Categories of Life

I was doing a random, nerdy search online today. I discovered this, became fascinated, and wrote a little something about it. This is completely off the cuff, by the way. What do you think is missing from this list of themes? What would you include? Inquiring minds want to know.

Prose Poem
By Katy Jacob

Poetry Themes as Identified on Poets.org:

Aging, animals, anniversaries, parenting, birthdays, breakups, childhood, Chaunukah, autumn, body, Christmas, revolution, daughters, Halloween, enemies, farewell, fathers, friendship, funerals, weather, graduation, summer, aliens, space, home, clothing, illness, love, shoes, mother, school, nature, underworld, lust, sons, sports, grief, war, weddings, winter, work, New Year’s, teaching, writing, scary, movies, romance, heartache, politics, pockets, spring, libraries, flowers, gardens, Thanksgiving, carpe diem, dreams, drinking, reading, birds, turmoil, gratitude, for teens, sharks, vampires, landscapes, night, maidens, lanes, music, eating, fruit, divorce, pets, dogs, cats, tragedy, high school, patience, life, horses, fish, old age, loneliness, ambition, memories, instruments, snow, innocence, New York, vacations, buildings, monkeys, storms, mourning, language, whales, survival, boats, America, history, theft, beginnings, daffodils, roses, jazz, cities, flight, travel, regret, masks, faces, rebellion, lunch, breakfast, dinner, creation, listening, Apocalypse, hands, feet, blood, thought, bedrooms, kitchens, wind, gender, miracles, beauty, objects, breath, voice, Nativity, skin, self, identity, maps, mountains, rivers, oceans, ancestry, future, heroes, infidelity, vanity, luck, anger, time, cooking, sun, earth, moon, loss, desire, past, plants, dance, afterlife, moving, deer, Freud, trees, Snow White, Jews, Love Today, hair, brothers, happiness, drugs, suburbia, beach, ghosts, pacifism, myth, science, dead fathers, LGBTQ, silence, For Mom

These themes just beg for themes of their own:

Things That Seem Obvious:

It is interesting how weather places itself right in between funerals and graduations.
Mourning and storms are not so different after all.
High school is, indeed, a tragedy on some level.
Old age involves loneliness and fish.
America was built on a history of theft.
Rebellion is not so far apart from eating lunch.
Heroes are not always faithful.
Pacifism is a myth.
Mothers might find themselves caught between shoes and school, with no one taking either seriously enough.

Things That Are Worth Questioning

Are daughters bound to be tied up with revolution and sons with war?
Does Freud deserve his own category?
Are there no other important holidays?
Why are some animals more equal than others?
There are really only 42 poems about lust?
Is this all there is? What about color, envy, clouds, healing, hunger, cars, stoicism, laughter, trees, games, furniture, technology, annihilation, exhilaration, adulthood, medicine, warm, cold, absence, presence, seasons, sleep, oppression, freedom, and the birth and death that sit on the other sides of life?

Things That are Important to Consider

People write poems about pockets and turmoil in equal measure.
There are enough poems in someone’s database to warrant numerous categories.
Loss and desire might just be part of the past, or at least its close cousins.
New York sits next to innocence, which calls the whole pattern into question.
In the end, we might all just wish to move away from it all, by dancing into the afterlife, embedded in silence, asking For our Mothers.

Consent Part Three

Wow, I haven't been here in a while. In case anyone is wondering why, it's because of the cancer. The cancer that apparently doesn't want to leave me alone, no matter what I do to get rid of it.

That's a good segue into what I want to talk about here, AGAIN. It's time to discuss sexual consent people! It's time because recently I was reading an editorial where a female journalist was talking about how distraught she was that she was interviewing teenage boys for some story, and most of them expressed this opinion that consent was a confusing issue, and they didn't know what it meant, and how intoxicated is too intoxicated? She said that we need to have this discussion, kids don't know what to do!

How much bullshit can I call on that?

I've said it before--consent is easy. It is obvious. People who claim to not understand it are not confused, they just don't give a shit about the person on the other end of their dicks. This is not about hormones, or alcohol, or feeling sorry for boy rapists who "make a mistake" and "ruin their lives." This stuff is rampant in high schools and colleges not because youth or testosterone or kegs make it happen, but because the culture of house/frat parties leads everyone to believe that this stuff is inevitable and normal. As a 38 year old married woman, I don't have a lot of experiences where I'm surrounded by hundreds of drunk people who are trying to get some. I go out with my husband, or my girlfriends. I have a party and there are often children present, and if not, everyone is just happy to eat someone else's food and drink someone else's alcohol and no one acts like an asshole.

However, I still deal with this idea that attractive women are asking for trouble just by nature of their existence, regardless of my age. I might take a walk in the early morning, and I might see a car slow down, and some teenage kid shout out "nice ass!" And while I'm wondering if he is actually talking to ME, I also am forced to realize that it's dark out, and I'm by myself, and this kid and his friends are creepy and THEY KNOW THEY ARE CREEPY AND THAT IT'S DARK AND I'M BY MYSELF. I spend a night in a hotel in another town because my job is based out of state, and I am tired and in the middle of chemo and I just want to sit at the hotel restaurant and concentrate on my flatbread pizza when some dude winks at me and I realize he's been staring at me and that wink does not mean, hey, nice pizza! It means, hey if you're up for it, I want to bed you.

We hear so much about SIGNALS and how hard they are to read. It makes me wonder how some dudes are completely on the clueless end of everything, and you could be doing 500 things to make it obvious you are ignoring them, and they come on to you anyway. What part of sitting by myself and eating pizza screams I want to have an affair with you? What part of walking by myself and maybe going to buy a coffee means I want some adolescent douchecanoe to discuss the nature of my ass? I remember being in my 20s and regularly going out for a drink with one of my girlfriends who lived near a bunch of bars. We would go in our jeans and tshirts on a Friday night, sit at the bar, talk to no one but each other and the female bartender, and some drunken guy would offer to buy one or both of us a drink, and we would politely decline, and then inevitably he'd be all I JUST WANT TO BUY YOU A FUCKING DRINK, WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU, DON'T BE SUCH A BITCH.

You know the guy I mean.

There are so many examples of this. People need to start calling others out on their predatory behavior, not excuse it as a misunderstanding; predators understand exactly what they're doing. If he's coming up to you in a completely inappropriate situation, where you are alone, or no one can hear you, or you're drunk or asleep for Chrissakes, he is doing it on purpose to get at you when you are most vulnerable. How about when I was 14 and at a blues festival downtown and some guy pulled me aside--he literally pulled me away, so I was momentarily separated from my friends--and told me I was beautiful and I could be a model and did I want to go somewhere with him to talk about that? It should not have been on me to realize the predatory nature of that and jerk my arm away and rush in the other direction back to my friends. If some other girl who got less attention than I did and therefore didn't see it for the criminal behavior it was, got into that situation, the question should not be why did she go with him, but why did he ever feel it was ok to do that? Or how about in college, I remember a few times when I got a knock on my door past midnight in the middle of the week. I lived in a single, BY MYSELF, and I answered the door to find a stoned dude standing there, and he would say to me "wow, you look hot," and then just continue to stand there. And I would be all, huh, here I am in my sweatpants and my boyfriend's tshirt and I was freaking ASLEEP because I have to go to work tomorrow morning before class, and why in the world would you think it was ok to come over here with that line and that look in your eyes? Do you honestly think I want to have sex with you right now because you are so irresistible? DUDE. I want to have sex with the guy who gave me the tshirt!

Right?

And don't get me started on jock culture and how that leads to murky issues of consent and rape. Everyone knows how much I love football, and many people know how much I also detest the general CULTURE of football, with the locker room talk in high school and the outright felonies in the NFL. But here's the thing. Being a jock, being a good looking, strong, athletic guy who girls and women love does not make you a rapist. Being a rapist makes you a rapist.

I dated my share of football players in high school. None of them were rapists. I've recounted some of the cute stories, actually, recently, when talking about my 20 year high school reunion. I discussed ditching class and fooling around with a guy who asked me if his hands were cold when he undid my bra, and I laughed over my Katy-doesn't-know-how-girls-are-supposed-to-behave answer. I didn't write about this for this reason, but it got me to thinking that what seemed like a cheesy or even smarmy line was actually the awkward teenage boy equivalent of asking, hey, do you mind if I feel you up? And my answer was the awkward teenage girl equivalent of no, I don't mind at all. It made me think about a time when I had sex with this boy for the first time as a teenager and I asked him if he had a condom and he said yes and then he asked, incredulously and adorably, "Really?!" It makes me think about conversations, or experiences, with boys, and men, who weren't sure what to do, or if I wanted them to kiss me, or take my clothes off, or whatever, and maybe I could tell they were confused at the time or maybe I didn't know until later, but in every single one of these instances, regardless of the "status" of the guy, regardless of our sobriety or what I was wearing or whatever, every single guy who was a decent guy did the exact same thing:

He did nothing. He worried he had offended me. He was awkward. He pulled away. He chose inaction over action, because he wanted to be sure.

