Is Anybody Out There??

First, let me say that since taking the writing class (which I loved), I am eager to write, and I may, from time to time, write about things other than singing.

This doesn't mean that I have stopped singing!  In fact I am looking forward to my voice lesson today, when I can work on some of the scenes from Carmen.

But I would like to branch out.

Something happened yesterday that made me terribly sad, and of course now I feel like an idiot for feeling sad!

I just feel so much loss.  Loss of the possibility of doing anything "noteworthy" with singing, loss of the possibility of having an interesting and stimulating livelihood, loss of a peer partner (which is a lose-lose situation; if she dies I will be desolate, and as long as she lives I am trapped in a lesser life), loss of my mother, who, even though she had a deformed spirit, still really was interested in what I was thinking and doing, even if only to argue with me about it.

The thing that made me sad involved an interchange between a father and daughter on Facebook, in which the father expressed pride in an blog essay the daughter had written about bisexuality.  True, this is not a new story.  In fact,this article covers a lot of the same territory. But I felt sad that never, in a million years, would my mother have been "proud" of anything I wrote as it stood. (The subject matter here is immaterial; it never bothered her that I had a same sex partner, it bothered her that I had such an ordinary life.) Her first impulse would always have been to gleefully, like a child asking permission to eat a forbidden cookie, say "is it ok if I take out my red pencil" (pant pant slobber slobber) which of course put an end to it.  If I said no, she would tell me she would rather not read it.  She was never really interested in what I thought, or in how well I formulated my thoughts, or in relating to me as a separate person, with whom she could agree to disagree.  Although specifics really didn't matter.  No matter how compellingly I might write that something was blue, she would make a case for the fact that it was red, and if I had written compellingly about the fact that it was red, she would have made a case for the fact that it was blue.  In any event, discord would ensue and everything would be spoiled.

But since she died, in some ways things are worse.  Give or take one or two people (my SO aka my "it's complicated" is not one of them) no one really gives a damn.  I can't tell you how many interesting Facebook status updates I've made that no one has responded to (and believe me, most of them are more interesting than what Jane Doe ate for dinner or the fact that Mary Smith spilled soup on her blouse!).  Or the fact that this blog has only 13 followers (the daughter I referenced has 23).   I mean every day I look at my stats, which show that obviously I have more than 13 readers, but still.

My therapist helped me see that so much of what makes me feel wanting is generational.  The women who have the things that I want are 40, not 63.  I have not done badly for someone who was told during what is now called emerging adulthood to "turn on, tune in, and drop out", the latter with disastrous lifelong consequences.  Few women of my generation had "careers".  Blue collar women had blue collar jobs and "intellectual-ish" women worked in the pink collar ghetto of the publishing industry cleaning up grammar and syntax, which is what I am still doing.  That work has as little to do with the putative "glamourous world of publishing" as being a house cleaner has with being an interior designer.  But the types of "career" that not only pay well but that entail traveling, attending conferences, and meeting people, did not figure in the lives of most women, even intelligent ones with a good postsecondary education.  And it was not just the women.  Baby boomers dropped out of college in droves, to finish, sometimes, at night as middle aged adults.  People in their early 20s made hippie marriages, some of which they ended up stuck in (I would count myself here even though I am not legally married).  Being lazy was a virtue, working too hard was frowned on (one of the dream jobs back then was being a case worker for the city, which in those days entailed visiting clients, allowing for huge swaths of absenteeism during the day that went unnoticed).

So I really don't feel wanting compared to most women my age, except that some managed to marry someone gainfully employed for most of their lives, and many are still working full time (many at jobs they dislike as much as I disliked mine).  The handful of women I grew up with who had enviable careers are all single.

I probably was happier in those two sessions of the writing class than I have been in a long time.  That was the first time in - decades, it seems - when I was in a small group where it felt that the playing field was level, and each person's story was deemed equally worthy.  Each person got an equal share of the talking time and was listened to.  I can't remember the last time I felt listened to on a regular basis, even in cyberspace.

I am not sure where I am going with this.  Tomorrow I am having lunch with the only friend I have (herself bisexual, and, like me, someone who never had  the luxury of being a stay at home wife and mother) who totally agrees with me that marriage is about money not about love.  Unfortunately, my SO will be there with me, so we can't talk about that (last time we talked about it briefly while my SO was in the loo).  Maybe if I can catch her on the fly she will tell me "you made a good point there, BabyD, succinctly and well put".  Other than in the writing class, that's a phrase I haven't heard in a very long time.