Concessions

Fucking bitter resentment. I am supposed to be all about Zen, calm, fucking smooth, relaxing and somewhat pleasurable contentment. Right?

Okay, so here's the deal. My dad, secret drug addict, abuser, terrifying man who later benefited from the invention of Prozac and became #1 Team Grandfather to my son's baseball team.  They provided him a reason for living and he provided them with countless blow pops, licorice sticks and whatever else they requested after a big win. That was my dad. My life was but a concession.

Mom - depressed, not available, now dead.

Oldest brother - dead.

Middle brother - dead to me.

Youngest brother - dead.

First husband - in prison.

Second husband - doing very well, thank God I had the strength to set him free.

Third husband - in a federal satellite camp (could be called prison) but my kids tend to refer to him as "away".

When my mom died in 2007 of depression, masked as breast cancer (because you truly cannot have a lump in your breast that size and not know it might be an issue) left everything in her estate to my middle brother because she knew he might not be far from death and she wanted him to always have a place to live.  She spent her life keeping my drug addicted brothers off the streets so of course, she naturally chose to keep him, the last of the three, in a safe harbor throughout her death.  It was easy for her, "my daughter has always provided for herself, so she most certainly always will".

When my ex-husband went to his country club, a/k/a prison camp last year, there were no provisions made as to how I was going to make ends meet as a full time mom.  Nobody to help with childcare.  Three kids, a full time job, a house.  I was barely able to keep my nose above the water as a 50% joint custody mom; yet, it was easy for him to see, "she has always provided for us when I didn't hold a job or spent us into debt or relied on her to pay all the kids expenses even after we were divorced, and she most certainly always will".

As I write this, I am approaching the fifth month of being a full time working, full time single mom and I fucking hate every single word of this post typed thus far, for it reeks of pity.  I have been swirling about in a cauldron of evil consisting of:  Hate, Resentment, Entitlement, Hair of the Dog, Bitterness, Red Dirt vs.White Snow, Shaved Spirit of the Innocent, Red Wine vs. White Wine or worse yet, no Whine at all.  And it comes to me. I want to move back to Oklahoma because it's not supposed to snow in late March. Oh and also......

Duh.  These are your lessons you dumb shit. Since when did you ever feel sorry for yourself?  Get the fuck up and manifest this anger into your destiny. I gave it to you for a reason.  You only do well, when you are pressed, pressured or pissed.  Now you are all P's to the three and I am sitting here, laughing my ass off, waiting to see how you swat at this ridiculous hornets nest I save for the only those I love the most.

My kid's dad recently told them God only punishes those he loves the most, that's why daddy ended up in camp "away". To which, the sick and much demented grandmother figure replied, "then God must really, really love your daddy". Concessions.  Holy, moldy shit, concessions.

I have picked up my giant ass fly/hornet swatter and I am going to destroy anything that stands in my way and that means you: Resentment, hate and pity - you were sent here to piss me off.  

But what happens when you catch yourself in the mirror and you stop, truly stop in your tracks? You try to deny it but it is there.  You look just like your brother, who looks just like your dad.  You said it yourself last Thanksgiving when you couldn't take your eyes off your brother because he made you uneasy, like he was going to send you to your room at any moment for being the worlds first and only virgin whore. And here I am, looking like my brother who looks like my dad.  Same fucking nose, same fucking eyes, same fucking.....?

Same fucking hero to a little league baseball team who counted on the gray haired man with a lawn chair, a huge smile, and a pocket full of dollars for a sugar coma provided by none other than a concession stand.

Fuck me - I have to stand on top of these concessions? I'm going to need more than a few licorice sticks.

Mama Pop

Boundaries...My moms ain't got them.

That is what I am discovering in therapy, well, one of the big things. And of course, figuring out how to set my own since I was not raised around them. Awesome fun I tell you, paying a near stranger $120 an hour to tell you that you need to not let your mother run her emotional battlement tank all over you. Sometimes the obvious isn't obvious to everyone(ie. me). Though it is helping and I am learning all sorts of fun techniques to move me forward and help me stop my brain from taking a kernel of anger and turning it into an three-day rumination on why my mom sucks(that list is a post in itself)when I should be sleeping.

In fact I have come up with my own mental device to disengage when I start fixating on thoughts about her. I picture her face stretched across a balloon, and then I take a long sharp needle, all glinty and menacing looking, and I pop her. It's just violent enough to satisfy me in some small way but kind of funny and shuts off the train of thought. Anyhow, a story...

I was a virgin until I was twenty-one. I wasn't the girl with the perfect, bouncy blonde ponytail with my 10-carat gold chastity ring and pristine white-knee highs. I was what is now called goth but then was just theatre chick, smoking, swearing, furiously masturbating, curious, slutty, kiss a new boy at a different party every weekend kind of girl. I was the girl who found the Joy of Sex book on our bookshelf at ten and then secreted it away for me to peruse at my leisure. I would sit on the concrete curbs of my street, far enough away from the windows and ears of our parents and I would entertain and educate my friends with descriptions of things like premature ejaculation and cunnilingus.

