spouse and I cooked pasta, filled our recycling bin with wine bottles, and ate cheese. A lot. I gained 15 pounds, he gained 20, and I hadn’t got the memo telling women that to be fashionable, jeans were now supposed to reveal the butterfly tattoo flowing out of their ass crack. Not only did my jeans button way high up, they were baggy, tenting out around the crotch like those worn on the Northeastern college campuses of my early-1990s youth. I think the intent of this style was to redirect attention from the butt toward the brain, as this was the hopeful early-Clinton era, when egalitarian relationships seemed possible. (Remember?) At any rate, I had no idea that the winds had shifted…until my separation from my husband when, sooner than I’d imagined, I began dating. As well as dropping the 15 pounds from stress and a cross-country move. When I went to the local mall to find some new clothes for my new, uncharted life, I found a curious dichotomy. There were hideous, “sensible” garments meant for folks in my age-range (I was 30), who were clearly perceived as spending all their time in a corporate office or on a golf course—or boat. Alternately, there was Juniors: clothes designed to make teens look like hookers. I didn’t want to appear 53 at 30, so I chose hooker-wear (I chose…the microwave!), and my lower back has been chilly ever since.
As the weather in my Northern town cooled and my pants sexily offered sparse cover, I began dating a 25-year-old—who later became the father of my child, but that’s another story. He told me that in his college classes he often noticed girls, as they rose from their chairs or walked around campus, spastically yanking their pants up in attempt to recapture parts of their lower back/ass that were poofing out. I don’t think he perceived this as flattering. So if this style disaster has been an attempt to please heterosexual men, one might question its success.
When I “became pregnant” a year later, I settled in for 9 months of pants misery. Anyone who has ever enjoyed maternity wear, and the changes of pregnancy, knows what I mean: at a certain point the pants either retreated in horror as they were forced toward my thighs, or, after seeming to fit, loosened and slid toward my enlarged feet. In the last trimester I often felt that I would give my kingdom for a pair of jeans with a zipper . But my post-pregnant era has provided scant relief for the overriding (low-riding) problem of pants designed to punish the fact that most of us, unlike prepubescent girls, have got “back,” and fill our stomachs with good food occasionally. OK, there’s also vanity. I could buy the golfing/ yachting/ office pants and have done with this. But I want to appear as if I have a sexual pulse, which has meant, among other things, never working in an office. I also have a generously-proportioned ass that requires restraint or containment, so baggier or high-waisted pants make it look HUGE. And I don’t have the budget to acquire whatever new styles are available to rich people, which may have moved on from the plumber-crack trend: I’m stuck in thrift stores where the jeans are from at least 5 years ago.
I wrote this because all morning—dropping my kid off at daycare; purchasing an iced coffee; crawling back into bed to stay warm, since New Orleans’ temperature has, in two days, just dropped from 89 to 59 (hi, Fall!)—I’ve been yanking and pulling at the little lip of denim inching down my post-brie-consumption hips…and realizing I don’t have a single pair of pants that gracefully accommodates this ever changing, feast-or-famine portion of the figure which is like a barometer of one’s moods and stance toward life.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Through the puddle
Just now a cloud has pulled up
while I was talking to the Emptiness
of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves
at the bottom of the ocean.
–Jason Shinder
It was March and the sidewalks were full of rain, when the man I was newly seeing stopped our ungainly umbrella-walk to look at some children. There was a large puddle on the cement in front of us, and these kids were playing in it—taking advantage of another crappy Ithaca day and finding in it cause for lightheartedness. X., beside me, sighed deeply and said, “I guess I’m just going to have to go through the puddle.” He was referring to the fact that officially, he was still someone else’s, and he was going to have to go through all the fallout of ending a long-term love.
He is a man I still sometimes wonder about. If I hadn’t, six months later, moved to New Mexico for grad school (where he sent cakes and other whimsical gifts to me through the mail), would we have stayed together, married? He’s long since wed someone else, and after following suit into (and in my case, out of) matrimony, I have put the question to bed. But the puddle is still there, so to speak, and I’m beginning to realize—as New Orleans evinces its painfully abundant fall beauty—that this time I really do have to go through it.
