In Which I Change Form

There are things no one told me about perimenopause, important things, things I would have liked to know about well ahead of their arrival. I put too much stock in my understanding of this liminal state based on my understanding of the prefix peri – I thought this would be the time around, near, close to menopause, it would be a short hallway to traverse, during which I’d get a few hot flashes and the need to buy a big new bottle of personal lube and fewer tampons, my periods would fade away and one day, voila, menopause! And there I’d be, in the Crone third of my life.

Now that I’ve gone through that doorway, I see the meaning of peri is also surrounding, just like the dictionary says. Perimenopause, in my body at least, has all the subtlety and softness of adolescence, which is to say it’s like a hammer or a shovel or some other implement of blunt force trauma. I assume the fine pruning shear changes come later, once I’ve survived this first round of rounds. Hot flashes aren’t cozy, like blushing, or hard-work-pleasant, like hiking uphill in the sun, toward a scenic viewpoint; I become my own crucible, consuming my old self with no idea of just what is going to survive the sun’s surface heat centered in every cell of my being. It’s the white flash heat of a nuclear explosion, unleashed without a call from the red phone, and gone just as quickly. And this whole thing is so much more than hot flashes. It’s the sudden inability to remember words that have been faithful expressive companions forever, the losing of car keys and purse, and tasks from my mental list. It’s the anger at myself because I couldn’t figure out how to enjoy as many one night stands as possible before I lost any sex appeal I ever had. It’s the anger I feel at the every book and article and expert who claims as truth the algorithm calories consumed < calories expended = weight loss. Because I have learned through experience, tracked and documented in an app that threatens to entice me into an eating disorder, that I can starve myself and walk 3 miles a day on my treadmill, set to a speed and grade that puts me in the promised “fat burn zone” and still my body will gain, gain, gain. It is a kind of magic, my ability to turn a shred of cabbage, a long sweaty walk, and bad thoughts into more me.

For a while, I could pretend the weight gain was temporary, I could hide the full extent of it by focusing every second on sucking my belly in while in public, by wearing the “right” clothes. Now there is no denying reality: I am becoming a toad, and this change feels like a spell cast without a reversal option. Dessicated with a witchy wart on my chin, my center of gravity has moved to my wide, simultaneously fat and wrinkled, pale toad belly. It’s not the exciting belly of pregnancy or the luscious fat belly of a goddess, when I look at myself, all I can see is a toad. One toad in particular, the one I saw in a nature documentary, careening across the forest floor with stunning clumsy crashes into tree roots and over logs.

I am a little bit down on myself right now.

I know this. I recognize the cruelty of these negative things coming out of dormant, patriarchy-infected files in my brain, things I’ve internalized, things I never think about other people’s bodies. This hatred is special, reserved just for me. I see women who have slept with the same men I’ve slept with, and I think, “they must wonder how I ever managed to get him into bed with me.” I see men I’ve slept with and I think, “he must be feeling so lucky that we never got together/stayed together because look what he’d be stuck with now.” I force myself to get dressed and leave the house each morning by refusing to examine each hateful barb my brain launches at the rest of me, telling me how hideous I am, how embarrassed I should be, how ugly. I wrap myself in the largest towel I own before I step out of the shower because the sight of my naked body makes me cry. And then I cry more after I remind myself that, if I’m lucky enough to live another 10-20-30 years, I’ll remember this form of my body longingly and wonder what the hell my problem was. I cry because I’m so angry at the way I’ve internalized this misogyny and how I can see its true face intellectually and yet not alter the fact that my gut believes it all.

Given all the real and grave problems facing us today – climate change, the pendulum swing back to authoritarian and fascist regimes, toxic masculinity and white supremacy ascendant, etc – my choice to write about this petty wrestling match I’m locked into with my body and perimenopause feels like complicity in these evils. I know I should be putting my energy into healing and fixing and building the world my children, all of our children, need and deserve. And of course my feelings about this become stress hormones that tell my body “bad times ahead, plump up now for the famine!” and I move that much further into my toadself.

One of the advantages perimenopause has over adolescence is that I do know myself well now, and thanks to years of therapy and mindfulness and journaling and cultivating introspection and assessment of self, I have a decent grasp on how all of this connects back to  the same old deficits and unhelpful patterns I’ve been working on since childhood. I know how to pull myself through what feels like base betrayal, like the mutiny of my meat suit. I know how to wring meaning from experience, even when I don’t like it.

For now, I’m comforting myself with one memory, I’m using it as the cornerstone in the narrative architecture I’m constructing, brick by brick, stick by stick, to shelter whatever arises from the ashes of this perimenopausal phoenix fire.

Two summers ago, in the early days of this transformation, I went with my daughters to our favorite swimming beach. It’s an inlet of the Salish Sea, where there’s shelter from wind but the water is still cold, year-round. I’ve been swimming in the water around this island my whole life now, and it has always been bracing, fine so long as I stay in motion but not the sort of water one enjoys in a tropical vacation way. Until this day, when I realized that, for the first time, there was no chill at all in my body. None. I had grown my own insulation, enough that the water was truly pleasant, even in the deep away from shore. And my new padding gave me buoyancy, enough that I could float without effort, looking up at our blue sky, completely at ease. There are many things I’m struggling to accept about myself, and I cannot honestly say that I love anything about how I look. But I loved how I felt that day, I loved the way the sky and shore looked from the sea, and I loved being alive and being myself just then.

If I am to be a toad, I will at least be a strong toad, hell bent on enjoying my life despite my body’s changes and my brain’s self-sabotage campaign. There is so much beauty to appreciate and horror to confront so long as I just keep my gaze in the right direction. And now I’m big enough to stay planted where I set myself, to mean it when I sing, “I shall not be moved.”

Living Underwater

This is the year I finally slipped under the water and stayed under, and I’m here to report that it’s OK down in the deep. I’ve spent the past 10 years kicking so hard, keeping my daughters and myself above the waves, gasping for breath and squeezing salt out of my eyes to see what’s coming for us next. 10 years is a long time to do this work alone. And while we’ve had amazing, vital support from my family and friends, I have felt very much alone in the hardest work. 

