You're Cheese, and I'm Cottage Cheese

Has anyone ever told you that your story isn't true? Or that you have no right to tell it? Have you been criticized, censored, excoriated, misquoted or misunderstood?

Well congratulations! Someone's listening.

As a woman who only started blogging because she had a rare and aggressive form of cancer and she wanted her children to know something of her if she were to die young, and she wanted her friends to know how she was doing, and she didn't want her immediate family to have to explain all the time, I am somewhat naive to the ways of the blogging universe. I know nothing about sponsorships, little of blogging communities, a tiny bit about trolls, and have only a vague knowledge of audience and how to attract it. Normally, 50 or 60 people read my blogs. Various cancer survivors or others find specific posts, for years after I've written them, at times, and I know that I have helped people who say that they were searching for something "real."

Once I got used to writing KatyDidCancer, I realized that my blog was only technically a cancer blog. I started this one so that I could continue to write about a variety of things without having to figure out if they were related to cancer or not. This domain has enabled me to write posts that are essentially ME. But there's another reason that I started this blog.

It's because I sometimes had the experience of people telling me that the things I expressed in the cancer blog were, essentially...WRONG.

You shouldn't feel that way. You should be more appreciative. I am living for my children; what is wrong with you?

Those sentiments have been rare; most people have responded in an overwhelmingly positive manner to my blogs. But what is interesting to me is how common it is in this world where there are millions of bloggers--especially women bloggers--to tell people that their stories aren't worth telling. People feel comfortable using this anonymous social-media-fueled medium, to violently criticize others--often while admitting that they didn't actually bother to read the entire text.

Ponderous thoughts don't work so well in an instant-gratification universe.

And women are on the receiving end of this punishment quite a bit. We have mommy wars, feminist wars, body type wars, skin color wars, the decade of my youth was better than the decade of your youth wars, your suffering is not as bad as mine wars, jock versus princess wars, funny versus serious wars. There's always someone ready to say that the life you've lived is inauthentic and the way you have chosen to talk about it is unacceptable.

I began writing a blog because I wanted to tell some very specific people my story before I died. It would be a lie, however, to say that I only started doing that in May of 2010. The truth is, I have always done that. And here's the proof.

When I was 15 years old, I loved poetry. Like any teenager, I was curious about sex, but was technically a virgin (back then, we were led to believe that oral sex "didn't count). However, I hated poetry about sex. I told someone that I could write a sex poem as good as any adult's. It was a dare. I wrote this, and my mom printed it off and framed it and hung it in the living room.

I Don't Know What
by Katy Jacob

it is in you
that makes me
crumble, or
whether it is
in pale moonlight that I
seem to fade
and I begin to open my
best heart--
or if it is simply
the action of opening;
here and there a dark new
thing
precisely made to offer
to you something
hotter
than hell--
like the warm stuff of eggs,
this that
makes me
shrink
and possibly
falter
and then
you--over me, silenced--
leaving behind only
a shedded snake-like
sigh
for the killing



When I was in college, I won an award for writing a poem about wondering what it was like to grow old:

The Elderly Couple
by Katy Jacob

As they go upstairs to bed,
the last light faintly fades.
Everything has been put away
and they are clean again, tired again.
They walk slowly in their soft clothes
as if steps were secret thoughts,
spinning and floating on delicious air,
leaving light traces of empty space behind.
As if his hands weren't silently shaking,
as if she had time to spare.



When I was maybe 18, I was riding the el with my boyfriend, who was, let me see...20, and it was really hot and there was no air conditioning on the train and there were a million things to look at out the window, but I was only looking at one thing, and it was insignificant so I didn't say anything, but he did. He was looking at the one thing I was looking at, so I wrote this to tell him that:

Doorman
by Katy Jacob

The doorman stands before me waiting in his red coat.
Shyness of color is too subtle for him;
the wool of his jacket is purpled like a worn bruise,
a color so heavy it hurts.
The detail he possesses is a kaleidoscope
of moving pictures that wrongs my eyes.
On a coat like his, even the buttons are moving.
They bleed bright light all the way to the ground,
reflecting shiny blood-drops on his face.
The collar is regally wide and teases his shoulders,
leading to simply-perfected metallic stripes on his arms.
These are his decorations--the stripes are nowhere hurting.
As the door man shifts in sunlight,
these lines become molten to his body, taking on his form.
Looking more closely I see that they are
glad straight arrows, funny kissing mouths,
two gold things going down, new money.



