Therese Oneill's Blog, page 3

Goodwill, Unopened and Cruel.

Crystal died so fast.

She never knew what to make of me. Our daughters had been best frenemies since age six, their squealing little naked bodies careening through our small house, slipping on laminate, streaking from their daring “night swim” in our inflatable Intex Quik-Set into a hot shower. They were trying to shock Gus but vastly underestimated his ability to block out child-squeal.

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LE and Sweetie once upon a time.

To this day I’m not sure Crystal actively liked me. She worked the night shift and though our daughters spent summers together we seldom crossed paths. When we did, she was wry, polite, and distant. I chalked that up to the fact I am…a confetti cannon of off-putting. In later years she’d say I talk too fast and too weird and it made her insecure. But she never disliked me, and that was good enough.

Sometimes people are put on this earth and you are compelled to love them. Whether they like it or not. Hell, whether YOU like it or not. So I pestered Crystal with friendship. She tolerated it, a lifetime of unhappiness and downright sorrow making her suspicious, always.

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Taken from Crystal’s Facebook

But she did love. She loved her daughters. They were 6 and 12 when I met them and she doted on them.

Things changed over the years. I wasn’t a constant part of her life after our daughters firmly parted ways. I would check on her if my daughter reported anything needing checking that she gleaned from school. Thus maybe our friendship took on a matronizing aspect.

I badgered her to fill housing forms, would stop my car in an abandoned field with her in it until she made the difficult red-tape phone calls she needed to make. I knew what it was like to be so under it all. So buried in demands upon your spirit and energy that you just stay in bed, or in the bong, or in the fridge. Friends yanked me out from time to time. I tried the same tactics.

I loved on her, sporadically and with force because there seemed no other way to go about it. I loved her youngest daughter, Sweetie, too, sometimes to my own daughter’s “steam-coming-out-the-ears” objections.

“Sweetie” isn’t her name save in my house. My son Jack, age four, hearing me continually refer to her in casual endearment (Mother’s Little Secret, all my children’s friends are named “Hon” “Darlin” “Babe” or “Buddy.”) decided it was, which delighted the seven year old girls. “Iz Sweedee!” he’d chirp when she’d appear at the window.

I made the mistake of introducing her on some outing as Sweetie.

“That’s not my name,” she stated with fire and confidence. Then softer, “That’s just for Jack.”

She is an unusually beautiful child, 11 but slight as a nine year old, carefully laying out clothes that match and making sure her hair is clean and brushed. Her eyes have the remarkable white/blue/silver you’d find at the heart of a glacier, ringed in black corona; the overall affect being an image that could have only been given to Earth via the Hubble.

NOT Sweetie. And the eyes are too dark. But you get the idea. (source unknown)

She showed up after a year’s absence at my door. I had been keeping tabs on the tumult. Things weren’t great on her homefront. She’d come home with my daughter from the bus-stop, and my daughter was just as surprised as I was. Sweetie was calm, mature, had apologized to all the girls at school for any friction they might have had between them in the past.

I believe the child is built for survival. And I believe she knew on some level that rocky, rocky days were ahead. It was time to lay hands on every adult relationship she’d built over her life and make sure it was steady.

I took Sweetie back home that night and disliked what I saw…and here began my powerlessness.

I don’t believe in calling DHS (child protective services) if a child is not it serious peril. Because DHS can’t guarantee, though they intend well, that any new situation will fix that peril. Sweetie was physically safe, fed and sheltered. Her mother was simply overwhelmed.

So I did not call DHS. But over three people had called DHS on Crystal by the time I’d come back into their life.

If you can help that parent, one whose not a junkie and not mentally ill, get back to ok, where they can they then care for their babies like the once did, THAT’S what you do first. I made a rule for myself to stave off saying the wrong thing or making the presumptions I am dying to make.

The first and only words from your lips are “How can I help?” and they are spoken to  the parent, not the kid. So I made grocery runs, drove to doctors appointments. Then more doctors. Then…

A week after Sweetie reappeared, Crystal, her mother, 46, went to the doctor with a sore leg and came home with a cancer diagnoses. Sarcoma, muscle cancer in her thigh. Words like “rare” and “aggressive” bounced off me because she wasn’t scheduled to see an oncologist for near a month so it couldn’t have been that bad, right? And we all know people who have gotten cancer and, if they are young and the cancer is followed by light words like “skin, muscle” instead of “lung, lymphoma” they’ve come out ok.

Crystal was given pain pills and that was good. Reality was no place for her right now, she had no idea what to do with reality. No one should suffer that waiting for further tests and so-so answers and hem and haw without anesthesia of some sort. But they made her bed-bound. I’d go to her there. She placed my hand on her back thigh and I felt hard impaction, a flat swelling (two things that don’t usually go together, “flat” and “swollen”) under the skin. My palm was too small to cover the entirety of it.

But it didn’t click. My hand told my brain weird soothing things…”We’ve felt hard skin before. Cysts. Pregnancy. Obesity. Inflammation.”

My brain only later let me re-frame.

Tumor.

My hand had been on a tumor, or part of it, because it was so large I couldn’t totally cover it. A malignant tumor that size is no longer living local; it has swam on, seeding a whole body, sapping life force to power it’s mis-programmed cell multiplication.

Crystal had a thin support system. I wanted to be more, do more. But she just didn’t like to ask for things and I had no right to try and butt in and direct things. She had family and closer friends…they just weren’t near, and though I tried to connect with them I didn’t do well.

Things sped up when she had reluctantly asked me to take her to a doctor’s appointment. I told her to be in front of her apartment waiting, and she wasn’t.

I used the pitifully concealed hide-a-key and let myself into the dark apartment. It was damp and hot despite being November; she’d shut every window and kept the fan pointed at her bed, recycling fetid air. Crystal was sound asleep. This made me mad. Cancer, no matter how light as we all assumed it was, meant you don’t fucking miss doctor’s appointments. This was important. I  aggressively flicked the light a few times over her cringing face in as if to trigger Bucha Vertigo and hollered none-to-warmly at her to get her sick butt UP.

I wasn’t mad at her. I was mad that she was so damned sick and no one was there to take care of her and that’s WRONG. She groused from her bed that she didn’t care about “that junk” (doctors, I assume). I declared tough shit and grabbed clean sweats from the top of the laundry. I dressed her as she began to doze on the toilet and got her in car. She was incoherent on the drive, dehydrated.

Thank God, because the doctor saw it. Saw that she was NOT ok.

Crystal’s father, elderly but capable, entered the picture and I faded back. There was a constant undercurrent that I caused more hassle than comfort when I tried to insert myself. I had never been accepted into their loose clan and that just was that.

Sweetie didn’t come around much after the first few days she spent with us, despite my zealotry of outfitting the guest room to her taste, my lectures to the girls that they were to behave as sisters when Sweetie was here…they didn’t have to play together or even like each other, but they had to live in kindness. I was eager to mother her, but she pulled away gently. Partly because, I think, she had three or four other options, some of which didn’t make her go to school, partly to be with her mother and sister, and partly, to my shame, because my own daughter was not kind to her. LE didn’t understand the scope. She just saw a person she seldom got along with cuddling her puppy, playing with her annoying little brother, and being snuggled by her mom. LE was pure ice-burn toward Sweetie.

I sent regular texts to both Crystal and Sweetie, mastering all the funniest non-corny gifs and stickers to communicate with Sweetie and short “tell me how much of cancer’s ass ya kicked today woman!” to Crystal.

I hung around their apartment while scattered teenage boys who loved Crystal and called her “second mom” shaved her head for her…they didn’t quite do it right but I forced myself not to but in. She was happier with their jokes and bumbling. I came later, scrubbed her down in the shower and made fun of her granny panties as I dressed her. She laughed and then cried, which she only ever did in short bursts. I folded her thinning frame into mine. “I can’t do stuff for myself!” she said. “I should be able to  do stuff on my own!”

“Who the hell SAYS, Love?” I asked her. “Guess what?  All women battling cancer get free back scrubs after head shaves, it’s  the law. Now let the people who love you take  care of you!”

Oh if I coulda just convinced her more people loved her.

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From Crystal’s Facebook

I checked in via text one night mid-December.  “Well do I come up now and give you your prezzies or wait til you come home?” I texted.  I’d put together a care package. Three sassy head scarfs, “Cancer Picked the Wrong Bitch!” big mug, “You’re stronger than you know” inspirational wood plaque, and one silly sassy bright red cosplay bob wig, her favorite color. They’re all in the Goodwill box now, unopened and cruel.

She said she was in the hospital. I said “Ug. Hospital. Treatment or trouble?”

And simply: “No more treatment. I’m terminal. I have six months.”

I have no idea what I wrote and I deleted the conversation in some stupid fit of melancholy. But she responded to whatever I messaged with “Luv ya.” Last message.

Crystal was given six months.

Crystal cashed out in six days.

I say cashed out because…Crystal was done here and I do believe she had a choice in how long she wished to stay. That the spirit had flown before the flesh. I believe because I’d seen my mother do it. Both women had begin to shut down, separating from their most loved ones.

Before I knew the extent, when I thought that “swelling” was nothing to fear, I’d appear at the foot of her bed arms crossed, “Crystal, LE says Sweeties not been in school all week!”  Crystal scrunched her face and shrugged “Well I don’t know nothing about that. She’s been in school probably!”

“Crystal where is Sweetie staying tonight? I’ve asked Mark and Sheila and everyone else she normally stays with but they don’t have her.” Crystal would lift her ever-present iphone and squint through messages, until finding the polite message Sweetie had left telling her mother where she was crashing that night. “She’s doing fine,” said Crystal, turning away from me. “She’s tough kid.”

That disconnecting is painful but it’s the last protection the dying mother can offer her child. Independence and self-reliance. “Get used to me not being around.” When my mother, rather dismissively, stopped coming to her porch swing to watch her grandchildren play months before heart disease took her, we were offended and hurt. But it was a gentle shrugging off of bonds…something a loving person might do to loosen the connecting tendons of love so there is slack when they’re slashed by death, so maybe it hurts less.

