Mirror, Mirror

                                                

I cannot  tell you how many times I have walked by a mirror and stopped short to pull my cheeks up toward my temples. For a very brief moment I look like I used to.Gone are the  marionette lines I’ve gotten from worrying and laughing equally...I continue to examine myself in bits: forehead seems to not be the main problem, eyes have held up somewhat, but there are definitely little hoods closing in on them. Firmness, however, is gone. My neck has rings like redwood trees. The cheek droop courtesy of my mother’s genes has taken residency in my face  and my jaw is no longer sharply defined or “snatched”,as I’ve heard it referred to in tik tok tutorials.I look at myself, and the adjectives that comes to mind are: soft,blurry, blobby. I have done the unthinkable-I have aged. Gasp.

Because I am an overthinker I of course dwell on this. I ponder on the possible reasons for  this variety of panic we generally have at the prospect of aging; is it because we know that it’s here permanently, an unequivocal announcement of decline? Perhaps it is an uncomfortable reminder that it’s later than we think? I would not call it an overwhelming feeling, but it is most definitely a nagging one. I ask myself: Could it be possible that all this time I have embraced the wrong message? That I have looked in the wrong mirrors for meaning and sense of self? the memo I got my entre life and that continues to bombrad us every day is that youth is beauty and beauty is power, and therefore once you lose it , you in a way, are lost too. 

When I was in my 20s, I remember enjoying flipping through magazines like Hola, and marveling at one never aging woman in particular who seemed to defy and bend the laws of time and physics. She now looks like a velociraptor but that notwithstanding, I became a religious SPF applier early on and knew way more about skincare than any person not studying to be an esthetician should at that age. I started out with Olay at 21 then lost the training wheels and made my way through Reviderm,  PCA skin , Lancome, La Mer, Skinceuticals, and anything that promised preventing my face from ever being lined. Because the message had set in: lines were unacceptable and even ugly. My fool’s  errand to perpetuate youth continued and so I graduated to Botox and other needles-in-the face situations. Once, my friend’s kid asked us why we were getting our  flu shots in our foreheads.It seemed comical at the moment but now I realize that if it sems ridiculous to a child, it probably is.

As time passed, what was once a three step routine became a war chest. Once I went as far as to burn off  my entire face with lasers to get rid of any spots which are telltale signs of age. Yes, you read that right, I consented to a self inflicted third degree burn in the face for the sake of youth. During all those years not once did I ever a stop to think what the purpose, philosophical reason or true motivation behind it all was, and most importantly did it come from somewhere inside of me or was it a construct from the outside, a dogma I adopted without really evaluating if it aligned with my own principles?  I, the overthinker, didn’t think twice about why it seemed so important and reasonable to dedicate so many resources: time, energy, attention, intention and money to this never ending Sisyphean task of youth maintenance.

I came to realize that things fall apart faster than I can fix,repair or prevent them. I found  myself stepping onto this hamster wheel  of sorts and then getting to the point of figuratively screaming “Stop the ride! I want to get off!” The choices became clear :I could fight back for the remainder of my days and continue expending energy on the never ending and ever more aggressive project of retaining youth or I could, like Atlas when he had the world on his shoulders, shrug. I opted to shrug. 

I shrug because I see the inevitable: loss in a fight against time and nature. Nature, that same force that makes the sun come up every day, that controls tides, that makes flowers bloom out of mere seeds. Do I know better than such a wise force?

I shrug because at 46 I have come to the full realization that my looks are not my currency and  also not in the slightest way a measure of who I am, what I offer in the world, or of how I move through life. 

I shrug because I have earned it and no magazine and no collective and no individual has the right to tell me what I should look like. 

I shrug up because I straight up refuse  to live up to expectations and standards  that I did not set for myself. I have no interest in looking the same forever. I look forward to being old and having my face and my body reflect the fact that I have been on this planet for what is probably a bit more than half of my life now. I want an honest face. One that shows happiness and humor, laughter tears but also the other tears, the deep sadness of loss and grief, of betrayals and starting overs. In short, a face that is a testament to my life. One that says, this one’s been through it. Notice I say my life. Everything I’ve written here is true for me, might not be so for others. Maybe it’s just me who has been looking at the wrong mirrors to try to see myself but I get a feeling it’s not. And if you already think like me, then you came to this realization sooner  than I did: that it’s the mirror where you see yourself as a whole that counts not the one where you get gussied up and edit for the world’s approval. If you are good with the first one, measuring up to the second one becomes weirdly and pointedly  unimportant. The ironic bit of it all is that we do so much to look good on the outside which even when achieved can feel hollow - when perhaps the same effort should be put in  to get our inner life squared away: to strive to attain things like peace, satisfaction, harmony and health rather than buying the perfect face. to feel GOOD. I will never be a woman who stops traffic or looks 25 years younger and that’s quite alright. I have finally seen myself in the mirror that matters and I have the only approval I needed all along-my own.

