What about me???

Years ago, Sig Other and I were goofing around and talking about what we would name our fictitious future autobiographies.  “Simple,” said I, “yours would clearly be called ‘What About ME?’”  Sig Other laughed and agreed that no name could be more perfect.  And so it stuck.  Now, every time I don’t answer a phone call or email quickly enough or pay enough attention to every detail of Sig Other’s life, a cry will ring out across the internet or phone lines – the cry is a simple “What About Me???” 

So tonite, as I sat at dinner with a group of friends on a Friday eve as Sig Other was 3000 miles across the continent, I checked my emails and discovered a text that read, “What about me?”  That meant he was winding down his day or going to bed and couldn’t reach me.  That meant he felt abandoned. 

Sig Other loves attention.  Sig Other loves to be the center of the universe, and his universe is mostly me.  Sig Other is ridiculously generous, self aware, and flexible.  He is also vaguely narcissistic.  If Sig Other and I were asked to cast the movie based on the story of our lives, here’s what we’d do:  I would make a list of fabulous actresses who are in or nearing their 40s but look much younger thanks to plastic surgery and a series of injectibles.  After looking at women inappropriately attractive, I would cast the girl in the starring role who felt the most authentic to the essence of the woman I am.  Sig Other would cast himself.

If asked about my rockstar fantasy, I could go into great detail about the outfit I would wear were I to have sung backup for the Rolling Stones on the Bridges to Babylon tour or I’d wax poetic about the little black dress and pulled back hair I’d have sported to audition for the contemporary equivalent of the girls in the Robert Palmer video.  Sig Other would be lead vocals, songwriter and producer of his own eponymous band.

This is the fundamental difference between S.O. and myself.  S.O. walks down the street assuming that all eyes are on him.  I walk down the street and assume that even people who know me don’t see me.  Sig Other is the exotic butterfly yin to my camouflage yang.  And I like it that way.  I like the deflection.  I like that he is larger than life and over the top and outrageous.  And I like that only those very close to him know the gooey, sweet center on the inside of the hard candy shell. 

So when I get the insistent, demanding, plaintive text crying “What about me?” I simply smile and feel lucky and pick up the phone to call my sweet love.

What's wrong with this picture?

I had a fabulous date with my Best GF tonite.  Sig Other is out of town so BGF and I made some time to talk and laugh and catch up on our lives and I felt really great afterwards.  What’s weird is that it was a phone date.  What’s weirder is that we started our date talking about what we’d each had for dinner. 

Let me back up. 

I had a brutal day.  I got home at 8:30p and didn’t realize for almost an hour that I’d left the front door wide open as I’d rushed in from work to feed the dogs, call my boss, iChat with Sig Other (who is sick in bed in his New York hotel room) and open a mediocre bottle of red wine while making myself something to eat. 

Here’s what I had for dinner: an Annie Chun Noodle Bowl.  Reconstituted noodles with rock hard tofu squares and miso scallion broth.  Here’s what BGF had for dinner: a handful of chocolate malt balls.  Here’s why that’s just wrong: we’re both in our 40s, both successful business women with big fat salaries, full-time housekeepers and lives that most people would consider highly organized and ridiculously functional.  So how did we find ourselves in this situation?  How is it possible that my evening meal consisted of a bowl of salt water and hers a bowl of sugar? 

When I was a teenager, I imagined a future fantasy life very much like my current real life.  I would be successful, have a gorgeous home, a sexy Sig Other and beautiful dogs.  I guess what I didn’t fantasize about was what I’d have for dinner.  If I’d thought of it I would have imagined a private chef who would fill in on nights I wasn’t either out at the hottest restaurant or energetically whipping up my own five-course meal in my state of the art kitchen.   What I wouldn’t have imagined was a solo night at home with a phone glued to my ear and a bowlful of re-hydrated noodles in a plastic bowl on my lap.

I’m shocked at how ridiculously unglamorous my life is.    Shocked that people as highly organized and functional as me and BGF have not figured out a way to keep a refrigerator stocked with fresh, organic and healthy culinary delights.  But mostly I’m shocked that a mediocre bowl of brown salt water and a good thirty minutes on the phone can feel like one terrific night out.  Maybe I’ve got all the sustenance I need after all...

I knew this would happen.

