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Clever men place the world into cages, but the wise woman ducks under the moon and throws keys to the rowdy prisoners. – Hafiz
There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? and Who’s in charge?” – Elizabeth Gilbert
On Wednesday I had a hot and sweaty date with five demanding women. Heather and I took our respective progeny (two daughters each) to the beach.
A couple of weeks ago I had discovered – not-so-funny how some of us claim things new to us even when they’re long-known and owned by others, ahh the history of the world – Centennial Beach at Boundary Bay.
It was a spontaneous thing. I’d heard about this beach, we were out for a drive and I found my way there.
And what a beach. What a bay. Long, uninterrupted swaths of white sand bordered by a bird sanctuary on one side and the surprisingly warm Pacific Ocean on the other.
Did I mention the water was warm?
The water was warm. My girls immediately got in – clothes be damned, Sophie wore all of hers and Lola took ‘em all off – and stayed in. When you live north of the 49th and you find water warm enough to swim in, then by the water gods, goddesses, sirens and mermaids (but not Shark Week, damn you Shark Week!), you swim in it. Now. You don’t wait to be equipped with petty luxuries like towels and bathing suits. Skin is a fine swim suit.
And then you brag to your bff that you discovered what would have happened if the Holy Grail mated with a unicorn: a beach in the Pacific Northwest that doesn’t make your pointy bits announce their presence to the world or seek shelter internally.
Naturally, Heather immediately wanted a piece of this hot (ok, warm) swimmable beach action.
So we strapped all the kids into her super-sexy Dodge Caravan with the unspoken and fervent wish that the kids would splash and make sandcastles while we gossiped and all would be right with the kids-being-kids/mamas-being-adults world. You know, fantasy land.
When we arrived the tide was out – waaaaaaay out – and recriminations ensued.
“Why are you getting mad at us?” I asked. “We didn’t make the tide go out. That’s the moon. That’s a higher power than your mothers. You need to take that up with God.”
Heather and I unpacked the towels, blanket, snacks, sunscreen, wipes, extra clothes, and beach toys ferried from car-to-beach by a small fleet of valets, puckishly attired man-servants, donkeys, camels and helpful elves – which is to say “the two of us” – and then encouraged the children to play. With each other.
Heather’s two year old promptly reclined against Heather’s thigh while my four year old set up shop in the small of my back. They snacked. They ignored our pleas to go play in the tidal pool.
(Hey. We suggested a tidal pool, not traffic.)
And this, I told Heather, is the paradox of motherhood.
Our children know that we bring the tide in and out. When they are little, their world is small and we are large. So large that we duck under the moon to order bed times and vegetables and boss the sea. We choreograph their world so why not the natural world, too?
And just when we marvel at our own power and glory and incredible ability to command clouds and caravans and kids, they sit on us. With their casual permission to access our bodies they remind us exactly who’s in charge, after all.
This week I was intensely and disconcertingly drawn to someone I’ve never, ever met before. But, because he looked like someone I used to know – a man once who said something to me that might have changed the course of my life - I felt like I knew him. And so I immediately liked him a lot.
He reminded me of the friend of a man I dated ten years ago. I loved that guy a lot (the guy I dated, not his friend. Obviously, the other way around would have been inappropriate).
And that guy – the one I dated – drove me batty in both good and bad ways. Let’s call this guy “Prince”.
Prince was gorgeous, stylish, passionate, brave, and showed me his vulnerable side…and I adored that about him.
Prince was also new to the country and wanted to plant his fashionable
boot firmly on the back of my neck. He told me I asked too many
questions, talked too much, and he wanted me to mind him.
And that…well that I did NOT adore.
So we fought a lot (which, by the way, is HIGHLY unusual for me.
I’m definitely more of a lover than a fighter) and broke up a
lot. I cried a lot.
And one time, when we got back together, his friend Lucky came
over to talk to us.
