blog today, die tomorrow

I came across a thought-provoking article yesterday in the NYTimes about Valerie Boyer, a mother and member of French parliament who has introduced legislation requiring photos used in advertising that have been digitally altered to be labeled as retouched. (Find a link to the full article here).

Though overall I think I’d be in favor of that injection of reality into the increasingly implausible images used in marketing, I’ve got some chewing to do on various points before I make up my mind where I come down on the idea of legislation on the issue.

But I know exactly how I feel about something else the article brought to my attention. Oh, I live in a sheltered world, I really do. I am largely divorced from most media; by choice and circumstance I ignore a great deal of popular culture. So maybe you know all about this already, and consider it old news, like the last decade’s incredible proliferation of oral sex among the pre- and young-teen population, which I gather I need to start talking to my seven-year-old about in just a few years. Gah.

Where was I? Oh. Digressing, obviously. Maybe because I’d almost rather think about oral sex in middle school than about what the Times piece has made me aware of: the existence of a huge internet community that goes by the term “Pro-Ana.”

Wikipedia defines it as “the promotion of anorexia nervosa as a lifestyle choice”; a blog subtitled “Dying To Be Thin” was my top Google hit for blogs on the topic. Stop by and see what happens to your stomach, pardon the tasteless though unintentional pun.

Me, I’m standing here, sickened, stunned, and most of all saddened by just the few posts I read on a couple of the blogs. The authors and their followers would not appreciate my sentiment, I’m sure, but that’s where I am.

Are there websites and blogs out there devoted to promoting (read: encouraging and glamorizing) snorting heroin, mainlining meth and smoking crack, too? All just lifestyle choices, right? “Take a minute to show your love to CrankChick [link here], who had her first 3-gram day yesterday!”

Heaven help us. I’m not gonna Google it, because really? I don’t want to know.

May your day be guided by the desire for health and vitality, dear readers.

naked

Okay, the disclaimer: this is the topic of the day for Kate’s Wednesday Madhouse. If you clicked looking for some full-on or even partial-on nudity, I’m afraid you are in for some serious disappointment.

With a nod to the fact that I have what might be considered by some to be an embarrassing abundance of on-topic stories that I could tell on myself, I bring you the following thoughts instead. Because who really wants to hear about waterskiing hijinks on Lake Powell in my 20s, after all? Right. Thought not.

The Nekkid Truth

I believe in kids spending some delightful portion of their early years in the state we refer to around these parts as “nekkid.” As a new parent, I gave it some consideration and decided that the end of untrammeled nekkidness should arrive along about the fourth birthday or so.

And then Megan turned four, and I simply couldn’t fathom that there was any reason on god’s green earth that she should be instructed to clothe that precious skin. So I said, well, when she turns FIVE, that will be the time to put the foot down, and the clothes on.

And then she turned five, and that sweet nekkid body still didn’t seem like anything that needed covering.

And then I started to wonder if maybe I had veered unawares onto some crazy hippy granola head-in-the-sand road, and I should make the MPM or someone pick an arbitrary number and force me to stick to it, because I wasn’t in touch with reality and might well find myself in a few years telling her sure, go ahead and run around the yard nekkid, but pick that bra up first and put it where it won’t get stepped on.

And then the summer after she turned six, one day she came downstairs and I looked at her and heard myself say, Oh no, Missy, you go get some clothes on before you play in the back yard.

Why, I don’t know; it isn’t as if she looked any different, or had started asking questions, or anything at all, really. I just knew. It was time.

And in retrospect, my heart aches a little, because I know full well what’s to come, and know that that day marked the beginning of the end of a state she’ll never know again: total, pure, body unselfconsciousness.

All too soon standing in front of the mirror will cease being a study in exuberant admiration, giving way to the sharpening focus of the Eye Critical. All too soon she will come into the awareness of others’ awareness of her body; too soon into the awareness of what that means in our culture; too soon into a lifelong relationship with her body marked, most likely, by the desire for bigger, smaller, other.

Oh, beautiful girl, I hope you will embrace your naked self as you did your nekkidness. If I could give you that gift, my love, oh, I would.

veritas

You know the phenomenon that occurs sometimes, when you learn a new word and all of a sudden it pops up repeatedly in your life?

I’ve had something similar going on in the last few weeks, which is a post that’s been fermenting, and now I seem to keep finding myself in conversations/situations/email exchanges where the topic arises.

