PROCREATING + PUZZLES | guest post: alisha giampola

Over the years I've never quite been able to resolve for myself the "you should't need a man" comments that come my way. Of course I don't, I think! I never I said I did. There's a quote out there that's something along the lines of: don't wait for a man to bring you flowers, go out and tend to your own garden. And I get it. And I like to think that since graduating college I've done a hell of a lot of tending to my metaphorical peonies and dandelions and cherry tomatoes. But the whole man bringing you flowers thing? Well, it isn't really about the flowers. It's about the person on the other end of that bouquet.

The feminist in me bristles as the double standard of women-don't-need-a-man-but-poor-Jen-Anison-that-she's-never-found-one.

And because I've been thinking about it a lot, and because I think I know some pretty remarkable women, I asked them to sort through their own feelings and spit out some words.

And boy am I glad I did.

Alisha is one of my very favorite people in the world. Seeing her, even if it's once a week, always feels like Christmas morning. She's smarter than I am, and more no-nonsense, and hell of a lot of fun.

What follows is her response:

I recently (embarrassingly recently, if I'm being honest) realized that I was being very judgmental about women my age who were deciding to procreate. I'd hear about a friend (or an acquaintance, or anyone under thirty, really) who was giddily posting ultrasound pictures on Facebook or posing for a maternity photo shoot complete with bunting and handcrafted chalkboards and my gag reflex would just start acting up. It was like their motherhood was a personal affront on my very modern, progressive, independent choice to not procreate at this moment in time. Show me a baby shower cake filled with secretly pink (or blue!! which is it?!) frosting and I'll show you my Judgy McJudgerson face.

What's funny about this is that I really like babies and kids. I actually work with them every day in my job. Babies are the greatest, and say that with zero irony. I want one someday! I just don't want one right now, and I say that too with absolute and total sincerity. So the minute someone on my Facegram or Instabook or Whatever pops up with a blurry overexposed alien-fetus image with the caption: "COMING THIS FALL!!" I simply can't control my reaction of: "What is she thinking?!!"

Of course, what she's thinking is: "YAYYYYYYYYYYYY" but I can't wrap my head around that. And the reason why? Even though every rational part of me knows that someday I too will be wielding an ultrasound photo excitedly around in front of all my friends, I can't imagine anyone would want to do such a thing outside of my personal prescribed life-timetable for how it should go.

This is a very human response. We all have it. When I decided to marry my very long-time boyfriend/roommate at the age of twenty-seven, I got more than a few surprised looks from more enlightened friends who couldn't dream of a reason to tie the knot so young anymore. And I mean, fair enough, ladies. Honestly, I get it. Welcome to the future! We can marry or not marry when and how and whom we choose; we are tap tap tapping away at that pesky glass ceiling in vast hoards so that it may shatter and our daughters will look up and see the glorious, unobstructed view of our spinning galaxy, equally distributing prosperity to both men and women of all colors and creeds.

No, we are no longer expected to find a man, marry, and settle down with kids. And thank god for that, because some women would prefer to find a woman, not marry, and maybe get a couple dogs instead. There are loads and loads of people who aren't cut out for, or are in any way interested in monogamy. Still others who identify as uninterested in romantic partnerships and decide to seek out loving networks of friends to fill the very human need for social support.

But there are lots of people out there on this earth who seek lifelong companionship of the heterosexual variety. When men seek out the path of monogamous life companionship, it is celebrated and the man's desire is never questioned. He is a man, and therefore can of course do whatever he wants, so if he has chosen to do this, it must be because he wants it and with his strong, masculine hands he scooped it up for himself!

But oh, that sneaky double standard of sex. Of course men can do All The Things without having their motives come into question. But women have so much more to prove. Even now, I feel the shadows of all our grandmothers and great grandmothers looming over us, whispering: "Remember how hard we fought. We fought so you could get that Musical Theatre degree and wear shorts and vote." When women want, seek, desire a man to share a day or a life with, it is predictable, weak, backwards-leaning, probably going to ruin her career, something her parents want for her tsk-tsk-tsk.

