this woman’s work

Maybe it’s the caffeine. I’m doing this because everyone else is doing it and I liked reading ‘em so much. So here it goes.

100 Things About Me by Dawn L. Friedman

1. My middle name is Leslie.
2. I hate my middle name.
3. My son just woke up and is in my lap.
4. I picked my husband up in a bar.
5. I had to drive him home because he was too drunk to find his car.
6. It’s a good thing he was a practicing alcoholic when we met or I might not have found him attractive.
7. My taste in men was always problematic.
8. Brett has been sober now for 12 years this month.
9. We have been together for 12 1/2 years.
10. Our anniversary is April Fool’s Day.
11. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was about 4.
12. I think I officially am a writer now.
13. I thought I would have my first book published by the time I was 16.
14. I was 16 sixteen years ago.
15. I am an INFP but everyone thinks I’m an extrovert.
16. My husband is an ENFJ but everyone thinks he is an introvert.
17. I’m great at public speaking.
18. I love teaching and facilitating groups because I like to be the boss of everybody.
19. And I’m a ham.
20. When I was 12, I wanted to audition for the movie Annie at the open casting call in Cleveland. My mom said no but my best friend got to and I was very bitter. I still give my mom a hard time about this.
21. I always hated Aileen Quinn for getting the part that was meant for me.
22. In truth, I have no musical talent.
23. This does not stop me from singing loudly. Often.
24. Noah sometimes asks me to stop singing so he can hear the real song.
25. Fortunately, he does still occasionally ask me to sing him lullabyes.
26. And I always sing when I push him on the tire swing.
27. I know the lyrics to dozens of Disney songs, which impresses many of the other children at the park.
28. Brett thinks I’m a good singer.
29. I always figured I would have children with my second husband.
30. I used to think divorce happened to you; like the flu.
31. I had to go to therapy to figure out that there is choice involved.
32. I’ve been threatened with libel. Twice. Both times by the same person. Most recently it happened as I was writing this.
33. Sometimes I wish I was a lawyer.
34. I’m a binge reader.
35. My sister and I sometimes forget if things happened to us or if they only happened in books we’ve read. We have to check with each other when we get confused.
36. My sister and I lost our virginity on the same day. This was not a planned thing.
37. I have never had an accidental pregnancy; this is a hidden benefit of infertility.
38. My fantasy is having an accidental pregnancy.
39. I want to be like Madonna and not figure it out until I’m 4 months gone, thereby skipping the whole first trimester.
40. I also want to have a long chat with Madonna about her failure to be a good role model for bulemic little girls everywhere.
41. I liked Madonna’s looks better in her “Lucky Star” era but I like her music better now.
42. I have a love/hate relationship with her, all up in my head, of course seeing as how we’ve never met.
43. Sometimes I really miss working.
44. I hope I never have a real job again.
45. There are times that I wish I would have started having kids earlier since I have been more fertile in my early-20s but other times I wish I would have started later and had more money.
46. I worry about money a lot.
47. Brett handles the finances because I am so neurotic about money.
48. I feel very little wife-y when I have to call Brett to ask him if I can grocery shop.
49. Despite not having financial control, I still have most of the power in the relationship because Brett really doesn’t care much about power.
50. I am fiercely ambitious.
51. I am a pretty conservative about a lot of things.
52. I’m a classic Capricorn.
53. A psychic told me that in the late 1800s I was a rich, childless, intellectual woman who held salons. He also told me that before that I was a peasant woman with many children. He said that I found both lives pretty satisfying.
54. I believe him.
55. I don’t really like to travel and feel obscurely guilty about this.
56. I think I’m a good mother.
57. I think I could be a better mother.
58. I have alcohol maybe once a year because I don’t really like to drink.
59. Infertility has made me confront a lot of my body issues.
60. I feel grateful that if I had to go through infertility, I got to go through it partnered with Brett.
61. I think I’m pretty brave.
62. I think I’m pretty selfish.
63. I used to think that everybody else in the world were people I’d made up.
64. I was very caught up in how other people’s lives impacted mine.
65. I still struggle with this self-centered point of view.
66. However this point of view makes writing easier.
67. I had writer’s block for 5 years and thought I’d never write again.
68. This was when I’d met Brett and I blamed it on happiness.
69. I do think happiness had something to do with it and my writerly orientation certainly has changed.
70. I read mostly women writers.
71. In the 1980s, I read mostly men.
72. In the 80s my favorite writer was Milan Kundera.
73. I still adore him although I find him very sexist.
74. I hated Stranger in a Strange Land because there’s a part where a woman tells the hero not to help her if he hears her crying rape.
75. I’m amazed that other women like that book.
76. I think we cut male artists a lot of slack. Too much. Mick Jagger comes to mind. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole but he was one.
77. I’ve been thinking about the artist thing lately because I’m writing that groupie article for Bitch.
78. I’m getting pretty tired of reading about unhappy women partnered with famous men.
79. Speaking of which, I used to quote Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” a lot. “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
80. I have issues with my father.
81. We stopped speaking for two years.
82. Thanks to much therapy, I’ve learned to accept him but I cry about it a lot.
83. Sometimes I wish I had a daughter so I could see what a good father/daughter relationship is like.
84. Sometimes I hope I don’t have a daughter because I’m afraid of doing a poor job helping her accept her body.
85. I think the world is unsafe for little boys and little girls.
86. The Dar Williams song “When I was a Boy” makes me cry every time.
87. Having a son and loving Brett made me appreciate how sexism fucks us all up.
88. I was in labor with Noah for about 36 hours.
89. I still get upset when I think about his birth story.
90. When I was a kid, I thought my stuffed animals were alive. I saw them move.
91. This is one reason they had me skip fourth grade.
92. I was a complete geek until 10th grade when I became a punk rocker. This is true of most punk rockers.
93. I think strife is character building.
94. I want Noah to have character but I don’t want him to be unhappy. This is a dilemma.
95. Noah is a lot like me and we lock horns daily.
96. I often feel bad that Brett is so out-numbered.
97. We do a lot of yelling around here. We do a lot of laughing, too.
98. My mother once told me that I owed it to Brett to go on anti-depressants.
99. I have never been on anti-depressants; Brett doesn’t seem to mind.
100. Moodiness and infertility notwithstanding, I usually feel pretty content.

Possibly related posts

• May 2002 (0)
• June 2002 (0)
• January 2002 (0)
• House break (0)
• When blogads make me smile (1)