We Have All Dabbled in Crime- NYE musings

Jan 1, 2020

I was naive enough to ask my husband if he thought the gym at our club would be open today. “Bee, its their busiest day of the year, of course it’s open.” True, I thought . The resolutions list are likely to have ‘work out” at the very  top. Why? because the notion that if we exercise we will be more healthy, we will have better bodies. We will better ourselves. Which is the entire purpose of resolutions, to become better people, right? Which begs the question : what kind of people were we this past year that we are so eager to shed them and start over? why do these resolutions brings us so much comfort? The word that comes to mind  is hope. I think we look back and see where we tripped on our own feet  and think “yikes”. I think we look back and see where someone stuck their leg out to purposefully trip us and we think “never again.” Our lives will be better from now on because we have resolved that it will be so and we have list to prove it.

Work out.

Change jobs.

No booze.

No Instagram.

Read more.

Learn a new language.

Travel.

Eat better.

Stay away from toxic people.

Block the fuckboy.

Find my passion.

Get a raise.

Move out of my parent’s house.

All designed to make you a new and better you. The problem is time  passing and the hands on a clock moving won’t be what will make us new. The people we were 24 hours ago are the people we are now still and there is a reason those people (us) gravitate towards the behavior that led us to create a self improvement list in the first place. So I  resolve to give up on lists. It’s not that I don’t want to be better, it’s not that there is no room for improvement here. There is plenty, trust me. But I cannot overhaul myself to start at zero partly because it is a sisyphean task of epic proportions and partly because a complete overhaul, a deleting and erasing to start again at zero means that no part of my 2019 self was worthy saving. And that is simply not true.

A criminology study determined that over fifty percent of the crime happens within  less than five percent of the blocks in a city. There is not an entire bad neighborhood or bad area as we tend to think. Just like cities, we are not all bad or all good. We have specific areas were we repeatedly mess up - a couple of really bad blocks in which we commit our crimes, albeit unjailable offenses but offenses nonetheless- against ourselves and against others. The triggers that lead us to react badly over and over and relive negative stories we tell ourselves, they live here.

 So in  2020 the list has been replaced  with a more specific principle- to not lead a life of crime. My friend Jon and I share a theory that lists are in general not effective towards behavioral change,  but that  starting out slow, picking one word to focus on, one that embodies what  we want to live by in the coming year -a word that describes what we will strive for and adhere to. Maybe your word is peace, or self love, maybe your word is declutter, maybe your word is contribute. Whatever your word is it will be powerful if you stick to it. It has been proven -not by a new age clown in LA, but by science -that we all feed off  each others energy. Whatever good things you do to and for yourself you will inadvertently pass on to others, contributing far more than you could think and for far longer than three hundred and sixty five days. So latch on to whatever momentum the energy of  the New Year gives you to take steps towards who you want to be and the kind of world you want to live in-  hopefully one where  we will all be criminals no more.

*in case you're wondering my word is contribute, I'm tracking my progress and I feel like this counts. Happy 2020 :)

The Forties Flop

The Forties Flop.

“Repeat after me: My hair is my prop. I will never cut it again lest someone pays me handsomely to do so”. That was Rio’s closing line after the talking to he gave me for having shaved the side of my head, which I had not done in five months, but the awkward length of the new hair  made it impossible to pass as a Forties woman for the new FX show Fosse/Verdon. As a committed thespian and having transcended a good bit of my vanity I gave him the green light to chop it all off. I left the fitting looking like an overage Ramona Quimby but the excitement of a costume bested the fact that this has never been my most flattering look. Maybe nobody’s. Except Keira Knightley. Or Marion Cotillard. I drove home daydreaming of the lovely vintage rust colored silk crepe dress I would wear for filming- the way it shimmered, the way it draped, the way the dolman sleeves pleated at the shoulder- it  made me feel like a siren version of myself. I was thinking Atonement, El Tiempo Entre Costuras, Chicas del Cable. I could not wait.

