My house is half clean. My laundry is half done. I’m halfway through the book I’m trying to finish. My feet are half pedicured. I look halfway decent.
It’s like I’m stuck here at the nexus of optimism and pessimism.
There is a family in our neighborhood who lost an infant to SIDS about five and a half years ago. When it happened, I also had a baby just a few months older, and it hit me hard. I heard about it from a mutual friend, but I didn’t know the mom at all, although we had older girls almost the same age.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to send a note or leave a gift, but it felt intrusive, as if the whole neighborhood was gossiping, so I did the only thing I could do: I added the family, especially the mother and older daughter, to the list of people I pray for daily.
Back then, the list was small: my immediate family and close friends. Now, the list has grown, because people often say to me, “Oh, my mother/sister/aunt/friend has cancer,” and I say, “I’ll pray,” and I do. I pray for my friend who just lost her daughter to the nightmare that is addiction. I pray for the people who have supported me in so many ways, through their friendship, or their writing, or by bringing by food. I pray for people who have encouraged me, sometimes 20 years ago, but I remember, and I pray. It takes me over an hour to get through everything I pray about every day, so I multitask. I pray while I do housework, or especially while I go for a walk. I should wear earbuds so that when my lips move, it looks as though I am singing along instead of talking to myself, but I don’t. I just walk, and pray.
Sometimes I miss a day, and then I fret that I may have forgotten someone: someone’s aunt, or someone I met at the grocery store, or in the waiting room. I’m sure that people have dropped off the list. I can’t worry too much about it: I say, “I’ll pray,” and I do — it doesn’t mean forever. But always, the woman who woke up one morning to find her baby no longer breathing has been at the very top of my litany. It was then that I began the routine of praying daily for someone I didn’t know.
I ask God to bless that family and give them comfort, but after 1600 days of praying for the same thing, it gets boring, so I have gotten creative in my prayers. I ask God to make them laugh and bring them joy. I ask him to reach into her heart and sharpen the good memories of her baby and dull the pain of her loss, a pain I cannot imagine, and don’t even try to. I ask God to bring her peace, and to make His presence known.
When I began praying for this woman, I did not even know her name. Now, I do know her. We’re becoming friends, but I still don’t know her very well.
Sometimes I want to let her know that I have held her in my prayers for over five years, but that’s not the kind of thing you can just up and tell someone. Maybe someday it will come up in conversation naturally, and maybe it never will. That’s okay. I’ll keep praying.
When we lived in New York, I would occasionally make the trek to the World Trade Center for one reason or other. I remember the massive, stark courtyard with the giant spherical sculpture in the shadow of the two enormous striped buildings. At lunch time on a nice day, all the suits would bring their sandwiches outside and eat them before dashing back inside to broker financial power. On cold days, or drizzly days, it was deserted, a good place to be alone while at the same time feeling connected. Everyone felt it, the connection: the financial guys, the sandwich vendors, the overworked coffee baristas, the shoe shine guys. It was “it,” where it all happened, and everyone was part of it.
It was a good place, and the people who worked there were good people.
We had some friends over for dinner this weekend, C. and A. They’re friends we have over a lot, because whenever they come over and my kitchen isn’t quite tidy and I’m still in a tank top and old shorts, they say, “Oh, good, let’s cook together,” and then they pitch in and know just what to do. We’re crazy busy and they’re crazy busy so we do this thing, every time we get together, which is to pull out our calendars and schedule the next time. Then we all say, “synchronize watches,” because if there is a family that is nerdier than we are, it’s our friends.
Even better, they have kids, and our kids all get along. And their kids are seven years older than our kids! They’re neighbors, and so the kids have all grown up together, and I think it just goes to show that personality counts more than developmental stage because the four of them play amazingly well together, and always have, and the age gap has never even been a blip on the radar.
This afternoon, C. and I were talking about how well our kids have always played together. She mentioned that her younger son has a hard time coming out of his shell, and that when he is around people he feels uncomfortable with, he clams up in a visibly awkward way.
“I do that,” I said.
She looked at and said, “No, you do not, I know you and you are always perfect and witty and smooth as silk.” I called for backup from Chris, who was kinda in the other room.
“Hey Chris,” I kinda yelled. “Am I embarrassingly awkward and lacking in social skills?”
“Yes,” and then he went into a riff about the awkward things I do:
You always push the limit on TMI.
You get everyone’s attention like you’re about to tell a great story and then you say two words and just sit there and stare, and you stammer, and once you tell the story, it’s not funny.
