I’m guessing it never occurred to you when you looked down on older women, the ones you assumed weren’t even making an effort, one day you’d discover all the effort in the world still won’t make you sixteen, twenty-two, thirty again. Sometimes all the effort in the world can’t even make you a marginally better forty-eight.
Oh I know, honey. You do it to feel good. You do it for mental-health reasons and just to feel more confident. Me too. It has nothing to do with my pants or thighs or post-childbirth tummy or my bat wings or my neck or my age or my life or my struggle against mortality. Obviously! I’m sure if magazine covers, Instagram, and every corner of our cultural press paid the most slaving attention to nothing but forty-five-year-old women who hovered right around a size 14, we’d still be doing all of this stuff, right?
Of course we would. Wouldn’t we?
What about your face? You can’t exercise that. Ugh the face, it always gives it away, doesn’t it? But if you monkey with your face, well, you best be prepared to apologize to the world for being so vain.
Now, why on earth would you be so vain?
It’s a mystery wrapped in a just-go-die-already fortune cookie, isn’t it?
I say I see you. But I only see you when I’m looking for you. Because no one really sees middle-aged women, do they? They don’t see we are the same girls we were before. That our laughs are the same and the way our hair always curled in that one particular spot, that’s the same too. That our stories are the same as they were before, as are the jokes; they just come out of a mouth that is softer. The lip line less crisp.
I see you, and I will think how middle-aged you look. How you are obviously older than I am. Then somehow I will find out you are actually younger. By a lot. And I will realize I’m comparing your outside to my inside, because my inside is a solid twenty-eight or thirty-two max. And I will see me, finally. I will catch the reflection of my fleshy triceps-ish area in the mirror. What the fuck! That’s certainly not my arm, not the way it rolls over like that, with not a small amount of momentum. That’s the arm of a neighbor lady in Rhode Island, arms poking out of a shapeless shift, a housedress, a Tab in one hand and Newports in the other. It has to be. That splotchy ham hock can’t be mine.
And I see the spots from those early years of lying around beaches listening to shitty music, absent of sunscreen and present of baby oil and Sun In. I see the skin on my forearm, crinkling like birthday streamers in response to the slightest pressure. That’s the skin of my mother and my grandmother before her. That’s the skin I clearly never planned on having. But there it is, right on my own arms. Well, this is certainly ridiculous.
I see the fading fox tattoo on the inside of my wrist, the one I got when I was twenty because I thought it would protect me from ever having a corporate job. Obviously no one would give a serious job to a person with a single tattoo the size of a quarter. So adorable.
I should feel grateful for living this long, for being healthy, for being here at all. My kids’ classmates have lost parents, a mother to suicide, a mother to cancer, another mother to cancer. When I hear this news, I am crushed, even though these were not my friends. Because as he curls into bed my son will tell me, “We were waiting for you guys to show up at the concert and I asked my friend where his mom was and he said she died in January,” and like in a movie, my hand automatically claps over my heart and I gasp.
“Oh my God, that’s awful.”
I feel the mundane and utter blandness of my normal-ass days and all my complaining about pants smash against a rock. I think about this alternate reality where I don’t miss your school concerts because I am out of town or have a meeting but because I am dead. And I will never see another anything that you’re in. I will never see anything about you again. You will know it every day, that I can’t be there like the other mothers because I will never be anywhere. I go to bed that night, I drive to the bank the next day, I take the dog for a walk, and for weeks afterward I whisper to myself, “Please, please, please don’t let anything happen to me.”
So, yes, in the words of my friend Kate’s father: “It beats the alternative.” Aging beats being dead.
That is my positive review of aging.
But I’ll tell you what, when I look at my friends, I see them. I really see them. And truth be told, they are some hot-ass chicks. I’m jealous of their good bums and strong arms; the thick hair, open ears, and utter can-do-ness they possess. They are brave, not in the same exact ways, which is crucial. I see them whole, and if I notice a softening jawline or a dimple anywhere but on their cheeks, those are just features and those are just facts. Like whether the sun is rising or if there’s a storm blowing in. Those are not the entirety of who these grand women are. They’re not even a decent percentage.
That jawline is not their laugh, and those dimples are not the tears we’ve let loose at birthday dinners or midweek cocktails, coffee dates or Christmas parties. The tears from laughter and frustration, from fear, from the subset of sadness that comes when you tell people who you really are and hope against hope they won’t turn away.
It’s one thing to have acquaintances at this age. It’s quite another to be able to say the worst things, the saddest things, the most complain-y things—which you, through habit, will quickly follow up with, “I’m sorry, I’m bringing everyone down.” And just as quickly the responses will fly back, “Shut up, this is what this is all about. This is what we’re supposed to be about.”
We are trained to compliment-sandwich our way through life. Our lives, our husband’s lives, the lives of our children, our employers, our employees, every figure of authority, and every peer. We must facilitate everyone’s fragility and be more than happy to do it. We especially must do this with other women because are we not all on the same side?