On the day we were shooting I was an hour early to set. I wanted everything to go smoothly, to not be rushed. We were filming in Brooklyn at the old Prospect Hall on Prospect and 5th Avenue where the forties froze and are still standing still. I checked in, had breakfast and then it was time for my favorite part. HMU. That stands for Hair and Makeup. Hair first. I walked into the room set up as some sort of hair and make up refugee camp. Bakeshop vanities everywhere- every station equipped with hot rollers, all sorts of brushes and industrial amounts of cans hairspray. "If a fire starts here", I thought, "we will be the first to die". I spotted Rio and immediately made a bee line for his station. His rollers weren't hot enough yet and since time is of the essence  he passed me on to someone he deemed comparable to himself- an average height, plump hairdresser with bleached  named John. John made his best effort to be personable bit it wasn’t happening. He had a bad cold and understandably wasn't feeling  chatty. He did, however, feel the need to comment on the side of my head with the awkward growth. an eyebrow was raised. I could see him internally shaking his head and thinking “idiot’. He got to work with these hot little roller things in pink and baby blue, twisting my hair onto them and wrapping them all over my head.After some minor skin burns and a helmet of setting spray he sent me off looking like a pastel colored medusa. “Come back when you are done with make up”, he instructed me.

Off to make up I went.I learned that in the forties eyebrows and bold lips were a thing. I grew up thinking red lips were tacky, and wondered at which point they had gotten that bad reputation. I’m glad I am a woman in an era of contouring and bronzer. The porcelain doll look seems somehow devoid of warmth and made us look  like beautiful, perfectly put together, but soul less dolls. Time to go back to Jon.

Maybe the Alka Seltzer kicked in, maybe the girl before me was a total bitch, but John looked happier to see me the second time around. He even made an effort to make those typical comments in tv where everyone goes on about how perfect or fierce you look while you stare into the mirror and think to yourself you guys may just be in parallel universes. Or that they are big fat liars, taught to  when in doubt, flatter. “Your hair takes such  beautiful cur!!!! .It’s like it WANTS to be in this hairstyle. This period is perfect for you”. I'm sorry, my hair wants what? Ramona Quimby was now Ramona Quimby as a poodle. Flashbacks of the hairdo that earned me the nickname Boomer. Tight little curls that made my already short bob into a brillo pad nest. And then the damning realization that if this is what my hair goes for, that if it intuitively cooperates to look like this, and that if my individual body parts are making all these bad decisions for me, I, as a systematic whole, am fucked.

In the end, while shooting , they placed me in the front row of a seated cabaret show. We shot from than angle where my table was directly in from of the dancers, while across the room the actress playing young Gwen Verdon watched as well. Then they moved to the next shot using the big camera on the crane and said crane was placed where my table had stood before. So my table, my fake date and I were now displaced. In amazing vintage clothes, but displaced nonetheless. In the end all you will ever see, fruit of my fititng, Rio’s talking to, John burning my neck and my hair cooperating with this bullshit hairdo, is the back of a poodle’s head. Eso si, with a really nice bedazzled headpiece. If you look closely enough you might even be able to see the burns on my neck. And why would a sane person put herself through all this for beer money and an unwanted extreme makeover you ask? I don't know the answer to that. I guess you'd have to ask a sane person.

The Martini Shot

The Martini Shot

I can’t complain. If in 2017 I was a sad bitch , in 2018 I was a bad bitch. I started out the year a bit wobbly..getting in a spat with my sister and realizing I had the next five months ahead of me in the mother country, still fraught with uncertainty of where  my next foot should fall.  “Surprises are good for you”, said my heroine Nora Ephron once. And they sure are. Those five months were exactly what I needed. While most think all I did was lounge around country club pools in tiny bathing suits the better part of my shift happened then, it was just not something you could see on Instagram.

What you did not see on IG:

- The terror of facing who we are. The relief in finding that we actually like what we see. Winter in El Salvador was  a time for Finn to learn where he comes from ,at least by half. He learned a new  language, but also some of the particularities and wonder that surrounded my childhood in that big old house camino a Los Planes. Before 2018 he was my kid and we were close- physically close (as in  I was always there and he was always near.) But in 2018 I chose to lead the life of a single mother - the responsibility and the joy of parenting both resting upon  me. We  weren’t just close in proximity anymore, my child and I developed a bond that had never been there before and that we will hopefully never lose. We laughed, we cried, he got  sick.  We got lice. Twice. I know that rhymes, but it’s true. We went to a fantastic island with Daddio.

