Sunday,May, Addendum
20 May 2012 1 Comment
Last night, a long and wonderful party with friends. Today, bog and Kalamazoo River. Trout stream cold and clear as glass. Dragonflies, hippies making out on the dock, children knee deep in muck. Asparagus and pesto, white wine and cold milk (for Jonah). Harry Potter on the television tonight, first time the machine has been turned on in almost a month.
Mom, you’re the most beautiful woman on earth. Is it just because I’m your mom? No. You are. Jeez. Just get over it, okay?
He’s on his belly, his arms around Max (the dog’s) neck, robins picking through the yard.
Trout Stream, Kalamazoo Nature Center
Sunday Morning
20 May 2012 Leave a Comment
Sometimes mornings drift in like this one: a haze already setting up near the horizon, the bluejay scaring off all the birds from the feeder, Jonah still sweaty and sleeping in my bed. A strong cup of coffee. Toast and strawberries; the dogs sprawled, panting in the long grass of the back yard.
Last night, we went to a birthday party of a friend, and Jonah ran around with their children in the late evening sunlight and into the dusk, around the hawk’s cage, to the creek where the boys found and captured a tree frog, ate cake and pizza and drank beer (well, I had one; that’s my party-girl, single-mom limit), and we didn’t get home until almost 10:15. I had walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water, and Jonah said, calmly to me, “Mom, we’ll leave in ten minutes?” And when he got into the car, he fell into that softly quiet daze, fell asleep almost immediately in my bed.
There were little brown bats and the cheeping of flying squirrels; there was a sky indigo and star-lit, Kalamazoo’s small-city lights rising up out of the still-hot evening, our own house smelling of vinegar and lemon oil, sheets stiff and just off the line and smelling like summer.
And then this morning, birds calling, the grass already this early in May, yellow and hard. Dianthus, speedwell, veronica, false sunflower, hydrangea, milkweed hanging on for dear life in the new garden. This morning, where things are okay–perhaps jus t for now, perhaps for a while. I’ll take it.
In The Empty House, An Empty Room, A Bare Table
18 May 2012 2 Comments
It has been a very quiet, and difficult, and enormously sad day. Oh, I know: in so many ways I’m okay. There is nothing truly wrong with me, or my life: I have a wonderful, smart son, I’m gainfully employed in a career I love, I have these animals, friends. But it also seems that the things I want most–or at least, today–are terribly simple, and terribly remote. Seemingly in absolute terms, beyond my reach.
Except for a brief phone call this morning from Jonah where he wished me a happy birthday, until I picked him up from the bus stop at 4, I spoke to no one. I ran seven miles on the Kal-Haven trail, despite my sore Achilles, despite my tired legs. And in those few moments on the drive home, endorphins still coursing through my veins, I wasn’t weepy.
But what I want, what I cannot have, what I have learned I can not count on having, perhaps ever: is someone to make me dinner on my birthday, to not come home to an empty house, someone who wishes me a happy birthday, in person, right here, means it. Isn’t coerced. I should be used to this, really. I have spent every birthday in my 30s alone; before that, I was essentially alone, hoping my then-husband would remember, would pay me some kindness without me having to ask, to remind.
That someone would remember it was my birthday because they cared about me, and that’s what you do for people you care about.
Oh, my family did: there have been calls and texts. And if it weren’t for the one good feature of Facebook, I think I would have keeled off in despair.
But. Jonah’s father yelled at me on the phone when I told him we were on the way to baseball practice.Why? You knew it was my fucking day. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to take him? Why wouldn’t I take him?
I apologized. But should have said because it’s not like you fucking have paid for a goddamn thing,not viola not baseball, and you’ve never fucking showed up to a viola concert or lesson or parent teacher conference even when it is your fucking day. But I didn’t. At at practice, his father helped out with all the other dads and Jonah had little need for me at all. I sat with a few mothers, another who’d gotten divorced at thirty and remarried. So I suppose it’s possible.
Jesus. I’ve cried most of the day, felt pathetic and sorry for myself and know that I should be thankful for what I have, instead of sad for what I don’t. But it doesn’t seem so much, to want to not be alone so goddamn much. My family is scattered across the continent. My friends all have their own families, their own troubles, their own sorrows–oh, probably far more important than mine. I know this too. I am ashamed even that I am this sad, even so.
Maybe it is. I don’t know. Maybe what I need to do is want less. Or learn to not want this, want anything. To be okay with this silence perpetua, to hold my own hand, make my own birthday cake.
