Golden Calves and Gold Records

This week has been rough.  2016 in general has been rough.  It's been a year when friends have crashed their cars, been diagnosed with cancer, lost jobs, and ended relationships.  It's been a year when many of those who share my view points on politics were dealt a tough blow, and it's a year when we have lost a lot of public icons.

Icons. It's a tough word for some people.  If you grew up in a Catholic church, or in a Catholic school - as I did, upon occasion - the word icon brings to mind the wooden plaques and hand-held images that give accessibility to the saints.  Pocket saints, I always thought of them. But an icon is just a representation of an idea. It is not, as so many of those I grew up with  believed, a physical image of someone to worship.  If you take literally those words said to Moses, then icons could be considered golden calves and false gods.  Even the icons of the saints are reminders, not something to be worshipped on their own.  I saw plenty of these a few weeks ago, when I was staying in Santa Fe.  Everywhere I looked, there were icons for sale.  Beautiful tin and wooden pieces to be held in hand, or hung on the wall, or dangled off a Christmas tree. Honestly, I never knew there were quite so many saints.  Someone to aid you in prayer for a lost pet, a lost job, and anything else you might think of praying about.  There is a saint for everything.  An icon for every occasion.

But those icons, they're not the saints themselves, and they're not someone to whom you should pray.  The icons represent an idea.  That's all.  And pop cultural icons are no different.  (And I'm sitting here, having typed those words,  waiting for Sister Regina to whap me over the head with a ruler).
Our pop icon represent ideas, not even always the same ideas for all of us.  And 2016 took away its share of icons.

David Bowie.
Alan Rickman.
Glen Frey
Harper Lee
Patty Duke
Prince
Muhammed Ali
Kenny Baker
Gene Wilder
Bobby Lee
Leonard Cohen
Florence Henderson
John Glenn
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Nancy Reagan
Fidel Castro
Alan Thicke
Garry Shandling
Garry Marshall
Elie Weisel
Kimbo Slice
Janet Reno
George Michael
Carrie Fisher
Debbie Reynolds

So, go ahead, make the argument that these are just actors, writers, scientists, singers.  Debate with me that I don't really know any of these people and that I should be equally disturbed by any natural death, enraged all the more by any senseless demise.  On some levels, I don't disagree.  I mean, certainly, society mourns for the loss of genius.  We mourn because Alan Rickman's voice will never stop us in our tracks again as he cuts down another actor with biting wit.  We will never hear again the genius of Bowie's tenor.  There will never be another middle finger to inequality from Carrie Fisher.  Sure, we mourn those things.

But these are icons.  Our connection to these people is subjective.  I'll give you an example - Prince.  I was an impressionable child when he released his Purple Rain soundtrack  But a few years down the road, it was the album my first boyfriend and I listened to when we would make out in his basement rec room.  To me, forever and ever, Prince is the sound of innocence fracturing, both because I was discovering a more adult world, and because the boyfriend in question died tragically young in a car accident.   Whenever I hear "When Doves Cry" I feel both excited and devastated. Prince himself became an icon for that period of time in my life.

Debbie Reynolds passed away yesterday.  At just 19 years of age, she co-starred in Singing in the Rain.  It became an iconic film of its generation.  The movie of the late 30's and early 40's were often starting to be edgy for their time, and there was a glamour and a sexiness about them.  After World War II, with the dawning of the Cold War, there was an idea of wholesomeness and traditional family values that crept back into American culture.  Debbie Reynolds was an icon of that girl next door ideal.  Don't believe me?  Check out Tammy and the Bachelor, or any other from that series.  Watch a young Ms. Reynolds throw out her heart for Leslie Neilson.  She was a symbol of what every American should be or want, if we wanted to stay one step above the Russian heathens.  She was an icon.  Stayed that way all of her public life.

John Glenn.  The first man to walk on the moon.  A few hundred years before, we had scientists debating exactly what the moon was, and there was John Glenn, taking that first step for mankind.  Like Debbie Reynolds, he was beating the Russian communists, but this time in the space race.  He was a hero of a generation and the world mourned his passing, no matter his having lived a long and full life.  It wasn't that he died too young, or too tragically.  It's that his death was like closing the pages of an era in history.  Another icon for a time of innocence and less than innocent competition.  I find it ironic that another book about the first manned space mission will be released at the end of this year, Hidden Figures, about the role of women at NASA in getting that first manned flight off the ground, so to speak.  No one in the general public knew the story of those African American women, but after this movie, they might be icons of their own, and stand for a dream for young girls growing up in our country now.

Harper Lee changed the thought pattern of several generations of school children with her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.   Through the eyes of Scout, countless school children have been forced to confront their own feelings about race and what is right.    Her writing is an icon for generations of students whose own thinking was awakened - usually by force - through reading her powerful story.   That book has made many a young person confront what they really think about race and what is fair  - outside what their family or community has taught them to think.  Words have the power to do that, when spoken through a powerful voice.  Harper Lee was that iconic voice.

Muhammed Ali who was an iconic figure in the world of sports.  A man who seemed invincible, who led the way to many a young boy's dreams, both because of his race and because of his dedication.  His voice, often mocked for its well known rhymes and cadences in public speech, was the voice of someone who didn't know how to quit.  To this day, he is quoted as a voice of grit and determination. Don't start counting the repetitions until it's started to hurt.  You think you have a plan until you get punched in the face.  The icon for someone overcoming the odds.  Everyone loves that story, no matter the time or the setting.  It's an age old ideal, wrapped up in a man who didn't know how to lose.

And so it goes on, the sports figures, musicians, actors, writers, politicians.   They are not, as individual human beings, any more important than anyone else. All of us make contributions. Each of us counts as the same specks of dust in the universe.  But it's the icons they became that count as so much more, and the icons that are mourned.

Carrie Fisher passed away a few days ago. All my life, I've admired her - first wanting to be Princess Leia, then admiring her powerful voice as an advocate for women and for those with mental illnesses. She walked a hard road, and she gave hope to countless others who walked that road.  She understood a little the power of an icon and the gift they could be.

So, we mourn, because it's been a suck ass year for icons. It's been a year of loss and heartbreak, as we quietly memorialize moments of our youth, memories of those associated with those losses, the moments in our personal histories, and the giant holes left in our cultural histories at large.  We aren't worshipping them as idols, but we hold them as icons in our hearts and occasionally on pedestals, reminders of what the human spirit can manifest, and reminders of how we all often touch one another, though we sometimes forget that in our daily lives. 

To a young child, the worn stuffed bunny they might carry counts as an icon.  It's a symbol for everything that is right in their world - mom, dad, home, family, love and security, all in a portable object that they can identify.  Those other emotions, those are hard for an adult to wrap their mind around, much less a child.  But a stuffed bunny is manageable as an idea and its tangible.  Our pop icons are no less powerful, images for things that are important to us. Allow us to mourn those pieces of ourselves, our pasts, our futures, and our identities.  Allow us to recognize genius and how it touched our lives in all manner of ways.  And let those stars continue to shine in our eyes, as their iconic presence helped shape who we are as well

The Word of Your Body

I woke up early this morning, well, I mean it was technically morning, because it was after midnight, with violent leg cramps, the kind that drag me out of bed to walk in hobbling, cussing arcs back and forth around my bed.  Cussing more because I didn't turn on the light and stumbled into the corner of my bed frame.  New bruise.  It can join the fifty or so others sprinkled all over my body.  My favorite right now might be the foot shaped bruise on my forearm - complete with toe prints!  Thank you, Maria - nothing like a surprise souvenir from jiu jitsu.  But my early morning pacing wasn't from rolling, but rather from running.


