Claudia commented on the last post about ambivalence and what a hard thing it is to understand let alone live with. And it was making me think about how maybe I knew that word but I didn’t know that word until I was seventeen. Like a lot of voracious teen readers, my vocabulary was impressive but sometimes off. There were words I could define but couldn’t pronounce (still are) and words I knew in context but not out in the natural world, like ambivalent.

I was seventeen and in love. I was madly in love. This was after Joaquin (who I’ve written about plenty) and this was the guy who I thought could maybe wrench Joaquin free from my heart and save me from myself (because I wasn’t yet in therapy so I didn’t know that the only person who could do those two things was ME).

This guy, I know facts about him but not much else. I never really knew him because I was too busy being in love with my idea of him. We were both writers and he was actually good and thought I was good so that was something. He was quite a bit older than I was (6.5 years, which is a lot when you’re 17), had a real job with a desk and everything as well as his own apartment. Me, I was living with my mom; I still had a curfew when we first started dating.

Anyway, to my mind he was brilliant and romantically tortured and way better read than I was. He was also the lived out results of my Electra complex seeing as how he was short and stocky like my dad (although blond where my dad is dark) and charmingly bitter yet personable, also like my dad. I’ve written this before because it’s the most telling — his favorite author was Edgar Rice Burroughs and he had a first edition Hemingway while my dad has a huge collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs first editions and I have since inherited his beloved and beautifully tacky collection of cheap paperback Hemingway novels from back when you could buy them at a dime store.

Ok so it’s embarrassing to admit but basically I fell in love with my dad. What can I say — I hadn’t had therapy yet!!!*

So I was in love, like stupid in love, like head over heels in love. I was an insufferable infatuated 17-year old (actually I was 16 when we first started dating but he broke up with me for awhile and then we got back together). While the target of my overwhelming affection was screwed up enough to fall in love with a depressed and barely post-pubescent woman, he was on the edge of getting healthy enough to realize that this was altogether a Bad Idea, which is how I learned the word “ambivalent.” He would frequently tell me that he was ambivalent about loving me.

Sadly, there is nothing more exciting for a teenager with a Daddy-complex who is still two years away from getting a good counselor than to hear that the great romance of her life (or at least the second great romance of her life) is in jeopardy. So I did what any love-sick girl would do; I doubled my efforts. Did I say I was infatuated? Please. Obsessed? I was twelve stages past obsessed. Naturally I was doomed for a broken heart.

By acknowledging my own culpability in the inevitable demise of our relationship I don’t mean to let this guy totally off the hook because — hello — the guy was dating some years below his peer group. Also before he broke up with me for the second time, he arranged for us to drive several states over for a trip and it was only some years afterward that I realized that if I hadn’t had my tidy little Datsun 310 (or if he’d had his own vehicle) that we would’ve broken up an awful lot earlier. That is to say that not only was he contributing to the delinquency of a minor, he was also using her for her car.

Anyway. Ambivalent. So he kept telling me that he felt ambivalent about loving me and I finally said, “What does that mean?” And he said, “It means that I both want to love you and don’t want to love you.” Like it was a choice while any (in)sane teenage girl could have told him that LOVE was something the universe fated when it signed my beloved’s name upon my heart and so set the stars in motion for us to love each other forever and ever amen until we died still clasped in an embrace that no man (or that slutty girl who is always eying you when we go out dancing, don’t TELL ME that you don’t see her!) could put asunder.

Listen, at that time I would have thought the new Eminem/Rhianna duet was romantic. I was screwed up, people.

Then one day I rode my bike to his house and he was sitting on the front stoop and he announced that he was no longer in love with me. And I rode my little self home, shakily I am sure, and that was the end of it. Except for my continued semi-obsessive, semi-annual phone calls.

He moved in with an older woman a year or so later (and eventually married her) and I met Brett (and eventually married him).

And that, my dearest blog friends, is how I learned what ambivalent meant.

* This ex of mine is now a successful sci fi author and his first book was basically an homage to Tarzan. His recent series is one that I’m positive my dad would LOVE so maybe I should give it to him for Christmas but this somehow seems a little icky, eh?

You know how some kids think the olden days actually happened in black and white? Well, here’s proof that it didn’t. Also an unsung Rosie the Riveter. Click to see all the pics in all of their glory. It’s worth it.

Feminism did not leave conservative Christian women behind. Conservative Christian women rejected feminism. This is not a trivial distinction.

Heres a story. My late dog, Lucille, hated bananas. But more than that, she hated my dads late dog, Guinness, getting anything edible that could be hers. So one day, my dad drops a banana chunk on the kitchen floor, and we both watch Lucille pick it up in her mouth, make a face, then drop it again. Guinness swoops in for the banana chunk, at which point Lucille immediately picks it up again — only to remember it grosses her out and drop it. But then Guinness moves in once more, so she growls and picks it up. Except… still gross. Drop. Swoop. Grab. Ew! Repeat. Comedy gold, as long as you had nothing invested in that banana chunk.

