relationships

The best part of this video is watching Jason giggle like an eight year old boy and then break into some Latin (like you do), while discussing The Kiss.

So, tell me, why do people kiss each other? Haven’t you asked yourself that question?
I have.

I remember a long time ago reading somewhere, I think relating to Kabbalah (an ancient and mystical form of Judaism), the high regard with which they held a kiss. They consider it a sacred act. It is an act so intimate that you are virtually “sharing” the breath of another person.

Knowing that marked me.

Today, the most widely accepted theory of kissing is that we humans do it because it helps us sniff out a quality mate. When our faces are close together, our pheromones “talk” – exchanging biological information about whether or not two people will make strong offspring.

Well, that’s just not sexy.

Here are some other fun facts I found:

Do any other animals kiss?
Save for the bonobos that suck on each other’s tongues for up to ten minutes at a time, there aren’t any animals that kiss. And are we really going to count a tongue-suck as a kiss anyway? Somehow, humans are actually the only species to kiss on the mouth, and the meanings of a kiss are plentiful.

Why do they call it a French kiss?
The term ‘French kiss’ – once also called a ‘Florentine kiss’ – is popularly considered to have been brought back to the English-speaking world by soldiers returning from Europe after World War I. At the time, the French had a reputation for more adventurous sexual practices, and so it happened that these soldiers returned to their sweethearts with some newly acquired “skills”.

That being said, with decades of dating under my belt, I became a bit of a connoisseur regarding kissing. There is a Goldilocks zone where kissing is concerned. I’m sure you’ll all agree with me on the fact that a bad kisser can kill even the best chemistry.

No tight, dry “butt pucker” lips.

No overly moist delivery that makes you want to wipe your face with the sleeve of your jacket.

No wide open “shark mouth” where your teeth bang together.

And my least favorite, the wild tongue thrusting where it feels like they’re looking for their car keys somewhere around your tonsils.

Ah, the kiss. Done well it makes me giggle and speak Latin too—how about you?

Carry on,
xox

Hey you guys,
Digging around in my “dead drafts” file I came across this stream of consciousness, shitty first draft of an actual event that happened to me last year at this time. Since it’s a year old I suppose it’s a Throwback for a Thursday. Right? And since I know most of you, no, make that all of you, have loved and lost, I thought I’d share this unabridged account of just how much I suck at it. Loss that is. So here goes. 

Carry on,
xox

I wish more than anything that I had a profound and pithy quote befitting this story, instead, all you get is:

“Omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,breathe.”~ Me

I heard his voice again last night. For the first time in thirty years.

This is a voice I would have given my left tit to hear back then, back in the days and months after our break-up in 1986.

Truthfully? I would have sold my soul, my car and my beloved cat to hear him say my name in that seductive way he had.

Just one… More…Time.

Shameless doesn’t adequately describe me.

Neither, do I have enough fingers or toes to count the number of times I sold-myself-out emotionally.

I would call, he would answer and I would hang up. Or, I would get his out-going message on his answer machine and since I knew he wasn’t home (he was never home), I would call back and listen to it ten to fifteen times in a row with the intensity of a FBI voice analysis expert, searching for any small hint in the tone, or the words that he used as a clue to his state of mind.

Was he happier without me? Or did he sound like wads of Kleenex were shoved up his nostrils, his heart-broken into tiny pieces that were scattered across the globe by the wind—like me?

Mostly I did it because second only to his smell, I desperately ached for the sound of his voice. That along with a longing for reentry back into his inner circle from which I’d been banished.

He was the drug and I was the addict.
He was the tall, cool drink of water. I was dying of thirst.
He was the Sun, and whatever small ray of attention he chose to shine on me, like a sunflower I reached up and reveled in it.
He threw his scraps of attention to my bruised and broken heart as I rolled around in the dirt like a feral animal, begging for more.

You get the picture. Shameless.

It had to be enough—but it never was.
Because that’s the thing about that kind of love. The always evident, finite nature of it, creates mental insatiability.

From the beginning, the deep tone of his voice could magically make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
Like a musical instrument, my body was specifically tuned to him–it had a visceral reaction—every cell vibrating with desire.
It was crazy. At nearly thirty years old I’d never felt anything like it.

My love for him felt crazy. So, I began to mistake feeling crazy—for love.

It culminated in a real eye-opener when I jumped out of a second-story window and chased his car down the street. In that moment it turned dangerous crazy. Stupid. Untethered to reality.

