Waking into dread again; bring back oblivion, please. No, don’t think, swing legs over the side of the bed, open curtains, put the water on. The flakes tumble into the bowl with a merry ring; they look appetizing with the raisins peeking from in between. Life is good with just cereal in the bowl. No yesterday, no tomorrow, just cereal in the bowl. Chop wood, carry water.
**
People go to great lengths not to be here — that place of having relinquished everything you dreamed of for years for the sake of a greater value, of walking through the worst fear and pain you can imagine because you know you have to speak your truth. Trudging home through whirling snow the other night, I considered that if we can’t be personally courageous, and brave this nauseous, chilling, near-catatonic I’d-rather-die-than-feel-this terror and grief in our private lives, what will we do if the Nazis or the Fascists come again? Really? How do we learn to stand up in the face of grave fear and loss? Especially when it’s safer to mind our own business?
Here in the United States we live in a time and a culture of a sort of extreme libertarianism, where individual rights are paramount and responsibilities to one another are almost nil. I talked to a charming elderly man from Surrey, England on a plane a few years ago who was horrified to hear that while there was no limit to the wealth an individual American CEO could acquire, there was also no safety net available to a destitute person with cancer. That would never happen in his commie pinko socialist country.
Looking after people is a “feminine” value; sensing that we are part of a web rather than a dog-eat-dog hierarchy is often part of the experience of owning a womb (on which someone else may, in fact, depend). We have to be able to anticipate and interpret the needs of tiny, helpless creatures who can’t talk to us or tell us what’s wrong, so our empathic and subtle emotional capacities are turned up to eleven. We read others; we feel them; we feel for them. In an socially isolationist culture, this can expose us to tremendous scorn — instead of the respect we may more accurately deserve — because we’re seen as weak, hysterical, irrational, even crazy.
This time, I trusted my craziness.
**
The introjected Critic starts flogging me immediately, with help from his buddy The Rationalist, for following such a dubious compass. Together they make me the queen of self-second-guessing. It was they who bound and gagged me all the way through college, leaving me mute in a forgotten corner. Shut up, you stupid bitch! Who do you think you are? What do you think you know? Unless you have all the airtight evidence in your briefing file and a lineup of impeccable witnesses, you should keep your goddamn mouth shut. No one could possibly take your unscientific ravings seriously! You’re likely to get slapped with a hefty fee, or sued for libel.
I wept yesterday, gratefully, hearing personal-development guru Michael Skye say in an online audio recording that the emotionality of women is our greatest gift, that the depth of our pain in relationships indicates the depth to which we can love, and that this “gift” of ours is the source of our true beauty and power.
It makes perfect sense, then — assuming Michael is correct — why Damien Rice’s emotionally rich music would restore me to such a strong sense of self, and why I would have such a bastard of a time explaining this to a male reader.
(A momentary aside here: where are all the women out there? I’d really like to hear from you. Not that I’m ungrateful for the few vociferous gentlemen who want to engage, but sometimes things feel a little unbalanced.)
I’m supposed to remain “reasonable”…and nice. A nice, reasonable female, who isn’t too convinced of what’s what (certainly not by anything “irrational”), and doesn’t assert anything too strongly. It’s already hard enough for me to be firm about anything, even when dealing with my friend Natalie’s defiant teenager, who is constantly sneaking out, getting in trouble, and breaking promises to her mother. I’m always asking myself: how is it my place to judge anyone else’s behavior, or tell him or her what to do?
Yet I’ve always admired those bitch-goddesses of tough love in movies and books, who lay it all out for the protagonist, three-quarters of the way through, telling him just how it is, boyyy, so you better straighten up that sorry ass before it’s grass. You’re runnin out of foolin, as the Queen of Soul sang, and I ain’t lyin.
They remind me of Ms. Cribb.
**
Ms. Cribb was my volleyball coach and modern dance teacher in high school. She was a petite African-American whippet of a woman, lean and powerful at nearly fifty, and leagues sexier than any of us fresh-faced teenagers on the dance floor. I had never encountered anyone who so perfectly embodied the prototypical coach-as-caring-hardass. She made sure we all knew we were valued, but she drove us relentlessly, and when we screwed up everybody had to drop and give her ten (pushups). We wanted to do our best for her, to push beyond our known limits, to make mamma proud. Her ironclad certainty was like our anchor; she didn’t have a tentative or wavering bone in her body. We felt her love, and that love was tough.
