A Harry Chapin Song

I love it when we actually wake up on time and don't poke around too much that we get to walk to school.  I'm not a morning person, and Katie is the pokiest person on the planet, which means that often we're rushing around so much we end up having to drive.  But this morning the stars were aligned and somehow we got out the door with plenty of time to spare, so we enjoyed a morning stroll to Katie's school.

On the way we passed our neighbor's house.  Two kids wearing back packs were just then walking out their front door.  I smiled and waved at them.  They both smiled and waved back.

"Why do you always smile when you see a kid, Mommy?" Katie asked.

"Do I?  I dunno.  I just like kids." I squeezed Katie's hand.

"You always smile at every kid we see," Katie continued.

"Huh.  Yeah, kids are awesome.  I usually like kids more than I like grownups," I confided.

"Me too!  Grownups are always so work-work-work.  Kids are more like, play-play-play!" Katie said.

"Not all grownups are work-work-work," I argued.  "I don't think I'm like that."

"Yes you are!" Katie said, like duh, Mom.

"What?  No I'm not.  I'm tons of fun!" I knew I sounded defensive.

"You work all the time, Mommy!" Katie countered.

"I do not.  I only work twenty-four hours a week at the library," I said.

"And you write.  You write all the time, Mom.  I get Saturday and Sunday off school so I only have to work five days a week, but you write all the time so you work seven days a week!"

I didn't know what to say.  She's right.  I felt a combination of pride and guilt.  My kiddo thinks my self-indulgent blogging is actual work!  I'm so proud!  My kiddo thinks I work all the time.  She probably thinks I don't spend enough time with her.  I feel guilty.

"Would you like me to take a day off of writing so I can play with you mor--"

"Yes!" She interrupted before I completed my thought-out-loud.

It will be hard to take a day off, but she's right, I should.  I'm quite all-or-nothing with my writing.  If I don't keep up the momentum of daily writing I easily get side-tracked and lose interest in my writing project.  But my kid's only gonna be a kid for a short while.  I have my whole life to write.  I don't want our relationship to turn into a Harry Chapin song.

As we walked further Katie went on to tell me that she she doesn't want to be a writer when she grows up.

"I wanna be a drawer," she explained.

"I used to love to draw my stories too, when I was your age," I said.

"You did?" she said.  I was surprised at how surprised she sounded, but then I remembered she didn't know me as a kid.  She only knows me now.  She never knew the me who sat at the kitchen table for hours, drawing.  She only knows the me who sits in front of the laptop for hours, writing.

"Yeah, before I learned how to write stories, I drew them, just like you do." I squeezed her hand and she squeezed mine back.  "When I got older, like 12 or 13, I started writing my stories and then I quit drawing.  I kinda wish now that I had continued writing and drawing so I'd be good at both things now, but I felt more drawn to writing," I laughed at my pun.  Katie laughed too, though I doubt she got it.  Just as yawns are contagious, so is laughter, especially in kids.

"When I grow up I'm going to be a writer and a drawer because lots of books have pictures and words in them.  They're not all chapter books, you know," Katie announced.

"What happened to Katie's Fun Factory?  And the other day you said you wanted to get a PhD in art class.  And yesterday you said you wanted to be a librarian.  You know, you don't have to make up your mind what you want to do when you grow up for a long time, Sweetie," I said.

"Yeah," she said, ignoring my advice.  "I want to get a PhD in art class and in reading!  And the thing about Katie's Fun Factory is that I can do whatever I want.  People can come and eat dinner there and play games and sleep in the rooms and I can be in my office working on my work, like my painting or my book or whatever I want."

"I wanna work at Katie's Fun Factory, too," I said.

"You CAN, Mama!  It will be fun!"

By then we were in front of her school, so I leaned over and gave her a kiss.  The other day, when we were in the waiting room of the doctor's office I leaned over to kiss her and she pulled away.  For the first time ever.  When the nurse brought Katie to me on her first day of life, Katie wrapped tightly inside a blanket and cuddled against the nurse's neck, she said, "You have the snuggliest baby I've ever seen!"  And it's true.  Katie has always been a snuggle bug.