Something broke inside me on the day of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. By that night, walking away from our tiny local candlelight vigil in the pouring rain, I could feel it, like a virus. I was sick the next morning, but not with anything I’ve had before. Soul sick, I think. I slept all day, every day, for 2 weeks, awake only just long enough to get my girls to their schools in the morning, back again in the evenings, to keep them fed and all of our animals alive. Much of single parenting is the work of Sisyphus, and this fall I had to let my rock rest at the bottom of the hill for a while, on top of me. The doctor my HMO assigned to me told me there was nothing else to do but sleep until I was done, until I’d had enough. I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen, but I woke up just enough, with just enough regained energy to wade back in. 

My daughters are stronger now, and they’re starting to hold themselves up in new ways, they’re to find their own free style, to feel their own buoyancy. I’m still their lifeguard, but it’s less of a hands-on role, more coaching and modeling from an arm’s reach away. I want them to be strong swimmers, so I have taken them into the deep with me (truly, we’ve always been out here, but now they know it; this is one of those gifts of age that they might want to give back at first).

I think my daughters’ growing strength has allowed me to admit my own weakness and exhaustion. This year showed me more about who I want to become, and where I want to be, and these visions are thrilling to me, so enticing. It also showed me how far away these goals are, and for now, for the next while, I need to give in and slip under and rest in the quiet slow of the deep. It’s lovely here. I move more slowly, everything seems like more work than I can do right now, so mostly I’m just floating here, resting up, enjoying the beauty of the world and trusting that eventually I’ll be ready to surface and get back to work. 

For now, if you need me, please give me time. I’m still resting up. 

Creating Themyscira

My birthday starts in an hour, and to celebrate I bought myself a Michal Golan evil eye necklace and a ticket to see Lindy West: The Witches Are Coming, and now as a free gift to myself,  I’m going to turn my Facebook experience into a first iteration of my own personal Themyscira. For however long it feels good, I will share my Facebook content only with women, I will only allow women to post comments on my timeline. I’ve created a special list just for this. I know, it’s only Facebook, but it’s a start, and it would be difficult to overstate how important Facebook has been to my activism and day jobs over the past decade. I’m old enough that my daughters have taken to calling me “MeeMaw,” and the young men who load chicken feed into my Buick call me “Ma’am,” so I’m not digital native, but I am one of the geezers who took Facebook over and used it for my own purposes (promoting civil dialogue, building an international network of gift economies, fundraising for nonprofits, that sort of thing). So this will be a big change for me. And I cannot wait.

When I can remember my dreams these days, they are always about anger. I find my dream self in humiliating situations over and over again, mute in the face of paralyzing shame and mortification. These are old dreams, a theme my subconscious has been exploring for decades now. But there’s something new: I am only temporarily mute now. Dream Rivka takes a few minutes to survey the situation and then she starts to smash things and kick and punch throats and yell, not the high shrill lady yells that men assign to us in their ventriloquist acts, but deep, strong, primal woman noise, with a resonating frequency that turns bone to milk, that flattens the world like the shock wave unfolding in front of a bomb. These dreams are powerful, yes, but I wake up exhausted.

I want a break from the world of men. I want to focus on the voices I most want to hear, the voices of other women, especially those women whose voices have been the most silenced under the white Christian supremacist patriarchy that I live in. The system that has infected my own reflexes, my self-image, my almost-everything. But not my core. I want to give this core of mine a chance to find its daytime voice, so I can stop dreaming about destroying the world because I’m too tired from building a new one, for real, in the waking right-side up.

I find that it’s not men who disgust me most, it’s myself. It’s the way that I cannot stop myself from suffering fools, from stroking fragile male egos, from always finding something nice to say when men inevitably speak up to center themselves, looking for validation and soothing and attention. I would like a break from this work, this caretaking of men who prove over and over again to be so deeply infected by the same systemic toxicity that they cannot see me as a human being with dignity and agency to equal their own. It’s not their fault, it’s not my fault, but it is our shared responsibility to step up and change ourselves and our systemic structures. And right now, I see a lot of women doing this work but very, very few men.

So until further notice, I’m going to create my own digital Themyscira, my own portal to the land of the Amazons. I’ll still see and talk to men at my day job, in my family, and the partners of my women friends, but that’s it. For a while, no more energy spent on any man without the courage, strength, compassion, and empathy to prove himself, through his own initiative, worth my life minutes. I’ve been listening to men all my life, I’ve learned to gaze upon myself through their eyes. Enough of that. I’m taking a vacation, to build a room of my own, to wash the patriarchy right out of my hair, to build a bit of Themyscira.

Love Is Supposed to Have Teeth

This has been a long year. I’ve been thinking of the story of the Jews wandering for 40 years in the desert after escaping bondage in Egypt, in particular about the interpretation my chavurah favors of just what we were doing there, turning a 2-week journey in 40 years. We say that those born into slavery were not ready to be a fully free people, that we needed to birth and raise a new generation who knew not the Pharoah’s cruelty nor the predictability and Stockholm Syndrome-safety of our constrained role under his cruel thumb. We say that our minds and bodies born and raised in slavery were not capable of imagining a nation of free people, or directing our own hands to build it; we needed our children, born and raised in the danger and possibility of desert travel to achieve this goal. And this year I’ve been thinking this story applies all over again to my own mind and body. I thought that my years as a feminist theory major in college, all of my years of living as a self-aware, very therapized woman, had allowed me to see enough of the structures of patriarchy and racism and christofascism in our society to be getting on with the work of dismantling things. I didn’t think I had any big blind spots left.

I was mistaken.

I have only just realized that patriarchy turned the best thing I have, the part of my self I’ve been most proud of and reliant on, into a glue that I was using to keep these unjust structures stable. I learned that my love, my faith in love, my trust in love, which has been my interpersonal compass since adolescence, can be twisted to act like one more tool in the master’s kit.