My children will tell you, I don't run.  I walk, I sprint, I amble, I sometimes hobble and limp, but I don't run.  Or at least, I don't run often.  I'm trying to change that.  There are deterrents - leg cramps, shin splints, sore feet, the time I dislocated my shoulder, the fact that I only have time to run at night, and there are some creepy people hanging out on the trail at night...but, still I try.  My first attempt at running came about three years ago, when I woke up one day and said, "well, that's enough of sitting around on my ass," and I walked out the door and started slowly circling the park.  That first month, I was in so much pain it became my constant companion.  I could have named the pain, taken it out to dinner, bought it a drink or two, because it was real and tangible and never left my side.  My shins ached, my hips burned, my back felt broken, and for some ungodly reason, my arms hurt.  I didn't understand what arms had to do with running.  But running brought me to kickboxing, which brought me to jiu jitsu, and so I suppose in some ways, those first couple of months of running in my neighborhood changed my life - and possibly saved it along the way.  But I still hate running, and I let it go in favor of cardio classes and weights and boxing.  Now I'm back at it, for no reason other than I'm turning 44 this year (this month really) and while I'm no longer young and spry, I'll never again be as  young as I am right now.  I have no way of knowing what parts of my body will give out tomorrow, or next year, or ten years from now.  If I'm going to do something, I might as well start it now.


A friend joked with me not too long ago that I must really hate myself to punish myself physically the way that I do.  I don't look like I'm as active as I am, but I put my body through a lot in a week - jiu jitsu, cardio classes, MMA, running, yoga, not to mention normal day-to-day wear and tear from working and hauling groceries, and cleaning my house, and laughing and drinking and being alive.  But I had to clarify that I don't hate myself - I spent enough years doing that.  I do the things I do because I actually LIKE myself, I like my body, and I want to celebrate the fact that it can do so many things.  I just wish I'd figured that out long before I did.


Growing up, "body" was a dirty word in our house.  Bodies were dirty and most parts were better off being covered up and kept secret, even from ourselves.  Young girls didn't look at their bodies, didn't think about their bodies, except to keep them thin, because that was what men wanted.  Girls who touched their bodies were dirty and my mother was willing to beat the dirty right out of me, or out of my brother, who I suppose was a dirty boy in his own right.  That duality was confusing - how could something so shameful be something worth so much?  As a child, the message received was that I had no real control of my own body.  My mother would control how it looked, how I dressed, how I wore my hair, because my body was really only there to transport me from place A to place B until there was a man who wanted my body enough that he would take over where she had left off.  And only a man who wanted to marry me had any right at all to my body in any way, and what I felt about it had no bearing in one way or another.  It was my body, but I merely lived in it, had no ownership of it or what I did with it.


Rebellion as I grew up meant being careless with my body.  Reckless.  I broke bone after bone, learning to ride a skateboard, falling off a balance beam, trying some crazy stunt involving roller skates and a bike and a really high hill.  And as I got older, being careless and reckless meant giving other people access to my body.  It'd never been mine to control, and so I didn't know how to take back ownership at that point, and the only thing I discovered was that there was some power over those to whom I had given the privilege of touch, whether it was the power over the creepy old guy in our neighborhood who liked to grope preadolescent behinds and wouldn't want his wife to know, or over the teenage boys who just wanted to touch some girl's boobs for the first time and were willing to pay for an icee if it got them a trip behind the 7 Eleven.


As an adult, I have abused and punished my body in every conceivable way - eating crap and gaining weight, not working my body the way it was intended, alcohol, sex, and at one time, self-harm.  It's been easy to accept things done to my body, abuse heaped upon it, being raped, being taunted, and being controlled.  There's truth in the statement that I am not my body - it's not the heart of who I am, any more than the car I drive is a representation of me.  But my body is where I live, it's what I use to represent myself to the world, and it's what keeps me tied to this earth and to the people I love.  I owe it respect and I owe it some care.  In return, I'm finding myself amazed at what my body will actually do, and how much it can endure without breaking.


I have friends who are struggling with illnesses, their bodies partially out of control, and fighting every single day to take back ownership of all of their bodies.  From a friend who lives every single day with a disease with which she negotiates for daily necessary movement and function, to a friend who is kicking the ass of cancer and went to her surgery wearing a tiara and a smile, because she knows who owns her body, and it's not cancer.  They don't take their bodies for granted, and it would be insulting for me to do so, when I have so many fewer obstacles to go over. 


So, I'm turning 44 soon, and my body is carrying around over four decades of wear and tear.  Gravity has won several battles, and I carry the scars of a whole lot of others - stretch marks, surgical scars, imperfectly mended bones, and some that are only visible on the inside.  But as I start my 45th year, I'll take nothing for granted, and I'll not allow myself excuses.  I will push my body to do the things it was made to be able to do, and celebrate those things and reward my body with bubble baths, and long stretches, and a soft bed stocked with a warm kitty.  I'll appreciate all the things my body can do, and accept the things it really can't do (I really, really can't climb a rope, even if it were to save my life).  And I don't say that no one is ever going to touch me again, but now it happens on my own terms.  And I won't say that no one is ever going to hit my body again, but now I know how to hit back.  It took four decades, but I finally took ownership of the house I live in - and you know, despite the cellulite and the scars and the sagging, I kinda like what I've got.  It's gotten me a lot of places in life, and there are a whole lot more places I want to travel with it.


And I say to my friends, celebrate your own bodies.  Listen to them, and pay attention when they tell you something is wrong.  Give yourself love, and push yourself to find your limits and go past them.  There will come a time all too soon when our bodies won't be able to respond the way that we want them to.  Until then, I'm going to enjoy every moment in my vintage edition.  Even if some of the parts are hurting - at least they're letting me know they still work.

Nasty Girls

It's been a fuck of a week.  No, it's been a fuck of a 2016.  Every week I seem to have friends saying, "when will this year END?"  Every day I turn on the news to hear about mass shootings, bombings, natural disasters, race riots, police shootings, ISIS, and the list goes on and on and on.  All of this has galvanized one of the most heated elections in my memory - gone is the apathy with which most recent elections seem to have been met.  Gone is the feeling that it doesn't matter who our leaders are, really.  This election became personal.  The two candidates became symbols for everything that is right and everything that is wrong in our country, each of them becoming little more than cartoon effigies for the issues plaguing our news and waking us up in the middle of the night.


I am a single mom, raising two teenage daughters.  So many things have terrified me in the last year, so many things wake me up from nightmares these days, because a parent's first and foremost thought is how to keep their children safe.  Everything else can be fixed later, just keep your children safe.  But I can't keep them safe from knowing all manner of things waiting just outside our front door.  For my oldest, legally an adult now, she's becoming more and more aware of the dangers and the inequality of our world.  As a young woman, she's startlingly aware of both all her future potentials and the limitations that are placed upon her, sometimes because of her gender.  This election season drove so much of that home to her and, in return, to me. 


To Katie, neither major candidate was all that appealing, but she did her homework, she recognized the futility of voting third party, and she sided with what she saw as the only logical choice.  She was a young woman, voting for the first time, for a woman presidential candidate.  That was pretty exciting in itself.  As time got closer, there were so many news reports, and we had quite a few late night discussions over those.  My daughter values her friends, and those come from a wide scope of minorities, backgrounds, sexual preferences, genders, socio-economic classes.  The things that Trump was saying in press conferences and debates scared her.  Actually frightened her to think of a future where he could make those things happen - where presidential decisions could impact her and the lives of people she cares about.  She began to care more and more about the outcome of our presidential election.