In my late twenties, I got tired of hearing people talk about women's words as if they were always sexual words, or of people conflating the very ideas of women and sex, and I decided to write a poem about riding the train. The TRAIN, people.

Commuter’s Lament
by Katy Jacob

When I rode different trains
I wrote different poems.

Two straight lines turned into three
as I lied a little, to mix it up.

Late became world weary,
crazy ended up spiritual.

I’d make love and redemption
out of three tin cups.

I wouldn’t cover guns at my head,
hands up my dress or the friends I kept.

Words only flowed
from the ordinary

when the sharp rumble
where my feet should have been

caused the faithless to pray a little
made the ride home sweetly rougher

turned 6 pm into everything I’d want
to remember about the life I never had

over the wooden trestles
where the sparks burned blue

the screech lingered and
you had to go down to feel the real world.



Once, on my lunchbreak, I went to a museum. Really, I did!

On Viewing "The Old Guitarist"

When Wallace Stevens saw it
he wrote about things as they are
and things as they seem
and imperfection.
When Rafael Alberti remembered it,
his written recollections were all of blue.

But when I stood in front of the painting which
stands by itself, apart,
on my day off from work in June,
I thought of making art about art--
of the ways we create worlds from a wall--
and I wondered if I could do it.

I don't think I will ever know now,
because I don't know how things are,
and I can't imagine what exists outside of
imperfection and colored memories.

All that I can recall of that Picasso
is the way it made me want to know
if there was ever such a man
so tattered and bent and blue,
if his fingers were really so long,
and where it was that he was sitting.

I can't get to the metaphor
for the obstacle of wondering
if he was real.



When my daughter was a baby, she grabbed a frozen leaf:

First Winter
by Katy Jacob

No one ever told you what lies beneath
the most beautiful days.

In the whole of your life
no one ever told you about the
heavy sharpness of white lace ice,
the glare in your eyes that you will miss after the melt,
the implied noise just before the branches crack,
the danger and perfection all mixed together.

Remember that I will always remember your tiny hand
curling up to a soft white leaf, which cracked and fell at your touch.

If I could, I’d give you this gift,
this day, a postcard you are too young to receive.
I’d vanish into you
so you could see how you smiled.



And when my son was a baby, I held long and intellectual conversations with him:

Talking to Babies
by Katy Jacob

I have a secret.
I use you to talk to myself.
You don’t mind.
You could watch me
search for dust in the air
as long as I was close.
I leave you alone
and you babble and shriek
to yourself, my son.

So keep my secret,
learn what I have learned.
Other people don’t need to be there.
Words are what you make them.
They’re real if you hear the sound,
or even if no one does.

You and I are here,
talking around each other,
wondering what the other one is saying,
alone together at least for a few more months
or maybe forever.
But why am I telling you this?
Your eyes crinkle up at me, saying
come on, Mom, we’ve had this conversation already.



In college, I did an independent study wherein I wrote a bunch of dramatic monologues--poems in memoir form, from someone else's point of view. I wrote one poem, which I will NOT include here, about myself, from my lover's point of view. He said I got it right, and my professor, who was a man, said, "I think only a woman could have done that. That must have been very difficult. I mean, it's even erotic! How interesting. You see yourself as others see you." And one of the other poems that I wrote--years before I married or had children or had lost anyone very close to me or was daily facing my own mortality--was based on the monument of a child that you can find in a cemetery in Chicago. Now that more than fifteen years have passed and all kinds of things have happened, I can say this:

Yes.

Graceland Cemetery: A Mother's Request to a Sculptor
by Katy Jacob

A little more curl in the hair, please.
She always wore her bow on the right.
That's it! That's her face--
but not her eyes,
they were never so bright white, pallid, unmoving.
Please, why can't you get her eyes?

