Confessional

Opportunity Knocks

A woman I am no longer friends with once read a manuscript of mine and responded with the comment “I didn’t know you were so competitive,” a remark straight out of the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife playbook. Either I admit to being competitive, or I deny it, argue with her and defend myself thereby demonstrating my killer instinct. The friendship dribbled along but ultimately did not survive this minefield. I went on my way truly believing that she had misread me and unjustly accused me of being a bad, bad person. Maybe I could re-frame it as projection? Always a good move.

Now for the confession. I have not been a good sister. I’m not talking about my relationship with my actual sister which has had its ups and downs but which overall has been one of quiet appreciation. I’m talking about my sisters in the classroom, in the office, in the innumerable groups where we shared our stories about being female. I’ve been one of those women who have always got along better with men. In college, all my friends were men. Sometimes, I also had boyfriends who were other men entirely, but that didn’t seem to matter one way or the other. The men I hung out with didn’t seem to threaten the men I went out with. They just liked having me around.

Photo by Duy Pham on Unsplash

I can’t say exactly when I learned this behavior was frowned upon, a kind of dirty pool, but at some point I met up with feminism and realized that I might be liable to accusations of disloyalty. I also noticed that other women had girlfriends - not yet lovers - and that I didn’t know how to go about getting one. I remember having a few female best friends when I was a child, but once the chemistry got unleashed, the competition was too fierce. Better to retreat. I wasn’t conscious of any of this, of course, I just wandered around in a fog of carping judgment and barely disguised hostility, keeping the other girls at a distance, behind enemy lines. I did not go to the prom. I did not go to wedding or baby showers. I hung out with people who had no interest in these girly things. People like myself who made grave mistakes with mascara. I never learned my lines. I never learned the rules of the game and I went to great lengths to assert that I didn’t want to know them. Disdaining all that gave me a certain illusory power that I guarded with my life…until I aged out.

Now that I’m old, I can for the first time engage my rusty curiosity about other women. Never too late to open the gates to the flood of remarkable people out there who have lived through childbirth and raising families, marriages, divorces, illnesses, and deaths. Not to mention book writing and art making. These women, my contemporaries, are still here, loving, creating, looking back on long lives lived in female bodies. I also have a new awareness that gender has become much more nuanced in recent years. There’s a lot more involved than what my mother failed to teach me in the ‘50s, keeping it simple by paring it down to powdering your nose and making sure your seams were straight. Gay women have something to teach me. Non-binary people have something to teach me. But most of what I know rests on my lifetime of admittedly partial experience. What I know is that an intransigent competitive streak has kept me from getting to know other women in a deep way. It has kept me imprisoned in my head, the old neighborhood, where I reasoned incorrectly there is no gender. I have so much to learn.

Learning is always the paradigm that keeps despair at bay. Yesterday, I heard someone invite a deeply resonant meditation bell. I don’t know if it was the bell itself or the person who struck it, but the sound reverberated on and on to the outer reaches of time and space as if it would never end. I listened until I wasn’t sure that I was still hearing it. Even after that, I knew that the sound continued and that the vibration would go on forever like the yearning for deeper understanding and the self discovery that arrives unannounced when the mind empties out and the body, my woman’s body, wakes up.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.