Lucky said,
I know you two love each other a lot, but all this fighting and
crying and breaking up and getting back together is ridiculous. I’m glad that you’ve made up, and I hope it works out this time…I’m hoping that this time around you’ll be adults who will be rational and communicate with each other instead of fighting. If you’re fighting all the time, then something’s really wrong. That’s not love, that’s drama.
I was MORTIFIED. Here I was, a grown-ass woman of 27, and someone needed to talk to me as though I was a fourteen year old just figuring out
dating.
But…
The next time Prince and I had a fight – and our fights almost always
concluded in a (usually temporary) break-up – Lucky’s words echoed
in my head.
“Ridiculous. Communication. Adults. Drama.”
And I told Prince, “if you do what you usually do – refuse to speak to
me for a day or a week or three weeks – then when you are ready to talk to me, it will be too late. I’m not doing what we’ve been doing any more.”
And I meant it. And, sure enough, when he called three weeks later to apologize and tell me he loved me, I said, “I meant it. No more.”
And I SUFFERED. I wanted that guy so much.
But I didn’t want to be in a relationship that required interventions from friends. I didn’t want drama. I wanted love.
So I’m lucky that Lucky intervened. I’m lucky that he had the balls and the wisdom (and was exasperated enough!) to speak the truth.
And I carried that wisdom forward into my life.
Mostly.
And that’s who this guy resembles. Lucky.
Lucky me.
This might be a little frou-frou academic but let’s get polemic and creative and re-interpret The Blog. Add jazz hands as necessary.
Yes. I’m for real. I’d kinda like to encourage you to mangle language, stream consciously (or un), make wild analogies, mix and unmatch metaphors, make up words (plurk), get taxidermical with George Orwell, run fast and loose with slutty punctuation, wax lyrical, write 12,000 word essays (on porn – please – at least keep us interested), create loopy titles that are paragraphs and induce migraines and embrace that as a personal objective, take on personal titles as pronouncements and dub yourself Queen of the Gays/non-sequiturs, and toggle between play-dough and Plato.
Read poetry and if you must, write it, but for the love of ye gods and all that is holy DO NOT INFLICT ANY OF IT ON US.
Instead, channel Hemingway and write anorexic prose. Or embellish. Amplicate. Invest in curlicues and adverbs, make adjectives your bitch, and swear a mofo lot in cynical cartoons because that’s just funny.
Be funny. Insist on detailing the amoebic nuances of daily, boring, beautiful life. Tell us about the time your little brother glued his G.I. Joe’s to the kitchen wall and declared war against all things legume. But stay away from clown sex.
(Probably NSFW. Google The Bloggess and clowns – and squids, while you’re at it.)
Mess around with fonts and characters and spacing to make your point. Sidle up to your point and kiss it on the shoulder. Parse. Write some unscannable pieces (whaaaaa? No lists? No bullets? No headers? Fetch the stake and the matches!). Please. Thank you.
Use vivid, physical, metaphorical language (mad, insane, crazy-making, blinded, deafened, crippled, disabled, epileptic, schizophrenic, idiot, fat, MILF- what?! because usually, not so much?? – bitch, pimp). Despair at the politically nefarious connotations of that language. Talk about it. Write through it. Invent a new language.
Link to everything. Link to Jonathan Swift (thanks, Seth). Link to nothing, at all, ever. Let your copy stand on its own.
Promise never, ever to use the word copy again. Liar.
Indulge in the dash. Be parenthetical. Be self-referential. Pretend you’re an expert. Admit you don’t know a thing except how to be wildly intellectually mastubatory while using your blog as therapy. It is all a writing prompt, after all, and we’re all in it together.
Create characters (The Farmer. The Gentleman Caller. You), address your readers directly, imagine you’re Samuel Richardsonand your blog is your Clarissa and in fact blogs are the new epistolary novel because that’s not pretentious at all. It’s still true.
Go dirty. Go highbrow. Result in raised eyebrows.
Decide that you can’t decide between your two beloved babies, fragment or run-on sentences, and just out and out dare people to call the grammar police.
(Because what is grammar for? Writing clearly and conveying your point effectively. Use it. Abuse it. Bend it like Beckham. Do whatever you need to do.)