What I would give for you to color this marble!
Then it wouldn't be so easy
for death to creep right in.
Then it could be how I remember.
But now she seems cold, so cold,
I don't want anyone to touch her.
Surround her with glass, let the sun in,
give her a space that lasts longer than seven years.

I want to see her eyelet dress move;
I want her to look on stone-stemmed flowers that won't fade;
I want the ivy to loop through the wood slates
of the white wicker swing she always sat on--
I want the green of it to glisten and melt into every
Saturday morning.
I want to drive that chisel of yours straight into my heart.

O God, when I die
lay me to rest underneath her name
Inez


These things, these stories, large and small, were worth telling. They are true, or at least as true as anything. Sometimes, it's the sharing of perspective that's important. Sometimes, we can learn all we need to know from a three year old child. My kids had this conversation the other day, and it brought everything into perspective for me, and it allowed everything else to just roll off my back. Here it is...truth.

L: you're male and I'm female.
A: no, I'm not.
L: you're not male?
A: no, I'm something more fun.
L: what are you?
A: you're cheese, and I'm cottage cheese.

On Becoming a Woman: What Does That Mean?

I have been thinking about writing this post for a long time. That means that I will write something that is very long and still not say what I meant to say.

What does it mean to be a woman?

I mean, we seem to know as a society what it means to "be a man," even if we disagree about some aspects of the definition. Little boys hear about how to be a man from the time they are babies, and what we often don't realize is that little girls hear that too. And when we collectively discuss "being a man," we mean so many things:

Being strong, responsible, secure, determined, aggressive, stoic, smart, handy.

Now the more enlightened among us might say, whoa! That's not what being a man is about! Men could be those things, but they could also be sensitive, kind, goofy, contemplative, etc.

OK, maybe that's a step up. But my point is this: Being a man MEANS something.

Growing up, I would internalize these messages, and I remember thinking, but I will never be a man. So what will it take for me to grow up? What does it mean to be a woman?

I felt like I knew a lot of men, and that a lot of them were actually...women.

They were grownups. Adults. People who took care of themselves and anyone else who came along. People I trusted, looked up to, admired. But the only thing I ever heard SPOKEN about what it meant to "become a woman" seemed totally ridiculous to me: Getting your first period made you a woman.

Nope, impossible. I got mine at age 11.

Having babies made you a woman.

But how could that be? A lot of women couldn't have babies or didn't want to have them.

All of the things that "made you a woman" were physical things or things that happened to you, not things you did, things you made, things you decided.

I could get into a long tirade about misogyny, down to the kind of deep and disturbing misogyny that is involved in our ingrained rape culture. But that line of conversation will make me too depressed. What concerns me, now that I have both a girl and a boy to raise, is how we are so casually misogynist, ALL OF US, and how we don't even realize it. And because we don't recognize it, we don't admit how it effects our children. We use misogynist language as if it is NORMAL language. I do it too:

Man Up. Take it like a Man.

And then, little boys at such a young age learn to say things like "Ew, I don't want to do that. THAT'S FOR GIRLS." And you can practically hear them retching from the very thought. What bothers me about statements like that, or things like "you throw like a girl," "stop crying like a little girl," and even the concept of "girl power" is this:

When people say these things, they are speaking of something that is inherently less. Little girls might say they don't like something because "that's for boys," but you don't get the implied disdain with that statement. They are saying I'm a girl, and therefore I'm not interested in that. We might take issue with those thoughts. But when I hear boys saying "that's for girls," even my own son, who just learned that idea maybe in the last month or two, these boys are implying that being a girl isn't as good as being a boy. They know at three years old what we pretend isn't true at 30.

I feel like I am somewhat of an authority on this topic, and here's why:

When I was very little, I was just a little ball of crazy. I wore my brother's clothes and had my hair cut in the same style as him because my parents were broke and lazy about style. Then, I was still a little ball of crazy, with the affectionate nickname "little shit," but I wore patent leather shoes and dresses all the time (bought for me by my grandfather). Then, I became a tomboy--a really serious tomboy, for several years. I cut my hair very short. I wore the same two pairs of sweatpants with holes in the knees every day. One day in sixth grade, my best friend took me to her house before school, lent me a skirt and put some makeup on me and put a ridiculous bow in my hair and I went to school like that, literally as a joke. Some boy told me I looked pretty and I chased him around the classroom trying to get in a fight. It wasn't long after that that I told my mom I didn't want to be a girl. She asked me if I didn't like who I was and I said I did, but that I didn't want to have to do girl things. I told her I wanted to wear a suit to the prom. I told her I wanted to change my name to Keith.

