I am just an ordinary woman. This is enough.

The curious girl with the father of dirty fingers and calloused thumbs leaned against the frozen wall of the supermarket. She ate a peach. She took sloppy bites and let the juice drip from her chin onto the collar of her shirt.  She liked to watch people enter and exit the supermarket. She would examine their carts filled with vegetables and laundry detergents. She would peer into their bags, try and imagine what color they painted their kitchens. She liked to imagine what they might be making for dinner that very night. The curious girl was a spy.

In the parking lot, a foreign couple walked hand and hand. Their heads were bent in a conspiracy. The wind picked up. It bit down on the shoulders of the girl’s thin blouse. The wind reached out its hand and snatched the woman’s scarf. The scarf rose into the air like quotations surrounding unspoken words. It swelled against the sky like heartbreak. The girl watched the scarf. She ached.

The man took long exaggerated strides across the parking lot in a vaudevillian attempt to halt the flight of his lover’s silk scarf. The woman laughed. She threw back her head.  She offered her throat, exposed and vulnerable.

When the man caught the scarf, he cheered. He raced it back to his lover. The woman greeted him in a thick embrace. He kissed her like desire. The curious girl watched as the lover wound the length of the cobalt scarf around the arched tender of the woman’s milky neck. The woman sighed sweetly.

With her lips still sticky and wet from the juice of a peach, the curious girl heard this sigh and it unhinged her. She watched the man winding the scarf around the woman’s neck. She felt it like a noose tightening.

This room is the color of Santa Fe, the color of the sand in St. Martinique, the color I imagine my womb. There is no color in the sky. I watch the sky hoping I could pinpoint the exact moment it turns from light to dark. Like, when I was small and I would try to identify the exact moment that wakefulness became sleep. I wanted to touch the divide. Every morning, I would wake up surprised that I had no history of it. We are something, and then we become something else. Sometimes you miss things.

The children are eating pancakes while I type. I read what I’ve written to my husband. I like this opening. It is random and without purpose. David says this post reminds him that there is no self. Self implies that you are who you are, that you never change. Things which do not evolve die off. I listen to him speak, and all I can think is that sometimes we dream like dinosaurs.

I just want to float like a fat white cloud in a fat white sky on a splintered green bench on the wet green grass. I want to be like Sexton and write, A Little Uncomplicated Hymn for Joy. I want to see Ntozake Shange’s poem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enfu, performed. I imagine reaching the end of the poem with a crowd of listeners. Together, we would recite,

i found god in myself
& i loved her/ i loved her fiercely

I have been thinking about performance art, about progress. I like the idea that art is an organism that breathes. You read my words like an inhalation. The intent of my thoughts convert with each exhalation. Everything changes. This is and is not the theme. Simply forget theme.

Sometimes, I think of something that strikes me as beautiful.  I become a rush of fingers.

I tell my daughter stories. There once was a little girl who was born with an enormous heart. The child’s heart was a mountain. The small girl was born perfect and full of love. Still, there existed empty spaces inside the cavern of her heart. These empty spaces rattled like pennies in a tin can

As this little girl grew, so did her heart.  Experiences filled her. The more she loved, the more her heart expanded. As her heart widened, the wind whistled in the beautiful open spaces.

The small child became a woman with a heart that thundered.

My daughter listens to this story hungry for the part when the woman becomes a mother. Oh, how the heart did stretch itself then, I tell her.

The story ends with the woman wrinkled and grey. Her heart, grown as big as the universe, beat with the memory of all the woman ever loved, finally is silent.

When the story is over, my daughter who is two and lives every day like it is a poem waiting to be written, asks,

Momma. Does a heart so big ever break?

I stare at my daughter’s hands. I think about all the things her hands will reach for, touch. My daughter’s hands are both her present and her future. They are round and soft, still chubby with an infancy the rest of her body is starting to separate from. I stare at my daughter’s beautiful hands. I listen to her whistling heart. Her heart that is a mountain.