Oh…I wanted to be in charge, my friends. That’s a problem with me. I always know how to make it better if everyone will just see it my way. I had resources others didn’t, I had space, I had good research abilities and a great knack for getting what I want. Let me take over, I’d hiss in my brain. Let me arrange care for you, Crystal. Let me get you a patient advocate who won’t take “sometime next month” as an appropriate scheduling for an oncologist.

But they can’t see it my way because they aren’t me. They have to make it work their way. And I have to be a help, not a mouthy pushy butter-in.

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And Sweetie? That’s tricky. She’s little. She still needs a pushy butter-in to advocate for her, although she’s been navigating this atomic upset of her life with poise and patience. Still, the only other time Crystal cried in my arms was a quick and sudden break down early on, while Sweetie was bouncing around her bedroom packing enough clothes to stay with me for and indeterminate time.

“Thank you for keeping my baby safe.” She let me hold her with a begruding lean that wasn’t dislike for me, I  think, but the rigidness that took her when she let the enormity and the unfairness of it into her brain. More than a person should bare alone, though I think she insisted on it.

I held her again, said, “Just until you’re strong enough to, Darling.” And Sweetie…seeing the tears her mother seldom showed and having a composure life had given her along with the many gut punches, sighed in the doorway and said, “Mom? Don’t cry just because I farted.”

Crystal laughed and kissed and hugged her child.

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From Crystal’s Facebook

Crystal died a few days before Christmas.

Sweetie is… well I don’t know. I’m not blood, I’m not legal. I text her directly and she consistently insists she’s “fine,” but insists it from different homes, different relatives, different states. I think there are many more things that she is, underneath that “fine.” But good God that child is strong.

I want to bundle her into my life, or at least give her what I can without upsetting all the others who love her. I want to do right by Crystal, do right by Sweetie. But I’ve no rights to do right.

All I know is my next move. I know her remaining legal guardian. My next move is to buy him a hamburger and say those words, the only right ones. “How can I help?”

I can’t do anything else.

 

 

Princesses, broken soldiers, lard-asses and draft dodgers. Unite?

I picked the first woman I’d ever hear use the term “micro-aggression” to ask. This is not her name. Belinda. Belinda is an academic, a professor in a male-dominated study. She is young, and she is pretty. She is often mistaken for a student on campus.

I asked Belinda what she thought of my previous post. I wanted to see it through the eyes of people who would have been deeply disturbed by it. I know she is highly sensitive to institutionalized and casual bigotry, particularly sexism.

She hashed it out patiently with me. I asked questions and she tried to put it in terms I could understand, even using a fashion analogy from “The Devil Wears Prada” to show that the big guys on top make decisions that trickle down and affect us all. She was trying to help me understand that just because I personally hadn’t encountered many problems with oppression in my adult life didn’t mean I wasn’t affected by it.

She had said her sensitivity to the small insidious nature of male dominance formed from studying to be a professor in a male-dominated field. That it was a death of a thousand paper cuts situation.

As for my previous post about Steve the screamy hugger, she was conflicted. She said my conclusion that I was not hurt by the experience “bugged her.”

She said, “I like that you are taking ownership there – but somehow it sounds a bit victim-shamey.”

The more she explained, the more reflexively found myself shaking my head at the screen.

Unfocused, unreasoned anger creeping down my chest. Then another dear friend explained how she’d felt when a male friend had tried to comfort her after he witnessed her in an altercation by telling her she had been “brave.” Something he’d never had said to another man. Then, the world being particularly transparent and putrid when it comes to men and sex lately, just a glance at all my friends and acquaintances on social media showed a tidal wave of offended women.

And I was getting angry…at the women. Angrier. Indignant, even.

I found more pictures of women holding signs saying what awful things had been done to them. And I know when it was that I snapped, found a visual representation of why I was getting mad at these women. These (complaining) women. These (entitled and whiny) women. These (emasculating, politically correct, special snowflake WEAK) women.

It was when I found two images too close together. One, a woman holding a sign that said, “I won’t smile to be prettier for you.” and a different women holding a sign saying “I was wearing a long sleeve sweatshirt and jeans when he raped me. I was seven.”

There. There.

How the FUCK, I thought, does that first woman dare think she shares territory with the second? How dare she feel “oppressed” by something the man probably didn’t even know was wrong and the only action she takes to stop it is tattling to social media? How dare women start looking at every time a man said something stupid or smug to them put it not in the “person said something stupid” column but the “Sexual Abuse” column.

I was livid.

I’ve had a LOT of therapy, however.

First Rule of Anger: Therapist says if something…some one or some trend is pissing you off hard, it’s because of YOU.  Not “them.” Don’t blame “them.” Some ugly spot on you, Therese, is being exposed by these women’s experiences and opinions. The only way to stop it is to find out what you’re really angry about. What that person is mirroring to you that you find so ugly.

I began writing back to Belinda but stopped. I was NOT actually writing to the flesh and blood woman who’d laughed with me over dinner and let me hug her without warning when I recognized her at the elementary drop-off. I was arguing with an idea.

And by the end, I think I found the ugliness these women were exposing in me.

I’m…so…jealous.

Jealous that you ever got the leisure to notice … improprieties and small gestures. That you never had to go where I went. 

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I’ve cribbed some of that letter I was writing to not-Belinda. Here’s some of it. I’m not revealing any secrets except those which are mine to reveal.

I wrote:

I need to tell you some stuff.  Look, If I ever said I didn’t believe myself a part of sexism, I misspoke.

For most of my life it was ALL I KNEW, Belinda.  I’ve been at the absolute mercy of  men. My father…I loved him, love him still. But he was the largest inhabitant of a world solely populated by men and boys who terrified me, clear into my mid-twenties.

Parts of my childhood are straight from Lifetime movies of the 80s and 90s. Pardon the melodrama.  Trip on my shoes? I’m thrown into a wall. Left the wet towel on the new table when I’d tried to mop up some 7-up I spilled? I wake from a dead sleep to being called a numb little cunt, dragged out of bed by my arm. After I came out of my first stint in a mental ward…still wearing the wristband from the hospital, I sat on the floor and he SCREAMED I was a selfish little bitch and no one could even wipe their ass without first checking to see if poor little Therese was ok with it. I was costing him hundreds of dollars a day because instead of enjoying his expensive motor-home it was sitting in the driveway and they had to come home from summer vacation and take care of FUCKING FUCKING YOU YOU LITTLE SHIT. OH JESUS YOU GONNA CRY NOW? His face would contort when he got like that, spit and blood-flushed. I was 18 then, I guess I could have severed ties. But I had no money, no idea that a girl could take care of herself. In fact I was POSITIVE I couldn’t. So I do know what it’s like to not realize you have a choice.

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14 years old, first day of boarding school. This picture…really sums me up at that point in life. And yeah…that’s my Dad.

But it wasn’t just that. Everywhere and without end. I went to a two room K-6 school house where both teachers were terrifying, answered to no one, and disliked women. Home and that school, my entire world. The biggest misogynist I’ve ever met was my teacher, and she WAS a woman. She went by a genderless name, had a man’s haircut and dressed like a man. She punished girls for acting girlish…took away recess if they spent it talking too each other about girl stuff. Because they “obviously had no intention of actually playing so they didn’t need it.” She would never let girls do any of the fun or adventurous jobs because “she needed someone strong for this”. We ached to prove to her we were strong enough! It was a real honor to be allowed to attempt a “boy’s job” like arranging tables or getting something out of storage from the bus barn

I hated being a girl. Girls existed to clean house and wait hand and foot on men and children and be mental and physical punching bags. They were boring, useless and helpless. I hated them.

In middle-school something about me screamed VICTIM. Maybe how desperate I was to be liked. If I wasn’t invisible I was “outta my way lardass” “what’s so funny you fat bitch?” “look I got a whole fist full of fat off this fatass” (That was the time my bullies crossed the line…Derek and Lila (Lee-la…but most certainly a 14 yr old boy) were their real names…and grabbed my gut just passing me in the hall). I didn’t tell anyone, it was too embarrassing. To admit you’re so unpopular and so weak that boys know they can lay hands on your and hurt you and you’ll take it. So I know what it’s like to be too scared to tell.

Then religious boarding school, where sexism WAS literally institutionalized. Different rules for boys and girls in all things. Biblical proof for why women weren’t meant to lead or cause anymore trouble than causing the entire downfall of the human race by eating an apple had caused. But damned if there wasn’t

a certain amount of cherishing in their sexism, at least compared to what I was used too. Therese, your dress needs to be below the knee because you’re pure and good, and we don’t tempt our brother’s in Christ to sin. (Like my ugly ass could tempt anyone, I thought.) But that was heaps nicer than I’d ever been treated. No one called me names or hit me. I felt safe there. So I know what it’s like to meekly except institutionalized wrongs as okay.

Then to large state college, where for the first year or so I went back to either invisible or fatass bitch.

I don’t know when that part of my mind…jumped tracks. Gus was part of it, so strong and kind and strange and he loved ME…fat weird useless ME.  A new college, where the classes were full of people who appreciated quick wit…which it turned out I had somehow cultivated through years of television, reading, and constant formulating unspoken “You give yer boyfriend rimjobs with that mouth, buddy?” retorts when someone insulted me.

And dad died. I held him for hours the night before, he was hurting so much. His shakes, death throes really, would slow and ease if I held his hand over my heart or stroked his bare forehead. I loved him. I still love him. So I know what it’s like to love and forgive your abuser.

Then I became a mother, which I regarded as a powerful mantle, and the confidence showed.

