Paring down

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Jill

I was reading a friend’s screenplay, and wondering about those moments where an entire relationship is encapsulated in a single exchange. That one conversation, and you get them. It’s the union of “we” and “I” — each character and their dynamic as a couple. It’s what Pixar’s UP did so masterfully. In like eight minutes.

And it’s the conflict, strangely, in relationships themselves — the tension between “I” and “we”. I work for a partnership of attorneys. The three of them have been in business together for 26 years. And last year, one of them was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In the time since, their marriage has shifted. Their various roles have, by necessity, had to change, and those changes are emblematic of tragedy. Of the fact that their friend, and brother, and partner is dying. He’s dying. And there’s still this business to operate. And money. And responsibility.

“We have our roles in this marriage,” one of them told me. “Sometimes I hate my role, but it’s still mine. And I have a part in that. Whether I chose it or it was given to me, it’s mine.”

So maybe I’m talking about the way you reveal yourself in your relationships. We can buck against our roles, but we have them. We have roles. Presumably because they suit us in some fashion. They align with our character. I handle the money in my relationships because I’m good at money. My skill translates into a relationship skill. Just like my weakness, a tendency to vanish when distressed, translates into a relationship weakness.

Sometimes we outgrow our partners. Sometimes we shift away and back. Away and back. Sometimes we watch them struggle and attempt to negotiate some support. Sometimes we just hang out with our helplessness.

For a long time, I didn’t believe in marriage. And then my friends asked me to marry them, and I had to think about marriage. I had to think about ringed love. And I wrote this speech about love’s rebellion. And I became the converted. Their rehearsal dinner was thrown by my old boss, and a bunch of friends & former coworkers were there, and I looked up at some point and Mary had a baby in her arms. He was raised high up, and her head was bowed into him as though she were dipping her face. She was murmuring.

I think of that moment more than any other. The celebration of it. The aloneness. A woman in a room holding someone else’s baby. We might have been the only people there. And then she looked up at me.

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Happy Kitty and the romantic duo

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Jill

My coworker suggested we paint pottery for Mary. I loved the idea — G & me tricking out some cool plates — but kept picturing the broken pieces after our inevitable washing mishap. Nobody breaks dishes like I do, except Mary. We should just buy camping tin and be done with it. Still, conspiring with Gavin on Mary’s anniversary gift was an entirely sonic suggestion. The kid is the smoothest smooth.

“Hey, wanna make Mary something for our anniversary?”

“She wants a Hello Kitty,” he told me. “Let’s make her one at Build-a-Bear. I’ll dress it. It’ll look just like Mary. It’ll have a purse and a tutu and ballet slippers.”

That’s actually a fairly comprehensive description of Mary. And so we went and built her a Hello Kitty. Red — per Gavin — with a red tutu and red sparkly heeled shoes and a sparkly purse and, of course, a duvet & Hello Kitty pillow. We put our hearts inside her after the ritual and watched her get stitched up. When you squeeze her paw she shouts, “I love you!”

He told the clerk what the present represented: “It’s Mary day. It’s the anniversary of our love for Mary.” She looked at him for a long time and said, “You’re the sweetest kid I’ve ever met.” I agree with her. Every time I pick up this silly bow, or her heels, or her purse, I think of our love for Mary. Every time I lift the squishy red creature, I think of the kid’s passion for his family. The way that he honors all of us. The way he introduced “Happy Kitty” to the rest of his stuffed clan, and then said maybe she should sleep on the floor of his room, or maybe on the foot of his bed, so she wouldn’t get lonely in the night. The way he read to her and built her Legos. The way he showed her off to his friends when they came over to play.

And when Mary walks around holding that cat like a stylish red baby, it’s just perfect. It’s just exactly right. A love as big as childhood.

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Call It Courage

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Jill

I don’t remember the details anymore. A boy was kicked off his island for cowardice and forced to sail away in a canoe with his weird little dog. The dog was missing a leg or something. I’m pretty sure. The boy had a knife. And there was a shark. And the dog loved the boy beyond anything. The dog loved him the way that I loved the world. Fiercely.

I read Call It Courage when I was in fourth grade. A pivotal year, fourth grade. We were leaving Missouri to move to the Pacific Northwest for a year while my dad got his Master’s. We were going to pretend to be civilians. Rent a white house with green shutters. In a real neighborhood. With trees that grew in funny directions. And neighbors who might be old. Retired, even.