At no time was I aware how unsustainable that kind of love, lust, obsession was.
Nothing that burns that hot can survive as it consumes everything it touches. It must flame out. It must. Even volcanoes go dormant.

I thought I would never get over him. The mere mention of his name could send me to bed sobbing for hours.
The pain was simply unbearable.

In order to function in the world, I put myself into an emotional rehab of sorts. I removed all signs of him from my immediate surroundings. First I got rid of all the gifts he gave me. An 80’s abstract patterned sweatshirt, a small, carved jewelry box. Then I took the pictures of him out of their frames. Well, to be honest, for years I left them in the frames and covered them with more current shots of friends and family in the hopes that this was all just a bad dream and we would eventually reconcile and I could put our pictures front and center once again.

Slowly, I erased all of his saved voice messages. They were like the tiny airline bottles of booze alcoholics save in case of an emotional ”emergency”. A quick fix. A masochistic game. A rush followed by the pitiful groan of my heart as it dropped like a piano from a fifty story building. Over, and over, and over again.

First to go were the simple ones, “Hey babe, just checking in.” Hearing those only hurt a little bit, like a blister or a cold sore.
I could hit erase on those and not immediately burst into flames.

The next ones, the ones that were funny or touching, well, those hurt like I imagine a cracked skull or broken bones do. I would suffer physical pain for days after deleting those.

The last ones to get erased took me the longest to let go of because of their intimate nature.
They held my heart in chains and like a prisoner with Stockholm’s Syndrome I feared I’d die if I we parted.
I threw up for four straight hours the night I had the courage to hit ERASE on those.

Detox. It was Emotional Detox.

I’m not proud of the fact that it took me five years to become neutral. Yes, you heard me. Five fucking years to get that man out of my system. But I did.

Eventually, I healed and as part of that healing, I held a ceremony where I burned everything. It was my graduation ritual. Emotional rehabilitation complete.
As I watched all of the cards, love letters and yes, finally, the photos of us disintegrate into ash and swirl their way back into the aether, I felt free. He no longer held my heart prisoner. I was literally and symbolically free of him. Finally! And I have to say it felt fan-fucking-tastic!

So, you can imagine my reaction when a few weeks before Christmas, out of the blue, after thirty years —he reached out on Facebook for connection. And it triggered in me the most curious mixture of love and hate, attraction, and revulsion, curiosity, and fear.

Anyway, we agreed to talk. On the phone. Like for real.

He is fifty-two to my fifty-seven years and still in dire need of a “sensitivity chip”—just as I remembered.
He laughed hysterically when I said I was fifty-seven. “Yeah, sure you are” he guffawed, “You just keep telling that story.”
“I will, because it’s true,” I replied with a half-ass laugh, trying to keep things civil. Truth be told I wanted to reach though the phone and stab him in the neck with a fork. Come to think of it, it was not an unfamiliar impulse where he was concerned, but the rage he was still able to trigger shocked me.

Remember, we burned HOT.

After listening to him for a while, it was clear as he reminisced about our on-and-off two years together back in the eighties that:

1. He remembers that time fondly. Like, scary, made up memories of weird things that never happened, fondly. I do not. I was not my best self back then. Not even a little bit. Think, hot mess. That time turned into a catalyst for my own self-reflection and introspection. I’d jumped out of a fucking window overcome by lust so I’d say I was a girl desperately in need of some self-respect. It was not my proudest moment and as a result, I did decades of work on myself after that.

2. Our five-ish year age difference which I will admit felt much larger as a twenty-five-year-old woman with a twenty-year-old man (boy) had grown to a much broader span of his memory (hence the snide remarks). In HIS telling of our tale, the age difference has grown to decades. He is now Ben Affleck and I am Dame Helen Mirren, (who by-the-way admittedly looks better than I do in a bikini), but that is neither here nor there—the woman is seventy. 70!

3. His life has fallen to shit. He is re-connecting with me because he has become the Mayor of Martyr-ville. As he explained it, when his beloved father passed away, he gave up a thriving career and a life filled with fancy houses, cars, tons of money and super-models, (insert HUGE eye-roll), turned his back on love and ever having a family of his own, to live in his childhood bedroom taking care of his ailing mother and special needs sister. Oh come on! He’s NO saint. I can hear you, don’t turn on me now!