All hearts break, baby.

I want to tell my daughter what loss feels like. I want to share hospital rooms where you bleed out babies onto sterile tables, and doctors try to fill your ache with gauze. I want her to know that angry fingers force themselves into places they should never be. I want to turn on the news and rock her hard like an earthquake. I want her to starve in my arms, just so I can arm her against hunger. I want her to get lost on the safety of her small bed, so I am sure to find her. I want to protect her. I can’t.

All hearts break, baby.  I want you to remember that when a heart cracks open, the love a Momma has for her daughter never spills out.

I put my daughter’s perfect hand inside my own. We thunder.

Hearts break. Hearts recover.

Last night, I read a post from a well-known male blogger* that made me confused. He wrote about being in high school, having a crush on a girl, being denied her affection. As I first read, I could relate. Who hasn’t wanted someone or some thing so badly they experienced anger when denied? I have. What happens, however, when anger spills over into action?

This particular blogger wrote about thrusting his hand between a young girl’s legs when he and she were both in high school. A girl he described as wearing a silk blouse and no bra. A girl that he desired. A girl that did not want him. While pushing himself unprovoked and uninvited between her most private space, he demanded, “Is this what you wanted?” The story ends with the girl in tears in the backseat of a car, and the blogger admitting his own actions were scary.

I wrote a private e-mail to this blogger and asked him why he shared the piece online. I wanted to know what his motivation was for publishing it. He replied by telling me he wrote the piece because it was true. This made me furious. Does truth automatically make something acceptable? If we write our dirty, hateful, secrets are we immediately made brave just by the telling? What sort of community are we if we heap an author with praise just because he or she sits down and writes about his or her own repulsive act? What sort of society are we when another blogger comments that the young scared girl in that car was not even a victim?

My head spun. I tasted bile in my mouth. I physically shook. I needed to step away, from that blogger, from Twitter, from my own head. I went to sleep. Upon waking up this morning, I realized something. I thought my anger came from wishing this blogger had written the piece with more remorse. Not true. It was not really about that blogger. What I really want is retribution for all women. I want every single man who has ever hurt a woman in a sexual way to spontaneously burst into flames right….about….NOW!

Am I angry? You bet I am. I think the question is why isn’t every person angry that violence still happens in small ways like the backseat of that car? What good is sorry, really? If the two men that took advantage of me, while I stumbled like a sloppy drunk in the snow, apologized for the bloody raw ache they left inside of me, would it make it better. Fuck! No!

This post is not about re-hashing my old wounds or stories. I’ve claimed my own status as a survivor. I do not need to go backwards even when there are posts and people that trigger the memories that propel me down the rabbit hole of my own history. I just need to make sense of why this particular post from this particular blogger had me so enraged. There has to be more than just the telling, his and mine. Simply writing it down is not enough. What do we learn from it?

Some of you who’ve been reading me for awhile might remember a story I told you about when I was younger. There was this cocky kid named Tommy who corned me on a deserted stairwell. He thrust his fingers uninvited and unwanted up my skirt. I was this shy, awkward, girl who had never been looked at much less touched by a boy. It was not what I wanted. It made me scared and confused. What I left out, when I previously told the story, was that three days after the stairwell incident happened Tommy asked me out. I said yes. Yes? It felt strange and scary but good to be wanted, even when the wanting part was done all wrong. Just writing those words brings back all the confusion I felt when holding the phone to my ear and saying yes to dating a boy who previously violated me. I never told Tommy that what he did that day on the stairs felt dirty, frightening, and wrong. I never spoke up when he broke up with me and spread untrue rumors about my body to the entire class. I never said a word. Silence is a weapon young girls and women are taught to use against themselves.

When I first read the post of that popular male bloggers, I felt the same type of conflict that I felt as the scared confused girl I once was. This post was written by a blogger I knew and generally liked. Someone I saw as gentle, dorky, kind. I never would have imagined that story being attached to his history. After reading the post, I could not help but question every thing I knew about him, start to read deeper and more sinisterly into what I thought were previously funny and harmless tweets. It made me wonder how much I could really trust any online “friendship.”

