Unhand Me, Greybeard Loon

Today, I pulled out one of those stiff chin hairs with a tweezers and--whoa!--it was white. This and the weird little growth I had removed from my cheek last November, which turned out to be a wart, and I may as well start building the gingerbread house and perfecting a hideous cackle. It's not that we post-menopausal women hate young people, it's that, over time, the way everyone, younger and older, ignores us drives us bat shit crazy. And then they were right, we are nuts, and we do hate them, but not a priori. It's for a reason.
In my case, this is nothing new. I was invisible while young as well. The recent fuss about cat-calling on the streets has always been a non-issue for me. Even in high school, where the jocks called out numbers between one and ten as girls passed them in the halls, I was not rated. You can be sure I'd remember my rating if I'd heard it. Anyway, it hasn't happened to me yet, and I'm pretty sure it never will now. I feel bad for those it does happen to, but the assumption that the experience is universal is just as ridiculous as the assumption that it is harmless. Possibly the only thing worse than being objectified is being treated as if you don't even exist.

This Face--it's a Curse

I don't feel bad about my neck, but I do feel slightly negative about my chin. I used to have one. Now it is a notion buried in wattle or dewlap or whatever you call the sagging of cheeks to chin line. The collagen that's failing me now makes my face begin to resemble a frowning bulldog. And I have the canines to make this passing resemblance something a little more than fleeting. Pictures of my Cooney relatives in their 60s had this chin, this downward arch imprinted on their lower faces whether they were frowners or not. It's an old wives' tale that making certain facial expressions will make your face stay that way. You have no choice which expression you'll be staring at in the mirror decades from now. I knew I'd never have the pursed lip cinch of my grandmother. I intended never to be so judgmental, and I haven't been. But there they are, little lines around the mouth that when I'm not smiling make it look as though I disapprove. Of everything. Of you, your idiotic fashion statement, your favorite movie, your best effort at poetry. My face betrays me every day. I do not feel what it constantly shouts at people. This face--it's a curse!

Domestic Architecture

Your new apartment (new to you!) has a tiny bathroom with two mirrors facing each other. Now as you step from the bath or sit on the toilet, you are faced with the ever-increasing dimpling of your thighs. In the past, you were younger, thinner and better able to steel yourself before taking this in. Now it is thrust upon you each day like subliminal scare tactics. At the same time, your ability to truly care what kind of figure you cut has eroded. If this extra padding were health-neutral, you wouldn't give a fuck. But lurking in your genetic die roll is a tendency toward Type II diabetes and you can't say you don't know what that means. Strict diet, needles, declines on all fronts--incremental at first, then with a sharp downward slope. Best not to let it begin.
You cut carbs. You walk fast. Faster. Time is chasing you. It speeds up as you slow down.

A Little Thin

I'm getting a little thin in the oddest of places. Not the hair on my head, though that is something half the women in my family have had to face--you know, the shiny pink scalp with only a few sparse tufts  poking out at irregular intervals. No, it's my Maggie Thatcher. And not where the rude tangle could use some pruning, but a quarter-sized patch, smack dab a little to the right of center. Now I'm a person who won't depilate. I can't even shave my thighs above halfway from the knee. Just gets too itchy and annoying a day or two later, and for what? If I wear a swimsuit in public, the fact that Maggie won't stay inside the elastic bits will not be the main reason people avert their eyes. The cellulite will scare them so badly they'll have closed their eyes before they get there. Wax? Don't make me laugh. Just watching the comedy/torture chamber procedure on various TV shows and movies (I particularly remember Evan Handler getting his back waxed on Sex and the City) made me shriek in sympathetic horror. For days afterward, the sight of a candle could terrify me. No, the old Maggie is purely the 1970s version of Our Bodies, Ourselves, just as radical Bostonian feminism has intended. But then along comes this age-induced (I assume) deforestation. Pearly pale, has never seen the sun. A clearing in the woods. Perhaps it is not baldness, per se, but merely a wearing off, a wearing down, like my formerly hirsute lower arms that are now hairless, thanks to miracle stretch fibers like Lycra. Or like my dad's calves worn smooth by decades of sock-wearing. But the only person who might notice this, besides myself, is not the most observant of men. He's always the last person to notice if I've gained weight. His objectification of me (and other women, no doubt) tends to the idealization end of the spectrum. We are all so beautiful to him. Whatever kind of goggles he's got on, I hope he won't be taking them off soon.

