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.

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.

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.”