I've read child development books so I knew her pulling-away-from-a-kiss phase was long overdue, so it didn't hurt my feelings too much when she did it in the waiting room.  I figured she was nervous or something.  Later in the day, when we were at home and she kissed me on the cheek before going into the back yard to play, I held her wrist and said, "Hey, Punk.  How come you didn't feel like kissing earlier, at the doctor's?"

"I don't like kissing in public anymore," she announced and bounced out the back door.

So when Katie kissed me back, in front of her school, in front of her peers and all the other parents dropping their kids off, I relished the moment.

Swing Set Multiplication

We were at the playground after school.  A beautiful blue sky, warm breeze.  Sun felt great on my skin after such a long winter.  Katie was swinging and I was just hanging out, looking up at the sky.

"Hey, Mommy!  Two times three is six!" Katie announced as she hopped off the swing.

"Are you guys learning multiplication already?!" I asked.  I've been shocked at the rate they teach these first graders at Katie's public school.

"No," Katie replied.

"So who taught you that two times three is six?" I asked.

"No one.  I figured it out," Katie said, smiling.

"What?  What do you mean you figured it out?" I didn't believe her.  Someone must have been talking to her about multiplication, or she must have heard someone say "two times three is six" in some movie and she just memorized it or something.

But she was serious.  She pointed to the swings.  "See how there are three sets of two swings?  There's one set of two here, one set of two here, and one set of two here," she explained, pointing.

"Yes," I said, following along but not knowing where we were going.

"Well, if there are three sets of two, and there are six swings, then two times three is six," Katie reasoned.

"Oh my gosh, Katie, that's awesome.  We'll have to tell Daddy when we get home."

At the dinner table, Katie and I told Will what happened on the playground.  Will smiled wide, like he wasn't surprised at all.  Without saying another word, he started grilling her, "If two times three is six, what's two time four?"

Katie's eyeballs rolled upward like she was looking at her brain for an answer.  "Uh, two times four is eight."

"Right!" Will beamed.  "So what's two time five?"

"Um, two times five is, um, ten!" Katie shouted.

"Yes!  Ten!  You've got it, kid!" Will laughed.

We talked about getting her some workbooks to use this summer when school is out so she can explore her interest in math.  Then it occurred to me that if she can figure out multiplication from a swing set maybe the answer lies not inside a workbook but in getting this kid outside to play as often as possible.

Momblag: My Six-Year-Old Debate Champ

The alarm went off and I hit snooze.  Katie was lying in bed beside me.  Our dog Sawyer was lying on my feet and our dog Earl was lying on the floor on Katie's side of the bed.  Our cat Thatcher was curled up on Will's pillow next to me.  Will had already left for work.  The sun peaked through our dusty blinds.

The first thing out of Katie's mouth was not the standard "good morning," or "time to get up," or even a grumpy "grrrr".  Instead, she started the day with a question.

"Mom, why did black people used to have to drink from a different drinking fountain?"

I closed one eye as if it would help suck one more drop of sleep from the room.  With the other eye open, I looked out at the blue sky through a crooked slat in the blinds.  I wondered where she had heard about separate drinking fountains.  I used to be able to trace her thoughts back to the source with ease when it was just Will and me taking care of her, but now that she's in school and reading books on her own and playing with classmates with all kinds of knowledge of the world, there's no telling where she picked it up.

"Because our country has a long history of racism," I said before succumbing to an epic yawn.

"What's racism?" she immediately asked.

I didn't feel like getting into this discussion.  I felt like going back to sleep, and if I couldn't do that I felt like getting up and peeing and letting the dogs out and feeding the cat and both dogs and sticking a Morning Round into the toaster and pouring a glass of water for Katie and picking up last night's clothes from a pile on the floor and throwing them on so I could get this inquisitive child to school on time.  Also, how do you explain racism to a six-year-old?  At the same time, I'm honored she still comes to me with her questions about life and I know soon she'll be a teenager and know it all and my wisdom will seem less relevant, so I relish these inconveniently timed questions.