Why do guys do that? Why do they call you after they’ve fallen down the rabbit hole? I KNOW with every fiber of my being that if his life were going well he may have looked me up out of curiosity on Facebook (like we all do), but he would have NEVER in a million years have contacted me. I know that because I’m over fifty and life doesn’t work that way.

He sounded to me like someone who was in dire need of the three “C’s”. Camaraderie. Consolation. Contrition.
I don’t think I’m the right person for the job. I tried for about thirty minutes. Then I couldn’t wait to get off the phone and back to real life. You know, MY real life of fancy houses, cars, and super models.

For several days afterward I felt emotionally unstable. Like I’d been massaged by a plunger or punked.
I couldn’t tell if he felt bad about how things had ended and he most certainly didn’t call for my forgiveness.

You know why? Because he has no idea the suffering I put myself through. Did you catch that? I tortured myself. Everyday. All by myself.

So… why did he call me? Why was I the one he chose to soothe him? Honestly? I have no idea.

One of my friends who is familiar with our saga asked me if I somehow felt vindicated by his shitty life. You know, the best revenge is living well and all that. So…did I?… Maybe…and Yuck!
Had I learned nothing? Great. There go tens of thousands of dollars spent on three decades of self-help.

After feeling ashamed of myself, I have also started to figure out why I feel so out-of-sorts.

Perhaps because it was clear he still inhabited that wild, careless and dangerous place I had turned my back on years ago, and maybe I was afraid that hearing his voice would somehow lure me back there after being off of that sick, adrenalin high for thirty plus years. Perhaps.

More likely it’s because I have absolutely no desire to re-live the past. Even those lusty, tempestuous years with him. Like I said, those were not the good old days for me and no amount of reminiscing will make it so.

I have a distinct memory of something my mother said to me as I writhed on her bed in my broken-hearted agony—so here’s your quote. “He’ll come back. One way or another, they always come back.”

I lived breathlessly off the fumes of that hope for many years like a lost Mariners wife waits for the sea to return her beloved. Until eventually, facilitated by the passage of time, the entire situation was no longer a trigger for tears but an ancient, distant memory.

Then… he came back.

Suffragette Susan B. Anthony’s Headstone covered with women’s “I voted” stickers.

“In the midst of the chaos
When the wind is howling I hear
The ancient song
Of the ones who went before
And know that peace will come.”
~Susan Stauter

I woke up this morning and opened my eyes. Peace.
That is until my neurons started firing, thoughts flooding in, reminding me what day it is.

Election day here in the U.S.

No peace today, right?

I voted early so I have plenty of time to go bite my nails down to the nub, watch the election results with my eighty-year-old mom.

Just that I can do that makes today a victory in my book.

As far back as I can remember my mom has followed politics. More than followed.  If you look up the phrase “political junkie” online my mom’s picture will pop up. She could give Tom Brokaw a run for his money. Seriously. She has lived and breathed every aspect of this game called politics going all the way back to waiting breathlessly as a young girl for election results to be announced on the radio. A child of the thirties, she was among the first generation of women born with the right to vote.

That was huge and she taught me never to take that lightly. The common thread throughout my life has been this single phrase: This is history, Janet.

I’d like to say I’ve always shared her passion and respect for politics but I have to admit there have been many elections through the years where I just didn’t give a shit. When Reagan ran against Mondale I was in my twenties. They were two boring old white guys and I can say in all honesty—I gave less than a shit.

Not my mom.

There have been decades where I would have to change the subject immediately (usually to football, another passion of hers), so as not to get caught in a political discussion because let me tell you—she will not suffer the fool who can’t name the candidates, their platform, and where they stand in the polls.

Eight years ago I got lured back in by Obama. I cared about hope and change. So did my mom. I hadn’t seen her that fired up for a candidate since Bobby Kennedy all the way back in 1968.

God, she loved Bobby Kennedy; well, all the Kennedy’s really. Camelot had been the real deal to her. Jack and Jackie were just like her (except for the rich and movie star gorgeous part) and their children were even the same age as hers!
Then, when it ended so tragically, we all sat in front of our little black and white TV for three days so my mom could try to process her grief and mourn with the rest of the country. Watch this. This is history, Janet, she said to someone too young to understand fully what she was seeing.

She wanted Bobby in the White House so badly that when he won the Primary in our state of California that warm June night in 1968 she went to bed jubilant, only to be woken up early the next morning by my dad. “Bobby Kennedy was shot last night. He’s dead.”

