I confess: my expectations of girls and women are
conflicting. Over the last few weeks, I
paused to consider the expectations I was imposing and bitching about,
scratching my head about, allowing myself to become depressed over, and – of course
– the expectations I was setting myself up for. I have more confessions. Maybe this can be a “Name That Conflict”
kind of game, for I am trying to answer for myself how these things fit
together (or not). I see potential problems – maybe your experiences are
similar? – but, in this world and as a strong woman hoping for a professional
career, I’m not sure how to move myself around them. For now, there may be
lines to be drawn . . .
. . . in football?
1.
At the bus stop just outside my apartment, I
stood staring up at a pair of billboard-sized, posterized cheerleaders as they
hovered above the Sullivan KinderCare, flaunting their cleavage and belly
buttons for the Arena Football League, the “SpokaneShock” Games. The text on
the board read in big orange letters: “MORE THAN just a game.” And I thought to
myself, “Now what the hell does THAT mean? Are they offering something beyond the
usual football cheerleading like End Zone pole dancing?” Then a bus appeared
with an ad for
Busty’s Top Espresso plastered across its broad side. There,
larger life, rolled up two more sets of women’s perky knockers in push-up bras,
i.e., bikini-clad baristas serving Spokane’s top coffee. I made some snark
comment to no one, but then I let the bus wisp me away to the downtown bus
Plaza where I always feel overdressed – even a bit floozy – in the mornings in
my v-neck blouses (a more womanly attire?) and with my lipstick fresh.
2.
I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, but I went on a
mad search for Madonna’s NFL half-time show after the fact. I was a child of the
80’s, and by the early 90’s she was teaching me super-details about sex, and I
loved her for it. Her boob cones were fantastic. She has orgasms on the concert
stage, I liked to say as though I had actually bore witness. After I watched
the entirety of the her half-time show, I smiled for the World Peace thing at
the end, but then bitched that the show was surprisingly modest, as if Madonna
had somehow digressed. I said it was probably because she was now a mother or
maybe because she’s over 50, but I couldn’t talk myself out of being a little
pissed.
. . . in girl talk?
3.
We have new neighbors – a set of three young
girls in the apartment just above us. The three young girls have replaced a set
of three young boys who partied every weekend, having turned their bay window
into a fully stocked liquor cabinet. When the boys were here, they revved their
pick-up truck/tank every morning before daylight. Their partying friends liked
to steal our assigned car port. We dealt with the boys but not without griping –
once even mentioning the thumping bass to the management. But the girls, since they
had moved in, had been so stompy and loud and bass-thumpingly annoying that
they might as well have been doing the Dougie on our last nerve. Finally, they piled up in the
stairwell one night – a school night – near to midnight, laughing and squealing
and calling out to each other between the levels. They were stumbling over each
other, having a good ole’ time, keeping every last toddler awake in the building. It takes a lot for me
to work up the anger/courage to let someone REALLY know how I feel, but often
times I’m good to go once I have convinced myself it’s for a higher purpose. I
did it for the sleeping babies – including my own. I let them have it. I marched out into the
stairwell and told them there were people and children trying to sleep in the
building and then I told them they needed to shut the fuck up – five times. I surprised
myself. The cute red head responded with “Calm down, honey,” and I told her to
shut the fuck up again. She’s lucky I didn’t break her nose. My partner
practically grabbed me by my waist and pulled back in to our safe haven. He was
a little shocked . . . and scared. We argued over this a little, but he
insisted the boys were far worse than these girls had ever been, and I never
once attempted to let THEM know how I REALLY felt. He accused me of taking on
some “boys will be boys” level of tolerance that I wasn’t willing to extend to
the girls. He was right.
4.