In the puddle are heartache, loss, my own ambivalence about intimacy. It holds the things those of us who can’t fall asleep do to avoid getting into bed (and also the peace that might eventually find us, given a chance)—which, for me, is mostly aimlessly surfing the web, scrolling through photos on Facebook that represent all my far-flung friends, as if the images could become less flat and distant, could accompany me in this haunted interior murk that rises up when the noise and the lights die down, when my child is asleep in her pink plastic bed and I go in to turn the AC up and look at her closed and flowering face.
while I was talking to the Emptiness
of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves
at the bottom of the ocean.
–Jason Shinder
It was March and the sidewalks were full of rain, when the man I was newly seeing stopped our ungainly umbrella-walk to look at some children. There was a large puddle on the cement in front of us, and these kids were playing in it—taking advantage of another crappy Ithaca day and finding in it cause for lightheartedness. X., beside me, sighed deeply and said, “I guess I’m just going to have to go through the puddle.” He was referring to the fact that officially, he was still someone else’s, and he was going to have to go through all the fallout of ending a long-term love.
He is a man I still sometimes wonder about. If I hadn’t, six months later, moved to New Mexico for grad school (where he sent cakes and other whimsical gifts to me through the mail), would we have stayed together, married? He’s long since wed someone else, and after following suit into (and in my case, out of) matrimony, I have put the question to bed. But the puddle is still there, so to speak, and I’m beginning to realize—as New Orleans evinces its painfully abundant fall beauty—that this time I really do have to go through it.
In the puddle are heartache, loss, my own ambivalence about intimacy. It holds the things those of us who can’t fall asleep do to avoid getting into bed (and also the peace that might eventually find us, given a chance)—which, for me, is mostly aimlessly surfing the web, scrolling through photos on Facebook that represent all my far-flung friends, as if the images could become less flat and distant, could accompany me in this haunted interior murk that rises up when the noise and the lights die down, when my child is asleep in her pink plastic bed and I go in to turn the AC up and look at her closed and flowering face.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Eye or I?
I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me... –Emerson
When I was 14 and spent the summer at camp in Blairstown, New Jersey, I had a couple of firsts: I finally bled (the last among my peers to do so) and had my first huge crush on a man. His name was Richard and he was 19, from London, fond of soccer and chess. I don’t know what created such combustion within me—a yearning that lasted for years. At first, he was just a cute guy my cabin-mates in our so-called “Algonquin Village” gushed about. Then, as I turned my own focus on him—because these other girls had, they must be on to something—I found him to be an excellent blank screen for projecting almost anything. He was tall, spiky-blond hair (this was 1989...), blue eyes and that accent that made wonderful things happen, as if he had melting ice cubes in his mouth so that everything he said was cool and without edges. And, God bless him, he was mostly quiet. So I had no real idea about his personality, opinions, etc. and could imagine all the best, imagine he secretly noticed me, too despite the fact that he was dating a girl his age who worked in the dining hall (my friends and I, envious, called her the “Kitch Bitch”). There was also the strong taboo element: others in whom I confided about my crush told me he would be arrested if he even laid a finger on me—which, duh, wasn’t exactly off-putting. When I left camp at the end of the summer, dragged away in my parents’ Volvo, I missed him—whose longest sentence to me had been, “You don’t have to pick those chips up, they’re biodegradable” (in that accent)—for months, for years.
That was the time, the moment, when my focus definitively changed from me looking out at the world, to me seeing everything through the Other as I imagined this Other looking at me, through me. (I am reminded of philosopher Simone Weil’s idea that God, who is referred to as male, can only love her as the space in Creation that she takes up; the more fully she submits or removes herself, the more God can fill and possess the space she leaves behind.)
