You don’t really know a song until you play it live.
— Robert Smith
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
America is 245 years old.
That’s under 2.5x older than Betty White.
Was.
RIP
Danish scientists believe there is a shark in the Greenland vicinity c̶a̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶T̶r̶u̶m̶p̶ who is older than that. So is Twinings Tea. And despite one being a fish and the other inanimate objects, both are more civilized than the US, as of late.
“Civilized” exists in contrast to barbarity: you know, behavior like storming the Capitol, or rioting and looting and other American pastimes.
It may mean, simply, not being rude. You know, like tweeting and commenting and canceling and baseball and other fun-filled American pastimes.
“Civ” is derived from the Latin root “civis” which relates to being of a city. A citizen. The denotations are straigjtforward: “A citizen is either a native or naturalized member of a state who owes allegiance to its government and is entitled to its protection” (Dictionary.com).
The Declaration of Independence is under attack because of its hypocrisy, and as one of the persons completely omitted from it until 1920, I continue to defend the power and potential set forth. On the surface, it publicly rejected the divine right of kings in favor of the divine rights of non-kings. BOOM.
In the depths, lurks the potential – that self-upgrading feature that whomever the hell is running Apple and my Android should build in without the constant notications and space gorging.
Redirect.
For a while it seemed like we were growing up. We outgrew the terrible twos and potty trained. The better angel in us won the great internal conflict. We made it to middle school where the bully problem persisted. We elected some curious, disastrous, and handsome G.O. presidents. There was a lot of color war.
Fast forward, or flashback, to the 1980s. Please let’s never ruin that decade. Can we keep it under glass with laser sensors that neither Indiana Jones nor upside down Tom Cruise could compromise? The Love’s Baby Soft – Silver City Pink – Hello Kitty – First Wave – Shoulder Padded – Good Bill Cosby days. The penultimate 20th century decade when no one – absolutely no one- used the word “penultimate” and the last decade when no one except maybe Al Gore used the Internet.
80s kids are now mid-century years old, which is 1/5 the age of America, which should make us feel ancient, while underscoring how young this superpower truly is. A superpower that projected authority and capacity but recently revealed itself to be the man behind the curtain.
Our Toto is the internet.
Since the start of the pandemic the information coming at us from trusted sources who contradict one another – even themselves – with the ferocity of, well, our internet addiction.
I am not an existentialist: I grip the (uncool) belief that essence precedes existence. We did not create meaning. We find it.
Euphoria’s Secret
Amazing things started happening when I stopped wearing a bra in the
house.
There is little I can control at this point of my life. My internal weather man is
bananas.
The gray hairs, the sag, and
what the actual f* is happening to the skin under my arms?
For most of my life, l’ve been
strapping these weights in like Charles Manson in Quentin State. The Grand Canyon runs through both shoulders.
They were never welcome, always a source of shame. It wasn’t untill
nursed the first of my four kids that I thought, ok,l get it.
But since then, they’ve gone back, but not in the physical sense, to being part of the design, more an appendage to be squashed by Mammogram Terminator once a year, biopsied and prayed over, before returning to their permanent utility: crumb catchers.
It is a moment of bliss when that bra comes off at night. lf you know, you know…
TBH, sometimes I didn’t bother
and slept in not just makeup but an underwore bra! There were seemingly always teenaged boys at home (yeah, those
same kids who spent their first year on the very area we pretend does not exist on my person), so I kept the Bali on until they were in college.
Some people call this time of life
empty nest syndrome. I call it empty breast symdrome.
Sorry neighbors and husband and people who show up at my door unexpectedly. Sorry grown kids who show up to borrow the car or do laundry.
These weighted blankets never brought me comfort, or safety, but they did for the most important people in my life.
Now it’s time for me to be one of the most important people in my life, and damn it, I’m flying comfort class.
Death. Be Not Proud.
Trigger warning: I’m pro-choice.
…to a point. Is that also a trigger warning?
The Wall Street Journal just published an op-ed reflecting on the 15 week fetal development mark, as observed by ultrasound technicians. It applies these observations to Rowe v Wade through the premise of what was known about development Then v Now and without taking a deep dive into the amniotic politics, there are compelling points to pack up and take away.