Child One is growing up.  I knew this would happen.  The delight of her chubby girlhood was always meant to disappear down the inevitable but steady path to adulthood.  And so she marches, albeit awkwardly at times, toward the bright, funny, inquisitive, self-possessed, over-achieving young woman she is meant to be.  But I hate it.  I don’t hate who she is or will be.  I hate that she is no longer a little girl, no longer dependent and no longer around.  Last night I had a dream that she was taking an apartment in Santa Monica to be nearer school and that Ex-Wife had blessed the move.  I freaked out – isn’t she away from us enough, I shouted?  Between school and internships and studying and horses, isn’t she away all the time?  And we only get her for another year and a half before she leaves us entirely to go to college – a new adventure in a life that promises to be full of things I only dared dream about at her age. 

I read about abandoned children in Haiti and babies born with no hope for the future.  And as I turn the pages of the newspapers and magazines, irrational craziness pops into my head – I should go get one of those children, bring home a baby or two to take care of.  They need homes, they need love, they need food.  But what I’m really thinking is “I need them”.  I need them to replace the growing half-children in my own home.  Even Child Two is no longer a baby.  Every day, traces of Young Man creep in to replace the scared, funny little boy he used to be.  The new Young Man is confident and sensitive and daring and far more adult than an eleven year old boy should be.  He’s extraordinary really. 

If I spend more than two seconds thinking about it, I willingly come to the conclusion that the last thing I want is a baby or young child in the house .  Sig Other and I have little enough time with each other to begin with – we never had a honeymoon period – never got to be a young couple on our own.  It was always more important to both of us to integrate the children into our lives and so now that they are getting older and will be around less often, we should revel in time that we have to spend together.  And I can’t wait really.  I look forward to a romantic future as much as I mourn the family-ridden past.

But I miss the days of driving Child one around.  I miss the days of too many obligations and not enough “me” time.  And now that “me time” presents itself I don’t know what to do with it and wish that time was spent with the children doing children things.  So I will do what all parents of growing teenagers do – I will ask Child One out on a date – I will see if she can squeeze me in this weekend between homework and horses and friends.  And I will be grateful for whatever moment she can spare for me along the busy and frenetic and fabulous path she carves from sweet chubby girlhood to fabulous, intriguing and exotic adulthood.  Maybe just a trip to Starbucks or a jaunt out for frozen yogurt?  Please?

Invisible Me

I am invisible.  I am not seen when I walk down the street, not seen in the back of an elevator, not seen in a crowd. 

I remember very distinctly the moment that my invisibility became clear to me.  It was my 42^nd birthday and I was in Las Vegas with a group of friends.  We were camped in a cabana on the grown up side of the massive pool area (the other side was dominated by families frolicking in the wave machine and kicking up sand on the fake beach).  We ventured out for a dip, protected from the blazing sun with big floppy hats, and made our way gingerly toward a pool crowded with string bikinis and the hard, tanned bodies of the under 30 set.  There we stood, five of us, mostly in our forties and of varying shapes and sizes and realized how terribly self-conscious we were surrounded by hot-bodied vixens with perky boobs.  We marveled at this one’s tattoo and that one’s perfect ass and lost ourselves in self-critical nonsense until suddenly I realized the thing that has become the most liberating and also most crippling fact of my forties.  No one was making fun of our wrinkly faces or wobbly knees or soft bellies.  No one noticed our saggy boobs or cottage cheesy thighs or imperfect shapes.  No one noticed our imperfect shapes because no one was looking at us.  We were invisible.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a group of very attractive women, all in pretty good shape and mostly looking younger than our 40-something years.  But it seems that in general, being a middle-aged woman means being invisible.  I can't remember the last time I heard a whistle aimed in my direction or had a man flirt with me.  In part, my invisibility is self-perpetuated. I am married, and madly in love with my very handsome husband.  So I certainly don’t create opportunities for flirtation.  At work, I am aware of maintaining a professional air at all times.  And professional air flowing around a 43-year-old woman is not sexy.  In fact, I guess it’s so unsexy as to become a cloak of invisibility (and not in a cool superhero kind of way). 

But it isn’t just that I’m married and trying to maintain a professional façade.  In large part, it really is just my age.  I was at dinner the other night with three male colleagues and realized it was incredibly comfortable and easy and fun and in part that ease is due to my being a woman of a certain age.  I am not a girl to flirt with.  I am not some broad to get drunk and hit on.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not one of the boys.  I’m treated differently – my sex is acknowledged.  But I’m a dame – a woman of a certain age who commands a degree of respect.  And very often, I enjoy being a dame.  But truly deep down and dead honest, I miss being seen.   