God. What a brave man, my dad. I can’t imagine giving her that news.

By the time my ten-year old self stumbled out of bed that morning, my thirty-year-old, optimistic, resident of Camelot, political junkie of a mom had been transformed into a somber, red-eyed cynic. “This country has gone to hell.” she sobbed. Pay attention, this is history, Janet.  This time I understood. But something in her had changed. She stayed in the game but the light went out of her eyes where politics was concerned.

And yet she still had her opinions.

She thought the whole Nixon/Watergate thing was deplorable (sorry Hillary, she said it first.)

She liked Clinton, she just couldn’t stomach his self-sabatoge—and she wished he’d just keep his dick in his pants.

She could hardly believe the shenanigans involved with the hanging chads, Supreme Court decision of 2000.

And don’t get her started on Bush. Or Cheney. “These two are ridiculous (words I can’t write here). Someone needs to reign them in. For godsakes, where are their wives?”

But my mom was ecstatic when Obama won in 2008. The fire was back. “ I can’t believe we have a black man in office. I never thought I’d see that.” she kept repeating as we both cried our way through his acceptance speech in Grant Park with his gorgeous, beaming wife and two young daughters by his side.  “I hope nothing bad happens to him”, she worried.

Pay attention. This is history, Janet.

“But I called it, remember?” she reminded me proudly, like she’d picked the winning horse while he was still a foal. “When he spoke at the Democratic Convention back in 2004? Remember? I said he could be President some day!”

I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning but I do remember her saying that. A lot.

So.. this election. This election has been…unprecedented. I think that’s the word that’s been used most often these past eighteen months. Can you believe that? This spectacle has been going on for almost 600 days!

But my mom will scoff if I throw that word around lightly. “What this guy is spewing is unprecedented!” I’ll lament into the phone. I can hear her take a deep breath, her political science professor of a brain quickly gathering the facts.

“That’s not true.” She reminds me. “People need to remember George Wallace. He ran for president in 1964, 1972, and 1976, as a Democratic if you can believe that!” she spits out the word Democrat like a nasty word. “And in 1968 as an Independent. Oh, 1968. The Vietnam war. The assassinations of Bobby and Martin. The Chicago seven. They had riots that year at the Democratic Convention.”

They say if you can remember the sixties—you weren’t there.  Oh, she was there and she remembers EVERYTHING.

“George Wallace was a bigot, and a segregationist, populist who used the Ku Klux Clan as his security. He was a man filled with anger and hate, so this guys not the first…but at least our party had the good sense not to nominate him.”

So, things have been just as bad… or worse. I should have paid more attention to history.

So, yeah. I’ll be watching the results with that woman. The woman who reminded me a while back that what was unprecedented was having the first female nominee of a major political party and potentially the first woman President of the United States.

History is being made and its gotten completely overshadowed.

But not in her eyes. I really hope and pray I get to see the glass ceiling shatter tonight, sitting with my mom the life-long political wonk as she reassures me that she’s seen it all— assassinations, hate mongering and undecided elections and that in the end—our democracy will endure.

Pay attention, Janet. This is history.

Carry on,
xox

My mom and me sometime during the Reagan administration.

Once upon a time, I was a hoe. Or least I had convinced myself that I was.

During my early twenties, I fell in and out of love—a lot! And by a lot I mean, weekly.
But there were two teeny, tiny, complications.

Number one: I mistook infatuation and lust, for love and…
Number two: I was married. So, there was that.

I’m sure the fact that I was completely and totally unhappily married lead me to look for greener pastures, but truth be told, lush green grass was EVERYWHERE I looked. As a matter of fact, I didn’t have to look for it—it found me. I seemed to unconsciously wander naked into field after green and luscious field of wild, verdant, grass.

Are you getting the thinly veiled sexy grass analogy? Yeah, I thought so.

Anyhow, I know that being a dissatisfied housewife summoned the greener pastures.
How do I know that?
Because less than two years after my divorce and a subsequent short-lived roll in the hay dalliance, I remained tragically single for eighteen years, half a dozen of which were grass-less and barren. The furthest, most opposite of lush green grass as you can get. Mohave Desert brown and dry.
Swollen tongue dry.
Severely chapped lips dry.
Camel toe dry.
Dry in every sense of the word—if you get my drift.