I suggest you read it because this isn’t a response to the article. It didn’t change the way I feel about the right to choose, — whose compass needle is moved by confirmation bias-free options? — but it did underscore the fact as a formerly pregnant human I already know what it means to have more than a hypothetical relationship to the subject matter.
I’ve been pregnant five times and I have four children. Ever a statistics exemplar, the 1 in 5 pregnancies ends in miscarriage was pregnancy #3. It was a silent abortion – a misleading misnomer – which just means there were no signs until the ultrasound failed to detect a heartbeat where there had once been. I had to have an abortion, which is still called an abortion when the fetus is not alive, which makes no sense.
I’m not here for a pity party nor grand philosophical dissemination. Suffice to say, my body, not my choice. Things happen. You go on.
My point is that pregnancy and pregnancy loss teach you more about the moments when the developing life inside becomes a baby. While I realize this is personal, that is exactly the point.
The first flutter. The kicks. The elbows and feet. That head in the bladder. I didn’t need an ultrasound to tell me when my baby felt like a baby and not just a source of hyperemesiss gravitas.
The choice to end a pregnancy is always personal, even when thrust into the public sphere. Laws be damned, women who want abortions will find way to get them. You can’t be a little pregnant and you can’t stop women from taking control of their pregnancies.
And if you think women are joyous aborting their babies late in pregnancy, you’ve never met a woman who had to abort her baby late in pregnancy.
Nor a doctor who had to do it.
And there are sound reasons for abortion which I won’t waste your time listing. You know them.
There are no sound reasons for the trend to boast about one’s abortion. It’s a tasteless, attention seeking tactic, that achieves the opposite effect of what the braggart is attempting to do. I’ve never even considered side stepping the pro-choice crowd until confronted with this extreme lack of respect for what is often a traumatic episode in a person’s life. If you’ve ever worked in a clinic or with doctors who perform abortions, you appreciate the solemnity of the practice.
It is easier for some than others to rid their bodies of an unwanted cluster of cells. Or a baby, perhaps. That distinction is in the belly of the beholder.
And for the Wall Street Journaling, on a sonogram screen.
Whenever the distinction of life begins, the distinction of humanity ends when abortion is something we celebrate.
An SOS to the World
I am sitting on a beach feeling grit between my toes, sun on my shoulders, as I scribble words onto a precious piece of unlined paper. I will roll it up, place it into an empty white wine bottle, replace the cork, and heave it into the sea.
Except I am in my bedroom, reclining under a white duvet, smartphone in hand. Typing.
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.
#NeverAgain
Bad Messenger
Not THAT Hermes
What is it about being “the messenger” that is so delicious to a person? What human need is this filling?
We all have that friend, and I use the word “friend” cautiously, who loves to be The First to tell you something absolutely awful. The lack of self-awareness is sometimes so grievous that is it more so the story than the story delivered.
Yesterday, something wonderful, in the greater scheme of the world, happened. The widower of my deceased friend got engaged.
As pundits like to say, “two things can be true at once” and in this case, that is certainly true all by itself. His engagement is joyous news. Being that he is also a single dad who was widow(ered?) suddenly with five small children, the reality that he will no longer be alone, and his children will have a loving stepmom there for them is not just comforting, it is a correction of a grievous, unnatural wrong the world Hiroshimaed at them. The light found its way into that sudden cavern that sucked the path to the future from a family, and the ladder out seems placed there by an angel, herself.
In my heart, I know that not only is this something wonderful, it is something my beloved friend would have desperately wanted and possibly, as my magical thinking whispers, facilitated.
To a lesser but sharper degree, this engagement underscores the fact that my friend is dead. Fewer things say dead more than your widower getting remarried, and the empty seat at your table occupied by another woman. Also, she will raise your kids, be at their weddings, and celebrate every motherly milestone with them, and while the world is benevolent in allowing that for them, it SUCKS that it isn’t you. It sucks that your own parents are navigating every day without you and that there will never be a replacement daughter the way there can be a replacement wife and mother. Hey, I’m just a friend. We were just friends. Platonic. Casual. Ships that passed in the night. Ephemeral. And I feel your loss like a persistent ache and know I will have it for as long as I have a working mind. I can only imagine what it is like for them.