We drove north in our green Dodge van and I thought about that poor kid. Adrift. Last month, I was reading this list from the dude who wrote Gift of Fear, about the things that must be true about your child before you should allow the kid to stay home alone, or commute by herself. One of the items was: Are you ready to hear whatever your child experiences, even if it’s negative or unpleasant?

I was telling G about the evacuation of London during WWII. How parents sent their kids away. How it’s unfathomable to me. The way boarding schools are unfathomable. Your child raised by strangers.

The world hasn’t gotten more dangerous, but we know so much more about the dangers. We know enough to see them everywhere. We know children aren’t safe in the suburbs. We know they aren’t safe in the country. We know they aren’t safe in the city. And neither are we. Terrible things can happen any place. Terrible things can happen no matter how thoroughly we prepare.

Sometimes just speaking is an act of courage. Sometimes holding your tongue takes all the fortitude you have. Kids go every day into the world knowing they are at the mercy of their circumstances. Reminded when they’re scolded to make their beds, take out the trash, do their homework, that what they want is secondary to what we want. We forget how much courage it takes to be a kid. How new most of their experiences are.

Our days become automatic. And I worry that we have put our children in the strange position of mimicking our soullessness. We over-schedule them. We forget that their job is to play. At 7, Gavin’s circle of security has extended further than ever. He still returns to me to recharge, to check-in, but he is perfectly happy to go down the water slide by himself. To play with the neighbors and adapt his games by popular vote. He gets more space to navigate. More space to explore.

And those old rites of passage — ten, twelve, thirteen? A boy set loose in a canoe. A boy with a knife and a 3-legged dog. Children on trains without their parents. Military brats getting to ride their bikes down unfamiliar streets — streets that sprawl and wind and may be entirely unguarded by young men with firearms. We talk so much about fear and so little about courage. So much about religion and so little about science. We are sensory creatures, after all. We used to test our experience. We used to test ourselves.

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Golem

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Jill

We were talking about emotional affairs with exes yesterday, about how they can exist whether or not they’re reciprocated, about how they can be entirely one-sided. And then I realized we were talking about golems. About fabricating a stand-in. I created this thing as a placeholder; I brought my love back from the grave. Isn’t it pretty?

How we nurse grief, sometimes, the way we nurse anger, and then we don’t have to examine our circumstances. We don’t have to realize anything about ourselves. I just can’t think about that now; I’m distressed! I’m super busy being distressed. Maybe when I’m feeling stronger I can reflect on my self. On my choices. On the fact that my unhappiness may not have anything to do with other people.

The way prescription drug addicts’ brains manufacture pain so that they have to take drugs. They’re in pain. It’s awful and they need relief. The pain hurts. They made it themselves, but it still hurts. So, is the pain real?

I wanted to be a better woman, and I sat in a Mexican restaurant and asked my father to explain enmeshment to me. He told me that if I changed my shape — if I learned and maintained boundaries, I’d change my shape — and my existing relationships, particularly the unhealthy ones, would try to reestablish the shape I’d been. They’d try to force me to be square, and they’d escalate and escalate to keep me from being a triangle. He was right.

Your relationships rely on a certain level of comfort, a certain level of predictability. Nobody wants you to be entirely new. It’s confusing when you’re new. Other people feel judged. They feel like you’re saying “no” unnecessarily. That you’re being more difficult than the situation requires. That they don’t know you anymore. Why can’t we just go on as we were? Why can’t we just be the same? Why can’t we raise a golem to be the thing we were? Why can’t we birth this creature to represent us? It can be your guilt, and my anger. I don’t ever have to get over you. I don’t even have to consider what it means that we ended, because I built this thing. And I’ll carry it around forever, because its legs don’t work. And its arms don’t move. And it mumbles incomprehensibly. But it’ll keep me busy forever. And I’ll never have to think about my own shape. I can just think about yours. I can go on thinking about yours and resenting, resenting, resenting.

My belief system is built entirely on grace. We all need it. We need grace. We need it from each other, but more importantly, we need it from ourselves. I thought I was broken because I didn’t move the way I always had. I kept getting stuck. I had to get used to my new shape. I had to learn to be fluid. I had to forgive myself for the ways I’d tangled and collided and gone astray. All that work is still easier than carrying around some creepy old golem.

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Go Fish

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Jill

The kid has his first school play tomorrow evening. Initially he was bummed not to have a speaking part, but now he seems grateful to have less stress and more pleasure about his big performance. It’s a musical, and the kids who don’t have speaking parts get to be any underwater creature of their choosing. Naturally, he picked a catfish.