I remember being drunk at age 17 at a party, and the guy I was dating, and sleeping with willingly, was helping me walk home. He had to practically carry me (I didn't drink much or often) because I couldn't walk straight. And he walked me home, and kissed me, and that was it, because I was drunk.

I think about my husband, who is a perpetual Mr. Hands. He is all over me all the time. And yet, he still, after almost 9 years of marriage, worries about whether I want that attention and what it means. If I swat him away, even playfully, he retreats. If I've just done chemo or seem tired and we're in bed he will straight up ask me if I want to keep going. He felt insanely guilty when we first had sex after our first child was born because it hurt so much for me, even though I laughed about it because I knew we just had to get through that to get back to normal.

I go back in my mind to the relationship I had with a man who was in his early thirties when I was 27. I liked him all right but really the relationship was almost purely sexual. We played a lot of games together. One day he asked me if I would be willing to do something--could I just lie there and not move? I said uh ok I guess, and we started having sex like that, and then I thought, what the hell is this game? What are we playing? Am I playing dead? Drunk? Unconscious? What weird rape fantasy is this? And in the approximately 30 seconds that I agreed to play this game I started thinking about the very things that made him so attractive to me that were now concerning: he was very muscular, very strong, he had huge biceps, and now I was put in a situation where I was thinking about how easily he could snap my neck. So I put my hands on his chest and told him I didn't want to play anymore, and he said ok, fine, and we went back to "normal," whatever that means, and he never brought it up again.

I imagine a world in which we talk to our sons the way we talk to our daughters. In that world, we would tell our sons to watch out and not get too drunk or someone might put his penis in his mouth against his will, or someone might take a beer bottle and shove it up his ass. I imagine a world in which boys and men worried about taking their shirts off in public or changed their jeans because their butt looked too fine in it and they didn't want to give off the wrong "message." In that world, being handsome or built or sexy would be a detriment to men, not a plus. When adults told a boy's parents that damn he was good looking, he would grow up to be a heartbreaker, there would be no sly winks, only vague feelings of terror for what might befall him.

But we don't talk to our boys that way, do we? No, we assume that their bodies are theirs to have and to hold. We don't talk to them about losing their virginity or saving themselves or "giving it away" and all that. If my daughter ever asks me about losing her virginity and what that means, or even if she doesn't, I will tell her this: Here, shake my hand. Now, look, you can't have it back. Does that make any sense? Do you have any part of you that you can give to another person? No. What you have is yours to keep. It is up to you to decide how you want to use your body and who you want to share it with and when and how. There is no part of yourself that can ever belong to anyone else. But should I have to tell her this? Should I have to acknowledge that she has already learned how to give that stone-cold poker-face of complete indifference to boys, and she is not even 8 years old? No, I should not. And parents of boys should stop making excuses for their bullshit. I have a son, a son who acts crazy and always wants to wrestle and struggles to understand boundaries. And he gets his 4 year old ass handed to him on a regular basis. That's what we are here to do--not to have conversations with our children about good awesome fun sex or anything equally awkward, but to teach them how to live in the world with integrity and respect for themselves and other people. We do not have to explicitly teach consent to people who know how not to be assholes.

And finally, I think about the experience I had at 15 that I will never truly write about, that I thankfully got out of, and I want to put a few things out there that I am willing to discuss. I want to tell you that I went back in that room to help another girl get out, that I did that though I would have rather done just about anything else, including eat glass if you had offered me the chance. I did it fully thinking that I would fail and that I was not going to help her in reality but that I was just sending myself back into the lion's den as well. But I did go back, I did help get her out of there, even though she thought I was crazy and overreacting, and I did that because I distinctly remember saying these words to myself:

How can you not go back? What kind of person are you? How could you live with yourself?

And that is how I know, I KNOW, that the idea that kids don't know what to do or get scared or confused when they see horrible things happening is concrete bullshit. If a traumatized 15 year old girl knows what's right, so the hell do you.

And I remember the boy, who was a popular handsome athlete, who found me sitting in a stupor in the kitchen afterwards. He asked me what was wrong and I said I had a headache and he knew immediately that I was lying. And then, he did something I will never forget. He sat there and talked to me about nonsense for at least half an hour, during which I don't think I spoke a single word, because he knew something was wrong and he didn't know what it was and he wanted to make me feel better.

He did that because he was a decent kid.

I have carried the memory of that boy with me for 22 years. I have also carried other things, including years during which I would have a near panic attack if I was the only girl in a room; no matter how lovely and sweet the boys were, I would always have to find other girls to be in the room with me. I carried the idea that that happened to me because I was the wrong kind of girl, and no it didn't mean that, it meant...I was the only girl at the party who wanted to watch the game. And I was being punished for being that girl.

But in the end, I carried something else with me as well. It is something that I think about when people tell me today that I am brave, or inspirational. There is nothing brave about dealing with cancer, because you have no other choice. I'm not sure there's anything inspirational about being publicly bald or speaking openly about your own suffering. I know that bravery is not being unafraid, it is being afraid and doing things anyway. And even today, when I am feeling down on myself, or feeling afraid or defeated, I think about that 15 year old girl whom I once was, and how she did the thing she dreaded doing because it was the right thing, and I hold my head up higher because I feel that in some way, I am still her. I recognize that one of the hardest and most important things I would ever do in my life I did when I was just a kid, and no one really knows about it and I can't talk about it in detail because people would tell me I was crazy or lying and I don't want to hear it but I KNOW, I know who that girl is. She is the same person as any normal, decent human being out there, male or female, who knows the difference between right and wrong. I see the passing of time on her face and tell her often that she is still that person. She knew then what was right and she knows it today and so do each and every one of you.

The Anti-Bucket List

Everyone is supposed to have a Bucket List. You know, the list of things you'd like to do before you die. It has always seemed to me that most people who have bucket lists are nowhere even close to death, given the amount of time they have to devote to thinking about shit that has never happened and that probably never will happen. I have never had one of these lists, though I have cheated death my share of times. When you are afraid you are going to die--from a traumatic accident, for example, you literally don't have time to think about the future, real, potential or otherwise. My experience with that is that your life flashes before your eyes in the few seconds it takes for your body to hit the sidewalk. In that time, you get the luxury of a few random memories of your short life. Or, let's say you have a potentially fatal disease. Everyone tells you that NOW is the time to do everything you ever wanted to do! And you're like, when? Now? During chemo? After work, which is the same work I had before cancer? After feeding the kids dinner? WHEN, people?

When you are actually afraid you are going to die, the only thing you want is to have more of the life you are afraid you might lose--that crazy, stupid, boring life. And then something interesting happens. You realize that the thing you REALLY want is not to do exciting things you have never done, but to not have to do annoying things that you have to do. You begin to have less patience for people or situations that seem like unnecessary drama. And then you have an epiphany. It's not a bucket list that you need! It's the opposite of that! You need an anti-bucket list, or a list of things you never want to do ever no matter how long you live on this earth. To gain some inspiration into this list, you start looking around at people's actual bucket lists. You find a webpage called bucketlist.org where anyone and their mother can add to the list of things folks should do before they kick off. And the very first entry gives you the very first entry you need:

Hug a Tiger.

OK, hell to the no. And, why? Tigers are not kittens. Hell, most kittens don't even like hugging. Do you think tigers sit around thinking about hugging human beings? Do you know how quickly that tiger could crush you? And also, what kind of bravery is that, when you do something that is bound to piss the animal off because tigers and people don't go around swapping affections in the wild. Just, no.

Here are some more in the list of Things Katy Doesn't Need to Do Before She Dies, Not Ever.

1. Take a cruise. The entire concept behind the cruise makes me think of dysentery. Oh, to be stuck on board with thousands of other people with food poisoning, diarrhea, or some other godforsaken illness. And then there is the endless amount of rich food and the forced entertainment. Not to mention the possibility of fire, or pirates. So when I want to go to a beautiful location, I will fly there, and then spend actual time on the beach rather than circling the beach wishing to God I wasn't stuck on a boat of ridiculous proportions.

2.Speaking of flying...Fly to Australia. Shit is too far away. Now, if someone could just transport me there without the interminable flight, I think Australia is one place on earth I would absolutely love to see. But I learned when I flew nonstop from Chicago to Maui that my limit on a plane without stopping is about 10 hours. I could maybe do 14, if I had some good drugs or something. Anything more than that and you might need to send me a postcard.

3. Read Moby Dick. I say this as an English major, a poet of sorts, a person who has been called a writer. Again, shit is just too long and there's other things I could be doing. Plus, the 1956 movie version is excellent. I love the first line of Moby Dick. Who doesn't love a book that starts with Call me Ishmael.? But then, you know what, that's almost enough. No matter how metaphorical it all is, there is only so much I want to read about WHALES. Anything else that I might need to learn, Gregory Peck could speak to me.