I am so tired of this loneliness. It seems so endless.
Moving into My 36th Year
17 May 2012 1 Comment
I will turn 35 tomorrow; I am enormously uncomfortable with this. Yesterday, I sat in the back yard, in the only chair we’ve got left after last year’s wind storm and Mr. Bill (the dog)’s chewing spree and watched Jonah chase his flying dragon across the yard and couldn’t help weeping: I’m thirty-five. I’m facing yet another birthday alone; I will most likely never have any more children, my book is still unpublished and I’m flattened with summer’s precipice of anxiety: time and space. Despite all the running, I feel bloated. I pinch at the flesh at my waist. I watch the line between my brows in the mirror grow deeper. I am thirty five.
Last night, I couldn’t sleep with worrying. Today, I planted Dianthus, false sunflower, mophead hydrangea, separated and transplanted countless daylilies, ran seven miles, ate lunch at the elementary school cafeteria with Jonah, and Q, his best friend who looked at me suspiciously. Interloper. Weird adult.
So instead of feeling flattened by what I haven’t accomplished in my 35th year, I’ll try to focus on what I have:
This remarkable boy. On Monday, we attended his first Little League practice, and although we forgot his mitt, although he got only one hit at batting practice, I watched how he opened, blossomed, yearned for all that adult-male attention. I doubt his father will come to many games, any practices at all, although Jonah said, weeks ago, My dad will come to baseball, won’t he? as he knows he won’t come to viola, or church or school. Jonah was so eager for all that attention, all that male feedback. I could hardly keep from weeping on the bleachers, once again odd single-parent-out, as those men bent down, adjusted his bat, his stance. Jonah’s radiant face. That is exactly why I will not let him meet any man I date, ever, particularly since what I date seems to be shadows, impressions of men but hardly real men at all.
I have been named Chair of my department, even if I had to endure a scathing session with my Dean on Monday, in which I could hardly keep from crying, from laughing. She was in trouble; it was my fault. Oh well.
I have published poems, maintained this house, planted a garden, continued to raise a remarkable child. I have run a half marathon and signed up for a full marathon. I have adopted yet another foundling cat who is sitting on my lap as I write this, the other two perched hear my shoulders on the couch.
I have endured long spates of loneliness. It is familiar, this flattening despair. I have walked into it, despite it. I have done all of this by my fucking self. I keep a house, I do my job, I parent my son, I write poems, I pay my bills, I sing, I audition, I agitate for the union, I garden, I prop the ladder against the eaves and scrape the roof of leaves, I scoop the detritus from the gutters, I reattached the siding, I trim the hedge, I mow the lawn, I attend baseball practice and viola lessons and choir practice and college meetings and I deal with the fact that my son’s grandmother, my mother, doesn’t give him anything for his birthday, doesnt’ call, I prepare for my fifth birthday alone, fully alone–and I fucking do it. I cry and I drink too much wine, probably, and I avoid mirrors and I worry that I’ll always be alone, that all I want is someone to have my back, just once, just hold the fucking ladder so it doesn’t shake so goddamn much–
That I’m not always going to feel like this. That there is such a thing as a man who isn’t going to lie to me, that I don’t always have to be so guarded.
The sky is lilac and inkspot. Crickets and distant highway noise. A freight train moving through Kalamazoo, only the repeated reveille of the horn lifting over the lavender dark.
Hope is real, isn’t it? As real as despair?
My Radical Marxist Feminist Dialectic
10 May 2012 2 Comments
The windows are closed against a cool May wind; the house smells like mushrooms, vanilla, vinegar, lemon. The floors have been scrubbed, three planters filled with hot pink geraniums, robins picking and stabbing at the long back lawn. Jonah has gone to his father’s for the evening, the house quiet. A goldfinch perched on the empty feeder, the house throwing its thick blocks of shadow against the lawn.
The dogs sprawl on the floors, the cats prowl at hte few open windows at the north end of the house, bedrooms empty and dust rising like hope, like the scales of this world, lifting in a small wind–
I stole this from the Internetz and my FB page.
The measure of a woman, if pop culture, mostly all of fucking history, and my own deep insecurities are to be believed, is how many boys one’s ‘milkshake’ can bring to the yard. And, if you were raised a sort of good, sort of Catholic girl like I was, whether or not one could make one of those boys marry that milkshake (instead of getting that milk for free.)