A man helped me learn this lesson about myself, about my own complicity. He is a man I’ve known since my first week of college; a man who was one of my closest friends from our first year of college, when we discovered that although our families of origin are very different, it was as though we had two halves of the same soul. We were close friends through the beginning and end of my first marriage, until that day he showed up at my apartment door and suddenly I realized that I didn’t just like him, I wanted him. This lovely surprise romance led to falling in love and getting married and having two children, and then realizing that marriage and parenthood were too great a weight for him to carry along with his anxiety and addiction, and so we severed that legal tie but remained best friends and co-parents for 9 years. And over those 9 years, even as I dated a few other men, we were best friends still. Through what I thought was a conscious choice to always choose love and respect, even when anger would be easier, we managed to navigate all of this without cruelty to each other. We did sometimes hurt each other without intent and we apologized sincerely and forgave each other, but we never stopped loving each other and wanting our friendship to survive. Even after he moved out, he spent more weekends at my place, with our kids and me, than at his own home over the water from us. We took vacations together, talked on the phone, went to birthday parties and family holiday parties together. We loved each other, or at least I loved him, without the sex or romance, but with something more than standard friendship.

Because I’m just no good at casual sex, I learned through experience to turn down his requests for best-friends-with-benefits sex. When you don’t fall out of love with the father of your children, sex is never ever just sex. Not in my body and mind, anyway. We talked about this each year, and he knew how I felt and what my answer would be when he offered me no strings sex, just for fun. I made it clear that I was flattered, but not interested in sex without a different sort of love, without more than what we already had.

Then this past summer, after some productive months with a new therapist had him feeling like himself again, this man called to ask me out on “a real date.” And I said “yes,  you are the only man in the world right now that I’d go on a real date with, so yes.” Because when a man you already love, who is also the father of your children and your best friend, and who knows how you feel about casual sex with him asks you out on a real date, you’d be a fool to say no. So we went out on that real date,  and it was lovely, and led to a very fun night and a few more weekends of the same.

It turns out, though, that he and I had very different definitions of “a real date.” To me, a real date is a date with interest in a possible relationship. To him, it seems to be any date with guaranteed sex.

I learned of this difference when he came over one night to sit on my couch and tell me that he had “taken advantage of me”; that he “was really just horny and lonely” and knew I wouldn’t say no if he asked the right way; that he hadn’t only wanted sex, he also wanted the “feeling of intimacy and connection” but only the “feeling” of it because while he loved me still, this was all part of his journey thanks to his new therapist and that he needed to date strangers to prove himself worthy of love; if I wanted to keep being his best friend and keep having sex and the feeling of intimacy and connection, he would be down with that, while he was working towards asking new women out. At which point I surmise he assumed I would quietly step aside to demote myself to co-parent while he built a new best friendship with his exciting new stranger lady love.

He was genuinely shocked and hurt at my level of hurt and anger upon learning all of this. He claims naivete, something I find puzzling coming from a 48 year-old-man who has had more than a few romantic relationships with women over the past 30+ years. He has said several times that he didn’t mean to hurt me and here I believe him. And this is where I begin to see how the patriarchy played me: I think it’s true that he didn’t mean to hurt me; he simply forgot to put my emotions and everything he knows about me from 30 years of best friendship-marriage-co-parenting into his calculations. He treated me like a sex and comfort robot, a tool for his use, something without sentience of its own, except a simple machine-like adoration that could be used to meet his own needs with a smile. And he did this, not with malice or even any consciousness, but because the patriarchy allows this, encourages it. He could do this because I let him, because I stepped right into that role. I was writing poems in my heart while he was focused on mundane prose, checking off boxes on his therapeutic journey and scratching an itch.

I turned myself into that sex and comfort robot because I forgot that love is supposed to have teeth. I’m fierce in my politics, in my activism, in my outside world life, and even in my friendships, but I love the way I’ve been taught to since childhood – with my whole heart open, with lines in my veins, ready to give my lifeblood to my loved ones, and I know how to hold my heart open even when it’s been knifed, how to re-hydrate so I can keep tapping my veins, over and over again. I love giving my love this freely, I love being unafraid to love, but I’m seeing that it’s been serving the patriarchy even as I take pride in this strength of mine.

All of this softness and openness and allowance and unconditional support and warmth isn’t love in its totality. It’s sweet, non-threatening Disney Princess Love when we need the whole picture, mother goddess love, Queen of the Cosmos Love. We need the love that is all of these things plus unconditional calling out of weakness, we need love that lifts up and also holds the line on boundaries of decency, respect, and equality. We need love that promises both the open vein and flames that keep feet on track. We need love that offers and demands passion and desire throughout adulthood, as all bodies change. Every mother goddess in every religion I know of has both sides, the light and the shadow, the hands that lift to life and the hands that guide to death, the clear-sighted unconditional love that praises when praise is due and corrects when correction is warranted.  Our current patriarchy has room for male gods but no room for goddesses, and we play this out in our hetero relationships, in which we women are trained to embody only half of what Love is. Our half-love treats men like kings while we accept the role of royal consort; we are allowed no societal claim to be queens on equal thrones. We women are supposed to be all yielding rosy lips and sugared tongues, we are supposed to dull our teeth around the men we love.

One night when I was in my 20’s, my friend Lori was exciting men by pulling cocktail cherries into her mouth to then display on her tongue their stems tied in knots, her magic trick hidden behind her lips. During a break in the flirting, when the men were holding forth without listening, she told me the secret: It’s all about your teeth. You break the stem from rigid to supple with your teeth, then you hold it into place with those same teeth while your tongue swirls it around, over and under and through, and your teeth anchor while you pull it tight.

Men love this trick because they think it’s all a tongue trick, because it’s veiled from their view behind our red lips, and they can almost feel our tongues on their dicks while we’re working those stems into tight, tidy knots.

“Don’t tell them how you do it, though,” said Lori, “that ruins it.”

No man wants to hear about our teeth, they don’t want to know the secret, they just want our tongues and our lips on their own rigid stems, no teeth, only slick soft flickering attention. I taught myself this cherry stem cocktail party trick because I wanted that too, I wanted the power that comes from being the one who kneels and only looks submissive while knowing that you have all the power, the power to conceal your teeth, to set aside your sharpness and skeletal weapons in favor of the power to please, to draw that out, to finish it off, to drive a man out of his bluster to a moment of whole presence. Men, for all their strength and violence, have a boneless fragility that generally likes only a hint of our teeth, or to know us only as pink openness, breath and tongue and oceanic wetness; inland personal seas of rolling tides and waves to sail, no barnacles or rocks.

