The Vietnam War was part of the background of my early childhood. Every day the local-ish radio station, WGY in Albany, N.Y. (only ninety miles away!), announced the war dead, and U.S. troop deaths were, without fail, miniscule compared to the number of Viet Cong dead. They were weirdly specific, as well, for example – two-hundred and eighty-nine American dead, three-thousand and seventy-eight Viet Cong. The daily numbers confused and perplexed me, and I asked my teacher at the time, Mrs. Roney, how it was we weren’t winning the war when these numbers told such a different, and unbalanced, story? Surely, we had to be winning? She explained that the Chinese Communists were sending hordes of fighters over the border between China and Vietnam, endless hordes of fighting men (she may have referred to them as little yellow men), to support vile, evil communism. Huh. Okay. Maybe? I imagined actual streams of men running south across the border – but even China couldn’t have an endless supply of young men to fight old men’s wars, could they?
Photos of the war, and of the My Lai massacre in particular, were on the cover of and inside almost every magazine that came into our home, and the children in the pictures were my peers. That little girl, naked, running, mouth agape, surrounded by carnage: she was my age. How as it possible that we – we, the collective good people of the United States – would allow this to happen, allow the murder, the gassing – or whatever Napalm was, the bombing of families, whoever and wherever they were? How did this happen? What were we fighting about, again? I did a report on Ho Chi Minh for 5th grade Social Studies. I didn’t really see much difference between him and some of our founding fathers, seeking freedom and independence for his people (he also wrote poetry, and spoke five languages), and because my teacher that year was a hippie, he approved, giving me an ‘A’. We weren’t taught the war in school as it was on-going, history in the making; we were merely child witnesses, watching from afar. I do remember being grateful my male classmates, my friends, would not face the draft, conscription ending in 1973 when we were just entering high school, although the war didn’t end until 1975. And while there were returning Vietnam Vets in my community, I didn’t personally know any, or wasn’t aware if I did, until one very angry Veteran started teaching us – and scaring us – in ’73. He’d been a sharpshooter, and four years later he would sexually assault me about a week after I graduated and turned eighteen.
I now know that the numbers of the dead, ours and the Vietnamese, were faked, deflated and inflated respectively in turn by successive Presidential administrations, administrations who lied to the American people for political gain, for reasons of propaganda, vanity, ego, and arrogance. I watched on TV, our one channel, as Hanoi fell, Vietnamese people clinging to helicopters and boats desperate to escape; I saw pictures and read about ‘The Boat People’, and atrocities committed in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and elsewhere. The world was complicated, I was a kid – not even born when the military complications of Vietnam began. All I wanted to do when the war ended was survive high school and my adolescence, get out and away, while dreaming dreams about a life I wasn’t sure I wanted to lead, because I didn’t know who I was and where I wanted to be, other than not where I was.
Cecile Pin’s debut novel, Wandering Souls, which I read and loved recently, along with Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and his follow-up novel,The Committed, all examine aspects of the events surrounding the Vietnam War from the perspective of those Vietnamese who lived through and – mostly – survived it. In all four novels, the authors primarily focus on those who emigrated from Vietnam to America, France, or the U.K. It felt necessary and important for me to read these books, because I was ignorant about the lives of the Vietnamese, in the U.S. and elsewhere, including Vietnam, along with the multi-generational impact of the actions of the U.S. and its allies – our allies. Yet – when Ms. Pin writes about the boat people and their painful, circuitous journey, I knew, I’d seen, I remembered the place of lift off, the scenes witnessed or read about as a child, and it felt good to know what happened, even if just to one family, although the novel is broader than that implies, and very powerful.
Coincidentally, last night’s PBS episode featured a segment about Asian Am. & Pacific Islanders, regarding their often violent and deadly interactions with the police in the U.S. In the segment, I learned there were approximately one million Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong who emigrated to the U.S. as a result of the Vietnam War, a significant amount, worth noting here, I thought.
The Sympathizer is hilarious, raucous, and shocking; I could not put it down, and like its follow-up The Committed and Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Wandering Souls there are specific, reality-based incidents of what war is, what happens in conflict zones, that are stomach churning, and heart-breaking. One of my several daily meditation mantras is ‘may the whole world know peace and healing’, which I repeat throughout the day, ‘may the whole world know peace and healing, may the whole world know peace and healing’. Often, I add, ‘which world includes me, thank you very much’, because I need reminding, and it calms my heart, and helps to unravel my grudges and anger, and my fear – fear that peace is impossible to achieve, as long as men seek power, and are incapable of giving a shit about the lives of others, including, often, their own citizens, from whom they supposedly derive that power. What’s that saying, ‘how can we have world peace when people can’t even get along with their neighbors?’ Seems about right to me, and, happily, I have a great neighbor, one I am committed to – if not loving, at least liking – tolerating, and consistently treating with kindness and decency, always.
JFK said, ‘World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.’ Sadly, there are more conflicts going on right now, around this blue and green and brown and white planet, than I or anyone else can comprehend. It’s daunting, and so I try to create peace in my tiny corner, not always successfully, but, I try.