At any rate…at some point in the last 15 years I began to own that I was not nice and pretty and good. Never meant to be, in fact. I decided I was weird, damaged, and a fucking Valkyrie. And when I decided that, the world agreed. Holy shit, they agreed! When I was talked down to, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to walk closer and ask the person to repeat what they’d said…and how just that was enough to deflate them. How a biting comment meant to be funny could wilt under a quick enough smartass retort. Holy shit. Power. I’d been growing stronger all this time. So I know what it’s like to buck The Patriarchy, in as so much as it needs bucking.

 

Valkyries don’t care for your sexist attitude. You will be eviscerated. 

 

And to now. To my anger. Where is it coming from?

Why it is, that when I hear women saying that the cards are stacked against them because of the Patriarchy I think, “Yeah no shit. Welcome to the world, Princess. Stop stomping your dainty little foot sniffling “not fair!” Grab the fucking deck and reshuffle.

3

I’ve no idea of the source or accuracy of this photo. But I used it because the sentiment is real among many women who think “feminism” is something shrill and cowardly.

But now just having listed off my own background…I see how unique it is. And…kinda bad in places. How thirty rough YEARS went into making me able to snap a comeback off the cuff or turn and walk face to face with a man because I’m confident he’s not going to hit me, and frankly partly prepared if he does. That’s what it took to make me oblivious to micro-aggression. Do I really expect the majority of women, in this time and place, to have gone through what I did?

Women aren’t over-reacting. In THEIR 21st century world, one mostly inhabited by socially aware, educated non-violent people, men being patronizing is outdated and should be phased out.

Women are doing precisely that, reshuffling the deck, but their  polite 21st century safe way. They aren’t going to say, “Yeah, hey, fuck you buddy” like my wonderful white trash self might. They’re gonna do social awareness campaigns about privilege and aggression. That’s how stuff is done in their world. And I can respect that.

That’s what I wrote. Now.

I’ve come up with my own analogy. This is the heart of my jealousy, my resentment. I’m gonna retell this story with different characters, maybe it’ll sink deeper that way.

I feel like a Vietnam vet shuffling off the plane, coming home damaged as fuck and knowing I’m STILL one of the lucky ones. Some of the guys in my platoon will never, ever be ok, never come home to safety.

And standing before me on the tarmac are angry lank men with long hair and megaphones, protesting, burning their draft cards and yelling at me that the War is wrong! Didn’t I know it was WRONG? Was I going to be complacent, or SPEAK UP, like them?? 

4

They’re right. The war is wrong. I sure as hell hated it. Maybe the only difference between me and them is that I was drafted so early, before the protests started. I’d be standing with them if just a few things had been different.

Weirdly, War made me grateful for small things. I’ve gone without water for days in prison camp in the Vietnamese jungle, so I’m not even phased that my building isn’t up to code, I don’t demand Housing Authority inspections…it’s quicker to fix the broken faucet myself.

I don’t think anyone is to blame when the city bus breaks down…shit happens. We put up sturdy barricades around out camp, did our best to protect ourselves, but the enemy still got it.

I don’t care when the delinquents on the streetcorner try to act tough when I walk by.  They’re annoying, not dangerous. I’ve seen dangerous.

I carry a gun, and practice my combat training, too. If someone draws a gun on me in the dark alley outside that apartment, then I believe it’s my own responsibility to draw faster and shoot with no hesitation, like I was taught in the war. I could write letters asking for more police patrols or make a fuss trying to get some street lights put in that alley, but I think I’ll be far more successful if I just prepare myself for bad things to happen. And…if someone gets the drop on me, their gun is better or they’re stonger, well…I’m fucked. Life is brutally unfair.

And do I get mad when some smooth-skinned college-boy on TV, some lucky bastard whose experience with blood and pain ended on the grade-school playground, denouncing the war, the crime in the city, and shaming everyone who doesn’t think and behave like he and his followers? Yes, even though technically, we’re on the same side wanting the same stuff.

I have other friends who came home from the War and began organizing protest marches themselves, Vets Against Vietnam, yelling louder and angrier because they truly know how bad it is an that’s how they want it to stop on a large scale. They’re braver than me in the long term. (That refers to my friends who would be holding the “I was raped when I was seven” signs, the ones who’ve survived inhuman treatment and are loud-spoken politically involved Feminists,) agitating for governmental change, society to change. How freaking bold, really. How amazing. You might think less of me for not joining them…but it’s not how I fight.

I just don’t want that college boy to tell me my way is ignorant or oblivious. I’m gonna try and respect his journey, because my children will reap the benefits of both our labors (You work with the eggheads to change rules up top, and I’ll teach them to use a gun in case that doesn’t work.)

5

It’s not that sexism doesn’t affect me. It’s affected me so much I can’t believe how lucky I am now, to be safe. I get shocked by how easily other people are threatened. I remember one friend confessing his father had a substance abuse problem. I felt hard and fast empathy. But she went on to say that when he was drunk the worst thing was that he became ill tempered and withdraws. I was…puzzled. And I said, unsuredly, timidly from the back seat, “So he never…hit you or hurt you? Then…wh…why are you mad at him?”

The answer: Because I’M KINDA FUCKED UP. She had every right to her feelings. It was her dad.

War raised, not lowered, my pain threshold, and gave me ugly but effective combat skills. It made me ready to draw blood – not from the safety of air support – but with the thrust of my own bayonet. Who in their right mind chooses hand to hand combat over safe cover??? Or, in feminist terms, It made me pissy and defiant to the man directly in front of me treating me disrespectfully, ready for awkward confrontation as long as I’m the one making it awkward.

And the newsflash here… I am not all women, and they shouldn’t be like me. God FORBID they should be society would crumble into a mass of cranky lazy smart-asses desperate for approval in weeks.

They have to go about getting the power back in their own way. And as for the women who’s mistreatment was mild by comparison but still agitate and hold signs and clam victim-hood…well by their pain thresholds, it wasn’t mild. It legitimately hurts them, over and over, like paper cuts. Paper cuts fucking sting, and they heal slow.

I don’t have all the answers. No one does. But sometimes I think more important than dismantling the Patriarchy, we need to understand where it came from, why smart women indulge it, why kind men thoughtlessly use it, differentiate it from qualified men in positions of deserved authority, and teach ourselves why every single person has a different, VALID reaction to it. And then, have some patience and empathy.  No one is plain wrong when they act and think different than me.

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These women stand shocked and quiet, and that’s not a failing on their part. My “Never get laid?  Really? Cuz when your mom was going down on me last week I totally counted that as sex,” is the result of … the kind of life that makes a reasonable nice girl like me be able to say that. I’M the outlier, they’re the norm in a civilized world. (again deepest apologies for lack of citation or credit, please let me know if you know who the artist is). 

Princesses, broken soldiers, lard-asses, marginalized professional women, women dismissed for being too pretty and young, women who haven’t been taught to fight back, and men who are allies and are trying to find their footing in a society that isn’t the same one they were raised in…we’re all on the same side of the battle line. We just need to respect that we’ve been placed in different positions behind that line. We flank, draw back, we charge, we’re front line or sewing stitches in the med tent, and we’re in the offices back home, studying maps and strategy. But we all desperately want to win this war. We all want to feel safe.

Filed under: Editorlessness Tagged: analogy, bad memories, biology, Death, Fat, girlie junk, Gus, hurts, NO., religion, sex, The old days

You don’t have the power to make #metoo.

The first time Steve put his hands on me, I sighed, audibly, said, “Okay, then,” and thought, “So this is how it’s gonna be, eh?” I was displeased, not offended or violated.

The first time.

The private room in back of the fancy Portland pub was empty except for me and a bundle of audio/visual equipment shoved in the corner. It was three hours until I was due to take the floor and present at that hip little venue, but traveling in Downtown Portland unnerves me more than transcontinental flight. One-way grids, “parking lots” with unattended booths that still somehow manage to fine you $200 for parking there, “blocks” that are in fact hexagons or wedges or not traffic engineering at all but in fact art installations. I circled (zigged, backtracked, squared, diagonalled) four times to find the pub, even more to find parking, and then lugged all my A/V equipment up-hill to the venue.

I wasn’t budging. I was gonna have a mojito and eat eggplant next to historic oak paneling and imagine all the weird underhanded business transactions that happened in that room over cigars and monocles and big man-bellies 100 years ago.

It was a festival. Lit Crawl, just the second time Portland has done it. Restaurants and book stores and venues all around Powell’s City of Books were hosting readings and panels and book stuff. I was going to read and show slides from my book, in a presentation titled “Unmentionable: The Victorian Guide to Horrifyingly Adequate Sex.”

It’s big. Real big. Has EVERYTHING. Actually so big you kinda give up after awhile and stumble out with a joke mug of Shakespearean insults you don’t really want. Least that’s what happens to me like every time.

“There will be red-shirted volunteers stationed all over the area to help out,” the email told the presenters.

Steve had apparently not received the same email I did. His must of said “There will be red-shirted Omnipotents mingling among you addle-minded children. Obey them. Those who question or attempt to impede the Omnipotent in his work will be subject to furious consequences.” 

He was large, over six foot, spry and thick chested though near 60. He came into the room, inspecting it with a nervous, jerky body language, muttering, touching walls and tables as if to check how much impudence they contained.

“Don’t mind me!” he said cheerfully. “I’m just preparing for an event later.”

“Lit Crawl? I’m Therese, one of the presenters. Thanks for diving into all this craziness!” I said, raising my little mojito at him.

He grinned and marched toward me to shake my hand.

In the past year, since my book came out, I’ve been offered hundreds of hands. I don’t shake. I fist-bump. A small part is because I’m left-handed and people always give me their right and it honestly confuses me. But mostly because I’ve spent months being reinfected with the same cold, and if my son gets a strong enough cold we go to the hospital for a few days to keep him from suffocating in his own lung mucus.

Everyone is usually cool with that, tho. I said, like always, “Ehh…bump me. I’m all germy and sweaty.” The strain of carrying in my screen and projector from the $23 parking spot I’d snagged had not yet dried from my hair line, and I stuck out a friendly fist to meet his palm.