Be homey. Invite us in. Strip textually naked. Surprise!
——————–
Do you want to surprise – and delight – your readers (and hell,yourself) with wild and free writing?
I can teach you some specific techniques to create emotional tension in your work. I can help you unlock – unleash! – your unique writing voice.
And I do that in a writing workshop that is chock-full of inventive exercises, examples, and gossip.
(Because writers are storytellers which is just a fancy way of saying we can’t keep a secret.)
…and we’ll do that, together, in a two hour workshop in Vancouver.
Here’s how it goes down:
Bonus:
+ a rant on why it is crucially, politically, artistically important to write personal
+ profanity. No extra charge.
The Details:
Saturday, July 17
1pm to 3pm(ish)
Hollyhock Room, 4th Floor
163 West Hastings
Vancouver BC
$100 CDN 
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PS never, ever do what I just did. Promiscuous out-linking in sales pages is VERBOTEN. Sales letters should NOT have links to anything except your “buy now, dammit!” page.
So. Do as I say not as I do.
Except in the writing workshop – you’re coming, right? – where you WILL TOTALLY OBEY my every command.
xoxoxo
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wanna be an affiliate? E-mail me!
…and this morning maybe I have the (possibly self-righteous) answer to the question that is haunting me:
(Or, in other words, not being a martyr or a doormat or hanging in there with someone who doesn’t truly care about me in words and deed.)
and the answer is…
A checklist. Clearly I’ve been body-snatched.
and, finally:
endings aren’t forever. They might just be for now. Sometimes we grow up and come back together. Sometime we grow apart. Sometimes we grow.
On the one hand, I understand. I’ve done it. I’ve ended friendships and romances because I was turning into someone I didn’t want to be. Because I was hurting. Because they were hurting. Because we weren’t doing anything good for each other. Because we were, in fact, making each other worse.
On the other hand, I worry about this trend towards disposable friendships, relationships, and marriages.
I have such mixed feelings about marriage. I liked being married. I hope my kids get married some day. I want to get married some day. EVERYONE should have the right to get married if they want to.
And I am totally fucking terrified both by the prospect of getting married again and at the thought that I might not marry again.
And, so given my fraught relationship with marriage, I don’t do weddings. I make excuses. I schedule vacations that conflict with the date. My gift arrives but I do not.
I don’t go, because marriage is sacred and I threw my own marriage away. I can’t shake off that shame.
I’m not alone.
A friend of mine is separated and working his way through his grief to a divorce, and he doesn’t think he’ll marry again. Not because he is afraid to, but because even if he divorces, he’s still married. He made a commitment. He’ll be married forever because marriage is forever.
Obviously, this is going to be a problem for him and anyone who one day entertains thoughts of marrying him.
But…I understand what he’s thinking. I respect it. I wish I understood this exact point when I was on the precipice of leaving. I wish I understood this before I got to the point where the only escape was to leap off the married cliff into…
not the abyss. Being single isn’t a curse – but divorce is a nightmare. It is a tearing asunder of that which has been joined together.
And although I would tear apart with my own prettily-polished nails all of those ‘thinkers’ *ahem* who blame rising divorce rates (are they still rising? or do we just like to run around screaming “the sky is falling! the sky is falling! oh my god those feminists are raining divorces down on the innocents! the sky is falling!) on that pesky women’s liberation, I do wonder if as a culture we’re now taking marriage less seriously.
I wish, when I married, that I had grasped the magnitude of the commitment I was making. I wish, when I was divorcing, that I hadn’t collapsed my world into a binary choice of leaving/saving self and staying/sacrificing self. I wish I had realized that in every marriage there is a conversation between space and intimacy. That you can have space and intimacy in a marriage. That you don’t have to marry the perfect person. That there is no perfect person. That leaving can indeed save your soul but so can staying. That even though leaving seems easier, it is probably much, much harder.
Which, of course, is not to say I would go back. You can never go back.