Sometimes in life, the Ms. Cribbs are absolutely necessary. In sports, in parenting teens like Natalie’s, and in dealing with anyone lapsing into unconscious or destructive behavior, the “whatever floats your boat” response just doesn’t cut it. Not, at least, if you give a shit. And bear in mind that this is coming from someone who wriggled her way out from under an authoritarian religious structure. I don’t ordinarily welcome the imposition of external judges, or the presumptuousness of intervention.
But Jessie Cribb saw diamonds in us; she wasn’t going to let us get away with slumping through practice like big lumps of coal. That’s the essence of a good coach or teacher: to see students’ potential, to believe in them, and to kick their asses out of their familiar, dead-end ruts.
Most of us want, whether we know it or not, to be the best possible version of ourselves; the hero, as John Barth said, of our own life story. But when we’re acting less than heroic, we may need a Ms. Cribb.
**
It was outrageous, really, from the standpoint of reason, of social protocols and the dictates of politeness, and what typically passes for common sense, to do what I did, to say what I said to someone without direct provocation. But I felt the emotional reality of a situation in my bowels, rather than connecting all the dots in my brain — although some of the indications were there too. I knew what was what, the way a wolf or a bat knows what’s what, the way my mother knows (whether I want her to or not) when I’ve been crying. My intuitive pointillism coalesced into a coherent whole, and the picture was not a pretty one. I shivered with the awareness of an old, intransigent, endlessly painful motif, wounded by my investment in the scene, tired of paying the unrewarding cost of admission. I deserved better. Everyone deserved better. All at once, I grasped with sharp-edged clarity that I could step outside the frame. I could opt out of the picture, and in that freedom, I could say what I saw.
So I spoke my truth. I took an outrageous, offensive, chance-murdering stand. I dived on a grenade, giving up on life as I’d known it (or hoped it could be) and consigning myself to an indefinite purgatory of grief (and possibly being hated), for the sake of something more important and possibly more real. I stood up for traditionally “feminine” values like empathy, and universal values like respect for self and others. I stood up for myself, painfully yet irrevocably realizing that sometimes you have to choose. I stood up for women, with our “unreasonable,” relational, emotional natures. And lastly, I stood up for the best possible version of a lapsed hero. Trusting myself…no questions, and no apologies.
Please-won’t-you-like-me little AlienBaby went hardass bitch-goddess for once, and pulled a Ms. Cribb.
To be that tough, I had to summon all my resources, and I cried my way through it — breaking every personal rule I had ever held about maintaining bonds, like a sister finally kicking her crack-addicted brother out of the house. I thought about how at my old job I could have continued to ingratiate myself by telling the owner only what she wanted to hear, and being a good little girl, but it’s not always the best thing to tell people only what they want to hear. I had to tell myself things I didn’t want to hear, ultimately. What do you do when you see no self-respecting alternative? All of the above could describe, to a certain extent, the essence of what happened at the studio.
And the last thing I wanted to do was leave a place that was like home to me.
**
My life coach friend applauds these radical acts as progress, as the emergence of a more aware aspect of myself into the driver’s seat. He (like many others in the personal development field) has always insisted that life shows up for us differently when we show up for it differently. I do think I’ve done much to dislodge the massive boulder of undeserving that’s been sitting in the middle of my road…but I lack his confidence that it will make that huge of a difference, or that I have the wherewithal to live through my current, almost overwhelming fear and grief. Employers haven’t exactly been beating down my door in this nose-diving economy…and having surrendered my dearest, fiercest desires, living within the limbo of these solitary, bean-eating grey days, I have less of a sense of purpose now than I ever have. Where do I go now? What do I do? I can’t think forward; I can’t look back.
Chop wood, carry water.
**
No, I don’t want to go into what happened in more detail. You have the feeling of it, you have Ms. Cribb, let that be enough. I will say that if anyone starts quoting Stephen Stills at me right now, love the one you’re with and all that, I will have to virtually restrain myself from virtually punching said individual in the virtual nose. Now is not the time.
The only man-fantasy I’m willing to entertain at present (which is still far more likely to happen than anything else I’ve wanted lately) is of literally bumping into a certain Irish troubadour coming out of a downtown hotel. Oh my God, it’s you!
We start to chat — he is, as he appears in interviews, down-to-earth, warm, and unassuming — and it turns out he’s staying through tomorrow as a surprise solo act in one of our innumerable music festivals. So I bring him to that pub in Lower Downtown that has seventy-five beers on tap, even though I never touch the stuff, and I nurse a glass of wine as we talk for hours and hours about life and love and music and how much better Ireland is about taking care of people, and then we wind up going back to his hotel for a spontaneous, sensual evening of amicable international relations.