…I was wearing a long tie-dyed t-shirt over my bathing suit, floating on an inner tube down the Delaware along with Richard, another counselor called Sarge, and a handful of kids, all of whom were somewhere in my line of sight but not nearby; when in a moment that seemed to magnify into a revelation, a shift, a bolt of knowledge or love, I saw everything around me—the swirling water, my bare legs and feet, trees rising up on the shore, the vivid Pennsylvania summer sky—imbued with significance and specialness as if I was not alone, as if Richard were inside my gaze, like I was imagining being him, almost, or feeling him finding my perspective fascinating and larger-than-life. This is how falling in love made me feel (and has): it replaced my “I” with the eye of the beloved in an ecstatic act of subjection, a hyper-aware openness.
How can I relish life with just my own eyes (and “I”), my own days, “reality” that feels like a ribbon ironed flat?
This is larger than a self-esteem issue, although that is involved. It’s why I write—as an act of reflection, to give the world to myself as if from outside, so I can feel the space that I, too, take up.
When I was 14 and spent the summer at camp in Blairstown, New Jersey, I had a couple of firsts: I finally bled (the last among my peers to do so) and had my first huge crush on a man. His name was Richard and he was 19, from London, fond of soccer and chess. I don’t know what created such combustion within me—a yearning that lasted for years. At first, he was just a cute guy my cabin-mates in our so-called “Algonquin Village” gushed about. Then, as I turned my own focus on him—because these other girls had, they must be on to something—I found him to be an excellent blank screen for projecting almost anything. He was tall, spiky-blond hair (this was 1989...), blue eyes and that accent that made wonderful things happen, as if he had melting ice cubes in his mouth so that everything he said was cool and without edges. And, God bless him, he was mostly quiet. So I had no real idea about his personality, opinions, etc. and could imagine all the best, imagine he secretly noticed me, too despite the fact that he was dating a girl his age who worked in the dining hall (my friends and I, envious, called her the “Kitch Bitch”). There was also the strong taboo element: others in whom I confided about my crush told me he would be arrested if he even laid a finger on me—which, duh, wasn’t exactly off-putting. When I left camp at the end of the summer, dragged away in my parents’ Volvo, I missed him—whose longest sentence to me had been, “You don’t have to pick those chips up, they’re biodegradable” (in that accent)—for months, for years.
That was the time, the moment, when my focus definitively changed from me looking out at the world, to me seeing everything through the Other as I imagined this Other looking at me, through me. (I am reminded of philosopher Simone Weil’s idea that God, who is referred to as male, can only love her as the space in Creation that she takes up; the more fully she submits or removes herself, the more God can fill and possess the space she leaves behind.)
…I was wearing a long tie-dyed t-shirt over my bathing suit, floating on an inner tube down the Delaware along with Richard, another counselor called Sarge, and a handful of kids, all of whom were somewhere in my line of sight but not nearby; when in a moment that seemed to magnify into a revelation, a shift, a bolt of knowledge or love, I saw everything around me—the swirling water, my bare legs and feet, trees rising up on the shore, the vivid Pennsylvania summer sky—imbued with significance and specialness as if I was not alone, as if Richard were inside my gaze, like I was imagining being him, almost, or feeling him finding my perspective fascinating and larger-than-life. This is how falling in love made me feel (and has): it replaced my “I” with the eye of the beloved in an ecstatic act of subjection, a hyper-aware openness.
How can I relish life with just my own eyes (and “I”), my own days, “reality” that feels like a ribbon ironed flat?
This is larger than a self-esteem issue, although that is involved. It’s why I write—as an act of reflection, to give the world to myself as if from outside, so I can feel the space that I, too, take up.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Single
The last time I saw my recent ex was on a hot August night when I visited his workplace. Nursing several glasses of wine, I had a long conversation with a woman a few years younger than me who bartends there. She had intentionally taken a significant amount of time away from romantic relationships to focus on herself. In that time she had done a cleanse, yoga, and a lot of reflecting, and is also training to become an alternative healer. Glowing with health and beauty, she concluded her description of her ongoing “single” experience by saying, in a tone of evident satisfaction: “My head is so quiet now.” My response was jealousy, for my head was not quiet. My head was like a 4 AM party that needs to be broken up by police or concerned neighbors. Even as I registered my response to this woman’s words—and her state of secure wellbeing—I could feel the howling wolves and broken glass of my inner hysteria…which, a couple of hours later, prompted me to initiate the end of that romantic relationship.