I never particularly thought I would marry at what is considered a young age in Manhattan, and pretty much right at the national average elsewhere. I always, even as a kid, imagined that I would be a cool funky aunt like my Aunt Monica and then find some brooding older interesting gentleman on my world travels and we would elope on my fortieth birthday on my yacht, while drinking champagne that came from my own vineyards in France. Imagine my surprise when I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life with someone in my twenties. And that not only did marriage feel right, and good, and like coming home, but it was what I wanted to do. I chose it and I scooped it up for myself with my strong, feminine hands.

So I have become wary when I feel myself judging my happy, hormonally-glowing friends who are expecting. Just because I am placing all my own fears of what pregnancy means for a modern woman on their lives, does not mean that they have not made strong, intelligent, clear-headed choices about their bodies, lives and careers and decided that a baby would be part of it. Right now.

I don't want a baby yet, but I know what that desire is like. And that desire is like the desire to mate for life. To find the other swan out there who will link necks with you. Searching for that companion is a small part of anyone's journey, but it is a valid part. I don't believe in soul mates. This topic is something my husband and I bonded over long before marriage was even a flicker of an idea. He said that he had dated a girl once who believed that everyone had a soul mate and she was determined in every relationship to try and cram herself into the exact size and shape of the other person's puzzle piece to see if she would fit. Like Aristotle, she imagined that her true love had been severed from her body in some distant past and her life's goal was to seek her missing half. I laughed and said that I couldn't imagine that such a thing could be true.

Life is too big and messy and interesting and complicated and people come both in and out of our lives with far too much purpose for there to be merely one small puzzle piece that I must find or be forever unwhole. My husband loves puzzles. I don't, but I enjoy watching him solve them because of how his eyes rapidly scan for color, size, and shape with an intensity and concentration that is like watching someone play the piano or paint a picture.

To solve a puzzle, he has told me, you have to begin at the edges. Work inwards. Sort the pieces by color. Decide which parts you want to tackle first and which details you will fill in later. Puzzles are made up of many pieces. They are beautiful both before and after they are completed. I think our puzzles are sometimes never completely filled in- maybe no one's is.

We have to choose the parts of the image we want to tackle before anything else happens, and which details must be filled in as we go. Sometimes people come along, join you for a glass of wine maybe, and help fill in a few pieces here and there. Sometimes someone shows up with those pieces you thought must have gotten lost under the couch somewhere.

I'm going to try to stop standing over other people while they finish their puzzles, but it's so hard sometimes not to. I can't believe I've just spent this long developing puzzles as a metaphor when I don't even like them. And I know exactly who is going to think that's completely hilarious.

alisha's previous guest post for me: on living alone

read more of her genius stuff here.

part one, part two, part three, part four. part five. 

on wanting (and not needing) a man

  I spent years of my life sending up a small payer of thanks each time I crawled into bed alone.

It was such a sweet moment. That breath—that suspended moment between one day and the next.

I loved going to bed alone—recognized it as both a blessing and a privilege.

And as a thing that would not last forever.

It was at a time when I was healing and learning and stumbling at such a ferocious rate that the solitude of nightfall, and the inevitably of sleep was manna from the heavens. Sustaining and necessary and a very great blessing.

I went to bed alone, night after night, because I wanted to. Needed to.

Because I was not in a place to share myself with someone in that way.

Once upon a time a man I loved asked me how I got happy—if I did it on my own, or if I did it with someone else.

On my own, I replied, knowing those three woulds mean I'd have to walk away from him.

I got happy on my own, which is, to this day, one of the very best things I’ve  done in this life.

I got happy on my own—meaning I figured out that happiness is but one sliver of a full life. And that all things ebb and flow.

And part of figuring that out was crawling into bed alone. Because there was a time I crawled into bed with a man I wasn’t nuts about and that took something from me—something so personal and so vital I never wanted to do that again.

But I knew, even then, that there would come a time when it would end. And that, even if it didn't, it wouldn't always be so sweet.

Because needs change. And experience has a way of shifting and shuffling priorities.

Eventually, I knew, I’d go to bed with someone else.

And what a blessing that would be.

Born of a desire, and a choice, and the inevitability of luck—capricious as luck mostly seems.

But that desire is a tricky, little bugger. Mainly because people attempt to read into it like tea leaves—divining mystical information where there may not be any.