What I am trying to say is that I have treated people, relationships and marriages as consumable goods. I go shopping for the thing I think I want or need, and then when I get it home and find it didn’t fill the gap, hit the spot, or look as good at the kitchen table as I had expected, I return it or get rid of it.
That’s treating people and relationships as disposable goods. That’s using people to meet my needs rather than appreciating them as they are, for who they are.
And that’s obviously not okay.
So I get a little icked out when I read that you can change your life by changing your friendships, or that your weight or your income can be predicted/determined by the five people you spend the most time with blah blah blah.
(My six year old and four year old own my time and their cumulative weights and incomes are skewing the averages down, down, down. Ought I get rid of them? Or just embrace my future impoverished but slim self?)
And, at the same time, sometimes the people in your life are terrible for you, and you do need to develop new boundaries. And maybe new friends. Or a different lover. Or no lover at all.
But where is the line that tells us when we’re establishing boundaries or disposals?
Because I’m having trouble telling the difference. When am I wisely dumping a friend or a lover because they’re bad for me and when am I casually disposing of a relationship because it doesn’t match the wallpaper?
Is the line between disposable relationships and healthy boundaries a fixed or moving frontier?
I wonder this, when I’m hurting, and when I want and need and deserve something that someone in my life won’t give me. Do I walk away from this person because she’s not serving up what I want for breakfast? Or do I find ways to satisfy my own needs so I am able to love him unconditionally?
Are the people in my life here to meet my needs, which means they can be disposed of when they don’t?
I am repulsed by a consumer approach to relationships.
But am I so porous and my boundaries so permeable that I’ll stay committed to someone or something that can’t or won’t help me get what I want and need?
Wondering about these questions wears me out. I am tired.
I don’t have the answers even though they are the subject of many a 4am freak-out. And so I am tired.
I stay up late or wake up early thinking about these questions and so I am tired.
I pack around these questions on my back and that backpack is already heavy with the responsibilities. I’m almost always entirely responsible for the care and feeding of Love and my loved ones. And so I am tired.
My questioning heart, head and shoulders are tired.
Which makes this exactly and urgently the right time to determine what things to let go of and what things to carry.
And, I suspect, this is when we damsels, fair maidens and princesses have been trained to look for a dude on a white horse to carry us, too.
We’re at my parent’s house. We’re staying in the cabin.
10.14 pm. I walked to The House to get extra blankets and pillows.
It is dark. My mother lit candles in little tin cans all along the path from the cabin to the house. Beautiful. Romantic.
At the house, I turn around…
and my little one, my almost-four year old, is there.
Mama, I’m scared.
So scared that she braved a trek across a quarter of an acre from the cabin to the house in the dark?
And so I wonder, in my best Carrie Bradshaw fashion, how often we think or say “I’m scared” when what we mean is:
I miss you
I want you
I need you
Don’t go
Stay
Shine
Amelia, that’s a cactus. Don’t play with it.
T: Have you ever had a crush on a boy?
K: How do you even get a crush?
T: You stare at a boy, and then stare at him some more, and then you start to realize that he’s really nice…that’s how a crush happens. Have you ever had one?
K, flatly: No.
all five girls, discussing what they don’t like about twelve-year old boys. (The list is long.)
T: I hate it when boys walk around with their jeans so low that you have to look at their underwear.
All: ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
A: If I wanted to look at a boy’s underwear, I’d go fold my brother’s laundry!
Just say no to cactuses, crushes and boy’s underwear.
And that about sums up my dating wisdom for the week.
xoxoxo
Sad. I am. But I’m totally equipped to deal with sad.
It might not be terribly balanced – and lo, I do not drink at the fountain of balance – but the ability to take risks is a privilege. The rest of my life is stable and secure which means I can be courageous with my heart.
Still, for the last year, maybe more, I took dumb risks. I did not look at the man in front of me and decide “is he worth the risk?”
I took the risk for the sake of the risk.
Unwise. Glad I stopped that.
But there is so much to be said for making the leap. For falling. Maybe even in love.