4. Have roommates. Now, I'm married and I have kids, so maybe that counts. Assuming Gabe and I don't get divorced, and assuming I die first which seems likely, this is probably a given. But I went to some great lengths to avoid having roommates as a young adult. I adored the grand total of two roommates I had in college, and am still friends with them both today. But I worked two jobs and stayed in unglamorous spots in order to be able to live by myself, a paradise of sorts that lasted for six years, even when I was in a serious relationship and he had a key and was there a hell of a lot. Even still, that place was mine. If I were the type to have a bucket list, I would place living alone again on it, right at number one. You can call me a curmudgeon, anti-social, or whatever--I don't care. The stuff that sitcoms are made of is the stuff that makes me cringe. All that comeraderie that happened in shows I never related to like Friends where New York was filled with white people who worked as waitresses and got badass non-rent-controlled apartments anyway and then ruined it all by letting these dolts come over unannounced all the time? No. Thank. You.

5. Pinterest. Because. Just...because.

6. Skydiving. Cancer cured me of my fear of heights. It did not cure me of my fear of dying because I jumped out of an airplane for any reason less than a hostage or terrorist situation.

7. Becoming a wine snob. Now, I like wine. I'm allergic to it, or at least to the sulfites in it if it isn't processed in a true organic sense, and that lessens my desire to drink lots of it. But that's not what I mean. I mean I could die a happy death never knowing what the fuck people are talking about when it comes to the nose and the body and the finish because then I just start thinking the damn thing is a car. The same goes for the new trend of talking about beer and even coffee like this. I love coffee. If you hand me a beer I will drink it. I like good wine. I like coffee for how it helps me stay alert and for how drinking it in the early mornings allows me to daydream about living alone again. I like alcohol if it goes well with food, and I like the buzz. There's a lot of decent wine and beer out there that doesn't cost much, and I could live a long life never understanding what makes a single bottle worth $300.

8. Meet (insert name of celebrity). It could be anyone, any single person who is famous, and I really don't care. I might be entertained and intrigued and interested for a minute if I came across a famous person, but if I never did EVER for the rest of my life that would be just fine. I've met a decent number of famous people if I were to stop and think about it, including President Obama back when he was just a state Senator from Illinois. I just can't come up with someone who intrigues me enough to make it on a Bucket List. I geeked out meeting Li Young Lee. When I met him he was working in a factory in Chicago. He's a Chinese refugee who writes poetry when he feels the desire. That was like straight up celebrity to me.

9. Run a marathon. I am a very fit and active person. My ability to participate in high impact sports was destroyed by the car accident I referenced above, way back in 1984. Even so, I don't have any desire to participate in extreme sports. Being active every day and feeling my body work and move and live and get stronger is good enough for me. If anything, I would love to be able to play basketball again, not just as Katy the Shooter, the almost 40 lady who can still sink a hook, but as the fast girl who could run and block until it started hurting too much.

10. Get a tattoo. Now, for a while there, post cancer treatment, I was convinced that I did want one. At the time I had no piercings and no tattoos other than the ones I was forced to get for radiation. Now, I have pierced ears, and I love them, though of course that is so far from interesting that it was more interesting to NOT have them. I thought that I wanted a way to mark the end of treatment, to give me some kind of sign that my body was changed and had survived something. I even decided on a design. I thought I could get it written under the left breast, until I realized how much that would hurt with the total lack of body fat I have there. Then, I thought I could get it on my hip, as another symbol of my near death. And then...I got over it. I realized that I would probably get sick of looking at it. Those stretch marks on my hips from childbearing should be sufficient, right?



This is just the beginning of the list, which has served as a nice diversion on a beautiful day. I am writing this while wearing a bathing suit, sitting in a paddleboat, watching my children jump and swim off the dock. I didn't even bother with sunscreen. I just had a beer and it's the middle of the goddamn afternoon on a Tuesday. There is nothing in the world I need to do today, nothing that is left, nothing that is forgotten.

This is the kind of day I was waiting for when my premature death seemed inevitable.

It seems fitting, somehow, and preferable to the kind of thing you're supposed to say when someone asks you what you'd like to accomplish before you die. It seems that this question must just stump some people. I am amazed by some of the entries on the Bucke tList website. I mean...go in a water fountain in the mall?

Oh honey. Really?

And what's up with all the people who are dying to see the Rolling Stones? I mean, they're a really great rock band. But do you think of them in the same breath as you think of your own death? On the other hand, it might not be a bad idea to walk straight up to Keith Richards and ask him how in the HELL he is still alive.

I've fallen in love several times, met men in interesting places, including on a cross country train, married someone who seems to adore me. I have interesting, charismatic children. I have studied important things and built a non-traditional career for myself that has suited me just fine. I have stuck my stake in the ground of my favorite city and I have never regretted it. I have seen the sun set and rise in some truly beautiful places in the world. I have lost the working function of almost every part of my body at some point, and had the pleasure of watching it all come back to life. I remember learning how to walk. Shit, I finally learned to ride a bike...when I was 35. I have lived almost every day feeling this body and this life as if it was some kind of miracle, even when it seemed almost impossibly small.

It's a good life. I'm happy with it. And throughout everything, I have been strangely unable to come up with a phrase or a symbol or a mantra to describe what I think the meaning of life is. I am not religious, nor even particularly spiritual. And then, eventually, I figured it out.

Don't tell me you weren't wondering what I would tattoo on myself if the desire ever seemed overwhelming. I realized what it would be, the phrase that has swum around in my brain ever since I first heard it. It means, look, this is impossible, technically speaking. But wouldn't it be fun to try?

Let's Waltz the Rumba.

Indeed, Fats Waller. Indeed.

The Gaze

Men look--that's just what they do. You should take it as a compliment.

The first part of this statement is true, and there are instances wherein the second part can be true as well. A woman knows when she is being complimented by a man who is looking at her. It happens every day: A guy sees you as you are walking down the street. He is walking, or driving, and he looks, catches you looking, and looks away embarrassed. That can be a nice compliment. He doesn't catcall or wolf whistle. He doesn't touch you. He doesn't get out of the car or make a uturn. He doesn't keep staring at you. Those things are not compliments. If a man you are dating or sleeping with or married to looks at you, it is often with fondness and googly eyes, and that's a compliment too.

So, before I get into this post, I just want to point out that I am not against men looking at women. Human beings do this. Most humans know how to do it without being disrespectful. And yet...we seem collectively obsessed with the idea that women are looked at, and men look, and that's just how it is. This is assumed in everything. It's not just in the extreme examples--being told to cover up, slut shaming-policies that tell teenage girls they can't wear strapless dresses to the Prom because boys will be unable to deal, having people tell you that you can't expect to be left alone, to receive one moment's peace, with those legs, those boobs, that face, that whatever. It's not just about how men look at us and how the blame always seems to fall back on us no matter what happens.

It's about how we look at ourselves.

I was reading some ridiculous Glamour magazine article recently--it was one of those surveys that asks a bunch of women random questions about sex. You know, so you can figure out all the different ways that you are abnormal when you read the article. I was reading this, kind of bored, and then a question caught my eye: have you ever had sex with the lights on? And I was thinking, that's the dumbest question I've ever read. Of course the answer is 100% yes. But some shocking number of women--grown women!--answered no, so there is this huge percentage of women who claim to do it exclusively in the dark. Here were my thoughts, in order, on this:

They are all lying.
I had no idea that systemic power outages were such a problem in America.
Who has time to worry about finding the light switch? and
But then, with no lights, how would I look at him?

It was this last thought that made me realize I had interpreted the question like a man. You read these things, and even the self-esteem-building articles are focused on getting women to understand that men really do think you're beautiful, really, flaws and all. They love all kinds of bodies. They don't notice cellulite. They like to look at you naked. And all that. And you should feel confident and sexy and keep the lights on blah blah.

But the thing is, I don't want to keep the lights on so that I can feel confident and sexy and validated in my body. I am not thinking about the lights, and I am not thinking about my body. I am thinking about other, more interesting stuff. Maybe I'm not thinking at all. And, you know, I want to keep the lights on so I can look at HIM. At that moment, I'm not thinking about what I look like, because I am not making love to myself. I don't care if he thinks I'm beautiful. I care if I think he's beautiful. Women's magazines have told me a thousand times that this is not normal woman-thinking. Well, too bad.

I have body insecurities--of course I do. They usually emerge when I'm trying on swimsuits. But I can honestly say that I have never felt much body insecurity in a sexual situation, not even when I was a young teenager. I haven't wondered how the lighting makes me look, whether he thinks I look good, or whatever. And it's not because I haven't had any reason to feel that way. I have been enormously pregnant in intimate situations, to the point where I weighed more than the baby daddy. I have had a hell of a time losing the baby weight. I have been sick, and skinny, and felt boyish in the process. I have had one of the most sexual parts of my body--my breasts--left looking temporarily like mauled hamburger. I have been bald, people--completely hairless, all over my body. I went through menopause at age 35. So, I've got the body insecurity issues covered, I believe.