I’ve kept the cherry stem secret, and I’ve kept my teeth to myself, I’ve steered men around the damaging rocks and monsters, I’ve have scraped myself smooth and safe and appealing and pink. And now I’m realizing what all of this has cost me, all of this complicity and toothlessness. I’ve weakened myself and helped to coddle my generation of men, making them weaklings in half-love, too.

Before 2017, before our pussy-grabbing president took up residence in the White House, before the #metoo movement took off running with new steam, before this dumpster fire of a year, I looked at my long best-friendship, my dedicated co-parenting, my unaltered albeit platonic love and devotion to the father of my children as a crowning achievement in my life. I was giving my children a sense of intact family, I was providing my best friend with the love and support he needed to heal and grow strong again and build his best life, I was loving myself because I loved what I was able to do for my kids when they needed me as teacher, therapeutic specialist, guide to neurotypical life. I loved all of this giving love, it didn’t make me feel diminished or lost, I felt strong and found and powerful.

Now I’m looking at myself and my choices through a different lens, the vision of the world and of women that allowed my best friend and father of my children to think I would be happy to serve as his comfort and sex robot while he looked for a new, real girlfriend. Through this lens, I am a fool. I gave up a decade of my life, sinking into single mother poverty that I won’t likely recover from, because I didn’t ask for spousal maintenance when we divorced, when I took on the role of primary parent. I gave up years to caring for our “special needs” children without asking for parity in parenting and thereby set myself even further away from a career with a living wage and any life-work balance. I am now, at almost 50, too poor to pay for the gym membership, personal trainer, bikini waxing, new makeup and perfume and haircuts and colors, flattering new clothing, and nights out that I would need to find a man to love me, while my blind, soft love has set my former best friend up to find a woman like the one I can’t afford to be, to build himself a new life funded by the new career that my time and energy over the past decade has allowed him to focus on. I held up more than half the sky of parenting our children out of love for him, and now I find myself where so many other women have stood: too old, too poor, too fat and misshapen to find any respectful sort of love partnership, but most of all too smart to think that any sort of respectful love partnership is possible with the men of my generation.

When I was younger and beloved, when I had curves and concavity in the right spots and to the right degrees, when men desired me, I was scared of the single, middle-aged women, the witches whose bitterness seemed like a hex, one that I needed to stay clear of. Now that I am one of them, I see that their bitterness is something different, not bitter, it is clarity of sight, wisdom, truth, all honestly earned. This is how smart I am now, Crone Witch Smart.

I’m done with the sort of love on offer to me here and now. I want no part of the inequitable and binary adoration and mutual service offered by our patriarchal culture, in which women cede worldly power to men, and serve them as personal gods, in order to be royal consorts in the confines of their shadows. I’m done being measured as desirable against a nubile standard with no room for the changes that motherhood and lucky years of survival write upon my skin and bones. I’m done being valued only for the sex and feeling of intimacy and connection I can offer to shallow, self-centered men who fail to recognize my equal sentience. I’m holding out for a balance of power much more ancient, one that will allows for mutual desire and respect, the fullness of our bodies, our voices, our power, all of us, not just some of us, not just those of us who are straight men.

I know that it’s possible because I got a taste of it with one man once, a good friend in college who was never a boyfriend, but whose bed I shared a few times, whose love I could feel even when we were states apart, years later. His bed was an altar, his grandfather’s down quilt our holy raiments. There was humility, gratitude, respect, and full equal presence on both our parts, and it never ruined our friendship, it elevated our connection without demanding either of us be less powerful. He is the one man who made me feel like a high priestess. That’s what I’m talking about, and if I could have that kind of connection for a little while, I know it’s possible for all of us still, I know we have it in us to get back to this once and future sort of love, the kind that has teeth as well as kissing lips.  The kind that demands we see each other as true equals in elemental and worldly power.

Until then, we are wandering in the desert, and we’ll be meandering lost here for some time. We have a lot to unlearn and a lot to remember, a lot to change. We need to teach our children of all genders love that allows for mutual service and adoration, that allows for royals on equal thrones, love that has the power and strength of lips, tongues, and teeth.  I do not expect my generation to reach this promised land, but I’ll keep trudging through this wilderness with this dreamland in mind for my daughters. We need toothed love to be strong and to keep each other strong.

 

The Year Without Love Is Dead, Long Live The Year Without Love

My Year Without Love officially ended on New Year’s Eve.

I hardly noticed.

Starting the night of November 8th, I lost track of almost everything except trying to stay alive, trying to figure out how I’m going to keep my daughters safe and alive. The election of that monstrous man is an existential threat to my family, to my country, to the world.

According to family lore, I was conceived after my grandmother’s funeral meal, in a guest bed in my grandparents’ basement. When someone we love dies, we feel the need to eat, to touch, to…not to fuck, not even to make love, but to be love, to be life, to stay on this side of the void by doing the most life-filled thing possible, to blur the boundaries around ourselves by being one with another person, to make space for a new soul to fill the emptiness. I owe my life to that impulse.

And on election night, I felt my country die, I felt my assumptions about my future die, I felt the promises I’ve made to my daughters die, the ones about their futures, their safety, their worth. I freaked the fuck out. And even while I couldn’t catch my breath, I longed for someone to take me to bed, to fill me up, to make me feel safe and beloved and worthy and alive, at least for a minute. I wanted to offer all of that to someone else, almost anyone else. That week, that longest week, after election day, that was the closest I’ve ever come to crazed promiscuity. If a man, almost any man, had shown up on my doorstep unbidden, I would have whisked him straight to my bed. Not even that far. I was ready to wrap my legs around someone right there by my front door, to be pounded against the wall, the edges of the frames around my kids’ art digging into my back.

It is likely a very good thing that no men, strange or known, showed up on my doorstep.