You get up and leave the room any time anyone ever says anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, and the most mundane things make you uncomfortable for some reason, so it just looks like you’re pissed off all the time.
You make puns in two languages, only the second language is one that no one knows, and it’s always a bad pun even for people who get jokes in ancient Greek or Sanskrit or Japanese.
You laugh too hard at other people’s jokes.
You have no tact.
You are so inarticulate it is a miracle you have any friends at all. I don’t know how you do it.
I’ve read stuff on the philosophy of love that can be summarized, “He knows me, and he loves me anyway,” and that describes my relationship with Chris. Everything he said was the absolute truth, unvarnished. But it’s a side of me C. has never seen, because I do like her so very very much, and so I don’t do any of those things around her because I’m never uncomfortable and therefore never awkward.
Before I got cancer, I had a pretty good handle on the Awkward Me, but the circumstantial quicksand that has been the past decade of my life (miscarriage, pregnancy, move, baby, transcontinental move, pregnancy, transcontinental move, baby, move, toddlers, cancer, cancer, and more cancer, voilá no cancer, pick up the pieces) has left me back-against-the-wall in survival mode so long that I have shed from my persona everything that is not absolutely necessary, and what’s left in the crucible is sometimes awkward.
I remember saying to someone once, “I have no details. I paint myself with a very broad brush.” This was during the horrible months after I got sick but before we knew it was just cancer, just something curable, or at least treatable, or at the very least identifiable.
I’ve gotten a lot better. In theory, at least, I recognize that social skills are important. I try. I really do. I even read self-help books, which I used to on the sly through snark-colored glasses, mocking the foolishness of people who would need to read a book to figure this stuff out. When I look at myself in the mirror now, not just the looking glass in the bathroom but the larger mirror into my psyche, I’m forced to confront the honest truth that while I might look normal on the outside (now), I’d better keep my mouth shut most of the time so that people don’t know how broken I still am beneath the surface. The worst of it, the very worst, is when I meet someone who knows me primarily through my writing, and I can’t speak, and I can feel their disappointment. It’s palpable, and all I can do is be glad that I have hair and eyelashes and two breasts, not just one, so at least I don’t look as frightening as I used to, and as I still would if my outside looked like my inside.
C. knows this about me, because she is one of two close friends here in Dallas who have had the courage to maintain an unbroken friendship with me beginning before I got cancer, during my treatment, and during my recovery. I’ve confided in her in ways that I’ve not been able to confide in anyone else, and yet she still likes me — but she has never seen the worst of me because when I’m with her, Awkward Me goes into remission.
And around our family, my children, in a comfortable setting where people know him and like him, C’s thirteen-year-old son’s awkward self also fades away.
I could see the little gears in her head turning. She looked at me with new eyes, and then she looked back at her son, and then back at me, and I knew that all of a sudden, she realized that her son — her brilliant, quiet, kind, handsome son, would also be okay. It’s hard to be thirteen. I think it’s harder to be thirteen than it is to have cancer.
It’s funny. I mean, actually it’s hilarious. The link says, “Hey check out …” and whoop. There it is. A picture of some dude’s privates, standing at attention. Even when the member in question doesn’t belong to a Member of Congress — the government kind, not the other kind of congress — it’s disconcerting.
Some people think it’s hilarious. I think it’s funny, but, like most practical pranks, funnier for the planner than the punked. It’s virtual streaking. It’s a phenomenon that takes many forms, my favorite being the No Pants Subway Ride.
Laugh-your-pants-off funny, indeed.
Or is it?
In general, I am a fan of public nudity and the chuckles it brings, but getting dickrolled makes me shudder. It’s a feeling similar to the nausea of pregnancy or chemotherapy, a sort of full-body disgust. There’s a word in Spanish that describes it perfectly: asco. Ugh.
I can think of a perfect parallel. It’s a little rambling, and a little insensitive, but bear with me.
Thrice, I’ve heard the same story. It’s a story about a particular facial expression, an expression that is part of the Maori culture. The first time I heard about this was when Chris and I were on vacation in the Cook Islands. We were at the officially-sanctioned cultural education tourist place, where the tables were decorated with spray-painted golden coconuts (seriously) and the female dancers wore modest tops, not coconut bras. We, along with a smattering of other tourists, were being taught how to dance. The women were taught the hip roll (obvious) and the men were taught the spear thrust (not what you’re thinking). To do the spear thrust move, the men hold a staff or a spear, pantomime stabbing a “wild boar” on the ground, make what I call “the man noise” — humhh — and then stare ferociously with their mouth open and their tongue sticking out as far as possible. I wish I had gotten Chris on video doing this. We have a Maori wooden carved spear around the house — if I can film him, I’ll post it.