I am, I have reason to believe, an unusually honest person. It has not ever been thus. No George Washington by any means, I told lots and lots and lots of lies in my younger years. Bigger ones more than little ones, even.

But the older I get, I find, the less dishonesty works for me. With the passing of years, it gets ever harder to keep up with a purely factual history, let alone trying to remember what fibs I’ve told and to whom, certainly. But there’s a bigger piece to it, and one which has less to do with the weakness of an aging memory and more to do with a philosophic shift.

I can pinpoint this transition, or at least the beginning of it, somewhere along in my late twenties.

In the field in which I worked at the time, promptness was crucial. It was also one that saw me, several days a week, driving to unfamiliar and/or out-of-the-way places. In those dark, near-unimaginable days before Mapquest, etc., this aspect was a real hazard when it came to the promptness end, and there were inevitably those occasions when I would miscalculate travel time and — cursing and frantic — be late. Not hours, but more minutes than was kosher.

And at some point, rather than make whatever excuse — “Traffic was a nightmare,” or, “There was a train” — I simply began saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t leave myself enough time to get here by 9:00.” No excuses. And oddly enough, no one ever seemed to think less of me for it.

That led, eventually, to the contemplation that the vast majority of lies I told — of whatever magnitude — were to one end: to impact, alter, or ameliorate the opinion someone held of me.

Hmmm.

Perhaps, began the train of my thinking, it would be better to a) chart the course of my actions to achieve the same end, and/or b) care less about others’ opinions.

So. Here I am, some years later. For me, this is clearly the right path, despite being often, sometimes painfully, reminded that I think about this topic very, very differently from most other folks. But for what it’s worth:

There are white lies, and there are the other kind, and I do differentiate between them. But I am stringent: White lies reside exclusively, or very nearly so, in the domain of opinion, not fact. This allows me to tell my mother-in-law that her new lamp is lovely, because to her it is, and for me to say I feel otherwise is pointless, not to mention harmful to our relationship. It does not allow me to tell someone that I didn’t return their call because I was, say, out of town when I wasn’t.

And if you ask me, as a friend, for an honest opinion, you will surely get it.

Yes, I’ve been known to omit, judiciously, details that are more hurtful than relevant. But not simply to save my ass, or make it look better, or avoid saying something uncomfortable.

Because overall, this late in my life, I’ve got little time for prevarication. If I’m investing enough time to engage with someone, I’m not particularly interested in tippytoeing around. Why bother? Facades are, I believe, big ole orange detour arrows in the road of connection.

Which isn’t to say that I feel compelled to volunteer random details of a TMI nature in the name of openness — but if you are interested enough to ask, I will tell you just about anything. I am who I am, and while I’m as insecure as the next person at times, I also have enough of a sense of myself to say that what you see, and get, is the real deal.

I believe people lie or prevaricate for one purpose: to manipulate. Yes, often the only thing they’re attempting to manipulate is someone’s opinion of them — but the question remains: to what end? In the larger scheme of things, how is my life enhanced by someone seeing me differently than how, who, I really am?

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a Saturday ramble

Getting in bed after midnight isn’t something I do often, which is probably a good thing given that few things make me feel worse for an entire day than too little sleep the night before. Happily Friday’s late lights-out wasn’t preceded by an overage of adult beverage consumption, so at least I wasn’t dreading the departure off horizontal demanded by the phone ringing at 8:30 this morning.

It was the confirmation call for our target departure for the grand Hunting & Gathering o’ the Tree, to commence at 10a.m.

It should be said here that I’ve been working for about five years now on putting my inner Grinch to rest, which has entailed coming to terms with the genesis of my humbuggishness. After all, I’m hardly a grumpy or uncelebratory person by nature, so wherefrom this vast disdain for the season’s tidings?

Well. If you remove consumption and Christianity — neither of which were observed in my family of origin — from the Christmas season, there really isn’t a whole heck of a lot left to build on. Perhaps a very focused attention to the other observations of the season, a mindful building of traditions, could be put in place instead, but, well, that wasn’t done.

My parents didn’t set out to make the holiday season a time of vast disappointment for my brother and me. They were and are loving, kind-hearted, caring people. However, you simply cannot live in American society — even without a television — and manage to miss the glaring fact that there is a lot of celebration and fun and gatherings and cool stuff, not to mention Stuff in the form of gifts, that you are completely cut off from if your family essentially ignores Christmas (/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa, et al.).