This scrappy, passionate leprechaun of a man makes love, not surprisingly, with the unsqueamish gusto of a horny lesbian, and is quite possibly the best I’ve ever had. We order room service in the morning and eat honeydew melon in bed, and I get to watch his gig in the afternoon from stageside…and on the plane later maybe he’ll pick up his guitar and start to write a song about a fading flower in a Western town, loved a man who was scattered all around. So at least for my troubles I gain a measure of immortality in the material world, like that sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, and I have an extraordinary memory and a singular story to tell my grand-nieces and nephews about a man who by then should be a legend, even if he’s not.
Like I’ve told you, I’ve got quite an imagination. But honestly, the only (other) guy I’d say yes to right now is a stormy little singer from County Kildare.
Well I could throw it out, and I could live without
And I could do it all for you
I could be true…
This has got to stop.
A.B., I’m about as proud of you as I could be given the absence of detail.
Whatever you did, it sounds like the days of the old A.B., defenseless victim of the patriarchy, are numbered! This has got to stop, indeed! And I apologize for being the first commenter despite having at least one Y chromosome. — Love, C
Thanks??? For the backhanded compliment!
It sounds like you (like my friend Russ) believe the concept of “patriarchy” is a paranoid female invention and an exercise in victimhood unworthy of serious consideration. Am I reading that right?
Are you so sure it is?
Hi A.B. — I didn’t mean to express an opinion about whether or not there is a patriarchy oppressing you, so much as to observe that I didn’t get as much of a sense of “I’m a victim” from your post as I have with some of your earlier writings. In other words I got the feeling that even if there is a patriarchy or anyone else seeking to dominate you, they’re going to feel the full force of your fire-breathing, sword-wielding Kali energy.
Still, framing things as “victimhood” vs. “not victimhood” is a choice I find more fundamentally shaming than helpful…Martin Seligman wrote about learned helplessness, a process of conditioning that leaves even dogs in need of someone to physically show them that they can leap over a barrier now. (If they could talk, instead of just lying down on the floor and whimpering like “victims,” they’d probably say “Nothing I do will make any difference.”) There are usually valid reasons why dogs and feminists and bloggers feel defeated, and some never manage to jump over the barriers at all.
Is that a spark of the Kali fire I feel, a glint of the fangs of the Dark Mother I see, beneath “there are valid reasons why I feel defeated?” Is there a “don’t you fucking call me a victim!”? I think there just might be! Love, C
Once again, if called out I’ll expound on my philosophy.
No, I don’t buy the whole patriarchy-is-oppressive bit, not because I don’t believe that there are social forces at work trying to maintain the status quo (though I think that can be dealt with without too much pain and torment); rather I question the gender connotation. I’d only accept the idea of a patriarchy if you’d also acknowledge an oppressive matriarchy.
After all: last month, you didn’t write a 3,000-word treatise on how your *father* found you on Facebook and was taking it over.
I’m willing to go with the idea of an oppressive hierarchy; if you want to break it out by what’s patriachally oppressing you vs what’s matriarchally doing so, I’d think that would be productive, if you’re honest about what’s truly domineering as opposed to simply discouraging.
I do like the idea that you’re speaking out, even if it will compromise what you want from the relationship. You’ll end up feeling better about yourself, as you’ve put your values and concerns out there instead of bottling them up and hoping for the best. “Well-behaved women rarely make history”. Cute bumper sticker, but better still when that idea is put into action. I don’t know what Sonny’s personality is like, but maybe he’s react favorably to a woman who didn’t just roll over and spread for him. How about some *real* tough love? Follow him into the kitchen and plant him one square on the lips. If he balks, grab him by the shoulders and say, “We can do this with or without handcuffs….”
After all: two can play at his game.
I haven’t abandoned my blog, I’m just taking a little break (trying to catch up on my real world writing gig) and waiting to see if Mand or sagenhoney or some as-yet unknown reader from the internet ether shows up to help me out on the lady angle. I feel a little like a Jeremiah Wright defender at the moment (which I also am, actually)!