She took everything but the name change in stride, telling me that was all fine, but I should keep my name, because it was the name she gave me and I should honor it.

You might hear this story and think it's funny, or quaint. I will ignore the reality that a boy wishing to be a girl would not be seen in the same light. I will also ignore the fact that it is easier, in some ways, for little girls to try on all different types of gender roles, because the gender that is opposite of them is the preferred one. Being a tomboy is cool. It's funny. It's quirky. Being a girl who acts like a boy is, you know, BETTER. Boys don't get the same message about acting like girls.

What concerns me about those phases I went through is this. What, exactly, was I rejecting? I never, not for one minute, ACTUALLY wished I was a boy. I was comfortable in my body and my own skin. I was very straight, and knew that even then. I just didn't want to have to ACT like a girl, whatever that meant. I had this vague feeling of unease about being female in the world. I wanted to be the one in charge, the crazy one, the independent one, and somewhere along the way I learned that girls could not be that.

I wanted some practical things. Back in my boy phase, I did things that are in some ways the essence of what it means to be a guy. And no, I'm not talking about playing sports or laughing too loud, though I did those things too.

I took up space.

I sprawled around, took up room, threw my clothes (what I had of them) around the house. To this day, I will be the lone female who chooses to sit next to the adolescent boy who is all sprawled out over two seats on the train. I have actually on a few occasions sat right on one of these kids' legs, just to make the point that he didn't pay for two seats so he'd better move the hell over. They are always so surprised that they just sheepishly say "sorry, my bad," or something to that effect. I still feel that one of the great mysteries of marriage is why, when we have a king sized bed, I am forced to fall asleep with Gabe's knee on my ass.

I was small, but I didn't want to have to ACT small. I was pretty, but I didn't want to be TREATED pretty. What's sad to me today is that there should be nothing in the world wrong with being small and pretty. What's funny to me today is that at 11 years old I envisioned a world where a straight 17 year old boy wouldn't mind going to the prom with a girl in a suit.

We shouldn't try to convince ourselves that everyone should be strong because strong is better, or that everyone should be tough because tough is better. But we also shouldn't tell ourselves that girls who are strong and tough aren't girly or that boys who aren't aren't real boys.

I grew out of my boy phase into whatever phase I have been in since about age 14, hovering somewhere in between, choosing boys and later men who could accept my backwards ways and even appreciate them. I have gotten used to guys initially liking my "feisty" ways and then realizing that I am not actually feisty, I am opinionated and stubborn and terrible at backing down, and losing their interest for that reason. I have chosen a man who is sensitive and nurturing because I am not, and I feel that those are useful traits.

And I still feel somewhat gender-confused, somewhat adrift. I often don't fit in to groups of women or groups of men. I told a friend last night that I am 37 years old, and I still don't know what women talk about when they go in groups to the bathroom. I have never gone to a bathroom with another person, not even in high school. And I envy the girl-power of the close-knit groups of women I see who know something about being a woman that I just don't know, because I never learned it.

I mean, you can't know what you don't even know you don't know.

I never knew that I communicate like a man until I took this "Efficacy for Women" development course at work a few years ago, which was supposed to be empowering, and I learned that for all intents and purposes I speak and act like a man, which is supposedly preferred in the workforce, but has never gotten me anywhere, to be honest. I was what, 35 years old? And finally learning why I didn't know--really, I didn't--why other women or girls had been mad at me in my life. Realizing that even when I understood, I didn't. Oh, you were mad at me because I said something that hurt your feelings? But why would that hurt your feelings? I don't understand why people get sensitive, or cry, or feel hurt in some situations, and therefore I am a woman acting like a man, supposedly, but I am NOT a man, so no one forgives me for it. And believe you me I have ALWAYS been treated as a woman at work. I've never been invited into the boys club.