Nary a phone call nor a sideways glance came my way. Nothing. Zilch, zero, nada.
Crickets. The complete and total lack of interest expressed in me by the opposite sex was if I do say so myself…appalling.

I found myself single…and invisible.

When the occasional fellow (and I mean occasional, three in ten years), did decide to traverse the desert and ask me out, I responded like any dried up, thirsty nomad looking for her green oasis—I drank at the well of desperation as I clung to him by my sand filled fingernails—while my toes dialed the wedding planner.

I’m serious.

I had convinced myself that I couldn’t be trusted to make good decisions where men were concerned, after all, I had listened to lust and let a good one go.
Or so I thought.
What can I say? I was hallucinating, not in my right mind.
So, if a guy showed interest, and (gulp) I slept with him, I had to MARRY him. Right? Or at the very least buy matching his and hers snuggies and put a down payment on a condo—because that’s not terrifying to a man!

I was confiding this whacked-out way of thinking to a young friend the other day as anecdotal evidence that I was once under thirty-five, made a ton of questionable decisions, and had sex with men who didn’t propose. Hell, they didn’t even spend the night. Often, they ran shirtless out of my apartment and down the street to their car. Or I jumped out of a window and ran shoeless after their car…

What a mess. What a hot, hot mess. A promiscuous monogamist.

Anyway…

Then the craziest thing happened. She admitted to feeling that way too sometimes. (And here I thought that went out with big shoulder pads and even bigger Bon Jovi hair).

“So what did you do?” she asked, “How did you get out of thinking that every time you dated a guy—it HAD to lead to the big white dress?”

“I became a hoe” I chortled, the memory of it causing a dribble of coffee to come out of my nose.
She balked.
“Seriously! My best friend, the one with the great husband, finally lost her patience with me and my dating drama and ordered me to JUST DATE!”

My young friend was intrigued, “Go on”, she said with a quizzical look on her face.

“Well, my friend advised me to just play the field—have fun—lighten up—quit overthinking it—leave your phone with the Bridal Registry on speed dial…at home—and have sex like a man!”

My young friend leaned forward “What does that MEAN?”

I leaned in too “It is pretty vague, but I got the gist of what she meant. Have sex with the damn waiter. If he’s nice and there’s chemistry, and you’re both careful…go for it. You will probably not marry him—chances are, after two or three dates you may never see him again, but that’s okay.
You’ll know the right one.”

Now, that’s the way a woman has sex like a man—but it was the virtual permission slip I needed from someone who really knew me well—and I ran with it!

Listen, I’m not saying you should do this or anything else I ever write about but I will tell you this, my young friend ran toward a pasture that she was afraid to venture into and walked in some very tall, green grass this weekend—if you know what I mean.

Carry on,
xox

I love rants. Rants by definition are wild, impassioned speeches. I rant often. It beats the alternative—apathy.

Anyhow, here is exhibit A.
A ranty little rant written by someone I greatly admire who is anything but apathetic.  We met on Skype a couple of years ago when I wasn’t so sure I was a writer (I KNEW I was a ranter), and she had just secured a humongous book deal from a giant publishing house (don’t let anyone tell you that shit doesn’t happen anymore, Steph is living proof!), for her memoir, Unbound (which comes out in January).

In each other we found a kindred spirit. Two souls tethered together.
We both have Muses, we both love our men and our dogs (maybe not always in that order), we both aspire to spend our days laughing, eating and writing (again, not always in that order), we both believe in BIG magic, and we are both YES Sayers.

YES Sayers are harder to find than you may think. Most people have made a habit out of saying NO.

I just had to share her little YES rant with you so you can get an idea of who she is. Maybe it will inspire a desire to retire (wtf?!), your NO’s and say YES a little more often, just like it did to me. I’m currently searching for an ostrich to ride…

Carry on,
xox

I rode an ostrich once. I sat on it’s pillowy arse and then it ran like the wind. It happened because I said yes.

Yes, I will ride that bird.

Yes, I would like to go to the jungle. And yes, I would like to meet the shaman.

Yes…absolutely, I’ll try a bite of that giant snail.

Yes, I do want that promotion. Yes, I am worth that much.

Yes, I will. I will do that even though it’s terrifying AF and I’m not sure how.

Yes, I would like to sit at the shore of an ocean I’ve never laid eyes on just so I can listen to the rhythm it drums through the night.

Ice cream? Yes.