"It's when people are treated badly because of their skin color," I explained, rolling over to turn the alarm off.  No point in snoozing now.

"Like when black people were slaves?" she asked.

"Yes, exactly.  It was legal in our country a long time ago for white people to own black people and force them to work for them without pay.  And then we had a civil war and decided to make owning slaves illegal. But for a long time after that, black people, and other people who are not white, were still not often treated fairly or equally, like they were forced to drink out of separate drinking fountains from white people until our country passed laws saying that all people should be allowed to drink out of the same drinking fountain and go to the same schools and stuff."  I started to pull the covers off, assuming my speech would suffice and it was time to get up.

Katie lay still.  She wanted to talk some more.  "So why do boys and girls use different bathrooms?" she wanted to know.

I sighed.  I love my little philosopher.  It's too bad little things like getting to school on time ruin a good discussion.  "That's a good question," I said, stalling.

"If boys and girls are equal, how come we have to use separate bathrooms at school?" Katie asked, her hands behind her head on the pillow.  I smiled at her.  In a few more years maybe she'll join the debate team at her high school.  I can sit in the audience, beaming with pride, and watch her question the way things are.

"Well, in our culture we hide our private areas from people, especially from people of the opposite sex.  Men and boys cover their penises and women and girls cover their vulvas and breasts by wearing clothes.  But when we go to the bathroom, we have to remove our clothes.  So it just gives us a little more privacy to do it in a separate bathroom," I explained.  I inched my way over to the side of the bed and placed my feet on the floor, ready to rise.

Katie still didn't budge.  "But there are doors on the stalls, Mom," she argued.

I smiled and looked at the clock.  "Yes, you're right.  Maybe some day you'll be explaining to your child how it used to be when you were a kid that boys and girls used separate bathrooms."  I winked.  "But for now, it's time to get up and get ready for school," I said.

What I wanted to say is, "Watch out world, here she comes!" but I try to reserve my maternal braggings for my blog, a mom blog brag, a momblag, and not say them too often to Katie's face, lest the child's head get too big to fit out the door.

Pot Holders

In the late 1960s, before I was born, my mom received electroshock therapy, twice.  Once because she drank a beer after taking a Valium and it triggered her "nervous breakdown" and the second time because she found out her husband, the father of her four children ages eight and under, was cheating on her and that her marriage to the man she had known since she was fourteen was over, and her life, at the age of twenty-eight was surely over, and how could she get a good paying job to support her kids as a single mom since she decided to not go to college and become an architect after all and instead dropped her "hard" classes her senior year of high school to take cooking and sewing classes because she knew the one thing in life she was destined to be is a housewife and she would be the best wife and mother she could be.  What she forgot to factor into her life plan at age seventeen is that marriage is a partnership and no matter how hard you work, if your partner isn't participating, it's time to quit.  Before she came to this realization, during a fight with her husband in which she took off running down the street in her nightgown to get away from him, she was taken against her will to the hospital, given medicine to calm her down, and given a series of electroshock therapy treatments.

Needless to say, Mom is not a fan of psychiatry.  When I told her my sister Kit, my husband Will, my daughter Katie, and I were taking a trip to the Glore Psychiatric Museum, she asked me why on earth we'd want to go there.

"It'll be fun.  They have artifacts from the history of mental illness treatment.  It should be fascinating."

"I don't know why you've always been so interested in mental health issues," Mom said.

I raised my hand, palm up as if I were presenting evidence to the court, and moved my hand back and forth between us.  Mom's had electroshock therapy, something thankfully I've never experienced, but I've got her beat in the age of first treatment category.  I was only eleven when I was taken to my first shrink.  She was in her twenties.  

Mom pointed a finger to her chest and feigned ignorance.  "I don't know what you're talking about me.  I'm not crazy.  I'm perfectly fine."

"I don't think you're crazy, Mom.  But you do have quite the history of mental health treatment," I explained.

"That's not my fault," Mom argued.