Now, about a month post- this latest breakup, I realize that I have either been in love with or dating someone since I was 18; almost half my life. What would it be like if the psychic energy I have been channeling toward men were poured back into me and my life? I also realize that to be a 35-year-old unemployed single mother is a horrible cliché. Around me, everyone I know has paired up. They have built or bought enduring structures. They appear able to, in the lingo of my Counseling studies, “form and maintain satisfying relationships,” both intimate and communal. Since about 18, non-sexual relationships have interested me very little: something that becomes clear whenever there is a holiday and I have no plans; that was apparent last month on my birthday when I did not receive a gift. How can I advise other people on how to succeed in relationships—of all kinds—until I can define what such success means to me?
I do not want to be judgmental here about my (or anyone’s) strong drive for love and sex. Trying to scrub these parts of me away or condescend to them would mean harming myself…which is exactly what I want to stop doing. I just want to press pause and see how I arrived at this state of things.
I am reminded of the end of the Jane Kenyon poem “Eating the Cookies,” which is about cleaning out the house after a close relative has died: the speaker pauses in her packing/folding and, for a moment, presses the last cookie from the tin against her forehead, “because / it seemed like the next thing to do.”
Now, about a month post- this latest breakup, I realize that I have either been in love with or dating someone since I was 18; almost half my life. What would it be like if the psychic energy I have been channeling toward men were poured back into me and my life? I also realize that to be a 35-year-old unemployed single mother is a horrible cliché. Around me, everyone I know has paired up. They have built or bought enduring structures. They appear able to, in the lingo of my Counseling studies, “form and maintain satisfying relationships,” both intimate and communal. Since about 18, non-sexual relationships have interested me very little: something that becomes clear whenever there is a holiday and I have no plans; that was apparent last month on my birthday when I did not receive a gift. How can I advise other people on how to succeed in relationships—of all kinds—until I can define what such success means to me?
I do not want to be judgmental here about my (or anyone’s) strong drive for love and sex. Trying to scrub these parts of me away or condescend to them would mean harming myself…which is exactly what I want to stop doing. I just want to press pause and see how I arrived at this state of things.
I am reminded of the end of the Jane Kenyon poem “Eating the Cookies,” which is about cleaning out the house after a close relative has died: the speaker pauses in her packing/folding and, for a moment, presses the last cookie from the tin against her forehead, “because / it seemed like the next thing to do.”
Saturday, September 4, 2010
A Transparent Life
When asked if I plan to have a second child, my answer is an immediate NO! as if I have been asked, instead, to debone a whole fish. (As Sara nears school-age, I have been delighted to get sleep, poetry, and other kinds of freedom back.) But there is another urge that has been growing in me for years: to join so many Americans in the strange act of writing a memoir.
Memoirs, in my understanding, used to be something you wrote when you were older or had experienced something catastrophic. Now, the field has been opened up and it seems that anyone, no matter how young or inexperienced, can write a memoir about anything. My creative inspiration has always been experience, and the only experiences I feel confident about recording are my own. Anais Nin wrote, “We write to taste life twice,” and I think there are some of us who have that taste—for whom living once isn’t enough. To have an experience, good or even awful, is one pleasure; to recreate past worlds of sensation and feeling is another that suggests a further pleasure of opening the vault of private experience to a wider world (why I blog): making private life into public record. Clearly, some people would rather be shot in the face than do this, but I have had an exhibitionist streak since the times when, during naptime in kindergarten, I would cross to the boys’ side of the room and flash them (who suggested this—them or me—is unclear).