Steve stopped, smiled, and threw his arms around me. “I’m gonna be sweaty soon too!” he said. The hug was intended, I believe, to show that he was an easy going lovable guy and he didn’t mind a little sweat and germs. I didn’t see him hug any other women that night. But I imagine I give off hug-vibes, chubby and childlike as I am. But I don’t remember the last time a strange man hugged me on initial greeting. Usually an outstretched fist is a pretty clear anti-hug message.

But I decided. People are quirky, and I’ve got no right to get upset if someone violates social protocol.  For instance, within three hours a beautiful pierced and tattooed audience member hopped up to adjust my microphone stand to it’s shortest possible height. She wore a very low skin tight top, and it was quite flattering. When she finished I said into the microphone, “Thank you so much! And your bosom is absolutely lovely!”

 

 

To the roar of laughter I added “Oh now, I said it but we were all thinking it.” My presentation is about sexual frankness…great bosoms are part of my wheelhouse! I have a whole chapter on them.

Also, I honestly believe it’s not creepy when I say it. (Whether or not it is.) Like how The Golden Girls got away with more sex jokes than any other show on Prime time in the 1980s because the women telling them were cute, not creepy. One of many examples where me being a woman gives me more freedom.

But Steve. Oh Steve.

 

I watched Steve for three hours or more. He was flustered, as had been the moment he walked in, like a man taxed with single-handedly planning and executing a shuttle launch; instead of arranging chairs and helping plug cables.

 

Another author came early to help set up for her friend. The author had an authoritative presence, her writing and her mannerisms showing a deeply-rooted feminism. But she had no Sacred Red Shirt. And she and Steve had different ideas about how things should go.

I had a mojito, as I said. And I didn’t care about the chairs. I come freakishly early so I don’t have to be agitated. As long as we got my screen pulled up I was set, and this hot stone soup needed no more cooks. The author, Amanda, bristling against what was becoming the apparent incarnation of everything people mean when they talk about The Man, except for the actual men who run out societies have been invested with true power. Steve had not been given enough and it was making him upset.

Did you know there are different “waves” of feminism? I’m not sure how they work. Basically, most Western people today are at least a little bit feminist in the sense that they won’t refuse a female doctor if they’re bleeding out in the ER. Even the oldest of the good ole boys have known competent women they’ve respected in their lives, women in pants, who get shit done.

Third wave feminism is the most current, I think. And I’m not sure what it is. Probably everyone has a different definition. But I know it digs deeper than “women are people.” It examines the little things the men do to screw over women and sexual minorities. It has terms like “micro-aggressions” and “body-shaming” and “fuck the Patriarchy.”

The truth is, I don’t understand micro-aggressions. Maybe because I’ve seen my share of macro-aggressions (that’s code for when a man is so drunk and angry he throws you into the steel knobs of the linen cupboards cuz he tripped on your shoes and you’re nine. Oh… I have stories to tell, but must wait for some people to either die or sign legal agreements not to sue me before I can tell them.)

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A woman shows an example of a micro-aggression spoken to her due to her gender. And I…don’t quite…see it. Via YCHD

But as for “micro” aggression…You’re either a dick or you’re not. If you’re trying to be a passive aggressive dick, then you should be called on it, calm and forthright. I did that when a male author, early in my career, smiled down on me and told me that signing a literary agent “was my FIRST mistake” and that if I really wanted to know how to be a writer I should have taken the class he offered last quarter because he didn’t have time to explain the details of his success of Amazon to me. When he said, “Good luck!” as I left his office, I said, “That’s…the most back handed good-luck I’ve ever gotten. It’s on the heels of a huge list of the mistakes you told me I made. But uh…thanks.” We haven’t talked in a long time. Except the time I swung by his office to say, “Hey! Made the New York Times Best Seller List after just two months of publication! Weird huh?” Cuz…I can be a dick too. It was 100% percent gloating dickery. I own it. [image error]

Which brings me to fat-shaming. I’m between…50 to 150 pounds over-weight, depending on which draconian health chart you consult. I’m ready to be called lard-ass at any time, with a clicking shotgun finger and a slap to my own butt with “Don’t I KNOW it, Baby.” Which is usually the end of the fat shaming. Crazy unexpected reactions beat casual cruelty. That night, in fact, since it was Portland, I sent my “FAT CHICK” shirt on her maiden voyage. I know my body dis

gusts some people. It’s visceral, they probably can’t help it, their brains are wired that way. If they keep it to themselves and give me a chance to show my Therese-ness to them, they we’re jake!

 

 

As for the Patriarchy…I…I might need to do more research on that. I don’t see a conspiracy, I see the slow adjustment of society to changing needs. Men ran stuff cuz they couldn’t get pregnant and they were stronger. For all of history. This has changed (um…thanks to a man’s invention of reliable birth control but whatever) only in the past 50 years…it takes some time to rewire all of society.  I think we’re moving at a fair clip, historically speaking.

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I can’t find who to credit for this masterpiece. If you know, tell me. And tell them I think they’re the ovaries.

 

But now Steve. Steve had been sent to challenge my mellow view of sexual equality, that gender isn’t nearly as big of a game chip as people say it is.

The second time Steve grabbed me was after he yelled at me.

 

He’d just barked off some mild-looking patrons who’d come early for the presentation, saying their presence disrupted (his control over) things and we would NOT open until six o clock. Barked. My German Shepherd does it when strangers come to the front door. Her hackles, the black fur on her shoulders and spine, spike like ferocious goosebumps. It’s a defensive response of her territory. Because she’s scared.

 

 

The restaurant was open and there was no keep-out sign on our venue room.

 

“I think it’s fine if they sit down,” said Amanda, an edge in her voice.

 

 

“NO. It’s NOT fine.” He spoke as if he believed he was the only grown up in the room. “It’s going to be CHAOS and I can’t deal with extra trouble right now.” The extra trouble that would have been…added to his chair-arranging.

 

 

At this point I was fiddling with my screen and computer, trying to make all the cords fit and stretch.

“‘K,” I said. “So I sit when I talk, and I need to be next to my iPad which is connected to my projector, so, yeah I’ll sit here.” I said, indicating a convenient looking spot.

 

Steve looked up from where he was exerting authority over my electronics. I approached my own projector, my sweet little jalopy, to coax and conjole it into doing what I wanted. Steve intercepted me and said..commanded…yelled,

“SIT DOWN OVER THERE.” He indicated a space I did not want to sit in.

You know that red vision “wee-woo wee-woo” alarm scene in some movies where the protagonist just had their rage button pushed? Men yelling at me. I don’t take that anymore. I fought long and hard, and I do not take that anymore. If you want to show your superior male prowess, then you’re gonna have to belt me, I won’t be able to fight that and I’ll have to do what you say til I can think of a way out.

But if you’re just gonna shout, and your brain is flaccid enough that you need to use your testosterone an amplifier, well, I’m in this now.

Underneath the short, cuddly pudge of my exterior, I’m an unhinged John Goodman. 

“I’m sorry. What did you just yell at me?” I came to a dead stop and stood up, walking closer to Steve. squinting my eyes in confusion like he’d just told me do a cartwheel. “Did you just tell me to go sit down like a five year old? Your mama raise you to treat ladies that way? Or did she teach you a word called please?”

It wasn’t a perfect comeback. And don’t think I was talking like Kiddo in Kill Bill through gritted teeth that threatened bloody repercussion. That wouldn’t have worked, it would have escalated, not resolved. I used a voice of irritated bemusement, female and sassy, non-threatening but no-nonsense. The voice of a teacher, a nurse, one of those acceptable female authority figures.

It worked though.

Sort of.

Steve broke into his grin again and groaned. He folded his hands in prayer formation and crowed “Mea Culpa! I’m so sorry! PLEASE try sitting over there! I’m sorry I’m just so flustered.” The he took my shoulders and pulled me toward him. I sunk down to a crouch and escaped him. A weird childlike move, one I’d never been allowed to use in my actual childhood. But unmistakably the actions of a person who didn’t want to be touched again. I thought.

When it was time for my presentation, I asked for the lights to be turned off. My projector is a sturdy little thing but it’s shy and needs darkness.

Steve was flummoxed by the request. Now, when I really could use help. By now there truly was chaos in the small room and the restaurant behind it, noise and standing room only. I was pinned to my place at the front of the room. Steve didn’t know if it was possible to turn off the lights. I had A. spoken with the owner and knew it was B. watched the manager flip them on when I arrived.

I couldn’t communicate that to Steve over the pressed sea of people, noise, and his fidgety, unfocused anxiety. He set off on a mission to find an employee and when he did find the switch (right next to the door) he found it was a simple dimmer switch.

Giving Steve control over a dimmer switch was giving Steve too much power. He toyed with the lights, up, down, blinding, black. He turned them full up and I collapsed in exasperation in front of my audience.

“I spent frickin’ HOURS finding these images of birth control douche-bags and TV-MA Kama Sutra drawings and you’re all damn well gonna SEE them clearly!” I told my wonderful audience.

Steve entered the center of the room and boomed. “I will not turn out these lights until 7pm. There is a waitress in this room doing her work and I have to be aware of her.”

I covered my anger with an indignant “Which of you dared order food or drink during my presentation!” to my audience, who laughed. Also, none of them had. The waitress was done. He must not have asked her how much light she needed or how many orders she had to fill.

At seven sharp, the lights blacked out. And I had a fantastic time with my audience and my presentation. I told people stuff that made them groan, gasp, and laugh. My audience was wonderful, and we had a fun, fun dang hour.

After a presentation ends, there is a mash of bodies. Some coming to see me, some going to the bathroom or leaving, and the next presenter was doing an entire burlesque show in that little room. There was allotted 15 minutes for me to clean up and her to set up. I moved slow I admit.

Steve got between me and a darling woman I’d just recognized (AND HUGGED) from another event and said in a way that might have been sincere but Jesus I was Steved OUT.