I think the boy is history, Russman. I wish it weren’t so…every morning consciousness is like a sucker punch in the stomach. I alternate between vast, incredulous grief and intense anxiety about a fraught and scarce future. Yay! At the moment I feel like an astronaut floating in space, disconnected from the shuttle and all (of my former) human contact, terrifyingly lost but at the same time strangely free. (Ground control to Major Tom…)
Maybe I’ll leave the state…or the country. Things here in the US are such a mess. Maybe I should unload my few worldly goods and go schlepping in search of my artistic hero, like some character in a movie I can’t remember the name of. My old friend Tara had been living in Dublin and once urged me to come…
Richard Bach said “Anyone desperate enough for suicide should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems…stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.”
I’m getting close to that desperate.
That’s one point I hesitated to make, about being male. If the patriarchy is oppressing you…well, take a look around at who’s offering the support, as well.
If things with Sonny have run their course, then there’s not much you can do. But, if there’s nothing left to lose at this point, perhaps you could try a direct approach.
You thinking about skipping town? If you want to give Seattle a try for a while, I know a place you could stay…full amenities, easy public transportation, great view.
AB, I get that this is feeling to you like a war between the sexes right now on this topic. And, my goal hasn’t been to take any position in some abstract debate, but to be supportive of you, because I know how much talent and brillance you have. That you have a writing career, which I didn’t know until now, suggests to me that you know that on some level.
PPC: Thanks, and I mean it! The writing gig isn’t much, certainly it doesn’t pay, it just gets my name out there and gives me the opportunity to generate clips for future use. When I do publish I get about double the hits of my city’s average, though…
I was thinking, it’s taken me 40-odd years to find my voice…and use it. Along the way I’ve struggled painfully through and over a lot of obstacles that nearly did me in. Some familial, some religious, some cultural, and some that pertain to my gender and its traditional orientation in the world. It hasn’t been a picnic, and I’ve doubted myself much of the way. So when somebody says, “that obstacle doesn’t exist,” after many bashing encounters from early childhood on with the attitudes of parents, teachers, doctors, trusted adults, strangers, etc, I’m gonna REACT! Some of my fellow Caucasians insist that racism no longer exists in this country. I don’t agree. That’s why I was waiting for some WITNESSES. Just WITNESSES, for God’s sake. Like the people who sat in Wright’s church and said “Amen.” Can I get a WITNESS?
Men like Warren Farrell (along with feminists Carol Gilligan and Susan Faludi) assert that the status quo hurts men too. Patriarchy is one commonly used name for the status quo we’re talking about, but I think the word itself is causing a reaction. It’s largely about what qualities and ways of being are valued in the culture, and which are denigrated. (But I also tend to believe that if a man had agonizing penile pain every time he tried to do the deed, doctors would bend over backwards to find a cure somehow, and it wouldn’t take ten years for them to even believe him, and then they wouldn’t tell him that insurance didn’t cover the surgery he needed because it was considered “cosmetic!!!”)
Russ, I’m sorry to edit you, but that was TMI cuz I didn’t want to go over the details here. Once upon a time that kind of scenario might have been enough…lord knows I miss that body…but what I realized is, it’s not some trip about ownership, it’s about deserving to be cherished just as much as I cherish. Not “selfishness,” but loving myself.
Seattle is a good town, but I don’t think I could take the weather. Or us arguing over every damn little thing.
Happy Easter.
Yes, I know, it’s over already – but everything is fuzzy these days, so why not the flow of time?
How are you doing, AB? I don’t feel like impersonating your mother today, and I have no advice in the bags…
Hm…wait, maybe…let me look…no, just kidding
Did you see the recent post from UrbanMonk about the topic of unwanted advice? (Obstacles to Mature Love, Part 3) I just see that now part 4 is available…
I don’t like the role of some ignorant stressed out male…Maybe it was countertransference or something similar?
Endure/enjoy your weightless floating…you may reach another planet at some point…or maybe an alien spaceship will pick you up. But always remember: On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.
I’m not familiar with the Vogons…what galaxy are they from?
I thought Albert’s latest series was fantastic.
Nice to see you bm3. I never meant to imply you were ignorant, although I realize that that veiled nose-punching threat seemed to be directed right at you. :O
You just can’t pry certain things out of my hands until I’m cold and dead…in a manner of speaking. Like with Charlton Heston and his gun.
Do you have a foldout couch in your living room?
Taxes, my mother’s taxes, car still not fixed…feeling rundown, and I’m developing a toothache….
In brief, the use of the term “oppressive patriarchy” does prompt me to speak out. I’m not trying to say that whatever life obstacles you’ve encountered aren’t real: I’m simply saying that (to my observation and my thinking) that it’s inappropriate and unfair to characterize them as (necessarily) due to gender suppression. (I can go into more detail off-book since some of the points I make will have to invoke certain places and people I can tell you won’t want enumerated, if only for anonymity’s sake.)