I’m here to tell you: we are not.
Nothing will make that more clear than a presidential election or being the mother of school-aged children. I have continuously been dragged and dropped into peer groups I would rather lick doorknobs than be a part of. It’s a maze of ugh, from school to sports, plays to birthday parties. Who the fuck are these people? The only thing we have in common is that we bred. And yet I guess that’s an invitation for this one over here to tell me her opinion on public versus private education even though she knows through the grapevine I’m currently homeschooling out of straight-up desperation and struggling to find the best fit, any fit that works, regardless of the philosophies of PEOPLE I DIDN’T ASK. Or I guess the fact that we’re standing here on this sideline is like a siren call this other one can’t quite resist, assuming our forced physical proximity and Saturday-morning captivity provide just enough things in common to force the most excruciating conversation this side of a Mormon cocktail party. Why do theoretical adults care about high school mascots? Who gives a fuck what choices this coach or that PTO president makes? Why are we discussing screen time? We’re outside. Why are you letting your entire life be defined by your kids? Remember hobbies? You should get some. Remember silence? Let’s enjoy some together.
Not surprisingly, I am not a good representative for how ladies are supposed to act. We are supposed to go along to get along. Cluck like hens in the henhouse, always something to cluck-cluck about. Doesn’t matter if anyone’s listening, doesn’t matter if there’s really anything to say, doesn’t matter if you don’t even like the person you’re talking to and they don’t particularly care for you either. It’s such a massive waste of everyone’s time. And ladies don’t have time to waste.
Sometimes you can feel the judgments happening in real time, when even a hint of vulnerability or honesty can send the inner scorekeepers scrambling up to the scoreboard to update the numbers. I think back to moments when I’ve jumped into conversations (always with the thought, Look at me! I’m turning over a new leaf!), assuming the kind of quick and funny chat I’d have with my real friends. And before I even know what’s happening, I’m suddenly sharing worries and revealing doubts in a school hallway o
r on the playground. Even though I know—I know—I should stop talking, I keep trying to bury my openness with more openness. It’s like my own mouth is swallowing me whole. It dawns on me, way too late, that I’ve mistaken operatives for opportunities and now I can’t stuff my words back in my mouth fast enough. I am talking to the absolutely wrong people. And oof, am I crying now?! Am I getting goddamn emotional? Bloody hell. One of them will stand stock-still in front of me as I carry on, with just the slightest, almost imperceptible, grin or raised eyebrow of satisfaction that says in this one realm at least, she has her shit together.
Not surprisingly, I’ve walked away from these interactions angry at myself for being vulnerable and for assuming ye olde sisterhood contract with women I’m not even remotely friends with. What the fuck? I’ll feel blue for the rest of the day.
The other day my daughter asked me, “Do you ever have a feeling like you’re sad and you don’t know about what? You’ll just be by yourself thinking, and then it’s just there. Or you’ll remember something that happened and think, Oh, and get sad all over again.” And I was like, “Girl, welcome to being a girl.” Sometimes there are so many things to feel unspecifically and very specifically sad about.
That’s why I need these hot-ass chicks like I need oxygen. Because the first casualty of motherhood is honesty. And the second is vulnerability. The third is a sense of humor. Wait, that might be first.
I need these hot-ass chicks because they do not play this “Everything is great, everything is fine, you can’t see how hard and fast my feet are paddling under the water over here, right?” game that we learned to play simply by being born female.
We all know no one wants to hear girls complain, honey. Now run along.
When we talk, we talk for real. We talk for keeps. And, sure, there is not a small amount of bitching. But then again there is not a small amount of things to bitch about. Sometimes it’s frivolous, most of the time it’s silly, and all of it is necessary. We have come close to getting thrown out of some very fine establishments; we roll in like some sort of fur-coat-wearing freak show and we do not give a shit. We have worked hard for these moments of utter ridiculousness and over-the-top fanciness, we will group-text the next morning something around thirty-seven times while wearing sweatpants and last night’s false eyelashes. We are continuously Cinderella after the ball, except we are the princes we’ve been searching for.
Sometimes we take turns competing in the Misery Olympics, some of us medaling more often than seems fair. There is caregiving for the generation above and the generation below. There is therapy for our kids and our marriages and ourselves. There are those moments where everything falls apart, all at once. We listen. We know. We can’t believe it’s this hard. No one told us it’d be this hard.
When we talk, we talk about how we still get fucked with, even now, even after all this time. We are awash in liberal men who think they’re just one Women’s March away from sprouting a pussy, so of course they can still talk over us and steamroll forward with their plans and then send passive-aggressive e-mails afterward that no matter how many ways you turn them, still don’t include the apologies they should. Hot tip: “I’m sorry you feel that way” is not an actual apology, dipshits. We are awash in needing to train husbands to pitch in like it isn’t pretty fucking obvious we need help. JUST LOOK AT US. And we are awash in feeling bad about saying anything. Because you’re not supposed to say anything; people are just supposed to know. Men are just supposed to know.