Even in the midst of my longing to connect, to be reminded that I had a body and breath and something concrete and joyful to offer, my brain skittered right into fight or flight thinking and came up with a number of crazy ideas that felt like truth.

First Idea: It was too late. I mean really, really too late. What I need for my safety in this new world is a man who can speak for me. To be coldly practical, I need a white Christian man whose privilege will protect me and my children. But this is exactly the kind of man I cannot trust now. I need a known partner, a relationship of mutual desire and need, of equal power. That sort of relationship takes too long to build, and things are too dangerous now to go building intimate trust in strangers. I’ve been likening it to what I hear about becoming famous: You only trust the friends you had before your fame came upon you, because they’re the only people whose motives you can trust all the way through. From now on, white Christian men are the ones who might be able to save me, to save my girls, but they’re the ones I can’t see being involved with, not even the “good” ones. And of course they are pretty much the only single men around here. Scary days are coming, and I can’t afford to jeopardize my kids’ safety or my own by trusting anyone whose privilege blinds them to reality, or whose new privileges seduce them slowly into complicity. Before the election, I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale, and these lines have haunted me since. This is Offred’s memory of the day she lost control of her bank account, her job, her autonomy:

“Luke knelt beside me and put his arms around me. I heard, he said, on the car radio, driving home. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s temporary.
Did they say why, I said.
He didn’t answer that. We’ll get through it, he said, hugging me.
You don’t know what it’s like, I said. I feel as if somebody cut off my feet. I wasn’t crying. Also, I couldn’t put my arms around him.
It’s only a job, he said, trying to soothe me.
I guess you get all my money, I said. And I’m not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it  came out sounding macabre.
Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I’ll always take care of you.
I thought, Already he’s starting to patronize me. Then I thought, Already you’re starting to get paranoid.”

 

Second Idea: I need to find someone to marry. I’d happily marry a woman, but that’s not a strategic move. I have no solid privilege to offer another woman, so I should probably only marry to protect my children and myself. I need to find a man in another country. Which country?  Australia, New Zealand? Wouldn’t they be safe during a world war? Scotland, with its dedication to the EU and inclusivity, and its whiskey and walks? Israel, so my daughters and I can die as part of our people, not alone? A man right here, so I don’t have to quit my poverty-level nonprofit job that’s about to be taxed more highly because I’m a single parent? But how could I do that? I’d make the worst sort of wife in this new climate, I have nothing to offer that would induce a man to choose me – Now we have the Pussy Grabber in Chief in office, and I have only my middle-aged body to offer; the content of my mind and spirit matter to me, but they’re not marital currency in the patriarchy. I certainly don’t offer obedience or acquiescence. I’m ready for an equal partner, nothing less. And the poison this administration is peddling will infect everyone, it will ruin equal relationships between men and women. For example, look at what I’m thinking right now. This is not what I believe, these thoughts of mine don’t reflect my values. This is desperation, this is wartime thinking. There’s no war yet, but it’s coming in one form or another.

Third Idea: Scratch that. Scratch all of that. All of it would be the “obeying in advance” that Professor Timothy Snyder warns us against. The most revolutionary thing I can do is to remain open, to love with a trusting heart, to build bridges with my heart and my body. It would be great to find someone to walk through these terrifying days with, someone to love and be loved by because what else matters in the end, really.

So here I am, not at all sure what the future holds. Still alone and likely to stay this way, but who knows? The Resistance will take many forms, and I miss love. I’d count myself lucky to resist by showing it’s possible to love and be loved without either person being subservient or less than equal.  I can live without love, I’ve done that for 8 years now and I’m still kicking, but I’d like all the sweetness I can get and give. I’d love to fight this hatred with love, messy real love. If it never comes my way, there’s plenty of other work to be done. I have a feeling this administration will shorten my life, so I’m not taking any of my days or nights for granted. Love seems like both an indulgence and a necessity, and I will make it as long as I can either way, because my daughters need me, because I love what this country is supposed to be, because I don’t want hate to win even if love never finds me personally.

I Ignored My Intuition. You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next…

A few years back, I had a short and scary relationship with a man who has some profound issues. Not being a diagnostic specialist, I don’t know exactly which diagnoses he qualifies for, but I could tell you in detail how he operates, and what it’s like to be in a relationship with him. I’m not going to do that here because I’ve worked so hard to leave the details behind me. What is important to this post, though, is that the relationship scared me and it made my daughters feel unsafe in their bodies, for good reason. I did a good bit of research into breaking up with people who have the same characteristics this man does, and I followed that advice when I ended my relationship with this man. It all seemed to work at first. My daughters and I were able to move on without any physical or sexual violence directed at us, and I felt like the world was a good place once again. It’s the only relationship break-up I’ve been through that left me giddy, that made me smile for days, that had me waking up happy, the only one I never shed a single tear during.

Until this man started to show up in a growing number of places around our small town, standing too close, stomping back and forth in front of me, standing always in my line of sight and staring, contacting my close friends and family to talk about me, joking with my house-sitter about sleeping in my bed while I was away, watching my daughter in the school playground (where his child is also a student) and parking lot, contacting me via email and social media. And then he continued these behaviors for a year after I asked him in writing not to initiate any sort of contact with me or my children. When he tracked my ex-husband down to invite him out for a beer, I looked the other way. But when he cornered me at a school festival, putting his body well within my personal space after I told him my festival station was closed, when he said, “I know, I’m just here to watch,” and when this interaction prompted yet another email contact, one that accused me of inciting drama and that spoke longingly of how much he’d like to sit down and share a piece of cake and talk with me, and when my lack of response to that brought him to block the narrow hallway inside my daughter’s school the next morning, where I was meeting with her teacher, I finally caved. I did what the local police had urged me to do a year before and what the YWCA Domestic Violence volunteer told me I met the standard for – I filed a motion to request a Domestic Violence Order of Protection to end the stalking  of myself and my daughters.