Knowing the blog world like I do, I knew the commendations for his “bravery” were coming. This is where the real tension was for me. I started to doubt myself. Who was I to be angry? Who was I to speak out in dissent? In fact, I wrote a tame first comment on the post where I danced around the issue of my own discomfort. That is what “good” girls are trained to do. Aren’t we? We don’t rock the damn proverbial boat. We never speak out. We maintain the shame in silence.

I think when women are silent we all become the metaphor of that girl in the backseat of the car with some angry guy trying to shove his fist between our thighs. I’m not going to let that happen to me. I can not worry that what I feel is not the acceptable response of the community at large. I can not worry about my own alienation. I will not be 12 years old again, crying in my childhood bedroom.

I think what that male blogger did to that girl was disgusting and wrong. I think some of his tweets are inappropriate. I hope that people read his post and they are shocked and disgusted too. I thought about linking him, but I do not want my writing to be about calling someone out. Even though, that is what I am essentially doing. This really is more about me trying to deal with the complexity of my own emotions.

I hope his post is read. I hope people actually discuss, disagree, determine their own feelings outside of the context of the group. We can learn from this, from anything, if we are willing to go further than just to write disclosure off as some brave act. I do not think there is anything brave about what this blogger did in writing his past down, even though I too found myself using the word “brave” in his comment section. In fact, I think writing this post was an inherently selfish act because the blogger is the perpetrator and not the victim. What is he really looking for? Absolution or traffic? The answer makes a difference to me. Even if it is absolution, it won’t be found so easily here.

I have learned that women do not always need to be so forgiving. I was at 12, and even at 19, forgiving others and hating myself when waking up bruised and missing my underwear. I will never again let my own silence make me that complicit.

*edited to add the link of the blogger. Go here to read his story. Although, since my post has come out, his initial post has changed. He has “toned” down his story. It was originally written about her not having a bra and him putting his hand between her thighs, not just resting on it. I wonder why a person would edit a post that they wrote because it was “true” then quietly change it when people took issue with it. Interesting.

*New Edit*

I asked Neil why he edited the story after the comments and my post came out. He wrote this, “I edited it because it was too intense and I wasn’t getting the reaction I wanted. I am not a journalist. I am a writer.”

*Final Edit*

Neil changed the original blog post back. He also shared this post. I think it is only fair of me to post it. I also hope we continue to have conversations as a community about all the issues that came about because of all these posts and tweets.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

I have been oogled, touched, used, discarded. I have shaved, plucked, and dieted myself into distraction. Bruises, cellulite, bug-bites, scars, I have them all. This is my skin. These are my bones. I am beautiful.

Henri Matisse once said, about his own use of color in painting, “When I paint green, it is not the grass. When I paint blue, it is not the sky.” When I tell you I want you to see me naked, I am asking you to interpret.

In 1905, Matisse submitted 15 paintings to the Salon d’ Automne. His work was described as an “orgy of color.” One critic, so taken by the explosion on the canvas, dubbed Matisse “Fauve,” a wild-beast. The room his pictures were hung in, room 7, became known as the cage. It could not contain him.

Every day I turn on my Internet and read all the ways that women hate their bodies. It makes me as sad as Cezanne. He painted the Three Bathers, big, beautiful, female bodies, but he made a mistake. Cezanne believed that women were temptresses, carries of evil. Matisse, although inspired by Cezanne, took his own paint brush and transformed this out-dated notion of womanhood by contorting the female form.

I am Fauve. I smash patriarchy. There will be no cages that contain me.

When I was 18, I first saw Matisse’s paintings in a museum. His paintings took my breath away. The moment was terrifying. I recognized myself in his art. It frightened me to think that any man might know the female body more intimately then I allowed myself to at the time. Back then, I was still at war with my body, a passive aggressive war that took the form of repression and denial. Those were the years I avoided mirrors and always got dressed in the dark.