"I never said it was," I assured her.  I dropped it because I didn't want mom to get defensive.  I have to accept the fact that she and I grew up in different eras of mental health treatment and acceptance by society. When she was young, seeing a psychiatrist and getting treatment for mental health issues was something to be ashamed of.  By the time I was a kid, First Lady Betty Ford was touting rehab for alcoholics, Woody Allen was making mainstream jokes about his long-term psychoanalysis, and people started sharing their mental health stories with Phil Donahue on daytime TV.  Society opened up its collective mind about mental health.  Getting treatment is no longer something to keep secret.

I understand why Mom likes to ignore her psychological past.  Denial shields her from the pain.  She prefers to sit in her comfy chair and watch "The View" and paint rocks and tables and chairs and canvasses, and crochet afghans, and sew quilts, and create all the "busy hands are happy hands"-type crafts she makes.  That shit drives me crazy.  Over the years Mom has tried putting needles and paint brushes and clay into my hands and I throw the stuff down after five minutes.  I don't like to make things with my hands.  I like to use my hands to write.  I wrote long-hand mostly when I was younger, but now I type.  Fingers flying across the keyboard as I pound out my thoughts and feelings and creative impulses.  Writing is my therapy as crafting is Mom's.

When I was a teenager and still lived at home, Mom and I would escape our hot house and my hot-tempered dad by sitting on the front porch in the evening, talking.  We mostly talked about our favorite TV shows, what had happened during the day, who was annoying us and what we wanted to do about it, but sometimes, if she was in the mood, I could get Mom to talk about what she remembers from her times in the hospital recovering from shock therapy.

She doesn't remember much.  Electroshock therapy is amnestic.  What she mostly remembers is sitting in the hospital bed keeping busy hands by making pot holders. The nurse would bring in a box, a kit, that had fabric strips and a plastic loom and instructions for how to weave the fabric in such a way that you end up making a useful item: a pot holder.  Something that keeps you from feeling pain.

I saw these kits when I toured the Glore Psychiatric Museum:

I'm glad I went to the museum and saw these artifacts from my mom's psychological past.  It helps me understand her better.  It reminds me to be thankful for how lucky I am to be a woman who lives in the time period I do, where I am encouraged to speak freely about my struggles and share my stories with the world.  That when I have temper tantrums and freaks outs and yelling and crying fits, I don't have to worry about being carted off by an ambulance to get shocked by so-called experts in the mental health care field.

My blog is my pot holder.  Although it doesn't keep me from feeling pain, in fact sometimes it temporarily intensifies it, I find that when I share my stories it helps me heal and the more I heal the less pain I feel from my injurious psychological past.  Writing doesn't cover up the pain.  It teaches me to endure it.

Dolls on Our Fur Couch

When I was a kid, my mom let my neighborhood friends and me leave our Barbies all over the living room floor.  Mom read lots of magazines and watched lots of talk shows on TV.  She'd heard that kids who are allowed to make messes grow up to be more creative.

I don't know if I'm more creative because my mom spoiled me or if I'd be just as creative as I am if my mom made me pick up after myself.  But I'm certainly a slob to this very day.  As a parent I find it difficult to scold Katie for making messes when I do too.  "Clean your bedroom!" sounds pretty hypocritical coming from a mother whose own bedroom is cluttered and dusty and prone to envelop important things that must not be lost.

Our Barbies were more than pretty playthings to my friends and me as kids.  They were the characters of the stories mapped out in our imaginations and realized in doll form.  Our Barbies lived lives similar to the soap operas playing in the background on TV.  Only instead of cheating and stealing our Barbies worked through struggles my friends and I faced each day.  It was fun to come home from school and act out one of the Barbies getting her first period, or one of the Barbies finding out her parents are getting divorced, or one of the Barbies who likes a boy who ignores her.  These stories meant a lot to my friends and me.  They were play therapy for us in ways grown ups sometimes don't understand or allow themselves to remember from their own childhood.

So when I stumble upon a scene of Katie's dolls, like this one below, it makes me smile and thank my mom for encouraging my storytelling.

Dolls on Our Fur Couch in the Living Room

BBW

"You should get a bikini," Will said to me yesterday after we looked at some porn together.