And when this man hired an attorney at the last minute and filed for a continuance that put the full hearing onto the docket of a pro tem judge whose regular day job is as a land use attorney, I knew I was in trouble but I didn’t see any other option. I wanted to regain my freedom of movement in my small community, I wanted to know that I’d be able to schedule a meeting at a coffee shop without fearing that he’d disrupt it, that I’d be able to go see some live music without having to bring a group of friends willing to form a living shield around me, that my daughter would be able to play at school without his gaze upon her. And since I was telling the whole truth in my statements to the court, I needed to stand and ask that my truth be heard and weighed.

And, this being how these things frequently go, I lost.

And, this being how these things frequently go, he didn’t change his behavior. He continues to attempt third party contact with me and he seemed happy to block my daughter at the school gate, so that she had to brush up against him to get past.

I expected all of this and I know I have to live with it. At this point, the only thing I can hope for is that he stops of his own accord (something that hasn’t happened yet in the 3 years since I ended our short relationship, but it’s always possible) or that he escalates his behavior to do something so obviously threatening that a judge of any caliber will recognize it as reasonably threatening. He’s smart enough to know how to stick right on the boundary, so this is what I expect for years to come and I am learning to live with it.

What I hadn’t expected was that my attempt to protect my daughters and myself from a person who scares us is that I was earning myself a label as “crazy” and “vindictive” and “unbalanced” and whatever else he has convinced his friends I am. These are educated guesses, based on how he described his ex-partners to me and I know how easily his charisma convinced me that he was telling the truth. I’m sure the people he talks to now believe what he says about me. And in this “he said, she said” scenario, there is no way for me to successfully address any of this picture of me. All I can do is carry on, bringing my true self to my friendships and counting on time to allow the full truth to emerge. The thing is, I live in a small, geographically-isolated community, and truth has a funny way of hiding here. People love drama, and people love to believe bad things about each other. And sadly, when it comes to this particular sort of situation, it’s a lot more comforting to believe that a woman is a crazy, vindictive ex than to believe that the man sitting across from you telling you the story really is a stalker. Crazy exes are easier to live around than creepy men.

I look back at this  now and I don’t see anything I could have done differently except at the very beginning. I could have paid attention to my intuition, the bells going off in my head that said, “something about this isn’t right.” I muted them in deference to my friends and family who kept telling me, “just get out there and date, go on – give people a second chance, don’t be too fast to judge, it’s weird to date at this age, everyone has baggage…” But it was my choice to ignore my intuition, and that choice has me here now, with a label that further constricts my already small community into an even smaller group of friends who are willing to overlook it, hopefully because they know it to be a falsehood.

And now that I’ve been through this life experience that I share with too many women, I don’t have any good advice other than this: Trust your intuition. Because if you find yourself in a relationship with someone who scares you, there is no guarantee that you’ll get relief. You may have to learn to live with it, counting yourself lucky to be living and learning how to hide in plain sight in your hometown.

 

Year Without Love: Sex Update

 

The facet of my Year Without Love that is proving most vexing is the one I thought would be the easiest:

– Become good enough at pleasuring myself that I’m not tempted to pursue sex without love. As delicious as that can be, I’ve learned it’s a lot like those Hostess Fruit Pies I used to be obsessed with. SO good going down, but then you feel empty and more hungry than before once the sugar coating fades from your blood.

I’ve been putting off writing about this for a few reasons. First of all, this is going to be the definition of TMI (fair warning; stop reading right now if that worries you, please). This feels so personal that clicking “publish” on this one is going to take some courage. What I want to write about seems to touch on a number of subjects I don’t see a lot of other writing about, the sex lives and fantasies and self-pleasure of single middle-aged women who have medium-sized bodies and some wrinkled fat (not the sexy, lush sort of fat, but the sort that is never displayed in polite society). I am plain nervous that I will be revealing myself as a bizarre freak, alone in my experiences and thoughts. But here goes, anyway.

At the beginning of this year, when I was organizing my thoughts and plans for my year without romantic love, I added this self-pleasuring goal to my list without worry. I figured I’d find the perfect toy(s) and erotica and that would be that; I’d post a link to the magic that does it for me and check that box off. Insert that needle scratching off the record sound here.  Not so simple. I think this may need a year of its own, just this one item on my list.

During my 7 years of single motherhood, since the demise of my marriage, I’ve had a few happy-enough trysts and one short but dangerous relationship that, two years later, I’m still coming to understand and recover from. On balance, my experiences have been positive, though. Whenever possible, I’m an experiential learner, and I’ve taught myself about online-only sexting affairs, ex-sex, fuck buddy sex, friends with benefits sex, small-town swinger sex, and long months with only my two hands for company.

I imagine that living a solo sex life might not be a hardship for some people. I wish it were easy for me. I’ve always related more to the pop cultural descriptions of the sexual drive of men than of women. I think about sex a lot. In my past when I had a spare hour, sex with my partner was at the top of my To Do list. I do a lot of other things with my time now, and I enjoy them all, but if I had a choice between gardening, hiking with my dogs, hanging with friends, making art, and sex, sex would be first on the list; then I’d feel energized for the rest of life’s fun. That’s not to say I want only sex; but it’s something I never tire of, no matter the weather or the state of my mind. These past 7 years have given me a chance to focus on other ways to use my time and energies, but I feel the net loss in my vitality, in my sense of myself as whole. I feel like I’ve had a part of myself amputated, and the loss of this part of myself is one of the main things I know I’m mourning when I’m suddenly crying in my car or in the shower (two places single mothers can cry in privacy).

The easy answer would be to install Tinder on my phone and join the hookup culture. And I’ve tried, really I have. This is the first of my problems: While I love sex, I’m no good at all at casual sex. It’s not that I think that all sex needs to take place in the context of marriage or established, acknowledged love, it’s that I just don’t like fucking people I don’t know and trust. Sometimes casual sex is exciting, but mostly it feels to me like scratching an itch. It’s simply physical, without much depth. It’s good for orgasms, but orgasms are not what I miss most. Sex with people I don’t know and trust requires a level of guarding of my heart, of my core, that prevents me from being fully present. And that’s what I miss most: Sex when my partner and I are fully present, fully there physically and in spirit, stripped bare of masks and artifice, so that the whole messy, delicious union is both primal and elevated, ancient and brand-new, profane and holy, the collision of individual bits of tinder that slam together to provide a glimpse of the moment of creation. I know this is colored by my religion’s view of sexual pleasure as a gift, not meant only for procreation, but for the joy and union of it, the glimpse of the universal oneness it allows us. Sure, in the fine print of my religion, sexual pleasure is meant to happen inside the bonds of marriage, but I know that’s a human addition, a patriarchal addition, so I’ve chosen my own interpretation that doesn’t require marriage but that does require trust, respect, and presence. Tinder’s handy, but it doesn’t deliver this for me.

