Day: March 28, 2014

Grumpy about vanity

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I am an incredible slob. I can go days without looking in a mirror. Usually I don’t bother to brush my hair in the morning before taking Jesse to school. If I do make the mistake of catching my reflection later in the day, I’m always mortified. Peeps at school must think I have a permanent case of crazy bed-head. But I admit, my mortification lasts but a few fleeting seconds and has no short- or long-term effect on my behavior. My friend Paula asked me yesterday if there was something new about my hair, because it looked good. I had to think for a second. Yes, I HAD done something new! I actually showered in the morning, which is a rare feat indeed.

I’m a t-shirt-and-jeans (and since it’s cold here, sloppy sweater) kinda girl. I rarely wear anything else. It apparently bothers Jesse. She asked me the other day, “why do you only wear jeans?” I answered, “I don’t just ‘only wear jeans,’ my love, I wear the same jeans every day until they can stand on their own.” Her OCD meter went haywire and the conversation thankfully ended. Next she was going to ask me about makeup, and I haven’t worn any of that since my early 20’s.

When I was a lawyer, dressing was easy. I did it like a guy. I had a handful of monkey suits, a bunch of shells in different colors, and a variety of shoes I kept under my desk to slip into after I walked to work. No collars or frills for me, thank you. I did not accessorize, except with a watch and eventually a wedding ring. I got really good haircuts so I wouldn’t have to do anything with my hair. It took me about 15 minutes to get ready and out the door in the morning, including a shower. Anthony helped make sure I was tucked in and labels weren’t showing. Still, I thought I looked pretty professional, but I’m guessing now that I came off as, um, rugged? Okay. Slovenly. At least I didn’t wear seersucker to the courthouse.

Some time in the last year or two I noticed that the enormous fleshy space between my eyes and my eyebrows — what do you call that, the eyelids? It’s kind of different on my half-Korean eyes, because it’s not folded IN, but I guess it’s still the lids. It makes the eye-shadow-on-folded-in-lids things a whole different ball game, which may be part of the no-makeup explanation for me. Euro-teen-girl mags in the early 80’s didn’t tell me how to do things to my eyes that made sense. I always ended up looking weird and wiping the warpaint off before anyone saw me.

Hold on. I’m reading back up to see what I was actually going to say. Right, so I noticed that my eyelids were looking wrinkly, like more wrinkly than the rest of my face. I peered more closely in the mirror and realized those weren’t wrinkles, they were hairs. GAH! This was too much even for me. Anthony has always asked me not to pluck my neanderthal eyebrows because he likes them, and I was more than happy to grant this wish, but I drew the line at eyelid hair. I now pluck those hairs that show up between my actual eyebrows and my eyelashes. It is brutal and painful. I cannot possibly imagine waxing anything, especially after I pluck those 6 or 7 hairs off each of my eyelids. A Brazilian? Are you f***ing crazy? That sort of depilation is not for me. Fortunately, I’m not really that hairy because of my ethnicity. Except for my eyelids, apparently.

But I admit, I forget about those stray eyelid hairs a lot of the time too. No one mentions them, so who am I to complain? I wonder sometimes why I’m so unmoved by a desire to look good. I mean, I do want to look “good,” but for me that means fit, strong, and plain. What I’m wearing, whether my face and hair are gussied up, I just don’t care enough to keep up any pretense for long.

I’ve decided today that it’s because of an episode I went through in eighth grade. I was very religious back then. I went to church and Sunday school every week; I had my own Bibles and I read them. On my own, like I was sneaking. It’s never a good idea to leave a 13-year-old alone with a religious text, especially a confusing and terrifying one. I used to lie awake at night waiting for the end of the world. Every time a plane flew over, I would tremble in terror because I thought it was some apocalyptic natural event beginning, or the sound of all of the USSR’s nukes floating in on their way to Stockton. Also I thought I was supposed to become a nun, or something akin to a nun since I wasn’t Catholic. That was a very bad stretch in my life. I probably should have mentioned my fears to Mom or Dad, or the pastor.

Anyway, that’s not on point here. What I’m thinking about is a stretch of time when I was addressing myself to the Ten Commandments. I read them, I considered them, I tried to live by them. But I mixed one commandment up. My mind abridged “thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.” I remembered it instead as “thou shalt not be vain.”

Asking a 13-year-old pubescent girl not to be vain is like asking the sun not to rise in the morning. And I took an extreme view. I thought that if I looked in the mirror to check that my clothing was on correctly, I was being vain. If I worried over my hair or did anything to fix it up, I was being vain. Jewelry? Makeup? Worrying about acne? Vain. Talking about clothes and stuff with friends? Vain. Taking pride in any of my academic or musical accomplishments? Vain. Worrying about eating the right amount so I didn’t get fat? Vain. Vanity, vanity, everything was vanity.

I honestly don’t remember how long this lasted, but it felt like forever as I struggled through the days, trying not to sin. Respecting my parents and not killing someone were EASY commandments. Vanity was impossible to resist. I would desperately avoid looking in the mirror after I dressed myself, steeling my body and soul against the draw of such a sinful act. I took no pride in successful recitals or competitions, good report cards. It was a sin. I wasn’t sure if my natural vanity was hell-worthy, but it was so pervasive I didn’t know what to do.