Love? Yes.

That dog’s tongue on my face? Yes.

Yes. Please. Thank you. Wow. Yes.

Here are some more Steph Jagger facts that I pilfered from her website:

P.S. I BET YOU WANT A FEW MORE JUICY TIDBITS DON’T YA?
I read. A lot. I love reading as much as I love laughter and when they’re combined. I can’t…I just can’t.

I’m obsessed about the good, the bad, the ugly and the drop dead freaking gorgeous involved with finding and truly owning who we are.

I have been referred to as the human embodiment of the mullet – polished professionalism up front and yee-haw laughter in the back.

I drink wine, usually it’s red but I won’t turn down white…or rosé.

The only kind of carrots I like are the ones on sticks, dangling in front of me.

I married my soul mate. The fact that he had a big, black dog sweetened the deal.

If I were a bettin’ gal, I’d put my money on pickles over cucumbers because I believe that courageous, awe-inspiring, hold-on-to-your-hat life doesn’t happen with one toe dangling in, but that we jump in and fully submerge. Get in the brine.

http://www.stephjagger.com

Hey guys,
I was going to write about this very subject. About belonging to a perfectly imperfect tribe, the useless pursuit of perfection, the messiness of life, and the complete and utter lack of balance I’m able to maintain in my own. Fuck you balance.

No…I’m not bitter.

But as usual, someone has beat me to it. And not just anyone, Elizabeth Gilbert.

That happens a lot. The same topics being talked about at the exact same time. I often wake up to find that several other writers, independently of each other, even on opposite sides of the world, have written exactly what my blog is about that day.

Not to get all quantum physics on you but it is my belief that an idea emerges from the inspirational soup and circles around. Sometimes only one person picks it up (Steve Jobs), and sometimes many do.

So, here is Liz Gilbert’s take on this topic. And I think she wrote just about the best sentence in all of English literature, “so, is that the person you would call in the middle of night when your life looks like a DROPPED PIE…?”

Right? #todaymylifelookslikeadroppedpie

Carry on,
xox

Dear Ones:

An Instagram friend named Jennifer Orkin Lewis (@augustwren) made this image of one of my quotes…and I think it’s so lovely!
I always talk about embracing the “glorious mess” whenever people ask me questions about how to find “balance”
in this crazy world. Friends, listen to me — I gave up on finding balance a long, long time ago. That ship has sailed, and I ain’t on it.

And seriously, guys, do you know ANYONE who lives their life in perfect and constant balance? And if you did know such a person, would you want to be her friend? Is that the person you would feel comfortable ugly crying in front of? Is that the person you would call in the middle of night when your life looks like a DROPPED PIE, and you know she would never judge you for having screwed up?

No.

The people I love and trust are no more balanced than I am. My beloved friends are the ones who have embraced their own glorious mess — and who have helped teach me, in the process, how to embrace my own.
Try to take it easy on yourselves this week, ok? Shed the obsession for perfection. Let go of the knife you’ve been holding to your own throats. IT’S ALL GONNA BE OK. It’s a messy business, being a human. It’s a messy world. It’s a messy life. And it’s all freaking glorious, and I love it.

Have a great week, lovelies. You’re all a bunch of hot messes, and you’re all perfect.

ONWARD,
LG

(And for more of August Wren, https://www.creativebug.com/…/illustrative-painting-with-go)

To my dear men,
I have had the supreme good fortune to have been surrounded by you guys all of my life. How lucky am I?

You are unfailingly decent men.
Good men.
Nice men.
Respectful and kind men.

And as the past few weeks have unfolded with this Trump Tape of Horrors and the ensuing conversation that followed, I have watched you squirm.

Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.

Although the language wasn’t new to you because hey, come on, you’re all grown-ass men—it was rough. Crude. I saw you cringe or walk out of the room. It embarrassed you and I took note of that.

The conversation about the sexual assault of women has been locked up. Sealed in a stinking Pandora’s Box for decades.
This incident has opened it and unleashed the Kraken, I know, and it’s uncomfortable.

That’s why we haven’t talked about it.

I see you trying to understand why all the women in your life are reacting so strongly to this. Why are we so emotional? Why is our hair on fire?
Finally, after about a week of talking and asking questions—we clued each other in.

During our talks what really surprised me was the genuine—GENUINE—shock you expressed at this sentence:
“I do not know a single woman, regardless of age, race, size, or color who has not had to fend off an unwanted sexual advance in her life. Ask your mother, ask your sister, ask your daughter. NOT A SINGLE ONE.”