I won’t go into my mother’s occasional attempts to make something of the holiday. They are really too sad, and pitiable, and I don’t want to picture her in that light by detailing them.  And frankly I don’t feel like thinking about them too much because while I understand, as an adult, that she was trying to make it better — for us, certainly, and for herself, too, perhaps; she had a great deal of despair in her own life — I also know how completely she failed.

I do not blame her today for the choices she made in those years. But I will serve witness here that some things, by their very meagerness, serve only to make the chasm between what you have and what you do not even more evident.

And out of that chasm arose my Grinch, with whom I kept company for decades. Aesop’s fox would be familiar with the sentiment: If you disdain the season, and all its accoutrements, you might not grieve its absence, its disappointments, in your child-life quite so much.

(And this is SO not where I meant to go with this post, which began in my head as a paean to the wonderful day we had on the tree-cutting mission, shared with good friends.)

So. Well. It was a wonderful day, shared with good friends. We dressed warmly, with persistence found our destination, marveled at the biting cold, took photos, laughed, watched the kids tear around (one sans mittens, which was the biggest marvel of all), and cut trees, a total of three, and drove back down the mountain.

And stopped and had lunch on the way home and took longer than necessary at the task, enjoying company and the relaxed atmosphere. Unloaded our girls and our tree from friends’ car, glad of its 8-seater capacity which had made the outing just that much more festive.

You see, we’re making a conscious effort to build our own traditions, ones that have meaning to our family. We don’t have a ton of them, yet, but the process of embedding them into our lives gives me joy, and I hold tight to the thought that our girls’ holiday memories will be woven from the comforting fabric of those traditions.

Anyone have favorite traditions they’d be willing for us to steal?

validation

Megan came inside from the end of her playdate with her next-door buddy and promptly fell apart. As far as I knew, up til then they’d had a fine time, but now the tears were flowing. Apparently the friend was “bored” of her and had told her she’d rather play with our one-eyed cat. Or something.

A natural reaction to this sort of drama is to launch into a full-blown litany of Reasoning. I’ve done it dozens, nay, hundreds, of times myself. And her daddy, coming in on her heels, was ramping up to do just that, when I gave him the shushing sign over her head, buried in my lap.

And I just listened. And said, Mm-hmm. And, Oh, that sounds like it really hurt your feelings. And a myriad other murmur-y noncommittal things, but all geared toward listening and respecting, and most of all toward validating.

Because earlier in the day I’d read Kate’s post, here, and it had stayed with me. How often do we, in our lives, want someone to move beyond their pain before they’re ready to? Before they feel heard? I think it’s unconscious. Yes, we want to do something to help; but maybe more than that, it’s a knee-jerk response to our own discomfort at being in the presence of someone’s pain.

We’re a society that believes the good face should be put forth. We admire strength in the face of adversity. And to some extent I’m on board with that — being a cowboy-up kinda girl, as I’ve said before — but when it comes to emotional pain, I think the world would be a better place if everyone would learn to say “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s awful.” Period. Full stop. Hug if appropriate.

I mean, let’s think for a minute about the platitudes that rocket around whenever loss or hardship strike. Does anyone truly — really, truly — believe that hearing “I’m sure God/Allah/the Universe has something better in mind for you,” or “Look on the bright side (whatever stretch that may be),” will make even one frog-hair of difference to someone in the depths of emotional upset?

In time they may even come to that place themself, but is it ever as a result of someone saying it? “Wait now, this door slammed shut in my face and about damn broke my nose — but you’re saying there’s another one opening somewhere??! My god! I never thought of that! Thank you!!” No. Those realizations, those pieces of peace, by their nature come entirely from within. And, going on personal experience, I’d say they come over time, and often more of it than one might think.

I’m hardly the first to come up with this, but I suggest that what the person in pain needs most, right then, is the simple act of validation: what you are going through sucks, and how you are feeling is totally understandable.

Without validation, moving forward is, while perhaps not impossible, a hell of a lot harder.

So. I actually think I do a pretty decent job of this stuff in my adult sphere, at some point having learned to just be okay with the awkwardness of simply saying, “I heard about X, and I’m so sorry.”