Because the thing is—and I can’t believe I’m saying this (since this is what people always say to me)—it’s not that deep.

Because sex is a thing. And oxytocin is a thing. And companionship is a thing. And a man’s arm reaching out for you at three in the morning after you’ve gotten up to use the restroom is one hell of a thing.

And those things…well, I can pretend to not need them, or want them, except that I am human, with, as Mary Oliver calls it, a soft animal of a body.

So yes, I would like to find a person to crawl into bed with night after night.

And for reasons surpassing my understanding I want that person to be a man--for better, or for worse, that’s how I was packaged up and sent into the world.

I lived alone for two years.  And loved almost every moment of it.

But hell if loneliness wasn’t a thing.

And I’m not talking about the-get-good-with-yourself-sort-of-loneliness—the kind that people always reference because they think maybe you don’t like yourself and if only you did, then you’d never be lonely again.

I mean loneliness of the variety that has seen my entire adult life in New York City, where I have faced nearly everything alone.

So when the time came to leave my studio apartment, faced with boxes and cleaning supplies and the daunting task of resolving the previous two years, I stood in that small space with a paintbrush in one hand and a blank wall before me, and I sobbed.

Because I felt so tremendously alone.

Because it was yet one more thing I had to do by myself.

And as my shoulders heaved and my chest rattled there was the very physical need to be held.

Embraced.

The soft animal of my body wanted nothing more than for someone to take me in their arms, press their face into my hair, and whisper small words, full and good.

And that need, that desire, was so physical, so immediate, and so totally consuming that it was a very real sort of terror.

Abject loneliness.

Several years ago there was an article making its way around the internet and quite a lot of people had quite a lot to say about it.

I’m going to remember it imperfectly, and I’ve already made peace with that, so I ask you do as well.

It was about a woman in her thirties who’d never had sex.

And in the article she so bravely discussed the particular loneliness and frustration and fear born from that.

And, as tends to happen on the internet, everyone, everywhere had an opinion.

And all I could think was, How can anyone comment on this? How can anyone, anywhere have anything to say? Unless, of course, they’ve found themselves in that very same situation?

Because, let’s be clear, getting married and divorced by that age, while heartbreaking and difficult, is not. the. same. thing.

I think of that woman often. That nameless, faceless woman and how she hadn’t been touched. And how that lack of touch divorced her from her body. Created a space that simply couldn’t be filled by her actions alone.

And how giving voice to her many feelings was a way of claiming the experience. Of quieting the shame. And accepting the lonely.

I can’t comment on that woman’s story because it is not my own.

But I can say there are specific realities to still being single (and single at twenty-eight in this particular city) that someone who is not cannot possibly understand.

I live an incredibly lucky life. This is not lost on me. But I’ll be damned if I don’t get to say that eventually I’d like to move my life forward. And it is my great wish, that that will mean climbing into bed and sending up a prayer of thanks for the person next to me.

This is what I believe to be true:

A person can be happy and content and with a very good life and want someone to share it with.

A person can be lonely (or not) and want a partner.

A person can be happy (or not) and want a lover.

A person can be totally good in their skin (or not) and want all of the above.

And these things--loneliness, comfort, sadness, acceptance--may all ebb and flow from within the boundaries of a very good relationship.

But let’s be  clear, being loved—unapologetically and guilelessly for who you are, flaws and all—I don't know if there is anything better than that in this life.

There’s a fragment of a Galway Kinnell poem that I think of often, the wages of dying is love. Meaning, because we have to die, we get to love.

We are actually paid in love.

Meaning: to love. To love to love to love. To love is the point.

Or so I think and so I believe and so I understand.

And so I want for my life.

(And so it’s just not that deep).

advice + attraction + many muddled thoughts

  Several years ago my mother gave me a small glass plate with a poem by Pete Hein, Shun advice at any price, that’s what I call good advice.

Eleven words.

Eleven words I didn’t understand.

But I toted it from apartment to apartment.

Because it was hers. And then it was mine. And I believe in history.

Thing is, the older I get, the truer it seems.

The more time passes, the more weary I am of small and pithy pieces of advice.

Be more casual. Don’t be too honest. Don’t say too much. Be light and breezy. Don’t reveal all of yourself too quickly. Do this. Don’t do that.  