Menopause Rant

I'd like to tell you what an absolute pain in the butt this thing is, but like all changes you have no chance of getting around, no one cares. The older women all wish they had your miniscule problems to deal with. They are all slowing down, losing hearing, eyesight, motor functions; a few rampant fat cells and hot flashes, moodiness--they wish they still had your problems. And younger women? They don't want to know about this! Yuck! They still have boyfriend, husband, baby, job problems. Don't overload them with more stuff they can do nothing about. Other women your own age are mainly interested in competitive symptomology: "What? You only woke up twice? I routinely have soaking night sweats three or four times a night!" And it's true, I don't have it that bad. Several warming trends per day, nothing sweaty (yet), minor sleep disturbances, a voracity for carbs, the fabled sag of the ass that many women started to notice in their thirties only began for me last year (54!). Men don't want to know. They are uninterested because it doesn't happen to them, or so squeamish they can't bear to hear about it. Something like labor stories. Oh, and my one experience in labor was also too easy--only four hours, no epidural, no C-section, not even an episiotomy. Now an episiotomy is when they make a small cut in the birth canal--you don't want to hear more? Why not? Come back here! I haven't even gotten to the discomforts of mastitis . . .

HOT

Now that it would be technically
True, if someone were to say
"She's hot"
The flash subsides
The glow remains
Her body is
A livable city
Subject to a strange
Weather pattern.
Can she blame
Global warming?
Better to open a window,
Turn on a fan.
A world-class city
In a heat wave is still
A world-class city.

The Indignities Continue

Down in the hormonal hellhole, hopefully just visiting, not planning to stay. I want to devour the world's donuts, chocolate, cheese, olives and wine, pasta, hamburgers, salmon and croissants. I grit my teeth through each day. I want to want to exercise, but I do not. So I don't. My neck is tight. My shoulders hurt. My jaw feels like a vise. Yoga, hot baths, physical therapy--yeah, I should, shouldn't I? But I don't want to. My thighs are stippled with new blossoms of fat cells, butter- and sugar-filled globules crowding each other under my skin like bunched grapes. I see them and I think "I should cut back," but I don't. Lucky I don't smoke. Menopause: the ultimate unfairness. Wasn't it bad enough that you had to bleed once a month for forty years? That if you missed one period you panicked? That when for two years, you finally wanted to conceive you didn't? Or was it couldn't? And now that you can finally get off that merry-go-round, which you 100% regard with great relief, it's like you're seasick. Moody, nauseous, sleep-disturbed, howling with hunger for those things you know are not good for you, angry that all the control and reason you used to have at your pinpoint disposal has flown out the window. And you can look forward to at least a year of this, when a month or two is more than you can imagine surviving.
On top of this, you are a lucky rich woman who has nothing to complain about. Everyone, but everyone, has more and better reasons to complain. Your elders crumble, your children strive and pine, suffer through first love or heartache, and you, you're sitting pretty in the place you love to be, surrounded by love and having gotten all the best things in life--a good family, a good man, a good son, all good from here on in, and then this chemical--this hormone--sandbags you from behind. Whap!
The new you, an angry, complaining, inventive whiner who won't shut up, or eat less. Nor can you really believe that it matters all that immensely what your thighs look like, because--who's looking? Anybody worried about 55-year-old thighs has got to be the shallowest person on earth. And you, you may be menopausal, but you're not shallow. Not yet.

Another reason not to jog

. . . is stress incontinence. The kind where if you cough really hard, or sneeze so the roof flaps even a little, or just try to run in place as part of a shape-up routine your son is roping you into, a little bit of pee is forced past the sphincter. That little ring of muscle is all that keeps you from one of the major horrors of homelessness. You can get a surgeon to tie you a little tighter in that area with a noose of surgical thread, but I prefer to just not jog. Now why should this formerly snugly fitting biological washer begin to relax? It's not like a baby came out of that hole and stretched it out so bad it can never go back. You can Kegel it up to a tighter fit, to some extent, but part of the aging process is this progressive relaxation of what used to be tight and firm and I don't think Botox in that area can do anything positive.
Yet another indignity. Ah, well.

