Me and Tippi

It's a rainy Sunday afternoon. I looked at the eggplants downstairs and promptly bought a coffee and bagel and wandered back upstairs. I need to go back down their and get one of those eggplants, some parm and some bread. Maybe some mozzarella too. The dish is going to be beautiful, but today is as grey as an old movie, so I am putting that off and settling in with the melancholy vibe. I am looking that bad boy in the eyes and just letting him sit there and stare right back.

I have been on a total Tippi Hedren kick lately. I am thinking about dying my hair the same shocking color blond. Flipping through old photo's of her, I came across the one above, which I simply adore! Sitting calmly with the object of her terror, lighting a cigarette with a match from his beak. How striking, how appropriate!

At a certain point you come to accept those things you dislike, stop running from the man in black and simply invite him in. There is a certain relief in this. I was looking at my old photos earlier too.

It is extraordinary how much of your life can be captured in a simple snapshot! I laughed at the tacky younger version of myself! Shiny jackets, long nails and big hoop earrings. I enjoyed seeing the thinner and thicker versions of myself. I looked closely to see what has changed over the years. I look older now, but I can't figure out what it is. I don't have wrinkles or anything, just older. My bone structure is more pronounced, which I love! I always wished for sharp cheekbones growing up, I guess good things come to those who wait. I looked at pictures of my little brother, the buff marine and the little boy, God I adore him! I laughed like crazy at a picture of him when he got fat!

I also looked at the pictures of D and I. The cake I made him for his 29th birthday, the gigantic one I made for his 30th, pictures of first dates and homes and family gatherings. They broke my heart a little, but they also made me smile. I miss him so much sometimes. God we look so different! How can you get that much older in less than four years? I am not a masochist, but I am tired of running. It is much better to just sit with these things every now and then and calmly look them in the eyes, then put them away again.

So, what is my object of terror, my flesh hungry crow? Am I afraid of being alone, or of regret or simply of pain? When I really think about it, it is not any of these things exactly. I suppose I am afraid of becoming someone else. I am afraid of becoming that deeply sad girl again. I am afraid of becoming that girl who desperately sought love, who let that quest preoccupy her mind. I am afraid of losing all the strength and happiness I have gained over the years. Looking at this fear, right into his beady little bird eyes, I think that perhaps it is as imaginary as a the idea of a flesh eating crow. I have grown-up and I will never be that little girl again.

That knowledge not going to stop me from grieving, or worrying from time to time (if only there was something to cure me of these, but I am still a woman!), but it does allow me to stop running. I can lean-in and calmly let my benign avian stalker light my cigarette. He poses no real threat, there is nothing left to run from.

The Steely Sheen of the Fairer Sex

One of my favorite movie lines comes from the 1955 film The Tender Trap:

"You want a girl. That's what you all want -- a girl. And that's what you can never have, because the only way to have a girl is not to marry her, because then she becomes a wife. That's something entirely different." -Sylvia Crews

What is the difference between being a girl and being a woman? Is it becoming a mother, or a wife, or a particular age? I believe that you become a woman when you begin to realize that life is not black and white, that hard choices have to be made, and you assume your role as a protector.

You see, there is a ferocious mother bear in every woman. This instinct is not reserved for children, but encompasses spouses, friends, disadvantaged strangers, and above all, yourself. A woman learns early on that though the brawn of man may be greater, no one will really protect her when she needs it the most, no one else can be relied upon for survival. That job is entirely her own. Biologically we may be wired this way for very practical reasons, the most basic instinct of any animal is to survive and reproduce. These two things would be very difficult if a mother was reliant on her mate.

So it goes, the theme of womanhood seems to be all around me. Watching a documentary on Burt and Linda Pugach, a story of a beautiful girl brutally burned and blinded by her spurned lover who 14 years later marries just that man, to me is not a story about love but about becoming a woman. Linda survived, she lived her life bravely and joyously until her sight left her completely and she realized her best option was to take back this lunatic who had become her only true option as a caregiver and provider. (This being the 1960's women were much less empowered to provide for themselves, especially disabled ones.)

Whether it is single mothers and college girls stripping for money, Hillary Clinton braving matrimonial humiliation to reach her political ends, Afghani women sustaining beatings to protect each other or simply a wife who would rather sleep with her husband than break his heart by revealing her disdain for him; women do what needs to be done every day. Our choices may seem calculating and cold, but I say that they are merely our biology taking over. Girls aimlessly follow their hearts, women have the burden of balancing their hearts and their minds.

Though I chase youth like the carrot-on-the-end-of-a-stick, the fact is, I became a woman a long time ago. Perhaps this is why I lack shame and regret, I see my choices not as bad, but as human. Though sacrifice comes naturally to me, I am a ferocious protector, and the cub that has been with me the longest is me.

The Hideousness of Men

I am reading a book right now that describes the intense, animalistic cruelty of men. Of course there are exceptions in the book, a few flickers of humanity in the cold landscape. It’s not just the book that got me thinking about the hideousness of man, and the power even that gives them. My boyfriend gave me another one of his “men are heartless animals” speeches.

Since the inception of our relationship, he has taken it upon himself to paint me a picture of what men are really like. He claims that it is because he resents the fact that their bad behavior has made his love life more complicated in the past. I finally asked him the question that has nagged me, as he spoke about the way men only want to use me. I asked him if he really thought that he was the only man who could care for me. If every other man just wanted a piece of ass, and saw me as nothing more. He snorted and told me he was sure some men would actually want to be with me, but they would want to fuck me first.

After three and a half years with this man, I will give him the benefit of the doubt. I will believe that he tells me these things, not to try to intimidate me, but to educate me. Why? I still really don’t know. It has been informative though. And I suppose it was the combination of reading vicious stories about the plight of my sisters in the middle east and my boyfriend’s speech that made me begin to think about the grotesque nature of man.

....

One of the most breathtakingly beautiful places I have ever been was not the Caribbean, it was not Mexico, it was not Europe or the Rocky Mountains. The place that truly took my breath away, brought tears to my eyes at the sheer wonder of it all was Iraq.

The beauty of other places is so easy, so effortlessly giving. The beauty amidst desolation; the splendor of the sunsets that painted the rocky horizon deep shades of Orange and Red and Purple; the shock and delight to see lush green surrounding the rivers after coming over yet another dusty hill; these things were gifts and perhaps just due to the contrast and the unbending will of this hard place, I fell in love with it.

I began to think last night that perhaps the species of man is like that harsh unforgiving place. When a man does something out of character:tender, soft, kind, it takes our breath away. The idea that we are desired enough for this selfish creature to change his ways, to be our own, to be gentle, it is enough to make us fall in love. If they are good men, then it will remain beautiful. We will stay captivated by the wonder of the beauty in this naturally ugly thing, we will remain in love with this mysterious being, captivated by him. But when he changes, begins to morph into that which our love is not strong enough to keep him from becoming, when he begins to hurt us; it is the memory and the potential for beauty we once saw that will make us stay. We will stay and stay until he has beaten the love right out of us and we no longer see the sunsets in his eyes, when all we see is the ugliness.

The hideouness of man and the female eye to see beyond it, the intense beauty of a man unlike his barbaric peers, the false hope and the happy endings; these are the stories that live in the war-torn heart of a Woman.