The woman sitting in her car

I read something once, one of those scare-tastic articles about protecting yourself against assault, that tells women all the things they do wrong. You've read them. You've probably read too many. They piss me off at this point, and are one of the reasons my window coverings are semi-transparent and I always have headphones in while I walk, unescorted, at night, wearing skirts. I hate anti-rape advice. MEN ARE ANIMALS ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES.

Anyway.

One article talked about women sitting in their cars.

"Take a look around a parking lot," it declared. "Men park, get out of their cars, and walk away. They walk purposefully and directly to their cars, then immediately drive away. Women sit in their cars, balancing checkbooks, putting on lipstick. This makes them targets."

When I read this, at 23 or whatever, I thought, "Shit. I don't do that. How stupid. Women are dumb."

I'm 38 now. I park 1/3 of a mile from my apartment, in a structure. I commute 30 minutes each way on the freeway. I get home, many nights, after work bs and commute bs and downtown traffic and navigating the crazies flying full throttle around the sharp corners of the structure, to park in a different spot every night. I turn off the car, and I'm tired. Cars are a crappy video game I hate playing. And then there is the video game of lugging all my stuff home through the undergrads. I need a few minutes to check my armor. It's heavy, and dented. I sit in my car and look at Facebook.

And I think about being a target. GO GO GO. Always keep moving. Don't sit still. Don't relax.

And my 30something mantra rears its head. Fuck you.

My sister told me about the Fuck You stage. I thought I was there already, years ago. But it keeps getting stronger every year. My Fuck Youishness. 

Fuck being a target. Fuck making other people comfortable. Fuck being on guard all the time. Fuck you.

I had this couples therapy session once and the therapist asked me what I most wanted to say to my partner and my answer was "I want to tell him, 'Fuck you.'" I think the therapist was shocked. Maybe my partner too. I know I was. It's not nice to tell someone you love to fuck off. I'm not the "fuck you" kind of person. That's my sister. My brother. Not me. I'm nice. I make people happy. I smile & try to make people laugh & like me.

When I heard my sister talk about the 35-ish disease of the fuck-yous, I translated it to mean I would be more confident, less concerned about the opinions of others, more able to chart my own course. I thought I was already there in my early 30s. I was confident. I knew who I was, I knew or was learning what I wanted. I wasn't afraid to ask for what I needed.

But the fuck-yous turned out to be different. They are, at least for me, about distancing myself from the emotional needs of others. They are my own teenage phase, which I missed somewhere along the line. 

I don't care what you think.

I dare you.

Whatever.

So I sit in my car, and try to pull the emotional strength together to go back out in the world. To still be not-home, not-safe, not-vulnerable. I don't have the energy to spend so much of my day, 10-14 hours, in armor. Armor is uncomfortable. 

And I think about women, my sisters. How much time we spend pleasing or being pleasant. How much time we spend being bled. How tired we are. Is it any wonder we want to be in the bathroom, in the parked car? I don't want to have anyone call my name, or touch me wanting something, or ask me anything. 

I think about the scene from Jesus Christ Superstar, where he pleads with the crowd to leave him alone. My nightmare about teaching. I can feel the panic rise sometimes. Stop. Stop.

But it's more than just the kids. It's the commute, and the neighbors, and the drivers running me over. The politics. It's that sometimes I need a safe space where I am right now, because I just can't go any farther without a timeout. If you try to give me a hard time about it, I've got two words for you.

I'm going to watch the sunset from my parked car. I'm going to actively unclench my jaw. I'm not going to read your bullshit article that wants me to be afraid. I'm the woman you see sitting in her car. Not ignorant. But learning to measure herself.

Super Mario?

Isn't there some cartoon character, comic hero, video game avatar that pulls power from the ground? I have a memory, foggy and indistinct, like an image I glanced at without much thought, but recurring and recurring like something deeply familiar. The image swims up to the front of my consciousness about once a month, bringing with it a sense of invincible power, a burst of tireless energy and optimism. My soldier soul, one of the many casualties of artificially regulated hormones. 

Touch the ground. Crouch down. Scrunch like Mario charging up, kneel like a sprinter finding your mark, one palm against the earth. Draw your power. Consider your trajectory. Prepare. To launch.

Go.

