And then what happened when I held myself up?
I got a little pep in m'step. I was forced to walk with some confidence with my chest puffed up like a rooster. And then I thought to myself:
Well, my underthings don't match my outerthings. I need some new cute clothes to strut in.
So I took a couple of bucks and, instead of doing something for the kids, I went shopping with my sister. For moms, this is usually very hard. It is definitely en vogue as an American parent to "always put the kids first." That's a theory and catchphrase that I think too many of us have internalized and taken to heart. It's as destructive as it is well-intended. What the hell good are we to our kids if we don't take care of ourselves? And if taking care of yourself is just painting your toenails then tell the kids to leave you alone for twenty minutes so you can paint your damn toenails. Or call me, I'll come over and paint your toenails.
(I won't watch your kids, though. Sorry.)
When the airplane is crashing, you put the oxygen mask on yourself and then on your child. Why? Because your child is helpless without you; you have to take care of yourself.
It was hard shopping for myself at first. I literally hadn't done it in years and years. When the seasons changed, it always caught me off guard and I'd end up wearing some friend's hand-me-downs to "get through." I never looked like myself on the outside. But at least I wasn't nekkid. That was the best I wanted for myself - just the bare minimum.
Just "not nekkid."
So I got a few cute dresses that looked like "me." And I wear them with some cute bracelets and cute shoes. And then sometimes, because I have a cute outfit on, I have to put some face on. And then, without red lipstick, I became the kind of person who will not leave the house in yoga pants.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. If "I just want to be comfortable" is your goal, then by all means. But that, for me, was an excuse. I now refer to them as "gave up pants" because that's what they were when I was wearing them.
I know some of you "just got done working out" so you walk around in your workout clothes, but this is something that is very American. In many countries, workout clothes are for working out and they are left at that. They don't double as clothes. They're like pajamas or lingerie. Just a little fun fact.
But it is shocking to me how, when you really start to care about yourself and make yourself a priority, it does not feel like extra work to put on a cute dress. It feels as natural as waking up and brushing your teeth. And it's born from self-love!
It's crazy!
I'm not dressing cute so guys will think I'm hot or so I'm the foxiest mom at the playground. I don't care about the guys or the other moms! I actually, finally, and really for real truly look cute for me! Like, for real.
Self-love is REAL.
And all because of my sorry, saggy boobs!
And check this out. You can want to improve yourself while simultaneously loving yourself.
Could you imagine such a thing?
You don't have to hate your boobs or your thighs or your self to want to change them. It's just bananas.
I got a little ways to go, still.
I'm still much chubbier than I'd like to get comfortable with, but holy shit I never thought I'd be the kind of person who actually got dressed. I thought my schlumpy perma-pajama thing was part of my charm. It was part of my quirk. But I know now that the schlumpy clothes and schlumpy boobs were really just a symptom of low self-worth.
BOOM!
Educated by my tits, y'all.
I decided to take my new revelations to my friends and slowly they started to join “the movement.” Some called it the “Get Dressed Challenge.” For so many stay at home moms and home school moms it's easier not to. But then it becomes cyclical and going and doing things feels difficult because, sigh, you'd have to put on pants. But there is something really busy-making and feel-goodish about waking up and hoisting your boobs up and putting on “hard pants” at the top of your day. You just feel capable.
So my lady friends started posting pics of themselves dressed every day, in hard pants and with makeup on their faces. We cheered each other on. It was pretty groovy. And all this goodness coming from a bra dilemma!
Old. Alone. Done For.
I've been thinking about my eventual death a lot lately.
It's not my mortality, necessarily, that scares me.
Aside from zombies, the only thing I am really afraid of is dying unloved.
Before you start crying rivers, please know I do not want pity or sad face emoticons. But if you feel sad for me, then by all means. Death is not something that makes me feel sad or scared. Typically, when I lose someone close to me, or someone young I am more humbly shocked than anything. I have a robotic "healthy" relationship with death as a reality, I think. I know I will lose everyone one day and they will lose me. I know I could run out to the store for milk and not come back. It is "morbid" to many but I'm a Pisces and my parents let me watch Beetlejuice when I was five so morbid is familiar and comfortable territory for me.
Even though I am only thirty-one, I am touched by only one degree by shortened lives or at least potentially shortened ones. Friends my age are being diagnosed with or dying from cancer. I never had that infinite feeling that goes along with being young and daffy. My mortality is what prompted me to file for divorce and leave my ex-husband. The day with the garbage can was the changing day. I realized then that if I died that day in the driveway covered in maggots I'd done absolutely nothing to feel proud of. My legacy and the last memories my loved ones would have would be of me fat, depressed, angry and unaccomplished. I am only a few short years beyond that day and so much has changed.
I am thirsty to finish my education with a ferocious clarity I have never before experienced. I am homeschooling my kids and they are thriving - academically and socially. I am molding them to become exactly who I'd hoped they'd be: questioning, challenging, open-minded, worldly, and courteous.