Some people feel invisible as children.  Some when they are teenagers and some their whole lives.  I never really knew what it meant to feel that way until very recently.  To be clear, I don’t feel invisible at home.  Sig Other sees me as a woman, as a partner and as a sexual object.  And that should be all that matters.  But it isn’t.  There is still a part of me that wants to be visible not just to my husband. There is still a noisy, turbulent part of me that wants to turn heads, inspire a whistle, make a man smile.  The challenge of my 43^rd year is to find a way to quiet that part of me, to feel relevant, to feel visible, to still be a dame but also to be seen.

Come Fly With Me!

Years ago, I kept a journal specifically meant to document my cross-country travels.  I flew a lot in those days, bi-weekly trips between LA and New York.  I was Executive Platinum – on my way to becoming a million mile member.  And I loved it.  This was pre-9/11 and back then you could carry anything on (once I even bought an extra seat for my Golden Retriever and walked her right onto the plane).  American Airlines still served caviar on a tray with a fancy glass filled with dry ice.  And flying was a luxury, not a hassle.   

One of the reasons I kept my journal was not so much to document the actual flight time as to document the famous people on board.  It wasn’t an autograph book or notes for a memoir.  It was security blanket.  I had a theory.  And my theory was this: if you fly on a commercial airline with a truly famous person, you are likely to arrive safely at your destination.  Think about it.  How many commercial airliners crash with movie stars, politicians or rock stars on board?  NONE!  Those people, those truly fancy famous people only die on private aircraft!  So if there was a famous person on board, I felt safe.  And in those days, there was ALWAYS a famous person on board.   

There was, of course, the secondary game I played in my head when documenting my travels with the rich and famous: the Headline Game.  It’s the one where you write the mock article following the crash: “American Airlines Flight X goes down over Kansas: Famous Actor and some other folks including mid-level movie executive perish. “  If more than one celebrity was on board, the game became about top billing.  Goldie Hawn or Bryant Gumbel?  Gwyneth Paltrow or Johnny Cochran?  Jean Paul Gaultier or Cyndie Lauper?  I flew with rock stars and politicians and newscasters, famous athletes and fancy directors, and of course movie stars both famous and infamous.  And we never went down.   

So it was pure instinct that led me to rubberneck this evening as my plane took a dive shortly after takeoff.  The aircraft shuddered briefly and dropped nose down and before it had even a moment to level out, I shot forward and turned around in my seat to see who was in my cabin.  Nary a famous face in sight.  Damn!  After we leveled off, I took a second look, just to be sure.  In front of me (yes, I got up and walked through once the seat belt sign was off) was a nebbishy looking business man who’d already fallen asleep into his newspaper.  And behind me were a family of four – mum, dad and two darling little girls in matching pjs with princess crowns on their heads and dolls in their laps.  Just before takeoff I’d heard the steward talking to the littlest one who was wearing her headset and trying to turn her screen on.  He explained that tv couldn’t be watched until after takeoff and she replied, “But I always watch tv when we fly on our own plane.”  From that moment, I decided not to worry about how much those parents spent to buy their two tiny girls seats in first class on British Airways.   I also decided that those people must be rich enough that they were headline-worthy.  And I felt safe.

So now we’re en route– bouncing around due to the crazy turbulence of winter weather.  And soon you’ll be reading this post as testament to a safe arrival.  But I miss those days of pre-9/11 travel when pulling up to the terminal meant freedom and adventure and not hassle and a pat down.  I miss the days when everyone flew commercial and we spent our time spotting celebrities and not racial profiling.  I miss the days when I didn’t have to pretend the people behind me are famous just to feel safe.  

Oh God!

This month’s Vanity Fair features a bare-chested Tiger Woods, an article about the new Wall Street movie, and a profile on the history of Saturday Night Fever.   It also features an enormous amount of God content.  It isn’t an issue on religion, per se, though there is an article about the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  But that’s not really the thing that makes it God-laden .  I suppose I could make the argument that the shock of the Tiger Woods scandal is deeply routed in Judeo-Christian ethics and morals (thus tinging the article with an undercurrent of religiosity).  But really, it’s a different article that struck me as fraught with faith-based peril.  