My belly hasn't seen the sun since I was our six-year-old daughter Katie's age.  I threw out my shorts in my late twenties when I saw a picture of what I at the time thought were my monstrous thighs.  When the OB on staff at the hospital where I had been in labor for nineteen hours said Katie was stuck and I needed to have a C-section, I laughed through my tears when she said, "the incision will be right below your bikini line" as if I planned on ever wearing a two-piece in public again.

Now I've got my husband whispering crazy notions into my ear and getting me thinking, Should I?

Apparently they do make plus-size bikinis.  Today on my Facebook news feed I found this photo, shared by ABC 7 Chicago:

Photo: Facebook

From ABC 7 Chicago's photo caption:

The average size of American women is 12-14.  Now clothing retailer H&M is making waves with their recent swimsuit ads featuring a plus-size model.  What do you think about the ad?  "Like" if you think it's refreshing to see an average sized swimsuit model!

Women's bodies of all sizes have been throughout history routinely scrutinized by society.  But it seems lately there's been an insurgence of so-called fat chicks all over the news.  Just a week ago I read this blog post about how CBS Houston had polled readers on whether or not Kelsey, a member of the Oklahoma City Thunder Girls cheer leading squad, is too fat to cheer:

Photo: BlogHer

It feels judgy for someone criticizing societal body scrutiny to say it, but puh-lease.  If these two women above are fat, I don't know what you'd call me.

That's why I appreciate this blog post by The Militant Baker, which she calls "Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls...So I Will."  She's fat.  She's hot.  She's confident.  She's in charge.

Maybe I just like it because I see myself in her.  She's reading.  And it's her own personal blog.  It's not something someone who gets paid to sell news posted on some mainstream site.  And it says affirming things such as this:

You are fucking beautiful. I'm saying this with a straight face and seriously meaningful look where I maintain eye contact for an uncomfortable amount of time. I know you don't feel like you fit into the category of gorgeous that our world creates. I know that its hard. I know that its a daily battle. But fuck their fascist beauty standards. The second you stop looking for a skinny model in your mirror and start looking at YOU... is the second you will start to appreciate what you are. Stop looking for flaws. Stop looking for differences. You are perfect. You are more than enough. You are the best thing that has ever happened to you. And you are fucking beautiful.

Affirmations help.  It's good to be reminded of your beauty.  Who'da known, though, that I'd find the porn my husband shares with me to be so self-esteem building?

Will tells me I'm beautiful all the time.  Until he shared some dirty pictures of fat chicks with me, though, I brushed off Will's comments.  He's too easy.  He loves everyone.  He thinks all women are hot.  He's the chef who thinks anyone can cook.  He's the singer who claims everyone can sing.  He's the handsome man who thinks all women are beautiful.

He's the guy who, early on in our dating life, took me to meet "one of the most beautiful people" he claimed to have ever met, a woman named Bobbi who lived in the Ozarks where she tended an organic garden and lived in a cabin with her hippie husband Mike.  Will had met this "beautiful person" at a bluegrass festival when they were camping neighbors.  He wanted me to meet her, so he drove me to their home one afternoon.

Will is a man of few words.  A friend of his said something about Will once that sums him up quite well: "You don't say much, but when you do say something it's important."  The important message Will had given me was that we were on a trip to meet his beautiful friend.  I filled in the blanks with my imagination.  My sad, socially-constructed idea of what it means to be beautiful.  So when we hopped out of the car and walked up to the front porch, I was surprised to receive a bear hug from this wrinkled, dirty, toothless old woman.  When she released me from our embrace, Will made the introductions.

"Becky, meet Bobbi.  Bobbi, Becky."

Oh, inner beauty, I thought to myself.  That's what Will was talking about all along.

But he wasn't.  Later, on the car ride home, when I mentioned to Will how sweet it was that he had touted his friend Bobbi as such a beauty queen when what he meant was she's a beautiful soul, he smiled at me the way he does when I say stupid things, a little pitifully, and said, "That's not what I meant.  I mean she's beautiful through and through.  Outside and in."

I didn't get it.  This twenty-one year old stud with long blond hair and piercing blue eyes thinks a fifty-something prune of an old lady is beautiful?  This one's a keeper, I thought to myself.