George Carlin, whom I admire and love so much, said in one of his stand-up specials, “The planet is going anywhere. We are.” We are. Unless, unless, unless – we can pull together. Fingers and toes and everything else crossed.
I have lived alone for all of my adult life. Yes, there were times I had roommates, but those times were few and far between, and far lonelier in many ways than actually living alone, as anyone who has had an incompatible roommate or partner can attest. There was one boyfriend who was going to live with me in the mid-eighties, but he confessed he was screwing his ex behind my back forty-eight hours before he was scheduled to move in; he said I didn’t need him the way she did. I said well, you’re not air or water or shelter, Bill. Or food. He said he knew I would eventually cheat on him. Whatever, although he was not the first or last man I was involved with to say that, to make that claim – each one of whom cheated on me as a kind of preemptive strike, I guess was their thinking? I have never cheated on a partner, it’s just not in me to do so, but – all’s fair in love and war, or so I’ve heard.
In my twenties and thirties, I suffered living alone, and being partner-less (though I much prefer the term ‘partner-free’) while all around me people, men and women, were constantly seeking to pair up, were pairing up and getting engaged, getting married, including numerous friends and acquaintances who divorced and paired up again, and so on. During those decades I was not a happy camper generally, but I definitely suffered from deep loneliness, as well as depression, neither directly caused by the other but as two lanes running parallel to one another. I dreaded the holidays spent alone, and dreaded holidays even more spent with my ‘nuclear’ family, where I felt misunderstood, judged, unloved, and more alone than when I was alone. Oh, the joy of getting back to NYC after a Christmas or Thanksgiving spent with my family of origin, especially if I went straight to Studio 54, where I could lose myself and all of my troubles, big or small, in the music, on the dance floor, surrounded by others doing the same.
Creating my own family was an option, but I didn’t want to parent, felt no need as so many women and men seem to do, to have and raise children. Plus, I was afraid of the parent I might be: too angry, too much pain stored inside waiting to come out like that creature in the film Alien. I was cautious, too much so, perhaps, scared to try, and dated too many assholes, eliminating them as potential co-parents one by one. I also knew single parenting wasn’t for me, believing that children deserve both parents on their side, especially as one parent (me) might be annihilating or nuts like my mother. No thanks. I knew women who married men or partnered with men they didn’t really love, to make children they very much wanted. Some of them stayed with these men regardless of the disconnect, regardless of no or bad sex, or barely concealed contempt. Others divorced and railed against their exes for not understanding they were glorified sperm donors: how dare he demand half, half of my apartment, my money, half of my child’s time. How dare he.
And men I could’ve created families with were always, always in relationships with other women, even if I became involved with them not knowing this initially, because men lie like dogs all the damned time, and the mess, the mess, the stupidity, the dishonesty, the rationalizations – it was all too much. It probably didn’t help matters that during those decades I had peeping tom after peeping tom, was constantly harassed and flashed on the street, was being stalked, and was – until I was almost forty – thinking about killing myself daily. I remember two men I was involved with running out the door the moment I spoke honestly of my mother, and how much I hated her, hated her, and loved her, and loved her, and hated her. They were probably very wise to run, but it seemed I was being punished for my honesty, and that didn’t inspire a sense of being safe to share anything about the life I had led and was leading.
I hired therapist after therapist, did drumming circles, and a past life regression, had my tarot cards and astrological chart read, took risks I should not have taken, and prayed for divine intervention I didn’t ever believe would come from a deity I thought was pure bullshit. In my twenties I read about and tried to believe in reincarnation (how wrong can a jillion Hindis, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs be?!), if only out of the hope that I would get another chance, a second, third, and fourth chance, at living a better, happier life – a different life. I participated in sweat lodge and during one I was sure I was going to die, and welcomed it, until I realized I had never lived, or had lived my entire life to that point under a dark cloud, or, more apt, a slab of granite, and that it was up to me – and me alone – to change that. I was thirty-eight, and was only then able to envision a life where I might be happy, truly happy – yet, always, the imaginings were of me on my own, alone.
Having a sense of humor helps, more than helps: it kept me alive. Surviving is key. I knew women who created from pain, created family, fought for it, and some of them did well, many of them. I could not, perhaps because I am so goddamned stubborn, and my standards are so fucking high, which is another way of saying I built a wall so impenetrable no one could get over it, around it, under it – in. And I struggle, still, to ask for what I need, because for almost forty years I had no needs, other than to survive that day, that hour, that moment of life. Air and water. Shelter, food. And sure, a fella if he wants along on this ride, mostly on my terms, because I know like I know like I know that my independent streak, which is wider and deeper and broader still than any wall ever built, runs me ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time: ‘Oh, give me land, lots of land under sunny skies above, don’t fence me in!’