This is what I think of whenever I hear people talk about conservative Christian women “reclaiming” feminism, or blaming those mean and nasty “traditional” read: “actual” feminists for keeping them out. You don’t even want the fucking banana. But you’d rather turn it into a lump of mush that nobody wants than let anyone else have it.

via Jezebel

I’m pretty sure this is the last of these posts for now.

I’ve not always been honest with myself about Joaquin. It took me a long time to get over him — well, not him so much as the relationship. I get into these funks where I’m thinking on it hard (I’m in one now, obviously) and I used to think it was about him but now I know it’s me trying to figure out me. Why did I love him? Why couldn’t I stay away? What part of me was hurting then and is it still present now? And this time around I’m also wondering, how was I complicit?

In one version of the story of our relationsip’s demise (this is the version I worked over for years), Joaquin throws me over several times. First with someone who went to high school with us, then with a woman with my exact same first name thereby obliterating me. (Even now I occasionally meet someone who can’t quite place me and then it ends up they have me mixed up with her.) In this version of events, I am the victim. Sure, I’m jealous and clingy but he’s the one ripping me apart into teensie-weenie little pieces and then using my attachment (addiction) to him to keep me in his back pocket as a just-in-case. This is all true.

But the other version of the story is also true and it’s one I hadn’t thought on much that has to do with my culpability. So I was thinking about how he used to say that I loved him but I didn’t like him and thinking about how it took me a few years (full of slammed locker doors, hysterical phone calls on either side and heady reunions) to realize he was right. I thought then that he probably didn’t care but maybe he did. It’s probably not a whole lot of fun to realize your girlfriend doesn’t like you all that much.

I disapproved of a lot of his choices and I disagreed with a lot of his values but I was so insecure and so defensive that I couldn’t own this and instead I would try to tear him down the same way he tried to tear me down. Because I saw him as invincible, I never thought that I could really hurt him even though I wanted him to hurt because he hurt me. But while I’m the type of gal whose feelings get hurt if the wind blows too hard, Joaquin was made of tougher stuff and so I had to work a lot harder and I could get pretty freakin’ mean. I’ve forgiven him for being a jerk but (I realize as I type this) I need to forgive myself for my own jerkiness so that I won’t be so desperate to pretend it was all on him.

(There was a lot of unkindness in me during the five years between 15 and 20; I took all of my essential hurt and tried to spread it around.)

I tried to control him as much as he tried to control me (again, with far less success since he had oodles more self-confidence than I did). I remember once in particular that I tried to get him to quit his band and focus more on his painting and I couched it in concern about his art but the truth was I was just tired of his groupies. I mean, if you really love someone you don’t try to make them give up something that they love.

I don’t really know when we stopped loving each other but I always think that if I’d just gotten over it when he dumped me for the girl in our class, we could have remained fond of each other. But I couldn’t let him go. And I guess he couldn’t let me go because he didn’t for a long time.

I used to feel invisible with him but what did I want him to do to prove that he saw me? I felt hemmed in by my girlhood — it was certainly easier for him to be a boy in a band than it was for me to be a girl who wrote poetry — but that wasn’t his fault. I was jealous of his autonomy and the room the world gave him to step out of bounds. I’d get mad when he’d declaim on feminism and ignore what I was going through right in front of him. I had sex with him and it freed him; I guess I can’t really hold him responsible for not seeing how it locked me down. He was 16! Then 17! (The last time we slept together I want to say that I was 19 and he was 21 but honestly I’m just not sure.) We were young and dumb and locked in a pattern that wasn’t kind to either of us.

If we’d just let each other go earlier! If only we hadn’t raked each other over hot coals and trampled over any good feelings we might have had for each other!

THAT is my big Joaquin regret — that I wouldn’t let it go and instead helped throttle my first love into a wilted broken thing.

Ahh well. Youth. Ignorance.

(sigh)

And this really is the last of these posts for now. (I got off subject anyway.)

exerciseI am blurry on the details. Both my parents were home, which makes me think it may have been a weekend. (My dad traveled most weekdays.) Also it was summer. I know this because I was in my underwear and a t-shirt. We were not a walk-around-in-your-underwear kind of family (not like my kids who regularly streak down the hall in little else) and I remember feeling quite daring for wearing a t-shirt and underwear to bed like my friend said she did. So I know I was already feeling a little over-exposed. And it must have been evening since I was (un)dressed for bed but I’m not sure how old I was. I want to say ten, maybe. Maybe eleven. It was before the divorce (because my dad was there) so let’s say ten.