I know I’d get the sort of sex I want inside of a relationship. Not a fuck buddy relationship, not a friends with benefits relationship, but in a good old-fashioned romantic relationship. And that’s the thing I’m not putting energy into pursuing. So that leaves my goal for the year, learning how to pleasure myself well enough that I’m content without the sex.

I was hoping that finding my way to solo mind-blowing orgasms would be enough. And maybe it would be. but this brings me to my second problem: I’ve lost my fantasies, the ones that used to get me off when I was alone, coaxing an orgasm from myself. I used to have a number of stories, words and images, I could play in my mind while my hands were busy. But now reality gets in the way. I can’t suspend my disbelief any longer. While my body is in bed, my mind is gazing down to see a medium-sized, middle-aged woman who is alone in bed because she’s not desirable any longer. I see every unattractive detail of my body through the eyes of my male friends, the ones whose candor I value, but whose comments about the aging female bodies of their partners and conquests come back to haunt me when I’m on my own. My imagination isn’t strong enough to picture myself as young and hot and sexy, and then come the memories of the abusive relationship that most of my recent in-real-life sex took place within, and more often than not, I get kicked right out of feeling horny to feeling stupid and pitiful, in bed alone with a toy that reminds me of Totoro (which adds another level of odd to things). So instead of giving myself mind-blowing orgasms, I end up feeling shriveled and ridiculous, rolling over to pick up a book instead, to read myself to sleep.

I’m still working on this, on finding a way to reclaim this part of myself, to heal this amputation. Right now, it feels like a Gordian knot and I don’t know where to begin the untangling, which bold action will help me cleave through the whole mess.

 

 

 

 

 

Year Without Love, an update

I’m coming up to the half-way point of my Year Without Love, so I figure it’s time for an update. In no particular order, here are some of the things I’ve learned so far.

• It has become obvious to me that I didn’t do a decent job of explaining myself in my previous post, back in January, because ever since then I’ve been on the receiving end of well-meant comments from friends that don’t match up with where I’m coming from. Some friends have offered tips on attracting that perfect someone, including “dress sexy” and “you just have to visualize and put it out into the universe.” People seem to think I’m “closing the door” on love, and “setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy.” I can see how one could arrive at this impression, but I promise I’ve considered this and don’t believe I’m delusional: I have not closed any doors, I’m not walling my heart off out of bitterness. If the universe sees fit to send me some wonderful partner, I’ll most certainly welcome that. I’m simply not waiting around for this to happen any longer. I’m moving forward to build a life based on my evidence-based assumption that I’m most likely in this lone mode for the long haul, to build myself a solo life that’s as good as possible. I’ve lived for 7 years now without love, and while I’d love to be loved (like everyone else), I am not going to let societal fantasies about the inevitability of love blind me to the reality of my situation. I live on a small island populated primarily by married people, the ex-husbands of my friends, and men around my age who are single because they ought to be for a variety of reasons ranging from their own choice to garden-variety narcissism to dangerous personality disorders. I’m over the age of 40, which means I’m part of a cohort of women who are competing for the attention of a smaller cohort of single men, most of whom are much more interested in women who are younger than we are (don’t believe me? Click here for an evidence-based look at the numbers). And I’m plain done with selling myself to prospective partners and with protecting the male ego; anyone interested in me gets all of me, fully present and fully myself, without any dissembling. That’s a bit much, really.
• Related to that last point, I’m beginning to suspect that the more I enjoy keeping my own company, the less likely I am to be attractive to anyone else. I’m not sure how to explain this, but in a nutshell, it seems that as I spend less energy pursuing (actively or just in my dreams) a happy, romantic ending/beginning for myself, the less lovable and attractive I become. Based on personal experience, I can say that I am a One Coffee Woman. Decent men might ask me out, but only once. Of course, because this is how life works, men I don’t want that first coffee with seem bent on asking me out more than once. It’s the classic circular ride: I long for the men who don’t want more time with me, while men I don’t want any private time with long to spend their time with  me. I’m doing my best to stay off that carousel now and it’s both lonely and freeing at once. It seems that when I broke up with love, it broke up with me, too. If I were in a movie, love would find me once I had the hubris to badmouth it; since this is real life, I can shoot my mouth off all I want without that happening.
• This is all survivable because I’m learning that I do enjoy my own company. I’m learning to hold two truths in myself at once: 1. I am lonely and that sucks. 2. I am enjoying myself in spite of being alone and sometimes because of it. Both are true. Being lonely is no fun but being alone frequently is. And it’s possible to be lonely while you’re not alone, alone but not lonely, and both lonely and alone. In any given day, I’m likely to be all three.
• I’m not at all sure I’m making much working towards any of my original goals for the year. I’m just muddling through, really. But I’m still kicking, my kids are both growing, my dogs seem to like me, and I have some amazing friends. Sometimes that’s plenty.

A Year Without Love

I like a year with an action theme.

A few years back, I wore the same used black dress sundress every day for a year, with nothing but accessories and layers that I received from free from my neighbors. Last year I burned hope and broke up with love. While casting about my mind for this year’s theme, I realized I already have it: This will be my Year Without Love.

In reality, my past 7 years have been this, but not by my choice. This year I choose it.

But I realize this sounds overly dramatic, pathetic, and like a plea for help. I promise it’s not meant to be any of those. It’s hard to talk about this without triggering people’s ingrained responses. It seems we’ve all internalized the lies in those inspirational memes and posters, the ones that say things like “True love will find you when you’re ready” and “No one can live without love.”