Perhaps if I had allowed myself to love and be loved by that boy from high school, the one who I dreamt of recently, a dream in which we were both old, as we are now, and lay in one another’s arms naked and old and kind to one another, as we never were in life. Who knows. We were both surviving families that were rife with pain and shame in a small town, a place where preserving the public illusion of happy family often felt like all I (I cannot speak for him) had to hold onto. For my part, there was simply no way I would expose him to my family, my mother, by bringing him into the fold, into the house, my lived experience. I regret this. Bessel van der Kolk wrote of the healing power of love while the brain is still developing, as a teenager, in his 2014 work The Body Keeps Score, a book I wish had been written when I needed most to read it, but that’s the way it goes, eh?
I have friends who live surrounded by family, including a beloved friend who is also in business and vacations annually with her husband’s family. I shudder at the thought of all that, although I acknowledge how well it works – for her. Everyone must find their own way, their own comfort, their own level; we are all like water. Spending holidays alone can be rough unless you love your own company, which I would argue is important every single day, and hour, regardless of holiday status, and – somewhere around forty, I found myself loving it, loving myself, finally, loving and giggling at my stupidities, my quirks and false starts, my life-saving humor, my ass-hole-ery, my fears and tears, my inconsistency, my humanity.
Expectations – and convention – being what they are (an oppressive force that is very hard to overcome), it isn’t necessarily easy to live alone, to live single and child-free, yet all paths – every one – have rocks and twists and turns, compromises, rationalizations, swamps, bogs, periods of loss and despair. Anyone who tells you their marriage is perfect is lying, and – in my experience – most likely of all the couples you know to be on the direct route to divorce, and soon, although stasis, fear of change, are as powerful as convention. Anyone who tells you raising kids is or was a breeze is also lying. I have found that, for me, living alone is a great gift, and it means I have to do the work of reaching out and making plans possibly more than others do – and, I know too, now that I’m in my seventh decade (holy fuck, how did that happen?) that if I have a bunch of social engagements in a twenty-four hour span, and by bunch I mean two, I must have a day, or more, of recovery. Must. Yes, introversion and introverts are real, and I’m one of ‘em.
Deep breaths. Gratitude, and curiosity about what’s next. All these are important while the vast mass of peeps celebrate whatever TF holiday it is. Because no one, no one person, has a perfect, trouble-free life, and loving what you have right now- whatever that is – is a muscle, a skill that needs work. For me, for me, for me. I try, I truly try to undertake to do that work joyfully, to do the hard work. Whatever I do, I also try not to suffer over my occasional suffering, the familiar scar and pain of loneliness; I observe it, acknowledging the sometime throbbing scar, and let it go. And so, while others parade and grill, I write, and then write some more, and read, and call friends, maybe, and dig in the dirt, and attempt stillness for a least five minutes, and walk – repeatedly – my miniature pony-sized dog.
*Among the reams of poetry my mother had memorized, this was one of her all time favorites, and as I contemplate the many broken fences currently existing in my life, and boundaries in general, I come back to this classic poem time and again.Happy Sunday.
Recently, I told a friend the truth. We have been very close friends for six years or so, after knowing one another for over a decade. We are the same age, go for walks together, give one another leftovers, text daily, advise one another on whatever the issue of the day or week is, and were once neighbors; she lived down the road from me, and I from her, about half a mile. Another former next-door neighbor of mine, and near neighbor of hers, a man who is an acquaintance of mine more than a friend (let’s call him Bill Earl), has met my close friend Pat (we’ll call her Pat as that’s her name) many times over the years, in at least seven or eight instances, in various venues, and always with me, which makes sense as she’s my friend. When these encounters occur he always, without fail, asks her, or me, her name, and basically says the following, ‘Hi, I’m Bill Earl. Who are you?’, or “What’s your name?’ And every time, after the encounter ends, she turns to me and says something along the lines of, ‘I have met that guy so many times, and he always forgets my face, and my name. He forgets we went through the exact same introduction before. He forgets having met me, period. What is up with that, Mahhhhhj?’
In the past, I have not ‘shot for the pin’, telling Pat in response to her Bill Earl query, ‘Oh gosh, Pat, he’s an asshole, who cares’ (we’ll call him an asshole because he is), or ‘He might be one of those people who never remembers anyone, just fuggedaboudit, move on’ (major truth-y caveat in a moment). These are not lies, they’re obfuscations, foggy half-truth answers. But this time, this latest time they met, and did the dance of his forgetting, which clearly hurt, and hurts, her feelings, I decided to tell Pat the un-foggy, hit the pin truth, or at least my version of the truth as I see it, and as I have experienced it: Pat, you’re not his type, ergo he doesn’t want to fuck you, and he’s one of those guys who can’t and won’t remember any woman he doesn’t want to fuck. You could change that, by being (by his definition) important or rich – but basically, absent that, you’re not his type. It’s not personal, and, quite frankly, lucky you, stupid him, because you are gorgeous, smart, kind, and any guy over fifty who turns his nose up at dating a nurse, a woman who can literally restart his heart, is a fool.