Valentine's Day

I meant to write something good for once, a happy bit of news from the other side of fifty for those who fear it or those who are already looking back at some peak, never believing they'll feel that good again. But, hey, good news lacks conflict, therefore momentum, therefore interest. My travel tales that play best in repertoire are the insect stories, the vermin difficulties. Non-travelers would rather hear the horrors than the glories, since they continually scavenge the newspapers for reasons not to leave home. And if you're looking, you can find.
Anyway, love. I could write about my relationship with my husband, how great things are, how well we understand each other, tidbits on the physical side of things--but I cannot. Unlike the tell-alls on TV, or unauthorized biographies, shows like Sex and the City, I can't reveal details. I'd like to, but it would feel like treachery, betrayal. The real person I'm having this intense relationship with deserves my reticence. If I tell others, I am actually according them greater intimacy than the person I really feel it for. So--no deal.
I dislike Valentine's Day for just the same reason. It is more about being seen to have a sweetheart who will publicly declare his affection than the quality of that affection in private. Another horrifying example of the modern preference for being seen as loved over really being loved.
I do like chocolate though.

Disequilibrium

It happened twice yesterday. One moment fine, the next in tears. This has got to be the mood swings of menopause. I have felt nothing like it since pregnancy, and if there are some women who are subject to this sort of bumpy ride their whole life, then I feel for them. Do we all go through periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium like toddlers do? We may fool ourselves for a few years that we've got it all figured out, we're over the hump, should be smooth sailing from now on in! Then--this.
Is it writing, discovering what I think as pencil presses into paper, that has made me all trembly, emotional and adolescent? Is this the way all writers feel? Or just all menopausal women? For some of my age cohort, I believe it is the growing conviction that they have made a bad bargain--they have put others' needs before their own for so long, they don't even know what they want any more. And they're furious at the whole world for not having mentioned this would happen if they waited so long . . .
How can I scientifically discover if it is writing or menopause or the stress of the sandwiched generation? If I stop writing and it continues, is it menopause or generational stress? Since I can't remove menopause or escape the sandwiched situation, perhaps writing is the only release valve available to me, and if I stop doing that, I may implode. You can only live your life in one direction. No do-overs.
Also, I find I have no peers. I have not had many over the course of my lifetime, but at this moment: none. I know no one who has been mated as long or as fruitfully. No one with both a teenager at this time of life and four aging parents who are as demanding and emotional as teenagers. Who vacillate between shouting for my help like toddlers and pushing me away to regain their adult autonomy. All of them believe I should just be able to intuit which they need when. I continually miscalculate and am blamed for not helping them the right way, for not allowing them to be masters of their own destiny.
For my friends with no children, any word I utter about my son is a squirt of acid in their face. If I complain about his behavior, I am ungrateful; if I praise him, I'm bragging, rubbing their nose in their lack. For those with no husband, again if I complain (even humorously), I don't know how lucky I am. If I praise him, I am preening and showing them up for not ever getting that perennial female brass ring: a man. Or not being able to keep one.
No, no, and again I say, no. I am only seeking to share my version of the human comedy. We all need to hear one another's stories. This is the only way any of the crazy things that happen or we do or we do to or for each other will ever make sense, fit into the chaotic puzzle we all live inside.

Not Crazy (Yet)

I woke up with the strong impression that someone had sneezed, someone else had slammed a door and shouted, "Gesundheit!" But recently I fear I am subject to auditory hallucinations. Sirens, timers going off, the heat turning on, the refrigerator cycling off--all clang with the crack of gunshot to my ears. I wonder if I am losing my grip on reality. I mean, more than usually losing it. When I was younger, my strong devotion to the separation of reality from unreality was like the difference between sun and shade at the equator. Now I'm not so sure.
From the bathroom came a percussive report. He--my husband--was on the ceramic bowl releasing quick blasts of gas, louder and stronger than most sneezes. Ah, once again, my dream was reordering actual events into a slightly elevated understanding, taking gross reality and transforming it into something fit for polite society. Likewise, his snores became cave winds, lion roars, train whistles, lovers' whispers. Am I crazy or just inventive? Mad or imaginative? The thing that seems to be changing fastest as I age is the length of time it now takes me to decide between dream and reality.

