Kids - who needs 'em?

I have never wanted children.  Maaaaaybe if I had ever married someone who a) I thought would stick around, 2) would be a great dad, and 3) wanted children himself, I might have considered it.  But my first husband had already had two, to whom he was a neglectful dad, and he'd wisely chosen to get a vasectomy.  Sweet Hubby most definitely does not and has never wanted to be a father.  And I just haven't ever felt that maternal pull.

I am curious about how it is that some people know they do want children.  Where does that impulse live?  In the uterus?  In the guts?  In the mind?  I think about being a mother, and immediately what comes to mind is "Whew, glad I didn't."  My life would have been so different.  Maybe better in some ways, although it's hard to imagine it could be better than it is now.

Part of not wanting to have children has been about enjoying the freedom of choice and movement I have always had, but part of it is just plain cowardice.  I think being a parent takes more courage than just about any other venture I can think of (although bungee jumping is high on the list of scary stuff).  I can barely imagine what it must be like to allow one's child to cross the street alone for the first time, or how hard it must be when their hearts or bones get broken, or when they make choices that seem destined to end in disaster or are simply too different from what one would choose for them.  My life must have been terribly challenging for my parents since just about every choice I made as a young adult probably seemed perilous and way outside their square-cornered boxes.  They tried to advise and sway, but mostly resigned themselves to letting me make my mistakes and then pay the inevitable prices.  Could I do that, or have done that, if it were my child?  All I can do now is wonder.

No, I'm glad to have lived my life as I did, and don't regret nor grieve my childlessness.  However, as I age I find myself wondering who will show up for me when I'm old, old enough to need  help and company and cheering up.

When Mom died, which was unexpected, my sister and brother and I immediately showed up for Dad.  I mean immediately.  He and Mom had been on vacation, on a river boat on the Mississippi,, and my sister and I were there are the airport to greet him when he flew home alone.   We basically never left him.  My sister especially, with the rest of us pitching in, spent the next - and last - year of his life making sure he was taken care of and not alone. 

Who will do that for me if and when I need it?  I'm pretty close to my nieces and nephews, but none of them lives close by, and they all have their parents and their children and their lives.  I can't really expect them to stay with me (although I do expect visits and will make sure they know that, gosh darn it).  If SH dies before me, who will ease the aloneness?  Thinking about this is the one and only time I wonder if maybe having kids might have been a good idea.

Is it possible to adopt a 40-year-old, do you suppose?

Is this how Tippi felt?

I'm sure I'm not the only person (I tend to assume that if I have a thought or feeling, most people have had the same thoughts and feelings; I think of myself as sort of spectacularly average) who has fantasized about wild animals being drawn to me, because they recognize my Snow White-like grace, charm, and innocence.  I've imagined birds landing on my finger, wild bunnies taking carrots from my hands, raccoons exploring the contours of my face, deer approaching to be petted.

This fantasy, of course, ignores the fact that wild animals are wild.  What they know how to do is survive in a world where they can only eat what they kill or find.  Actual encounters with wild animals are dangerous, and would be made more so if I actually gave expression to that fantasy.

This has been brought home to me just recently.  Three times this week, I have been divebombed by different pairs of crows as I walked through my neighborhood.  I understand they were only protecting nests, and they didn't hurt me or anything, but even so, it was scary.  They flew so close, I could feel the rush of air from their wings as they went by, and they cawed loudly right into my ears.  They were relentless, truly committed to driving me away, and no matter how many times I assured them that I was just trying to get home, they kept at me for several blocks. 

If (or perhaps when; I tend to think it's inevitable) there is a massive infrastructure breakdown of some kind, and there is no grocery store and no hot and cold running water, I don't think I'm one of the people who will survive.  Nice to know the crows will be all right, though.

A reluctant lark

I wish I were more like my mom.  She was the nicest, most good-natured, loving person ever born.  But I'm more like my dad, moody, spiky, with a tendency toward passive aggression.  Like Dad, I was a natural night owl, and could barely stand Mom's morning cheer.  When I was a teen, she would come into my bedroom and throw open the curtains, singing "Rise and shine and greet the new day".  No matter how much I growled or whined, she never seemed to catch on to the fact that her a.m. energy was too much for me to bear gladly.  Although I eventually became less grumpy when I woke up, even into adulthood, even into seniority, I could stay up until midnight or later and sleep until mid to late morning.

