Living La Vida Alpo

How to recognize a damsel NOT in distress

Note to all my neighbors who saw me fiddling under my car's hood one sunny afternoon earlier this week:

Thank you for stopping by.  It warms my heart.  Really.

And no, it doesn't bother me in the least that you didn't stop by to say hello.  Or that you didn't want to know how my holidays were going.

In other words, I fully recognize that your response to seeing some long-haired white-looking chick with a ratchet in her hand and her car's guts exposed (and okay, okay, I admit it.  I was wearing my big ole jeans. There may have been a SMALL amount of crack as well) to the cold December air was totally instinctive:

"Oh, my goodness.  Are you okay, miss?"

"Hello there!  Ya need help?

and, oh, my favorite:

"HEY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?!"

I get it, okay? I totally do.  Doesn't mean I appreciate it.

You people are just lucky it was snot-inducingly cold.  Tit-numbing cold.  Tears-down-frozen-cheeks cold.  Which made me just nod and go, "heh! I'm fine!" and get back to work on my car and forget about all the times I've seen guys in wifebeaters headfirst into their engine blocks, Coronas precariously balanced on a sideways tire rim in the very same parking lot, neighbors ambling by without a second glance.

Yeah.  You're lucky I was excited to finally be fixing my own car instead of paying someone else to do it like some hapless single chick and didn't care that the reason I was getting such attention was because of my long non-butch hair, two coats of mascara and ... oh, yes! MY VAGINA.

Otherwise, you woulda gotten the death-rays. 

That is all.  Thank you.

Relationship Statuses Facebook Should Consider Adding

For some reason, advertising your relationship status and adjusting it the nanosecond it changes has become the THING to do. Why, I don't know, but it is. 

So anyway, Facebook supplies six options:

1. single
2. in a relationship
3. engaged (as if Facebook didn't get a huge payoff from the wedding industry to include this one, hello?)
4. married
5. it's complicated
6. in an open relationship (in other words, the one status no one has the ovaries to select and broadcast)

Without further ado, I would like to suggest the following.

1. Trapped for life
2. Well, [partner's name] has money and I don't mind sleeping with them, so... yeah.
3. Single bitter (wo)man-hater
4. Just friends with [partner's name] but secretly sleeping together... shh don't tell!
5. Broke up with [partner's name], but it's still too raw, so leaving their name here for now.
6. Having as much fun as I possibly can before societal pressures take my freedom away in the form of marriage.  Call me!

Bruised fruit

It's been close to a year since I came home one day and announced I was done with my marriage.  That day surprised me almost as much as it did him.

Although in the months of retrospection and introspection, I've convinced myself it wasn't that surprising at all.  The signs were all there, in that elusive, intuitive, only-I-can-see them way.

Still, I've been told over and over again that it's easier for me; I was the one that made out, the one who got to do what I wanted to do, take control of my destiny rather than deal with the ashes I left behind. 

And maybe that's true.  Who knows?  I'll never be able to try on his experience of this whole thing, like someone else's coat from last winter.  I can only try to imagine, try to push aside my own feelings to sympathize.  But when I do -- and believe me, I do -- I find myself screaming to put my own moth-eaten coat back on.

My marriage was to a wonderful, supportive, extremely dedicated husband and father.  That has always been true. 

So why did I leave?  Well, those reasons are between me and him, so if you're reading this looking for dirt, fuck you and your little doggie too.  Go find the dirt in your own life and thank your lucky stars that you own it and no one else does.

In a community as small as ours, though, it's hard not to feel the eyes on me.  It's hard not to feel defensive, to want to explain. 

And in some ways, that's a good thing.  If I can explain, after all, then the rightness of the new direction in my life solidifies for me.  Still, the marriage that is quickly fading into my past is a semantic puzzle for me.

People leave marriages because there was something wrong, don't they?  Someone cheated.  Someone lied.  Someone wasn't committed to making it work. 

But none of that happened with me and my ex.  We were the best of friends, volatile lovers, and among the things we liked doing together, our favorite was making a home for our daughter.