Well, honey: I sold one milkshake, and I’ve given enough away for free to give any Sacrament of Confession and Reconciliation a metric ton of Rosaries to recite for penance (although, really: would 18 rosaries erase, say, Squirrel Tacos or Nick Tickle or even K (who needs a blog nickname–any suggestions?) from my still-Catholic-still-guilty-for-being-a-slutty-sluterton-consciousness? I’d recite those motherfuckers like that.)
And yet.
I do not know why I am so hopeful tonight, why, though it is summer vacation and I have hours and hours of unstructured time ahead of me, I am full, tonight, anyway, with a sense of the future, of the now, of this life. This only one we’re going to get–
My President has endorsed gay marriage. I have run a half marathon 15 minutes faster than I hoped to; I have run accident 9 miles two days later, rose-breasted grosbeaks chasing each other over Portage Creek, my ankle only a bit swollen today, my nailbeds dark with dirt from new planters of earthy-smelling geraniums, my nails cobalt-blue. Last night, my work friend JG and I watched Emmanuel Ax play Schumann, Beethoven, Copland in the gold-leafed Art Nouveau Chenery Auditorium. I came home to the only babysitter I’ll trust reading Gatsby on my couch (see why she’s awesome?), Jonah slumbering in my bed.
I drove through the countryside today; I dug in the dirt. I bought a single ticket to the Symphony for this weekend, I woke late with my arm thrown over Jonah’s knees, his hand open in my hair. I cleaned the refrigerator with vinegar and baking soda, I did two loads of laundry. Tomorrow, two meetings at the college with VPs. My sweet Bird turns 7 on Sunday, Mother’s Day. And I remember that Mother’s Day, seven years ago, May 8th, when I was so desperate to have that baby, and I waddled to church (alone, oh, how I did everything alone even then, although the quality of such loneliness was different than my loneliness now, more bitter, heavier, more desperate), and the rest of the choir sighed and someone said Oh, I thought you’d have that baby already, and all I could see of the future was a swirl of terror, of being forced to be alive in my life when I’d worked so fucking hard to stay distant from it, insulated against the emptiness at its core.
If I had not had that baby, I do not know if I would have gotten out alive. If I would have had the courage to engage, to leap.
Maybe I would have. Maybe the radical feminist dialectic of my early twenties would have won out eventually. I am not sure, though. At that point, it was only theory: a theory so fundamentally different and opposed to my reality of emotionally distant parents, of a family where we feel nothing, where we achieve and achieve and achieve, and admit no weakness, no human failing–
My radical, Marxist feminist dialectic arrived in a 6 pound, 13 ounce little boy, a dark hospital room, a reedy cry and a groping at my swollen breast: at that terror, that loneliness that I was, like it or not, alive in my body, in my life. And I had a choice then: I could retreat into my self, or I could start flailing in the water.
I started flailing. In so many ways, i feel like I’ve been flailing ever since. A string of seriously fucked up relationships (I have a thing, my therapist said today, for narcissists. I’d really, really like that to end, like, now.) A (finally) acknowledged anxiety disorder, an eating disorder, numerous bouts with depression: such frailty! Such failure, I think so much of the time.
You feel everything, K’s dumbass said to me, as if it were both a matter of curiosity, and also (I suspect) a criticism. As if to feel nothing, to mute the emotional self meant a more evolved kind of humanity.
It doesn’t, by the way.
My radical feminist marxist dialectic arrived in the form of this child, but also in the form of the claiming of my own life, which of course also insists on the sanctity, the wholeness of the lives of the rest of the world, of the ways in which I can never act without regard for the impact on the world.
So tonight, it’s wine and chocolate, the hum of the Lizard King’s perpetual lawn mower; it’s nostalgia for Chicago, for the glimmer of the Bahai temple on the Lake, of the rocky beaches on the western shore, of those long bike rides when I was 17 and 18 down Telegraph Road into Bannockburn, Lake Forest, of the sunburns before choir concerts and final plays; of the green and plowed countryside of West Michigan, of Kalamazoo rising up in the morning sunlight as the staccato patter of a thousand runners pads through downtown, of how good that run felt, all of it, how distance running has become the best form of prayer I know, how nine miles became a short-ish run, how I sat beneath Chenery’s glittering chandeliers and almost wept at the descending lilt of Schuman’s Etude Andante, how waking up with Jonah’s hand outstretched in my hair is the closest thing I’ll get to heaven in this life, I think; how, despite once again having fallen, briefly, in love with the wrong man, I am so deeply grateful to be present in my own life, really present. Having chosen this: having claimed this life, my own life. All of it is a battle, and some days it is everything I can do to hang on.