Full Body Scan

In the 54th year of my life, here are the things that I have noticed: hair, stable in its mix of white and dark for the moment, but always a few more wiry ones in the new strands, and strong return to the massive cowlick. A subtle hatching of crinkle lines on my forehead, around my eyes, the beginnings of those German pursed lip lines that I used to be able to make appear and then would erase magically when I smiled. Now, there they are no matter how serene I feel. The rest state of my face looks accusatory now, pissed off, like a combination of Hilary Clinton and Judge Judy. No wonder people back away if I flash them a glance. Each earlobe has one big dent in it, north to south. It's too big to be a wrinkle. Perhaps a crunkle? Horrid age spots appear monthly, new ones, in inconvenient positions, not where beauty marks should be. Chin and neck holding stable, but for how long? The skin of my chest which is exposed if I wear a scoop neck still feels smooth to the touch, but is likewise getting patchy and mottled. In interesting patterns, though. My once perky, though never large boobs are settling lower. Nothing a well-fitted underwire can't manage, but the days of fitting a pencil under each one and watching the No. 2s drop to the floor are long gone. Upper arms can flap like wings if I'd like them to. And lifting weights will not bring them into firmness ever again. The skin around the muscle is loosening and drooping. It is still very soft and soothing; all my little nieces and nephews somehow find it delightful to handle and bounce and caress. How can I be so mean as to keep them from such a sensual pleasure, just because it is slightly annoying to be used as a giant blankey? I can't summon up a sense of outraged amour-propre to fend them off. They manhandle me with the best will in the world. Who am I to deny them such comfort?
The skin of my hands and forearms is beginning to look like a balled-up piece of paper reflattened. Lotion is still able to make this surface less cross-hatched looking, but only temporarily and soon it won't work at all. I remember my grandmother's skin after 80 being still soft and quite beautiful but permanently marked all over with the tiny diamond-shaped patches, peaked and dented. My fingernails have become ridged and brittle.
All this is still under the radar. No one else might even notice a tenth of it, not even my husband. But practiced observation skills and a certain low level of health vigilance keep me apprised of these downturns. I'm watching the slippery slope. I'm not skidding yet, but it's only a matter of time.
None of what has fallen, drooped, discolored or dried has yet made any inroads on my lifestyle. Nothing above the waist anyway. Below that meridian it may be quite a different story.
I never had the flat abdomen of the stick leg girls of high school. Never. And now all that gravity which shouldn't be cumulative or conspiratorial (it's a physical law, not a moral punishment), seems to be increasing exponentially. Now every yoga pose, every five minutes of cardio, every kettlebell swung is only a staving off of the inevitable. Another German soldier losing his life at the Battle of the Bulge so that Hitler can commit suicide a day or two later. Maybe a week. And what is it for? I was no Catherine Deneuve, no Vanessa Redgrave even in my youth. Even when I was young I disdained throwing away my time on earth in anything more than routine body maintenance. Renovation, subtle or wholesale, did not, still does not, interest me.
But to continue. What was never that taut to begin with has softened further. The significant portion of Sitzfleisch I've always been saddled with now puddles about my bones and remaining muscle tissue. The ghosts of previous fat deposits slide past the extant ones as connective tissue melts like candle wax. It doesn't bother me particularly. I have no interest in competing on the physical, visual level with young women of today. Why would I now enter a silly race I can't win?
Blobs and bloobs of ever less controlled flesh and skin hang and flap and annoy. Inside each knee the crescent of extra flesh expands. Above the knee, skin hangs in rumpled curtains, like an unbent elbow, or a baggy suit of elephant hide, luckily not gray or the analogy would become a horrifying reality. Halfway up my thigh, the excess weight of years past is making its ghostly presence known in dimples and swags and effusions where it once burgeoned. The top half of the thigh is almost twice the circumference of the lower.
And the leg below the knee is still solid and trunk-like and covered in man-hair on the inner surface, smooth as ivory on the outer. Shaving my legs now takes half the time and is still not worth the effort as I have decided to wear pants from now on out. I don't want to look at my legs any more (never did), and at no point were they an asset to any of my endeavors: mating strategies, grade point average, or the pursuit of philosophy, so I now intend to keep them healthy, useful and out of sight. They're mine. They do the work I require of them, they do not also have to be window-dressing that attempts to advertise my inner worth or respectability.
My feet. Well, my feet were the one constant in my embarrassing series of wardrobe malfunctions called shopping. I could always find shoes to fit my feet. They still look like they're too small to anchor this particular body to the earth, but they don't look too bad otherwise. I never wore high heels (no, I couldn't take the pain, and no point--my legs would have required hydraulic lifts, not just the altering of the heels' angle to make them look better), so I don't have the mangled toes and damaged nails that that torture visits upon the vain. The heels are hardening up, but if I slather them with moisturizer morning and night, then pumice the hell out of them in the bath, they don't crack into painful fissures. It's a constant struggle though. If I go on vacation and forget to do the daily maintenance routine, a crack will appear to punish me.
Looking back over this, I see I may have exaggerated, slightly. It's not that bad. Only I really notice it. The public parts are still presentable. It's just that the decline behind the clothes goes on undetected, unnoticed, and easily ignored. Then about once a week, I catch sight of my own ass in the mirror as I step into my underwear and--Yikes! I'd forgotten. In my mind, my body goes back to its best possible moment when I'm not looking. It skitters back to that one summer when I thought for once I looked good in a bathing suit. Which tells you how long ago that was. My optimistic mind is carrying that image around as its reality, despite all evidence to the contrary.
To sum up: I now resemble a waxen votive figure left too long in the strong sun. I appear to be attenuating to a skeleton above the waist, with the melted wax pooling lower, making my usual pear-shape even more pronounced. But I can't complain, despite all the cranking above. All the parts still work well.
Full body scan complete. That will be $3000.