I've always been interested in the other women Will finds attractive, so sometimes I throw him a bone and look at naughty naked online photos with him.  I like the photo galleries better than the videos he's shown me.  I tend to appreciate my own imagination more than I do what the director wants to show me, so to me still photos are more erotic than videos.  Videos are too much for someone who has trouble getting her rocks of visually.

I'm not a big fan of most porn.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not one of those people who thinks porn should be censored or banned from adults in any way.  The People Vs. Larry Flynt is one of my favorite movies.  I'm a proponent of intellectual freedom and I understand one person's trash is another person's treasure.  I don't like porn because I'm not a visual person.  Erotica?  Yes, please.  I love reading sexy stories.  Watching people have sex just doesn't do it for me.  I find myself wincing and thinking things like, ugh, that's gonna itch when the hair starts to grow out.

So I'm picky about porn, but not opposed to it.  In fact, I'm surprised by how much better I feel about myself when I look at naked pictures of other women.  Will found one site in particular that has a subsection entitled BBW that has raised my awareness that not just health comes in all sizes but hotness comes in all sizes too.  Smokin' hot.  I'm serious.  I look at these pictures and I say to myself, Wow, if these chicks are hot, I must be hot too.

It's the weirdest thing.  Usually I feel worse about myself when I compare myself to others.  But when I look at pictures of naked Big Beautiful Women, I feel good about myself too.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't give a fuck what society says is hot.   For me, it's not whether you're fat or thin or really what your body looks like.  Confidence is sexy.  Flaunt it, and you've got it.

Sipping Hot Cocoa

I picked up Katie from school today in the car because it's snowing.  On May 2, 2013, in Overland Park, Kansas.  This freak weather occurrence meant that lots of kids got stuck walking home from school in the sleet/snow mix wearing nothing but a T shirt and jeans.  It was in the 80s yesterday and warm enough to fool you into thinking we might get a repeat in the weather when we headed out this morning. 

Katie and I drove by two kids who fit this description.  

She said aloud, "Oh.  Poor kids."

"Yeah.  I bet they're cold.  I wish I could pick them up and drive them home but I don't know them and kids are not allowed to take rides from grown ups they don't know," I said.

"I hope their moms or their dads make them hot cocoa when they get home," Katie said.

I didn't tell Katie that most likely their parents were at work.  I wasn't in the mood to explain to Katie the concept of latch key kids.  I felt sorry for those kids, but I also wanted to rush home to my own kid and my own cup of hot cocoa. 

I felt a tad selfishly sad at our good fortune: the decision Will and I made for me to work fewer paid hours away from home so I could spend more hours at home with our only daughter.  Our one chance.  She's growing up so fast, I'd hate to lose this time we have together.  We're broke, sure.  We can't afford the latest next big thing.  But we can hurry home after school and sip cocoa together, something a few extra hours at work just can't buy.

May 2nd Snow Anxiety

It's Snowing!  

On May 2, 2013.  In Overland Park, KS.  Freaking weird.  Everyone around me keeps saying, "You know how it is...Kansas weather."  But no.  I don't recall it ever snowing in May and I've lived within sixty miles of my current home for the last forty-two years.  Can anyone say climate change?

No matter how hot Jake Gyllenhaal is it's a bad idea for me to watch The Day After Tomorrow on a day like today.

Beyond Gender

These men in drag are hot.  According to BuzzFeed's report, "Kurdish men are dressing in women's clothing in response to the punishment given to a convicted man earlier this month. He was paraded down the streets of Marivan in a woman’s dress in order to humiliate him."  

Because looking like a woman is humiliating, evidently.

These Kurdish men are dressing in drag because they disagree.  They think there is no shame in dressing like a woman.  And it's not just men.  Women in drag are hot too!  A few Iranian women are dressing up as men to protest too.  Here are some of my favorite photos of these brave humanitarians.