It was something that was said that stuck with my daughter, and so many of my women friends in the last few weeks.  Trump referred to Hillary Clinton as a "nasty woman."  For me, that goes deeper.  "Nasty girl" was one of my mother's favorite phrases, along with "dirty girl."  Growing up, nasty girls played too much with the boys.  They showed too much skin.  Any girl who touched herself, pretty much anywhere between the shoulders and the knees, was being nasty. Nasty girls were loud, and opinionated and, well, had better be smart because no man was ever going to want to marry them, and take care of them.  I guess I've been a nasty girl pretty much all my life.  I guess I'm raising my daughters to be nasty girls too.  At least, I hope so.


How confusing is it to be a young woman growing up in a time when it appears that so many doors are open, and yet, there's a giant pit between themselves and the doors?  If my mother's version of nasty girls touch themselves, we have a president elect who thinks it's OK to touch other women any way he likes.  I hope my own girls know, those are their bodies, and they get to touch their soft bellies and their strong muscles, and their bony feet, and all the things that belong to them.  And no one else has the right to ever touch them unless they give permission.  And I've made sure they know how to break the arm of anyone who tries.  I want my daughters, and all the young women I know, to know that they should be kind, but they should never be silent unless they choose.  No one has the right to take away their voice.  They have the right to defend those they love, regardless of where they come from or who they love.  Skin color is only that, and my nasty girls get it, and how we all need to stick together - not tear one another apart.


I've spent the last three days listening to rants from friends and families, both elated and heart broken over the results of our 2016 presidential election.  My own feelings on who should or should not have won don't really matter at this point.  I'm not a defeatist, but what is done is done.  But now is not the time for those I love to run and hide or hold their voices. It's the time when we most need to love one another, most need to embrace our differences and listen to the words coming from each other.  As long as there is an "us" and a "them," we are never going to be strong.


There are issues that we face that are much larger than who is at the apex of our government.  And let me say, he's leading our country, so we better hope pretty hard that Trump pulls his shit together and does a decent job of things and gets some smart people in some pretty important offices, because I'm not ready to watch wars start, civil riots break out, or friendships fracture over a giant "I told you so."  Nor will I be silent if things do not go well, but what I won't do is use things not going my way or disasters falling as an excuse to hate or to blame or to name call.  None of those things are productive.  Please, Mr. President-Elect, take a note on that one, because you'll be repping us to the rest of the world.  Don't be that nasty boy on the playground calling all the other boys and girls names, just because you think you can.  Enough people in this country decided you were their right choice, please rise to that occasion.  Prove some of us pleasantly wrong.


With this past election, I've seen so many reminders of the suffragettes of the past, the ladies who laid their own safety and relationships on the line to stand up for their right to vote.  This year, women stood in line to put "I voted" stickers on the headstone of Susan B. Anthony, and I like to think she'd be proud, that she's a nasty girl who's saying, "next time, ladies, next time."  One friend, who I have dearly loved for most of my life, dressed in her big ass hat, and her pearls, and her ankle length dress and walked down the streets of North Hollywood to her polling station, because she's classy like that.  She dressed up to vote, because she is privileged enough to do so, and she paid homage of all those who paved the way for her to be able to do so.  Well done, Sammy Kate, well done.  And to those lady friends of mine who didn't vote, who thought their voices didn't matter and their opinions didn't count, get your shit together, step it up next time.  Educate yourself, stiffen your spine, and understand that your voice matters.  There are other parts of the world where no one gets a voice in who their leader will be, and you do, use that power every step of the way.


I was born in the 1970's (yes, that long ago), and despite the advent of NOW, and the sexual revolution, and the long past Vatican II decisions, women were still seen as extensions of their fathers and husbands.  I was raised to be educated, but with the expectation that I would never need it, if I just stayed pretty enough and kept my big, opinionated mouth closed long enough.  Now I gladly dedicate myself to being a mother and raising my daughters, to be women who I hope DO find love and marry - no matter who that person is, no matter their gender, no matter the color of their skin - but because they want to and never because they think they need to do so.  And I want those girls to be nasty girls who sometimes talk a little too loud, who are just smart enough and just skilled enough that they make the boys a little nervous, but are never quite tacky enough to point it out.  And I want my nasty girls to know that they can make a difference in the world, in big ways and in small ways, and the only things I expect from them are kindness and understanding, and maybe a little ass kicking when it's absolutely necessary.  Educate yourself, and fill your life with compassion - only good things can follow that, no matter how nasty you might be.

The Music In Me

What is it about the intoxicating mix of music and memories?  I heard a song from my teen years yesterday morning, and it got me thinking about what it was like to be fourteen, and I started thinking a little bit about something I read once in the book This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin.  Now, I didn't agree with everything Levitin said in his collection of thoughts on brain development and how it interacts with our musical intelligence, but his chapter on teenage brain and musical imprinting did strike a chord (oh, yeah, I just made that terrible pun on purpose - sue me).  In his book, Levitin suggests that the music we listen to at around the age of fifteen will forever hold the strongest emotional connection for us, and we'll feel more attached to that music than that which comes before or after, because of what is happening in our brains at that time.  Teenagers are at the height of limbic brain development and their reasoning is dialed down, as well as the ability to make logical decisions (hello, it's what the teen years are KNOWN for - wonky decisions).  I can completely believe this, and thus my unnatural affection for certain songs by The Cure, The Smiths, and, forgive me, but, Bryan Adams. 


My brain was on overdrive in the late 1980's and it was before CD's had really become the primary source of home music, and long, long before iTunes was even a thought.  Music was captured off albums, off the radio, and recorded on cassette tapes.  Favorite tapes got played until they snapped and less favored tapes were recorded over, and over, and over, until they were a patchwork collection of bits and pieces of song snippets and commercials, and long forgotten DJ's making jokes that are no longer relevant or even understood.  I walked the edge of listening to punk rock, alternative rock, pop from the radio, and early boy bands like New Edition. 


Music was the glue that held together all the other parts of my life, when I was a young teen, and today it still holds together my memories of those years.  All I have to do is hear Moody Blues' "In Your Wildest Dreams" and I'm sitting under the homemade bins holding records in Penguin Feather record shop, back in Maryland.  I can still hear that song and the way that my two best friends and I got a little thrill when that song came on the radio.  We'd never heard of Moody Blues before that summer, and they were suddenly our favorite new band that had actually been around since long before we were born.


It was the days of making mixed tapes.  We had tapes for everything.  Beach road trips required a special mix.  Carpooling to school in the morning required a different mix - something to wake us up and get our brains on the right track for six and a half hours of what we saw as minimum security imprisonment.  On my Walkman, I listened to secret mixed tapes, the ones containing the songs that reminded me of certain boys, or certain specific memories I didn't want to share with anyone else.  My mother was convinced that I would go deaf from always having those foam headphones pressed to my ears, but it didn't matter, because wearing those headphones, with my music cranked up and the ability at any moment to fast forward or remind, I had a little bit of escape that I could take with me anywhere.  In 1987, the year I turned fifteen, my mix tape was a weird little eclectic mix of songs off the radio and tidbits gathered from my brother's collection of LP's.  It was the year I had also discovered used record stores existed, and I'd bolstered my knowledge of the classics with albums by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Herman's Hermits.  Yeah.  Don't ask about the last one.   "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter" always made me smile. I think I liked the clearly British accent.