And still, I can't imagine my top of mind question in the sack being, I wonder what he thinks of how my butt looks? How do I hide the stretch marks? And, is this good enough? Because I'm thinking, nice ass! The kids are sleeping, let's go! I mean, at that moment, is there even a lightswitch in the room? Who cares?

And another thing--I've told my husband he can't wear those ratty white tshirts to bed. I don't want to look at that. He thinks my tank top and underwear bedtime uniform is hot, thankfully, and it's not like I'm trying to get him to wear the guy version of the sexy nightie (what would that be, do you think? boxer briefs one size too small?), but I mean, he needs to put in equal effort to not make this seem like we're just roommates. And when we're working out together and he takes long breaks to watch me do squats, I tell him to take his shirt off. This looking thing works both ways--right?

In our living room, it does. In the wider world? Not so much.

What a collective shame that everyone is looking at women, including the women themselves, and everyone is judging, including the women themselves. That time could be much better spent.

Men have body insecurity issues too, maybe now more than ever. I have to say that I am so DONE with this whole abs obsession. I thought when gender equality came on the scene, it would mean that more women could act like men and stop obsessing over nothing, but instead men are just starting to obsess too, like us, and they have started caring about things like carbs and now they are eating salads while on dates and it makes me sad for the whole state of humanity. But here's the thing. They have insecurities or want folks to think they look hot, so what do they do? They do that obnoxious pose with their hands pushing up their biceps in photos. They suck in their guts on the beach. They lament the thing they wish they had (a 6 pack! or a 12! maybe a whole case of abs!). And then they...let it go. Especially in bed. What guy is sitting around thinking about his body when he could be looking at the body of the chick or the dude who is naked in front of him? Hell, they take their glasses off and can't see anything and they don't even care about the looking because they are really enjoying and fully feeling that experience, while some of their partners are dedicating half their brain power to figuring out the most flattering angle.

My husband has been known to lament the fact that he will never be "huge," never have "enormous guns." Being a supportive wife I usually say something like, well you should be glad you don't have that body type because you eat like a human garbage disposal and you should be thanking your metabolism every day for allowing you to do that. But he doesn't actually NEED me to say that. Because his next thought is usually something like "but that's just the way it is. oh well." I mean, he cares. For about 19 seconds. Women have a different thing going on.

We've trained ourselves to look at ourselves in moments when it makes no sense to do so.

This has led to some positive things, I suppose. Women are able to compliment other women on fairly intimate things without feeling like it has a sexual connotation. You can tell another woman that her butt looks great in those jeans. You can walk up to a total stranger and tell her you love her shoes, and she won't think it's weird that you were looking. You can stand there topless in front of a woman you don't know well, because you had breast cancer and she just found out she has breast cancer, and she can objectively tell you that you have beautiful nipples and you're like word, can I have a glass of water?

I've written about this idea of the gaze and cancer before, when I have stated that it bothered me not just that I was expected to focus on how I look, but that I was expected to understand that everyone else would focus on it too. I would read stuff like this in cancer-support pamphlets: if you choose to be bald, you should wear statement jewelry. That takes away from the impact of your baldness and draws attention to your excellent sense of style.

And I would think, ok, earrings are cool. But what do you mean the IMPACT of my baldness? And no I didn't CHOOSE to be bald. It is what it is. Why is the assumption that it's on me to spare others the uncomfortable situation where they might have to look at someone who doesn't look the way a woman "should" look? Don't I have bigger problems?

When I was confined to a wheelchair as a kid, I got a lot of those uncomfortable hey I am not really looking at you as I stare at you glances. I was no longer the object of such looks due to my curly red hair, and the looks were filled with disdain, not admiration. This could have bothered me, but I had something going for me:

I was nine.

I was all, hey man, I wish I could walk. I wish I could go trick or treating. I wish I could go to the bathroom by myself. Hell, I wish I could use crutches and do those things slowly and awkwardly. I wish my parents didn't have to turn me over so I won't get bedsores. I wish I could jump in some leaves. I wish my friends would still come over to play. I wish they would allow me back in school.

The way I looked to others didn't even rate on the scale of important things. I'm sure it would have if I had been older when that happened, or if it was a permanent condition. But maybe not. I didn't wonder what people thought of how I looked when I had a grand mal seizure in front of the entire sixth grade, either. There we were, at the most awkward and self-hating time in early puberty, and I was convulsing on the floor and foaming at the mouth and the whole thing. I knew it was scary for other kids to see that; I knew some kids thought I was dying. It never occurred to me to wonder how I LOOKED.

I'm glad I never thought about that. It would have been mortifying if I had, I suppose.

It's not fun to be looked at, to be judged, even if it's so-called "positive" attention. Because there is something very negative, almost violent, behind so much of that too. You can try to stare down the dude who is doing the same to you, but it pretty much always backfires. The impact is just not the same. Some guy catcalls you and you stare at him in annoyance and he says something like, yeah I'll show you mine! and you think huh, that didn't work. So you learn to stop reacting.

You learn to look away. Or to look deeper into yourself.

My freshman year of college, I had one of the worst situations involving "the gaze." Some basketball player who was a junior supposedly "liked" me. Now, we were not 12, so I think when my girlfriend told me that her boyfriend who is friends with this dude told him that, the actual phrase was probably something like "I want to do her." I had no interest in this guy, not only because I was seeing someone, but just because I had no interest. My friend tried to get me to think he was cute. It didn't work. She invited me to a basketball game because she knew I loved basketball, but then I learned that the real reason was so I could meet this guy. I said hello, good game, though they sucked in that game, and that should have been it.

Then, the gazing began. He would see me on campus and stare me down. Literally--he would stop in his tracks and stare at me. If I moved or looked away, he would move to keep looking at me. In the cafeteria, he would watch me carrying my tray and TURN HIS CHAIR AROUND to look. He was always smirking and whispering to his friends. I knew he was not only staring at me but talking about me too, and he didn't know me from Eve. My second semester, I had a class with this guy. It was a nightmare. I almost transferred from the class, but I didn't want to give him the satisfaction. Still, I learned to avoid him, and I remember trying to get smaller in myself in order to seem invisible whenever he was around. I learned to see myself the way he did, and it made me feel like shit.

And that's the problem with the gaze being solely in the male domain. Even when it's positive--he thinks you're hot!--it arises from a negative place. Are you hot enough? Are other women hotter? Were you hotter 20 years ago? What were you thinking looking so hot? What could you change about yourself to make yourself hotter or less hot in his eyes?

No wonder half of our gender just throws up their hands and turns off the lights.

Back when I had long curly red hair, I got a lot of attention for it. I hated that attention. I felt called out all the time. One day when I was maybe 17 I was playing cards with a guy friend. I started to tell him about this thing that had just happened; someone (a man) had just walked up to me on the street and touched my hair, grabbed my hair with his hand and told me it was beautiful. What made him think he had the right to do that? And my friend said this:

Well, why don't you cut it all off, then? If you don't like the attention, get rid of it.

and I said:

Huh? But it's pretty. Why would I do that? I like to look at it too.

And he told me I had no one to blame but myself so I should just stop complaining.

He was right. We have to take responsibility for the role we play in perpetuating the problem.

So, I kept my hair, and I lost my friend. Because I knew how to look too, at the really important things, and I didn't like what I saw. So I just said, GIN, and never looked back.

I knew that there were people who got it, and I could choose to surround myself with those people.

Years later, I received an email from an old love who had found out that I had breast cancer. In it, he said this: Your hair is the thing everyone notices about you. Your breasts are the things that only the lucky few of us get to know about. But it's your eyes that always get me--not the way they look, but the way they look when they're looking at things. And I don't see that going anywhere.

Amen.

Working

I am supposed to be reading that book "Leaning In" for book club. I will read it--I just haven't gotten around to it yet. I've been avoiding weighing in on this whole issue, because the thing that annoys me the most about this whole so-called "debate" about women working outside the home is not the usual gripe; it's not about gender roles or empowerment. I've been avoiding it, but then I woke up early (like always) and started to read the Sunday paper before heading out to the gym (like always). I started reading an editorial about how this whole debate has been framed in the wrong way, because we are asking the wrong questions. This is going to be great! I thought. But no, the question we apparently should be asking is this:

Are you deriving joy from your job or your decision to stay at home? What makes you feel most fulfilled as a person?

And then I found myself doing that thing called "rage quitting" as I sat there muttering to myself while my entire family slept peacefully upstairs.

This whole debate is such an upper-middle class load of bullshit.

I say this as someone who has found herself living an upper-middle class life herself, a life she will probably never really feel comfortable in nor understand.

Life is not about deriving joy, feeling satisfied, or getting to do what you've always dreamed of doing. It's great if you have that privilege. But this article stated that the best way to be a parent is to show your children that you are fulfilled.

