Dear Cat,

The thing that I said I was going to write about has already been written about too much.

Here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20dowd.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=dowd&st=cse

And here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/whats-happening-to-womens_b_289511.html

The reason I thought this might be something worth writing about is that I keep having the same conversation with all of the smart, self-aware women I know. The topic: why is it so much work to be happy?

It’s whiney, anyway. And I think the explanation is simple. In this day in age, only stupid people are happy. There are fewer stupid women than stupid men, so there are fewer happy women than happy men.

To the women before me

Thank you
for clearing the branches off the trail,
for wiping down the table before I sat down to eat,
for flushing the floater down the toilet even though it wasn’t yours,
for speaking up when something wasn’t right,
for thinking of others without sacrificing any part of yourself,
for showing them all that you could do so that the same would be expected of me.

Screw you
for playing into stereotypes because then they were projected onto me,
for acting less intelligent than you are,
for just going along with things,
for settling,
for always buying what they are selling,
for making thinness your greatest achievement.

For the women after me

I remember the first time I heard her say she hates her body. It was in a dream. She said she hated her webbed feet. Even though she doesn’t have webbed feed, I woke up with a feeling of dread because of the inevitability of my six-year old niece one day coming to disdain a part or parts or the entirety of her body and then carrying that disdain around for the rest of her life. Can it be prevented? Currently, she spends hours looking in the mirror, loves her naked body, and flashes and shakes her little butt because doing so makes her happy. How can we prolong this celebration? We (you, me, my sisters and mother) must be models of self-love. We must celebrate ourselves every day and feel nothing but gratitude for our functioning, funny-looking, abundant, flat, hairy, smelly, beautiful bodies.

What does it take

A beautiful woman’s body is attacked by breast cancer. She and the doctors get the cancer out of her body and she regains her strength. I tell her she looks great, and she says she feels great. But then she says she needs to lose ten more pounds. I want to shake her: But you are alive! Is it not enough that after attack and then radiation your body is now dancing to the music and laying in the grass? If surviving cancer is not enough to quiet the incessant voice in a woman’s head that tells her that there is too much of her, is there any hope for me to quiet the voice in my head?

Taxman

Some people go through life keenly aware of how fucking trivial it all is.
Others give a shit about graduations and goodbyes.

I spent an hour or so today reading letters that my mother wrote to my father in the year or so leading up to their marriage. My mother has always lived life.

I was surprised by many things in those letters.
My mother was a romantic. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the pleasure of reading the letters that he wrote to her.

My mother and I are more similar than I thought.

Life is not that hard. I need more love in my life. Those letters made me feel like all of the things I care about and all of the things that I am angry about don’t matter. Just find someone to love.

In eighth grade my mother said she wanted to be a dental hygienist and that is what she still does today.

I saw pictures of my dad with another girl feeding him hardboiled eggs at some college frat event. My mother went on dates with many boys.

I feel like I could be plucked from the earth and it would make no difference.

Life is a journey, I know, but when will the sucky part be over.

My mother said she would die if she lost my father’s respect. She said it made her unhappy that he didn’t go to communion, but she didn’t want him to go for her. What were they up to?

My mother was a terrible student.

My dad’s friends called him Beans.

My mother and father were confused sometimes. They had conversations that made her feel “icky.” This is such a relief to me.

My mother looked forward to being a good lover and she said she was thinking about their new home and thinking about what to cook for dinner and then she marveled, “I don’t even get angry thinking about it.”

She said “I trust you, but not with directions.”

Fucking tragic that his heart stopped beating twenty-seven years later.

And in the background for me is this nagging feeling that what I should really be doing is studying the Internal Revenue Code for my tax class.

First I found your house.

And then I found you on the Internet.
Now I scan the obituaries for your name.

I come in peace.

One day I asked myself what if I go down this street instead of that one.
I don’t know, only one way to find out.
And so I took Orchard instead of Dudley and nearly stopped in my tracks when I saw it.
This house is the only thing that could keep me in this city.
Waking up in this house would make life worth waking up to.
Coming home to this house would give me a reason to have left home in the first place.

I smell my lentils cooking in the kitchen.
I hear me typing in the front bedroom.
I see my sisters coming over to play pinochle in the front room.
I see the attic full of fabric scraps and skeins of leftover yarn.
I see me sleeping with the windows open in the back bedroom.
I see me crying in the bathroom.
I see me stretching on the front porch.
I see my laundry hanging in the backyard.
I see me letting the weeds grow on the side of the house.

There is only one place for all of this, for all of me. And you are living there. With your wife and your dog. You are young. You look fertile, like you might try and fill the house up with kids.

And so I must wait.

A composite of some of the writer's facebook friends

I used to say that my mom was my best friend and then I met my husband. Now I say that he is my best friend because that is what people say. Actually, women say it more than men. But they always sound happy when they say it and so I say it. I am married to my best friend. But secretly, we like REALLY different things. If we weren’t married and people didn’t say you should be married to your best friend, there’s no way we would be best friends. I like shopping and celebrity news and lotion. He likes dogs and trucks and sports. One thing that we can agree on is that steak is delicious. He said that he knew that I was a “cool chick” when I ordered a steak on our first date and ate more than half of it. So whenever we fight, which we don’t really do that, we try to remember to go eat steak.

We also really like reality TV. We’ve liked it since the beginning, but now there are so many shows to choose from. We have different favorite shows (me: the bachelor :: him: west coast choppers), but they are all so good that we will each watch the other’s favorite show. That’s what marriage is all about, watching each other’s favorite shows.

We also really like working out. He loves “being ripped” and I just don’t want to ever get fat. He promises that he would love me even if I get fat, but he says such mean things about his sister Janine who probably needs to start working with a trainer that I know that if I got fat maybe he wouldn’t say those things but he would probably think them.

Right now we are saving up our money to update our kitchen. We went to a factory direct appliance store today to look at stainless steel appliances to go with our granite countertops. Our house will look just like a new condo! I can’t wait! After the kitchen is done, we are going to save up for a new motorcycle for my husband. And then maybe we will have a baby or build a deck. I am so happy and blessed and nothing is wrong. At all.