I made the choice early on not to have sex in high school for a handful of well-reasoned reasons. First, because I had moved schools after my first year of high school, the group of friends I landed with were mostly a year ahead of me. They did everything first from driving to fucking. I saw my best friends get their seventeen year old hearts broken in the wake of teenage intercourse. What do you mean you are breaking up with me, I thought we were going to be together forever kind of stuff. Second, my mom had birthed me at the tender age of seventeen and I saw that this was not in fact the easy path so many needy teenagers seem to imagine it is. I was resolute not to put myself even remotely near to the path of teenage motherhood. Third, I was keenly interested in sex and boys but I had enough information to understand that a sixteen or seventeen year old boy was unlikely to have the know how to make sex nice for me. So I decided pretty early on that I would save myself for college and a smarter set of boys or maybe even later. Until then I could play the ballgame to third base with no regret.

Being a kids who was, in hindsight, remarkable comfortable with certain parts of herself, I was not secretive about my decision not to have sex. I didn't wear it like a badge of superiority or some pledge to my future self, I was just open and comfortable with not being ready. My mother, probably in some part shamed by her Catholic upbringing and own unwed pregnancy, took my virginity as a sign of her successful parenting and my obvious(to her) virtue. It also became, sadly, a selling point.

Thankfully she waited until I was a freshman in college to dangle me in front of guys like a shiny new piece of unkinked tinsel. My mom met most of these would-be suitors at a dive bar a block from our house that she frequented after an arrest and DUI made it more important for a short drive home after a night of knocking them back.

"He was real nice and I gave him your number."

"You what?" I said.

"I said I gave him your number," she repeated through a mouthful of lasagna she had brought home with her, lasagna I was pretty sure she was going to be throwing up in an hour or so.

"Eew, why would I want to date some guy hanging out drinking at that shithole?"

"He was really nice, I showed him your picture, played pool with him."

"Even better." I said, sorry that my sarcasm didn't register with her when she was loaded.

"I told him you were in college and that you were, you know, you were a virgin."

This is when I would usually walk out of the room, afraid I was going to punch her in the face. How about blonde? How about interested in law or likes to read or has a cat or swims real fast or sings pretty or wants to learn how to drive stick or likes movies or listens to Peter Gabriel or anything besides whether some guy had poked my hymen like a hungry chimp shoving a stick into a busy ant hole.

I never, ever invited my mom in any way to find me a boyfriend or was ever remotely receptive to her thinly veiled attempts to pimp me out to some guy sharing the stool next to her. What did she get out of this, attention? The idea of dating some stooge my mom liked through a really solid pair of rum and coke goggles was revolting. That my mom would even say this or do this was proof to me that she didn't understand me at all. She didn't understand that I hated that she drank. She didn't understand that I would never regard her or an idea openly or warmly when she was drunk, that it would never be funny or silly or anything other than sad for me. She didn't understand that bringing one gross, inappropriate man into our house had been one more than I had ever needed. She didn't understand that although I hadn't had sex, I would never be with anyone who thought it was important that his girlfriend or wife be a virgin. These were not guys that had saved themselves for marriage, these were guys that made judgments about women and probably wanted a virgin so she wouldn't know how hard they sucked in the sack. My mom didn't understand that being a virgin wasn't part of my identity, it was just a choice and mostly a choice born out of not wanting to be like her.

These are the thoughts that keep me up at night. These are the memories(and they seem infinite) that make me so angry that I think I will crack my teeth from clenching my jaw. These are the reasons it took me almost fifteen, adult years to figure out how to trust and love someone, certain that they would not hurt me in ways that would make me lose all faith in them. These are things I think of that make me think of my own daughters that then make me furiously add up all the ways I am not like her until I can see it like a hand in front of my face. These are the things that clog my brain at two in the morning until I remember my balloon trick and that imaginary menacing needle.

Mentor

I mentor other women. Eight of them. It's not therapy, not even close. It's more like having me as your own personal cheerleader who will, without doubt, slap down any denial that comes out of your mouth like the wicked, open jawed, fang poppin', deadly rattle snake that it is.

This task of mentoring gets me up close and personal to women in ways I did not always know was possible. Women to me in my youth were frightening prospects. I was always suspicious of their every move, beat up more than a few, and, though always convinced they were going to try to fuck my man, usually ended up fucking theirs.

Becoming willing to be the student of a female mentor of my own cracked me open and spilled before me contents of my soul that had become fetid with depravity along the path of addiction. With what seemed to me at the time to be brutal force, she held my eyes and arms open wide so I could see all of it for what it was. She also held and cooed to me as would a mother to a babe in distress.