So what about everyone else? What about the people who work outside the home because that is the only option? Because shit costs money, and even if it's hard and even if it's meaningful and even if it's what you'd rather be doing, no one is paying anyone to stay at home with their own children? What about the people who stay home because they can't find jobs, or because they can't find jobs that pay enough to justify the child care expenses? What about those who need to care for aging parents or disabled spouses? What about the people who, GASP, work jobs they don't even LIKE, for bosses they can't stand, in less than ideal working conditions?

Are these people worse parents than the tiny percentage of folks who are out there living the dream while they pay someone else to clean their house and cook their food?

I'm tired of it. We live in a society that has been absolutely crushed by a horrible economic crisis. And then we pull out this tripe where we tell our kids they can do anything they want to do--we fill their heads with this so often and so early that they begin to see themselves as failures if that's not how their lives turn out. We talk about following your passion and breaking the glass ceiling and we listen to millionaires, whether they are women or men, tell ordinary people how they should live their lives as if those people have a freaking clue.

Growing up, with a father who was a teacher and a mother who stayed home except when she worked minimum wage jobs because she had to, I learned this lesson: I was being raised to be a productive member of society. That was the goal, according to my mother. The GOAL IN LIFE was to not feel entitled, to use my talents to do something useful if I had the chance, but to never assume that I was entitled to that chance. I was expected to get good grades because that was my WORK. Also, I began working when I was 11. Working for MONEY. In high school I used that money to buy my own clothes and help my mom pay the light bill. I understood that one of the greatest manifestations of parental love was watching your parent go to a low-paying job because she needed to feed you.

Most people have jobs, not careers. Most people need to work--for MONEY--for decades and decades. Most people do not go to college at all, much less graduate school or medical school or law school for crissakes. For many people, retirement is a a dream, not a reality. And yet we are steeped in this rhetoric that assumes that no one is happy just HAVING A JOB, because everyone wants to be the boss man or everyone's got that fire in her belly or everyone is trying to figure out how to cure cancer or be a rock star.

I used to love hearing my mother's mother and my father's father talk about their jobs. My grandmother was a legal secretary for many years, when suburban women weren't supposed to work and they definitely weren't supposed to be DIVORCED. I loved hearing her talk about dreaming in shorthand, riding the train, planning her boss's schedule, seeing the lake from her desk, matching her clip-on earrings to her necklace every day. My grandfather was in insurance, but I never once heard him talk about that aspect of his job. He talked about the social stuff--drinking with clients, going to steak houses, smoking cigars in historic buildings. So on the one hand, I learned that the TASKS of working could be the fulfilling and interesting part--learning to write in code, doing someone else's bidding--and on the other, that part of working was the people associated with it, and the job itself was less important than the access it gave you to the rest of your life.

So if your favorite part of your job is the gym at the office and the commute (looking in the mirror), you are not a bad parent. If your favorite part of your job is getting the hell out of there and going to have a beer with your co-workers afterwards and bitching about your boss, you are not a bad parent. If your favorite part of your job is COMING HOME, so what? If your favorite part of staying home with the kids is when they leave and you have the house to yourself, who cares? Who are we kidding? Do we think that housework is fulfilling all the time? That raising children is just joy after joy? There is drudgery in everything, and that doesn't make things meaningless. For most people, satisfaction comes from small moments of grace and insight--both at home and at work--amidst the mundane and the chaotic.

I have built this supposedly interesting career for myself. At one point, I was even very well-known in some circles. I have done fulfilling work--I have been a part of the low-paid advocacy groups that successfully forced financial institutions to change their abusive lending patterns years before anyone else (including liberal politicians) admitted there was a problem. I have been LUCKY, in addition to hard-working. I fell into this career. I answered an ad IN A NEWSPAPER for a job that sounded interesting, knowing nothing about the work I would be doing. I was hired because they thought I wrote an excellent cover letter, everyone liked me, and the senior staff was about to go on vacation, so they figured they would hire me. Thus began my life in policy research and financial services at age 23. I never saw it coming, nor planned for it.

I'm going to take a deep breath here and admit something. I'm not sure that I'm more FULFILLED because I have had a chance to do this big-thinking work. I have loved other jobs, some of them irrationally. I was a secretary for the summer when I was 19, working for the single most dysfunctional office you could imagine. Seriously, I could write a book about the sexism and the racism and the crazy shit that happened there. I used a radio to tell electricians what jobs needed doing, I did a lot of paperwork, and in general I managed everything while our boss was out golfing. At the end of every insane day, I felt...FULFILLED. I felt like I had done a lot of things, that loose ends had been tied up, that my day had been busy and interesting and tiring. I held that job because the woman who worked it before me was retiring--after 20 years. She worked for those crazy people for 20 years, doing a job that wouldn't affect anyone else outside of the office, and you know what? She missed it.

When I was 18 I worked at a bookstore. I made $5 an hour. I hated aspects of that job, including standing up for 8 hours and dealing with customers. I loved other things, like working in this space literally called "the cage," where I dealt with special orders in a tiny claustrophobic room and got to find out things like who had a penchant for German poetry or soft porn. One day, while I was working the register, a pregnant woman came over and put "What to Expect When You're Expecting" on the counter. I told her to wait a minute. I walked over to the overstock section and brought back the exact same book, with a hole punched in the cover to mark it as overstock. I said "this is the same book, but it's $5, and that one is $25. You're going to have a baby. You should get the cheap one." She was very grateful to me. The man behind her, all dressed up in suit and tie and reeking of cigar smoke and money, chastised me: "Honey, you need to earn that money they're paying you! Your job is to make the company money, not help pregnant ladies. You're a pretty girl but you have a lot to learn." Then, this dude asked for a copy of the Tonya Harding Penthouse edition that had just come out that week. I gave it to him (they were kept behind the counter and creepy guys always came into MY line to ask for porn, as opposed to the lines of my male co-workers) in a see-through plastic bag. I lied to his face and told him we were out of paper bags. He left looking embarrassed, trying to hide the magazine from people as he walked. I took my break soon after, and blew an hour's worth of wages on an iced coffee with whipped cream.

It's been 19 years, and that 15 minutes from pregnant lady to coffee stands out as maybe the finest moment of job satisfaction that I've ever had.

Sometimes, people work because they have to or because they want to, and sometimes people work because they wouldn't know what else to do. In my family, we could alter our lives so that one of us could stay home with the kids. That one of us would probably be Gabe, because he would enjoy staying home more than I would. But this is probably never going to happen--because we don't know how to not have jobs. We are both terrified of not working, because no matter our actual situation, we will always feel one step away from the poorhouse. Gabe will always be the guy who we use to get the kids to eat. We do not say that kids are starving in far off locations or in other neighborhoods of the city. We say, you know, a lot of people grow up HUNGRY, and then Gabe glares at them from across the table and eats all of the rest of their food whether he is hungry or not. I will always be the kid who sent money home to her mom in college rather than the other way around. I am that mom who rips a ridiculously long article out of the paper about strawberry-pickers and tells my daughter to read it, so that she understands that food shouldn't be wasted not just because some people don't have access to it (and those people could even be you sometime) but because people work their asses off producing that food.

We Americans seem so convinced that happiness comes through personal fulfillment. We consider ourselves enlightened if we think that happiness comes from serving others. Sometimes--most of the time--happiness comes from a decision to be happy as you live as a hard-working person in the world. Every survey that has ever been done on happiness shows that we are actually less happy (read: FULFILLED) than people in many developing countries. It's as if we have so many examples of happiness and fulfillment that are so extreme--celebrity culture, millionaire mother CEOs--that we have forgotten how to be happy with regular life.

This can be really problematic, even for very privileged people. People who want to be lawyers because of the exciting stuff they see on TV can become really disillusioned by the actual job itself, with the paperwork and the ridiculous hours. My mom once dated an obstetrician who thought delivering babies was boring, tedious. I can't count the number of managers I've met who lament the fact that they are so busy managing that they don't have time to do the work that they used to enjoy.

If everyone is chasing a fantasy, the reality of that fantasy can be a crushing blow even once it is achieved.

I hate being asked "where do you see yourself in 5 years" by managers or prospective employers. I always want to say: "gainfully employed, healthy and with a roof over my head," but I know I am supposed to recite some line about management or expanding my skill set or something. I'm supposed to be obsessed with getting MORE out of my job/career; I'm supposed to hate working for others as opposed to being my own boss; I'm supposed to look for ways to claw my way to the top.

Please.

Do you know when I have felt most proud of myself as a working mother?

I have never been prouder of myself than when I was going through chemo, after having had two breast surgeries. Yes, I went to work, and did very well, actually, earning a bonus and a raise that hellish year. Yes, I mothered my kids, though we had lots of help with things like meals. But the moments when I was proudest were those when I knew what was happening in my body--I knew that the derivative of mustard gas, combined with the drug so toxic it stopped some people's hearts, had destroyed my ovaries, my hair, my mucous membranes, my digestive system and my immunity. I felt proudest when I put one foot in front of the other and made it to the goddamn train. During my performance review that year, my manager asked me what I wanted to be doing in five years. I knew she wouldn't take it the wrong way when I said:

"I want to still be here."