I have found that advice is generally unhelpful. And worse, distracting.

If people want to share their experience, by all means. But to try to overlap one person’s story, on to another’s…well that’s just silly. Beside the point. A gigantic and befuddling waste of time.

To begin, you really can’t learn something until you’re ready to learn it.

And beyond that, there is no such thing as a roadmap, a template, a specific set of instructions for this life. (And thank God for that).

There is only the direction you want to go, the desire to move in that direction, and the willingness to figure out how to get there.

The older I get the more suspect I am of absolutes. And ultimatums. Of anything resembling a black-and-white, this-and-that dichotomy.

The older I get the more stock I’d like to place in the notion of  “loosely adept.”  Adaptive. Empathetic. Aware. Intelligent.

I had a friend who recently said to me on the phone, Oh Meg, you’re so shiftable, so easily swayed. It was condescending and unkind.

And I told him so.

At which point he casually laughed me off, Oh, what does shiftable even mean? I certainly don’t know.

And while it’s true that shiftable is not a word, we both knew what he meant.

Maybe I am shiftable. But maybe what it means is I’m doing the best I can to make the most out of changing and imperfect situations. Maybe I’m altering my view to allow for different experiences.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Maybe it’s just a little bit of synthetic happiness coming into play.

I’m especially weary of advice where dating and flirting and relationships are concerned because oh-me-oh-my do people like to give it.

And the older I get the more I realize that affection and attraction are out of our control.

Which means, advice ain’t worth a damn.

All you can do is show up and make a go of it when the when your frequency happens to hum along with someone else’s.

But you don’t get to choose the hum, or force the hum, or coax the hum. Yes, this can be a tremendously difficult thing to stomach, until it is not. Until you give over and realize it is the very best thing in the world. Because if it’s out of our hands then all we can do is honor what is actually happening.  And that has nothing to do with small and pithy pieces of advice and everything to do with listening to the gut.

This is what I know to be true: I’ve never hooked a man with a perfectly-worded phrase, never lost him with one either. I’ve never tricked a guy into liking me by softening my edges and making myself more palatable. Attraction tends to be a big-picture thing. It happens in that wordless place—it is a combination of synapses firing and smells registering and our bodies reading symmetry. All of this happens on a mostly unconscious level. And if we are really, really, (really) lucky we are aware of it—in so much as, we know something is happening and that it is bigger than us (and so get out of the way).

I’m old enough to know now that there are levels of attraction, and when you happen upon that highest level—that penultimate level that leaves you breathless and nervous, then everything else is a cheap imitation. And suddenly good is just not good enough.

Which means occasionally, we must wait.

There is no such thing as one-right-way. And the older I get, the more I am in awe of ambivalence. I say in awe because it a thing. Like, it actually exists. That I can be standing in one spot, looking at the one person I want to speak to more than anyone else in the world, and having but one thought: please don’t let him come over here.

Because fear is a thing. And it sits on each of us differently.

And just because one person does one thing, one way—well, that doesn’t mean anyone else will (or should).

The world is mostly painted in shades of grey—each of us calling it black and white according to our whims, muddling the landscape.

I just keep thinking about feeling the fear and moving towards it. Up the hill, water sloshing from my metaphorical buckets.

Because the view at the top…well, that’s the thing.

on flirting. and being really, really, REALLY bad at it.

It is generally acknowledged that I am the world’s worst flirt.

The truth of this becoming increasingly real with each passing day.

(And age).

When I mentioned this to my good girlfriend Alisha, she cocked her head, smiled, and said, Yeah, we’ve known this for a while now. (And by we, she meant me and her and, I’m assuming, everyone else.)

I—I just, well, I thought that was just something we said.

Oh. Yeah, no. No, we were being serious, she responded, chuckling as she sucked down a bit of frozen margarita through a straw.

A guy at work—a lovely man with a wife and two kids and a keen sense of honesty, recently said to me—Oh, you’re that girl who, when you like a guy, has got the car in reverse.

Which is about as true a thing as anyone has ever said to me.

Flirting in reverse. My particular specialty. (And also what is sure to be the title of my first book of essays, so don’t anyone take it. I’m claiming the title here and now, on this, the 30^th day of May in the year 2014).