Through the common journey of single-parenthood I have made so many close friends from around the country - other lady warriors not content to just keep their own raft afloat but to share a bail bucket with their sisters in need.
I've taken the last few years to so some seeeeeerious emotional work. I've cleansed myself of the demons that haunted the first twenty-five years of my life, determined not to take them into my future - or worse - allow them to taint future generations. I am, however, still pretty fat.
Shrug
But all in all, if I go out for milk and get struck by a car, or mugged and shot, or a triceratops stampede comes and runs me over, my little soul will float away feeling 80% okay about my life. I think that, for being thirty-one, that ain't bad. I try really hard to feel grateful for at least that.
However, the nagging itchy 20% is dissatisfaction belonging to one truth. I've never been in love with anyone and no one's ever been in love with me.
Oh, but you still have time...
Well, it's time that is not exactly guaranteed or owed to me.
You know your twenties, when you're dating and falling in love and focusing on yourself and all that? I didn't do that. My ex and I moved in together when I was 19, after knowing each other for 6 months and after finding out I was pregnant. I was not in love with him. He was not in love with me. But by some bizarre "code of honor," that in the end he did not actually believe in, he insisted we stay together for the sake of the baby. And I, embarrassed and determined not to go home to my family a knocked-up failure, agreed.
I always knew he was not a good partner but my fear of being alone, and my fear of being "a single black welfare mom," was bigger than my desire to self-preserve.
We, eventually, loved each other in some sort of way, I guess. But we loved each other the way two castaways on a deserted island grow to eventually love each other. You just try to not die together and there's no one else to talk to - so you eventually sort of love each other. It's more like
Stockholm syndrome, really. I was isolated and have no perspective.
So now I'm single and I have three kids and I worry that I will never find love.
It's not because I don't think I'm worthy. I know I am.
I'm whip-smart. I'm hilarious. I'm empathetic. I'm a good-listener. I'm open-minded. Very little is taboo to me. I got it going on.
I'm too busy making myself exceptionally awesome to have time to date.
I am focused on getting myself so "on top of it" that I will never, ever, ever, ever find myself in a two bedroom apartment with three kids and one mattress eating rice and beans every night because we're poor ever again.
EVER.
But, no, my fear of dying unloved really comes from time.
I'm going to be in school for the next 3 years minimum. Then I'll be out in the world working and will maybe be in a place, emotionally, to begin dating. Anything can happen and I don't know if I'll be able to squeeze it in before I take the long dirt nap. But, as a person who thrives in a chaotic environment, the fact that I'm actually planning and taking steps really fills me with a mild sort of dread.
Right now I'm "doing it right."
I'm not dating before I'm ready. I'm going back to school. I'm focused on the mental health of myself and my kids. I'm not allowing myself to be led by my vagina or my loneliness or insecurity.
I see my fellow single mom sistahs get pulled in, left and right, into these short-lived flings and I feel for them but I am so glad I am not in their place.
One single lady in particular is so blinded by her fear of being alone that I am puh-retty sure her boyfriend is a predator. He grooms and gives me the mad creeps. But no amount of warning can sway her. She is positive he's a gentleman despite there being no consistent evidence for that to be true.
I'm not in that place, emotionally. I've got a rational, logical, data-backed plan.
But what if I don't get the cheese at the end?
And in five or ten years, with my degree and my healthy kids I shout "ok world, I'm ready for love" and then BAM! Zombie apocalypse and I'm dead. No love for Jess.
I exaggerate of course, but really, planning is scary because you are taking yourself out of the present, on purpose, to create a reality that will hopefully come sometime down-the-line with no guarantee that it will.
That kind of love is not owed to me. I do not deserve it. None of us do. It's just a gift if we can get it. It's like a good parking space or a crab leg that cracks perfectly and you can get that big, whole piece of crab, y'know what I'm talking about? It's amazing when it happens but it's not, like, a guarantee or even a right. It's a sweet, precious, surprise, luxury, happy event.
Millions of people die every day without having ever been in love. People die without ever seeing their children grow up. I noticed that when someone young passes away, it is often customary for people to say "they were taken before their time." But who ever said we were owed all this time in the first place? What do we know about how much time people are supposed to have? Humans are fragile and can die at any time.
That seems to be a conflict of perspective.
I am gravely aware that neither time nor romantic love is owed to me.
And that realization kinda bums me out.
So even though I hope to maybe one day meet the man I'm supposed to be with I still have to sit in, and accept, the possibility that it won't happen.
And the love of my kids and the platonic love of my friends might be the only love I get this time around. And that is a little scary and also a little sad.
And every "it'll happen" just boils my blood.