The past few years, though, I have been alarmed to see myself turning into a morning lark, unable to sleep past 6:30, sometimes awaking as early as 4:30.  I see now that when I was wishing to be more like Mom, I should have been more specific.  This was not the trait of hers I wanted to emulate.  These days I find myself nodding off at 10:30 in the evening, sometimes missing chunks of whatever movie Sweet Hubby and I are watching or whatever book I'm reading.  I fight the sleepiness, grimly avoid going to bed until at least 11pm, but my days of being a night owl seem to be behind me.

Of course I realize that it makes perfect sense to simply surrender to sleepiness whenever it occurs, taking a nap or going to bed early, waking up when my body is ready to.  Why fight it?  It's not as though I have a job I have to get to, or deadlines I have to meet.  Why all this resistance to my natural, though changing, rhythms?

I've come to see that it's a matter of identity.  I have always identified myself as a night owl.  There have been times I would stay up all day, all night, and all the next day and be perfectly fine, with no loss of energy or spirit.  So to find myself snoozing and snoring before the crack of midnight makes me feel old and not myself, not who I think myself to be.  Giving up my identity as a night owl feels like a concession to age, like taking the legs off my step bench in order to still do those vigorous workouts without collapsing.  And if I make those concessions, isn't that just admitting I'm old, and won't the aging process speed up because I'm conceding?

Since I can't seem to change my body, I guess I need to change my attitude.  So here goes:

I am grateful to have lived long enough to experience the ravages and detriments of aging.  And I'm going to do my best to live as though aging gracefully will extend my healthy life by ten years.

So there.  

Divorcing friends

I'm over-socialized.  The drive in me to make lots of friends comes from the childhood years when my family frequently moved from place to place.  (No, we were not military nor running from the law.  The transfers were part of my dad's career as a petroleum engineer.)  I was so terrified of being lonely and alone, I quickly taught myself how to show off, attract attention, put on a real dog-and-pony show, be everyone's friend and the teacher's pet.

So now I have too many friends.  Some of them, a lot of them, are terrific.  But there are some I don't really feel very connected to, and some I like a whole lot but our paths just never seem to cross.  Especially at Christmas, when I'm sending out cards, I find myself wishing I had fewer friends so that I could really nourish the connections with the ones I have, stay in closer touch.

It always feels weird to me when a friendship just sort of fades away, because I'm never sure if I should do something to revive it (keep sending that Christmas card, send a "let's get together" email) or simply ignore it.  The latter feels to me an awful lot like ghosting and I'm just not comfortable with that.  It's too indefinite.  Are we still friends or not?  So every once in a while, I suggest to a friend who has become distant that perhaps we should mutually agree to let each other go, with all blessings and good wishes.  Retire the friendship with open eyes and a fond farewell.

What's funny is that there have been several cases when the person in question will adamantly reject the retirement.  "Oh no, you can't get rid of me that easily.  We're still friends!"  And then I never hear from them again.

Maybe it's this year of COVID lockdown which has made me ever more aware of the fact that I want to live a simpler, less crowded, less hectic life.  I've spend so much energy juggling the balls, spinning the plates of all those connections, and while that has filled my life with wonderful people and adventures and experiences, it has also taken me away from the quieter pursuits I'm now more in love with, such as writing and reading and sitting in the open air listening to trees.

And by the way, if you're reading this, you are not somebody I want to let go of.  In case you were wondering.

No wonder people believe in Heaven

I find it terrifying to know that I'm going to die without knowing when nor how.  But I'm going to.  It's certain.  So what does it all mean, this life, this momentary time?

I didn't have children so am not leaving any of my genetic material to humanity, but even if I had, so what?  I would still die.  Even if a child of mine had created a way to make plastic truly biodegradable and had therefore helped extend the reign of human life on Earth for decades or centuries - so what?  We hairless monkeys would simply continue to have to fix the terrible messes we make and end up extinct anyway.

Does knowing death is inevitable make individual life pointless?  As brief as a mayfly's and as driven by appetites.  Or does it make every moment precious beyond belief?  This rare, exquisite, brief gift of being able to experience the richness of the planet and of each other.