The persistence of romance

I was in a philosophy class once, Philosophy of Sex. We were talking about the feeling of being in love, the way it consumes you, the way it doesn't last. I said something about how it is good that it doesn't last, because it wasn't real life. I was married at the time, had been married for years, was at the point where I'd given up waiting for my husband to lead, given up being a good wife who nurtures his ego and had instead marched back to school and found the quickest path to a degree and a middle-class job so I could stop crying over my taxes. I loved him, but he was a child for whom I had decided to care, no longer did he impress or thrill me. There were lots of romance-killing emotions in our relationship by that time - my pity for him, a bit of shame, a sense that I was more powerful than him.  I still saw the marriage lasting at that point, I still shared everything with him, came home from school and teased out all the intellectual discussions with him, talking for hours, analyzing everything, sharing my reading assignments and pulling his viewpoints into my own, carrying them back as pollen on my legs to my classes, where my instructors wondered in comments scrawled across my papers about whether they should be giving him a grade.
My philosophy professor smiled, asked me to explain. I thought back to when I was in love, really consumed by my husband. I thought about how nothing else mattered, how school and making money and talking to other people were exhausting chores. You can't live like that, I said. We'd starve to death.
Even as I said it, some little voice inside my heart, young and idealistic, was gagging at myself. Are you 85 years old?? What is more important than pleasure, intimacy, joy? Who gives a crap about getting anything done? Think of pre-contact Polynesians, eating fruit and having sex and laughing and totally unprepared for getting-shit-done Europeans to show up - do you really want to argue that that's NOT your ideal?
But there was another part of me that did feel very righteous for my "getting shit done" attitude - plowing through my degree requirements, summa cum laude, thank you very much, working full time, check check check. No time for being in love. That leads to weeping over the taxes.
After the divorce, there was a while when I thought that I'd just have to keep rotating partners so that I'd always have some new prospect of "in-love"ness on the horizon. The romance only lasts a few years, so keep 'em coming.
I started to notice that after a while, almost without thinking about it, I would take a new romance and start trying to mold it into Something Traditional. Something Responsible. Without really considering whether I wanted Responsible. And then I'd get bored, and miss my romance, and start looking for excitement. And the personal growth that comes from me reconnecting with my messy emotional self.
I don't know if I want Responsible. I don't know what I have, if it has Responsible potential. I still have lots of freakouts, about Expectations and The Future and Worst Case Scenarios and Someday I Will Be Old and lots of other fun channels with similar names.
I'm beginning to think that part of what kills romance for me is a sense of having conquered. Being more powerful. And yet somehow at the same time also, surrendering. Not the scary deep bits, but the parts I like, the messy emotions. Halting my growth. Setting up, settling down, leaving the road. Ceasing exploration. Getting shit done instead of figuring shit out.
I've told him before that one of the parts I most love about him is his strength, the way he pulls against me. He says he knows what I mean, though I do fear that he interprets it as "Don't make a commitment" or "Don't ever give in to me or show weakness." He smiled and said, "I got it." I hope so.
Because it is different. It is how he is always himself, how well he knows himself, how he is always internally consistent, how I can pull against him to find my way and trust that the line is always going to be taut. He changes, he adapts, he listens. But he doesn't give up, let go of the line. He doesn't accept everything I say - he makes me prove it. It enrages me, because it makes me vulnerable. I can't just blow smoke at him. He demands my best work. It forces me to know myself better, to go back to my core, to stop taking the easy way through.
Learning, learning. The growth is a good place for me. Ask me about the status of my relationship and what can I say? It doesn't fit into the categories I thought I knew. Laura said that relationships made of two whole individuals will always look strange from the outside, because we aren't trained to see the union of whole people as romantic, because individual growth can seem "bad" for a relationship, because we value self-sacrifice, togetherness, advancing lockstep at the same pace. Because if you are individuals, you'll be independent, apart, and yet if your relationship is healthy you will also have a persistent intimacy - which must surely confound observers trying to determine if you are either estranged or a storybook.  It confounds me. This isn't how it is supposed to be, I thought. Am I being lazy, or fearful, that I don't feel like doing anything to fix it? That I'm not taking charge and commanding my battlefield?
I know I really like myself a lot more than I ever have, and I know I'm having a hard time getting shit done, though its not always because I'm with him but also because I'm exploring alone. Sometimes the fruit knocks me on the head, and sometimes it falls right into my hand. But if I can make peace with my fear of invading conquistadors, I am standing where I wanted to be. Or rather, lounging.