 - I gave my mother the gift of lost time back, handing her the opportunity to have a child live with her  again, this time being a softer version of the woman who raised me. I gave myself the gift of forgiveness. I reopened old wounds and this time I opted to seal them instead of salting them, putting decades  long childhood resentment to its final bed. On the day I was about to fly back she told me she just wanted me to be happy. I said I was sorry I have always judged her so harshly. We both wept.

-I strove  for things worth having: peace, satisfaction, being of service. I tried to make decisions that wouldn't give me tummy aches after, or leave me vulnerable for mistreatment again. I’m not done, Probably nowhere near done, but I’m on it. And I’m learning and growing as I go. I learned the value of time affluence and chose to be a person who expands constantly  through learning and experimenting rather than one that seeks being established through career or money. 

- I worked hard. I worked in a jail, I worked as a florist, I worked with refugees seeking asylum my first two cases a woman and a child from El Salvador. I worked as an actress. I learned more in one year from all these interactions than I have in a decade put together. I finally understood the true meaning of gratefulness and a new, fuller appreciation for the small every day blessings bestowed upon me,- ranging from a keen ability to spot beauty and feel it  blowing my mind to the renewed breath of every morning when I open my eyes. I learned to just what an incredible extent the people in our lives shape it and enrich it. Every day I am grateful I get one more day on planet Earth with all you other animals. Fill in the blank with your name here _______.

-I learned  to lean towards acceptance and rethink the pride in anger because I just want to live in peace. I learned that the more I love the better I feel, and the better I live, the better I’m doing in fulfilling  my life’s  mission  which is the same one we all as spiritual beings on a human adventure have: To learn to live and love better. To be proud of every aspect of who we are , our bodies and our souls and how its great to be proud of the former but more satisfying to be at peace with the latter. I learned to appreciate the amazing things a body enables us to experience. Sensations ranging from wind in our hair, seeing the golden hour a the end of a day, hot showers when you are wicked tired, passion, a complicit squeeze of a hand, the understanding of friendship in a tight hug. The tenderness in kissing the top of a child’s head. I realized I perhaps need to take better care of my body, but most importantly that no one and nothing is worth endangering my soul.

Wrapping it Up.

In this recent venture in the acting world I pull twelve to fourteen hour days shooting  scenes you will see on your screen for not even a minute. By the time it’s time to go home  the day’s work has been put in,a fraction of something has been produced and it will come together with its whole eventually. It’s true of scenes in a film , and it’s true of life. I like thinking of  this year as  a constant shooting of scenes that we have finally come to the last of. This is what is referred to  in Hollywood slang,  as “The Martini Shot” . It is the last shot  of the day and after that the next one, well, it comes out of a glass. In my mind I hear the AC  yelling “Check the gate”  and the AD saying “Moving On”, meaning we are close to wrapping and indicating a milestone, a maker on the road to a finished film.

PASS ME BY

   

 Baby killers? Yes, that will catch your eye, capture your ear. It’s the debate du jour. Everyone who has ever wanted to hear the sound of their own voice will tell you about it, share their stance. Some do it from their Facebook status prompt, others on the floor of the Legislative Palace. Some will do it out of true conviction, others out of a very well calculated way to walk  the path to a political career. In spite of the extreme passion the subject of legalizing abortion in the two instances proposed by Johnny Wright  has aroused (Side note and completely unrelated to his proposal: you gotta love a man in politics who maintains his integrity and has a set of balls of steel...And so young too! But I digress.) I am happy to see debate going on. I am happy to see an exchange of views and for us Salvadorans, always so filled with apathy, to finally be speaking out. Whatever your view may be, by default it is an unpopular one for the other side-  and taking unpopular stances is good for you, it tests your mettle.

    In El Salvador our small world is very judgmental, and constantly seen in  black and white. There is a lot of living in extremes. For those of you unfamiliar with my country, it is one of five that still considers abortion a crime. Under no circumstance can an abortion be legal, whether the pregnancy is a risk for the mother’s life, whether the pregnancy is the result of raping an underage girl or (gasp!) whether  a woman for any other reason, powerful or not, does not wish to have a baby. Johnny Wright recently proposed a change in the current criminal law which would , if passed, legalize abortion in the first two instances mentioned above. The spirit of his initiative is preserving women’s health but it has been enough to launch a national morality competition. If this were the Trojan War, John Wright stole Helen. 