Bill Earl is definitely a fool. I know all this because Bill was my neighbor, and he asked me out, because I’m his ‘type’ (more on that later). Bill E. is about a decade older than Pat and myself and I’m his ‘type’ in part because he was looking for, and was very open about looking for, a younger woman to marry, one who would be able to take care of him as he aged. He shared this with me over a mystery meat and soggy veggie-filled buffet supper at a truly crappy restaurant he took me to called The Colonial, a dinner I paid for because no, just no, I am not letting this guy treat me, not a chance. Not only was I uninterested in Bill Earl, it is actually not possible for me to be less interested in changing the diapers of a Boomer Boy, any Boomer Boy, although I guess he gets snaps for honesty. Maybe?
About two years after this ‘date’, Bill married a wealthy, younger than him by at least a decade divorcee who had once dated his older, richer, more successful brother, an aspect of the situation I’m aware of because he gleefully shared it with me on more than one occasion, which I personally found a bit gross, because why is this dude competing with his brother in this gross way and why, why, why the fuck is he telling me about it?! At one point during his marriage to this woman, he admitted to me that he knows he is a dilettante at heart, a dabbler, who was happiest being taken care of by those who are worker bees, like his new wife. Ouch. She has since – wisely, although I don’t know the details – divorced him, and one supposes he has had to go back to work, at least working to find another busy bee to take care of him. He does have two daughters as back up, I guess. We’ll see.
Bill Earl is what I call a lookist male. Lookist males are those who require beauty, standard issue beauty, in their female partners, and often in their female friends as well. Standard issue beauty is defined as (mostly) young or much younger than said lookist, thin or curvy (not ever fat or fat-adjacent), tall but not taller than he is (short only if very thin, uber-feminine, and entirely unthreatening), with even, open European facial features. Great hair is also a plus, as are big boobs, even if they’re fake. Think Fox News female anchors, with D’Trump as the best/worst example of a lookist. These criteria exist because male lookists see women as, basically, arm candy, as a reflection of themselves, their egos; to them, women are decorative plates on the walls of their lives, not individuals with hopes, dreams, aspirations and desires – and even walls of their own. There are a lot of lookists in every institution and profession, and a whole lot of lookist goons on line, trolling women with regards to their appearance, women who, if they’re smart, grounded, and mentally healthy, do not give one half of one fuck what these assholes think, feel, or say about their looks, or anything else.
My former neighbor and good pal Pat is a gorgeous woman, a wonderful friend, a beautiful human being who is constantly extending herself to take care of others. Was it true, what I said about Bill Earl never being able to remember her (maybe, my opinion), was it kind (no, I could see it stung her, as did his continual inability to recall her face or name), was it necessary (not really but after trying to answer without telling the truth for a decade, FTS), was it an improvement on the silence (oh hell, probably not, but honestly fuck that guy)? Anyway, it’s done. And, because we’re close friends, I will follow-up and talk to her about it, apologizing for my tactlessness, no matter how true I believe it may have been.
Yesterday I finished an okay, not great book of fiction that had several pearls of wisdom, one of which was that much of our lives is defined by the consequence of either making what we know is the easier but probably wrong decision, one that is inevitably also easier to identify, or making the difficult, hard, possibly, maybe right decision, but isn’t it all so uncertain – because hey, who can really tell! – a decision that goes against the tide, the tide of easier. Making the right choice, making the right decision, oftentimes requires hard work, and sacrifice, means swallowing our egos, our pride, our desire to be right, or snarky, or clever – it even, sometimes, means giving up the idea we have about being nice (especially true for women), because nice people never hurt anyone else’s feelings, which is ludicrous. It can mean, those harder choices, being unkind, inconveniencing others, calling off the move, the wedding, the promotion, the trip, the need to go along to get along. It can mean change, and blowing up what is because what might be, might be better.
At times, like family weddings, for instance, I have had to eat a lot of shit to get through the fucking event. What’s that British saying about ‘lying back, turning your head into the pillow, and thinking of England’? This saying was coined as a coping mechanism for women, as a way to get through having marital sex with one’s unappealing partner, and that’s pretty much what being human often requires. And, sometimes, facing the pillow or eating shit is simply not possible, and the truth will out, must out. Sometimes, the shit that happens as a result needed to happen, needs to have consequence, be consequential, is long over-due, because burying our truths is too high a price to pay for niceness, for tight smiles, and letting whatever it is go for the hundredth or thousandth time.
In a time when women, and women’s stories, are increasingly more likely to be believed than in the past, a time when men – conservative white men especially – are freaking out because they’re facing a world that is more diverse, more female driven, and much more likely to be consequential for them – as in they are more likely to face consequences for behavior men have been getting away with for a millennia – resisting the pressure to be nice, stepping into the risky space of change, of disruption, of ‘un-likeability’ and into full-personhood is essential for all women and girls, who have been conditioned to be decorative for just as long – a millennia – at the expense of our humanity, and often our lives. Embrace your full-personhood, women, and tell dudes like Bill Earl to his face, ‘Look brotherfucker, we’ve met like nine times, you asshole! Remember this face, because this face, this body, and millions of others just like it, are the future.’
*I wrote this piece in or around 2007, and could write forever on the subject of body, weight, diets and all that jazz – in fact, I think I have, with this being just one iteration of that endless seemingly saga…thanks for reading.