This is exactly what I do for the women I mentor. I've often said it's like learning to spoon feed barbed wire to another human being in a way that won't kill them. It's the constant motion of the acrobat on the high wire; always adjusting my movements from brutal honesty to the tenderness of compassion and back again. It is dancing along the edge of another human being's cliff while always attending to my my steps in a way that will prevent me from falling off of the edge of my own.

I've been the student of my current mentor for over 10 years. She is a glorious and powerful woman in her sixties. She has seven children, 15 grandchildren and one great-grandchild; all of whom know their access to her love and strength are undeniable. In a grocery store or Wal-Mart a person might come away from an brief encounter with her with a surprising desire to turn back, find her and tell her something they've been wanting to get off of their chest; a dirty secret, a hope or dream that they know is important, but continues to be defined as 'silliness' or 'time wasting'. She is gladly a grandmother to all, and can also tell you stories from her 20's of pushing her children in their baby strollers across the Arizona/Mexico border as a way to smuggle heroin. She has worked harder than most to become an embodiment of the words trustworthy and honest.

I like to think I am regarded in the same way by the women I mentor; trustworthy and honest. Goodness knows they are a varied bunch. Between the eight of them they range through married, single, divorced, never married and partnered for life. They are in their 20's and 60's and everything in-between. They have children, no children, and wishes for children that will never be fulfilled by their own bodies. They are white collar, blue collar, ain't got no collar and royal bred with silver spoons in their mouths. What we talk about is called everything; sex, drugs, rock -n- roll. We discuss hopes, dreams, failures, desires, mistakes, the dirtiest things they have ever done and moments in their lives that are so astoundingly beautiful that we cry together in the joy of it all.

The ultimate reality of being the student of a mentor or mentoring another woman is love. Pure, simple love. My own mentor feels to me as a mother. I call her 'Mama' and she often calls me 'My Child'. The women I mentor, especially the ones I've mentored the longest, feel to me as sisters, daughters and soul mates. Meant to be. On the road together, making our peace with honesty and trust.

And yet, sometimes even the love of a mentor can do nothing. If someone I mentor is desirous or janky-minded enough to bulldoze her way through her life in a way that is destructive to herself and anyone in her path, all I can do is step back about three feet and let the tornado fly. Let the chips fall where they may. Get right with the fact that the cookie is going to crumble. Square myself with the fact that the shit will eventually hit the fan. Get down with the reality that love and trustworthiness in cases like that are useless until the tornado has stopped spinning. Even then, they sometimes only stop spinning long enough to lick their wounds, take a nap, and then start spinning again. Sometimes being a good mentor is being willing to observe from three feet away for a long time.

Sometimes one of the women I mentor will get dangerously close to loosing sight of the fact that pointing her tools of destruction toward me or mine is nothing short of stupid. I've been watching one of them consider doing it for the past few weeks. She's nervous about her physical attractiveness. She's worried about it. Thinking of it too much. Forgetting that she has more to offer than her bare ass and a few good moves on the end of a cock. A lifetime of getting what she wants and believes she needs by way of fucking has done her no favors in the department of believing her words, good deeds, intelligence and simple presence is attractive.

Last Saturday my husband and I attended a BBQ. She was there as well. I watched as my husband made his way around the park pavilion to go to the restroom. I watched as she watched him as well. She looked him up and down like the fine man that he is. She got up from her seat and quickly walked through the other guests to intercept him on the sidewalk. I watched as she tossed her hair and looked up at him with adoring eyes and fluttering eye lashes. She reached out and brushed his arm with her hand and laughed at something he said with an open mouthed bawl that showed all of her mouth. She wiggled her ass and stood erect with her shoulders back to offer up her breasts as if it was Thanksgiving and she was proud to present her turkey, free for the taking, on a silver platter.

Watched her watch him walk away with frustration on her face, as he had only greeted her, looked a bit disconcerted by her open-mouthed laughter and arm touching, and then moved on to the restroom

My eye is on it. My husband's eyes are on it as well. We talk about things like this without heat, jealousy or anger. If anything, both of us get pretty offended by those who know we are married and try to seduce us anyway. It's nice to have someone to talk to about it.

I'd like to say I've been watching all of this with nothing but a kind and understanding heart. Nothing but a mature ability to feel compassion for this woman while also understanding that I am fully capable of making major changes in my relationship with her if needed.

But I'm not. I've had visions of myself standing in her front yard and throwing one crow bar through her patio window and using another to beat the fuck out of her car. By the time all is said and done I've slobbered my way into a frenzy to beat fuck all. It feels good and I like the way the adrenaline is pumping at my psyche. The way it makes me walk on air and feel like some minion should be shouting, "Step aside! Let the woman through! Step aside mother fuckers! Let the woman through!"

This is why I have a mentor of my own. She reminds me that I am not confused, only navigating rougher waters.