Finally I bothered to go back to the source, and LO! Angels sang anthems down upon my absurd head as I read the words I had forgotten. Not TAKING THE LORD’S NAME IN vain was something I could manage a whole lot better than not BEING vain. I was so relieved. I stayed up late for at least a week obsessively checking my ass in the mirror, trying on my wardrobe, and diddling with my hair.

I think that episode broke something in me — or spun another way, it freed me. Maybe not so much in my teens, but surely as an adult. And that’s the only legitimate excuse I have for looking like this. Once in a while I pay attention, and then Anthony says things like, “You clean up good.” I guess pretty soon I’ll need to start dressing better just so I don’t embarrass my kids. Until then, it’s a sloppy free-for-all.

I haven’t been grumpy. Just depressed. Whatever.

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For the past few weeks I’ve been sinking into a funk. Superficially I blame Jesse, and also sometimes Nick, but I know it’s really just me. Jesse’s anxiety and PITA syndrome have been in a healthy UP cycle for a good month. It’s a whole lot of emotion management. She lashes out at me a lot, whines a lot, beats up on herself a lot, complains about things from all sides, churns little blips into major issues. It’s all “a lot.” Nick is always A LOT, even when he’s on an even keel (for him). When they’re together with me, they yell over each other constantly to get my attention so I can’t make out anything they’re saying, and even when they’re getting along (which I admit is most of the time) they’re just crazy people. So it only takes a moment for me to reach some serious sensory overload.

I could share anecdotes and stupid stories, but honestly, who cares, because all I’m really saying is this: it’s just the same old boring shit. When I deal with Jesse’s bursts of negativity these days, I feel a combination of bored, bleak, and blank. I’m going through the motions: feed the kids, put on a fake cheerful attitude for other moms, play with the kids (yawn), get my exercise, pick up and drop off the kids here and there, read some news, homework, blah blah blah. What I’m feeling inside is a vague need to escape. I found myself yesterday fantasizing about what my life would be like right now, at 47, if I had never had kids or a partner. Would I be a partner in a law firm instead of a partner to a human? Rich as Roosevelt, socking away bucks for old age, my wardrobe and hair well-attended, a secretary to send my mom flowers on various occasions?

It’s a lame thing to imagine, of course, because it’s just exactly what I rejected, a path that would have been filled with loneliness and long hours and extreme stress. So I think it speaks to a sort of sub-clinical depression. Rationally, I know I’ve been down this road often, most plainly when I began working hard on emotional self-control a few years ago with Jesse. My first order of business when we started taking her to a shrink was to stop losing my shit and screaming at my family. I struggled with it for a few months and felt like I was succeeding, but Anthony eventually confronted me with a big problem. The exorcism was not going as well as I thought. It seemed I had a binary switch: insane rage or sullen bleak depression. This bothered Anthony. I was angry and defensive when he brought it up. It’s all I’ve got, I told him. It’s the best I can do. I’m emptying myself of emotions so I don’t feel anything at all, and that’s how I stop the yelling. I thought that’s what everyone wanted. I don’t have anything positive to fill the chasm my rage usually fills. How come what I’m doing isn’t good enough for you? How come nothing I do is good enough?

When I was done feeling sorry for myself, I took heed of Anthony’s words – spoken in compassion and perhaps fear, not in recrimination — and eventually I was able to work on a more constructive mood, along the lines of calm but not blank, an open space where my mind can think about the problem confronting me, without self judgment, and evaluate whether I can add positive sense or whether I should walk away for a spell. Oftentimes, I can actually find my way there.

But when I get like I’ve been the last few weeks, I’m back at sullen. I don’t know what it is about Jesse that’s so exhausting for the adults around her. I don’t have answers, but I have a lot of fears and I’ve been out of ideas for the next evolution. I also haven’t felt the warmth I need to help her overcome whatever hurdle is lurking in her heart right now, which I’m sure she intuits. I haven’t had a sense of humor about it all, which is essential to survival in my world. I haven’t even felt grumpy, and I’ve had no desire to write and share my vapid thoughts with the 20 or 30 folks who read my dribble. This is really bad.

Stick a fork in my ass and turn me over; I’m done. I’ve been attending my pity party for weeks now and I’m pretty tired of myself. A couple days ago a song came on the radio, and there’s nothing better than a good pop song to break a cycle. “Let’s Be Still,” recorded by The Head and The Heart, brought it on. I listened to that tune and the lyrics, and it broke a dam inside me with an easy sigh and no tears. First it made me laugh, because of course I thought, hey, it’s another mommy song! I’m always asking my kids to be still. But it took me someplace else too. All the hours I spend  trying to own the emotional status of my kids, to spy out the path of their lives, to love them and live with them peacefully and fully — it’s all too much. Living in the moments and small battles, I forget that I have to slow down my racing thoughts and just be still for a moment. Also the song and its band remind me of a lot of music I listened to in a less complicated time in my life, with hints of the Beatles, VU, Mazzy Star and even Tiny Lights. It’s all good, I thought to myself. We’ll make it. It’s not that complicated.