After I said that you all sat back in your chairs like you’d been physically pushed. You shook your heads in disgust. One of you put your hand to your mouth to stifle a gasp.

“I didn’t know that… I didn’t know how pervasive it is”,  was the resounding chorus from the decent men I know. I’m going to cut you a break because good and decent men tend to hang out together, so the odds of you seeing bad behavior goes up. And let’s be real—its not on your radar.

Probably because we, the women around you, are not putting it there. So now I will.

Look, you guys lock your doors at night, right? You watch your wallets in a crowd. You don’t talk about fight club. That’s about the extent of your concern for your personal safety.

It’s different for women. Our bodies are what “they” want. The perv, the creep, the rapist or the jerk shoving Tic-Tacs in his mouth, waiting to get off the bus and hug and kiss us on demand. 

You guys have always tried to keep me safe and I love you for that. You have warned me out of certain neighborhoods at night. You have escorted me to my car in dark parking lots. You have walked me protectively past construction sites listening to the cat calls. You have alerted me to the fact that my tires had dangerously worn tread and that you didn’t feel it was safe to drive through the Nevada desert alone at night—but you have no idea what it means to be the object of every creep’s unchecked lust.

It’s such a common occurrence, we don’t talk about it. So common that if women blew a whistle every time there was an impropriety—you’d hear nothing else.

I love you guys, I really do. Good men are the majority in my opinion. But I think you’re innate goodness has left you naive. And it’s time you knew the truth.

Women deal with this shit. Day in and day out. And it’s got to stop.

Not just me. Every woman you know. We just don’t talk about it.
Until now.

And you should too. To each other and to the women in your life.

Thank you so much for listening.
xox

“When are you going to start a family?”
Really? The ink wasn’t even dry on the marriage license, I still had rice in my hair, for cryin’ out loud.

How the hell did I know? I was barely twenty, my husband twenty-three. WE were the babies in the room.

It’s the rare individual who is introspective enough to ask themselves at a young age: What kind of life do I see for myself? Do I want to be a parent? Will I have children?

Some people just KNOW. The rest of us? We go along with the proverbial flow.
We date, fall in love, have the wedding, the picket fence and….screech! (sound of a needle being dragged across a record) hey! Not so fast!

Your early twenties are a time of impetuous, risk-taking behavior. NOT the picket fence and most definitely not parenthood—at least not for me.

I could back it up with SCIENCE:
There have been recent studies and in fact, research from the National Institutes of Health have shown, the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with inhibition of risky behavior, and decision-making, doesn’t get fully developed until age 25.
Being a late bloomer, I am certain my prefrontal cortex finally matured at around thirty-five, and sadly, it still wasn’t screaming “make a baby!”

What was wrong with me? All my friends were doing it. Even my little sister.
Hello?! Where was my maternal gene?
At the time it felt like it had been replaced by the much more irresponsible (red hair dye, wine drinking, spend every dime on shoes, travel around Europe), happy-go-lucky gene.

It wasn’t a calling for me. I know a calling. I move heaven and earth when something calls me. Motherhood? Meh, not so much. It’s not that I don’t love kids, I do. Just never enough to make any of my own.

There was also the fact that the stars just never aligned.
It didn’t occur to me to start a family when I was married, it always felt like a decision for another day; and when it finally did cross my mind I was epically, tragically, single. Not a man in sight, let alone “father material.” By the time I married my second husband, as fate would have it, my eggs were all dried up.

Sooooo, I gave single motherhood some serious thought, only to be discouraged by a very wise, older woman friend, a “crone” who asked me, “the maiden”, why I wanted to have a child?
I stammered on for a good five minutes, never coming up with anything better than
“Everyone else is doing it.”

“It is the MOST important job, being a mama. Come talk to me when you have a better reason.”

Unfortunately, this maiden could never come up with one.

“To make the decision to have a child – is momentous.
It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body”
~Elizabeth Stone

By my mid-thirties, when I answered “no” to the kid inquiry, a sad, concerned look would wash over women’s faces; until I assured them that I was biologically able—but not interested in doing so. Well…

UNLEASH THE KRAKEN! 

Many women got angry, really, really angry. Especially at baby showers. And in my thirties, there was a baby shower EVERY weekend. You know the ones where you bring your babies? THOSE were the worst.
There was even some name calling.