I'm still at the point where I deal in metaphors.  Maybe years down the road, I'll have a blunt, straightforward way to describe what happened, but for now, the best I can come up with is bruised fruit.

What was it like leaving my marriage?  Like deciding whether to eat bruised fruit. 

Holding in your hands a gorgeous, ripened peach.  Smells delicious, and you know anyone would be lucky to have such a treat in front of them.  But in washing it and preparing to eat it and claim it for your own, you drop it.  And when you pick it up, there's a bruise on one side. 

And that's what it was like for me, that choice.  Knowing I was lucky to have the marriage I did, but also knowing if I went ahead and ate the damn thing, I wouldn't be able to avoid that bruise.  I'd obsess over it, wait for the mealy consistency that comes from eating the bruised part, ignoring the ripe, juicy flesh of the rest of it.   

And knowing that no one deserved to have to share that peach with me, thinking I was savoring it when I wasn't.

Doing it my way.

Week one of being officially in my own apartment went by in one supersonic, sleep-deprived blur.  But I do remember a few things.  Allow me to impart my hard-earned single-woman wisdom:

1. When a spider marches nonchalantly across your chest on its way across the living room floor and you do nothing but stare at it, you know that a) you're officially home, and b) your lack of screamage says you're growing up all by yourself.
2. Hissing "THERE ARE PEOPLE DOWNSTAIRS!" at a seven-year-old does nothing to deter the screaming, the jumping, the running, and perhaps most of all, the brattitude.
3. People who live in third-floor apartments with a dog are either dumbtards or gluttons for glute workouts.  GUESS WHICH ONE I'M VOTING FOR?
4. Never ever move into your own place without at least one chair.  The toilet does not count.
5. When you're worried about paying the bills, or when your legs have fallen asleep or your back is aching from sitting on the floor, or you're hit all over again with the realization that for the first time in your life, you are truly, honest-to-goodness, on your own, take a look around, remember all the good people in your life that helped you get here, and...

shut the fuck up.  You're doing pretty damn good so far, lady.

What I know about me

Okay, so my ovaries went into conniptions when I first read MoCo native Tori Amos' piece out of the UK, "What I Know About Men."  It's too easy when reading that thing to see the entire species of men as this ambiguous yet omnipotent force that shapes a woman's life. 

I decided long ago not to be a male-basher, and to be pretty overt about it -- masculinity is a societal pressure in and of itself, so holding a guy responsible for being... well, a guy?  Well, that logic lost its effectiveness pretty much the moment I hit puberty, no matter how many times people told me boys did this and wanted that.

The poor wankers, right?

But what keeps me coming back to Tori is this line: "I will never give myself over to anyone."

Well, fuck.  Add on "again" to the end of that sentence, and Tori pretty much just stole my mantra from the last seven months. 

It isn't quite that my ex-husband did anything wrong.  Rather, it's that I gave all of me to him, body and soul, quite literally, so that there was nothing left over for me.  It's a romantic idea, really, but quite miserable in the living. 

I am just now coming to fully realize, seeing now the changes in me (and, I hope he won't mind me saying, in him) what a huge burden that was for both of us.

More profound still, the realization that this is far from the first time I've done this to myself, laid my whole self in someone else's hands.  Like Tori, I've been assaulted, bullied, and abused.  And yes, the huge majority of the people who committed these violences against me happened to be men. 

But the worst criminal was a woman: me.  The men who laid their hands on me or told me lies about me only existed in my life for the briefest wink; I was the one that let those ghosts stare me in the face for years.

And, like Tori, I've found my daughter's presence in my life to not only be healing, but the incentive I needed to take ownership of myself.

So, yeah.  Sucks that Tori feels the need to author a piece that, at first glance, centers around the men in her life.  Or that I need to read it that way, anyway.

But in the end, we're all interdependent, aren't we?  And the only thing that's gonna keep me from losing myself totally to that web of humanity and the hegemonic spider that sucks our souls when we lose ourselves?

Yeah.  Duh. 

Me. 

Obvious as it may be, it's a lesson I gotta learn... over and over again.

