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.
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