I have read many memoirs this year as I’ve turned this wish over in my mind. Some were beautifully written—like Mary Karr’s Lit—some were about some combination of food, romance, and France; or, extending this further, butchery and infidelity (I really like, and was slightly embarrassed by, Julie Powell’s second book). Some also served as a self-help manual for the reader, teaching by example; maybe all, since another person’s story can always be internalized. Some I’ve read and thought, I can definitely write a better book than this person. But when it comes to it, I can never commit to a topic (depression? motherhood? marriage/divorce?) and get started. Maybe underneath, there is some conviction that I don’t dare speak about my little experiences; that I have nothing valuable to say to people.
During my senior year of college, I worked as an artist’s model. Once a week, myself and several forty-somethings met at a beautiful little house out in the country—lots of warm wood and glass doors, a transparent kind of house—and ate avocado salad and plates of rotini, sometimes proceeding to the outdoor hottub with our wineglasses and sharing a joint. Then, off would come my robe and I stood (or sat, knelt, or lay) among some white pillows in the center of the basement room under a spotlight. I did this, for something like $20 a session, because I thought it was a cool thing to do and because it scared the hell out of me. As a result, I did not create the best or most graceful poses. I think I looked rather stiff and awkward and, as one (male) artist remarked, I appeared skinnier when wearing my clothes. My nipples, as another person despaired, kept changing size due to uneven heating of the room (this was winter in upstate NY). In other words, I was completely under scrutiny: more than physically, it felt like. Because I believed the body—my own not-so-skinny 21-year-old body—to be the gateway to love, to being known as a person by another person. This was something I could barely conceive of at the time, since I’d had very few lovers and was about 10 years away from discovering the clitoris and any sense of ease during physical intimacy. But to reveal oneself, I learned, is an opportunity, opening one up to criticism, joy, and the complexity of things.
Self-disclosure, whose different forms I’ve pursued ever since, has never brought happiness—for long. But it has occasioned knowledge and, as my friend recently wrote in an email reflecting on my (transparently) messy life, knowledge is the most faithful of lovers.
Memoirs, in my understanding, used to be something you wrote when you were older or had experienced something catastrophic. Now, the field has been opened up and it seems that anyone, no matter how young or inexperienced, can write a memoir about anything. My creative inspiration has always been experience, and the only experiences I feel confident about recording are my own. Anais Nin wrote, “We write to taste life twice,” and I think there are some of us who have that taste—for whom living once isn’t enough. To have an experience, good or even awful, is one pleasure; to recreate past worlds of sensation and feeling is another that suggests a further pleasure of opening the vault of private experience to a wider world (why I blog): making private life into public record. Clearly, some people would rather be shot in the face than do this, but I have had an exhibitionist streak since the times when, during naptime in kindergarten, I would cross to the boys’ side of the room and flash them (who suggested this—them or me—is unclear).
I have read many memoirs this year as I’ve turned this wish over in my mind. Some were beautifully written—like Mary Karr’s Lit—some were about some combination of food, romance, and France; or, extending this further, butchery and infidelity (I really like, and was slightly embarrassed by, Julie Powell’s second book). Some also served as a self-help manual for the reader, teaching by example; maybe all, since another person’s story can always be internalized. Some I’ve read and thought, I can definitely write a better book than this person. But when it comes to it, I can never commit to a topic (depression? motherhood? marriage/divorce?) and get started. Maybe underneath, there is some conviction that I don’t dare speak about my little experiences; that I have nothing valuable to say to people.