Summer 1987 favorite mix tape:


A Side


1. I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) - Whitney Houston
2. Everybody Have Fun Tonight - Wang Chung
3. Let's Spend the Night Together - Rolling Stones
4. Touch Me, I Want Your Body - Samantha Foxx
5. Nasty - Janet Jackson
6. Back in the USSR - the Beatles
7. Kyrie - Mr. Mister
8. I Know You're Out There Somewhere - Moody Blues


B Side


1. Crazy For You - Madonna
2. I Melt With You - Modern English
3. Kiss- Prince
4. Farewell My Summer Love - Michael Jackson
5. She Loves You - the Beatles
6. Living on a Prayer - Bon Jovi
7. In Your Wildest Dreams - Moody Blues




Clearly, I had some kind of crush working that summer.  Or maybe it was when I was dating one of the temporary boyfriends I had at that age, the kind that made me write my name next to theirs and doodle little hearts around our initials on my notebooks.  One has to wonder about the random inclusion of "Back in the USSR" and "Living on a Prayer," and what those might have said about that summer.  The details are long gone from my memory, but the emotions remain.  The tape disintegrated years ago, but I can still hear it in my mind, including the annoying way that the first side cut off about ten seconds before the song actually ends.  Whoever owned the car you were in, you knew there was going to be a collective groan when a favorite song cut off mid note.


A few years back, a friend and coworker introduced me to the writing of Rob Sheffield, who is a well respected writer for Rolling Stone magazine.  He grew up just a few years before I did, and all his connections to music felt familiar and cozy to me, but it was his book Love is a Mix Tape that made a whole different kind of imprint on me. In this book, much like in his other two books, Sheffield connects music to emotion and uses lists of songs to drag the reader into his own memories.  But it's about more than that; it's a story of a kind of love that boggles the mind, and when I read it that first time, I fell a little in love with his wife, Renee, myself.  In the story, set against a backdrop of basement punk rock and drunken nights of shouting out lyrics to one-hit wonders, he made me envy his short lived marriage to this described force of nature.  I was jealous of Sheffield for having that kind of love with anyone, and my heart broke with his when I read of Renee's sudden death.  In my head, when I hear the songs he attributes to different stages of their relationship, I can feel a subtle manipulation of my emotions as well.


So I was heartbroken for Sheffield, and there was elation about a year later, when I discovered he had a new book coming out.  Turn Around Bright Eyes documents a new chapter in his life, exploring his relationship with his second wife, Ally, through their mutual love of karaoke.  Cheesy classics and 1990's alternative rock are the foundation for the story of his return to being a husband and to feeling something outside of nostalgia and grief.  Sheffield lays himself out naked for the world, in exposing his grief and the strange depths to which he sank, before starting to live again.  But my favorite parts of this story were in how his second major relationship compared to the first.  Renee was his young love, his burst of excitement and raw sex and driving too fast to music played too loud.  Ally was the woman he found later, a more comfortable kind of love, no less real, just not dialed up to eleven.  There's an a-ha moment in his storytelling when he describes both of them sitting in her living room while he was reading, and her telling him that, if he just wasn't too busy, she'd really like more of his attention and affection right then.  And he realized, "oh, this is how grown ups have a relationship."  Oh, yeah?  I hope I get to find that out someday, too, Rob.


Even without a physical soundtrack attached to his writing, I heard the echoes of those songs in my head, and made that connection with the writer.  As much as I ached for him in Mix Tape, I felt his confusion and elation in Bright Eyes.  Sheffield managed to bring together a powerful storyteller in himself, with the powerful drug of music.  It is a drug - it changes brain chemistry, forges neurological connections, and at times can make us irrationally emotional.


I still make playlists on my computer - the one playing right now is titled "Shut Up and Get Shit Done."  It's a fun mix of Billy Joel, The Smiths, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Leon Bridges, Neko Case, A Fine Frenzy, Kate Bush, and John Coltrane.  All of the songs on it have meaning to me, but nothing too deep that might pull me away from my work.  It's all about balance when you're talking about music.  Or really, about anything in life, I suppose. 


Playlists are fun, but sometimes I miss the hiss and pop of a really good mix tape.  The thrill of someone else making a tape for you, picking out songs that make them think of you.  Nothing like popping a tape into the deck with some anticipation, and wondering what you're going to hear.  Sometimes you're elated because it's a song with some deep meaning and other times, you're bound for disappointment, when it's nothing but techno pop without soul.  It's always worth the ride.


I'm a little sad now to think that the music my children are going to forever connect to might come from Justin Bieber, One Direction, or Ke$ha.  But they've been raised in my house, and maybe some classics might slip in there somewhere, somehow.  Still, I wonder what's pounding into their brains, what's imprinting on them, through those tiny little ear buds that have long since replaced the foam covered headphones I grew up treasuring.  What music will make their hearts pound, or ache from remembered unrequited crushes, what tunes will make their hearts race, or make them laugh remembering a best friend years from now?

Connectivity

Years ago, I first read Madeline L'Engle's book A Stone for a Pillow and, in it, she talked about our connection to nature and to the universe.  She dissected the word disaster, which when broken down to its roots, means a literal separation from the stars.  Because when we are separated from nature, from the light of the stars, the feeling of the earth below us, the pull of gravity and the wind blowing across our bodies, we are disconnected from life.


I was thinking about that last night as I sat outside with some friends, feeling kind of loose thanks to some really good music and some pretty fine beer.  Looking up through the branches above us, I could just make out a few stars between the clouds.  I felt pinned, between the stars above and the ground below.  I felt connected.


More and more I realize that, despite living in a crowded city and being constantly, electronically connected to hundreds of people, most of us spend most of our lives pretty much alone.  We are alone inside our own heads, within our own bodies.  Each of us walks in something like isolation much of our days.


It was a heady feeling as a child to realize my thoughts were truly my own.  Because, at first, I imagined that my thoughts were there for others to see, to hear, to read, and nothing I thought was truly private.  When I realized that I could think as I liked, and no one could look in and see my exact thoughts - though my face probably gave a clue, as I do not possess a poker face - it was both freeing and terrifying.  Freeing because I wasn't going to have my mouth washed out with soap for what I was thinking and I wasn't going to hell, probably, like I'd been warned.  Terrifying because I was alone with my own thoughts, all the time.  In the middle of the night, when frightening dreams yanked me from sleep, with heart pounding and a urge to flee, I could never fully convey that fear to anyone else, and I was all alone in the night, trying to put order back to my thoughts and slow my heartbeat. 


When we are young, there is a sense of knowing, but not really understanding, that other people operate much as we do.  They have the same sense of seeing the world in their unique first person point of view, and they have their own private world inside their heads that I will never completely see.  Even as an adult, I am fascinated and overwhelmed by the frighteningly unending number of internal worlds there are out there.  I try to catch glimpses of it, but I'll never fully understand what even those closest to me are seeing or thinking or feeling.  Their reality is not mine, and our worlds connect only briefly.


Young children who are learning to separate and experiencing separation anxiety are going through a developmental milestone of understanding that they are separate from parents and caregivers, that mother's warm embrace is not an extension of their own selves and desires.  No wonder children cry and cling - they're losing a part of themselves, and breaking a connection that can never truly be regained.  I think about it now, and I have sympathy for my children who are long past that stage, and for the casual way in which I treated their distress during those times.


We spend the rest of our lives trying to forge new connections.  From earliest interactions and playground friendships to complex relationships of adults to sharing worlds with a larger audience, we are constantly seeking assurance that we are not alone.


I was thinking about all of that last night, as I listened to a friend play with her band, admiring her dedication and the way she was both lost in the music and also sharing a piece of herself with a group of friends and strangers.  She creates for herself, but also to connect.  I think now that all creative efforts are done in order to share our world with others.  Music, poetry, prose, two and three dimensional art, plays, dance - they're all ways to give others a glimpse into what we see and how we feel about it.  Some of us feel compelled to create, to forge relationships through this type of sharing.  Creation and connection are two of the urges that make us human.  I believe we are biologically driven to do so.


Connection, after all, is the basis for human creation - for continuing the species.  If we are all separate, and we are aware of how separate we really are, then seeking physical connection with others seems only natural.  Just as I felt last night, feet touching the ground, wind blowing my hair, I can feel connected and real when I'm holding a hand, snuggling a small child, when my senses become tangled with that of another living being.  Physical intimacies are another kind of creation, another way of sharing our world with another.