Another true story: a few weeks ago, a drama
between two love-strewn high school girls via Facebook resulted in a flash mob
of teenagers anxious to view a predicted cat
fight at the Spokane Valley Mall (by
the Orange Julius, just beyond the dark breezes of the Hot Topic). A boy had
broken up with the younger girl to start dating the older girl (“Because what high
school freshman doesn’t want to date a sophomore?” I thought and then kicked
myself for it). Although much of this is the result of rumor (the result of having a daughter in a local high school and having a keen ear on the bus), it was said the boy was beside his new older girlfriend when older
girlfriend pulled out a knife and stabbed the younger old girlfriend in the thigh,
nicking her femoral artery. The younger old girlfriend, left a trail
of stark blood on the mall floor all the way to the bathrooms, and she might
have bled to death if not for the convenient appearance of an EMT and a surgeon
who happened to be around, browsing American Eagle and Radio Shack and gnawing
on Auntie’s Pretzels (Okay, either an EMT and a surgeon or highly trained mall staff). The older girlfriend and the boy disappeared, presumably to the Centennial
Trail as it is across the road from the mall; the trail follows the river and dips
under one badass railroad bridge (If I was a teenager of the valley I would so
hang out there every full moon). I heard (via high school kid gossip on Bus
Route 97) that older girlfriend threw the knife in the river and the two of them tried to skip town. Of course, it had to be a boy, I said to myself. He probably asked older girlfriend
to marry him afterward as they were running with dry blood on their shoes, and the girl saw cloud castles and rainbows through her tears. Stupid, stupid
girls. It’s just a stupid, stupid boy. But then if I was dumb enough to stab some chic and run, I sleep easy at night knowing I'm lucky enough to have a a lover/partner/husband who would be right there with me, running alongside, ready to truck it to Mexico, telling me when we get there, he'll find us a couple of Strawberry Daiquiris, and he has no qualms with changing his name. And what better lover could one ask for?
. . . on buses?
5.
I’ve been on the bus a lot lately, since my Looney
Tunes edition Venture minivan died and since I realized how idiotic it was to
keep driving (even after the Venture was replaced) back and forth to work,
wasting gas and spewing emissions, when a bus route
could get me there for free and with little worry. Last week, I rolled my eyes
at a set of loud girls who stood in the aisles of the crowded bus, pushing each
other around, laughing like second graders on sugar highs. They flipped around
their flat-ironed, dyed hair; they wore tight skinny jeans and thick make-up –
extra curly-Q mascara, and their eyebrows were plucked near to oblivion. They
took turns punching each other in their respective limbs and giggling and
snorting. They stood between impending conversations (as they were occurring across
aisles between myself and a colleague) without even noticing. Or maybe they
noticed and kept themselves in the same spot regardless. Surely they were
having fun. Surely they wanted all eyes on them. And that’s where mine were,
although I was far from impressed; rather, I was steaming and my nostrils were flaring. Because I didn’t want to scare my colleague
as I had scared my husband when I let the neighbor girls have it in the
stairwell, I said nothing. But then, had I caught myself thinking "Girls should know better" again?
6.
In the fall, I was on a Greyhound in the middle
of Kansas on a four-day trip from Spokane to Indiana for a family funeral. My
presence back in Indiana was absolutely necessary, but a bus trip cross-country
was all I could afford. I came to learn I wasn’t the only one on the bus taking
the cross-country route. I was sharing the same space with several of the same
faces I’d met up with, even joined coming from Seattle, at the Greyhound
Terminal in Spokane. Conversations were sporadic but always with purpose. Some
of us had grown to know each other quite well. Some of us had gone far to
illustrate our distinctive personalities. All of us were smelling bad and ready
to be out of Kansas. The bus driver told us the air conditioning had stopped
working not far outside of Salina, but we wouldn’t be able to change buses
until Kansas City. At some point – a stop post-Denver? – the bus had picked up
an older obnoxious woman in a tank top with lots of tattoos, who wouldn’t stop fidgeting
– standing up, sitting down – and also chatting with thin air. The man beside
me told me she was likely “missin’ her crystal.” When a few passengers started
telling her to sit down and shut the hell up, she became pissed and started
flipping us all off. She threatened us all with an ass-whoopin’, told us she
didn’t have to put up with our shit, started yelling at the bus driver to do
something because everyone was ganging up on her. A twenty-something girl who
seemed quite comfy in the bus setting had been among the first few who had spoken
out to her. The girl stood up where her seat was (as the bus trucked on down
the wide and super-flat interstate) and told the older woman to come a little
closer if she was going to be such a whiney ass bitch and the girl would see to
it that she shut her mouth. Sweat glistened on both of their foreheads. The
older women flinched as though she might pull up a fist, and it was enough to
send the twenty-something girl near-to crawling over the head of the passenger
seated between them in some fit of mad rage. A man jumped to his feet to hold
them apart while I sat shaking my head like I beheld greater self-control and wisdom.
