The Goddess Lounge: I Want To Go To There

Yesterday I read The Goddess Lounge from start to finish, in between Sunday afternoon laundry and taking the kids to the park, cooking dinner and doing the dishes.

Just wonderful, delicious, funny, etcetera. I copied some quotes from the book into my diary, and it takes a special book to do that.

Sometimes you have to put brush to canvas, pen to paper, and whorls to keyboard. This book made me want to do that again.

The Goddess Lounge

Her Words

She keeps a box under her bed, way in the corner nearest the window. The box is the size of a small jewelry box, but wooden and plain. In the box are hundreds of scraps of paper, one word written upon each scrap. Sometimes the words are scrawled quickly in pencil, sometimes they are boldly written in all caps with ink. Never names, although she wants to write the names of the ones who came before him. Just impressions or feelings or objects, enough to capture the thought but not enough to damage anything if the box were discovered.

Bench.

Coal.

Caramel.

Skin.

Cotton.

Smoke.

Dance.

Unwittingly.

Desperately.

He can never know about the box, should never know, but if he did, he would probably be puzzled and wouldn't bother to read more than a couple of scraps, and he certainly wouldn't lay them out to look for patterns.

When she feels tethered, she fingers the paper. With her eyes closed she can feel the bold words and the soft ones. She lets them slip through her hands to the floor and listens to the whisper on wood and wonders if the breeze blew them through the window could she follow.

If you were to paint her she'd be in a cotton dress, in bare feet, sitting on the edge of the bed in a plain room. It would be a hundred years ago, and she'd have rough, worn hands for someone so young. She might be looking out a window, or she might be looking at her papers near her feet. He'd be working in the field, visible through the window behind her, but small compared to the vast horizon.

Behave Yourself

Four men have told me to behave myself. This has all happened very recently, within the last month. While those two words and four syllables - be-have-your-self - say more about the men than they do about me, I would like to explore in words for you, dear reader, just what circumstances compelled these men to attempt to put sideboards on how I live my life.

Exhibit A: I'm sitting in a meeting, in Grand Junction, surrounded by handlebar moustaches. I am cogently explaining the programs I manage and a new project in the works. Another male manager leans across the table to me and asks with a smirk, "How much is that gonna cost us? Thirty two million?"Referring of course to our recent thirty two million dollar accounting error in Denver. I lean across the table to him and say, "About three dollars a person, but thanks for asking. Your question was extremely helpful to all of us." Dead silence in the room for a beat. Then twenty people start laughing and handlebar moustache man is red in the face. Special note: This is not the only instance in which I give him the what what. There is another one, but you get the point.

Exhibit B: I have several meetings with the Director over the course of five months, about a merger we are going through and about a very political project I've been working on. At one point I think I get exasperated and throw my hands up and say, "Dude!" After our last meeting he says, "Behave yourself, but not too much." Special note: I'm still analyzing that one.

Exhibit C: I'm sitting in a meeting in Denver, with a guy with a handlebar moustache from Grand Junction, not related to the special man from Exhibit A. We are discussing meeting options for our budget meeting. This older man, who was most likely hot shit in the 1970s, says, "There's a new gentleman's club. We could go there for the meeting." To which somebody replies, "But would the women be invited?" To which he says, "As long as they dance." I have three options here, as a high-ranking female manager who has the responsibility to stop sexual harassment in the workplace. I can ignore it. I can use sarcasm. Or I can very intelligently and firmly explain that the comments are inappropriate and unappreciated in the workplace. Of course I use sarcasm. I told him that his comment, coupled with the fact that he asked me to get him coffee at the beginning of the meeting, made me want to take him behind the building and beat him in a fight, which I was sure I'd win. I think I also told him, "Dude!"

Exhibit D: My father-in-law, a man I love dearly and use sarcasm with whenever possible, has been slightly befuddled at my insistence that my husband take some turns hosting holidays, as in cooking the entire Thanksgiving dinner, including organizing it and doing grocery shopping while I drank vodka from a plastic cup. At Easter dinner, I filled my plate ahead of my father-in-law, and he started blathering about the men always getting to eat first in the family and so on and so forth, to which I replied that if he needed somewhere to cry he could go in the back bedroom and I'd go the extra mile and get him some tissue.

Behave yourself. From each one of them. Independently. Without holding some sort of inner circle meeting to coordinate their strategy. I take it as a sign that I make them slightly uncomfortable, or maybe that I lack the tact, or maybe that I need to zip it more often.

I find it highly amusing.

Be Awesome

To all you strong women out there:

You've walked there in your mind to what could be, you've asked "Why not?" Follow your own footsteps to the edge of reason. You might have to get around some cobwebby trolls who whisper "It'll never work" or "You don't have time to be awesome right now." Some of you with strong conflict resolution skills will politely but firmly ask them to step aside. The rest of us will have to get them off balance somehow and push them into the weeds, then taunt them and run.

Letter to Fourteen Year Old Me

Dear Me,

Oh, dear me, dear me, sounds like I'm wringing my hands. You're thirty four now. Seems hard for a fourteen year old to imagine, I'm sure, her life twenty years gone.

I'm jealous of you, the fourteen year old me, nostalgic for you. All of your boyfriends and various states of undress with your boyfriends are approaching, and I remember the idea of first love and horny sex but that's all it is, an idea. I don't have the energy these days to relive it. I envy you those times, but not the heartbreak. I say there is nothing I can do to save you from that pain, nor would I want to. You got your heart broken many times, but it led you to the man you are married to today. You have pilot projects, test cases, comparison studies ahead of you. I don't advocate hesitation or caution when it comes to love.