We talk about connectivity in terms of our digital distances and interactions, but that type of connection feels false - I'm still in mental and emotional isolation during these types of shallow connections.  There is no warmth of skin, sound of breath, no emotional engagement for another living being.  Sitting outside, late on a summer night, surrounded by friends who are laughing and sharing drinks, while feeling the not quite still feeling of the earth beneath my shoes and breathing in the humid air that has been exhaled by those around me, that kind of connection can't be made through my smart phone.


Now, some of my friends resented connecting with the part of nature that comes with six legs and an exoskeleton scurrying across a midnight patio, but still they are connected - through their startled reactions, repulsion and laughter as they found humor in their own response to such a tiny creature.  I'm not a fan either, and I connected with each of those ladies as we gave a collective look of distaste at the roach scuttling out of sight.


Each of us is gifted with a life that no one else can quite understand and experiences that can never be replicated.  By reaching out and connecting, we enhance one another's private worlds, but also bring the outside into our inner workings and enrich ourselves.  I'm making it my goal to put down my phone more this summer and get connected in other ways.

Moving On

Growing up, my family moved.  A lot.  There was one year I attended five different schools.  Another year, my mother forgot to enroll me at all and I missed most of my fourth grade year, instead sitting in a relative's house, watching reruns of bad 70's television and playing with my grandmother's antique tea sets.  Other times, we'd stay in the same house, the same schools for a few years in a row, long enough to accumulate things in our rooms, to make friends in our classes, to plant new trees in the yard, or build a fence.  But in the end, we always moved on again, to accommodate my father's job.  I learned to let go of things very early on - I was only allowed to bring a certain number of toys and books each time, so I learned to choose carefully.  I was never going to be a hoarder.


Since becoming an adult, I've lived in only four homes, all in the same city.  My children have attended only two schools in their lives - a private Pre-K through 8th, and a public high school.  They see friends every day who they have literally known their entire lives.  They, like all children, do have a little bit of hoarding in them, and our houses have overflowed with their toys and crafts and puzzles and outgrown shoes, and all the debris that follows in the wake of those who are carelessly secure in their own home.  They take for granted that things in their lives will change someday, but that someday won't be now.  I can't say that I haven't wanted to make moves or changes, but I tried to give them something I never had growing up - a permanent home.


The hardest part of moving all the time wasn't leaving behind books or Barbies or baseballs, it was leaving friends behind.  It felt like I always moving on, always leaving just before some monumental event.  We unpacked in Mobile on my ninth birthday, having a quick celebration at a pizza parlor recommended by the realtor.  I missed a ceremony where I should have gotten a city award for poetry, but we were driving away to Tennessee when that was taking place.  All over the country, I left salt dough maps half finished, forts half built, games that would never be completed.  Only once in all that time did I watch another friend move away first.


I was eight when Heather moved from a small town in Alabama to Ohio.  We had a sleepover two days before, making forts out of blankets between the moving boxes, listening to our voices echo in her nearly empty basement rec room.  Her mom made the kind of frozen pizza we liked best, and let us stay up late watching old movies, until the station went off the air around midnight, because television wasn't always twenty-four hours a day.  Riding my bike to Heather's street, I pulled up in front of her driveway just in time to see her family climbing into their station wagon, the giant moving truck already rolling away around a corner.  Heat rose up off the asphalt as I stopped and Heather got out, ran and gave me one last hug, and promised to write.  I stood there, straddling the seat of my bike,  feeling the warmth of the pavement through my summer sandals and no warmth anywhere else, and feeling empty inside.


When you're the one moving on, there is often some sorrow, but there's also nervousness and excitement and a sense of adventure ahead of you, no matter how reluctant you are to move at the time.  When you are the one being left behind, you feel only the sadness and...hollow.  It's bittersweet watching someone who has filled a piece of your life, for no matter how short a time, drive off in to the sunset.  As an adult, I'm happy and excited for friends who are embracing a new opportunity, a new adventure, and I feel a little like a selfish asshole because sometimes those feelings get so strongly outweighed by my own sense of loss and wish that they didn't have to move forward.


This summer sees five of my favorite people moving away - all for very good reasons.  In some cases, they've known for months that the move was coming, and for others the change was quite sudden.  I'm having a hard time saying good-bye, though I know it's certainly not a final word.  In today's world of technology, I can easily keep track of them and their lives.  But it's not the same - whether they're going a few hours away, or across the country, the change will mean it's not possible to meet up for a last minute drink or plan an evening training session together.  And they're moving on in more ways than one.  People come into our lives and we can stay in touch, but as things change, our relationships change as well.  Moving on has to do with more than just a location on a map.  No matter how we might fight it, things will always change.


I am sad to see my friends move, and I am also maybe more than a little bit jealous.  I've been rooted for longer that I had realized or planned, as is only right, while I raise my children.  My job is wonderful and challenging and means something to me, but it's been the same job for quite a few years.  I am the very opposite of moving on right now in my life, and I feel the same restless pull that others do, but I've forced myself to resist it.  I've gone forward and grown in other ways, in ways that affect my physical being and my emotional relationships.  Stagnant would not describe my life, just grounded.  In just a few short years, my children will both be out of school and will be going forward on their own, making their own changes and forging their own paths on the map.  And I'll likely feel that pull again to move onward.  Maybe that time, I'll decide to let the urge carry me forward.


For this year, I'm planning trips, to California and Colorado, looking forward to testing out a tiny bit of my friends' adventures and new lives.  I'm saving up some time for when they come to town to visit, so that we can reinvent our friendships to fit with their new lives and new homes.  Things are both ending and beginning in parts of my life right now, and sometimes that seems a little scary.  But there's not a whole lot of choice about moving onward, only about which path to follow.

Let It End

Some days I dread turning on the news.  I mean, I turn it on because I feel a need to know what is going on in the world, but the news is generally so ugly, listening and reading leave me feeling heavy hearted on so many days.  When did news become synonymous with tragedy and hate?  People make jokes about "slow news days," when the reporters talk about inspiring kids starting up lemonade stands, or the president visiting an orphanage.  I like those days, because it means that somewhere in the world, someone did something out of hope and out of love, and someone else saw the value in recognizing it.  And I guess I wonder if what is reported on CNN is an accurate representation of the world in which we live?  If someone hundreds of years from now had only that as an archive of who 21st century human beings were, what would they think of us?  We'd be the barbarians,  that word we use describe some early civilizations.


So, billions and billions of dollars are spent on research for finding a cure for cancer.  For diabetes.  For heart disease.  We spend untold amounts creating safety standards for roads, airplane travel, group sporting events, school safety.  Human natural life expectancies are at an all-time high, despite our culture's absolute obsession with doing self-harm through food, alcohol, drugs.  All of this effort, but we squander those few moments we've gained through medical advances by allowing hatred to win?  I'm so fucking confused by all of this.


Maybe it's because I'm living in my fifth decade now, and I'm seeing how quickly the time from 23 to 43 has gone.  Maybe it's because I see how quickly my children have grown and watched so many of my students move on.  Our lives are tiny - no matter what kind of impression we leave - and there comes a point where none of what we are in that very last moment on earth really seems to matter, other than how we are remembered by those who knew us.  Why waste it on hatred?   Because someone is different?  Because they don't think the same way that you do?  Because they look different, or act different, or make you think or feel something that maybe you weren't ready to think or feel?