From the neck up, these two look like they could be my aunt and uncle.  I'm some white chick living clear across the planet and yet there is a familiarity to these two people's kind faces:  

Photo source: Facebook

Then there's this guy.  He looks like someone I'd like to have coffee with and talk about all those books he's got on the shelves behind him:

Photo source: Facebook

This guy kinda looks like my husband, Will.  Or, what I imagine Will would look like dressed up in the same outfit.  I wonder if this guy's a meticulous hippie, too?

Photo source: Facebook

I like the look on these people's faces.  They look like they're trying to look like they're thinking "Unite and take action!" or some such tepid progressive talk, but what they're actually thinking is, "This is bullshit!  When are these stupid people in power going to realize young people all over the world today are bored with this nonsense?  We have moved beyond gender.  Repressive Regimes, take note: It's time to catch up!  Come on, now, I'm tired of this bullshit.  I wanna go back to looking at pictures of cats on my phone."

Photo source: Facebook

I like the colors and composition of this photo.  Like Book Guy above, I'd totally have a coffee with this dude, out on this patio with all the lovely foliage.  He looks like he has interesting things to say:

Photo source: Facebook

We all have interesting stories to tell, no matter what our gender.  Here's one I heard on public radio the other day.  It's a touching story about a local woman, Stephanie Mott, who struggled with her gender identity until she found hope and love at a church in, of all places, the land of Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church: Topeka.  It's an awesome story.

People should not have to struggle so hard to be true to themselves.

Gender is ambiguous whether you're transsexual or not.  What does a woman look like?  What does a man look like?  In American culture, gender roles used to state that women wear dresses and men wear pants, but that custom is no longer in fashion.

I wear men's shoes because I have wide-ass feet.  I wear pants or dresses, depending on my mood.  I do not wear high heels because I am a klutz, and, again, wide-ass feet.  It's impossible to find heels I can afford that are wide enough to fit my feet.  Professional drag queens must spend a fortune on their heels.  I hope they claim them as a tax deduction.  

I no longer wear makeup or put hair styling product into my hair because I've discovered I look and feel better without it.  I shave my legs because my husband likes me to just as I like him to shave his beard.  But I also know he loves me even when I have hairy legs, just as I dig him full-bearded.  My husband has always had longer hair than I have.  I do not let my finger nails grow out and I do not polish either my finger nails or my toe nails because I don't like the way it looks on me and I have a compulsive need to pick the polish off.  

Does my appearance make me a mannish woman or a hippie?  What does it matter if I'm not hurting anyone?

What does it mean to look like a woman?  What does it mean to look like a man?  The answer to those questions depends on the time and place you happen to find yourself living on our planet.  If the answer changes with the times and with the places, then whatever answer you give seems a bit arbitrary and irrelevant, doesn't it?

Meticulous Hippie

Will asked if I'd do the grocery shopping because he had to pick up Katie from school after he got off work and he wouldn't have time.  I miscalculated how much time I needed to finish a writing project, so when I got to the store I only had an hour to stock up on our family's groceries, get them home, and get myself to "work"--my paid job--at the library.  I did the best I could but I ran out of time.  I managed to get all the perishables put away and I put up high anything our Great Pyrenees mix Earl could swipe off the counter and tear into, but I ended up leaving a bunch of jars and cans and bottles on the counters before dashing off to the library.

When I got home from work and saw that all the groceries had been put away in neat rows inside our cupboard, I thought fondly of the days when I first met my meticulous hippie.

Will and I met eleven years ago when we both worked at the library.  He's long ago moved on to other opportunities, but back then he had recently been hired as a Reference Page.  I saw him from across the library, holding a big book in his arm, walking forward, steady on his long legs, a big grin on his face.  He had on a bright blue button down shirt, almost too nice for a library job that requires a lot of bending and stretching to shelve heavy reference books in their proper place.  His long hair, half-way down his back, in-between dark blond and light brown, fluttered behind him as he kept a steady pace.

I said to my friend and co-worker, Brent, "That new Page is kinda cute."

I wouldn't have said it to The New Page's face, though.  I'd had the proper harassment training.  Plus I'm shy as hell when I first meet people.  So I said nothing to him.  Will had the mandatory harassment training, too.  But he was smoother than I.