I was telling Jenn on the phone, “I never had time to be in love. I was nineteen when I got pregnant and twenty-nine when I left him. My entire adulthood up until now has been orbiting around him. I know I'm worthy of love, yes. But I do not believe there are many men out there willing to sign on to a woman with three kids who can't have any more. I mean I could be one of those women who gets pregnant despite having her tubes tied, but still. Even if he did exist, I do not want to blend families. I think it significantly increases the risk of divorce and I'm still tied to my ex's family. I don't want any more in-laws if I can help it as that would give my kids something like five or six sets of grandparents. The pool of available men gets smaller and smaller and smaller, and I know so clearly what I want and need and that makes the pool even smaller and if he is out there, will I even meet him and. even worse, what if he doesn't even exist?”
And after interrogating and pushing and questioning and offering advice and insight when she finally got it all she could say was "damn, that sucks."
And yeah, that's all there is to say.
I'm kind of a robot. I'm really rational. It's possibly my best quality since, according to her, even though I cannot join people in grieving and crying and I have no real emotional highs and lows of my own, it is for that reason that I am a good go-to woman for making people feel stable, for offering facts and data. I'm a true ENTP.
But, because of my brain-first approach to everything I worry I won't "turn on" my feelings in time. It's crazy.
It's a shit realization that totally sucks and there's nothing more to it.
It's a fleeting feeling, like all my feelings, that sneaks in late at night and gnaws at my earlobes until I give it a little attention. Usually, it's gone by morning.
I'm not walking around paranoid or worried about some Final Destination-esque freak accident. But I'm also not presumptuous enough to think I've got all the time in the world to develop myself as a person and find Prince Charming.
It's one of those times I wish I was the kind of person who thought little beyond what pants to wear and feeding the dog and football season.
Love is the only box left to check and I don't wanna go with it empty.
Everything He Needs
Earlier this year I was beside myself trying to figure out how to find positive male role models for my son. He'd grown prone to apologizing before or after speaking. He was passive. This worried me.
We went to counseling for a while but, with our poor-people insurance, ended up with an apathetic counselor. He really just reinforced Jack's middle-child-syndrome by barely listening and zoning out while he was talking.
A male friend of mine came over a few times to watch movies and play but eventually got back into his single-person life and hasn't been over in months. I was so worried Jack would feel re-abandoned.
We were sitting outside one day and Jack was playing with some sticks in the front yard, trying to fashion himself a bow and arrow. The girls were making bows and arrows, too. I called out to him, “Maybe your Uncle Terry can come over and hang out with you, Jack, and you guys can make arrows together.”
He nodded apathetically and then I was stricken with some wisdom.
It's my fault.
It's all my fault.
He wasn't meek and passive because he didn't have a male role model. He's meek and passive because I didn't even give him a chance to feel okay. I told him his life was lacking without a man in it. I put that hole there.
This is hard to explain but bear with me.
The story is that little boys need a male role model so they know how to be a man. So single-moms need to busy themselves with finding a man for their sons to look up to.
But do people say this to widows?
I've never heard it in reference to women whose husbands have died.
If this is true for men then it should be true for women, also. Do people say this in reference to single-fathers? Do people warn single fathers that their sons or daughters need a female role model to look up to? I've never heard it this way either.
I have several lesbian friends raising boys with their partners. Do I ever feel like their sons need a male role model? Nope. They all seem pretty happy.
I tried to think of exactly which personality traits came along with a Y-chromosome. Does one need a penis to
be honorable? Trustworthy? Brave? Tender? Assertive?
Nope. I can't think of any personality traits that require a penis or male gender-identity.
What about statistics? Studies show that boys with no male role model grow up to be all kinds of horrible things.
But is it possible that the statistics are flawed? Let's just go on a mind-adventure, here. Is it possible that, under the stress of this ever-present idea that women can't teach boys how to be men, it is not the lack of penis or role-model that creates the problem but the lack of confidence? It is a bit like going into a game with everyone telling you that you will fail and you will lose. That can shake your confidence, right? It might make you act in ways you normally wouldn't.
Maybe this is why some women are serial daters. Trying desperately to find that male role model because, you know, she's gonna ruin everything with her lack of penis and penis-appointed character traits, she introduces her kids to a host of less-than-suitable men. Perhaps if she felt like she was capable on her own, she wouldn't feel the need for the men in the first place, resulting in her creating high standards for herself and finding the right man only – not just a man.
I didn't feel the same panicked insecurity when it came to my girls. Wouldn't they need a male role model just as much?
I poked too many holes in this Truth. I didn't have anything to replace it, necessarily, but I certainly found enough wrong with it to set it aside and try to come up with a new, experimental Truth to replace it.
I thought about what traits it took to be a “good man.”
Honors his word, follows through, protects those who can't protect themselves, speaks up when there is injustice or discrimination, takes care of his responsibilities, communicates his thoughts and feelings effectively, has healthy outlets for his stress, etc.
Pancakes Taste Like Poverty: And Other Post-Divorce Revelations Page 17