    I see a lot of problems here. But not the obvious ones. There are enough people out there giving their two cents on morality, principles, and even going as far as calling legalizing abortion under the first two proposed instances a genocide. There are enough righteous fingers zealously pointing at those who have sparked this debate, so I am thinking more than jumping to a condemning verdict on whether someone has a broken moral compass or not, who is bad and who is even badder, I would rather share the questions I have come up with.

The options. What are the options for girls/ women under these first two premises? What kind of resources do they have? Does this government know enough about them to come down with a condemnation that will affect their lives and impact their health in a huge way? Will the government give them some sort of support  after forcing them into a decision they were not prepared to make? Are we giving women the credit they deserve when we are  tying their decision making hand and foot by sending them to jail if what the State has chosen for them is not in alignment with what they want?  What will happen when you force women to have these babies? Will they actually follow through, or will they turn to clandestine clinics and get a procedure under the lowest medical care possible?  

For the ones who follow through and carry their pregnancies and give birth to an unwanted baby the obvious choice is giving them up for adoption. Where are we putting all these babies?Has anyone visited an orphanage here? Does anyone know what the chances are of these kids actually getting adopted in a vital phase of life were nurturing from parents is KEY? I would like to think they will get  scooped up by a nice family from Copenhagen who will buy them  an Ikea bunk bed and summer vacays in Biarritz , but it’s not happening. It is more likely that these kids will rot in an understaffed, under budgeted orphanage lacking love, lacking guidance and therefore lacking the pillars for the self esteem and sense of self they will need to navigate life in a joyful way.  I don't want to be a Negative Nelly just sitting here pointing out deficiency after deficiency but- Has anybody read the adoption laws in this country? Laws are not meant to be stagnant. For laws to serve their purpose correctly they need to change with the times. They need to be dynamic. Which leads me  to the following thought:

This debate is partly on legalizing the choice to have abortion when the pregnancy is the result of the rape of an underage girl. I don’t know a rape victim personally, but they are everywhere in this country. At the rate of one every twenty minutes, this issue should be getting a lot more attention than the abortion debate. I am not saying it is more important, I am saying look at the origin of things first. Nip that in the bud.  Why have we not looked at this more closely, why are we not debating to modify those laws? Why don’t we protect our girls as a government first,after all -isn’t the crime in this country what puts them in the position of having an unwanted baby in the first place? This is not a confusing case of what came first chicken or the egg. For an underage girl to get pregnant by her rapist  a crime needs to be committed first. Everyone talks about life as a constitutional right. But freedom is there too. What about health, a safe and secure childhood? How does one decide which life is worth more? a defenseless cell or a defenseless child who is already here?

As for the girls we are trying to protect from committing a sin that will make them criminals on earth and damn them to hell in the next life: 

I have had the privilege of working  with gang member girls as young as fourteen who have been incarcerated. In many ways they are not that different from you and me, in others the way they grew up has been a tough experience our silver spoon  fed selves cannot fathom. They are hopeless romantics who grew up in a home where they were not valued or loved in the proper way a child needs to be nurtured in order to thrive. They have lived on the streets, they have been raped a number of times, usually by a family member. Their mothers knew the truth but would not risk crossing the males who dominate their family. These girls turn to gangs because they are offered loyalty, and a sense of belonging, and the protection they never got at home. I know what some are thinking. That I am some sort of asshole because I am not saying we should throw them all in a hole and burn them because they are bad eggs. Yes, I have heard people say that. Because it is much more simple to declare that they are bad seeds who do bad things than to think of ways to help them repair their damaged selves. I’ll tell you what. No one is born bad. Perhaps if our circumstances had been different,  we would be their cell mates. We are all so passionate about defending the life that is to be. But what about the life that is already here? these girls have been forgotten. No one thinks of them, no one writes about them. Where are the enraged moralists? Perhaps speaking out for those girls, who are still our girls, is not chic. It is not the debate du jour. The problem here is crime, not the babies- but no one looks at the background. And so I join the ranks of those who use their voice, not to stir the pot even more, but to raise some valid questions. I am aware I am  taking an  unpopular stance, and unpopular as it is, I stand by it. I hope we can one day say girls here are safe from sexual aggression, but if this cannot be a reality I support them having a choice to be healthy not just physically but mentally and make decisions pertaining to their bodies and their lives along with their parents or guardians. I support them having those rape babies or not, I support them if they want to  risk their lives to have a baby, or not. I urge you to allow yourself a glimpse of who these girls and women are. I assure you the less privileged are the ones who will take the brunt of this. Try walking in their shoes- switch the Manolos for a pair of chancletas. Lastly acknowledge that this world is not black and white, and that our humanity lies in the very gray. If this all sounds like baloney to you, then, in the words of Frank Sinatra- “if you don't happen to like it , deal me out,  thank you kindly, pass me by”.