I turned 35 this year. My body is no longer as tight as that 18 year-old girl. My breasts don’t have as much perk. My stomach muscles are soft where they use to be taut. I curve generously in my hips and my thighs, which bear stretch marks. But, I am every bit as lovely if not more so. And, I wish someone would sketch me nude. I think about volunteering to pose as the model in one of the local college art classes. I think the initial embarrassment would be worth it to see myself in charcoal and oil. What could be more empowering than to acknowledge the slope of my breast,  the meat of my thighs on canvas?

I would like to give my body as a gift to some young hopeful artist with eyes like stars. I imagine he or she would take one look at my body and channel Matisse. Paint me as the stunning woman that I am, post-impressionism, avant-garde, art.

My mother’s generation of  feminists were taught to hold mirrors between their legs to examine the flower of their vulva. I found my womanhood in art, and loss. In the written word.

The first time I saw Georgia O’Keefe’s painting Music Pink and Blue, I realized I was a stranger to myself. Knowing starts with touching, and so I did, in bathtubs and solitary bedrooms. Understanding the dark spaces of your body should never feel illicit. If it does, you are doing something wrong.

I started seeing a therapist after I miscarried a son. When the doctors took him from my body, they discovered a tumor. Inside I was malignant. Suddenly, oncologists replaced gynecologists. Talk centered around chemotherapy instead of baby names and shower dates. It was around this same time that I discovered a shadowy figure creeping in the wild of our backyard. I used to sit for hours on top of the washing machine in our laundry room and stare through binoculars at this imaginary outline in the trees. At night, this dark man stole into my bedroom and took things from me, my favorite pair of socks, the cheese grater, the last remaining tube of toothpaste. Ordinary things that anchored my life went missing from the cupboards and the nightstand. Without these objects, I had no way to moor myself.

Freud coined transference, the redirection of feelings and desires, the reproduction of emotions relating to repressed experiences. Freud also said that flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotion nor conflict. I wonder what O’Keefe would have said about Freud if she had written a blog.

Who would you be without your writing? Would you know yourself without your words?

We all need to go places that are silent. Once there, I take off all my clothes. I forget about the mirrors. I need to look without distortion. I use my own fingers to touch myself from big toe to hipbone to earlobe. I recognize myself. I know that I am quite stunning. Even though words and histories may write themselves as fiction, I can always trust my hands to tell the truth.

I had a son I loved but never got to touch. He died inside my body. One day he was kicking and the next his heart had stopped. Just like that. Sometimes we lose the things we most hoped for. Without the memory of Riley bound to the tips of my fingers, it is easy to forget that he was ever real. Even being able to remember the amount of pain that came as a result of the miscarriage can’t always convince me that this child was anything other than longing. That does not mean I was not a good mother to him while he grew. It is just that miscarriage like death is different for every one of us. I loved the possibility of my son. When that possibility was gone, I fiercely mourned it. When J was born and the nurses placed him in my arms, I made a conscience choice to let the grief go. I make a choice everyday to love my body.

In my favorite photograph of Georgia O’Keefe, her hair hangs loose around a robe of white silk. The tip of her thumb is pressed like a secret against her nipple. Her face is bare. She is so striking. Open. I imagine some might see the downturn of her mouth and confuse her pictures with sadness. But, any woman who knows the true art of touching herself can tell you that what you see when you look at a portrait of Georgia O’Keefe is anything but grief. There is nothing even akin to remorse. What Georgia teaches me to see is the tremble of longing. I am like O’Keefe.

Knowing. I touch myself. I feel. To be a woman is the most exquisite of things.

Sometimes you have to tell a story. Sometimes you have to keep telling it until the words blur on the page and you become your own deconstructed narrative. “I” is a beautiful fiction.