Happy at a Funeral

Yet again I do not feel what the others feel when the others feel it. At my cousin's daughter's funeral, a girl the same age as my son, I was not feeling that bizarre apprehension others seem to feel when it easily could have been them. I know I was supposed to feel as if a bullet had just gone whizzing by my head. And I told someone that. My son, his daughter, a car, an accident, 911, brain dead, organ donation, funeral, distraught teenagers and their first brush with their own mortality, a wailing in the aisles of the cinderblock church. Cheerleaders and stoners weeping in the pews. The youngish priest built like a linebacker purposefully bringing his brow into the tented triangle of sorrow. His face relaxing as he told charming anecdotes of Darla, pinching up again to swing the censer.
I knew how it was assumed I'd feel, but I didn't feel that. I stood, I sat, I knelt, I listened to the mass, I sang if I could follow the tune. I was there, wasn't I? I did my best to witness and fulfill the procedures required. But in the middle of the funeral, a wave of well-being surged through my body. And it wasn't just the animal thrill of being alive in the presence of death. I've felt that. This was something deeper and more significant. A welling up from some place in my core that told me this: if, by some chance, the same horror would happen to me, I'm ready. I'm living my best life even now. I have few regrets and none serious. I do think I've done my best, and though I haven't always gotten the results I'd been hoping for, in other ways I have led a charmed and generously appointed life. Death won't be able to cheat me of that. I stood in that church flushed with pleasure.
Of course, the only reason for my happiness at a funeral that others might be able to understand would be some twisted and evil kind of delight that a worst case scenario has occurred and reconfirmed my negative and hateful cynicism. But it's not that. I hope this essay communicates that.

Welcome to Jupiter

Mars and Venus aren't real places. Men aren't from one and women from another. It's just that certain cultural habits of mind lead men to wound women in a particular way and women to wound men in a different way and some members of each sex would rather retreat to the sureties of the same-sex societies they knew before the whole sex-and-love issue came up. Wouldn't it be great if you could get everything you needed from your gang of girlfriends at brunch? From your gang of guy friends banging each other over the head with toy light sabers? It would, wouldn't it?
But it would also get boring. Women need men to shake up their perfection and pointless fussing. Men need women to give them a reason to stop being barbarians and work toward something, anything. Women need to get their hands dirty, go outside GirlWorld's safety zone: men need to learn how to take care of babies and get a glimpse of the bigger picture, beyond competition, prizes, money. The problem with the patriarchy is not that it's never right, but that it is only half-right. Same with the matriarchy. Those who believe if only women ran everything it would be a more humane world are overlooking the fundamental flaw: half of humanity would have to try to deny their very nature, just the way many women have to in a patriarchy.
And are these really sex-linked traits? Woe betide the sensitive individual born with male apparatus, the mainly rational individual born with a vagina.