Which is why, in my joy, there is bitterness. And when I got that fucking text from her, my very much alive friend, with two party emojis, telling me of an engagement of a man she does not know whose dead wife she did not know, I wish I had the words to tell her how utterly tone deaf that was. How maybe I am overreacting because I am a bundle of conflicted feelings looking for a target and, hello, she just drew a crop circle size bullseye on her head.
With two party emojis.
On the Bra Straps of Giants
I should be sleeping.
For over 2.5 decades I’ve been praying on this. Whether it be because of work, or child rearing, or anxiety consequent to either or both, my mind doesn’t follow the rules as well as the rest of me has.
But I played by the rules even as they were changing.
I had a career, or a dozen, and some kids, which were not but felt like a dozen, and I teetered on heels bringing home the (kosher) bacon, frying it up in a pan.
I hosted weekly Shabbat Thanksgiving feasts and was a one woman catering company every September. All this, while squeezing in work days and getting paid less than the boys who didn’t have to think about the price of corned beef or when to stuff the cabbages, or take the kids for haircuts.
It wasn’t just my Generation – the irrepressible and irrelevant Generation X – who were the test cases for second wave feminism aka We Drank the Enjoli. It was also our mothers, who held jobs and handed out latch keys, but didn’t know they had to carry the guilt (which was our albatross.) Our grandmothers, at least mine, worked until she was almost 90. By that time it was volunteer, but her identity was shaped by service to her family and community.
And now, these young, bright, ambitious females are entering the workplace with righteous anger about how unfair the workforce is to women.
Wait. What?
Excuse me, you, who thinks Oops I Did it Again signaled the feminist revolution and now waltzed into the boardroom, Blahniks or Birkinstocks, outraged at inequality and discrimination you have never and probably will never experience in your lifetime.
You have maternity leave, preferential hiring, unified anti-mysogynist watchdogs, and advances in equal pay and family time. I can get behind that progress. Yet. You demand time off to have your hair done for a very important meeting (Yes, that’s the exact thing keeping me up. Petty? No. Illustrative. You bet.) And you complain about inequality that is vanishing as the words leave your lacquered, filled, lips.
Is this what we put the thankless years in for? For rootless entitlement? For unnecessary vanity? For the undoing of our breathless race to the finish line regardless of the unequal demands life extracted from us? We put our everything into performing as equals – not models or objects or high maintenance princesses. Just people.
If you’ve ever put on makeup at the traffic light or given the A train a glimpse of your mascara application eye gymnastics, you are my people.
Yeah, we have deep trenches on our shoulders from where the bra straps etched like the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In the striation, you might catch the toe of your lovely Louboutin as you perch on my shoulder mistaking me for a barstool or other inanimate ass supporter.
Sounds resentful and bitter, but I do wish you well. Not for you so much as for us: those of us who, faced with the reality of the equity we deserved and demanded, had painful choices to make, ones you will never know. Whether we decided to fold our own education into a square and store it in our pockets while we provided traditional at home support for the family, facing confusion from those who wondered why we bothered, or for those out on the front lines being reminded they could try it all but never really have it all, it was we who forged the path, burned bras, protested, demonstrated, failed, persevered, and opened the doors you think you spent some imagined childhood constructing.
So take a closer look. What part did you play? How are you reaping the rewards? And who should you go and thank?
I’m going to sleep.
The Hummus has Expired
“The truth is,” he said, “historically, women weren’t supposed to live past a certain age.”
He meant it as a joke, unless, of course, you agreed with this hot anthropological/ misogynistic take, which some of the men in our lawn circle concurred to varying degrees. You could see by the way their mouth corners smirked and they furtively met one another’s eyes, acknowledging this great truth universally held.
The philosopher noted my scowl. “Kidding, Jen.” He got up to hug me as he mouthed “Not kidding” to the group.
We were working in sleep away camp that summer, as we had many summers before and would continue to until our children aged out. By “we” I mean the women, the wives, the future ex-wives, the powerhouse moms who juggled whatever their demanding summer position living the woods, usually followed by a September-June job, and child rearing. The men were there for their weekend conjugal vacations after a week of bachelorhood.