Before I go any further, I have to clarify what I mean by “love.” I have plenty of love in my life. I have my children and I love them even when they hate me. I have amazing friends who say they love me, and I believe them because I love them back. I have my family, and I know they love me because they have to; it’s a contractual obligation. The sort of love I’m talking about is the sort we prize in this society, the sort I’m positive those annoying posters and memes refer to: Romantic Love.

I’m here to say that it does not always find you when you’re ready, and you can live without it. And this is the year when I aim to prove that not only can you live without out, you can thrive without it, and without any space saved and held for it. If Love wants to find me, it’s going to need to wait a year and take a number. After 7+ years of life without this sort of love, and about 5 years of being happy on my own, I’ll be busy with some other things. Some of these will be TMI, so we’ll see how much I end up sharing about this process. A few of the things on my list:

– Invest in solid platonic friendships with people I truly want in my life, without suffocating anyone or otherwise making myself a nuisance.

– Find ways to share my incandescent moments of joy, e soul-crushing moments of despair, and mundane trials without having a partner to whisper with in the night.

– Become good enough at pleasuring myself that I’m not tempted to pursue sex without love. As delicious as that can be, I’ve learned it’s a lot like those Hostess Fruit Pies I used to be obsessed with. SO good going down, but then you feel empty and more hungry than before once the sugar coating fades from your blood.

– Figure out the financial aspect of permanent single motherhood enough that my children aren’t seemingly the only kids in town who never get to travel off this island for fun, take classes they’re interested in, or buy a treat without mental math of my bank account. And I’d love to be able to get my hair cut by someone other than myself. I’ll find a way to pay for all of this, one that’s fully legal and not demeaning.

I’ll come up with more, I’m sure. I’m sharing this here because I’ve learned a lot over the past few years of casting spells, and one of the truths I know is that speaking things aloud, writing them down and sharing them, carries a real sort of magic. Another is that choice matters greatly. So much that even though I don’t exactly have an army of suitors pounding down my door and fighting each other for my favor, my choice to live without love changes everything. This will no longer be the fault of bad luck, belly fat, or my leaden personality. It is my choice.

So. Onward. Into my new year, the one where I choose to live without love, happily and with gusto.

Breaking Up with Love

burning hope

I broke up with love this year. Not with all love, but with romantic love. At least with our society’s current version of it. Not out of anger, not out of disappointment, but because I’m just plain old DONE with it as currently practiced and understood.

For nearly seven years, I held space in my heart for it, I hoped for it. “It” being love involving an equal, adorable, adoring partner to build a messy, complicated, joyful, shared life with. I did all sorts of introspective work on myself. I built the sort of life I wanted to share. I kept my heart and mind open. I didn’t desire perfection in another, someone to complete or fill or fix me; I hoped for a man whose meshugas complemented my own.

And I came to realize that holding onto that desire, holding onto hope was killing me. OK, so it wasn’t killing me in a literal, physical sense, but it was killing my capacity for joy and for true gratitude. It was increasingly obvious that I was not going to find what I wanted. I wasn’t alone the whole time. My open heart and mind spurred me to experiment. I had a short open relationship with a verbally abusive, narcissist. I offered my healing services as a feminine amuse-bouche for men on the rebound, serving as a meaningless palate cleanser between their main course relationships because it’s a way to fill the long winter nights and because there is much to be learned from this sort of fling. I dabbled in just enough online dating to know that dating of any sort is not my cup of tea. I found myself dwelling on the Buddhist idea that desire is the root of suffering. I was tired of being tormented by my own hope, my own desire for what I didn’t have.

So I called a meeting of the coven I’ve put together on my island, a group of powerful women who meet up to make up our own spells, burn things in my back yard fire pit, and stay up late drinking and eating and talking and philosophizing and laughing around the candles on my long table. We met this time in the dark of the moon to burn things we wanted to leave behind, things we were done with, once and for all. Everyone had something to burn. I wrote “hope” on a 3×5 note card, then I spoke its name out loud and set it into the fire. I watched it curl up in the purple orange flames, turning to a sheet of ash.

The next day, I felt different. Lighter. Strange. Unencumbered by desire for love. I didn’t trust this new feeling to last or mean anything. The magic snuck up on me, then one day it hit me as a delicious, giddy realization a few weeks after burning hope. I was in my car at the 4-way stop in our town center, waiting for 3 couples to cross the road. One couple seemed to be new, in the whispering, hands always touching, glowing eyes, heady days of lust-becoming-love. One couple had obviously argued recently, each of them wearing a grim mask of civility but with that palpable chill that comes when you have a thorny issue between you. One couple had a newborn and a toddler, in those early days of parenting two children when you don’t have time or energy to think about much of anything, you’re just present in the moment be it sublime or wrenching. I watched all of these couples and I saw the merit it all of it and I wanted none of it for myself. For the first time, I was happy with what I had right then, happy in my bones and my heart and my mind. I did not hope for more. I did not want anything except to go on my merry, single mother way.

Now when I find myself with people who are in love, instead of longing for what they have, I feel lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Lucky not to be constrained in a relationship that requires me to limit myself, to constrict my views, emotions, intelligence, will, creativity, or humor. Maybe you’ve never made these sacrifices for love, but I used to. Now I am lucky to accept my life as it is without hoping for anything or anyone else.

This isn’t to say I’ve closed my heart off with a wall of defensive anger. I’m not afraid of pain, of the cracking of self that true intimacy fosters, of the chaos that comes with creating a shared life out of the complexities of separate adult lives and children. But I am done with the love I knew before. No more settling for less, no more ignoring my intuition, no more walking on someone else’s path and letting my own disappear behind, no more destructive constriction, no more fear of losing love. Once you know you can live without it, once you are happy without it, you realize that the only sort you’ll welcome if it happens your way is the sort that illuminates and strengthens. The sort of love that’s just for the sheer joy of it, between two truly equal, fully present people. I’m not at all sure we’re collectively capable of this yet, weighed down as we are with some bizarre internalized ideas of what love looks like, and what it demands of us. I leave it to the rest of you to sort that out. I’m enjoying the world I see now, without hope clouding my vision and blinding me to the beauty of life just as it is for me, nothing missing, nothing else needed than what I have.