But I’ve hung on. I’m hanging on. I’m doing this thing, this life. And it’s pretty fucking beautiful.
May Day
02 May 2012 1 Comment
Tonight it’s all new-cut grass, honeysuckle, lemon-oil, rain-damp earth. The Lizard King is out mowing his lawn in scraps; his lawn, of course, a terrible patchwork of dead spots from the Roundup he’s sprayed on the few dandelions that migrated from my lawn to his: overkill, his lawn pocked by feet-wide patches of sickly dead yellow.
Tonight, it’s Jonah singing in the bathroom, viola lessons, writing group, a short, hard run through the little woods, bluebirds lighting on high branches; tonight, it’s thrushes calling across the reservoir, the highway noise muted, peepers and crickets and wet things singing love songs in the middle distance. Tonight it’s math from Jonah’s bedroom Mom, I know fourteen plus forteen is twenty-eight. And Fifty plus fifty equals twenty-five hundred, right? and Mom, I can show you a picture of Japan. Can we climb to the top of Mount Everest? and when looking a picture in his animal book, Look at the floating butt-cheek.
Tonight, it’s the worst semester I can remember almost behind me, four months yawning before me, a world trapped in perpetual springtime outside my window.
The lawn is finally mown completely, the house smells of vinegar and lemon oil; i’ve fixed teh garage door, the second bathroom toilet (again), I’ve given the damn cat her pills, I’ve paid a thick bundle of bills, I’ve run hard and slow on tired legs through the woods, half marathon less than a week away, my 35th birthday looming on the horizon, sodden shirt, wet blanket. I can feel the bones of my ribs through my t-shirt; my jeans fall off my hips without unbuttoning them. The yard is dark and empty, the house of my heart is rattled through with wind, sand, with the straight keening of loneliness; the hard bone of keeping-on.
I was worried sick about graduation, that contractul aday where all faculty must show up; I shouldn’t ahve worried at all, K. was a no-show, no surprise. Whatever it was, it was nothing. Whatever it was, it has slipped away as if it never existed. I never existed. But I do exist. I spent the preceding weekend with a group of women, at a church camp near Lake Michigan. I was dreading that too, and yet: it was grace. I drove home on Sunday morning, 6:30 AM through Sawyer, and Dowagiac and Watervliet and Paw Paw, over back roads and past farmsteads and dying towns, the sun pressing up through the cloudbank ahead of me, and I was all right. I’ve been all right. Of course I’ll be all right. I always am.
What choice do I have? I asked my therapist a few weeks ago. All of it is a choice: who we love, how we react, how we grieve, how we move on, how we hurt or do not hurt those we love.
I am in this life; fragrant with honeysuckle, cut grass, lemon. And everywhere tonight, though inside the house it is quiet and I cannot imagine a future different than this one, the world is singing: love songs.Beltane rising from the reservoir, and although those goddamn love songs seem always to miss me, it’s still May Day. M’aider, then, world. Venez m’aider.
The World Shines
25 Apr 2012 2 Comments
For almost a year, I was waking up around 5 or so, starting the pot of might-as-well-be-Turkish-coffee, lighting a candle, and writing longhand, with a black felt tipped marker in yellow legal pads. I watched the sun rise, the small constellation of parking lot lights glint and dim and eventually go out in the Meijer parking lot across the yard, across the reservoir. The sky pink and lighten, birds and ducks begin to dart their flat cutout shapes over the yard, lift up from the pond. I started simply by listing what I was grateful for, what was beautiful about my life. Somewhere, around August or so, i realized I was remarkably–for me–happy or at least content in my own life.
And then, around March 9th or so, I stopped. I couldn’t do it; couldn’t find the grace in my own life, as I was hurtling once more down the rabbit hole, down the rooty and peaty depths into another Depression, into another bout with the hairy beast, My Worst Self.
Instead, I stay up late (ha! late means nearing 11 o’clock), drinking (three glasses of Sauvignon blanc!), not eating, watching the sky outside the living room windows darken, the western sky pink, go orange, blush to lavender. Go blank. Sit in the dangerous blue light of the cmputer screen.
I’ve written, a bit: poems, ghazals. Two were picked up by a longshot journal. I’ve run more than I’ve ever run in my life; I’ve laid in bed fantasizing about my next long run–13.25 miles last Friday–when my knees would burn and I’d push past the heaviness, the thick desire to turn around, curl up, go home–for those moments when my head would clear, my breath would match my gait, and there would be nothing but road and forward movement, woods and birdsong. One foot in front of another.