Random self-liberating thought

The biggest mistake I've made in my life was to be too eager to embrace my womanhood.  Or, rather, my womanhood as defined by generations of humanity before me.  I've always known this, but I'm rediscovering it every day in this new life as a single woman. 

NOW I get why they say married men and single women are the happiest.

Adrienne Rich once said, "The most notable fact our culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities." 

So.  I was eighteen.  There was this really cute boy who liked me.  He said he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, which is a huge compliment in and of itself if you stop and think for a minute.  And so I chose to step into the Princess syndrome.  It suddenly became my goal to be the best wife and mother I could be.

(Pic from this awesome post on the Fallen Princesses project.)

And somewhere along the way, I forgot that anybody can be an awesome wife and mother, whatever that means, but no one can be as awesome a QueenAlpo as I can.

In the last few months of continued introspection, I've come to realize that I did this to myself -- this loss of dreams, this dependency on the idea of a nuclear family structure and a white picket fence, this desperate need to be as happy and plasticky as the people in a Target commercial, this despair that my life didn't measure up to the Good Housekeeping standard.

I've come to realize that most of the personal goals I've pursued in the last several years were ones suggested to me by well-meaning people and adopted as my own.  Which means I've been chasing other people's dreams for me.

I've also come to realize that saying "fuck you" is among the most liberating things a person can say.

'Cause he ain't my friend and he ain't my lover...

...but I love him so.

Okay, my dear elves.  I need your help desperately.  I need a name for this man.  This very special, lovely man who's got a permanent room in my heart, complete with a half-bathroom and a walk-in closet.

It's been three months now since CK and I "separated."  And yes, the quote marks are necessary, because even though we both consider ourselves single, we're still living in the same house, and [insert legalese mindfuck here], so... yeah.

So far, we've been calling each other "ex."  Well, not actually ex.  It's not like we pass each other in the hallway and say stuff like, "Hey, EX!  Did you feed the dog yet or should I?  Oh, you did?  Thanks, EX!"

But more like, "Oh, hey, I wanna introduce you to my ex-husband?  Isn't he beautiful?  Yes, I said ex.  Yes, I'm still standing next to him with my arm around his shoulders and loving on him.  Yes, I promise I'm not teasing about the ex part.  Yes, DAMMIT, he's my EX!"

*headslap*

I've tried "baby daddy."  But the smirk on people's faces when I say that kinda tells me... um, NO, that's not gonna work.  Oh, hell, no.

Some have suggested "friend."  Well, yeah, he is THAT.  But he's sooo much more.  And when I introduce him as my "fwiend," I also want people to understand that this is a man who pretty much incubated me and my soul for the last ten years and is still my partner in raising our daughter.  He deserves that much, no?

Last weekend a friend of ours suggested Amex.  As in amicable exes, not the credit card.  *guffaw*

So... help.  Help me free this man of the cross he bears.  Literally.  Wait, no... I mean figuratively.  Right?  Um.  Yeah.

Bookish Serendipity

Once upon a time in another life, I interviewed Deaf-Blind writer John Lee Clark (who has a new collection of poetry, Suddenly Slow, out via Handtype Press) for an article.  We chatted about his publishing work and about literature, both deaf and in general. 

I've never forgotten one thing he said: that it's not about whether a book is good or bad, but whether we're ready and in a good place in our lives and in our reading history to read it.

Well, perhaps I was really ready to read this book, or maybe the book gods dropped it into my lap in a weird coincidence while I was browsing books at the library waiting to meet a friend: doesn't matter which. 

Unraveled is a memoir by Maria Housden, who decides to leave her husband, giving him custody of her remaining three children (she loses one to cancer at the age of three), and go off to rediscover herself.

And hello?!

Maria totally killed me softly with her words.  The way she loved her children but felt like she wasn't the mother the world expected her to be; the way she could never fit into the mold of "wife;" the way she sacrificed thinking about her own desires and values for that of her husband, friends, and family... these all resonated with me deeply.

And her book was a true gift to me... someone who is constantly asked these days why I'm doing to my family what I'm doing.  How can I be so selfish?  One person I talked to recently found out I was separating from my husband.  Her knee-jerk reaction: "What's wrong with him?"