What is so tremendously frustrating is that I am not without skill. I know what to do and how to do it, but only—and this is key—when nothing is at stake.

Because in front of a man with light eyes and superbly fitting pants (oh, the pants)—the composition of his face such that it’s hard to look at, and harder not to, I am inept. Befuddled. Bumbling and wordless.

I am eight years old, wide-eyed, and mute.

And occasionally mean.

Very often mean. Unfriendly, unkind, and un and un and un.

And, the thing is, none of these things is an appropriate response when a man flips your stomach. Because life is hard enough—for all of us—without assholes like myself giving all the wrong cues, to all the wrong people, at all the wrong times.

I have spent my entire adult life living and dating in New York City.

Which is a fate I would wish on no one.

This city is ruthless in so many ways. And love and dating are no exception—the rules of both being unwieldy and unclear and mostly capricious.

(Or so I thought).

Sitting in Tom’s office recently, I was detailing the many, many ways in which I manage to flirt-in-reverse, which is to say act-as-unfriendly-as-possible-to-the-men-I-am-attracted-to/sometimes-act-unfriendly-and-sometimes-not-which-may-actually-be-worse-because-it-is-confusing-and-unfair-and-has-everything-to-do-with-those-crazy-making-things-known-as-MIXED-SIGNALS!!

So there I am, sitting in Tom’s office, lamenting how unfriendly I am (because come on, I’m a puddle around a handsome man) and he looks me squarely in the face, So what you’re saying is, the only guys who end up approaching you are the one’s who disregard your signals entirely.

Oh, oh, OH—those are so not the guys I want!

And Tom looked at me, half-smiling, You think?

Because all I really want—what I imagine what so many of us really want—is to feel like I am both seen and heard.

Because, well, that is a big fucking deal—THE DEAL, maybe.

Over the years I’ve dated a few different guys—a strange sampling of the population. Varying religions, careers, upbringings. And because they were so seemingly disparate I couldn’t understand how time would invariably, unfailingly, INFURIATINGLY reveal how very much the same they all were.

So many different shades of…not-good.

And then Tom went and pointed out something so obvious as signals and a person’s response to them! And I found out I was the problem—which is THE BEST sort of news.

(This is why Tom gets the big bucks).

You see, I was, without realizing it, weeding out anyone who might actually be worth my time.

(Easy fix).

And this is how we shoulder the universe forward two inches: easy fixes and small leaps and little bit of courage.

Except that it wasn’t such an easy fix. Mostly because I’m a deeply fearful person and the notion of that first big bridge—that moment, or collection of moments when a person you like actually sees that you like them—well on the other side of that bridge is either crazy good things or…Dum dum DUM…rejection.

And I am not so great at rejection. (I know, I know).

And so I’m sitting there, hashing it out with Tom and bumbling on about how I’m scared and if I’m still so scared after all this time, and all this experience, is it because I’m not actually that keen on myself?

Because, well, I thought I’d gotten to the point where I was pretty okay with myself. And, shoot, are the miles betwixt here and there so innumerable?

And Tom, in typical Tom fashion says to me, I don’t think it’s as complicated as you’re making it. Any feedback you’ve received in the past is inherently distorted because you weren’t putting in any input—or at least, any appropriate input.

Which I gotta tell you, feels so rational and so right, that it might just be the game-changer I was waiting for (without knowing I was waiting for it).

There’s such a thing as a feedback loop and it has to be fed.

Which brings to mind a certain Noah and the Whale lyric: But if you give a little love, you can get a little love of your own.

If you give.

If, then. Causation.

Sometimes things take effort. Sometimes, smiling or speaking up is an uncomfortable jaunt up a very steep hill. Sometimes what comes so naturally to some, doesn’t come so naturally to others.

But finding out that we are the problem is so incredibly good—so incredibly empowering.

It is the beginning of a totally different ever-after. Or rather, the beginning of a totally different pursuit.

The ever-after will take care of itself.

home, home, home, home, home

The very first thing I hung in my new apartment was the Dear Sugar poster. At the head of my bed. Just above where I lie my head each night.

“Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

“Every last one of us can do better than give up.”