Tyranny of the Tablecloth

How I have expressed my love all these years--by listening. How they have expressed their love for me all these years--by giving me presents that if they'd been paying any attention these many long years, they'd realize I have no interest in. Purses, dishes, stemware, linens, towels. I'm supposed to like this stuff because they like this stuff and the way they imagine their own continuation on this planet after their death is in the hands that have learned how to smooth the ironed crease from a tablecloth. The ability and desire to take these things seriously will be passed down genetically, and the skills involved will be transmitted from mother to daughter in apprenticeship mode. My mother honors her mother by requiring me to wrangle my offspring into following her canonical rules.
But the slavery to the tablecloth stops here. I have no daughter. Even if I did, I'm sure I wouldn't require her to enter unquestioningly into this traditional progression. But because I will not do this thing, uphold the proven moral order in this way, all my choices are thus suspect. I am not taking my responsibilities seriously. I must be a shirker.
My point is different. I do not shirk my responsibilities as I see them. Please allow me to choose from the heavy smorgasbord of responsibilities available to a woman my age. Clearly some that I find important mean nothing to them and I have refrained from scolding them about them for years. But if they begin scolding me too frequently, I can always start!
Whenever I express my thoughts on such topics as this, I am told I just don't understand how normal people feel. I do see how they feel, I just don't believe it's my job to fix their problems. Especially their self-inflicted problems. Like Thanksgiving.
The holiday season is now upon us. For me, it starts the moment my mother brings out her lists and begins assigning roles. This is her theater, the theater of happy family relations, of papering over the vast cracks between competing worldviews of the many-eyed beast that is our family. I am enjoined to slave at the rock face of family togetherness and to slave with a smile pasted on my face. I am a daughter; I'm supposed to please my mother. I am a woman: I'm supposed to like this holiday fussing. Don't we all? It's only natural.
This is the season during which I am expected to force my two abstract randoms to not only go along with customs that have little or no charm for them and no reason or nostalgia value, but also to enter into the spirit of the season. They are Jews by birth, actual or honorary, and atheists by choice, so Christmas especially is a species of voodoo to them. Symbols of an ancient mystical cult. Why? they ask. And my extended family does not know why and is angered by the question. Because. That's their answer. Because we've always done it this way and we had so much fun in the past doing it this way that the only way to have more fun now or in the future is to follow the format. The proven format.
And when my two abstract randoms fail to enter into the spirit of the season, all heads swivel towards me. They believe I have failed. Failed to explain how important this is. Failed to take my native tribe's side against the outsiders.
Yup.
I have failed.

Men Want Paradise Too

We've probably all seen one of these recent fart-driven comedies on TV or the movies about what men want: Wedding Crashers, Two and a Half Men, The Hangover, The Ugly Truth, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Knee-deep in dirty sweat socks, pizza boxes everywhere, constant TV or video games, in fact a grimy pigsty inhabited by cavemen who still somehow believe they are attractive to women.
This is, of course, a gross exaggeration in order to ratchet up the humor stakes--at least, I hope it is. Anyway, the reason it is funny is the grain of truth within: Most men don't like to clean up, themselves or their den. They don't want to dress up, go out, hit craft fairs, art crawls, or fancy restaurants. The only reason they do any of these things is when women, women who might sleep with them, want them to. Require them to.
But most men are not cavemen. They believe themselves to be nice decent human beings who perhaps see no reason to shave, put on a tie, or God forbid, a suit. Let's not talk tux. What they share with these over-the-top Oscar Madisons is this deep-seated belief that no matter the exterior, they deserve female companionship. They, unlike many women, don't believe they need to change something about themselves to deserve love. Lots of women will agree in principle that they should meet men halfway. Many men want to be met more than halfway. With little or no reciprocation. There are even those who want women to give it up freely, for nothing--and then go away.
I am reminded of Elizabeth Bennet refusing Mr. Collins' proposal in Pride and Prejudice. My husband often accuses me of having no compassion for the slimy Mr. Collins. That's not true. I do feel sorry for him. Just not as sorry as he feels for himself. Obviously he does not have the skills he needs to find a wife in the regular way. He has to resort to a version of shooting fish in a barrel. No, what I object to is such a common women's complaint about men that it crosses all centuries and all cultures. Mr. Collins wants to be understood by Elizabeth, loved by Elizabeth, given every benefit of the doubt--without having to bother his thick head with seeing anything from Elizabeth's point of view. Mr. Collins has worked out what he wants from her and he just doesn't understand what the problem is. Why won't she do as he asks? (Of course, in Jane Austen, the only time a woman can make herself heard is in refusing a proposal. The culture is so constructed that that is the only moment in a woman's life when she has any say in the direction it will take.)
Even today, some men have this weird belief that women should be more like men: moral, independent, untied to any other consideration than their own desires. Just like men. But as soon as women actually begin to live exactly like men, as independent moral beings, women find their own need to understand, pamper, and forgive men for being short-sighted and me-centric all the time just dries right up. Some men think that women should just let men do whatever they want--because they'd let women do that too, wouldn't they? (Well, not really. It's just a talking point, but whatever.)
But women, many of them, want harmony. Even if they do no go so far as to want perfection (see below), they are not so wedded to having their own way that they couldn't compromise to suit all parties. Many women want to do things together, not separately fulfill separate desires. They want to bake the cake and eat it too. Not just gulp down the ingredients serially. They want love with their sex. They want sex with love. They want the visuals and the essentials. They're not afraid of work; they just don't want to be the only one doing any. In their search for harmony, they continue to hope that there is something they can do to improve the situation. Sometimes there is. Sometimes not. Sometimes the guy is too close to Mr. Collins to be affected by any action of theirs.
Obviously, this is far from the last word on this.