What If I Had Never Met You?

I opened my eyes and the room seemed way too bright. That was enough to send me into a tizzy as I live by “ If you are on time , you are already late”.  Because nothing can be easy on a day were the goddess Fortuna has decreed you will be miserable, Finn was a grade A brat, and I was destined to leave the house frazzled with a screaming kid in tow. 

“TE VOY A NALGUEAR!” 

I am not an advocate of physical discipline. Some books say it is inhumane. What’s inhumane is the crap he puts me through. But I get it. I would very much rather reason with him and talk it out but sometimes you just see red, you look at the clock and back to that shit eating grin on his face while defiantly kicking the furniture and looking at you square in the eye. All symptoms are eerily similar to  a panic attack but it’s merely a reaction to  Kindergarchy.

-“Please brush your teeth.” 

“NO.” 

Sigh. Positive discipline alternated with  threats. Everything is a fight.

Having left him at school I focused on what was next . Clear rubber bands, I needed clear rubber bands. I agreed to teach a flower arranging class and today’s work was “How to make a European Bouquet”. Rubber bands were of the essence. Still consumed with my thoughts as I was walking to my car, I met the eye of a fellow drop offer. I had seen her many times but we had never spoken. Today, of all days, we chatted. I discovered that behind that quiet face  I have walked by on many occasions over the past two months is a woman that I relate to and whose conversation am I enthralled with. Having written her off as another plus one wifey in athleisure I am embarrassed to admit I had never bothered with her. On the drive over I thought of how many amazing women are out there that we are missing out on. So many points of view, so many stories and wisdom. Friend FOMO. I thought of how we do ourselves such a disservice by trying to remain separate when connection is so much better.

I looked at the screen and Waze was saying I would be at CISF ( stands for Center for Feminine Social Integration in Spanish) at 9:17 a.m. “ I’m good,” I thought..Today was my first day at work and my second time meeting Merci, who works for an NGO that does tremendous work in Centers were girls between the ages of 14 and 25 have been locked up. I am charmed by her lack of pretentiousness, her ethic and her authenticity. We taught the “Girls Club” class together and all the stigmas I had about gang member girls were crushed in one morning. The girls I taught have not given up, the girls I taught still, in some small place in those hearts that we all like to define as black and white, are hopeful.

After class Merci and I took an early lunch before our next class. When I sat down and checked my phone (which I was not allowed to have in Juvie Jail), my heart sank. A ton of missed calls already, from the same number. And another call coming in. My kid’s teacher. She explained in that Montessori Zen voice that she is at the hospital with my kid. Merci looked up after listening a bit and got the check. We put together an emergency plan for her to take a stab at the class alone while she reassured me it would be ok. I felt awful I couldn’t finish the day. I felt awful for the girls. I felt awful for my kid, sitting in some hospital without his mama to hold his hand- and me still being at least 35 minutes away from reaching him. That’s the thing about women, they really do need us everywhere.

Pedal to the metal is nothing. I zigzagged from Ilopango to Finn’s school, where they had taken him back after the hospital visit in what felt like an eternity but was really half an hour. I spoke to the teachers and could not believe my luck that I had entrusted my child’s education to two women that are so competent, and assertive and compassionate and amazing. Later, as I sat in the Pediatrician’s waiting room talking to Adriana recounting the events of the day we somehow manage to laugh. How great to have a friend.

Like in those movies where you see seemingly stray lives come together in some way as the plot develops , International Women’s Day this year was a day when I was inspired, taught and saved by very different women: Girls who did really bad things but keep trying even if society has given up on them, a potential new friend, a woman with a very simple heart of gold, two angels who take care of other’s children as if they were their own, and the treasure that is a true girlfriend. Exhausted to the almost point of tears, tucked in bed in men’s pajamas I think: It’s a good day to be a woman and to have so many amazing ones around me. And one last ironic thought strikes me : With all the shit we have to get done and be, the people we need to comfort, the kids we need to raise, the careers we have to juggle-  these days you need a pair of  balls to be a woman."