I’ve watched my own body whittle down; 120 to 115 to 110 to 105. Ribs and hip bones emerging, breasts shrinking, feet thickened with calluses, thighs strong and capable. I both hate and love that I know the numbers, that I’ve caved and let the health assessment woman weigh me, have climbed on at least two scales in the back of Meijer. My clothes don’t fit; 13 miles no longer seems too long, seems not long enough. I consider, and then in a moment of tw0-glasses-of-wine-and-its-10:30 haze, sign up for an actual marathon.
What does it mean to be brave? This is something I’ve thought about a lot lately. To move, completely aware, into one’s life? To claim it all? To look unerringly, into the breach? To risk, even when the risk means heartbreak, means terror, means recasting the clay, resetting the wheel, making the self again–
Fifteen years ago, I entered into a relationship that seemed to offer what Adrienne Rich called the possible ‘full life’ of a woman: whatever that meant, marriage, motherhood, claiming what I thought was the ‘female’ (read:non-intellectual, therefore sexual, therefore flawed (I’d never measured up in the conventional high school and college beauty market, those girls who seemed at home in their flesh; who wore black eyeliner and taffeta prom dresses and kissed boys), subject rather than object–essentially the fate and ‘real life’ my childhood subliminally geared me toward, despite the outward (and strong, and contradictory) push toward a life of the mind, of a self becoming–).
And then, ten years later I was out and thought I was done for good. And yet: the bifurcation remained. Remains.
And yet: today, my creative writing students discussed two stories (one abysmal, the other lit around the edges with promise, both authors quiet, the abysmal one with her cheap fingerless gloves, her ‘I Love Goth Jesus” t-shirt, the promising one with his bleached and disheveled hair in his eyes–) for almost two hours, who laughed when i said, off hand I love you guys, genuinely surprised and delighted that they’d discuss with such attention to detail and compassion, the work of their peers, we love you too, Sara, even though I feel like this has been the worst semester ever in my teaching career, so distracted I’ve been with failed love, with my own descent into self-hatred. You’ve been off your game, sure; C., a long-time student and friend said, but I hope things get better. Today, Jonah sat at the kitchen table and then on the couch trying to write a poem when I told him he had/got to comet o my students’ final reading next Monday and that if he wanted, he could read a poem as well from the microphone, his face screwed up in concentration and frustration but Mom. I want it to sound right and I don’t know what to say. The World Shines? But then what? And I couldn’t help but cry, as I watched this most remarkable child struggle with his own world of the mind, how it manifests, or not, in the world, how difficult it is to translate between the two worlds, how desperately important it is to try.
I am hardly brave. What I do seems far from remarkable. And yet–
Oh God. I have no idea what I’m doing, but this small boy, with whom I’ve shared a twin-sized bed for two nights now because I’m too goddamn lazy and tired and up-to-my-eyeballs in final paper grading to do my own sheets–is attempting poems. Because it is, after all, my own life that I’m inhabiting, all almost 35 years of it. Because we drove to the Lake on Sunday and it was cold and the wind blew and we still ran up and down the sand, Jonah walking up to his ankles in the cold swale; because despite how desperate the urge has been the past month or so to abandon my life, to hide, to feel nothing, to wallow in the shame of feeling anything at all, of being hurt and humiliated and once again cast aside, a disposable girl, at least I’m alive in my own life.
I feel all of it. My sweet bird is writing poetry. He tucks his feet beneath my hip, he pats my shoulder and says “it’s cool you can run a half marathon,” and tells his teacher nonchalantly “My mom will run a marathon in the fall. No big deal.” Who uses the word “penultimate” correctly because on the way to class yesterday I explained what it means, and he used it today. Who somehow, without my knowing, played the whole song at viola lesson today, and said casually to me as we got into the car, let’s practice at least three days a week in the summer, okay? and who has learned the treble part of a piano duet by ear. Who knows a fifth from a seventh interval.
Who asks me to rubber his back, who burped out a word at dinner today and reduced us both to laughing tears.
Who is the most remarkable thing I have ever made, hands down.
Both poems by Jonah.
Stars Falling
The world shines.
Snow shines, falling down
from the sky. Flowers gloom
in winter and snow covered apple
trees look like sno-cones.
Summer snows across the sky:
asteroids fall in a meteor shower–
The world shines.