On Persona

So I'm reading Philip Lopate about how even personal essays need conflict, how you have to examine your flaws, but without giving in to self-disgust, not constantly underrate yourself nor give yourself too much credit. Parade your quirks, then implicate yourself . . .
So the trick it seems is to hone a slightly insecure persona, one that has bizarre, faintly ridiculous foibles that make you more like the Twizzler-munching Twiggies who want to be on TV or at least in a magazine.
Even if that is not who you are.
Even if that type of persona does actual violence to your real self. Because what are doing having a self that can't be sold? Buffed, tweaked, positioned--sold. That's what everyone wants--right? And if you dare claim you do not, get ready to be painted self-righteous and moralistic and no fun at all. You are impeding commerce.
But then Philip (I can call him Philip, can I not?) ends with this quote: "The process of turning oneself into a character is not self-absorbed navel gazing but a potential release from narcissism: You have achieved sufficient distance to begin to see yourself from the outside. Doing so can be liberating."
And I love Philip all over again.

O, My Son

So this morning I'm getting dressed, putting on underwear, slathering salve on sticky icky sections of my anatomy (see below), when my son bops into my bedroom to grab the laundry basket. I am caught with my fingers just leaving my you-know and I, to cover my embarrassment, hop out of my room, 95% naked, the bare backs of my knees draped with downed panties, the rest of my generous flesh flopping about in a frog dance. I make it to the bathroom. Whew! He is 15. There are so many ways for a son to misinterpret a mother's nakedness, actions, attitudes, beliefs. One can never know what damage is being done to his delicate (or brutal) psyche. One would have to be ignorant or arrogant or both to think that one has any kind of control over any of that. It would also be disingenuous to believe it simple or overdetermined. (What am I talking about here? You tell me.)
Meanwhile, bless his overgrown gangly body still harboring a little-boy heart, he asks me, " What is it? Are you afraid of me or something?" He seems to believe my frog dance of embarrassment a gesture of fear. That I fear him. O, my son, I do not. I only fear for you.
I am, briefly, speechless.
"No. No, I'm not afraid of you." But do I have any business instilling in you a body self-consciousness that has done me no favors? Embarrassment about one's own icky sticky bodily functions and urges? If you do not have them now, is it my job to break you in? Will you also suffer, as I have, in being the only unself-conscious animal in the room, otherwise full of vicious punishing beasts? People who have had their animal reality beaten or shamed out of them to the point where they can not trust their own simple desires? People who no longer know what they feel, how they feel, are forever separated from the words for their own feelings? No, not my job.
"Not afraid. Never afraid." O, my son.