So if you have the opportunity to follow your passion, whether that means staying home with kids or starting a charity or working for yourself or being an artist or a plumber or a CEO, good for you. But if you are just plugging along, as most people are, GOOD FOR YOU TOO. There's nothing wrong with that. Your worth as a person, as a woman, as a parent, should not be derived from which side of an elitist debate you hail from, because your situation might change, and you will still be the same person, with the same amount of worth.

People always ask me when I will quit my day job to become a writer. I always say that I can't imagine doing that. Again, I fear not having a paying job, with a regular paycheck and health insurance, and that fact does not make me a lesser person than you. But there is another reason I would never do that. I like having a separation between my work and my passion. To me, work is work. Writing is NOT work. I know I could change a lot of things and find sponsors and advertisers and get paid to write this blog or something else. Kudos to my friends who do that. I just don't want to do this for anyone else. I want to do this the way I want to do it, all the time. I don't want to ever have to write because I have to or about something specific or by Tuesday at noon. I do that with my job. I see my husband, a guy who built a career in IT out of his hobby, lament the time he used to spend tinkering on computers for fun. I listen to the wives of carpenters talk about how he never does any work around their own house. I hear the words of my grandmother, the legal secretary who loved wearing spectators and costume jewelry and walking around among the masses in Chicago at rush hour, discuss her various arts. She could do this amazing embroidery, sewing, knitting; she made these rag rugs that no one else I know could make, even when her eyesight was practically gone. These are the kinds of rugs that last forever and could sell for a decent amount of money. She lived on a fixed income in a subsidized retirement community and struggled to pay for medications and utilities. Couldn't she sell those rugs, couldn't she earn a little money from all the things she made?

"Well, yes I could, honey. But then it would be WORK. I do this for the love."

Insomnia

I have insomnia.

I don't mean that I have insomnia sometimes, or that I get anxious and I can't sleep, or that I need to count sheep. I mean that my inability to sleep is a lifelong reality that I have learned to accept, and that those who love me and live with me have learned to accept as well. I had an epiphany in my 20s that enabled me to manage this issue, and that revelation led to changes in my lifestyle that might seem extreme, or selfish, to some people.

I am now teaching these techniques to my 7 year old daughter, who is a lot like me.

My mom has always told me that I stopped napping at a year old. I would sleep soundly all night long, so soundly she would fear that I was no longer breathing, but once I was up, I was up. And I was always--ALWAYS--moving. I never sat still, though we as a society seem to believe that is a problem that only afflicts little boys. She says that my entire childhood was a "blur" of me dashing through the room. I was also not the most affectionate child on the planet. When she would sing to me for hours as a newborn and I would continue to cry, my mother would wonder what exactly it would take to calm me down. One day, when I was maybe 6 weeks old, she couldn't stand it anymore, and put me down in my crib to "cry it out." I instantly started cooing at my bumpers, happy as a clam.

I just wanted that crazy lady to leave me the hell alone.

I am still like this. I love spooning--for a minute or two. I give a hug and walk away. I snuggle with my kids, but I don't linger. I hate back-rubs. I have perfected the art of getting the boys and men in my life (every single one of whom has been more affectionate than me) to take it down a notch and give me my space.

I am also still the same person who stopped napping at a year old. I never slept much, even as a teenager. I woke up early. I couldn't even nap when I was pregnant or going through cancer treatment. Five hours of sleep is adequate for me. I can be pleasant on less, and if I get more than six hours, it's like a miracle. When I had morbid insomnia from chemo, and I didn't sleep at all for four nights--not at ALL, people--I could still function, and work, though it was hard. When I had menopause and literally never got more than a single hour of sleep in a night--for months at a time--I was fussy and irritable, but I managed. Falling asleep has always required rituals for me, tricking my body into thinking I was doing something else. I used to have "seasonal insomnia" (I made that term up) in the summers in high school. It took me years to figure out why. I've always been little, and jumpy. My metabolism works overtime, with everything--food, drugs, you name it. I've always had more muscle for my frame than seemed normal.

I now believe that all of these things are related.

When I was in my 20s, working two jobs, dating, hanging out with friends, and interminably busy, the insomnia started to grate on me. I was still jumpy, still little, hanging out at a size 4 before vanity sizing had taken effect.

I didn't have a lot of time to exercise.

I took a long walk every day--I had always done that. My need to walk is partly psychological, partly physical. After the car accident I survived at age 9, I had extreme arthritis and bursitis in my hips. If I didn't walk long distances every day, my hips would lock up on me or the pain would be too severe to manage. (This is another reason I don't sleep well--I am a side sleeper, and I can only sleep on one side for maybe 2 hours before the pain in my hip wakes me up and I have to switch positions.) That car accident also gave me a fear of atrophy, since I was immobile for 3 months.

So, I walked in the early mornings when everyone else was asleep. I walked to the train, I putzed around my apartment because I still can't sit still. But I didn't go to the gym--when would I have done that? Two jobs, grad school...

Walking an hour every day at a fast clip (can't run, due to my car accident injuries), a 20 minute routine of situps and pushups and other toning exercises I essentially made up, and swimming in the summer--that was my exercise, and I did it faithfully every day for my entire adult life. It's a hell of a lot more exercise than most people get.

It wasn't enough for me.

I finally realized that I had seasonal insomnia in the summer as a teenager because I was doing less, and therefore moving less. Eventually, I came to the equilibrium I've been at for about the last decade.

If I want to sleep WELL, I will get 3 hours of intense exercise EVERY SINGLE DAY.

I walk, I spin, I do strength training at the gym and at home, I do water aerobics. In the summer I swim, paddleboard, run for an hour through a strong current (I can run in the water--doesn't hurt my joints). I go to the gym three days a week at work (lunchtime) and early in the morning at home 5 days a week. That's in addition to everything else.

I have small children, I work full time--how do I do this? Well, I'm lucky to have a gym at work. It is probably my favorite thing about my job. I'm lucky to have a husband who knows and understands that this is a necessity, not a privilege, for me. He has fond memories of watching me do jumping jacks through the window of my condo after he dropped me off from our dates in the early days. He could eat anything he wants, forget to exercise for two weeks, maintain his six pack at 37 years old, and still fall asleep right in the middle of a goddamn sentence if he wanted to, and he once told me he really wished he could "give me his sleep."

I have listened to people berate me for being small or skinny or having a good metabolism all my life. These people need to keep that shit to themselves, but they also need to recognize something. There are people who look like me who don't exercise at all. I know these people, and they have been blessed with a great metabolism. I would get bigger if I didn't exercise, but that is NOT why I do it. I'm not some vain little mini-sized freak. I also don't exercise like this to reduce breast cancer recurrence, because I was ridiculously active before my diagnosis, so let me just say this once: lack of exercise did NOT give me cancer. Maybe all this exercise will help prevent a recurrence, or maybe not--it doesn't matter. I am not one of the people whose cancer is related to activity, unless I was destined to be a professional athlete who works out 8 hours a day or anything lesser would kill me. That is NOT why I do it.

I just want to sleep. And stay sane.

I want the same thing for my daughter, my 7 year old, who doesn't even weigh 40 pounds. The one who can do one-armed pullups, 42 situps in a minute, 19 pushups in a minute, climb the rope higher than any other kid in her class. She is tiny, and has big arm muscles and a crazy strong core section, and the combination allows her to do these things.

She also isn't very affectionate, and she has trouble sleeping.

My daughter will hug us. She will cuddle with us--for a minute. Then she asks to be left alone. She runs around, even as she loves to just sit and read.

She wakes up before 5 AM on many days--right before I leave to go to the gym or walk. She does this even if she doesn't fall asleep until 9:30. She has told us that she tries counting sheep, but sometimes she is still awake at 10:30. Because she is so quiet, we never knew this was happening.

I could take her with me on walks, but she is short, and therefore slow in comparison to me even when running, and I need to MOVE, not amble--so I don't. We have been telling her to read, to try to go back to sleep. She gets fussy at night.

I changed my strategy just last night. I told her--and my husband, who is not a morning person--that if she woke up early, she should go outside with her dad. He could use the stationary bike on our porch, since even with his tiny body fat percentage self he could use the cardio, and she could jump rope or something. I have also decided to let her come with me in the nice weather sometimes--she can ride her bike while I walk.

She woke up at 4, went back to sleep, woke up again at 5:15 and was UP. I left for a walk at 5:30, told Gabe to get up. When I returned, I asked her what they did. "Daddy used the exercise bike. I ran up and down the hill."

That's it? Were you playing a game or anything?

"No, just running up and down the entire time."