“What are you going to wear?” I asked.
“Oh, something with scales would be good. Or fins.”
“I think that’s maybe more elaborate than they were thinking. Your teacher said fish masks or fish hats.”
“We’re just going to be fish heads?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“So I probably can’t wear a tail?”
“Probably not.”
“But I still get to wear face paint?”
“Yeah, totally.”
“Then maybe I should wear something glittery. To go with my face paint.”

There’s no question we have a performer on our hands. The kid walks around belting pop songs and has already written plays to be performed by his Lego. His stories from school come home with dialogue and punchlines. He’s the kid I was in my secret life. In my imagination. I wrote plays and songs and poems and newspapers. I performed plays in the yard with costumes. But I kept my stories to myself. I don’t remember telling my parents, or enlisting other people to play characters. He’s a brave child, and for all that, easygoing. I think it comes from being certain. From being so certain about who he is. His conviction is contagious.

He is the kind of person who is eager to dance. Perhaps that says more about him than anything else. Except that we are also more eager to dance, just for being around him.

 

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Take Heart

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Jill

Little kids in KKK robes. It’s hard sometimes to live in this world and not be discouraged. It’s hard to see hope when we have states legislating creationism. Sometimes it seems the crazy has spilled and we’ll never get it cleaned up. Some people are mean for no reason.

And yet.

Most of us believe in science. Most of us believe in the ethical treatment of animals. Most of us believe in equality. There is money to be made in the chaos, so of course it’s encouraged. There is money to be made while we squabble over lunch meat.

I saw a photo this week of a dude in a suit attacking the first woman ever to run in the Boston Marathon. The world changes. They are fighting us so hard now because we have made progress. Because we have enacted change. They are fighting us because they don’t want equality. They want to rule without opposition. They want to rule without dissent. They want to rule.

I think we’ve had enough silence. I think the time has come to shout. I think the time has come to bellow. Get up. Get up and name the world you will have. The world you will live in. The world you’ll be proud of. Get up and help your neighbor. Get up and protect a child. Speak up for people who are intimidated. Speak up. And when you’re tired, remember you earned it. You earned your weariness. Because you never stopped protesting. You never stopped giving name to what is not acceptable. You never kept silent and swallowed somebody else’s version.

There’s a thug everywhere. And there’s plenty of silence. We spend half our lives in the dark. Take heart, my friends. Take heart. People are endlessly surprising. You are not alone. And when your skin won’t filter the blows, when you feel wounded by the news, turn that shit off and go outside. Watch the leaves flutter on the trees. Feel the muck with your fingers. Let the sun pan across your face. This marvelous world. You deserve this. You deserve all the beauty you can imagine.

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The problem with shiny

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Jill

I used to have a shiny problem. It felt like tragedy to deny myself the opportunity to experience something. Or someone. I like people. I like their curious brains. I like being praised. I didn’t mean to collect acolytes, but that’s what I did. And artists do. We are collectors. Of books and anecdotes. Of stories and admirers. Of new experiences. Who hasn’t contemplated sex in a bathtub?

In some ways, the shiny problem is an adolescent issue. We pick beauty without any contemplation of consequences. I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, I’m busy chasing shiny. And whatever shiny is, once we catch it, is mostly irrelevant. Tin foil doesn’t last, but it’s not meant to last, and there’s copper and steel and glass and you get me. There’s always a new girl somewhere. Someone entirely potential. Who hasn’t developed a single pattern of conversation with you. Who never says, “God, not this again.” Someone shiny. And so far, perfect.

This is egoless narcissism, right? The plight of all of us who don’t think we’re worthy of love and so just chase brightness instead. At any cost. Cheating is how I got out of miserable relationships. But shiny is about more than cheating. It’s an attempt to assuage our ego. Somebody somewhere is waiting to tell us we’re fucking awesome. We should cultivate that, man. We should seek that shit out.

I got over my shiny problem when I was 35. I was at a conference and this girl approached me and I thought, Not for the wide world. I’d just met someone who made me certain. Really, powerfully certain. And the fact that she would never have known was exactly why I said no. I didn’t need it anymore. I didn’t need shiny. I had learned, at last, to separate myself from attention. To tell the difference between pretty and impermanent and my own heart.