I suppose it has to be both, because neither exists without the other.  Deep joy without the knowledge of loss would be flat and easy to take for granted.  The terror and sense of pointlessness would be unbearable without the occasional experience of deep joy and sensory pleasure.

Without subscribing to it myself, I understand religious belief, the need, the hunger for something to give meaning to life and offer the possibility of eternity.

Weight and Liz Cheney

Weight has always been an issue for me, as it has been and is for every woman (perhaps for every person) in Hollywood.  Perhaps for every American.  Perhaps for everyone in the world.  Even when I was young and lithe and limber and strong, I never felt thin enough.  But I do love me some food.

Three times I have had dramatic weight losses.  What is common to them all is that they happened to me and were not the results of any commitment or resolve on my part.

1) In 1976 I had a bad sore throat for 12 days, couldn't swallow at all.  The weight I lost then stayed off for a long time.

2) In 1991 my thyroid went hyper-active and my metabolism speeded up so drastically that I lost weight no matter how much I ate.  I went down from the size 10 I had been to size 4.  It was several months before I finally went to the correct doctor, got the correct diagnosis and the correct medication.  That weight came back.

3) In 2000 I moved away from Los Angeles, lived on the central California coast, and started a new life.  I exercised more, discovered all sorts of community dances, and fell hyperbolically in love.  Weight simply fell off without me thinking about it.  That weight stayed off until menopause hit me like a hot brick.

I'm not happy with my weight now, and with more reason than I had at any of those other times.  The trouble is that I haven't proved to myself that I can lose weight by choice.

I exercise every day, sometimes two or three times a day.  Clearly my problem isn't activity but food, which I use the same way I use video games and movies - as a way to avoid deep, troubling, sorrowful, conflicted feelings.  So naturally I'm not eager to deny myself one of my avoidance mechanisms, when it will mean experiencing all those feelings: what it's like to live with the tensions, anxiety, and rancor of the COVID era; my outrage at what the Republican party has turned into (I never would have thought that Liz Cheney would become one of my heroes, but she certainly is right now.  Surely some of her Republican colleagues are squirming with shame as she models integrity and courage.  No wonder they want to kill her off.  She's making the rest of them look like the stinking cowards they are.); how much I miss my mom and being near my family; my feelings about my sister-in-law; doubts about whether I have it in me to write a superb play; terror about the inevitable fact that I'm going to die without knowing when and how.

I have to believe in myself right now, tell myself I can instead of that I can't.  "I can't" is a powerful phrase and takes a lot of spine to overcome.  "I can" has a different power, the power of the possible, the power of the unknown, the power of belief over certainty.

So here goes.  I can.  

The Oscars and racism, Part 3

The exchange with my brother continues, and once again, I find I am inspired to examine my own thoughts and opinions in order to understand and express them more clearly.

I had claimed that he and I have no idea what it is to be a POC in this country.  Which isn't completely true.  Certainly we have ideas about what it might be like.  But Bro objects to my saying that we can't truly know what it feels like to move through the world with black skin.  He contrasts my avowed inability to imagine that with my sympathy/empathy for the situations in which Palestinians live.  (This conversation about the Oscars has grown branches and twigs and leaves.)

It's true that I have been to Palestine, or what used to be Palestine.  I have had conversations with Palestinians, visited some of them in their homes and orchards, seen the spent tear gas canisters and rubber bullets lying about, seen the walls and barbed wire and check points, the Israeli solders patrolling the streets with their rifles.  I have read books written by Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and Brits about life in Israel.

Still, I continue to assert that I don't really know what it is to be Palestinian, what it is to be black, what it is to live the life of the oppressed, because even if I could imagine it fully and deeply and truly, I could also stop that imagining and go back to my safe, un-oppressed life whenever I choose.  I can't possibly know what it is the live an oppressed life and not be able to get away from it.

I used to think about what it would be like when my mom died.  I could easily make myself cry with those imaginings, they were so vivid and emotionally powerful.  But when she did actually die, it wasn't like anything I had imagined, and that was mostly because I could never leave that state of grief, couldn't get away from it, but had to live with it all day every day.  And even this is not a completely analogous situation (the difference between the imagined and the actual), because grief eventually fades.