She seemed so happy. I know now that this is what we need to do--we need to find a way for her to move manically, every day, for the same amount of time that I move. It will be hard. Chicago Public Schools allows 20 minutes of recess a day, not always outside. They have gym only 6 times a month. Well, you know what? I work an office job. It's hard, but it's possible. It takes a certain amount of selfishness to continually claim that time for yourself, but everyone around me is better for it, and the same will be true for her. I can teach her that it's ok to be who she is--little, strong, jumpy, manic, stoic, not so affectionate, even that dreaded word SKINNY. We were made this way, and it wasn't a mistake. People will still love you, even if at 7 years old you have already heard so many people say mean things to you about being little, strong, skinny, or stoic.

I was thinking this over breakfast when she was refusing to listen to something I was saying, and in spite of my annoyance, I wanted to give her a hug.

But then I thought better of it and told her to go brush her teeth. She smiled at me, and went charging away.

A LiveChicken Mother's Day

Mother's Day will forever be a strange time for me, thanks to two things: It falls during the same week as the anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis, and on Mother's Day, thousands of people walk right past my house for a community fundraiser for breast cancer. So it's like Mother's Day=breast cancer around here. It's weird, and sad, and confusing, and there's a lot of pathos and reverse nostalgia mixed into the whole mess.



But that's not the only reason Mother's Day is different in these parts.

The messages of Mother's Day are often lost on me, including the main one: that I should be celebrated because I am a mother and mothering is unbelievable and I am the only mother who could ever mother my children and there is no work more important than this.

I love my kids and I think parenthood is an exciting, entertaining, worthwhile trip. I've learned a lot from them, these small people, probably as much as they've learned from me. I would die for them--literally, I would throw myself under the actual, not just the proverbial, bus for them.

But I'm not LIVING for them. I would be living fully without them. Now--I would not be living fully if I had to live without them NOW, because that would mean something unthinkable had happened. But my life would be worthwhile and meaningful if I had never had kids. People say "I was meant to be a mother," "I always knew I wanted to be a mother," and "this is the only thing I've ever wanted" and I think, huh. Becoming a parent seemed like a natural progression to me and I wanted to have a family with my husband, but I didn't dream of motherhood any more than I ever dreamed of the perfect wedding.

When I was younger, I dreamed about having adventures and falling in love and being a writer and being able to do things like sing and dance well. I dreamed about being a grownup who lived in her own apartment in a big city and rode the subway to work. I dreamed about getting old and sitting in a rocking chair and looking around and realizing that all my people, no matter who they happened to be, were all right.

Some of those dreams came true, and some did not. And once I had kids, I was still the same person, though I loved them differently than I ever loved anyone else. I just never figured that my love would be questioned because I was a less exuberant or purposeful mother. So these days, my kids follow MY routine. Their schedules need to fit into our schedules. We place a hell of a lot of importance on our relationship with each other, even if it makes them jealous. Hell, maybe in some ways BECAUSE it makes them jealous, and helps them learn that there's a wide world outside of them and that world is filled with love too.

If I were to die, and that is a less rhetorical statement for me than for other moms, I know my kids would suffer. I also think my husband could raise them without me, and that someone could take my place as their mother.

Now, I don't think anyone could ever be ME, but someone could still hold the place of mother in their lives if I weren't here. This happens all the time, for a variety of reasons--death, divorce, parents being unable or unwilling to care for their kids--and people step in and the kids turn out just fine. Maybe it's that thought that keeps me so intent on being ME, because that is the unique thing that I have to offer to them. Sure, I'm a kick-ass baker and I am an expert at distracting people (including adults) away from their own frustration and pain, but other people are good at those things too. But you know what?

I'm the one that the traditional Mother's Day cards and gifts weren't made for, so I get other things instead.



Messages about letting mom have time to herself, leaving her alone in the bathroom, letting her take a bath and all of that?

Please.

I do my own shit all the time. Much of it involves working out, but I also sit here writing or I collapse on the couch after dinner or watch basketball for an entire month and ignore them and God help anyone who comes in the bathroom when I am in there for any reason, I mean ANY reason unless there is a LOT of blood involved.

Breakfast in bed?

RUGRATS OUT OF MY KITCHEN. and of course RUGRATS OUT OF MY BED.

Pedicure?

Um, yes please, if my husband does it for me using the skills he picked up during all those years he hung out at the nail salon where his grandma worked, because chemo JACKED UP these toenails.

A bottle of wine and cozy slippers?

Girl, I have that messed up sulfur allergy and most slippers are ugly. How about a bourbon, neat, and a wedge heel?

Inspirational books?

My brother sent me a poetry book about the war in Iraq.

Cuddling and spooning and foreplay?

Um, OK, if it's Father's Day because that's more Gabe's shtick and I am a meat and potatoes girl, if you know what I'm saying, and did I mention that my kids are little and go to bed early and at 9 pm around here it's pretty much always Katy and Gabe party time? And as for the spooning, I love that! For a few minutes. But can someone explain one of the great mysteries of marriage to me? Why, when we have a king sized bed, do I have to fall asleep with his knee on my ass? WHY?

Chocolate?

Yes! Definitely. But I am married to a chocoholic whose addiction is so severe that he once literally hoarded chocolate at the neighbor's house and told them not to tell me. So that comes with a lot of baggage.

Flowers? Jewelry?

Yes, I do like flowers, and I get those fairly regularly from my husband, which is nice. And now that I have pierced ears, I like getting earrings, though I REALLY like to pick them out myself.

Really sappy and sentimental cards?

Gabe loves these. I just, I don't, I mean, I can't even.

Chick flicks?

No, not really. When I am nervous and want to relax I watch Bond or Bourne movies.

There is nothing like being a mother.

True, but there is nothing like being anything that is different than all other experiences.

No work is harder than mothering.

Parenthood is hard, in that it is hectic and the love you feel almost hurts and you become paranoid and the whole thing is a leap of faith. But also, it's FUN. It's not like some thankless chore. I can think of a lot of work that's harder, like working in a sweatshop or a coal mine or scavenging through garbage just to survive or being a sex worker or cleaning up other people's messes when those people are not related to you or a thousand other things.

Cheesy cards and crafts made by my kids?

OK, these are usually awesome. Especially when they tell you that they are making a surprise and then they show it to you right then and there or say things like "it's a bracelet made out of paperclips and that was just a HINT mommy."

A day at the salon or spa?

I can barely be bothered with hair anymore. One of my fondest motherhood memories will always be the first day I went to Lenny's daycare bald, after I stopped caring if other kids would ask her questions. I was all prepared to face the onslaught, as the day before I had worn a chin-length red wig and a few weeks before I had long, curly red hair. I walked in and some of the parents and teachers looked away. A little kid, about Lenny's age so maybe 4, stared right at me. With a look of utter boredom on her face, she shouted: "LENNY! Your mom's here." So, no to the salon, though I do have to go more often to get it cut now that it's short. And a big NO to the facial or waxing or anything like that because let's face it that is just PAIN, and beauty is NOT pain, not in my opinion. I do appreciate a massage and I have been practically saved from the abyss by acupuncture, but that shit still reminds me of cancer so no thanks to that too.

I'm not hard to please--really, I'm not. I like to have good food and conversation with my kids and my family and friends on Mother's Day. I like to get some exercise, and I like to be left alone. I like to have a drink and have sex and I like to sit outside if the weather's decent. I like to think about making it to another Mother's Day, because that seemed like a long shot three years ago. I like my kids. Of course I love them, but that's the easy stuff. I also LIKE them.

On Mother's Day, I like the things that I like every other day. I claim many of those things for myself and I don't feel guilty, not for one minute, not any more than a man would feel guilty for being himself when he's single, married, a father, a widower, or whatever. I will not be the one to say that being married and having children is my life's work.

That's what my husband said the other day, and I believe him.

I don't know that I have a life's work. But I know that I have this life, and I love it, and I appreciate it, and I hope I have a lot more of it.

And now, I have to go.

The boys have left the house, and it's time to kick my daughter's little 40 pound behind in a friendly game of gin. Happy Mother's Day!

Contemporary American Autobiography

Someday, perhaps we will all look back on this point in time as being an aberration in history, a time filled with the self-importance of those who felt an uncompromising desire to tell the stories of their lives to an anonymous public in blog posts on the Internet.

I often think this way about myself, even when I recognize that the stories I tell, while deeply rooted in my own experience, are often told for some reason that sits entirely outside of myself. That is what the genre of “memoir” really does, does it not? It allows us to think about life and art and meaning through the lens of someone else’s experience. It is different than “autobiography,” because anyone, including those who are far from famous, can be the subject of the story that is being told.

My love affair with memoir was consummated when I was 18, but I suppose it began much earlier. It probably began with poetry, when I would read the words people had written about seemingly unimportant scenes or events in their lives while I was standing in the kitchen or the bathroom, because those broadsides from the 70s peppered the walls of my house the same way that tacky wallpaper peppered yours. I would brush my teeth, and Marvin Bell would yell at me: “No more fossils of eunuchs!” My family had inside jokes about the line “in thy infinite mercy let Neil drive the combine” from a poem by someone no one reading this knows existed. My kids eat dinner while looking at this, just like I did when I was a child:

UTAH, by M.J. Rychlewski

almonds or
sandstone on cloudy days
it's hard to say
what she was but she was
smiling and came
in the heat of Moab
with a glass of A&W

yes we have salt and pepper
yes we're open most of the time
(my older brothers are like my uncles)
yes you can take 70 into 89

a girl in Kanab
who threw her eyes
and her hair
a cheap motel
and giggled
why the Starlite everyone goes there


And what does that mean? That, my friends, is a story. A clear picture, an admonition that says, don’t you feel like you were THERE?