I’ve written before that I’m intensely frustrated with safe, tepid, tentative, risk-managed, pseudo-”healthy” dating and relationships.
And here’s why: because every single relationship I have had has ended. That fucking hurts. Endings tear you apart. Divorce is violence.
And so if I entered into relationships explicitly trying to prevent pain and and manage potential heartache, I would just never get into one, or any, ever. Because they’ve all ended that way.
And almost every single one was worth it.
That’s why I take the risk.
These days, I’m doing it better.
(The temporarily chaste thing really helped. It was like a “reset” button that made me stop interpreting men in light of what I wanted them to be and where I wanted them to go.)
Now, I only take the risk with someone who deserves it. Who is worth the potential heartbreak. With someone who can show up with the passion, connection, intellect and soul…someone with whom the risk might be great, but so too is the reward.
When I find someone like that, and our hearts and souls collide, and we inspire each other and lift each other up – and all of that is rare and precious – then yes, I leap. I fall. I don’t even look for the net.
Except maybe we don’t fall. Maybe we fly.
We did – or we tried – to fly. Turns out our wings weren’t strong enough.
Hitting the earth hurts. I hurt.
But…
I don’t regret it.
I am terrifyingly brave. I love. I really do. I’m all in. I show up and I open up.
And I am so proud of how I behaved in this most recent almost-love. I didn’t get freaky, clingy, angry or tense.
(When I had those moments, I “networked my neediness” – mostly with the author of that post, thank you, my friend – instead of making someone else responsible for fixing it.)
I didn’t try to fix him. I didn’t fall in love with his potential. I saw him. I saw flaws. I saw strengths. I took him as he was and I liked him as he is. I was kind to him and to myself.
I stayed present. I stayed in the moment. I didn’t worry about what we might be in one year or two years. I enjoyed him and us, right now.
Because right now is all we have. The past is dead and the future is imaginary.
And I really tried. When something needed to be said, I said it. When I was scared, I said so. When I was hurt, I said so. And I didn’t get all wound up about it and blame him for my feelings. I owned them and I spoke my truth. Evenly. Honestly. We made a deal to be honest even when it would be easier to lie.
That, it turns out, is not as difficult as I thought and infinitely more beautiful than I imagined.
And yet it didn’t work out. And so I’m sad.
But I am incredibly proud of myself.
Because I did my fucking best.
In a piece that Dave Doolin and I wrote together (you’ll see it soon), Dave wrote that when submitting pieces to other publishers, you’ve got to contribute your very best writing, because then if it is rejected you’ve got a “useful data point”.
That data point is this: your best effort wasn’t good enough. And that’s important, because then you’ve got something to work with: you need to become a better writer. That path is clear.
However, if you submit a mediocre effort and it is rejected, you don’t really know anything. You don’t know what would have happened if you offered your best. You don’t know if your best would be good enough.
It is a bit of a hop, skip and a jump to apply that to relationships, but here it is:
offer your best and truest love. Offer your you’iest you.
If it is not enough, it is not enough. But at least then you know, definitively, that this is the case. Clarity is peace.
I know this, intimately, because I once let go of a relationship without doing my best to make it work.
And I regretted it. For years. Eight years.
I was haunted by the thought – the bone-deep knowledge, really – that I could have tried harder. I could have done better. Maybe it would have worked if I had only done this, or this, or that…
Regret was my shadow.
So in that case, there’s no useful data point. There’s regret that I didn’t go all out because then at least I would know that I tried my damndest and it still didn’t work.
Instead, what I know about that eight-years-ago love was that I didn’t try.
There is nothing I regret more than not trying hard enough. There’s no fucking excuse for that.
With this more recent, wobbly-winged and wonderful relationship, I tried. I showed up. I showed.
There is nothing I would do differently.
I have nothing to regret.
Which is a great thing to know, because regret is a luxury and a vice.
Let’s not indulge.
amen.
mad, passionate love ‘n kisses to Tara Gentile for e-mailing this print by theloveshop to me today – and for knowing that I’d adore it. mwah.