But with my kid, the queen of angst, too often I see myself with my Fixit Hat on, trying to tell her why she shouldn’t feel the way she feels. It’s tempting, indeed, because the drama is exhausting.

But when I can remember to validate, validate, validate, then I find often we can move on, and I can gently move her in the direction of facts, and other ways of looking at things. And then she can really hear and maybe even see those things, having come upon them from a better place.

And then she can cheerfully go set the table, and we can get on with our evening, without ever having devolved into the awfulness that’s been rampant around here lately.

And that, oh blessed be, is a validation all on its own: I think I did it right tonight.

7/25

I owe a lot of things to a man in my past: Where I live. My ancient cat. A huge part of my music collection. A portion of my personal growth. And, to some extent, the timing of my first child.

I moved here to the smallish southernish city I call home because of him, and we lived together for two years. But don’t get yourself settled in for a big breakup story, because the man in question was my cousin (and this ain’t a West Virginia tale).

Someday when I can take the time and emotional space I’ll tell the EP version (hankies required), but for now I’ll just share the pieces that explain the first paragraph up there.

We’d lived together once before, under his mother’s roof, when I was 18 and he was 16. Though we’d spent our childhood as sworn enemies (you’ll have to wait for the EP to get the full back story), it didn’t take us long to became allies and friends, and that time together, something shy of a year, cemented a bond between us.

Fast-forward seven years to May 1990. When he’d come close to dying in ‘87 (backstory, EP) , I’d made a vow to reconnect with him if I ever had the chance. And here was the chance: I’d just graduated and could move anywhere I wanted to. And his roommate had just moved out. So I packed up all my worldly goods and belongings in two UPS boxes and flew east. He picked me up from my parents’ place in Pennsylvania and we drove south into the mountains, and I fell right smack in love. I’d come from the desert, you see, six long years of muted desert beauty, subtle tones of color, and I thirsted for lush, blatant, Mae West Dolly Parton fullblown verdant GREEN. And May is a big beautiful blooming time of year here.

So I moved in. And almost immediately started lobbying for a kitten. He, owner of new leather furniture, was opposed. Then my car got broken into and my months-old Totally Awesome Sound System was stolen, along with a bunch of great CDs and (okay, temporarily) my trust in the universe. He came and sat down next to Morose Me on the new leather couch, classifieds in hand. “Hey… wanna go get a kitty?” And here she is, 18 years later, The Cat With 900 Lives, a reminder of Tad’s sweetness, all he could think to do to make me feel better.

The music. Oh, the music. The Denon changer got racked up every morning and it ran until we went to bed. He owned over 500 CDs at the time and knew every one of them by heart, I think. And he was always listening to stuff no one else had found quite yet, though I don’t know how he did it (e.g. Barenaked Ladies… in 1991??). Even after I bought my own place, and he moved back to upstate New York, I’d get calls. “Radiohead. Buy it. {click}.” Oh, god, I miss those calls.

Living with someone over time invariably brings growth, if one is open to the notion and communication occurs. Tad was an at-the-surface guy, sensitive in a good way. Of the many things he taught me, I remember most that he would forgive anyone anything. Not immediately, but he could let go of hurt like no one’s bidness. I guess when you know your time is short, it comes easier. We should all.

And he brought to my attention a Really Annoying habit of mine: constantly suggesting a Better Way to do things. I’d start out like this: “Yeah, but what if we did x, y, z?” After a while, he’d just look at me and say, “You got the Yabbuts again, cuz.” Stopped me cold. (After a while it became an elbowed, “YABBUT!!” and we’d both start laughing.) I confess that this is a habit that dies hard; I’d like to think I’ve honed a sense of when it’s helpful and when it’s not, but friends, keep on me please.

March 2001 saw me married to the Most Prudent Man in the World. Per plan, I’d gone off the pill January 1, 2002. At the age of 37.5 we had no idea how long it would take us to get pregnant; I had May targeted, and thought February was an ideal due date, per plan. But when I came back home from my weeks in Florida at the end of January 2002, sitting on Tad’s bed as he breathed his last slow breaths, the hunger I had went beyond comfort in the arms of the man I loved, somehow, to what I can only describe as a primal need for coupling, for undoing the diminishment to the species just done. And BigSis was born in November. You do the math.

Happy birthday, Tad. You’re still part of my world every day.