“We need to get your stuff cleaned up. What do I do to help you?” That wasn’t rude, I know. But I heard his brain speak, his behavior over the whole night, not his mouth. I heard, “You’re in MY way. You’re making MY important job harder. I’m the boss here. I’m the BOSS of YOU.” 

 

I whirled on him. “Steve. I’m moving fast as I can. I will get my three items of clutter removed from your space. Give me five damn minutes.” I was pissed, well and truly. Not a place I usually find myself.

Steve’s face blanked. “No I mean it I want to help!” He reached out his arms again and walked toward me.

I leapt back. “NO. HUGS.” I said. 

He stopped and shook a finger at me. “You’re…I can never tell if you’re joking.”

“I am not.” I said, circumventing him widely, suddenly finding space among the a sloppy circled crowd that had formed like teenagers in a movie-fight scene. “I’m not joking. You’re bossy and I’m exhausted. I will clean up before the next showing. You have my word.” I had come out of strict-teacher voice into something closer to my own naked one,  tired and angry.

Steve left, muttering about not being able to tell if I was messing with him, to “help” set up the next act. That was the last I saw of him.

Steve wasn’t a dyed in the wool asshole. He wasn’t. My son is autistic, his diagnoses has caused me to learn a lot about what is called “non neuro-typical” people. What we used to call weirdos, geeks, retarded even.

This is what I gathered from watching Steve all night. He had little ability to read other people, his interactions felt like he was trying to play-act how a person in his position SHOULD act. He felt an over-exaggerated sense of responsibility and importance. He had difficulty completing tasks that required going from A to B without digressing to C and 11 first. He seemed to set on edge the teeth of all the people he was trying to help, particularly the women. Is that enough to make me think he had a minor cognitive disability? Yeah.

 

He crossed my very, very wide line. He yelled at me, treated me like I was foolish, and touched me despite my repeated loud non-verbal communication not to. It’s new territory to me. Men rarely bother me in any way in my adulthood. Partially because I had years of…well…lets call them “macro-aggression” from men. Telling me I should smile more often doesn’t necessarily even register as aggression to someone whose made their peace and forgiven the man who used to through them into walls. The last man who told me to smile was walking into an estate sale next to me. I stopped. I thought. I wrinkled my brow at him and said, “No.” And he said, “Okay.” Done. No harm intended on either side.

I wished my husband had been there. He’s from New Jersey with very high functioning Asperger’s. But to anyone who doesn’t know Gus, he’s a dead-eyed, silent wall of weight and muscle who pulses with the “he was a quiet guy, kept to himself ” as they haul out the body bags from the basement-vibe. But Gus wasn’t there that night. And I know if he had been, Steve would not have been a noticeable part of my evening at all. Therefore, he hugged and bossed me because I was a lone woman, one who didn’t look like much of a fighter, unlike Amanda, who was tall, angular and assertive.

But Steve was also a struggling, frustrated man over his head, compensating the only way he was taught to.

All I know for sure is that Steve was not helpful that night. That he lost his temper, that he made things harder. That he was too overwhelmed, and contributed to the disturbance he was supposed to soothe. I will write the organizers and tell them as much.

I don’t know if his behavior was purposeful misogyny. Or misogyny at all.

 

I do know one thing.  Whatever Steve’s  deal is, I wasn’t his victim. Not of micro-aggression or patriarchal oppression. The only thing I was a victim of that night was aggravation. You teach people how to treat you, no matter your gender. You can dress in leather leggings so tight your pudenda is perfectly outlined and still not be a slut if your eye contact is firm and your words are wisely considered. You can weigh 300lbs and defuse fat shame with a smirk and wiggle of your ass. You can stop micro-aggressions by putting up your hand and saying with a smile, “You’re kinda fucking around with me here, aren’t ya, buddy?”

But some people, like Steve, it takes them longer to learn what I’m teaching. But I wasn’t oppressed. Because despite what he may have wished, Steve did not have enough power to oppress me. I never gave it to him.

Filed under: Editorlessness Tagged: biology, Fat, girlie junk, Gus, NO., sex, tried a new thing, UNMENTIONABLE, writering

I don’t like summer. But I love Instagram Takeovers.

 

Instagram Takeover Part…like…the Fifth? tomorrow my friends! Theme: “What I did on my Summer Vacation.” Where I get to shower social media with a mixture of child-labor, chubby babes in sexy swimsuits that reach their ankles and wrists, a couple private pics of my own, and all things weird and summer-y. Cuz the secret…I really frickin’ hate summer. But I’ve found some bright spots. Come see tomorrow, August First, just search for Little, Brown on Instagram.

 

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Preview Just for my bloggies:

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Lawn Sprinklers. Naughty Postcard from Card Cow. Ah…tasteless humor knows now century, god bless us.

Filed under: Editorlessness

It All Depends on Your Definition of “Succulents”

“So what are you going to use it for?” the attractive older woman asked. “I thought it would make a BEAUTIFUL planter!”

Her assistant visibly popcorned in excitement at that idea, blond ponytail twanging.

NO. NOOOOOOOOO!!!

“Oh YES!” she said. “Succulents would look beautiful in that!”

“Or like a little stand for a guest bathroom supplies?” the owner offered.

I…had no response. My first reaction was baffled revulsion so deep it twisted my face and stole my language. To my ears, these nice ladies had just chirped “Hey you know what the Sistine Chapel needs? Some tract lighting with pretty scarfs draped over the bulbs! Hey, has anyone ever petitioned Congress to update the Statue of Liberty’s outfit?”

I had just finished a wild, barely scripted presentation at one of the nicest history museums in Oregon, explaining to a group of elderly ladies why free bleeding during menstrual periods was perhaps the most likely option for women of the 1840s walking 2000 miles across a hostile wilderness.

“Unhygienic? Oh screw you. Right in the ear. We live in a mud-house. All so that one day you could have a boutique wine bar on every corner buy marijuana lollipops.”

And I was HOT. I can’t think when it’s hot. Nor can I describe what I do. If I say:

-“I write books ’bout history” – they think…well nothing. Cuz that’s boring and could mean anything, none of which is interesting.

-“I wrote a funny book about what it was like to really survive as a Victorian lady.” – They think (and not incorrectly)…oh, lovely. This lady thinks she’s scholarly AND funny.

-“I wrote a New York Times Bestselling humor/history book about all the secret stuff ladies did in Victorian times like how Scarlet O’Hara went to the outhouse in them big skirts and now I go around and give presentations on it for museums and stuff.” -They think (again, not incorrectly.)  “That’s pretty impressive I guess…but who says all that braggy stuff in casual conversation? Hmph. Isn’t THIS little stuttering frizz-haired gal rather full of herself…”

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“So…old timey vaginas. They’re really something. Amirite?”

If I’ve ever been able to explain what I do, it wouldn’t have been nearly as disturbing when I paused for entirely too long, swallowing back sentences before they started, and then clutched the porcelain bowl to my chest and said,

“I’m…probably gonna lug it around the country with me and help people understand how old time ladies took care of their privates? Before toilet paper and tampons? And also birth-control. And (here I got excited and the autopilot flopped itself on: like asking someone who sells LulaRoe about the advantages of the clothing line) actually these were used for sooooo much. See people didn’t full body bathe back in the day, it was entirely too much effort to fill a bathtub with even reasonable temperature water before the 1920s or so, so they had all these SPECIFIC washing tubs for the dirtiest parts and, foot baths, hair washing, sitz baths for your bottom and in EUROPE they’d straddle these and use a sea sponge or a flannel whenever their vaginas…needed…cuz…vaginas need a great deal of…care?….”

And THAT’S how you bring a fancy antique shop full of people to an epoch of silence, pleasant expressions still pressed like plastic moulds upon their faces from decades of practiced good manners.

“Well!” said the polite classy owner lady, “I’m certainly glad it’s going to someone who can appreciate it on so many levels.”

Thank you Ma’am.

It had gone like this. It was sitting there in the far corner, unadorned…not locked behind Plexiglas with laser alarm triggers like it should have been. I literally dropped to my knees in front of it and god knows what I was muttering. Certainly something hallowed, along the lines of “no freaking…oh god. No freakin…beautiful so beautiful…” and other such pillow talk.

Oh Heaven Forefend…Mercy, I beg you.

“Isn’t it cute?” The owner asked brightly, a terribly well put together lady. “When I saw it I thought it was a bath for baby dolls! But now I can’t stop think how cute plants would look in it.”

I’d didn’t hiss at her, as much as I felt like Gollum crouching over His Precious surrounded by ignorant, shabby-chic loving Hobbitses.  This is to my credit. I know there aren’t a lot of people with my interests and hours of research. With my PASSIONS.

And the fact that this lady was still talking to me after she’d shown me a pair of crotchless drawers with tiny ANCIENT blood stains and I’d whispered in worshipful silence, “I’ve got quite a few pair of drawers in my shed but these…” And and the exact same time she said, “Oh yes the EMBROIDERY!” I exclaimed “THE MENSTRUAL BLOOD STAINS!” after which she gracefully left the room.

I’m going to corrupt a quote from Nabokov here. Because I’m only mortal and he was Infinite…so he can describe this emotion, when I saw her, best.

” A normal (wo)man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts antique porcelain and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a mad(wo)man, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine, in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone  straddle bowl, the slenderness of a  downy limb, willowy wooden basin support, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little 150 year old French bidet deadly demon among the wholesome crockery children; she stands unrecognized by them…” (Lolita p. 16-17)

What I found friends, is THIS. [image error]

Which…as any perv obsessed with the bathroom habits of human history knows…is THIS:[image error]

Which is not easy to find in America, especially the West, and is valued other places…(same model except in worse condition)….for THIS:

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I paid embarrassingly MUCH less than $900. Although still an awful lot of money for a flower pot.

There is a potters mark on the basic…it dates the bidet to around 1870s, France. My job and my passion, is to tell people how women handled the impossible tasks of maintaining their bodies and lives before the 20th century. This bidet is a staggeringly well preserved, touchable answer to half those questions. This is life, this is a woman alone at her most vulnerable, this is one of the pieces of history they didn’t want us to remember or know. My life’s work is to yank those secrets from the past. They don’t belong to them anymore.