(They do not know.)
I need these hot-ass chicks because sometimes what we have in common is what girls have in common, and sometimes what girls have in common is pretty fucked up indeed. We will talk on a hot August night on what was supposed to be a fancy excuse for a midweek night out, and before you know it we’re talking about rape and verbal abuse and all the times we thought we might be kidnapped. You know, girl talk.
There was that time when I was ten and my friend and I were walking back from the store near the beach. An old man driving a boat of a car crept along that road, once down and once back. Noticeably slowly. I mean, you have to drive pretty slow in a shitty old car to catch the attention of a couple of chattering ten-year-old girls.
Even as I recall this, my factory-installed gut-reaction-denier kicks in and I think, “Maybe he lost his dog; maybe he was looking for his dog” and Jesus Christ did I not just tell my own ten-year-old daughter two nights ago that she is never to approach nor go with an adult who says they have lost their dog and need the help of a child?
All I know is that on that day, on that hot summer day, most likely walking barefoot and holding on to tiny paper bags full of Swedish fish, licorice ropes, and Smarties, on the third time that car passed us, we took off running. No more waiting around to see what happened next. We sprinted, darted right, and slid down a scrubby embankment, flattening ourselves to the ground like cats. Ears back, tails twitching.
I still remember that golden brown sedan, slowing down where we had last appeared. And that old man searched; I can still see his potato sack of a face looking in the direction of those bushes and grass where we lay still, hearts pounding. Him and his car, his rolling creeper metal suit that glimmered in the hot afternoon sun, it moved along that one block slower than if he had been in a parade.
He hadn’t lost a dog. He had lost his chance.
That’s what us hot-ass chicks talk about, all those times we got away. And the times we didn’t. We will talk about that feeling in our gut that something isn’t quite right. We will talk about cowering or running, hiding or slapping. We will talk about how we pass these lessons on to our daughters. Because your options are to give them the tools they need or give them nightmares. Unfortunately, they usually get both.
We will teach them that you need to listen to your gut, don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings, just get out of there. That worrying about hurting a stranger’s feelings can be the difference between being alive or being dead.
And we will teach them that if you are lost and afraid, look for a mother with children because she is automatically more trustworthy than any adult man and especially any adult man who is by himself. That you have as much of a right to feel safe and whole as anyone else, that you don’t owe anyone anything, that being nice is so fucking overrated and you might as well learn that now. Nice can be a trap your entire life.
That is only the beginning of the lessons we teach. Not because those lessons are part of a radical feminist agenda, but because our daughters need to know these things as much as they need to learn please and thank you, where babies come from, and how to use a tampon. Because this is what it’s like to be a girl and a woman in this country, because no matter how understanding your husband is, he will never know what it’s like to grow up as prey. Not if he’s straight and white anyway. He will not know the feeling of car keys clenched between fingers like you learned freshman year of college. He will not know how automatically you cross the street when you’re alone to test if that person, that man behind you, is following you or is just going about his business. He will not understand that, sorry, but getting his ass kicked that one time in high school is just not the same as feeling like you alone are in charge of your safety 24/7/365. And that if you step off that path, get drunk, wear a short skirt, leave a party with a boy you just met, were a bitch, were a lesbian, were just not into someone, didn’t respond to a catcall, just existed, just breathed, just were a girl, a woman, well, good luck to you.
I need these hot-ass chicks because if there’s one thing this world is expert at, it’s gaslighting us, it’s telling us we’re crazy, and honestly it would be no surprise if we actually were. Clearly, we would have reasons.
So: pardon me if by the time we are middle-aged and it seems we are not making enough of an effort to be on proper display while not grossing men out with our very existence and teaching our daughters how not to be assaulted and arranging the magazines on our coffee tables just so, pardon me if I
don’t get a bit down about how it’d be great to just have a tighter neck or a thinner waist. Because I feel like I’m owed something for having juggled all these chain saws for so long, that all that balancing and “on the other hand”–ing should’ve resulted in some killer core strength right now. That I should be rewarded with just the right amount of visibility.
I am not asking to be on display, to be open and available to you. I am not asking that you appreciate my eyes or hair or tell me I’m beautiful. I am not asking you to validate anything about me. I’ve spent my whole life trying to do that, and this is as close as I’ll get on that front, I think.
I’m only asking that you don’t forget me, don’t forget us. Don’t forget these hot-ass chicks who have done so much and lived so fast. The ones who have married and birthed and nurtured, the ones who have cried at graves and shrieked at parties. The ones who are being passed over by our culture, our politics, our workplaces, our country. Please don’t forget that we love and are loved, that we will scrap with the best of them and oftentimes the worst. Don’t make us feel invisible, do not wave your hands through us to see if we’re even there.
Amateur Hour Page 17