Stars Falling 2
The world is all that exists. And
all that lived was a lizard creature
and it ate leaves. The stars
shooting across the sky.
The world shines.
Dandelion Wish
19 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
The grass has gotten long again, weedy up against the legs of the swingset where Jonah swung for an hour after school, before his father came and took him away. The yard is thick with dandelions, and Jonah picked handfulls of them. These are your wish flowers, Mom he said, handing a few to me. I know what your wish will be, he said, throaty with a cold that’s settled in his voice. That I’m going to have a good day. I blew the first puffball away; the second he said you need a different wish, okay?
I wish I had gotten a picture of him, his hair in his eyes, his beautiful face, those freckles–as he turned his head in the late afternoon sunlight and blew dandelion seeds into the warm spring air. For a moment, one fucking perfect moment, a thrill of joy, of perfection ran through me: this is enough. This. This beautiful boy climbing on my lap in the sun, letting me press my lips against the back of his neck, wrap my arms around him and tell him at least three times, god I love you so much, Bird.
I am capable of embarrassing him now. Walking through a parking lot, particularly in the morning as I walk him into the school, he slips his hand out of mine, tells me he’ll walk close, I’m trained now, Mom. He tells me to be quiet when i tell him he’s handsome.
And yet, when he drives away in his father’s jankedy truck, he shouts stay in the yard until i can’t see you anymore, okay? and sticks his arm out of the window, his hand making the sign language sign for I love you until his father turns the corner and he’s lost to me for the night.
I pull weeds in the back yard. I drive to get the cat’s prescription from the compounding pharmacy a few miles south. I go to Lowes, pick up a hose reel, come home and eat a bowl of kale, some leftover spaghetti, cheap organic wine from the health food store. I sit, as I am sitting now, in the living room, the yard still watery with evening light, the cats climbing in and out of my lap, on the keyboard.
The sky is pinking up in the west; robins call and call in the trees. I am enormously lonely. I am enormously blessed.
Someday, I have a small measure of faith that they’ll level each other out.
On Violence, Sex and Hope
15 Apr 2012 2 Comments
It is a thing, one understands rather quickly when one teaches creative writing, that certain students are drawn toward a kind of decadent violence: hypersexualized rape, pain-porn rendered with the excuse of “I read a lot of Chuck Palenhuik” and “I wanted this story to make you think.” It’s often men, but not always; for a few semesters, I had a glut of female students writing violently sexual, or sexually violent writing in which women are cut, fucked, raped, killed. I often thought, while reading such attempts at a story, that such an impulse is an attempt to reclaim their own victimhood: if you’re going to make a me a bitch, if the world is going to judge me only by this, pussy and tits, then i’m going to cut them off. I’m going to rape this woman, not you. These are often, but not always, girls on the margin: tattoos, body piercings, odd colored hair. But sometimes: beautiful girls, girls with expensive jeans who smoke American Spirits, hang in the indie coffee shops, go to shows. Writing poems and stories that accept, without questioning, sexual violence, is an act of rebellion, an attempt at beating the world at its own game.
Their stories and poems are rarely any good. They–like the men who also write these stories–have learned that shock, sex, blood–are cool, are trendy, are hip and now and edgy and seem rebellious.
The boys–men–who write such things (and this semester, I’ve had a glut of them; one student I’ve dubbed “vagina-knife-killer” who wrote an atrocious, hyper-sexualized story about a woman who willingly desires to be killed by her lover/murderer shoving a knife up her vagina; the most recent, a young man who wrote what he claimed to be a Palenhiuk-inspired story about a man who has his organs harvested while being hooked up to an orgasm machine, a story complete with larvae, eyelids sewn shut, engorged cock, semen stain and the word “ecstasy” used multiple times.) The thing is, the class loves these stories; they readily accept the premise that shocking equals merit.
I remember a few years ago, a student, “Waynetta” who generally wrote about fairies and dragons and elves wrote a remarkable poem about seeing her own body in the mirror. Waynetta, probably 23 or so, was an ordinary woman: somewhat overweight, awkward, bookish, shy. Her poem about her body–how it taunted her in the mirror, failed her, and yet she was stuck with it and how it defined her whether she wanted it to or not– floored me, although the class was less than inspired. I suspect some of the kids in the class thought “so what? Waynetta should already know she’s not pretty.”