The bus stopped and the older tattooed woman was handed a lecture (for
us all to see) from the bus driver who was indeed a firm woman who had been
quick to spout her rules when we first met (“If you are off smoking or eatin’
Subway and you aren’t back when I say I’m leavin’, I’ll leave your ass in
TheMiddleofNowhere, Kansas – Don’t test me.”). I confess: I had expected the
men at the back of the bus to start arguing about the pot smell coming out of
the bathroom first. I must have truly been delirious or an idiot. I came to learn that days on a Greyhound levels the playing
field in gender, class, and reasoning skills.
. . . for pretend or real?
7.
I didn’t
watch the Grammys because I don’t have cable. I did find a list of winners the
next day – Go Adele and Foo Fighters! But
what was with all the Chris Brown shit? And then there were the tweets. The
small-minded über-goofs of far too many naive girls calling out (as Brown’s
Grammy performance was rolling) hash-tagged comments to the online social networking
world like, “I’d let Chris Brown punch me in the eye any day.” Wink. Wink. I
confess: I hope they may never get a punch in the eye from a man who they think
loves them, but then a part of me thinks it might take something just like that
before they kick themselves for having ever made such an idiotic public claim.
Meanwhile, Brown will continue to get his shoes kissed like some R&B hero who
couldn’t help his manly rage (as sexy and encouraged as manly rage is). We’ve
been TAUGHT to raise a higher eyebrow at Rihanna.
8.
The only time I was ever homeless was when I was
hiding in a domestic violence shelter, seeking a divorce and doing all that was
in my power (which wasn’t much at all) to keep from losing custody of my three kids.
At the shelter, I had to keep my apartment up to par for daily inspections.
There was a curfew of 9PM and a locked gate. There were group therapy sessions
in the basement alongside the washer and dryer, and we cried to each other
while our children rolled around with a set of blocks on the cold concrete floor.
I stayed there in a tiny little apartment on the toughest side of Indianapolis
for almost six months while I endured court hearings and tried to keep my kids (and
myself) in the same school. Within that six month period, I drove down once to
my hometown (five hours south) and picked up my big sister just before her
husband was thrown in prison for running a meth lab (a business she had long
suspected but had tried to ignore). She showed me photos of herself she had
taken months ago when she had a black and blue face, swollen and broken to the
point of missing several days of work. She told me she took those pictures to
remind herself of how hideous things had gotten between the two of them. I
drove her up to Indianapolis with me – so she too could hide in the shelter
with me, even though her husband was going to be behind bars. We needed the
therapy. We needed the daily inspections. We needed the curfew, and we needed
the gate. If we knew nothing else, we knew that we needed those things, and
that we needed each other. When her husband got out of prison, she took him
back and not much changed. She didn’t see other options. She wanted to make him
better. I blamed myself for being the world’s worst sister, for preoccupying
myself with my schooling rather than giving her the friendship she needed. It
reminds me now of how I know there is a part of me who still blames my mother
for her crooked nose, having had it broken by my drunk father twice, early in
their 7-year marriage. And although divorced from him today, I can become angry
at her in a flash when she implies she may be regretful, being in love with him
still – if only a little.
finis. (Finally!) ;)
Anybody else got any conflicting expectations or confessions? Or did the world drop a make-believe egg on my head again?