We found out more about the facial expression later from a guy named Pa who led a hike up the old volcano that forms the island of Rarotonga. As we hiked, he told us stories about the Cook Islands including his opinion of colonialism. “A lot of bad things happened during the colonial era,” he admitted. “The Europeans did terrible things all over the world, but not here. Before John Williams came to us, we were cannibals, and now we are Christians.”
When Pa said, “We were cannibals,” he grimaced at us over his shoulder with his eyes staring and his tongue sticking out. It’s not an image that I’m likely to forget.
Years later, Chris and I were in Chicago without our children so of course I made him take me to go look at dinosaurs The Field Museum. He really is a good sport even if he doesn’t let me film him grunting with a wooden spear for this blog.
We saw the dinosaurs, and we saw a great exhibit on the wreck of the Whydah, and then we had a few minutes before the museum closed so I dragged him to the Oceania floor where the Field has an A-frame wooden structure, a marae, called Ruatepupuke II. It’s pretty cool, and even cooler was the tour guide, a Maori New Zealander who explained all about the work of art we were standing in, in our sock feet. He pointed out one of the carvings, a face with glaring eyes, teeth, and the tongue sticking out.
See that?
He made the face.
Then he looked at the kids in the room.
That’s a face you make on the playground, isn’t it? He made it again. In our culture, it means a lot more. Then he stood up straight. He was an old man, but suddenly he had much more of a presence than when we first walked in the room and, from a stool in the corner, he told us we were in a holy house, and to please take off our shoes. I got the sense he was about to impart a great truth. I wasn’t disappointed.
The Maori are a people of warriors. All over the Pacific Ocean, paddling from island to island in our outrigger canoes, we were warriors, fierce warriors, during a history not so long ago. And one of the things we did, as a warrior people, was to eat our enemies. That’s what that face is all about. It doesn’t mean to us what it means to you. It means, I am about to eat you and this mouth is the last thing you’ll ever see.
For a fraction of a second, I was as scared as I’ve ever been, and since then, I’ve looked at the traditional Maori sticking-my-tongue-out-at-you in a whole new light.
It’s the light source that sheds light on my uncomfortable reaction to being dickrolled. It’s not, “Hey, Look, It’s a Penis!” which is the reaction I have when someone streaks by. I don’t look at streakers’ privates anyway. I look at their faces. It’s much funnier. And that’s why the dickroll, at least to me, isn’t funny at all. Nor is it titillating. To my way of thinking, the only way an erect phallus, entirely devoid of context, would ever be arousing would be if it were an mp3 player loaded with Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On” or anything by Luther Vandross or Barry White. Not only would that be laugh-your-pants-off funny, it would be kinda sexy, which the dickroll patently is not.
It’s violent.
In a culture where sexual violence against women is endemic and epidemic, it says, “Hey, I am ready to rape you.”
I don’t know any woman who doesn’t have the fear of sexual violence lurking at the back of her mind, every minute of every day. When, as happened recently to someone I know well, a woman who has escaped from an abusive marriage gets a text of her ex-husband’s erect penis, it doesn’t mean wants to try again, to love her and to cherish her. It’s a threat.
“Oh, but that’s not what I mean,” is the response I would imagine I would get if I were to let a dickroller know I find his actions offensive. “Relax a little.” But it’s hard not to get all het up when I stumble across articles like this one, in last week’s NY Times, talking about sexism on college campuses like Duke, Yale, and Princeton. The author Lisa Belkin, herself a Princetonian, asks, “Why has the pendulum swung back to a feeling that sexualization of women is fun and funny rather than insulting and uncomfortable? Why are so many women O.K. with that?” It’s hard not to seethe when I happen across things like this film called Very Young Girls, a documentary that sheds light on the prevalence of trafficking girls as young as 12 years old. The girls in the film, like the vast majority of commercially sexually exploited children, are girls from lower socio-economic urban areas who have fallen through the cracks of our social safety network. From the ivy league to the ‘hood and everywhere in between, sexual violence, or the fear of it, affects all women, and we don’t need to be dickrolled to remind us of our ubiquitous terror.
I told Chris that I wanted to see if I could put together a post on dickrolling. “What’s your take?” I asked him.
“It’s disgusting.”
“Why? It’s not like you find the image per se disgusting?”
“It’s that I didn’t ask for it.”
What makes it disgusting is that I didn’t ask for it.
I know what I think of it. Gene Simmons captures it perfectly.
My daughter Catherine showed up in my room after dinner last night with one knee-high Barbie shoe.