I am deeply turned off by violence in writing, particularly violence without consequence, violence whose only goal is to titillate, shock. When a white, middle class, suburban boy writes about death and the apocalypse through the lens of a man hooked up to an “orgasm machine” that allows his “dealer” to harvest his organs and leave him suffering–when the suffering is secondary to the voyeristic, pornographic semen spatter, when no thought is paid to the fucking human element–
Well, I’ll tell you; i think it’s bullshit. What I wish I had asked the class, and made them defend it, was “what makes this good?” What I did ask them, however, was “How is this any different than pornography? What exactly is the point of this other than to shock?” And yet some of them didn’t seem to think there needed to be a point other than that. (Of course there are also always those students who do; who write me long, complicated emails about Eliot and racism and the consequence and import of literature. I have to remember these; or friends who tuck their own children into bed at night, who run out of milk and don’t have the right kind of cereal and who hold their children’s faces in their hands after a difficult day and see beauty.)
I think there does need to be something other than shock. Obviously. I know there does. This is fucking life, people. This is the only one you get, and I have a student in that class who lived through refugee camps in Liberia and watched his family be killed, and you fucking want to write pain porn? And for every sexually explicit story about a woman in which she ends up dead (and believe me, I get a lot of them. Women jumped in alleys, women killed by their husbands, women raped and raped and Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” no longer ironic or a feminist statement but an actual fantasy, without the element of critical judgement. I would guess there are also women in that class who have been the victims of sexual assault and at least sexual objectification who are deeply uncomfortable but who have learned to accept their lot: if only their thighs were smaller, their stomachs less round. Et fucking cetera.
What I want to know about is real life; the way we react to the world, and if there’s violence, I want to understand how it rends, how we construct ways in which to preserve our psyches; how we are forced sometimes to relinquish some of our humanity in order to stay sane. How none of it is so simple; how you can never eliminate the human factor, the complicating factor, from anything.
I have been obsessed with both Persephone and Penelope for these reasons: because Persephone was both controlled and willing; because we see her as both sexual and innocent, because there must have been some element in her that wished to go into the ravine, that also knew that by doing so she had relinquished the one thing that allows women some level of autonomy: her sex her one great weakness, her one great strength, the one thing she was allowed, after all, to define herself by. And Penelope, eternal waiter, sexual object who holds on to her autonomy by holding on to her chastity, who idealizes (perhaps) the other, the one who left her behind, who of course never considered his own chastity, her ‘oneness’ with him on his journey. How both Penelope and Persephone were granted a measure of autonomy and servitude by the virtue of their sex.
And yet, of course in my own life I too struggle with this seeming dichotomy: to be person or to be woman. To accept violence from others or to inflict it willingly upon myself (as if violence is the only option, and the only choice is by whom the blow is dealt).How my own experience can find a resonance in these stories. In their contradictions.
Perhaps I am simply of another generation than my students, whose bible of the Hunger Games (which I’ve read and think are okay, and yet which use violence as a plot device as much as a commentary on the hypersexualized and glamorized violence of our culture) and hipster Palenhiuk perhaps speak to a terror that the world is in fact hostile and the only way to survive is to numb one’s self to the horror. But I’m also a mother who cannot imagine letting my son grow up into a boy who writes vagina-knife stories, and thinks that ‘post-feminist’ and ‘post-race’ are real.
This boy, at whom I yelled to day when he left the back door open and the oldest cat, who’s struggling with kidney failure and old age, snuck out and came back inside with a fish hook stuck in her leg, sobbed “It’s my fault, it’s my fault Magnet got hurt” even after I apologized for yelling, for freaking out, for shouting for the fucking scissors so I can cut the line! Whose eyes glittered when I dropped him off at his cousin’s house so I could squeeze in a 12 mile run and felt bad the entire way home that I was abandoning him, that I’d screamed. Who flung himself at my waist, told me he loved me.
Who I want to raise to believe that all of us matter. Including himself. And know that to remain human, he’ll have to do an elaborate dance at times, but that he can always believe that love, and hope are possible.
It is what I am desperately trying to do myself; to believe those two things are true. Are possible. Despite the world. Because of it.
Eostre, Easter, Paschal, Pesach
08 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
It’s a common refrain, during my lectures, that I return to Disney heroines, the climax and destination of every princess story you’ve ever read, seen, watched: happilyeverafter. All that spunk to land Prince Charming (and in the case of, say, Sleeping Beauty, all that vegetable, comatose punishment for challenging the rules, for autonomy, trying the spinning wheel (and even that a ridiculously small rebellion, the desire to exchange ornamental femininity for functional femininity of the working classes).
To teach the history of women would be to teach the history of a dog, my mediaeval history professor in college said.