When I was five years old, I moved to a small town in Alabama from a large city on the North East coast.  It was like moving onto an alien planet.  I had no friends when I first started school, and other kids made fun of the way I talked, since I lacked their deep southern drawl and I spoke bits and pieces of other languages.  My first grade teacher despised me, and took every opportunity to paddle me, despite my behavior being no worse than any other first grader's behavior.  Mid-year in first grade, because my words didn't sound like everyone else's, I was moved into a special education classroom due to "inability to meet standards for reading."  At home I was reading Little Women.  In that tiny closet that they called a classroom, I learned for the first time in my life that not everything was fair.  That people could abuse power and sometimes there was nothing you could do about it.  Special education in that tiny world was made up of me, two deaf students, one black student, and two students who spoke only Spanish.  We had no windows, no books other than a dictionary, no games or distractions.  For two weeks, I stayed in that room - until my mother met with the school principal - and we did nothing but sit in silence and copy words and math facts from a blackboard.  I don't remember the teacher ever smiling, or even talking to us very much.  I learned to sign the words for "friend' and "turtle."  I learned some Spanish.  And then I left, because I had my mother to be an advocate for me, but over the years, I thought about those other students a lot. About how their education had been limited and perhaps a desire to learn completely shut off, because they were different and the educational system saw this as the easiest way to deal with their differences.   Still today, I hurt for the way we were treated.  Prejudice and hatred can be small, like shoving a child who talks differently face first in the dirt, while a teacher deliberately looks away, or it can be as big as a bomb ripping apart buildings, cities, lives.  Neither one makes any sense.


If I thought life in that small town was rough for me, I wonder what it was really like for my older brother, who was a student in the high school and who came out for the first time while living in that small town.  It was a town where I saw a cross burned on the lawn of the town's first black family - a family who lived in one of the most expensive homes and was comprised of a father who was a doctor, a mother who was an accountant, and a daughter who was a brilliant musician.  Hatred boiled over on this family, for no reason other than they were not only different, but brilliantly and successfully different.  They moved away shortly after that.  And so, I can't imagine how my brother was treated - I was too young to know the full stories.  I know many, many times over the years my parents have feared for his safety, despite their own difficulties with accepting him as-is.


I have friends who are afraid to let others know that they are gay.  Or Muslim.  Or Jewish.  Or Christian.  Or atheists.  Because they are afraid that they will be targeted with prejudice and hatred.  Hatred because they hold a belief.  Or because they love someone.  They hide a part of themselves in order to live in peace, but there's no peace found in a life where you can't be who and what you are. 


Now, despite all the political heat surrounding us in this country, I know that when it comes to safety, we are some of the lucky ones in this world.  There are many, many other places I could have been born.  Places where I would have had no voice.  Places where I could not publicly post the words I am writing without fearing for my life.  Places where I would have no right to an opinion because I am a woman.  Or because I am part Jewish.  Or because I don't hold the right political affiliations.


And at the end of the day, while I can tell you what people say are the motivations and justifications for their violent, hateful actions, I still can't understand.  See, I understand biologically the absolute improbability that any of us are here.  The odds that one sperm managed to survive the brutal assault that it's under from female anatomy.  That one fragile cell managed to divide and thrive and come into the world and then grow to adulthood.  The absolute against-all-odds that any of us are standing here - and that someone else thinks that they have the right to come along and take that away dumbfounds me. Because they have an opinion that is different than mine?  Or a belief that their concept of spirituality and a greater deity is more right than mine?  See, we already have cancer.  And car wrecks.  And acts of nature. Someone with a gun, they are not an act of nature.  They are not unstoppable.  Words of ugliness and hatred are a disease, but not one we have to accept.  Refuse to listen.  Even better, refuse to react.  Let the escalation stop here.  Let it end.


I have no power over anyone or anything, other than myself.  I can be saddened by what I hear on the news, and I can feel anguish for those who are left behind, bewildered and suddenly all too aware of how fragile our lives are and how stupid acts of violence really are.  But the only response of which I am capable is to refuse to hate.  No matter how much sometimes it hurts to see the child who is treated wrongly by other children, because they are different, or to see a friend turned away from a club because the color of his skin is wrong, or to see lives blown apart on the evening news - I refuse to hate.


Tomorrow, I really hope it's a slow news day.  Maybe there's a baby giraffe about to born somewhere and who can't feel love for a baby giraffe?  We could use some love.

We Are Family

Last year, on my 43rd birthday, I celebrated with my friends and family for the first time in my life.  It felt a little weird, inviting other people out to celebrate with me - as though I were demanding attention like a petulant three year old.  Yet, it was something a friend convinced me I needed to do at least once in my life.   My birthday is just before Christmas, and I was the youngest child of older parents - they never wanted to be bothered.  My mother told me one year that I was having a birthday party, but that no one had accepted the invitation.  It wasn't until years later that I realized, looking at pictures,  she had bought only a very small cake, and a handful of plates.  She'd known all along no one would come, because she hadn't invited anyone outside our family.  My immediate family was very private and closed off, and they didn't want to let anyone from the outside in.  It's easier to maintain a façade that way.


Growing up, my parents insisted that family was everything, that you couldn't count on anyone else.  My mother came from a huge family - she was the youngest of six children - and they were always around.  Even as we moved around the country, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents would show up and stay with us for a few days before moving on.  Somewhere, my mother still has reel-to-reel tapes from those visits - grainy, distorted colors flickering,  with all of us slipping through waves at the beach, raking leaves on the lawn, running through sprinklers, and playing in snow banks.  The adults always had cigarettes in mouths, and other than my mother, usually a drink in their hand.  No wonder we kept to ourselves - my mother's family are all alcoholics.  They might have stuck together, but often were so mean to one another that it would send me to hide in the closet.  Yet, they were a clan that was nearly unbreakable. My mother was the baby sister of five brothers, and they protected her.


My brother, David,  and I were raised  in near isolation, and certainly a lot of insulation, from the rest of the world.  We didn't often invite others into our home, and in all the time I was living with them, I never knew either of them to have friends outside of the family.  I had friends from school, and they were invited over to my house on many occasions, but always for a limited amount of time, as my mother could only hold her best behavior for so long.  My closest friends saw enough that I was often embarrassed, and yet I still clung to the idea that my loyalty had to lie with my blood relatives.  Even when they were cruel to the people who were the nicest to me.




David, as we grew older, pulled away from our insular family and moved more into a world of his own making.  I married young and moved half-way across the country to escape their painful affection, only to find that my parents had followed me.  Guilt drove me to continue to feed the lie that we were close even as I had children of my own and fostered my own kind of family. 


There was a Thanksgiving a few years ago when we were sitting stiffly at my parents' table, where I was seated across from my then husband, our daughters a physical boundary between my mother and I, and I was fuming because my mother had managed to put meat in every single dish on the table, including the vegetables, because she still thinks my being a vegetarian is a phase I'll grow out of. Like sucking my thumb, or refusing to step on cracks.  And while I was sitting there, pushing a roll back and forth on my mostly empty plate, having eulogized the turkey instead of saying a real blessing - because passive-aggressive humor is more my style than full frontal confrontation - I thought back to some of my best holidays.  Shortly after I had been married, a group of friends I would gather each year and cook together in one of their homes.  We were all, mostly, pretty mediocre cooks and we never managed to get all the entrees cooked at the same time, and our tables were a hodge podge of whatever dishes we could throw together.  What we had were people who had met through happenstance, who came together because we wanted to spend time with one another, not through obligation, but through mutual admiration or affection.  And I couldn't help comparing the two experiences and feeling a little bit of a loss that I didn't have that same sense of joy and connection with my biological family.  I could see my mother's connection to her roots - it was all around me, from the china we ate off that had been her grandmother's, to the lace table cloth my father's mother had made, and the silverware that was passed down through generations of her family.  And I didn't feel connected to any of it.