I want a dollar for every leg lift I have ever done, because then I would never have to work again. I want a dollar for every day I skipped a meal, or two, two meals. I want a dollar for every day in my twenties that I ate a pound of apples for breakfast, and nothing else until dinner, which was a salad. I want a dollar for every time I ate a muffin for breakfast in my thirties, and nothing else all day, again, until dinner, which was a salad. I want a dollar for every time I ate soup for dinner, or salad, salad, salad, and nothing else. I want a dollar for every can of tuna in fucking water I’ve eaten on lettuce leaves (Julia Child says use the tuna in oil for a reason, people: it adds flavor – remember flavor?). I want a fucking dollar for every time I criticized my female body because my Goddess I’d be so rich, especially if I added all the times I apologized for my imperfect female body, out loud and silently, especially silently, to others and most of all to myself. I want a dollar for all the diets I have been on, and all the schemes and plans and bullshit I put myself through to be what I could not be, which was as thin as my older sister. That she was anorexic during my middle school years, that she was bulimic during my high school and college years, and I was not, as well as clueless about how she stayed so fucking thiiiiiiiiiiiiin, doesn’t make a damned bit of difference; it fucked with my head. I want my money and I want it now.
No one – no one – knew about anorexia and bulimia then, not outside a few psychiatrists, therapists, doctors or medical types; I sure as hell didn’t, when I was 10 or 14 or 19. Karen Carpenter was still alive; she didn’t die until 1983 when I was 24 years old, and my older sister 27 and finally, finally coming to the end of her active eating disorders, before her third and final pregnancy, but – to me, for me – the damage was done. The distortion. The crippling comparison and mis-interpretation of everything my body, the temple of my soul, was and meant to me, and to others, oh yes, to others. Temple of my soul? Bahahahahahahahaha.
Wikipedia defines Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), thusly: it is a mental disorder characterized by the obsessive idea that some aspect of one’s own body part or appearance is severely flawed and warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix their dysmorphic part on their person. Do I think I have BDD? No, not in the sharply clinical sense, but then I don’t think I have any disorders. On the other hand, I have always thought my body was bigger than it is and was; this misapprehension on my part has become more apparent with every year that passes, and with the gift of perspective, the gift of aging, and its close twin – if you’re lucky – of wisdom. I look at photos of the years I starved and deprived myself to meet a fantasy goal I could never attain, years when I was, by any real measure, in great physical shape, and see that I was fit, maybe even thin or at least lean, and always, always active and healthy.
But I didn’t see it, I didn’t believe it. In my mind, I was huge. Huge. Thunder thighs, massive round head with chubby cheeks and a gut that went on for days. In my own mind, I was huge. This fills me with sorrow. What was I thinking? Why was I thinking it? Why couldn’t I see what was right in front of me, and why did I care so much about something as superficial as ‘thinness’? Jesus H. Fucking Christ. Of all the things to obsess over – and I get it, given the crazy-ass characters I lived with as a child, and our fucked up culture – what a stupid fucking thing to be obsessed with, feeding right into the ka-billion-dollar industry of supplements, and diets and food plans, and forever after un-used exercise equipment and on and on and on represents. Bullshit. It’s all bullshit.
I wish I had a dollar for every diet my mother was on, for every doctor she consulted about her weight, for every time I heard her complain about her weight, followed by another bowl of ice cream (or two), another bout of despair, of castigating herself, of bemoaning her fate, moans that she assuaged with hot fudge sauce, caramel sauce, scoops of fresh ice cream from the ice cream soda fountain in our dining room, a relic of the drug store my dad owned, along with an endless supply of cheap crackers and cookies and candy bars. Endless. Our fridge, or the deep compartment in the soda fountain, contained blocks of pale white American cheese as long as my ten-year-old arm, purchased direct from the dairy-man, Mr. White, who once upon a time used to deliver glass bottles of milk door-to-door, but now instead delivered to supermarkets and the few small groceries left in our area. Buying direct from him because he liked my parents (was he a former student of my mom?), we were able to get tubs of ice cream, 5 gallons each of vanilla and mint or plain chocolate chip, which mustn’t be left to spoil, for that was waste and waste was a sin. But, also, another message was ‘do not eat your mother’s food’, as she sat waiting for my dad to come home for work, guarding the kitchen from her perch at the end of the yellow Formica topped table, do not go overboard with the ice cream, do not eat two or God forbid four slices off the block of cheese at a time, after school or after playing outside, because doing so made her angry, sloppily and thoughtlessly wasting food like that, by eating it. I know, it makes no sense, right? Right. One summer she bought a bushel of cauliflower from the farm down the road, cauliflower she deep fried and froze in gallon bags she stuck in our basement freezer, but then she refused to let me have any, no one else dared ask, and my older, favored sister was surviving on carrot and celery sticks, iceberg lettuce leaves, hard-boiled eggs, and air. So asking her to ask was also out. We had to save it, and save it we did, until it was ruined, freezer-burned, and had to be tossed out, but at least I didn’t eat my mom’s special fucking fried cauliflower. Thank goodness. Thank God. Thanks be to God. Be grateful for what you do have, she always said. She had a point, but wasn’t the fried cauliflower something we all had? These were the kinds of questions I asked my mother that made her palms itch, itching to slap me, which she did, although she preferred to use the back of her restless, meaty hand.