During my senior year of college, I worked as an artist’s model. Once a week, myself and several forty-somethings met at a beautiful little house out in the country—lots of warm wood and glass doors, a transparent kind of house—and ate avocado salad and plates of rotini, sometimes proceeding to the outdoor hottub with our wineglasses and sharing a joint. Then, off would come my robe and I stood (or sat, knelt, or lay) among some white pillows in the center of the basement room under a spotlight. I did this, for something like $20 a session, because I thought it was a cool thing to do and because it scared the hell out of me. As a result, I did not create the best or most graceful poses. I think I looked rather stiff and awkward and, as one (male) artist remarked, I appeared skinnier when wearing my clothes. My nipples, as another person despaired, kept changing size due to uneven heating of the room (this was winter in upstate NY). In other words, I was completely under scrutiny: more than physically, it felt like. Because I believed the body—my own not-so-skinny 21-year-old body—to be the gateway to love, to being known as a person by another person. This was something I could barely conceive of at the time, since I’d had very few lovers and was about 10 years away from discovering the clitoris and any sense of ease during physical intimacy. But to reveal oneself, I learned, is an opportunity, opening one up to criticism, joy, and the complexity of things.
Self-disclosure, whose different forms I’ve pursued ever since, has never brought happiness—for long. But it has occasioned knowledge and, as my friend recently wrote in an email reflecting on my (transparently) messy life, knowledge is the most faithful of lovers.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Coming Home
My daughter returns from her month-long stay with my mom in the Northeast on Tuesday—and I can’t wait. It was a strange period of “vacation” time without her. I was laid off from my job, fired by my boyfriend, and enjoyed considerably more alone time, and 30 Rock episodes, than one person should have to withstand. (Liz Lemon, I am you!...) I also slept really late a few times and was accepted into Loyola’s graduate Counseling program, so it wasn’t all bad. Overall, though, the feelings I routinely experienced during this time make me think of a practice that my stepfather used to indulge in: walking across hot coals barefoot while chanting cool moss…cool moss…
Today I bought a cute tablecloth so we can eat meals, which I will theoretically make instead of microwaving, at the dining room table (not in front of the TV/at the computer, as was the custom before she left). With the crystal candlesticks from my dad’s parents’, the table I have been hauling from place to place for years—and have egregiously under-utilized—suddenly looks warm and sweet…and I realize that the one thing I need in my life right now is some kind of domestic happiness. I want to embrace the love I have in my life, with my child, and be able to really feel and give love (the real and nurturing kind, not the kind that steals from you and makes you less-than), in my body and in the space I create around me. This has always been the thing it is hardest for me to do; and I wonder why.
I keep trying to find a copy of the Laurie Colwin novel Family Happiness at used bookstores because I want to reread it. It’s about a woman who is split between her family, with whom she has a happy and secure connection, and her extramarital lover, who “gets” her like no one else; and chooses, in the end, to stay on both paths without ever having the two meet. Colwin’s writing is existentially comforting, nuanced, and buoyant and I need that now. I don’t think, though, I will be following the path(s) chosen by Polly Solo-Miller, the main character in the book. I want those two things together: a love, and home. Is it possible? I am going to hope. In the meantime, there is just a tablecloth. And three placemats.
Today I bought a cute tablecloth so we can eat meals, which I will theoretically make instead of microwaving, at the dining room table (not in front of the TV/at the computer, as was the custom before she left). With the crystal candlesticks from my dad’s parents’, the table I have been hauling from place to place for years—and have egregiously under-utilized—suddenly looks warm and sweet…and I realize that the one thing I need in my life right now is some kind of domestic happiness. I want to embrace the love I have in my life, with my child, and be able to really feel and give love (the real and nurturing kind, not the kind that steals from you and makes you less-than), in my body and in the space I create around me. This has always been the thing it is hardest for me to do; and I wonder why.
I keep trying to find a copy of the Laurie Colwin novel Family Happiness at used bookstores because I want to reread it. It’s about a woman who is split between her family, with whom she has a happy and secure connection, and her extramarital lover, who “gets” her like no one else; and chooses, in the end, to stay on both paths without ever having the two meet. Colwin’s writing is existentially comforting, nuanced, and buoyant and I need that now. I don’t think, though, I will be following the path(s) chosen by Polly Solo-Miller, the main character in the book. I want those two things together: a love, and home. Is it possible? I am going to hope. In the meantime, there is just a tablecloth. And three placemats.
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