He was right. We record what we consider important. What we consider worthwhile.
The class I teach at the college once every three semesters is called Women in Literature, rather than Women’s Literature. In theory, I could never teach a woman writer, ever. For haven’t women been at the center of literature for eons: the sexual object, the desired, the muse.
Women’s Liberation is a new concept, another college professor said, during a Women’s Studies course. We’ve had eons of patriarchy; we need to understand that we’ve come an awfully long way in a very short time against such a weight of history.
I said to my therapist on Wednesday that the part I hate most about myself, the part I wish I could snuff out was the inherently female part: the sexual part, the part of me that cannot escape my gender, my sexuality. The part that the world says is the bulk of my social capital, my inherent worth despite the life of the mind, despite the poem, the independent spirit. The part I feel most deficient in, of course. I can remember thinking, when I was a young teenager, how ridiculous it would be if I wore makeup, or did my hair. Me? Sara? My mother had a few tubes of ancient makeup: flesh colored, a tube of brown mascara. She wore, still wears, the same shapeless t-shirts, ill-fitting men’s bluejeans, orthopeadic white sneakers.
I got breasts early and large; I hated the betrayal of my body which screamed “female” and “awkward” which seemed totally at odds with my mind, which wanted nothing more than to bury itself in books, in possibilities that ranged beyond the stuffy hallways of Forest Avenue, of Chicagoland. A world of books wherein what characters felt wasn’t always at odds with what they were told. Where things added up, where the future glimmered instead of gaped.
I spent hours in front of the mirror, hating the roundness of my thighs, the slope of my belly. How my face was fleshy instead of planed, how awkward I felt in my own skin. Only on stage, or in choir, did I feel safe. Safe-ish. Recently, catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, stepping out of the shower, my ribs press through the thin flesh of my torso, small hollows beneath my hip bones. Either it’s the running (a half marathon in five weeks) or self-ablutions. It’s still not enough. Clearly. How I wish often I could disappear; become just plane and shadow; sexless. If I could just lose that desire to be held, to be touched. If I could not respond to such offers.
How many women, I ask, would sacrifice some knowledge in order to be beautiful, to be desired, to be loved? No? Well, let me ask: how many of us feel fat, unattractive, avoid mirrors, dread aging in a way our male friends and partners do not? The mere fact that most of us own makeup, while our male friends, for the most part, do not; that we own high heels, things called “jeggings” and underwire brassieres, nail polish. This is enough to know, of course, that our capital, our worth, lies first and foremost in the way we manage and display our sex, our desirability, our vulnerability, rather than our intellect.
I wish I could just be a mind, I told my therapist. I wish I didn’t want sex, ever. I wish I didn’t want to be wanted, to be loved.
My ex husband would get angry when I wore anything other than sweatshirts, jeans. Every man looks at your tits, he’d say. That’s a disrespect to me.
It’s my fucking body, I’d counter, but I’d also feel guilty. It wasn’t my body; it’s never been my body. It’s either too fat, too short, too fleshy; it’s either too sexy or too chaste. Every time I see an article (as one ran in our shitty newspaper lately) about what was appropriate to wear to work for women, there was always the caveat: don’t be too sexy.
I rarely, if ever, see any such caveats for men.
I thought, at 18, that feminism would save me. I would like right now to be a celibate, to throw off the mantle of female, of woman, of sex; to want nothing.
It isn’t about wanting nothing, is it? Or tempering one’s desires (which, let’s face it, has been the story-of-woman for eons).
Today Jonah and I drove out to Buchanan, Michigan, through small towns, through scrubby fields, handpainted signs advertising “Farm Fresh Eggs” and “Jesus Saves” and Ron Paul 2012. The sky was incurably blue; at the nature preserve, I was deep in a bad mood, the Saint Joe river glittering beside the trail, turtles sunning themselves on submerged logs. Turtles are good luck, Mom! Jonah declared, after this morning letting Walter, the small painted turtle his father found in the woods, go near a pond in his father’s wooded apartment complex.
Today, we watched the moon rise over the reservoir, clouds move in. Rain, if we’re lucky. And tomorrow Easter, that ancient holiday venerating Eostre, ancient goddess of fertility and renewal, Jesus emerging, morning-eyed from his tomb and only a woman to see him; rabbits and eggs, resurrection and life.
The river kept moving south and west, toward the Lake. The woods were full of sunshine, birds, trillium, turtles.
Some day, I will wake up in my own skin and feel at home in it.