My mom was morbidly obese for much of my life, and hers. At 5’3” tall, she weighed, on average, between a ‘light’ (to her and to us, so conscious of her weight as we, her children, her daughters, all were) 180 to a very unhappy 270 pounds. She tried Weight-Watchers, she ‘prayed down the weight’ with God at the Catholic Church, she did a week long fast at the Omega Institute with a cousin’s wife who was even bigger than she was, and the cousin’s mother-in-law, my aunt Sally, a woman who was not obese, just chunky and furious, filled to the gills, simply stuffed with rage, due to her philandering husband, my mom’s brother Norm, a first-class creep who undermined her confidence with every conquest he made, and he made a lot. My mother tried eating celery and carrot sticks for dinner, drinking vinegar and cutting off the fat on every piece of meat she made for her roast beast loving husband, but nothing worked, and nothing ever would, not really. There was one period that she did really well, was healthier, dropping a load of her excess pounds in her sixties. This seeming miracle happened because she invested in one on one work, meeting weekly with a Nutri-system coach, getting the help she actually needed, which more than anything was to be heard, to be understood, to be supported. But she gave that up after less than a year, saying it was an extravagance she could not justify, driving 40 miles in all weather, spending that kind of money on gas alone, even though she had the money (or rather, my dad did), the energy crisis was long over for fuck’s sake, but then there was the cost of the consultation time, and the food, not worth it, even though it helped her, and was one of the few times she did something just for herself, spent money and time on herself. Oh mom.
I wish I had another dollar for all the diets my friends have been on, for all ways when we’re dining together that I see their eyes calculate how many pieces of bread and butter they’re ‘allowed’, and the other crazy-ass shit they’ve done to meet their own bullshit body expectations. I wish I had a dollar for all the times their bodies, and mine, have been commented on, spoken about, by men on the street, in the gym, in life, period – as if their bodies and my body, their weight and my weight, were public property, or at least open for public discussion by men. I wish I had a dollar for every goddamned time some mother-fucking man, old, young, middle-aged, and fat or thin and everything in-between, has told me how much he liked this part of me or that part of me or how he’d like to do this or that to me, including what clothes he wanted me to wear and I am not, let me be clear, simply talking about my various lovers, I am talking about strangers, or bare acquaintances. Oh, what I could do with the money from all of these things! Open a rape-crisis center. Buy me a bushel of cauliflower. Donate to the Ms. Foundation. Fund Planned Parenthood forever. Brother fuckers.
I want a fucking dollar for every single fucking time some respectable married man has hit on me from the time I was 14 and started working in my dad’s store on weekends and in the summer, to now, to this day over 40 years later, all while keeping their respectable married man reputations intact, just trying it on, trying me on, as if I were a pair of fucking pants, just testing me, to see if I’d go for it. Fuckers.
I want a dollar for every page of every book I read as a middle-schooler while ignoring or trying to ignore the sound of my older sister thumping and whapping her thighs against the floor of our porch, right below my bedroom, thump, thump, thump, whapp, whapp, whapp, as she attempted to whack and whap and thump away the non-existent fat on her anorexic thighs. I don’t remember when it began, the obsession my big sister had with her weight, perhaps it was always there, but I remember well the day she asked me to get on the scale, after which she compared her weight, 72, to mine, 77. She was three years older than I was, and she told me then that her goal weight was 70. I was in 4th grade, or 5th. I remember the conversation and the numbers on the scale in our upstairs bathroom better than I do my exact age, the black and white dial, stark against the ugly orange 70s carpet. And I remember suddenly becoming aware in that moment with her in that sun-filled room, that weight was a thing, a concept not tied to the doctor’s office, or the nurse’s office in school, where height and weight and eyes and ears were checked annually, just figures in a notebook that meant about as much as our ages, right? Of course, they, the numbers, meant something to someone, which is why they wrote them down, but that was outside us, outside ourselves. The adults needed to know, because we should be, perhaps, at a certain level of learning or muscle mass, but that was all. I knew that my friend Debbie H. was shorter and skinnier than the rest of us in our grade, and always had been, but then she was part Syrian (so exotic!), so maybe that explained it? Debbie wanted to be taller, and not so scrawny, but you understood that, that was within the realm of what was easily understood, even at 8 or 9 years old. But after my sister pointed out my weight to me, things began to change, and I began to notice myself, notice others, as a direct reflection of what I felt was my older sister’s exacting and eagle eye laid upon me, weighing me up, an eye of particular brightness and power which, over time, became my own. She thought I was fat, and needed to be careful or I’d end up like our mother. I didn’t feel fat, but I was heavier than she was, and bigger, bigger in energy, in space taken up, and for the first time of many, many times going forward, I felt self-conscious in a way I hadn’t before.