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Untitled

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Jill

When I was 17, I was outed at my school. Sort of. Someone told girls I played basketball with. And, instead of confronting me, they decided to terrorize my friends. And then they’d send messages, “Tell Jill —”

But the messages never quite made it. My friends would give some watered-down version of what had happened. I don’t think they ever relayed an actual message. Or maybe there never was an articulated message. Not one of those girls ever said a thing to me. But we didn’t have cell phones. We didn’t have social media. The bullies were “anonymous” to me, but very real to my friends.

Yesterday, another kid committed suicide. And some educated white dude called marriage equality a gay issue. And my heart ached. Kids are dying. And you can’t see that marriage equality is a human issue? Kids are dying and you can’t see that these things are related? That civil rights — full and equal civil rights — are the only hope we have to save ourselves?

You are off message, Christians. You are off message. And the left loves to call you stupid, but they are wrong. You are not stupid, you are mean. You are supposed to consider your own imperfections, and when you find yourself faultless, cast the first stone. Remember?

The death of a child isn’t a gay issue. Marriage equality isn’t a gay issue. We are people, you angry motherfuckers. We are people. And we deserve exactly what you deserve. To live and love. To be treated with grace.

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Vanilla

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Jill

Yesterday, to my great delight, I read numerous articles debating whether or not spanking was mainstream. And, if it is, what that means for feminism. This is just so American, isn’t it? Two months ago we’re embroiled in a Congressional showdown over birth control; every day we read about new and more extreme legislation by anti-abortionists, and now: What S&M says about feminism! I love my wacky, repressed country.

At some point we could just own that spanking has always been common, couldn’t we? Like anal. Why do we talk about either as though they’re subversive? Sex is about power. And during my sexual life, I have realized that the more powerful my partner, the more willingly power is reciprocated. Our partners should be, to quote Dan Savage, “good, giving, and game.” What S&M says about feminism is that women are no longer apologists for desire. This is, after all, what the religious right is so upset about. How dare we enjoy sex! How dare we participate not only with delight, but with suggestions! How dare we have opinions about our experience!

Spanking has been mainstream for ages. I’ve never had a partner who didn’t suggest it. Ever. You know what would be fun, as an experiment, let’s just talk about sex as though it’s not secretive, shameful behavior. Let’s talk about it with facts and honesty. Consensual sex involves power exchanges. And the first and most radical act, is to ask for what you want.

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You are responsible for the entire world

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Jill

Kids have guilt complexes. I worried when my candy wasn’t evenly distributed. Starbursts always had one more orange and red than lemon and strawberry. It was some kind of conspiracy probably. I had to count them out and squish pieces together so that no one flavor felt slighted. Now, when I notice, I studiously ignore the fact that I’ve noticed. Sort of like the year I decided to be late for everything because being punctual seemed so sad, and I’d wait to leave the house for an extra 12 minutes just to appear more casual. Being late became such work that I finally went back to being timely. It was ridiculous.

If we’re friends, you’ve probably gotten an email at some point in which I’ve apologized for casually hurting your feelings. I’ve apologized for my carelessness. If you haven’t had one yet, don’t worry, it’ll happen. I blurt shit out and realize later it was a simply awful thing to say. And then I worry about your feelings. And then I email you to let you know I’ll be more careful in future. And I do try to be more careful, but shit occurs to me and I say it. And the whole thing begins again.

And Gavin, in the middle of a custody battle, has begun to assume a responsibility for everything. As though he can fix his parents. It’s awful and I felt helpless at first. You can tell a kid for the rest of his life that he’s not responsible for other people’s choices, but that doesn’t mean he won’t feel responsible for other people’s choices. We worry about the people we love. We take on their shit sometimes. Especially when we’re young and sharing is the ultimate kindness. (I actually think that’s always true: sharing is the ultimate kindness. But adults are not particularly adept at sharing.)

Anyway, I finally realized I could demonstrate how preposterous trying to take on other people’s shit is. “Hey, Gavin, none of these trees has any leaves. That’s your responsibility. What do you have to say for yourself?” At first he just laughed. A kid isn’t responsible for trees! “Gavin, that dude just tripped over there. How are you going to solve the whole tripping dilemma?” And now, he responds in kind, “Hey Jill, Jupiter is the largest planet, that’s your fault.”

Maybe he’ll still worry. Maybe he’ll still feel responsible. Maybe we always want to intercede when we see people struggling. But it isn’t his job. His job is to be 7 and enjoy his life. We remind him all the time. We have him repeat it, like a battle cry: MY JOB IS TO BE 7 AND ENJOY MY LIFE. Yeah. Get on that, will ya?

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