If I could infuse you with confidence in middle school and high school, I would.

You are still a writer, you'd be pleased to know that. Ramblings and poems and navel-gazing stuff and trying to make sense of the world, and some of our stuff is published.

The things you remember are not the classes, or the college classes, or the jobs. The strongest memories are being outside in nature with the ones you love. Your best memories are the times you don't get credit for, where you are merely enjoying yourself.

Your only regrets are the way you have treated people. At some point in the next twenty years sarcasm will become a crutch, and you'll spend years disentangling yourself from it and forcing yourself to speak openly, and see the world openly.

You do live in a city, even though you never thought you would. But you take your son fishing and camping. Your children pretty much rock. But don't worry about that yet. Enjoy just you for a while.

You gained a bewildering confidence somewhere along the way.

Try again to get into that creative writing class in college. Go on those trips, goof off, lay in the sunshine more.

The best things that happen to you are other people. Be open to them.

And put some sunscreen on your face, because we get skin cancer at 25, at a time we don't have health insurance, for God's sake.

And just be prepared: the only constant is change.

My sister has begun a women's group, to talk about those things that are extremely important to talk about but are shunned in mainstream culture, or ridiculed, or forgotten. Women's lives are intricate and not just for Oprah magazine. One of the group members had a suggestion: "It is an idea for women to contemplate their life journey, and to write yourself a letter. The letter is from the person you are now, to the person you were 10 or 20 years ago, telling yourself what you would like to say to your younger self, to spare yourself pain or to help yourself on the way if you could have... Here are very poignant examples to inpsire you.think I will do this activity-http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Letters-to-My-Younger-Self-Trisha-Yearwood-Barbara-Boxer/1"

"Torn"

Torn is book about work and family. I'm not talking about the Torn I recently read in which a girl dies and comes back to life as a demon slayer with super-magical powers and the ability to inherit the essence of each demon she kills, thus leaving her torn between her demon and human natures.

Where was I? Yes, this Torn is coming out May 2011, and it contains an essay by yours truly called "When I Sneeze, I Pee a Little."

So, if you are a mom who wants to write, a career woman who wants to procreate, a man who is married to a career woman who wants to procreate and write, or a career woman who wants to stay at home with her kids, this book is for you. Pretty much the only people this book is not for are stodgy old men who dream about the good old days when women could do the birthin' and the cookin' and the shuttin' up.

Here is what the book is about, in case my demon-slaying references were confusing:


Trying to strike the right balance between career and motherhood is one of the most stressful, heart-wrenching issues facing women today. In Torn, 46 women examine the conflict between the need to nurture and the need to work, and reveal creative solutions for having the best of both worlds. Their stories offer hope and inspiration, but also reveal the messy realities of modern motherhood and life’s inevitable crises, both small and large: from breast pump mishaps to battles with cancer; diaper blowouts to debilitating depression; competitive cupcake baking to coming home from war. In the end, the reader can take comfort in the knowledge that there is no perfect mother; nor is there a perfect balance when it comes to kids and career. The real challenge facing women today is not juggling their many roles, but realigning their expectations of what is possible and accepting that success does not equal “doing it all.”

Blueprints

"Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say." - Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

I've spent most of my adult life convincing myself I'm nothing like my mother.

My mother and father met in a laundromat. He had purchased some land, thinking his wife at the time would want to move to the country with him. As his dream came closer, his soon-to-be ex-wife moved farther away from him. He lived on a beautiful piece of land while he built his house: a floor topped with a wood framework at first, the bare bone beginning of his home. My mom moved into the start of a dream - a house so new she could see the moon straight through the skinned walls and ceiling when she fell asleep at night. My mother wanted land, wanted children, and a garden, and so did my father. They endured freezing cold nights with nothing but the structure of a house - no insulation - between them and the stars.

I spent my childhood watching them build our home. Solar power. Indoor plumbing. A blue tile floor. Carpet. A telephone. A color television with a VCR player. Two years of adding on new bedrooms. A new porch to replace the tiny one perched over the front door. Even today, a new dining room, a new kitchen. Molding their dream, solidifying their vision for themselves. Refusing to let snow and winter and mud and gas wells drive them out.

We forgive our men, my mother and I, for thinking that a home is simply wood and nails, paint and bricks, heat and water. We forgive them because we have food and shelter and laundry detergent and money for shoes and new furniture. We forgive them for not noticing our contribution to building our homes.

Our contributions are very real. Ask any woman if what she does for her family can be packaged, reproduced, sold, described in color and shape, texture and weight. She will say no. If you say, well then, your contributions are nebulous, indescribable, and therefore invalid, you would be wrong.

We keep in touch with our men's families. We send cards, letters, answer the phone when their mothers call.
We understand when our men need their space, and leave them alone.
We care for our children's emotional needs. We are the soft place to fall for our children, and this, out of all our contributions, is the most likely to be overlooked, minimized.
We plan time with our men. We insist that we get away from work and responsibility for a mental rest. We make the hotel reservations, arrange for the care of pets and kids, and check in with our men to make sure they are having a good time.
We do the chicken soup, tissue, poor baby, thermometer things when our men are sick.

We eke out time for ourselves when we can.

My mother moved into a shell - not a house, not a home, a shell - and has spent the last thirty-three years making it a home. She had the wood and the walls but where was the warmth? Where was the insulation that kept out the cold?

We believe in our dreams, we believe in our men, and so we are willing to forgive our men for forgetting the warmth, for thinking the structure of a house is enough.

I've spent most of my adult life convincing myself I'm nothing like my mother.