Category: Random Thoughts

I’ve been super busy with a work related crisis lately, but I’m going to put a story here that I wrote a while back so I don’t forget to be active with it. And for my 2 followers. 🙂

Mayfly

“They got the wrong house again,”  you say, looking out into the front yard, over the marigolds that your wife planted long ago, to the grass that used to be green.

“I guess.” says your daughter,  without looking up.  She sits, crosslegged and barefoot, pinning insects to a piece of cardboard by porchlight.  She is surrounded by a beetle, a butterfly, a grasshopper, a cockroach, several other drab insects, and a metallic-green June bug.

She looks like her mother in this light. Here, the light reflects off her smooth hair, which is twisted into a clip at the back of her head. The ends stick out on the top like a brush. Her skin is soft in the yellow of the lamp.

You wonder if she remembers her mother, if she misses her like you do. Someday, you will ask her.

You walk to the edge of the porch steps and look out again, your back to her and her bugs.  The moon is blurry behind the mist, but you can still make out the word  burnt into the front lawn.  Last time when it was red paint, it was easily fixed with a lawnmower. This time would be trickier.

“Lets go inside,” you say.

“In a minute.”

She sticks a pin through a butterfly. Her hands are covered with orange dust from its wings. She scrubs them on her overalls and grabs another pin.

You stand between  Amy and the paint on your lawn. Someone made a mistake. There is no slut here.  You work long hours, then watch reruns of  MASH.  Nothing else happens to you. Amy is only fifteen.  She still makes valentines out of construction paper. She still sleeps with that stuffed rabbit with one missing eye.

This morning,  you asked her if she knew who might have done it. She said she did not.

It is a mistake. You will leave them a note telling them so in case they come back.  Maybe paint the note on the lawn. Maybe keep Amy inside, until the misunderstanding is cleared up, just in case.

“It’s time to go inside,” you say again, like you mean it.  She is cradling a brown insect, winged and dead, in her palm.

“Look,” she says, “A Mayfly. After they get wings, they live only one day.”  It is her little-girl voice coming from her mother’s face. You smile.

“Is that so?” you say.  It doesn’t look like much. Like a dragonfly’s tiny, brown cousin.

“Just a day,” she says again. She places it on the cardboard and stabs it carefully through the thorax.

 

I recently read an article shared on Social media, on ‘The Invisibility of Middle Aged Women’ and I tried hard to relate completely to it.  I’m 48, so I’m apparently now firmly planted into that demographic. While there have been brief moments when I have related to parts of this article, I find that most of the time, I feel fine about my age. Am I weird? At one point, the article states,  “ If a woman has kids, she will always be a mother, but a woman who has chosen not to procreate and who now no longer is young and sexy is perceived by many as a pointless being.” Well, I don’t have kids, and I don’t feel like a pointless being.  I feel much the same as I always have, except slightly less lost, and a lot less objectified.

Remember puberty? Puberty sucked, and we got through that.  Some of us got awkward and tall, not knowing what to do with our overly long arms and legs, elbows and knees protruding everywhere.. some of us got chubby, as the hormones banged around all over the place, confused. Added to that was acne, periods and hair growing in weird places. It isn’t a fabulous time for most of us.

Middle age sometimes feels like the second coming of puberty. We have to get used to the fact that we can no longer spring out of bed with a dewy complexion after drinking the night before. We can no longer  notice a 5 pound weight gain one day and then slip back into tiny jeans just by being ‘good’ for a couple of days after. Nowadays, I can gain weight (in weird places, too) just from smelling pizza, and one night of drinking a couple too many results in a whole week of crankiness and eye bags.  Even my  hair has gone psycho, with more and more gray ones sprouting up, altering the texture enough to make it feel like a stranger. I can sometimes still pull off ‘dewy’ with the right camera filter, but I’ve learned not to expect it.