As regards your painful intercourse problem: that’s really awful, and you should have been taken seriously. On the other hand, EVERYONE has horror stories about an incompetent or indifferent medical establishment. My own, which I can now look back on with humor, had to do with going to a highly-recommended doctor once I was on an insurance plan, to see about my occasional bouts of apnea–I’d stop breathing in my sleep, and wake up gasping for breath. My doctor didn’t know what to make of it, but really put me through the wringer about my drinking. I was losing hours of sleep a night, but he dismissed these episodes as anxiety attacks. Meanwhile, he was ordering up bloodwork, and wanted to ultrasound my liver–despite the fact that I wasn’t sick, never got hangovers, and wasn’t showing any outward signs of alcohol abuse. Fuck ‘im, I just went with another doctor. Ever hear the phrase, “I don’t suffer fools gladly”? For me, that sentence is one word too long.
Would you have been taken more seriously if you were male and had sexual complaints? Don’t be so sure, at least with your physician in question. A doctor that doesn’t listen is just that: a doctor that is unresponsive to the patient’s needs, and we’ve all met them. (In addition to my own doctors, I’ve had to arrange for doctors and specialists for both my parents, and I feel like I’ve been very lucky in comparison. Being a doctor is NO guarantee of intelligence, I’ve found out: it’s a job, just like any other, and there are ones who are good at it and others that seem to be doing little more than collecting a paycheck. And, of course, medical benefits….)
Think the medical establishment would attack a sexual function problem if it affected men? I suggest you take that up with anyone who’s had to undergo the indignity of prostate surgery, the consequences of which can include incontinence, erectile dysfunction/pain, or possible penile nerve damage (so even if they could get it up–which is difficult enough with all the hormone suppresants they put you on–it wouldn’t do them any good. Which is the *real* reason, truth be known, that Viagra and its cousins initially got covered by so many insurance formularies). And that’s if the surgery is considered a *success* (meaning the cancer is excised or driven into remission), and that there are no lingering complications.
Breast cancer strikes about one in four women. There’s a National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October), pink ribbons year-round, posters all over this office for the Susan G Komen Race For the Cure (including a big push at today’s all-staff meeting), and Campbell’s soup changed the color scheme of their tomato soup cans from red-on-white to pink-on-white, in the interest of consciousness-raising.
Good and well: more power to the cause. Prostate cancer strikes nearly one in *two* men over the age of 50, almost twice the frequency that breast cancer does in women. Tell me honestly: do you know the color ribbon for prostate cancer? No Googling, now. Ask your friends if any of them know. Just saying.
Take your empowerment, and your support, where you can find it. The world’s a hostile place, and I don’t count on anyone. CATCH-22 is the book that changed my life: bad enough my enemies are trying to kill me, my friends are too. They’re all crazy, but they think I’m crazy. That sort of thing.
You couldn’t handle the Seattle *weather*? It’s got to be a hell of lot more clement than that Rocky Mountain climate. Leaving me to conclude that it’s rather my disputational nature that argues against this fair city. Not that I take that personally–I just read what My Crazy Roommate had to say about being back with her family in Baltimore; if that’s what she prefers, I must have been worse than I realized.
Who used the term oppressive patriarchy anyway? I think it was PPC, not me. Jesus, I’m so sick of this argument.
“The world’s a hostile place, and I don’t count on anyone.” If that’s your honest take, please don’t read or comment on my latest! I’m not looking to be discouraged!
Goddamit, we are not having an argument!
I’m glad to hear you see the world as welcoming (or want to hear from people who do!) Love, Chris
I surely want to. And sorry to point the finger (if it helps any, it wasn’t the middle one), I’m just sure I never used the modifier “oppressive” in conjunction with “patriarchy,” and that was frustrating me. The pairing is kind of a cliche…especially among folk who mock feminism…like my own folks! (I was raised with images of shrill, bra-burning harpies.)
What are your thoughts about my latest? I finally went off about what I wanted, see??? I want, I want, I want…
Feels very vulnerable to say those things out loud, especially seeing as I have no clue how to make any of them happen, and I’m expecting to get taken apart for voicing such exorbitant wishes.
Although I did hear immediately from Samira in LA…she and Ken haven’t left for Asia yet. She said “Join us!” and I said “How?”