“The fuck is your life. Answer it. “

I moved from Brooklyn back into Manhattan. Into a tiny two bedroom apartment in a tangle of streets in the heart of Greenwich Village.

After so many apartments over so many years I worry about little more than light and noise. So on a breezy day in mid-April when Lauren and I walked up the one flight of stairs at the back of the building and into a tiny apartment with large windows and quite a lot of quiet we both knew it would do just fine.

And so a few weeks later, when my new space was little more than boxes and a bed, I pulled out a single nail and hung that Dear Sugar poster above my bed, knowing immediately, that it would live there alone.

I went back to Ms. Strayed’s book, Tiny Beautiful Things, a few days ago. I was in search of a very particular essay right at the start of the book.

“My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love. “

How often I think of these words. And the clank of my very own iron bell: home, home, home, home, home.

Love by another name.

Time keeps hurtling forward—somersaulting over itself.

And because it does, and because we cannot change this, we must move, at the same time, in the direction of our choosing—into the thick woods of what has meaning for us. Which is very often a dark and treacherous and tangled place. Where roots grow sideways out of soil and it’s a steep and slippery slope to the waters below.

The notion of home clangs around in my body, banging me up a bit. Mostly because it’s an ever-moving target that resists my desperate efforts to wrangle it into stillness.

Home is not today what it was the day before, nor what it will be tomorrow.

And I am caught in the thick underbrush of discovery.

Which, is as it turns out, a prickly place to live.

But the soil here is thick and rich and awfully fertile.

When I moved across the East River I said I’d never move back—if I could help it, I wouldn’t move back.

But sometime, in the space of those two years, the clanging of home changed.

And suddenly home became shorter subway rides and lower rents and the awareness that this phase of my life is ephemeral at best. And so instead of trying to change that, I’d dive into it. Accept that the beauty was in the impermanence. And that perhaps moving back to Manhattan would be the beginning of a long and sweet goodbye.

And that, maybe, in order to move on, I’d first need to live here in a way I never before had. Which is to say, right in the middle of everything.

Brooklyn was so good to me. The backdrop to such a magical, and deeply personal time—belonging only to me. Already it feels half-imagined. I fear I maybe found it too soon.

But I’m quite sure I had to leap-frog to a phase of my life that saw me living so totally alone, and in a place so different than Manhattan, in order to return to where I am now: still quite young, still with a bit of fight, growing roots into the air.

Still searching for the meaning of home. Still reaching for the brass ring on the moving carousel.

Not where I thought I’d be. But where I am. Nonetheless.

Home, home, home, home, home. Love, love, love, love, love.

There’s a large windowsill just next to my bed. I’ve placed five small succulents there.

I’d move back to the city and I’d get plants--that was the deal I made with myself.

I had meant to get them way back when I lived in Washington Heights.

Was absolutely sure I’d get them upon moving to Brooklyn.

But somehow I never managed to.

Until now.

Ten tiny succulents in all.

Ten succulents, and me absolutely terrified I will kill each. and every. one. of. them.

Lauren has told me to stop touching them.

But I fuss. Because each one is helping, in its own small way, to answer the hanging question of home—and what it is now... and what it will be tomorrow.

When my father came to visit last weekend he asked where I would write. The apartment is small--there's not room enough for my desk. Currently I've tucked the pieces of it away beneath my bed.

Tom had asked the same question.

I don't know yet, was all I could think to say.

But here I am writing, cross-legged on my bed, looking up toward two frames with a split photo of a building in Paris.

Two photos I didn't take. Because I have yet to go to Paris.

But two photos as a window to what comes next, I like to think.

Which seems like the perfect place from which to write.

A view of home and love and its many iterations--both present and future.

I can’t wait to get to Paris.

And yet, I can. And that is now an immutable truth in my life.

Paris will wait.

For the right person. For the right time.

It too is a question in search of an answer.

And the thing is, I’m okay with the questions.  And I’m okay with the slow unfolding of answers.

I’m okay with waiting for something better—moving towards something better. For the refusal to accept anything less. And I won’t apologize for the trajectory of my life. For my many mistakes and missteps. For spending so much time in the thick woods of discovery.

Because home is the pulsing belief that there is still more to unearth. And love is the iron bell of my own heart.

And the gold ring is just an inch beyond my fingertips.

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