So happy. (She threw in the blood-spattered underwear for half price, too!)

Filed under: Editorlessness, Tarnished Gold Tagged: biology, FOUND!, girlie junk, happy, The old days, tried a new thing, UNMENTIONABLE, Visual, whoops

MOUTHS SHUT & UTERI OPEN, LADIES!

 

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If you’re in the Portland area, SO AM I, this Saturday at 2pm, Tigard Public Library. Gonna be doing some serious schooling, Wives. 
Filed under: Editorlessness, Tarnished Gold Tagged: sex, The old days, UNMENTIONABLE, Visual, writering

Therese Goes to Arkansas and is Now Fully Qualified to Solve Race Relations

 

Don’t call them “Rebs” and don’t call it The War of Northern Aggression even in fun. OR in sincerity because you’re contrarian by nature and you’ve read waayyyyy too much about the Right of Secession.

They will go pale, look frustrated or guilty or…..guiltstrated…. and not be able to think of how to respond.

Never say “you people” to African Americans even if you MEAN, “you Southerners with your obsession with mac and cheese and Cool Ranch Doritos. ” That’s considered racist, though it was meant…geographicist. But if you do, just carry on and hope your non-regional dialect, (the only accent Oregon can lay claim to), is pronounced and that the lady you just said it to understands blunder-mouthing from intentional condescension.

Condescension! “Bless Your Heart!” is a flat out insult no matter how sincerely you may say it back in Oregon.

Off the top of my head, these are the first three rules of decorum I violated upon entering Arkansas. There will have been more, but me being me I do not [image error]know what they were.

Oh! If you sit on a stoop with bags at your feet wearing jeans and a t shirt, you look like a hobo and no one will give you directions back to your hotel. Even if you shout after them “I’m not a bum! This is like $60 worth of specialty deli food at my feet!” In Oregon, you might still look like a hobo but the class-guilt is strong enough that people will talk to you anyway.

Men of all ages and station will tease strange women. Walk right up and say, “Now which of those sweet things you buying are for me?” Or, “Hey there! Sorry ladies, they done give away your hotel rooms! Teach you not to be such slowpokes next time!”

They do not know they are committing micro-aggressions or violating your safe-zone, nor that teasing is a mild form of hostility, one particularly misogynistic. Therefore, providing them a lecture or pamphlet explaining their transgressions will do no good.

The proper answer to this behavior is of course, to slip on your Mae West imaginary feather boa and respond “The only sweet thing here is me and I’m not for sale.” And “Well then I guess you’re going to be a gentlemen and hand over your room.” If you can do it while poofing your hair with your hand or twitching a dismissive hip, you win.

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The racial tension you never understood cuz there are three black people in your town is real here, no one talks about it, and they all do a remarkably nice job of getting along despite it.

Maybe.

To be fair, the only black people I met in Arkansas were in hospitality industries where they have to be nice, ladies who liked my work, or feted authors and poets.  A small a biased sampling.

Little Rock, Arkansas, was a reframe.

It’s hard to have your town be most famous for the first high school integration. They have this huge monument, Little Rock Central High, that symbolizes…too much at one time. Progress. Hatred. Being forced to do something you weren’t ready for. Being embarrassed that you were forced to do something you should have been ready for, 60 years later.

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The Nation Guard is called to escort nine black kids to Little Rock Central High. 

——————-

“This part of town is just coming back to life,” my friend told me as we pulled into the revamped auto shop that was now a fantastic museum.

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I met the owner of the museum, the consummate picture of a Southern Lady of Means and Class. Her hair was snow white and styled with edge, her bright dress a perfect unique casual that costs at least $200 to achieve. And oh, that accent. I fell in love with her for all this, not just because she too had a lifelong obsession with collecting 70 year old lipsticks and purses. My friend told me she was almost single-handedly responsible for reviving the neighborhood.

“Gentrification!” I said. We have a LOT of that in Oregon. Ghost towns built to harvest lumber becoming wine tasting destinations, old banks becoming dance studios and art galleries.

The dear lady looked…guiltstrated. “Oh. Oh no I don’t think that’s the right word. I don’t like that word. It’s just revitalization!”

We were in the special room of her museum dedicated to the purses and ephemera that had been donated by African American ladies when she said this, showing me 80 year old fire-iron hair straighteners and 50 year old skin bleachers. I asked direct questions about the products and she struggled to answer, that same consternation I’d been seeing over and over.

It hit me all in a jumble, that the South had once actually HAD a ‘gentry’ and she was likely descended of it. And if so…she wasn’t allowed to be proud of it.

———————-

Later my friend told me about the neighborhood in a hushed voice. “After integration, everything fell apart down here. White flight cleared this part of town out. The weird thing is that before the integration, the black people had a thriving neighborhood. They had all their own services, stores, schools. But afterwards, the black shops lost most their customers and had to close, people who had jobs became derelict…it’s weird.”

Little Rock’s Pankey Community

“Why’d that happen, you think?”

She said softly, the guilt of being smart, Liberal, but still a privileged white girl with no right to an opinion imprinted deep in her voice. “Cuz people were made to do stuff they didn’t want to do.”

There were other reasons, including new roads causing a shift in geography, but the reason she cited had weight too, and it wasn’t an easy one to say.

We sat in her car outside my motel for 15 minutes talking, and in that time I found out why I’d been blanked when asking for directions. Being fat and sloppy isn’t the same as being black, but class-conscious people must register them similarly. The neighborhood was different at night. Twice black men approach her idling car, motioning for money through the closed windows.

Her body went rigid each time they approached. I…well…I though they wanted directions, natch. She was ashamed to not have any money to give them. “I honestly already gave my last few bucks to a guy earlier today.” She looked at me. “Cuz y’know…no one wants to be begging for money. You have to help if you can.”

Guiltstration.

I have only been to the South in the history I love so dearly. And history is, and I say this quite purposefully, black and white. Brutally cubist, delineated. White people were mean to black people and we need to be sorry WHILE managing to move on with the goal of skin color resonating no louder than hair color.

That’s pretty easy to do in a place like Oregon. Every corner of America has rotten spots when it comes to whites vs. everyone else. Technically, though not well enforced, black people weren’t allowed to live in Oregon til the 1920s. Still, we here in the west aren’t surrounded by reminders of recent conflicts and cruelty and anger. And we’re not looked down on as much for the side of history our community fell on. Not when there are places like Arkansas.

“My dad says that people who are born in places like Little Rock and are Liberals, have to try much harder than people born in Oregon or New York,” my friend said. “It’s more of a fight when you have to shake off everything you were taught and raised with, shake off everything you see around you, to think the new way that you know is right but…doesn’t feel quite natural. Whereas you guys are born thinking the “right way.”

I don’t think she meant having to struggle free of sick brainwashing by bitter, horrible racists.

I think she meant something so much more complicated and messy. How it is if you grow up loving your dad, feeling safe at night as his snores rumbled the house, being painstakingly taught to use a pocketknife or hunt or do trig or gouge the eyes of a man who corners you in a parking garage by him, watching him do amazing Dad-things like make broken things run again or spending a weekend building a wheelchair ramp for an elderly neighbor on the hottest day of the summer, cracking goofy jokes the whole time, and watching him spoonfeed your stroke-invalid mother until her dying day….well you love him, hard. You’re proud of him.

But he was openly anti-integration. He thought black and white people, all people, do better with their own tribes. Racist.

What a punch to the gut to have to put an asterisk next to your own Dad’s name. “He was a good man, *BUT…(not really. One simply can’t be racist and good at the same time. Right?)” Should you have to? I mean…if you don’t then it’s like saying the stuff he thought was okay and it wasn’t but…he’s my dad. He was good.

When I flew back over Portland, the plane descended from grey clouds over the grey Columbia River. The black-green trees were clumped everywhere, grown where their seeds had landed, not where hands planted them. Even though you usually get tense when you wait for the wheels of the plane to gouge into the runaway, I felt myself relaxing. When I left my gate, I followed our famous ugly beautiful carpet,

How The PDX Carpet Became a Hipster Icon

and when I looked up there were the people. Strangers. But the slight differences leaped at me. The North Face Jackets. The sherpa hats. Few suits, not much jewelry. Men of all ages in retro t-shirts. Home. Home home home. People I know, people I can disappear into, my tribe and my land. Cheesy, but that doesn’t make it less true.

I cannot understand the complexity of living in the 21st century Southern United States. I have no experience with race relations, really, and neither do a lot of the people who talk very loud about them. My life is naturally, not forcibly integrated…and that integration mean about a handful of black people who, for whatever it’s worth, don’t have to tread the same ground every day their ancestors were slaves on. I’m not asked to feel guilty on a daily basis, nor am I living in a place where my grandparents weren’t allowed to eat at a cheap Woolworth’s lunch counter because they were black. I don’t know what it’s like to be hated because of my appearance, or, because of what my grandparents might have done. And I can’t believe I thought I knew shit about any of this. Like books and movies could possible tell even a fraction of the whole story.

The only thing I understand now is that it’s not as simple as we’ve been taught. Not as simple as we wish to god it was.  That much of what we consider good and bad is actually spin-art, not cubism. The colors of cruel, kind, justice, anger…they’re clear, but history; the time and place and the way things worked back then and there, that’s a vicious centrifuge. It whips it all around into blots and smears. You can’t tidy that.

Not Black and White. See what i did there? (The Artful Parent)

And we should respect that we can’t.

 

 

 

Filed under: Editorlessness Tagged: analogy, bad memories, biology, tangled, The old days, tried a new thing, UNMENTIONABLE, whoops

Dark Night of the Fourth Floor

 

I hated that room. I shouldn’t…I do enough historical reading and research to know that this room is a life-giving miracle. But I smelled like vinegar and old underpants, because the spare shirt my husband had grabbed me two days ago was a heavy sweater and the heater was broken in this room, so I hadn’t changed clothes for days.