He tells me the first time he saw me, it was Halloween and I was wearing my book worm costume.  My ex-girlfriend Kristin took a big box and designed it to look like it had the cover of The Color Purple on it.  I wore it with my face and hair painted green and wearing green pants.  I was the book worm inside one of my favorite novels.  When Will saw me he said to himself, "I wanna get to know that chick."

The first time we actually talked was at the Feed the Need chili contest in the staff room.  I had made some vegetarian chili with TVP.  Will sat across from me and took a bite of the chili I had made.

"Mmm.  This is really good," he smiled with those bright red lips of his.  "What kind of meat is this?" he asked.

"It's TVP," I explained, smiling shyly.

"What kind of meat is that?" Will took another bite and smiled as he chewed it.

"It's not meat.  It's textured vegetable protein.  It's vegetarian."  I explained.

"So it's not meat?  It sure tastes good," he said, taking another big bite.

Other than that Will and I rarely saw each other.  He worked nights and weekends and, at that time, I worked only days, Monday through Friday.  I recall showing up to work first thing Monday morning and there it would be: this colossal mound of mail, piled up in neat rows awaiting the courier to take it to the post office.  It was impressive how he managed to get it just so.

"Looks like Will worked hard again this weekend," my friend and co-worker Linda would say, glancing at the mountain of mail.

"Yes.  Impressive, I'd say."

It's weird that meticulousness turns me on but it does.  I'm terribly sloppy and disorganized myself.  I'm impatient.  I hate puzzles.  I don't want to bother my brain trying to figure out how to clean up a mess or assemble boxes and bags of mail so they can be most efficiently transported.  I throw them in a bag, seal it, and toss it into the postal box.  Done!

So I admire people like Will who takes such pride of ownership in his work.  He assesses the job and figures out the best way to tackle it.  He thinks ahead, works slow and steady, and ends up with not just a completed job but a thing of beauty.  This is a man who neatly arranges items on the shelf at his job at Whole Foods, then takes his six-year-old daughter to a pretend play place and proceeds to straighten the shelves in the pretend grocery store, then he comes home and arranges the items in our cabinets in proper order.

Will restocking the groceries at the pretend grocery store.

This is the same guy who likes to put together impossible puzzles.  For fun.  Puzzles like Phish's Lawn Boy, which consists of mostly bright green blades of grass.  

I don't know why it makes my stomach get butterflies when I see this man tidy and straighten and fit things together, but it does.  He was bagging mail in my department at work the first time he asked me out.  His schedule had been tweaked so he was in my department on Friday afternoons.  

He was so smooth about it, he caught me off guard.  

We'd been talking about movies.  He was getting ready to put the DVD "The End of the Affair" into a bag.  I said I loved that movie.  He asked how I could possibly love a movie that's about an affair.  We talked about art and morality and finally the conversation got less intense and we began talking about different movies we like and he asked me if I'd seen "Lord of the Rings" yet.

"No," I said.  He'd mentioned this movie once before, when we sat across the table in the staff room eating chili, after our little TVP discussion, now that I thought about it.  He must really like it.

"You want to go see it with me?" Will asked, smiling big and confident.  The big tower of mail in neat rows behind him.

"Uh, um...sure." I said.

He was 21.  I was 31.  I immediately thought to myself, "What have I gotten myself into?  Who is this kid?  Asking me out?  He didn't even know what TVP is!  But he did just defend monogamy and fidelity which is sweet and kind of cool.  Oh what the hell, this could be fun..."

I was so nervous and my inner thoughts were distracting me so much that when he asked me to write my phone number down (this was in the dark ages of no cell phones to instantly plug someone's digits into) I started to write "Becky's phone number 515-1234" but half way through I thought to myself, "Oh, but what if I'm not the only Becky he knows?"  So I thought I changed it to "Becky Burton's phone number 515-1234," but what I actually ended up writing down on the little slip of paper was, "Becky's Burton 515-1234."

Will took one look at it, smiled, and thought to himself, "This is going to be easy."

See, I'm so awkward and messy, I need my meticulous hippie to keep me from drowning in my anxious muck of a life.  To make things neat and easy.