Paradise Seekers

I don't know if you can spread the truism to all women, but a bunch of my female relatives do want paradise. Paradise here on earth, starting with blue dishes. Moving on to new curtains, which eventually become window treatments, new kitchen counters, pull-out racks in their kitchen cabinets, the side-by-side with the ice dispenser. They have a picture in their heads of their ideal home, and they have been ameliorating the premises continually, repainting the dining room, putting a door where the window used to be, glassing in the screen porch. A house to them is Play-doh waiting for the hand of the Master Decorator.
Hotel rooms, too, need their furniture rearranged, that table over by the window instead, one chair facing the other so you can sit with your feet up. Nature must be tamed as well and forced into this aesthetic, beautiful to look at from the windows, but you mustn't touch it. Green lawns, trimmed trees, groomed beaches, sunsets admired from deck chairs along same. It's not that this vision is not beautiful: it is. But it is also sterilized, requires someone's maintenance (not mine, I won't do it!), and somehow still needs airbrushing in the photographs. In fact, it needs photographs. Its beauty must be framed and mounted, taken out of context and repositioned over the sofa. Scrimmed, screened, cut down, managed.
Bird-watching is the perfect sport for these paradise seekers. If you put out feeders, the birds come to you and display themselves right in front of your picture window. No need to clomp around in the muck looking for them. The only drawback is the greedy squirrels come to gobble up the seed. A bit like the hungry 12-year-old boy who cuts a hunk out of their cake before they've had a chance to frost it. So the women who desire paradise bang on that window to chase the squirrels away, although it sorely grieves them to have to do so, and shoo those boys away from their lovely cakes: "Here now! Get away out of there! That's not for you!" When, of course, it is.
They want paradise. They want someone to make paradise for. They want that someone to appreciate the paradise made for them. They want that someone to deny and alter and reverse his very nature--his testosterone-produced aggression, his hormonal competition, his desire to take a hunk and bite into it. The very desire that brought him to the woman in the first place.
This tension--women who want to be desired, but also want to remake the boudoir into a place that must never get dirty; men who want the soft compliant nature of woman, but want her to resist other men with tooth and claw--is human culture. This border between competing desires which must be continually renegotiated results in culture. It will never be resolved, solved. If it could be, we would reach stasis and die.
Next up--what many men want. They have their own idea of paradise.

The Slippery Slope

Okay, this is kind of gross, but I have crotch problems. Nobody, but nobody, wants to hear about this, so here goes.
Patterns of fat deposition after the age of 50 and my genetic truckload of pear-shaped inevitability make all my extra blobs collect below my waist. First this meant that my callipygian form pouffed out in back, a bustle of extra flesh. Deep ass crack became deep ass crevice became deep ass crevasse. Now I can not keep that flesh apart for enough time in the day and night, naked or clothed, so the flesh is not let to dry and that leads to chafing and itchy red splotches. Yuck, right?
Next, in my efforts to deal with this moisture problem, I began the habit of ass-spreading. Sit down, separate ass cheeks. Stand up, press knees together to separate ass cheeks. It seems to work most of the time except when it's hot or when it doesn't. Not enough to bother a doctor with, and besides, what would a doctor say? Try this cream. Lose weight. Get normal. Be a man. Suck it up, cupcake.
Yeah, so. In fighting this running battle--which is what we are all doing on this side of 50, at the top of the slippery slope, hoping to hold on for a little while longer before the accident or catastrophe befalls us that makes it not a running battle any longer, but a last ditch defense until the death--I am holding my hoo-hoo closed up tight like a sphincter and the ass crack wins while the hoo-hoo loses. A warm moist closed environment that is no longer being flushed out periodically by my periods. That's right. Two months gap now. Of course, my first thought was: yeast infection. So I went to the drug store, bought the suppositories (what an ugly word for a yucky thing) and used the hermetically sealed plunger deal to stick a little bullet up my vajayjay. And then slowly it softened and melted out and stained my underwear even though I put a pantyliner on and then it didn't even help. So what is it?
I looked online (mayoclinic.com) and found out it might be sexually transmitted (no.), or bacterial (maybe), or atrophic vaginitis or some non-infectious source of irritation like scented pads or douches or sprays or creams (no.). So maybe it's just the poorly aired plastic bag of a middle-aged woman's coochie that has some low level bacterial thing going on--or we have to consider atrophy. It's old and dry and thin and fragile and subject to opportunistic infections, but what can be done about that? Is it time for estrogen rings and HRT patches? So soon?
And here I thought that finally being freed from the seemingly endless round of menstruation would be a liberation. More like one step forward, three steps back. Get ready for the anxious scanning of the slippery slope for handholds, little scruffy bushes to cling on to.