I’d already abandoned all modesty at night, announcing to the night staff, “This is the maternity ward too, yeah? So you’ve seen ladies stumbling around in underpants and a sports-bra before? Good cuz these pants are coming OFF.”

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Yeah then don’t LOOK if ya don’t like it. 

It was my third day in that hospital room with my son. I’m not sure that room was even meant to be. The stone support pillar that was wedged against a small bedside table was an exact twin to a pillar on the opposite side of the building…except THAT pillar was exterior, outside the building??? For some reason they’d built a weird little room around this one. A strange little after-thought of space, not quite big enough for both his hospital bed, Jack’s sickness, and my general life force.

It was the asthma-dance. I hate it, but the steps are ingrained, muscle memory. The boy stops breathing normal, meds don’t clear his airways, he likely has pneumonia, we go to the ER and settle in until the virus clogging his lungs passes.

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It’s basically…his lung-grapes that soak up oxygen get clogged with guck and not enough air is absorbed. Scientifically speaking.

We were quarantined, no one could enter or leave the room without papering up in yellow gowns and masks and snapping on blue laytex gloves. I’d been allowed out once, to buy Advil and a cookie (he hadn’t eaten in three days) at the gift shop while a CNA babysat.

I had to wore a mask the whole time, washed my hands every time I entered or exited an elevator, hallway, or room. I had to walk directly to the locked doors of the maternity/pediatric ward, no dallying to try to get a glimpse of that little newborn I could hear mewling through the walls. They never said if they were trying to keep germs off Jack or Jack’s germs off everyone else.

And after just the first two hours of the immense stress that comes with admitting a child to the hospital, you stop asking all but the most basic questions. And even that is difficult.

On this the third day, I was jimmy-legging and rocking slightly as a pediatrician read an “Asthma Action Plan” to me. It was how I should react if I ever go to take my son home. It said, “If his medicine don’t work bring him to the hospital.” This is the same “plan” my family has been instituting since I was two years old, lying in the space my now plain-breathing son occupied.

I could not bear her pace, one I would have appreciated for any subject I didn’t fully understand, but for this..I finally cracked and said (interrupted) as politely as I could, “You are exactly, precisely, to the letter…describing the process I went though that brought us here in the first place. And the last time. Time before that too. Not my first rodeo.” My voice was lilting a bit toward a hiss, so I smiled, because don’t be a DICK Therese. I know they’re trying to help, dammit. Be nice!

 

I felt disgusting. I hadn’t been too fresh to begin with..grabbing pajama-like clothing in the six minutes it took me to pack for the emergency room. I’d been surviving on whore’s baths with wet wipes and the occasional shower hose diverted straight onto my most offensive areas. TV was even more terrible than I remembered. When I slept, it was on a coffin size bench, my head resting where countless asses of anxious parents had been over the years.

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But most of all, I was just so damn soul-tired. I wanted to go back home, where I was strong and safe.

In all stories there is supposed to be a moment where the sadness and misery of the plot crushes the main character, and spurs her to change or action. They call it The Dark Night of the Soul.

I hit that the second day. I had talked briefly to my husband, encouraged him to stay away for the day. I wanted him, but not as badly as it would hurt him to come. He is strong, but not when his children are suffering. He doesn’t understand the asthma dance like I do. His voice on the phone was far from okay. I told him all the small improvements Jack was showing, how he chatted up the female staff, how much he played with the blocks his dad had brought him.

And when I hung up I realized there was no one else to call. My mother…well. All I really wanted was her. But she is dead.

I don’t have any other blood family that will talk to me. My friends knew of my situation through Facebook. My very close friends knew from texts and brief calls. And they were all as supportive as friends should be, more so. But my mind landed on one person.

One person who…might…who could…I still can’t even finish that thought. I don’t know what I was expecting. I looked at Jack, his torso heaving with every forced breathe. He’d gotten worse since we’d been admitted. Viral pneumonia, swollen lungs, oxygen receptors choked with mucus. I began crying. My baby. This place. Me. Just hurt, and I cry when it hurts a lot.

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Wee Jack, before it got really bad

And so I decided to go all in. Jackpot or broke. I called a mutual link, the one person who speaks to her often, and to me politely, and I asked.

“Could you please…and no more need be said about it…but you could you please ask her to call me? Let her know about Jack and that I asked her to call me? And if she doesn’t…tell her I understand.”

The person agreed.

And…I waited.

I thought…there has to be a line. A place you get to where everything that happened before doesn’t matter anymore. An age where it’s more important to be a family than to stay angry. A place where whatever I once did can be forgiven. A place where if nothing else, I’m a remnant of our beloved mother. I wanted her to find this place, and picture where I’m sitting alone in the dark, watching her mother’s grandchild burn with fever as a line of faceless people stab him with needles and tubes. At that point…other stuff can’t matter, can it?

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There were a LOT of images for “ignored” but they were too tragic. I gotta be honest with my big angry baby self.

I waited. It got dark and I cried. Thought…maybe now. Because it’s dark and…surely she knows I’m in a bad bad place if I even asked. We know I’m not supposed to ask. It’s been five years. Nearly the entirety of Jack’s life and half of his sister’s.

Darker.

You did it again, I told myself. Spread open your arms, pointed at your vital places and said, “aim for here…it will hurt best here.”

I called Ro, who is a sister to me, blood or no. I made no sense, just cried into the phone. I had to go when the nurses came in to listen to his lungs and I was making too much noise, even huddled against the window, for them to work.  Ro intuitively heard what I most needed, and only five minutes later her own mother called me, one of a few dear women left, who tucked me in at night at sleepovers and kissed my head. The sound of my own name in a gentle, familiar, mothering voice made me start crying all the harder.

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Say hello, Ro.

 

But the time to pity myself had passed. Jack was awake, there was a staff-shift change, instructions, questions.

I can’t remember how many friends texted offering every sort of help imaginable. Sent private messages and public cheer. My crisis was not the only one happening in most of my friend’s lives but they were there. Everything from taking my daughter overnight so her Dad could have some time to cope from offers to fly in from Boise just to sit with me. Real offers.

Jack is recovering with speed, yelling at the sloppy planning that goes into the schemes of the green piggies on Angry Birds. I feel like bleached denim, not the purposefully bleached sort but the result of accidentally dumping chemicals on top of a load of jeans. Drained, faded through, not as tough as you’d think. But I have my Gus and daughter back, and they have us. Family.

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it’s who I am (the dramatic toddler, forever)

Family. I’ll probably always be waiting for that call.

It won’t come any time soon.

But it’s who I am.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Editorlessness Tagged: biology, Death, Gus, hurts, The Barnacles, The old days

You FAILED, Christmas 2016, for I yet draw breath!

By the end of Produce, my underpants had slid clear down my butt and hips. They came to a crumpled state of rest in the seat of my “joggers” (grey sweat pants with pineapples on them) and there they seemed content to stay. I tried, once, in the toilet paper, tampon and cold medicine aisle, to exhume them by hand and replace them. I did not try to hide what I was doing or who I am; a fat lady with exploding hair, wearing a knee length latch and loop cable knit sweater apparently borrowed from a devastated Dust bowl chicken farm, rooting around in her own pants. It was the medicine aisle. That’s like the hospital of the grocery store. I believe standards are different in that aisle.

And such was the state of my holidays that, when they had completely fallen by the dairy case, I left them there for the rest of my shopping trip, hoping but not bothering to check if my oversized sweater covered the outline of them.

I first got sick on October 19th. I was well for a single week in early December. I have been sick since. I refuse to give credence to the old ridiculous wives-tale that (despite repeatedly proving true through all of recorded history in every human’s own lifespan, has not been satisfactorily EMPIRICALLY proven),  that being IN the cold will GIVE you a cold,  and so I’m do not believe my sickness has anything to do with trying to help my wine-valley raised, snow-baffled children build a snowman.

Seriously they were utter dolts out there. They didn’t know the role-press-turn routine of getting a nice big snow butt. But they were dolts in snowpants and hats and gloves. I was wearing a sporty sundress because nightgowns creep my husband out.

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….worth it

We got through a tiny party for both my children, who suffer December birthdays, mid month. I attacked the Amazon boxes their gifts came in as if those boxes had raped my mother, stabbing and tearing with keys, steak knives, the sharp corner of nice rock I own. I threw the tangled seaweed of air pillows to my dog, who I’ve heretofore yelled at for playing with, hoping each bag would feel the force of her 250lbs per sq. inch jaw pressure.  Thinking “kill it. kill the joy. kill all of it.”

We pulled off the little party, I think. I was two Nyquil and a Robitussin down by then so I only remember missing my daughter’s bus as I incoherently instructed the girl at the grocery bakery to take all the Frozen shit off the blue cake and make it gender neutral and do it NOW (I caught the bus on it’s second time round the neighborhood), and the folly of hanging a pinata over a mud hole in December.

Oh, and somehow I purchased a completely different style, make, model of Apple Product (meant to be brand new Mini…was somehow refurbished Ipad2) for my daughter. I have no doubt the error was mine. I get turned around so easily with Apple junk. She was happy tho so I played it off like a pro.”Yeah! Just as big as mine! No…you can’t play any of those games on it…Roblox will make it melt. Ooo…here’s some Toca Boca…no…nope can’t run those…huh. But it’s like you got your own fuzzy giant camera now! Yay!”

Ooo…and look at your special new iPod!

I have GOT to stop buying gifts after taking cold medicine. And mixing that medicine with five hour energy drinks. And some pills. Or…screw it . Whatever.  I’m a beautiful fading sunset leave me the hell alone.

The ice storm hit again, but I needed a fucking Christmas tree. And though I love Christmas, yes, that is unfortunately how I continually referred to the symbol of family and joy in my head. Fuckincrissmaztree.