Sometimes we looked forward to seeing them but you didn’t have to dig too deep to learn, during any of our endless late night confessionals, that we resented seeing the toilet seat up, our meager shelf space occupied by His toiletries, and things not exactly the way we’d organized them to be.
No, no, no! Things are not the way we’d organized them to be.
It is years past those camp days and we’re still here.
I’m sorry we didn’t die in childbirth or after reaching peak sexual attractiveness.
I’m sorry we’ve outlived our utility to the world. Maybe our kids hope we’ll stick around for babysitting or because they truly love us. Maybe those aging men are grateful for the advances in female mortality because they anticipate their nursing needs.
But there is a sector that still DOES NOT see us.
The workforce.
We may have stayed in it juggling parenthood and an outside profession or two.
We may have taken time off to raise our kids.
And now that our kids are off the table and we are on it – we are treated like disposable dishes when we are precious antiques.
Name one promising young Ivy League graduate who has the proven gets it done record that many of us older women do.
I’ll wait.
And I’m not going to list the gazillion positions we hold as moms, because there aren’t enough words. Some skills are ineffable. We just get the job done – 24/7 – year after year after fiscal, never take a riskle, year.
We may not have the latest tech skills, but we’re quick learners. We’ve literally pulled all nighters trying to jump the learning curve.
There is this adorable name for us: returners. As if we left for the Bahamas and sipped Pina Coladas for 20 years. Or maybe we were on that Cocoon voyage.
Or did we leave the cult of valued humanity and now beg for re-admittance?
The truth is, historically, men have fucked up this world big time. Move over boys. It’s time for the old ladies to take the wheel.
A Tale of Two Kitties
May 2020
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of (dis)belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light (Animal Crossing), it was the season of Darkness (Tiger King), it was the spring of hope, it was the winter spring of despair, we had everything before us except toilet paper and Clorox cleaning wipes, we had nothing before us except endless laundry, cooking, and cleaning, we were all going direct to Heaven for homeschooling, we were all going direct the other way for risking our lives shopping at Trader Joe’s—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. BLAH BLAH KNIT ONE PEARL TWO.
I have too much time on my hands, but it is either time on my hands or a broom in my hands. The anxiety over the Decameron I haven’t written or even the public domain play I haven’t adapted, or the series “The Good Place” that I wanted to watch, is at war with the self-loathing I feel for not completing my “Learn Arabic” course or keeping up with “Mod Po.”
Mod Po, FYI is an obsession with poems that make no sense unless you work very hard at making them make sense. Does that even make sense? Trust me: It is worth making sense of this paragraph.
Or don’t trust me. I assigned The Princess Bride – the book – not the movie – to my 8th grade English class, once, just once. That still haunts me.
Anyway about the Kitties- because you’re not here for Dickins, there are these 2 cats, Trevor and Emma.
Emma is a vicious beauty. She is a long haired white heterochromatic, delicate featured, uber bitch. Emma has been with me since she was an abandoned baby but nevermind, she barely tolerates me. Nevermind also, that I nursed her back from the brink of death. Such an ingrate.
But why should she be different than my human housemates?
Trevor is a sweet boy who loves to snuggle and be held. He’s also snow white with a bushy tail and yellow eyes ringed with blue.
Emma likes to beat the crap out of Trevor Mommy Dearest style.
And every day is the same for them.
It’s strange that I’m identifying more with cats and the beta fish in the 5 gallon tank, than with humans.
Humans, right now, terrify me more than this pandemic. Seems like the everything we’ve learned from the best of history and literature, as well as the moral, ethical underpinnings of religion, has been upended.
What matters? The stuff we know doesn’t. The stuff Hannah Arendt warned us about when she talked about the really bad stuff that happens when people feel isolated.
And she knew, first hand, all about it.
We had warnings from Huxley, Orwell, Weisel, King Jr.
We had warnings from the Bugels. Video killed the radio star. Then reality TV killed the video star. Then social media killed reality TV. Social media will kill everything else.
I’m not putting the blame on one person, one side, one cat. It takes a lot of (tech) people to build a pillory. It takes a lot of (users) people to shame the guilty. Or the not guilty.
Behind a lifeless black screen we have the power to hurt.