There once was a girl with a spine as straight as a staircase. She was not stunning. She was just drifting indiscriminate, taking up head space in math class, and wishing she had the practicality of numbers. She had a heart for romance, but her body was awkward and stiff. She tried to teach her fingers the hidden language called pleasure. Her fingers betrayed her with the threat of sin that rests like a serpent between a good girl’s Catholic legs. She grew up hungry.

I was never the most beautiful girl in the room. Sometimes my mother would be. At that dance in eighth grade, the one when I was all five nine against the boys that bellied up to my navel, my mother warned me not to be a wallflower. She handed me a bag of her cosmetics. Despite what she was offering, I knew instinctively that social graces can not be learned by applying burgundy lipstick. I grew up coveting beauty like it was a religion.

Books brought me anarchy and atheism. I was not smart. I tried to be. I bed boys in music bands three credits short of degrees in Philosophy. The self was a shadow. I detached. Would it have been easier if I raged with anything other than the stubborn violence between my open legs? If I could have stood on a rooftop and screamed hot blood at the world, maybe acceptance would have come easier? I’m not sure. I have been so desperate to crash into something, someone, anything that could give me answers.

In graduate school, I learned that I was smart. Intelligence became a type of currency I could barter. The program I was in was powerful, feminist and political. Women sat easy in office chairs and spoke about linguistics and meta-cognition. Education is often a bastion for racism and constantly perpetuates the socio-economic divide. My degree was the study of literacy. I learned the intimacy of language. To teach would be to recover lost tongues. In those moments, I pushed my own tongue out from between clenched teeth. I used it to wet my lips.

I have been writing my own sex down. I have been frantic to match this blogging to my body. I think I feared becoming that indiscriminate girl again. If I write, I am a writer. When I read my own prose, I have this quiet certainty that I am made lovely by my language. Why should I need you or anyone else to tell me that is so?

I have written two unsuccessful novels, or the attempts at novels. Every single time I get to around page 50, I start to lose the cadence of my own prose. I re-read my words and I do not recognize myself. It is all hollow posture. My body twisted on a mattress for a man with a thick-bound anthology in his hand. I stand naked asking this dark man to bludgeon me. It always ends with revision.

I have been so desperate for you to see me, want me, touch me. I was looking for a mentor, someone who could teach me how to let go of the past once and for all. Someone who would read my words, swallow them whole just so beauty could rest inside their body. Instead, I made myself a caricature of my former self, all lonely cliche with spread legs. Open as a wound. I’m 34 years old for christ-sake. I’m not nineteen anymore. Rejection still stings, even when it is necessary.

I’ve been thinking about a book, my book, for so long that I forgot exactly what I wanted. They say that muscle carries memory. All the history I need is etched in the skin stretched out against my bones. I just need to write it down. I sit quiet in the dark after everyone I love has gone to sleep. I try and coax myself out. It is not about counting pages. It is not about seeing my name in print. It is not about leaving a legacy. I already live one. No. Writing is about something else entirely. Inherently more seductive, completely more intimate. This is about me listening for that first line. Opening up. Beautifully unraveling. This book is like my body. I am built like a poem. I write it down. For me. It is enough.

I have a thundering heart, the heart of a poet. I wonder where it comes from. My mother is as literal as her lipstick. My father as solid as a scientist. They do not go to art museums or watch foreign films. They have no desire to ever visit Europe. My childhood was as sturdy as a tool belt, as homogenized as my mother’s activity in the local PTA. It is a wonder that they ever produced a child such as me.

We took the children hiking yesterday. 2.8 of the most lovely miles. My daughter’s little legs still learning the terrain grew tired. I swung her on my hip and carried her like a romance. While we walked, I whispered language in her ear, snatches of song lyrics, Sexton poetry, Shakespeare. If there is a hidden and primordial language that can release the wilderness inside of us, surely it is in the form of poetry. For a stretch of mile, my daughter and I were quiet. This is what nature does. It reminds you to be still. Lately, I have been too busy crashing into things just to note the bruise. I held my daughter against me, my legs pushed through decomposing leaves. Swoosh-swoosh-swooshing. We are the sound of dry waves slapping ground, a pulsing fetal heartbeat. We are the memory of when my daughter grew inside me.