Women take  this stage of life harder than men, it seems, and why wouldn’t they? Everything we see in movies and on television tells us that 50 year old men are still sexy, but women are no longer attractive after 40. We see 25 year old leading ladies with 50 year old love interests in these stories all the time, and celebrities being shamed when someone catches a photo of them on the beach with no makeup and a little cellulite (in other words, looking like actual humans). The articles I read about this are everywhere. Time magazine claims that while male film actors peak in their careers at 46, female ones peak at 30. Seriously? Who knows anything at 30, much less reaches their full potential by then?  

Ordinary women continually see these gorgeous, famous women being put out to pasture when we still feel like we have a lot of good years left in us. We still care about romance and fun, and many of  us even feel that we haven’t hit our professional peak quite yet.  It can take a toll on anyone who doesn’t choose to dismiss it as non-reality. It’s kind of like puberty, which is when we first began to admire these celebrity women in the first place and worry we will never measure up. Now we are being told that we have to work our asses off to maintain a certain appearance,  just to compete with women half our age or we aren’t useful in the world anymore. I’m not playing that game.

Other than a short burst of interest in pop music in my mid-teens, I’ve always been a person who is blissfully unaware of most of what happens in celebrity culture. I do watch movies and TV,  but I don’t really experience it as anything grounded in reality.  I know there are these people called ‘Kardashians’, but I’m not totally sure who they are or what they do. I have a vague knowledge of Beyonce and Lady Gaga, but I wouldn’t be able to identify any of their songs, and to be honest, I haven’t known anything about new music since about the mid-90’s. I don’t know why I don’t know about these things. I guess I’m just not that interested. Perhaps it is unrelated, but I also don’t feel bad about growing old. In fact, there are parts of it I embrace. I got to be young once, and I don’t remember even appreciating what  I looked like back then. I was insecure and trying to figure out the world and my place in it, constantly dealing with sexual harassment and condescending people who didn’t take me seriously. I’m actually relieved to have grown out of that stage. I rarely get cat-called anymore or have to deal with men trying to pick me up every time I’m alone for 5 minutes in public. When I am in charge of something, people generally accept it and listen to me. That never happened in my 20’s without a ton of work. I actually like it.

Many women I know obsess constantly about aging, and I wish they would stop wasting their precious time with that.  They torture themselves  by giving up everything that gives them pleasure and paying money they could be spending on fun for cheek implants and liposuction and collagen, which isn’t fooling anyone, and often even inspires pity when it goes wrong. I feel for them, and I totally understand, but I’m not going to join that club.

I survived puberty, and then I got to be a sexy,  young woman for a while when I finally got through it. I’ll get through middle age and be a happy old person that doesn’t give a crap about any of that stuff or what anyone thinks of me. Its a transition, not an ending. I’m going to drink some wine, eat some cheese and celebrate it.

I recently found a picture of myself and my step-sister from when we were about 6. She’s dark and taller with long, stick straight hair. I’m fair and small with honey-brown curls. The photo is innocent; two smiling girls dressed up for church, holding dolls we’d gotten for Christmas that were meant to look like us, except the boxes apparently got switched and she holds one with light brown curls, and mine sports a dark, silky mane. I was happy with that doll. I liked her hair better.

When I came across the photo 40 years later, I had a sharp moment of surprise. Is that what we looked like? Surely I was plainer, more awkward… and my hair was wild,  like the head of Medusa; out of control and  horrible. According to my mental database, she should  certainly be more beautiful; poised and airbrushed like a film star. Neither is true. We both look like cute, ordinary little girls. Why is my memory so different from this photo?