For years, I agonized over what I might be depriving my children of, if I didn't give them enough time with extended family.  It was my own daughter telling me she didn't like the way my mother talked to me that made the biggest impression, though.  They noticed more than I thought, and weren't hurt at all when I was sick one Christmas and wanted to stay home for the holiday.  And I remembered one of my favorite Christmases, early in my marriage, when we had no family in town and our car was in need of repair.  My then husband and I woke up in no hurry to be anywhere, to get dressed or cook the traditional items.  Instead, we dressed at leisure and walked to IHOP for a late breakfast, then walked on to a movie theatre, where we took turns picking out movies to see for the remainder of the day.  Outside, the rain fell down and it was cold, but we had good day together without any of the things that drive me crazy about holidays.


I've learned to find a balance with my parents, but despite our blood bonds, they're not people to whom I feel particularly close.  I care about them and I check on them now and again, but they're not who I turn to when I need something, and they're not the people I want to share with when I have good news.  Those places have gone to other people in my life.  People who share more than just DNA with me, but are, rather, the people I choose to have in my life - and the weirdos who chose me back.  It was reinforced for me this past December, when I invited people from all parts of my life to come have a drink with me to celebrate my birthday.  No matter how self-centered that made me feel, it was a good night.  And, on that very cold December night, as we sat around a fire pit, talking and laughing, I was able to look around and see my daughters, friends I've known for 20+ years, new friends, training partners, coworkers and people who have nothing in common in their lives except that they share a part of mine. 


Those people, the ones who care enough to spend time with me when they don't feel obligated, the ones who will get out on a Friday night when they'd rather be at home, or those who will pick up their phones and text me because they realize they haven't seen me around in a week, or those who send me jokes at 2 a.m. because they know I've had a horrible day and I'm likely to be awake - those are my family.  I love each and every one of these goofy, brilliant, talented, sometimes alcoholic members of my family.  I'm way more forgiving of them than I am of those who hang off a branch of my family tree.


I don't think I'm too worried about my children's roots any more - they have plenty.  Not necessarily the kind that come from relatives, but from the good people I've brought into their lives and the stable influences they bring.  My girls see that I have people who mean something to me, and on whom I can rely when it comes to that.  They get to share in our laughter and hear about it when I'm angry with one of them and their decisions.  Sometimes we don't get along, sometimes we make up, and sometimes we just pretend the fight never happened.  It's what families do.

30 Years of Teen Angst

Standing on the edge of the crowd, I watch a girl anxiously twisting a few strands of her long brown hair, her feet shuffling against the scratched linoleum.  She's trying to look, without looking, at a group of three or four girls who are standing together, giggling, and trying very hard to obviously not look back at her.  One in the group turns on her cell phone and swipes a few times, bringing up an image that she shows to the others, and they laugh, now looking openly at the lone girl.  I can see the indecision in her face, her gaze falling downward.  Running away really doesn't help, but the fight or flight instinct is there all the same.  Her hands smooth down her skirt, over and over, needing something to do. My own heart aches for her, because I recognize the feelings all too well.




I left middle school nearly three decades ago, and I've said often over the years that those are times you couldn't pay me to live again.  It's so incredibly hard to be that age, to be stuck between childhood and adult, to be assaulted 24/7 by your own hormones and emotions - everything just feels so much more intense when you are thirteen.  Once upon a time, I was convinced that my world was ending at least once a week.  Clearly, it never did end, and I survived, sometimes wiser and most of the time hiding the hurt so no one else would see, because to show weakness in middle school was to label yourself as a victim.  Girls at that age are vicious, being most cruel to those they label as "friend."  The opposite sex is a mystery, and early forays into dating meant late nights up reading way too much meaning into casual encounters and hushed phone conversations.


This was all before internet was a thing, when cell phones were in experimental stages, when talking on the phone after ten without your parents finding out was its own art form.   There was no texting,  and secret conversations in class were done by means of passing notes, covertly, and hoping your teacher wouldn't see and read your note aloud for the whole class - including the boy you had a crush on - to hear.  We learned to think carefully about what we put in writing.  Not only could you be embarrassed, but once those words were out there, in ink, you couldn't take them back.  Talking behind someone's back was one thing, but leaving evidence of that was entirely something different.  And who knows what person might decide to share the note you gave them in confidence, just because they wanted to start trouble.


Drama.  It was at the center of every day of my life when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old.  There was drama with my parents, with my friends, teachers, the girls who didn't like me for reasons I'd never grow to understand, and the girls who used to be my friends but decided I wasn't popular enough, also for reasons I would never grow to understand.  In other words, while I had some really great memories from middle school, most of what I remember are moments of quiet punctuated by intense drama and angst.  Growing up, I guess I thought that all of that would change, but looking at some recent moments in my life, I realize we're still all still carrying those thirteen year olds around inside of us, and none of those emotions really change, just the way we handle ourselves in the midst of them.  And I'm still struggling to understand it.


I have a friend who is very straight-forward.  If she is angry with you, she will tell you.  If she loves you, she will tell you that as well.  When there is a man in whom she is interested, she walks up and lets him know.  No apologies, no drama.  And I envy her.   She has all the same emotions, insecurities and fears as the rest of us, but the way she's learned to cope as an adult is as far from that middle school hallway as she could get.  I still hide behind the politeness that was beat into me growing up, hiding my own anger and very seldom telling anyone what I really want.  But a drama diva, I'm not.


Raising two teenage daughters of my own, there are plenty of emotions running high in our house, and sometimes I feel like a fraud, trying to teach these young women to cope with the highs and lows, when I really haven't figured it out for myself.  I interact great with the opposite sex - as long as you're talking about in a meeting, debating a book, or exchanging blows in a boxing match.  Navigating emotionally?  Not so much.


I know that we are forever imprinted by the things in our lives when we are in our early teens.  The reasoning portion of our brain is all but hibernating, while the limbic system is on hyperdrive.  The music we hear at fifteen, we will forever think is the best music ever (and most of what I remember is really pretty bad).  We forever connect to that first love.  We are drawn to the friends we had during those years, and we carry the scars of the fights, and humiliations, and the nothings that felt like everything.  But lately, I think the emotional approaches we have during those years also imprint on us, and lay down the foundation of how we are going to deal with ourselves and others for years to come.  I know that I can rationally talk myself out of most behaviours, but the hurt, the jealousy, the self-doubts, and the giddy joy still create chaos within me. I can control my outward reactions, but inwardly, I am still a seething mess.  So, I'm toying with a theory that if I could teach my children to calmly declare both their emotions and their intentions, they'd lay down a whole different kind of framework for their adult emotional blow-outs, possibly saving them thousands of dollars in wine and ice cream later in life.  But certainly giving them an empowerment that most of us do not have the luxury of owning.


Now, I'm the adult, and I can intervene for that girl in the hallway and I can force her friends to stop behaving like itty bitty bitches, but I can't change the imprinting that has already happened.  Will she be the woman who stands and lets a boss wrongfully fire her, while she stares at her feet.  Or will she be the date rape victim because she didn't feel like she had the right to say no, even though she never actually said yes.   Will she let opportunities pass by in her life, because she was too afraid to walk up and say, "I want this.  I want you.  You make me happy/angry/giddy and I own those feelings?"  So, I'm learning to do better with faking it until I make it, hoping that the young girls in my life can see some hope at the end of a tunnel that's filled with a lot of tears and laughter and fear and heart-pounding puppy love - usually all at once.  I know I still feel that way sometimes - I think it's part of being alive.  But letting it consume us isn't.   Let's condition our children to embrace their emotions, rather than running or hiding from them, and check the drama at the door.