Selfish.
I’ve been called that many times in my life.
It’s code for: why aren’t you doing what I’m doing?
It has been hurled my way in anger, hitting me like a dagger in the back.
It has happened so many times, I have a large callous there—these days the dagger just bounces off.

Is it selfish not to have children? Probably. Can selfish be a good thing? Yes, yes it can.

Call it what you want. I just knew I wasn’t wired for that level of self-sacrifice, and my unborn children are better off because of that.

Up until then, my life had not been premeditated in any way. It had all happened like a series of accidental decisions if there’s such a thing. Eventually, I recognized that I had actually made a conscious choice. I had decided “my supreme and risky fate”.

I didn’t need to hide in a cave or skulk away ashamed with my decision. Then, and only then, did the name calling stop.
Isn’t that always the way?

Now I’m over fifty, and the question is: How many grandchildren do you have?

What I know for sure is this: I’m so incredibly grateful to be born at a time in history when we’re not put in stockades in the town square, with villagers throwing eggs at our childless faces.
We decided it wasn’t for us…and that’s okay.

Luckily, times have changed since I was young and women are so much more accepting and supportive of different life choices. These days I feel anything but ostracized, some woman actually applaud my decision.

Childless women.
As Liz Gilbert and Oprah mentioned about on Sunday, we get to be the spectacular aunties.
Mama’s need the aunties.
We play a very important supporting role, we get to teach the children selfishness—which is thankfully something most mamas know NOTHING about.

Tell me about you. I’d love to hear YOUR story. Did you decide not to have children?

much love,
xox

Last Friday, after braving a harried curbside check-in and the usual TSA shenanigans at LAX on my way to Chicago, I did what I always do when I fly.

I indulged in two of my guilty pleasures. The ones I use to take the sting out of air travel. I stopped by the airport newsstand to buy a candy bar and “the rags”.  You know, the gossip magazines. I get so engrossed reading that shit that I barely notice the bumpy take-off or that bitchy flight attendant who always has to wedge my purse into the overhead compartment at the last-minute with the hysterics of a life and death emergency.

This trip was all Brangelina—all the time. And a Kit-Kat bar.

The dissolution of their marriage broken down into a precisely laid out timetable told in a he said—she said war-of-words—according to “inside sources”.

The day I heard of their breakup I gasped. It never occurred to me that they’d split. I had always imagined that their hot sex could help them to overcome any obstacles. Yes, Margret, I’m THAT naive.

The coverage was remarkable, and by remarkable I mean disgusting, even for “the rags.” One had the headline “I Had To Leave Him To Save The Children“ and was slanted blatantly in Angelina’s favor. It painted Brad as a drunken, pot smoking, child abuser who systematically berated the kids. You know, according to those inside sources.

THAT is a character assassinating bell that cannot be un-rung. I nearly choked on my Kit-Kat.

Another had the headline “Angelina—The Wife From Hell” where again sources painted the picture of a crazed. overindulged and neurotic woman with only the thinnest grasp on reality who tortured poor Brad with her wild mood swings.

I had to leave to it to People Magazine to be fair and balanced—the arbiter of civility (a sentence I never thought I’d write). They talked about the family, the kids and how sad everyone was about the divorce. It was a family after all. They had twelve years of pictures which showed the progression of the relationship, birth of the kids and various adoptions.

They all looked happy. Full of love. It made me sad.

Entertainment journalism…is not journalism by-the-way. And it’s barely entertaining. (Don’t get me wrong I love seeing the pictures of celebrities pumping their own gas or eating at In-N-Out.)

It is where the mean kids in high school get jobs after graduation until they get hired by TMZ. They make shit up to fill in the blanks of salacious breaking stories. They quote imaginary friends and sources. Ha! Some friends!

Everyone in LA is characteristically bored with the story of yet another relationship that’s hit the skids. “Oh, that’s out”, they yawn.

Is it me or is the world getting even more jaded?

Is it getting more cynical? Does anyone root for people to stay together? Are things getting meaner? Nastier?

Are friends standing in the shadows ready to rat us out at the flash of a handful of cash?

Is anything true? Is it all made up? Am I part of the problem because I buy that shit?

I think the answer to all of those questions might be yes. What do you think?

Carry on,
xox

I believe this with all my heart. Truth prevails.
Carry on,
xox