"Nothing!" 

And then there was an awkward pause.

Like Maria, I don't think I'll ever be able to explain to anyone -- even him -- to their satisfaction.  But Maria's memoir captures what I feel right now in a way that's validating and so much of a relief to read. 

I was completely enjoying being on my own now, and savoring the way my thoughts could chase themselves from one point to the next, without any chance of being interrupted.  I hadn't fully realized until now the way that, even as a young girl, my attention was always being diverted from what I thought was interesting or important.  I had come to believe that it was my responsibility to respond with interest, even if it was feigned, to whatever my mother, father, husband, and children were interested in; my own thoughts took a backseat to everyone else's.

Honestly, it's not that great a book.  One of my pet peeves is writers who can't make their "I" disappear into their story, even when narrating first person.  Housden has this problem, and it has the unfortunate effect of making her seem very self-absorbed. 

On top of that, her writing is, to steal a word used by a friend recently, treacly.  In other words, way too sugary and void of real substance.  Example: "Although I had dreamed of this moment for years, envisioned this place many times before, I hadn't ever truly believed it would happen.  Looking around now, anything felt possible, as if something new was coming alive in me, a sense without form, poised to take shape."  Uh... your point?

But, Goddess... something about the things she says drives a stake through my heart and stokes the embers of jealousy:

Closing my eyes, I inhaled a long, slow breath, and felt my heart soften as I inched closer to its deepest secret.  What if I had gotten it all wrong, if all these years I had completely missed the point of my life?  What if it didn't have anything to do with waiting, with trying to be good?  My eyes flew open.  There was such a sense of clarity and purity in this realization that I knew it was true.  This room, this body, and these feelings right here, right now, were my life.  Whether good or bad, perfect or imperfect, what mattered wasn't about what happened outside myself or whether others approved; what mattered was how fully and unapologetically I was able to be who I was.

Finding comfort in routine

7 am: wake up.  wake l'il Red up.  Make her breakfast.  Pack her lunch.  Pack her backpack.  Make sure she brushes her teeth and hair (really make sure, that conniving little snit).  Wave goodbye as she gets on the bus.  Deliberate whether to go back to sleep or actually do something today.  Look at my puffy eyes and disheveled hair in the mirror over a bowl of shredded wheat and decide that life could be much, much worse.

This has been my daily morning routine for more than a year now.  Autopilot most mornings.  Thinking too much about it hurts, but I go through the motions anyway.  There's a whole 'nother person that depends on me to get her day started, after all.

These days, however, it's the anchor of my existence.

I don't know whether I'll have a job next week, where I'll be living next month, or have the slightest clue what my life will look like next year.

This all feeds into my greatest fear: not knowing what comes next. 

Yet, I survive it every day.  And every day I survive, as much as I don't want to admit it, I get just that much stronger.

There's two ways I do it: 1) by pouring cereal into a bowl every day and drowning it in milk and offering it up to someone else, reveling in the familiarity of the mundane choreography, and 2) by constantly reaching out, finding amazing people and having a blast just talking to them and reminding myself: Good Goddess, there is life out there.

All I need is to find my own moment in time.

Standard messaging rates apply

One unexpected effect of getting Leah to myself two or three days out of the workweek, depending on what her dad and I have agreed on: I'm falling in love with her all over again.

I guess there's something weird about switching family dynamics from a triad to just us girls... where before we were all sharing each other with a third person -- not that there's anything wrong with that -- now I get to be totally selfish, and so does she.

But, boy, does that girl have a mind of her own.  Today after school she requested, for the umpteenth time this week, to go to the gym.  I'd already gone earlier in the day, so that wasn't happening.  When I told her so, she started screaming and sobbing and hot damn, that girl could take home a trophy for World Championship Whining.  (Guess she learned from the best.)

So to shut her up -slash- to spend quality time with her, I took her to get a manicure.  Which either makes me the best mother in the world, or the biggest pushover ever.  You decide.  Polls are open until midnight.