There is a thing that happens, to women, to girls, when they get to a certain age, when we get our periods, and the body we knew, and knew well, is no longer the same. This another marker of self-consciousness, a time when expectations and awareness of otherness increases by leaps and bounds, when the culture’s eye, the dominant default white male eye, takes over, and it becomes less about health, much less, than it becomes about desirability, about who has ‘what it takes’. Perhaps this has changed, perhaps it’s different now, forty-plus years after I went through it myself, but I’m not sure, I don’t think so; it may have changed but not as much as I would wish it to. Sitting on Main Street in my hometown with a 20-year-old female friend of mine, a man, much closer to my age by far, starts frisking around her in a way I know all too well, ignoring me, which frisking makes us both laugh after he walks away. He has a sausage dog, and the juxtaposition of the dog, its tail wagging, long body low to the ground right next to his master’s top-heavy chunkiness, his stomach so obviously sucked in, his shoulders up around his ears to compensate, is funny. His body reminds me of my long-deceased aunt, the one with the philandering husband, my scummy Uncle Norm. The truth is, this man is not attractive to either of us, although we don’t comment on it, to one another or out loud, as he is simply not attractive or desirable to us because he is such an obvious goddamn fool.
I wish I had a dollar for every single time I refused to look at myself in the mirror, or that I looked and saw nothing to like in the glass. I wish I had a dollar for every single hair I plucked or shaved away. I wish I could get a refund of every facial I paid for over the years, every cream, every special lotion/spray/mask/foundation/infusion/vitamin/supplement blah blah blah I bought with money I generally didn’t have but scraped together for the ‘good of the cause’, which was to make myself better for my own eyes, because it is there I am caught, and torn, and un-pretty.
My sister healed from her disorders, but she is still a size zero. My sister stopped purging to save on her grocery bills, to save her teeth and her marriage. She stopped thumping her thighs on our porch and other porches, she stopped blocking up the toilets in our house and in her apartment, and in all the places where the vomit brigade does their work. She is still thin as a rake, and as different from me in temperament and energy as she ever was, and that’s ok. I can spend time with her, I can even eat in her presence without finding myself so big the weight of it, of me, shames me. I can exist in the world of her thinness and whatever that is and was to her, and be okay.
My body is my own, and it has never betrayed me, though I have betrayed my body time and again, and others have betrayed me by using it, by taking advantage of my vulnerability – my cousin, the one who raped me when I was 8, most of all, most damagingly. I know now this was the act of a weeny ratfuck, a piece of shit – but more than that it was the act of an opportunist, a mother fucking coward who took advantage of a child who loved and trusted him, simply to get off. What the fuck is that about? It’s about power, I know this, but still, we are so hard on women, and on women’s bodies. We are so hard on ourselves for not being whatever the fuck the going standard for bodies is. We are so hard. We take out so much shit on the playing field that is not a fucking playing field and never should have been, the realm of girls’ and women’s bodies. And we are so poor, so poor. I wish I had a dollar for every single time I lost and betrayed my body by not being okay with it, and myself.
Pictured above is one of my latest Syracuse University themed gear purchases (themed? stamped? branded?), a beany hat I wear that is perfect for cold spring days, with temps hereabouts varying between twenty-eight and seventy degrees. Snowflakes were falling as I began writing this piece last week. Walking the dog that day I had on my SU beanie, my SU stretch side-pocket leggings, and an SU fleece in bright-ass orange. Am I mad for SU or SU sports’ teams? No. Not at all. I did attend SU so my wearing this stuff is an authentic choice, I guess? People who – years after graduating – continue to organize tail gate parties or attend numerous alumni functions baffle me, as I don’t have that particular need, interest, identification or loyalty – whatever it is. I had to laugh as I exited the house because, here I am, decked out like a real fan, derived from the word fanatic. Fanatic. Which I am not, not about SU the institution, as a center of college sports, as my alma mater, or anything else.
People love their tribes. I avoid them like the plague, generally, because belonging to any group, club, organization, what have you, feels like boxing myself in – and why the heck would I ever do that? One of my several recurring nightmares from childhood was that I was being buried alive, thanks largely to the film ‘Premature Burial’ staring Ray Milland, which I saw as a ten-year-old the week before Halloween. So, no, no, no boxes, please, and no tribal affiliations either. The only ‘tribes’ I claim are feminist and Democrat, and both of those are famously diverse, fractious and organized on a scattershot basis, just like the fractious Mueller fan-dam-ly from which I spring. Ah, the Muellers. What a bunch. What characters! What a – family.