I'm not complaining; it's just odd. I am as curious about women as most men are. I see how they flirt, or toss their hair, or laugh, and I wonder why I can't do those things. I see mothers talking to babies in lilting voices and I feel like there's something wrong with me as I talk to my children and everyone else's as if they are just very small versions of adults. I have a hard time inserting myself into groups of women because I'm not sure what to say, what to talk about, and I am not saying that to say that I am somehow better than other women. I am truly envious of those things I never internalized. Because men don't think I'm one of the guys either, so sometimes I feel just adrift. Gabe has this problem too. He can have trouble being around guys, because he doesn't like hoppy beer or talking about rock bands or fishing or chicks, and yet he feels weird being the only guy chatting up the women. I always tell him that the guys we know can talk about a lot of different things, but I know where he's coming from--he never learned the cues, and he doesn't know how to use them. I get it.

This friend I was talking to last night told me that she has always seen me as very feminine...just not girly. She said I look feminine, I dress feminine, and I agreed. I said this: "I guess in some ways that made it easier. I looked like a girl, and guys liked me, so I never had to learn to act like someone else."

And that's the truth. I could give people shit and make fun of them, just like I did with my older brother, and they would decide I was flirting because that's what they wanted to believe. Inside I would think, no, I am actually making fun of you. REALLY, I AM. But it didn't matter. When I was 14 years old and some friends dragged me out of the house one Friday night, looking chagrined when they saw me with no makeup on, hair in a ponytail, jeans and knee high black leather boots and a Rolling Stones tshirt with the huge tongue on the front (sounds cool, huh? Well, not for a girl in 1990, NO SIR), I learned something. That cute boy everyone liked asked me out anyway. And I literally said to myself, at age 14, "Really? This is good enough? Well, I guess there's no need to ever play myself out."

The lesson was worth learning, but the message is still odd. That same boy broke up with me because he "didn't like my personality." Specifically, he told me that I didn't take him seriously enough and I was always cracking too many jokes. I guess I was supposed to be sweating him all the time, feeling his biceps or something, but I didn't know that, so I didn't do it, and he was telling me that there was some massive disconnect between my appearance and my behavior, and I assumed that was true.

I don't know. I feel like I am feminine because I am female. I feel like my husband is masculine because he is male. And maybe, for some people, it's the other way around.

When I had my head shaved for chemo, after the tears had subsided, I took a good hard look at myself in the mirror and told Gabe that I thought I looked like a boy. Like a male twin of myself. He sounded exasperated and told me I looked beautiful, that I couldn't look like a boy if I tried. And whether that was true or not, let's not lie: He was required to say that in that situation. Breast cancer can make you question the entire nature of femininity whether or not you were so inclined to question it. But the point is this: I did look feminine. Because I looked like myself. And I am female. That look in my eyes is all me, for better or worse.

I just don't want to raise kids who believe what I believed as a child, that being a man was worth more, that the things men were and did were more important. My mother didn't teach me that, so I think it's a societal thing, not a personal one. She never wore makeup and had little to no clothes and wore glasses and did most of the manual labor and I never saw her gossiping with other women or having coffee with them or whatever and I never, not for one second, thought she wasn't the most feminine person in the world. Because she was female and she was my main role model for what it meant to be a grownup who could never be a man.

I think we need to rid ourselves of the notion that there are things and traits that are male or female, not because it is untrue, but because we have not evolved to the point where all of the things that are "feminine" are lesser. I remember being in a Women Romantics class in college, and reading the poetry of the few female authors of the Romantic age. Other students thought their poetry was pedestrian, boring. I argued that they wrote about their lives, and their lives were different from the lives of men. So, they were writing about marriage and children, and Keats was writing about becoming one with fire. Perhaps that was because him mom did his laundry for him. Perhaps he was the one who wasn't fully grown.

A few days ago, Augie had a horrible cut on his finger. We have 57 different types of kid bandaids, and I asked him what he wanted. He said "well, I like Cars and Muppets and Lenny likes Dora and Disney Princesses." The kid was crying so hard I didn't get into it at the time, so I asked him about it today when I was checking to make sure the wound had healed.