When I was 8, I wrote a story about my best friend moving to the Philippines after first grade, and it won an award. I thought it was just a child’s tale, this story called, simply, “Amy.” I never understood why adults would think it was good. I don’t have that story anymore, but I remember writing it, and how doing so made me feel like she wasn’t so far away, at least for the span of six pages.

I loved to read about other people’s lives. If someone could write well, offer me a nice turn of phrase or a really good last line (I still always read them first), I could read a book about someone watching paint dry. It didn’t matter how far removed the person’s experience was from my own. And I always loved to people-watch…not to make up stories about the people I was watching, but to catch the details, the mannerisms, the ways they talked or what they didn’t talk about or how they looked at each other or sideways at me. I was always just there, paying attention.




And then, perhaps in spite of myself, which is another story I suppose, I got into a nice little liberal arts college and was offered a really generous scholarship. We were required to pre-enroll in a freshman seminar; we had assignments over the summer, and the professor of that class would become our de-facto advisor until we decided otherwise once we actually figured out what the hell to do with our lives.

I enrolled in a course called “Contemporary American Autobiography.”

Over the summer, I read a book by Charles Baxter called First Light. I answered some questions about it in short essay form. I showed up at school, all long curly hair and Beastie Boys tshirt and clogs and excitement and romanticism and cluelessness, and I went to that class on my first day.

I loved it. I could write a post about that—about all the books we read, about how much fun it was for me to write short essays about them. I could write a post about the stories that the other students wrote about themselves for class assignments. Each week, the eccentric professor (someone I still write Christmas cards to, 20 years later) would pick one or two stories from the class, and we would spend half of the hour and a half discussing those pieces. There was this lovely intermingling of us kids, and our seemingly uninteresting lives, and the stories of published authors who won awards and hung out chain smoking at independent bookstores.

This post, however, is not about that. This post is about how HARD it was for me to write those assignments about myself. Creative writing, or writing in general, had always been my best thing. I could write poems or essays and get straight As without half trying. Hell, I practically stopped going to my AP English class my senior year of high school. I ditched that class all the time, wandered the streets, hung out in some kid’s pickup truck playing gin and probably having more intellectual conversations than I ever would have had inside those halcyon walls. Then I would nonchalantly consider whatever assignment I had, write some kick-ass essay, and move on with my life.

And now, I would be given an assignment with a theme, and I would struggle to find something to say. The paper would come back with a decent grade, never below a B, but damn! This was ME, writing. Why all the red marks, why all the frustration when the professor would call me in and ask me for MORE? He wanted more detail, he wanted something else. It upset me to no end, to think I wasn’t a good writer. He told me that I WAS a very good writer, but I was struggling with this type of writing. When we were given an assignment to interview someone else in the class and write about her life, I excelled at that. I wrote a really interesting piece about this other girl whom I had never spoken to much before the interview. The professor wondered why I couldn’t write like THAT about myself.

Because I am not that interesting, I thought to myself. She is much more interesting than me.

And then, he picked as the class example the story that was written about ME, by a fresh-faced boy whose name I cannot for the life of me remember, even though there were maybe only 350 kids in my graduating class. The professor loved his story. I hated it. He was a nice kid, and he listened intently to me, and asked some meaningful questions. But the only thing that I will ever remember about that story is that he referred to me as “feisty.”

God help all the little women the world over with big thoughts who are called “feisty” when what they really are is opinionated.

I remember wanting to punch him in his handsome face. It was unwarranted, that desire. But then again, desires are often unwarranted.

I continued to struggle, and the professor continued to pester me. A few years later, I would choose to be the preceptor for his class, mentoring freshmen kids on how to write memoir when I was only 20. I would laugh at him when I was a junior, and I took another course from him where he told us, when handing out the syllabus, “Here are the requirements for the semester. Of course, there is a sense in which nothing is required, except death.”

I remember a lot of things about this man, with whom I had a comfortable but distant friendship devoid of any creepy connotations. I remember the disturbed look in his eye when he talked about how much he hated Princeton. I remember how much he loved baseball, with some kind of all-consuming love. I remember the delicious vegetarian chili he made for all of us at the beginning of the semester, when we visited his house and saw his extensive gardens. Years later, when I visited with him on trips to the Twin Cities, I would realize his love for cream soda and pastrami.

I remember how he successfully convinced me to try my hand at a genre of poetry called “dramatic monologue,” wherein the author writes in the first person voice from someone else’s point of view.

I remember him egging me on, asking me: “do you remember in T’s piece when she said X? What about in R’s piece when he said Y?” And I would go on and on, remembering every single thing that other students had written, weaving their stories together, finding commonalities, expounding on themes.

I remember him constantly asking me about “the car accident,” which at that time was one of the truly defining moments of my life, to the extent that it came up in casual conversation just as easily as it became the subject of stories, including the story that enabled me to enroll, in spite of myself, in a pretty good liberal arts college with a generous scholarship. He tried to get me to talk about my family, different difficult aspects of my upbringing, the youthful dalliances and loves that had already begun to form my opinions of relationships. He asked me a lot about trains, cars, methods of transportation. Did this guy see into my future and imagine my eventual masters degree in urban planning? Or did he somehow predict that I would write an essay about Chicago (one of the other subjects he always wanted me to elaborate on, and the one that became the theme of the poetry independent study I did with that professor my senior year) that was half about streets and cars and trains, without me even realizing it?

He asked me lots of questions about what I remembered about other students’ work and the books we had read. He looked at me in an exasperated way, as I failed to get the message.

It was like I was paying attention to everyone’s life but my own.

I was doing well in the class, but the writing assignments left me constantly frustrated. At the end of the semester, we received our final writing assignment. The theme was: write about anything you want, as long as it's from your own experience.

I was stumped. I had no idea what to write. I procrastinated, something I rarely did, even in college.

One day I was sitting in my room, studying for a final for another class. I suddenly pictured in my mind this poem that my dad had written and given to me right before I left for school. It was called “Mnemosyne.” She is the goddess of memory. I called my mom and asked her to find the poem where I thought I had left it, and I wrote it down. And then, I wrote a piece that was loosely, maybe only tangentially, based on the idea behind that poem. I don’t remember, ironically, what is was about exactly. I remember how it FELT to write it though. I felt frantic about it, like there wasn’t enough time or that my extremely fast typing wasn’t fast enough. It was just so…EASY. The essay wasn’t particularly thematic, in my mind--it was snippets of things from my childhood, ruminations from my adolescence, scenes woven together from my life. It was an essay about memory, whether I knew it at the time or not.

My essay was chosen as the last essay to discuss in the last class of the semester. We spent the entire class discussing it. I finally got an A. There were no red marks. He loved it. He discussed at length my use of theme, the very specific sense of scene and purpose, the way that I had written about the only thing anyone could ever write about: memory. After class, the professor said this to me:

That is the best thing you have ever written.

And I said, yes, I know that was leagues above anything I ever wrote in this class. To which he replied,

That is definitely true. That piece is not even in the same ballpark as the others. But I mean, literally, I bet THAT IS THE BEST THING YOU HAVE EVER WRITTEN.

How could you know that? I asked.

I just do, he said.

That day, that last class, something else happened. This professor had never once taken attendance or asked us to sign in or said a word to anyone who missed a class. There were maybe 22 of us in the class. We all assumed he didn’t care about things like attendance. Then, he told us that he always gave a prize to the student with the best attendance. How can you know that? We asked. You’ve never written it down.

And he said, well…I always pay attention.

Apparently, I had perfect attendance in the class. I was sure I had missed one, but he told me otherwise. He said that he always gave a lot of thought to what the prize would be, and he picked out a book to fit the person who had earned the award. He unveiled it, and I didn’t know what to think. He told the class that the book was a memoir about a woman who was an unwed teenage mother who by the grit of her teeth made it into Harvard.

Is that how he sees me? I remember thinking.

He said that she was a master at developing scene. He said a bunch of things about the book and its contents. Then, he said this.

Sometimes, the theme is right there on the surface. Sometimes, you really can tell a book by its cover. I’ll tell the truth. Half the reason I picked this book for you, Katy, was for the title.

And he looked at me with this gleam in his eye, the gleam you get from people who listen to the things you say and the stories you tell without judging you, without making fun of you or implying that they are unimportant or small. I could have been offended, but the book is wonderful. I still have that book, that prize that I received for achieving perfect attendance in my Contemporary American Autobiography class my freshman year of college in 1993. The book is by Beverly Donofrio. The title is:

Riding in Cars with Boys.