Social media is not very social. Demented and sad, but not very social. It is an artifice.
Nature, it appears, is in on the game. If you can’t beat em, join em and keep them all at home with social media as the connective tissue.
I watch my cats a lot. Emma established her place in the animal kingdom pecking order and Her Majesty makes demands of the world. Other cats and most humans admire but despise her. Trevor harbors no delusions of grandeur. He asks of the world. He takes his lumps but remains kind. He is adored by everyone, except his mother.
There are several parallels you may draw or assume. There are no great psychological insights to offer. I’m just passing time and describing my cats.
The G Spot
There is a great myth perpetuated out there that is generously shared by women of a certain age.
This aspirational, literal old wives tale, purports that there is a source of sublime pleasure waiting to be tapped.
I’m sure you’ve heard it, too. Perhaps you’ve even spoken these words, too.
“Grandchildren are better than children.”
Wait. What?
THEY would have you believe that the offspring of your offspring is a delight that your offspring never amounted to.
THEY would have you believe that your experience grandparenting trumps (we can still use that verb, right?) parenting.
You know the reason:
“You get to enjoy them and when they poop you can give them back.” And by “poop” they mean anything unpleasant but the idea is that these small humans are not yours and not your responsibility.
Parenting is hard.
Parents deserve to be off the hook for the poop at some point, don’t you think?
So it would seem reasonable that this delightful bit of insight is true. Maybe for many it is. It stands to reason.
But I think this is the poop. There is no such G (grandparent) spot. It’s some kind of wonderful, I’ve no doubt. But I doubt it is better than parenting.
My kids are older now. Some are old enough to be parents. I’m old enough to be a grandmother. Many of my friends and contemporaries already are.
I am not sold on the superiority of grandparenting over parenting.
I loved being the parent of babies and toddlers and to some degree adolescents and to a somewhat lesser degree, teens.
I loved NOT having to give my kids back to anyone, ever, and still struggle with giving them to the world.
There was always a self preservation aphorism I fortified myself with: Children are a gift for you to safeguard. They are not yours to keep. They are yours to love.
I don’t know. Maybe the fear of losing them was always there so I needed to contextualize
Point is, a subconscious fear was “giving them back.”
If I could time travel it wouldn’t be to a past century or to the future. It would be just 2 decades back to when my babies were my babies.
And while I’m not quite ready to morph into a grandmother when I have trouble accepting that I’m not in the 80s anymore and no one knows who The Cure is, I’ll bet it will be incredible.
Sublime
Secondary
You Have Reached Your Destination
Not my words. My GPS announced this when we arrived at the cemetery.
I wondered if the mourners in the hearse just ahead of us heard the same announcement.
The funerals I’ve attended tend to be set on unseasonably warm, confection clouded days, and this was no exception. The February chill crept into our light coats, but the sunlight warmed us, nonetheless.
I knew the deceased for about 25 years. Not well, but well enough to feel that being at the cemetery was appropriate. It fell somewhere between Nick and Owl Eyes at Gatsby’s funeral.
Oh, spoiler alert. Sorry for that.
Yeah, so the Dead Gatsby had no one at his funeral, which is the point there, as the Great Gatsby had everyone at his parties, and you can now skip the chapter which goes into a lot of syntatic detail about that.
This funeral was for another Jay, which was the actual name of this deceased, and was attended by many people who loved him.
The last time I’d been to a cemetery it was to visit my father’s grave. Before that, it was to bury him.
Being that there were/are too many feelings to process about a loss so deeply personal, it’s an easier subject for examination when there are degrees of separation, as with Jay.
The collective emotions of the attendees, all of whom arrived at this place at this time for this man, froze us in a resin that will live on in memory. That’s the better spin than we just watched a formerly alive person be planted in the ground, or we were third wheels on a date with destiny.
We may have different places typed into our GPS, but in the end, we share the same destination.
Have a nice day.
🌺 🌺 🌺 🌺🌺 🌺 ᗷEᗩᑌTY, ᗷOOKᔕ, ᗷᖇOᗩᗪᗯᗩY, ᗷOYMOM, ᗷEᗪᒪᗩᗰ, & OTᕼEᖇ Vainglorious Pursuits 