I asked him why he had said that about the bandaids. I said, you love Dora. You love Snow White. Lenny doesn't really like princesses. You have never seen the Cars movie. You both like muppets. Did you think you should like those because you're a boy and she's a girl? And he said yes. So I asked him this:

But what's wrong with that? What's wrong with being a girl? Can't you think of any girls whom you would like to be like?

He immediately said, "Lenny."

I was proud of him. As he tumbled headfirst onto my lap by vaulting himself over the arm of the couch and proceeded to threaten to bite me all while wrestling me, I asked him this: "Can't you think of any other girls you'd like to be like," teasing him, baiting him, showing him that Katy kind of love. He said no, and laughed. I asked what about me? And he said:

No. You're a boy.

I was stunned, but played it off. I'm not a boy! What am I?

He was cracking up: "You're a boy. Mommy, you're a boy."

I tried to get serious, and looked at him: Augie, really. What am I? Am I really a boy?

No.

Am I a girl?

No.

Well what am I then?

You're a grown up.

And SHH, don't tell anyone, but I turned my head away and cried. But just a little.

Hey Sexy Lady

It's a new year, and I didn't get around to making any resolutions. I wrote a New Year's post yesterday that was all kinds of irreverent, so I wasn't planning on saying anything else for a while.

But then someone dared me.

This started out innocently. All I did was share the following truth on facebook:

There are some eerie similarities between Gangnam style and the Humpty Dance. Just saying.

And then, well, I was dared to blog about that. And this out of control facebook thread made me feel like I was playing a blogging version of I Never and I was just flat on my face drunk from LOSING.

Or is it winning?

So here I am, drinking bourbon and listening to Katy's Booty Playlist, which is something I worked on when my family was out and I was supposed to be doing something much more productive or mom-like. And I'm writing this damn thing. If that disturbs you, I'm sorry, but hell, at least my kids are asleep.

Now, seriously, there's not a red-blooded American out there who was over the age of 8 years old and under the age of 30 in 1990 who doesn't know the Humpty Dance. If you claim to be the lone holdout, well, WTF was wrong with you?

So, let me just explain why it's obvious that this new craze that's taking over our collectively-impaired social consciousness is not really new AT ALL.

There was already this geeky dude with glasses and an annoying nasally voice who got a bunch of people to do a ridiculous dance, no matter how much of their self respect they had to sacrifice in the process. I mean, maybe PSY upped the ante by sitting on the john during part of the song (no one seemed to mind), but the spirit of the whole thing had been there more than 20 years ago.

Come on...hips side to side...hands in the air, awkward pelvic grinding...hands on his own ass...

"it's supposed to look like a fit or a convulsion..."

"ya got it down when ya appear to be in pain."

"First I limp to the side like my leg was broken
Shakin' and twitchin' kinda like I was smokin'
Crazy wack funky"

Are you trying to tell me that PSY wasn't doing all of that during Gangnam style? Come on!

The purposely ironic clothes, the dude making fun of himself for being skinny or nerdy or whatever, the fact that it can't really be possible that this shit is so freaking ridiculously popular, the lyrics that you can understand, sure, because they aren't in Korean, but you can't really believe that they're real:

"I'm spunky. I like my oatmeal lumpy."

"I'll eat up all your crackers and your licorice
hey yo fat girl, c'mere--are ya ticklish?
Yeah, I called ya fat."

"I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom." (LL was at Red Lobster, so maybe that was a thing back in 89-90? Now, don't say it...I was only 14 then).

"'cause in a 69 my humpty nose will tickle ya rear."

"I use a word that don't mean nothin', like looptid
I sang on Doowhutchalike, and if ya missed it,
I'm the one who said just grab 'em in the biscuits"

I just don't want to live in a world where anyone will tell me that PSY isn't basically saying the same stuff. So, friends who speak Korean, KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. Because he paid all the homage he needed to pay, practically telling us all that he was trying to be the Korean Digital Underground:

HEY SEXY LADY!