I can’t remember — did my parents call me downstairs? Or did I come down to tell them something on my own? I also don’t remember exactly what they said but I do remember their worried, compassionate wrinkled brows and their assurances that they loved me. And I remember something vague about my dad having been a fat kid and how he didn’t want me to suffer the way he’d suffered. (But this adds to my confusion — maybe my father wasn’t there. Maybe he left it to my mom to tell me and I remember him being there because I remember my mom saying this. Or maybe she said this after this initial confrontation. It’s all a blur.)

I know they told me I was putting on a little too much weight, that maybe I needed to watch it a little because I was getting, well, I was getting chubby.

This is what stays with me: The cold, cold shame freezing my stomach and making my vision turn wide then small. My awareness of my physical vulnerability in my t-shirt and underwear. My want to disappear, pull a blanket over me. And my shock because no one — NO ONE — ever told me I was fat. No one had ever said these words to me. So the irony is that my parents wanted to protect me from the cruelty of other children but the only people who had ever told me I was fat were my parents who were telling me now. And this is also what stays with me: that spinning, empty feeling around my limbs as I realized that I did not know myself or my body. That my legs and arms and tummy were no longer close and familiar but were enemies bent on fooling me. Where I had felt strong and pretty, I now knew I had been mistaken and then I realized I had been a fool walking around in the world feeling good about myself because it was a secret from me, the way that other people saw me. And that was the shame that has, frankly, never left me. And this is a shame that I still feel around my family more than I feel it around anyone else because they were the ones to tell me.

It sounds like I’m damning my parents and I’m not. My parents really were trying to be helpful. I believe their intentions were good and loving because the bulk of my experiences otherwise at that time in my childhood were good and loving and supportive and encouraging. So I forgive them for doing their best even though it ended up causing me harm. My father was a fat kid and he carried those scars. On the other hand, my mom was always a skinny, skinny kid and likely didn’t know what to make of her sturdy, stocky daughter. Perhaps I was getting too chubby although pictures I have of that time show only me at my most Dawnest self — neither big nor small. Plain, sturdy, short of limb and stern of face.

I do wonder though what they thought I would do as a ten or eleven year old. We already ate well because my mom controlled the food in our cupboards and on our dining room table. We had lots of fruits and veggies; we had few sweets or processed food. I was one of the few kids who never had Hostess cupcakes in my lunch and when we drank kool-aid, she made it with a fraction of the sugar. I rode my bike a lot, too, although truth be told, I was more of a bookworm. My body at that age (I say, gazing at the pictures) was simply a sturdy, stocky body and this I already knew. My best friend was younger and a full head taller with long, long legs and her tummy never curved out in her bathing suit. But that was how she looked and this was how I looked and it didn’t occur to me that one was better than the other until I heard it. Until my parents told me directly and until I overhead adults talking about Annie’s body and how they envied her her legs, shaking their heads in rueful admiration.

What happened after this momentous day is that I quit walking like I was the person inhabiting my limbs. I felt self-conscious as I moved through space. I doubted the me I saw in the mirror and no longer trusted my ability to know what I looked like. I began to look at other people with suspicion and self-consciousness. In short, I became less likely to want to run or ride or dance or be active anyplace people might see. Which is obviously what my parents were trying to avoid. And this has never left me. Nor has the feeling of powerlessness over my body, this sense that it will do what it wants and I am disconnected — body separate from soul. This is a disconnect that feels like I am a poorly dubbed movie with a body that will not co-operate with my thoughts.

I think about this so much lately because I am now a mother to a sturdy, stocky daughter and I feel like high-kicking the world under its collective chin when I think of anyone — ANYONE — visiting any of this on her. I know she is beautiful like I knew I was beautiful. Because looking back, I can see that my parents were wrong. They were wrong to tell me and they were wrong in their assumptions in the first place because I wasn’t fat. I was lovely. And strong and sturdy and exactly how I was meant to be. I know this because my mom fed me well and I rode my bike and ran around the neighborhood and so the body I carried was the perfect body for me. But I can’t get back to that place and so I’m deathly afraid that someone with the best intentions will steal Madison’s sense of self.

So I will tell you now: My daughter is perfect. And so is my son. They are exactly who they are meant to be. They own the ground they walk over. They own the air they move through. They are grace even when they stumble. They are strong and free and masters of their beings. Their bodies will change — filling and stretching — and the change will be perfect even during those awkward times when their knees don’t seem to work right and their elbows knock into things. I feed them well, they run around — they are nourished and active and so I won’t let anyone else’s worries come to visit them.

When we talk about health, we don’t talk about weight. When we say “diet” we mean “food you put in your body.” We mean vitamins and minerals and diversity in your menu. We get off the elliptical trainer or back home from a walk or a run and say, “Wow, that really helped my stress levels! That made me feel strong! I’m going to sleep well tonight!” Because that’s the equation that will build the bodies they are meant to have and those bodies may be slim or round. They may be heavier or lighter or taller or shorter but they will be perfect and my children will never ever ever (god willing) have to lose ownership the way I did when I was ten.

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