When you become a woman, you’ll be a poet. I tell this to my daughter and she smiles. I wonder if this is fair. Women who write feel too much. Sexton said and allowed herself to be seduced by carbon monoxide in the year before I was born. I have no suicidal tendencies. I am not weighted by depression, but I can mourn like a caged bird sings sometimes. Would it be easier for my daughter to grow up like a cardigan sweater with perfect pearl buttons that only her husband would ever touch? What burdens am I passing on to my daughter when I love her fierce as lightening with my aching crooked heart?

I once followed a mother in a museum. She stood her small children in front of a Matisse and asked them to tell her a story in the blue bending of his bodies. I watched her secret as a spy to learn all the ways my own mothering could be. I should teach my daughter to be practical. Instead, I carry her on my hip deep inside a forest. This is what I tell her.

There is a metaphor in your mouth. Swallow. Do not fear the simile of your powerful thighs. Bear down on what lies between them. Look at your own breasts as they flower. Do not turn away from the gaze of your self. Play your own cunt like a love song. You are the most magnificent symbol of all. Baby, build your body like a poem.Welcome any lover who comes.

I am not whole. I am not fractured.

I’ve been losing weight. It is not intentional. I just forget to eat. My husband fills my book bag with cheese sandwiches and cups of chocolate pudding that I misplace somewhere between leaving the house and stumbling into the faculty room. It is like my teeth are too lazy to chew, my hands too busy to forage. I have been subsisting on bottles of diet Pepsi and random snatches of trail mix. I’m getting thin. Every couple of days I have to reintroduce myself to myself in bathroom mirrors fogged with steam. What was once curved and fleshy is now pronounced, hard and definite.

Why hello there hipbones. Haven’t seen you in awhile.

When we were 13, my friends and I invented a game. We would swish, swish, swish our hips parallel to the pavement. The goal was to count how many times the tipping of our adolescent gravity could evoke the honking of car horns racing by on the two-lane road. We were innocent girls let loose across the gravel summoning grown-up danger from the safe concrete of sidewalks and the cut of freshly mowed lawns. We never really wanted or expected the pickup trucks to stop.

Is there even a point to me telling you this story? Probably.

***

I told myself that I would stop blogging. On Halloween, I took my children trick or treating and then quietly crept up into my parent’s bathroom and sobbed. My son is struggling. I sit here worrying constantly about words like evaluation and denial. I finished two pieces of writing for publication this week. All I can think is what good is pride when your three-year old son trembles in the backseat of his grandmother’s car before pre-school, and once there becomes anger personified?

I do not have any answers.

I was going to stop blogging. Many of you wrote that I should not leave. You said you would hate to see me go. For a long time, I was convinced that didn’t matter. I constantly surprise myself.

I have only just found you, a few of you wrote in comments and private e-mails. You make me feel a little less alone.

There is such kindness in your words. I like to picture you, a woman in a nightgown that replaces her three-piece business suit. You nurse a bottle of beer or a tepid cup of tea in front of a computer screen that holds my words.  Are you a man with a casual sweater who is tired of constantly straightening his own tie? Here. Let me loosen it for you.

When I sat down to blog this post, I thought I would ask you stupid questions.
When you look at me, what is it that you see?
Please do not answer.

I worry that you will read this and imagine me quite sad. I am sometimes. Mostly. I am not. Really.
My life is full of mortgage and marriage, defeating scary monsters hiding in the closets of my children, and the mirror on my bathroom wall.

Sure. I am losing weight. But, it is not intentional. I simply forget to eat. Every couple of days I have to reintroduce myself to brand new kneecaps and the wings of newly drawn shoulder blades, the former curve of me now pronounced and sharp. The terrain of my body is a constant discovery.

This blog is another body. One of words.
I think it would be nice for it to remain soft and fleshy, undefined.

At least for awhile. If that would be okay with all of you.