When my father spent the last two years of his life as an invalid, I hated knowing my mother was ever alone. I would, often as feasible, drive the deadly ice corridor of the Columbia Gorge, skating the foot of Mt. Hood, in blinding snow and black ice. My husband would white knuckle beside me as I chanted over and over “If they don’t close the road, it means it can be driven. If they don’t close the road, it means it can be driven.”

Compared to that, gliding sideways (wee heeeee…wheee I’m in a two-ton toboggan…!!) down a few empty backstreets to the nearest lot was practically lollipops and somersaults. The snow…the snow is cold. My hands froze dragging a tree from the side of the  QuikEMart that sold them. I paid the night clerk inside.

Except night-time, in pajamas and birkenstocks….also my legs are half that long. 

 

“You need help loading that?” he asked, all but pleading I’d say no. And I did. Because I’m not sure he would have let me leave the lot in the manner I intended. Which was trunk completely open, tree hanging ass-end out the back, slippy-sliding a Camry back home.

My husband and I don’t eschew traditional gender roles on purpose. We like them, honestly. But we’re just AWFUL at them. We’ve narrowed them down to a mere handful. He doesn’t know what size clothes the children wear and he has never bathed them. I don’t know how to defrack or frag a computer, and on the bad lights that appear on my dashboard are not my problem. Also, I guarantee two full turkey feasts a year. That is all.

I was deep in the sick when I went to the smallest store in town to buy Christmas dinner. I chose the small one because I didn’t think I could walk a bigger one without dropping. The only turkey breast I could find was organic and the size of a softball. Me and two other women stood staring at the empty freezer case where the Cool Whip was supposed to be…refusing to accept that it was gone and genuinely expecting it to re-appear. We are Americans, goddammit, and we eat Cool Whip on pumpkin pie.

My bedroom had succeeded the state of fire hazard, due to the stacks of semi organized boxes and an archaeological layer of laundry that,

“Where’s the damn scotch tape??? I just HAD it!” 

when I’m better, I’m simply going to throw away because the past two months has proven I apparently have no need for those particular clothes. It had graduated into the room on Hoarders that that the therapist gingerly steps into, eyeing stacks of boxes and swollen garbage bags that threaten to topple at with the tiniest mouse fart.

 

I wrapped, which I like. I like giving nice presents. I balanced the numbers as best I could because I knew my daughter would count, even though her presents were more expensive. When left me staggering, hacking into my elbow, in the nearest drugstore on the 23rd looking for least drugstore looking present for a ten year old possible.

Do you KNOW how cheap Wet’n’Wild make-up is? Oh sweet Jesus some of the lipsticks were on sale for fifty cents. I mean, they were all like, “Herpes Mouth Pink” and “Chemical Burn Red” but she’s ten, she loves that stuff. I sank to my knees in front of their display and filled my little basket with tacky, horrible colors that would delight her burgeoning femininity. Thank you Wet’n’Wild, you cheap bastards. With all my heart.

[image error]Christmas happened…the kids were happy. The tree was decorated with two ziplocs full of handmade ornaments over the years as a tiny family. That and that scary scary card of Krampus Gus put up a few years as a joke and I put up every year as a reminder of Gus being special.

I meant to start dinner. I went unconscious instead. Which was a crushing thing to do to Gus, who hates almost everything on this infection of a planet, but turkey.  I made it the next day, though. We all got one serving before our ancient, barely sentient cat parked her flea-bitten ass on the counter and started licking it. Which told the dog, who is usually better behaved, that the folks were giving out free turkey and…I got no turkey sandwich.

My only goal in the store today was to buy enough prepackaged microwaveable

Worth the watermark…

snackable food to keep my children from asking either of us for ANYTHING until after the new year. That should work fine if they will live peaceably on fruit loops, cheese, and microwavable corndog bites. The young man at the checkout asked if he could help me out as I slapped down box after box of Nyquil in front of him.

I have comfort reflexes that I’ve never grown out of. That night, it was to sink down behind the check-out. Really I was just resting cuz I was…SICK. But by maintaining unflinching eye-contact with the boy as I did it, and talking in gasps and wheezes, made it seem more awkward than ideal.

“Y….esssssssss. But I have Ooo in my trunk…so… you’re gonna hafta…squish.”

(Ooo is my rolling Adventure Time cartoon suitcase that holds all my book junk. Adventure Time takes place in the Land of Ooo…so, it makes perfect sense.) Things went smoothly enough after that.

I’m feeling much better now.

One of the GREATEST one liners of the 80’s. Turned it into a personal mantra.

All right friends. Goodnight to all this. Wonderful things are around the corner.

 

Filed under: Editorlessness Tagged: Fat, Visual, whoops

Presenting New York Time Bestselling Mega-brat Bigmouth, Therese.

I’m a New York Times Best-Selling author. It’s rather technical, the NYT divides its non-fiction into sub categories. I’m on the Fashion, Manners and Customs list. I’ve decided it counts and have began dressing appropriately for a person befitting my station (see left).

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Do you KNOW who I am? 

The big list…just plain “Non-Fiction Hardbacks”….I think you have to be on TV or lead a large religion to get on that one. Those people, the ones with charisma to entertain millions with a smile, have dipped cups into the tureen that we shed-dwelling book-smelling writers have crowded around, starving, even though there is set a whole buffet table for them. Go be attractive and soulful by the dessert table, Bruce Springsteen, Dali Lama and Tim Tebow. This is our  broth and we’ve already got to share with a lot of people.

One of the reasons I’ve been successful in my short (5? years) career, is I’ve been told I have a “unique voice.” That means that I write like I talk, but better. Cuz I talk like a half-wit drunk on Nyquil. But that voice in my writing is scrubbed and rinsed. It comes out sharply, with words that fold like origami cranes into sentences that say just what I mean in a way lots of people aren’t bored by. That’s all a good writer is, really.

One of the reasons my voice is distinctive is because I have no proper sense of shame. I don’t remember where I lost it, or when. I did have it. I was too ashamed of my worthless ugly stupid self to even talk to people for YEARS of my life.

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Please don’t throw rocks at me. Or you can. I don’t know.

But at some point…maybe when my husband fell in love with me, I snapped it off. That long dry rotting shame stick. Broke it off. No replacement parts available. The end result was an inappropriate loudmouth who meant no harm. That voice, it turns out, altered just a bit for fun, sells books. (Or annoys the living crap outta people, but that’s fair.)

I have been having a really hard time understanding that I’m expected to filter that voice down now. Like, squinty-eyed, staring at a math problem written in Cyrillic, hard. Because I don’t mean any harm…why would anyone get offended? And I’m the same person I was before this book came out so…why…? I thought the whole reason I GOT here was because I was different.

Yet….[image error]

I have now stopped counting how many times someone from the amazing team of people who work so hard to sell my book has reminded me not to – or rebuked me for- inappropriate behavior.

A successful writer must not: 

-Tell people in book forums that they read it wrong and try to correct them.

-Point out to professional reviewers the pages they missed that would have most certainly warmed their tepid reviews.

-Personally answer interview requests. Especially not from pornographic magazines. No matter how funny you think it is.

-Post anything too transparent about your personal or writing life on any social media. Which is just…I’m an attention whore with no shame stick you have no idea how hard it is for me not to take selfies during my pap smear because that would be FUNNY….very difficult for some people.

-Skip proper channels of communication. If you don’t understand this it maybe is because you, like me, never worked in an office setting. You can’t just ask Lloyd in shipping why your boxes of pudding haven’t left the docks for Tonga yet. Really you want to ask Tonga why they haven’t put a rush order on your pudding…but [image error]you don’t know Tonga’s email. You especially  can’t if Lloyd doesn’t know you well and you tend to accidentally scream conversationally which some people find charming. You have to ask your supervisor, who will ask Lloyd’s secretary, who will speak to Lloyd at an appropriate time. Doesn’t matter if Lloyd’s office is directly adjacent yours, either.

And I forgot the rest. Shame nubs, itch. They all basically boil down to, there is a time and a place to act like your old, unfiltered self.

That time and place is when everyone has left the house and the houses near you and you are alone, locked in your bathroom, during a power outage. There you can talk smack all you want to decorative soaps and demand justification from your children’s rubber duck collection and literally show off what a wise-ass you are indefinitely to your flushable wipes.

That’s…maturity. Acting “like a grown up” is a term I keep hearing. Conducting yourself like someone who has their shit together enough to write best selling books.

The only problem is…what the WORLD is my motivation? Acting like a petulant child with boundary issues has netted me:

-True love and a strong marriage

-Just enough money to comfortable keep the wolves at bay

-Children I genuinely LIKE as well as love

-Friends in every flavor (local, casual, acquaintance, donate kidney for)

– A lift full of precious joy deposits just below the surface, gleaming through the soil.

-And oh yeah…that spot on the NYT Bestseller List.

I got troubles yeah…but the most mature people I know STILL have  depression, sloth, greed…all that junk I should probably one day try thinking about maybe working on.

 

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It’s a shed. But it’s got a loft. With a ladder!

But for the sake of those who worked hard to help me, and for those who paid good money to read me, that old self is just too pitted and scratched and torn. A few people will love it all the more for it’s flaws, but there is more now, than just me and those few.

I think I get it, finally. Sorta. I can’t become a sophisticate.  I was made how I was made, and no amount of reading, classy friends, or schooling has changed it. BUT.

I owe it to my readers and my associates and probable just everyone, to put on a clean shirt when I leave the metaphorical house. And not one with a fart joke written on it, either. To think before speak-screaming, and to not run up to every door like a belligerent moose and began trying to scratch and butt it open because I was too distracted to remember the key.  That’s not pretension, it’s just…showing respect to those who deserve it. Yeah?

I foresee absolutely no difficulty in quickly and thoroughly altering my habits at 38 years of contented age. Shush. Sarcasm is permit-able no matter what your maturity level.

 

 

Filed under: Editorlessness Tagged: analogy, happy, tangled, tried a new thing, UNMENTIONABLE, whoops, writering