The real motivation behind all that SU gear? It simplifies my life. I don’t and never have cared all that much about clothes, don’t like shopping, therefore going on the SU Bookstore website and browsing among items for useful garments distills shopping down to a couple of clicks. Simple = good. And, orange is a great color, especially when walking on country roads in rural America, and if you’ve never read Stephen Kings account of so doing, I highly recommend it, and link it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/06/19/on-impact )
Simple is good. ‘Men’s’ pants and shorts – which I have been buying and wearing for over forty years – are also good, mostly because unlike the vast majority of designed and marketed to women’s pants and shorts, they have great pockets. They’re also a lot more durable, literally built to last longer. Women want and need pockets; women want and need and deserve clothing that is durable. I also like to wear men’s boxers in summer as shorts because they’re capacious, 100% cotton for coolness, often in great colors, and they don’t ride up my hips or bum like “Ladies’ panties”, which I gave up in college. I choose comfort over all other concerns, and yes, of course, there are exceptions, although it’s been so long since I wore heels, the last time I did – for a wedding in May of 2022, it was an exercise in the power of mind over matter, and by matter, I mean mind over real live physical discomfort after about 4 hours of standing and walking around, most of it on stone floors. To think I once enjoyed – really enjoyed – those occasional events requiring a slip, pantyhose, and heels. Feh. I noticed one of the groom’s aunties had flats on, flats as in Converse low-rise sneakers, in a fabulous bright color. Genius. File under: Next Time.
I know that two of my more glam adjacent girlfriends think I dress like a slob. They’re both in professions that require a heightened style of dress: high-end NYC real estate, and Southern California business consulting. I do as well, think that I’m a tad slob-o-don-y, but I love my practical, slob-o-don garb. I remember a woman I knew slightly, as a dog owner only, accosting me in Central Park ages ago, saying, “What are you wearing!?!” She was dressed to the nines, with full-on make-up at 6:30 a.m., which I assumed was for work and also, I suspect, because dog walks were famous for bringing about romances between dog owners. But whatever her thing was, I said, “It’s 6:30 in the morning. Why do you care?’ I was wearing, I recall exactly, men’s boxers and my favorite Fire Department tee-shirt – so soft, 100% cotton and nice and loose – in burgundy. And flip flops. Did I have a boob-sling on? Maybe. Maybe not. It was hotter than hot out, and again, comfort first, peeps. My best, best friends, including the glam adjacent, are my friends in part because even if their eyes pop slightly at my lack of sartorial panache, they know better than to comment, or try to fix what ain’t fucking broken.
Clothing – the length or width of a skirt, the height and shape of a collar, neckline or sleeve – has been used to control, distract, hamper, and impoverish women since forever. The fashion industry, long dominated by male designers and owners while enriching mostly male stockholders, reflects our culture as a whole, and is not, in my opinion, very female forward, although that is changing, at a glacial pace, if you think glacial pre-global-warming era slow. Give. Us. Pockets.
Still, I acknowledge that my own sense of ‘fashion’, my penchant for men’s trousers and SU garb, is not only because simple is good, but because my experience of clothes, and shopping, as a girl-child led me to take a route I might otherwise not have taken. Who knows; that winding country road has and continues to be traveled, but it began not far from where I sit today, in the house I lived in with my own special mother dearest. Perennially obese with a penchant for combining sweatshirt tops and pearls over black stretch-pants, she didn’t want to buy me clothes; she didn’t want to spend money on me, period, and, especially after I hit puberty, she just wouldn’t. Like the patriarchal culture we live in, momma used her power in the consumer clothing lane to control and punish me, attempting to make me into someone I was not: a pliable, compliant, super feminine girlie girl. It is worth noting that her definition of feminine meant not speaking unless spoken to, no interest in athletics or boys (unless they were Catholic), and no pursuits that weren’t centered on the home. That I loved being outdoors, and swimming, was a talented athlete in general was considered un-ladylike in the extreme by the woman who gave birth to me. My sisters were much more in her wheelhouse of what was appropriately feminine as they weren’t good at sports (I believe my older sister skipped gym class for all 4 years of high school), spent 99% of their time sequestered in their rooms rather than wandering and playing in the woods, which I did all the time. My eldest sister was given carte blanche when it came to spending money on clothes, which weirdly also included two wigs at one point.
Thrift shopping, my mommy dearest work around, where I could spend my own, earned money, saved me, but I would never claim I was ever able to deck myself out as a result. I even occasionally have picked up perfectly good SU gear while thrifting. Not to mention a Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress, made in Italy, the real thing, a slew of gorgeous cashmere scarves and sweaters, corduroys from L.L. Bean, Ralph Lauren, and Ann Taylor, Peck and Peck sweaters and made in Scotland wool skirts, sweaters and pants, items able to withstand the weather, weather like today, 40 degrees out and rainy.
Clothes. Such fun. Ephemeral. Necessary. If ‘the clothes make the man’ (vestis virum facit), what do clothes do for or to women? Another endless subject, with so many sideroads, alleys and dead-end lanes, providing plenty of fodder for another day or days. Women are not decorative plates on the walls of men’s lives, or in the gaze of our families, culture, institutions and even other women. You don’t have to dress ‘like a girl’, in pink and pale blue or whatever ‘this year’s color’ is. One of my continual frustrations when I do go beyond my narrow on-line shopping lane is looking for the bold colors I love but getting fed a steady diet of ‘heather-ed’ pastels. Make it stop, please!!!! As writer and blogger Erin McKean wrote in 2006, a quote often mistakenly attributed to fashion icon Diana Vreeland, “You don’t have to be pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”
Vestimenta sunt milier, which, translated from the Latin, means clothes are not the woman. My new motto? Perhaps.