A belated happy day to all the women who toil and laugh and live and are amazing.

A Post Mortem Thank You Note

I used to be one of those kids who could ID what they wanted and make a bee line for it. Tunnel vision- what I wanted I got- sometimes in non kosher ways. But that decisiveness and drive were in me. Somewhere between patterns handed down from parents and surrogate parents, life kicking my ass, and living unconsciously and for and through my ego, I lost them. I always joke that if you hate to see me agonizing  over choosing  between two jolly rancher flavors, you really don’t want to see what I’d be like buying house. My head is always spinning, always weighing everything in an endless torment of factors and facts, when I should really just be discerning enough to look inside and get my answer. And I say should be, because inside all of us there is that spiritual self- that along with  body, emotion and intellect- is the wisest part of us and it has all the answers, the answers that our past traumas don’t let us trust. I don't trust myself.

 For all of the previously stated, to me, people who can intuitively skip the bullshit and not only know what they want but take immediate steps toward execution, are a bit of a rare miracle. We mostly live in transference and ambivalence, sometimes not even our thoughts are our own. All these rule books, written and unwritten, the shoulds and should nots. How freeing it must be to inherently know to follow your heart. To say no timid yeses , to have our no’s not be tepid no’s. To have the greatness to take bold steps and then not look back or retreat. To say FUCK, YES and ABSOLUTELY NOT. And mean it, and stand by it.

I lost my father when I was twelve, and at that juncture of an impressionable age I happened to have the fortune to have befriended a girl who was an only child. She became one of my closest friends throughout what have now been three decades. I was that kid her parents invited over all the time, on weekend getaways and even family vacations. So close was my relationship with her parents that in our twenties their daughter and I got in a fight over a boy and I threatened to them to not go on the trip. I told on her, she told on me. Typical family dynamics between siblings.They mediated, we made up, and we all went to Cancun together. Years later I was a bridesmaid at her and that boy’s wedding. That man who treated me like a second daughter gave her away.

My memories of him include the one where he  gave me my first job out of high school which consisted of making a report of the closing of the Coffee Sugar and Cocoa Exchange and sending it out, via fax, (ha!) to the major coffee growers in El Salvador. He also was the first person to ever fire me. Maybe because instead of doing the report I ate sandwiches with his daughter in her room. What I remember working with him is that day in day out I was both intimidated and mesmerized by this man, this force, that took over , loud, assertive, busy, determined, authoritative, dynamic. I never saw him blink or fret. Regardless of what he was pursuing  he always went for it-he never half assed a thing. If he ever had doubts, self or otherwise, it was never apparent. 

Last week his life was taken from him, brutally, cowardly. There will most likely be chatter about the circumstances, speculation. Big small talk for those who have nothing better to do. It’s just too easy for people to weigh in  and judge. It’s easy to condemn. You see, pointing out that the neighbor needs to clean up his yard is easy, even when our own yard is in front of you in desperate need to be  worked on. Destroying things is easy. It’s easy to ruin a reputation or break a heart. You know what’s admirable? to repair. Because it takes the very best disposition in us to repair broken things, things that aren’t whole or even useful. It’s hard work, it takes thought, and time and focusing and empathy. The bad in us comes to the surface readily, almost automatically. The good has to be pulled from depths of our soul that we are not used to tapping into.

 I have the leisure to be sitting at home doing one of the things that I enjoy the most because my boss-, for reasons that I completely understand- would not allow me to be absent for the two days I needed to travel for the funeral. I  went into his office knowing that I’d probably come out of it with no job to come back to. I was right. I had to choose- take the two days, pay my respects, kiss my lifelong friend or get a paycheck. I, unlike Don Marcos, have spent the last shitty year in painful ambivalence- weighing in on  my life, my marriage, my opportunities and  my choices. I’ve been to more therapy than I ever thought a person  would need in a lifetime. But as I stood there there was no ambivalence, and the best way to pay my respects to that man who was kind to me and generous beyond what most people reading about him in a newspaper will ever know is to have calmly looked around and made my choice. No weighing and backtracking. Clear as day. A paycheck over sentiment? (and here I can hear his voice) ABSOLUTELY NOT.

May you rest in eternal peace - and thank you,thank you, thank you.