She had unshed tears in her eyes.
“I found Barbie’s shoe, the one you threw away when I was bad. It was my favorite Barbie and you threw it away.” I recognized the shoe. It was from the Barbie I gave Catherine when she turned two. Barbie had pink highlights in her hair, fishnets, and a lace-up black and hot pink corset to go with those knee-high boots. She was awesome, even for a Barbie.
Now, I do throw out my kids’ toys when they are bad, but I don’t remember throwing out a Barbie. I love Barbie — I throw out cheap Happy Meal toys. However, I didn’t want to contradict her, so I listened, and then suddenly, she said, “No, it wasn’t you who threw it away the Barbie. It was Nanny, and she threw it away when I argued with her.”
I don’t blame my mom for throwing out Barbie. I’m sure Catherine was being a giant pain in the neck, and I think throwing out toys, even favorite ones, is not inappropriate. My mom is a fair person and she did a terrific job with my two toddlers during the year I had cancer. However, I also knew there was more going on.
“Oh, honey,” I said. “Of course Nanny through out that particular Barbie. She’s never been into that kind of stuff.”
“What, sexy toys?” If the Barbie in question weren’t named Barbie, she’s be named Trixie, I’m sure.
“Yeah. As you say, sexy toys.
“When I was your age, I never had Barbies,” I told her. “I never even had friends who had Barbies. The whole time I was growing up, whenever I had any friends who were any kind of cool, my mom never approved of them nor fostered the friendship. I know she only wanted to keep me out of trouble, and she was right — those were the kids who got into all sorts of mischief. But even now, she doesn’t like my edgier friends, or if she gets to know them, she likes them, but not necessarily the way they dress nor present themselves.” We discussed a couple of specific examples. My kid is cool that way. She then named a couple of her friends, the ones with the attitude. “So, Nanny probably wouldn’t like …”
“Once she got to know them, but yeah, probably not so much at first.”
Catherine was quiet. Then she said, “Oomph.”
“Oomph?”
“Yeah, you know, people with oomph.”
She acted it out. “Oomph.” Where did my daughter learn to sashay like that?
“You’re absolutely right,” I told her. “That’s like, the opposite of my mom.”
“Do you have oomph?” she asked me?
“Not so much. I mean, I can, but usually I like to keep a lower profile.”
“Yeah, I know what you’re saying,” said my kid. “But it’s nice to know I can put it on when I want to.”
“Me too,” I told her.
The first day of my kids’ first full week of school was today. “Woo hoo,” I said to myself. “Time to get stuff done!”
I made a action-oriented list of soon-to-be accomplishments, the first of which being to clean up the green effluence the dog left on the rug yesterday.
She doesn’t usually do that. If she did, she would not have a home with me. Chris, who likes gadgets, got out the rug cleaner-upper. Although I looked repeatedly in the same place, the place I thought it ought to be, I couldn’t find the cleaning solution to the machine, so instead I took a nap.
I woke up in the nick of time to get the kids from school, so I took a bath and still made it to carpool on time, if very last mom in line counts as on time. I thought I’d get some stuff done after school, but then I got a phone call from a friend, one of those “I need a shoulder and an ear” calls I used to get all the time before I got cancer.
I did clean up the mess on the rug, which I did by pouring Murphy’s Oil Soap on it and then scrubbing it up with a wet towel. That stuff will clean up anything.
Thank heavens tomorrow is also a blank day.
We’re having a laundry day.
Chris came in to the laundry room with our drier balls, which he had rescued from a basket of clean laundry he was folding. Immediately, I held them up in front of my t-shirt, like little boobies.
Then, I lifted up my shirt to compare. The drier balls, little boob-sized spheres, were no where as large as the ginormous hooters Dr. Robb made for me.
I just found out that a woman I went to college with, someone I liked a helluva lot, lost her battle with breast cancer. She, like me, kept a cancer blog, although unlike me, she kept it from the beginning of her treatment for breast cancer recurrence. Here’s a link to the first entry. Like mine, her story begins on Friday 13.
I knew she had cancer. To my college classmates, those who know both of us, when I was diagnosed, it was, “Oh did you hear, she has cancer too?” Hers was worse than mine from the outset.
I never reached out to her. It would have been weird. “Hi old friend, I’m a shit about keeping in touch with people, but I remember liking you, and, hey, we both have cancer.” It was a note I never sent. I kinda wish I had, but I felt, and still feel, that it would have been intrusive.
It doesn’t mean that I don’t care, or that I’m not shaken to the core.
Dance with the Reaper 