Just One of the Boys

Sitting - very uncomfortably - on a foam block, I looked out across the circle of women gathered in the glow of electric candles and dim track lighting.  It was my familiar yoga studio, and yet nothing was familiar or comfortable about this situation.  Instead of people waiting introspectively on their own mats, we sat looking out at one another, listening, and waiting for our turn to introduce ourselves and to talk.  Speaking to  group of strangers, introducing myself, talking about what I do like about myself and what I don't....it was basically my worst nightmare in many ways.  I got more anxious as the talking stick, a pretty pink plastic heart on a wand that would be the envy of any four year old wanna be princess, moved closer and closer in my direction.  It would be easy to say something flippiant, something that revealed nothing about myself, when my turn came.  But, somehow, I felt like that would be cheating.  I had listened to women reveal that they had been raped, verbally abused, afraid to return to life after a messy divorce, battled illness.  It would have been cheap and wrong to make something up, or to gloss over why we were sharing.

I'd registered for the workshop, a women's empowerment evening, because the teacher is a friend and someone I greatly respect and because another friend was attending and I accepted her encouragement to come with.  Yoga is what I do, when I have the time, to try and undo some of the damage my other activities do to my joints and my spine.  Yoga helps me relax, but it's not as key to my life as it is to some of my friends.  But I'm also always pretty game to try something new, and so yoga with all women to some music followed by wine was an invitation I couldn't resist.

So, I sat there, listening to these other women and thinking how incredibly strong they all are, and shifting around on my foam block, trying to find a position that it wasn't digging into my ass with every breath.  They  listened with open eyes, clapping for each person who shared, sometimes reaching over to give a hug.  Everyone has a story, and all of these women, of different shapes and sizes and backgrounds and each carrying some pretty heavy baggage the world doesn't see every day, they all came together to celebrate who they are.  Who we are.  I'm one of them, though I'm not comfortable with being that open, and I've never been one to flaunt my feminism.

If I'm being really honest, girly stuff gets on my nerves.  I hate to shop.  I don't travel to the bathroom with a gaggle of friends - I'd rather pee alone, thank you very much.  I wear make-up and heels, and I get my hair done, but it's not something I think much about at the end of the day.  Some of my best friends have always been guys, because I better understand their directness, and even their occasional crassness is preferrable to the cattiness exhibited by some of my female friends in years past.  Really, it's been that way since I was a kid, wanting to wear  a baseball cap all the time, and wishing I could play football with the guys.

But, lately, something has changed.  The women in my life have changed, or what I see in them has been altered.  Really, I think something happens to women as they age - maybe we grow into our femininity, in a more graceful and less forced way.  In the last five years, I have been priviledged to get to know some really incredible, badass, beautiful, and brilliant women - women from all walks of life, all ethnicities, and all types of lifestyles.  Somewhere in their thirties, most of them have thrown off the giggling and the worrying what men will think, and they've made being a woman into an art.  From my friend in Denver who dresses with class and grace, and whose sense of humor lies in the gutter with mine at times.  She's fearless and changed her life because the one she had didn't make her happy.  She's brave like that.  Or another friend, who is a fabulous hairdresser here in Houston, and whose heart is one of the biggest I've seen.  She sees good things in people that they don't even know are there.  And she's a dancing diva of the first order - her moves put all of mine to shame.  Everywhere she goes, it's soul train, all the time.  There's another woman I've known for years who holds those around her in love and grace and will be the first to offer you a hug at any time.  She loves my children as much as her own, along with many, many other children.  And she will cry for you, when your own tears refuse to fall.  I think, as someone who doesn't really cry in front of anyone, that that is incredibly brave.  These women...they've survived so much, and yet they smile and they have the ability to take others by the hand and by the heart.   I want to be that brave.

It's been said by someone in my life that I'm not much of a girl anymore, and I think they referred to the way I dress on the weekends - workout wear and running shoes, mostly, and to some of the things I do for fun.  Yes, I put on boxing gloves and beat on grown men.  Yes, I wrestle and I roll, and sometimes I walk around wearing the marks from those rounds - black eyes, busted lips, bruised shins.  And I laugh outloud, say what I think, and drink my bourbon straight.  But to me, this is just part of being comfortable with who I am and caring just a little bit less what others think.  To me lately, those things make me more of a woman - not less.

Standing on the mats a few weeks ago, sparring, I overheard one of my training partners tell another that he was "hitting like a girl."  I turned to him, arms spread wide, and asked, "what does that even mean?"  He was quick to back peddle, stammering a little and saying, "I didn't mean you, I mean you don't even hit like a girl."    "Yes, I do, " I replied.  "I'm a girl - however I hit, or walk, or talk, I do it like a girl."  In return I got a look that might have been sheepish respect or a silent cry of "you're crazy, woman." 

See, I'm not my mother, having to fight with my father for the right to go back to work after marriage.  I didn't have to stay in a place where I was unhappy just because it was expected of me.  I have the right to work in any career I wish, even knowing that a man doing the same job would make more money.  Progress - it takes time, and as long as we keep moving in the right direction, I won't bitch about the pace.  But still I struggle with what does it mean, to be a boy or be a girl?  After the new baby has been wrapped in pink or blue and bought the appropriate gender biased toys, where does it lead? 

We're not the same, no matter how much some would like it to be so - men and women are gloriously different, but we're not two homogenous camps.  No cookie cutter made all the women I know, each one their own unique creature with strengths and weaknesses that are theirs alone.  Their beauty, in each, unique.  Just as all the men I know have their own blend that makes them who they are.

Sitting there, I wondered about the men in the next yoga studio, having their own empowerment session, focusing on strength and power.  Were any of them struggling with what it means to be a man as much as I was grasping at what womanhood might be?  For a moment, I longed to be with them, partly because I didn't want to have to talk, and partly because mabye I could get off the stupid foam block.

When my turn came to share, I was a little blown away after just having heard a friend share something pretty soul shattering, and I found I first had to admit just how hard it is for me to share in a group of strangers, and how uncomfortable I really was.  Then I found the words came more easily and I was able to say why I really was there - that I'd been born in to a family who had taught me that I was expected to be everything a girl could be - beautiful, smart, classy and, did I say beautiful?  But it was considered wrong and selfish to spend any time on yourself, improving yourself, taking care of yourself, and how I had spent twenty years abusing my body  in every possible way because I'd failed to fit that vision.  Twenty years to figure out that someone might have been wrong, because I didn't fit their mold of what a girl should be.  Twenty years to figure out that I'm not a bad person if I make time to exercise, or read a book, or do nothing at all, if that makes me happy.  And I was shaking after I said that, passing on the silly plastic heart on a stick, and listening as the others around the circle shared their own stories.  But I felt brave for, for the first time ever, putting those thoughts into words.

As the circle was completed, and we gathered our yoga mats to begin practice, I felt more at ease than normal in yoga.  Our leaders stripped down to sport bras and bared more of themselves than just their thoughts, encouraging us to do the same in acceptance of our bodies.  My friend to my right proudly pulled off her top, but I'm just not that brave.  Some damage runs too deep, and I wouldn't have been able to stand there and not cover the scars on the outside and feeling the ones on the inside.  But together we moved and celebrated the bodies we had been given, dancing to music, shaking hips and stopping more than once for sweaty hugs.  The session ended with a dance party, and my diva friend rocked it out to "Pour Some Sugar on Me," as she was surrounded by others in freindship and kinship of the moment.  Her incredible lightness of being draws in those around her like a tractor beam, and I watched as I danced on my own mat, smiling at her sweaty glow, and glad that I had a chance to be with these other incredible women.

Rolling up my mat and preparing to go home, I wasn't sure I could ever explain all of this to anyone, but I'm hoping that this decade I'll grow into one of these women.  Their appeal goes beyond the false eyelashes and manicures, it comes from a sense of knowing they are increidble women and not being afraid to show that to anyone.