My mother married this girl’s father shortly before this photo was taken. My own parents had divorced when I was two, and I really have no memory of living with both of them. When this new ‘Dad’ arrived on the scene, I remember being curious and a little excited to have a dad that actually lived with us.  He was nice to me at the beginning. I always thought it was because he just didn’t know me yet, and after he got to know me, he realized what a bad child I was and changed his mind. Years later, I realized he was nice because he was still trying to seduce my mother, and once he had her, he didn’t have to pretend anymore. Years of self-therapy, and analyzing  him as a human person instead of the God of all that was correct has made me understand intellectually that none of his fury towards me was really about me. He was just a product of his own abusive childhood, but knowing that intellectually doesn’t completely eliminate the dark little cloud he left on my soul after living for 10 years with him.  For the most part, I’ve gotten over the most obvious damage he left in his wake, but my feelings when I look at this photo make me realize there is one thing about myself that is embedded in my psyche as a representation of all that is bad about me: my hair.

My entire life with this ‘father’  was a harsh lesson in survival. He was moody and often violent, and the threat of a swinging belt was enough to make everyone in the house walk on eggshells. For a child who was naturally creative, and had spent 5 years of her life being mostly adored by female relatives,  it was a sharp change in situation to realize that my existence seemed to be a problem. Anything I did or said was usually wrong. Any comment I contributed to a conversation might be called out as ‘stupid’. I was always too loud or in the way. Eventually, I became a bit reclusive at home, preferring to spend my time in my room alone with my records and books, but then I was often criticized for not participating.  I learned early on to adjust my behavior at the drop of a hat to avoid conflict. However, one thing I couldn’t change was my hair. It was a constant source of  conflict. My hair is fine and curly and easily windblown. My stepfather’s daughter, who would visit on holidays and in the summer, had straight, glossy hair that grew out of her head naturally that way and fell back into place after the wind had its way with it. In spite of constantly being pitted against each other with this comparison (and others that didn’t stick in my mind quite so sharply),  we were friends when left to our own devices. We would play outside in the wind together, running and jumping and climbing trees with the happy, carefree joy that comes with youth and companionship. However, when we came inside after a summer’s day of sweaty play, I was always shocked back into the reality of my life by the nasty comments I got for looking like a ‘mess’, a ‘wild animal’, an ungroomed ‘heathen’-   the very definition of what a girl should not be. She had not done anything differently than I had. It was just a fundamental flaw in my genetic makeup that made me so  terrible, and he would  pick at me about it, berate my mother for not making me be more feminine and threaten to chop it off so I could look like the boy I obviously wanted to be. A couple of times he even snatched up a brush and roughly yanked it through my tangled hair, practically pulling it out in his fury at my disobedience in letting my hair get into such a state.

In my research to adjust my thoughts about myself, I’ve read that a male role model in a girl’s life is essential. Unconditional love from a man is connected to self esteem, and the relationship is supposed to teach us what we are looking for in a partner later in life.  The entire time this messed up push and pull was going on, all I wanted was to be able to do anything to make this man approve of me, even if I couldn’t inspire actual love. I concluded that the fact that it never happened was because I was just basically unloveable, and this conclusion has colored every relationship with a man I’ve ever had.  I go in feeling optimistic and healthy, and run away the minute that messy haired little girl is resurrected by a comment or a behavior from the other person that pulls her back to the surface.  After all, I’ve spent my whole life keeping my hair under control so I can deserve being loved. I have spent countless hours flat ironing it, squandered my money on smoothing products, straightening serums and hairspray. I’ve avoided pool parties, picnics on humid days and swimming in the ocean. I can’t have that little girl ruining everything by sticking her crazy Medusa head in and showing everyone what I mess I really am.

I look back at the photo and I realize that even though my step-sister also got the wrong doll, she was perfectly happy to keep the one with the curly hair, just as I was happy to have the sleek one. Though we’ve lost touch, mostly because of my own bitter feelings about that time in my life, I wonder if she had her own unhappiness that I didn’t see because I was so wrapped up in mine. To me, it looked like she was perfect, but I’m sure the whole situation affected her too. I think she loved me, and she shouldn’t feel bad for having the right hair. I’m ok now, and it’s all under control most of the time. Sometimes it rains, and I lose my grip on it temporarily, but now I just pull it back in a ponytail, put on a hat and move on.

by Jennifer Decker, 2017.