Flip through the pages and you get to a picture of a man with a buzz cut and his face in his hands.  Accompanying that picture in an article concluding with a quote that is both thoroughly entertaining and utterly bone chilling.  It’s in the article on “Russ Crane” – a Special Forces sniper who did several tours of duty in the Middle East.  Crane talks about having God on his side.  He sites an instance in which he was ambushed on a road and he talks about seeing a shepherd on the horizon wearing a robe.  His arms were outstretched as if to call his flock to him.  It is a deeply biblical image. Crane believes this shepherd was sent by God to protect him in a battle in which he killed an unknown number of men presumed to be Taliban.  It is in this article that “Crane” is quoted as saying that when he gets to heaven to meet the Lord, he will have to ask: “Dude, you created all these beautiful places.  Wyoming, Montana, even Switzerland.  Dude, look around!  So tell me, why did you center the bible on the Middle East?”

The quote is entertaining in a way because it presumes that God is both autobiographer and author of a fiction that could just have easily been set on this continent as that one – it inherently posits that the Temple Mount could be in Los Angeles rather than Jerusalem.  It discounts the logic of the old Testament and the history of the new, though it is uttered by a man with deep fundamentalist faith.  And the quote is terrifying.  Because in the same article – in the same interview – Russ Crane also talks about killing people for a living. 

Russ says he believes that most people are good but that there are bad people and that God put people on earth to shoot those bad people.  There is no way for a thinking person to read this and not go back and read it again a few times.  Because inevitably, the logic of the statement would lead you to this: if it is the case that God puts good people on earth to get rid of the bad people, where did those bad people come from?  Did something or someone other than God put them here?  Did God only populate the earth with God-fearing “good” people?  And does that mean that bad people (or maybe Muslims or people who don’t believe in Jesus Christ as the Lord Our Saviour) come from somewhere or someone else?  Are they (or really “we” I suppose) the handiwork of the devil?  Or are we aliens, sent from another planet – the planet of bad non-believers?  Its an interesting dilemma really – the notion that God put people on earth to shoot bad people – the notion that we can use God to justify our actions rather than question a God who would put bad people on earth to BE shot in the first place.  But mostly it’s a reminder that interpretations of God can be used as justification for any behavior and may be more dangerous than the gun in Russ Crane’s hand.

 

Ready, aim, fire!

The List of Things We Care About.

One of the things I find most liberating about life after 40 is that the list of things I truly care about has gotten significantly shorter.   I care about my family.  I care about my closest friends.  And I care about living an ethical life.  But the rest of the stuff – that stuff I cared about in my 20s and 30s – that stuff just isn’t as important to me anymore.  Like the latest handbag from Gucci or Fendi or Lanvin or Prada, or whether to wear skinny or flared this season.  I don’t have the latest and greatest in fashion anymore.  My taste has changed.  But more important, my priorities have changed.  I have kids now.  And a husband and dogs.  The days of spending my weekends shopping and getting treatments are gone.  Those were the days of “me”.  And now I have a future.  And a “we”.  And it isn’t just that I’m being “good” or cautious.  It is that I truly care less about these things. 

So here we are at the start of a new year.  I’m in a far away city in a fluffy bed with too many pillows and no husband and so my sleep is limited and my mind drifts to things far too sentimental.  In acknowledgment of those things, here is my list of the shit that matters:

·        

It    * It matters most to me that I’m a good wife.
             *   It matters deeply that I’m a good step – that I take the time to figure out who those little aliens           living in my house are and that I help them through life to the best of my ability.

·           * It matters that I’m a good friend.

·           * It matters that I’m good at my job and that, in a ruthless business, I do my job in as ethical and kind a manner as possible. 

·          *  It matters that I live an honest life.

·           * It matters that I create a world in which those I love are surrounded by interesting conversation and good food. 

·          * It matters that my dogs are well- loved and that the vermin in the canyon stay outside. 

·          * It matters that I never lose sight of the value of an excellent piece of chocolate. 

When I really think about it – when I have a quiet moment and can calm the spinny voices that scream and shout for attention and acknowledgement and new shoes and a better handbag and more power and fancier invites  - when I step back and acknowledge that those voices are not really what matters – not really what brings me happiness – when I really think about it, the short short list of my 40s is manageable and easily accomplished and sometimes just boils down to the right piece of cake for dessert.