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Full Moons and Safety Glass
Member Since: April 14, 2008 Last Signed In: November 15, 2009 Blog Views: 3929 Send To A Friend Sign Guestbook Add as a Friend
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This month I hit a milestone. I am now, officially, closer to 40 than 30.
In honor of this momentous event I threw myself a birthday party. I know, breathing for another year without major incident doesn’t actually constitute momentous. Nonetheless, I hosted my party at a bar in my quiet, boring suburban neighborhood. It’s a nice bar…not an Applebees or a TGIF, but a nice, relatively hip, neighborhood spot. This place is also walking distance from my house. It turned out to be a great night (even if I was in bed before midnight). The highlights included: 1) my sister making the trip out from Denver and 2) a beautiful custom birthday serenade in the middle of the bar by one of my friends that brought the whole place to a standstill. Without the knowledge that party would be a nice mellow affair, Paul was willing to go along with this celebration under three conditions:
See, in our relationship, I am the extrovert and he is the introvert. I actually like to think of myself as an introvert forced into extrovert tendencies. Otherwise, Paul and I might never leave the house or meet new people. To be fair, Paul can be very outgoing in a situation where he is surrounded by people he knows. Usually people he has known for 20 years. Usually males he went to junior high school with. Did I mention that he is 44 years old? Armed with my knowledge of his introvert-tendencies and a pledge to stay under budget, I sent out the evites, coordinated with the catering manager, and set out to celebrate. When I mentioned to a friend of mine where the party was going to be held, she looked at me with a look of surprise and said, “Isn’t that place a magnet for cougars?” Cougars? I wracked my brain and thought about the times I had been there. Sure, it’s in a suburban location more prone to the financially comfortable, settled-in, carpooling set. This area does lend itself to plenty of middle-aged silicon and expensive highlights. No, it isn’t the hip 20 something crowd of mid-town, but frankly I don’t want to hang out with hip 20 year old girls who are starving themselves, smoking, and grinding on the dance floor with their girlfriends in hopes of catching the eye of some cheese ball guy or a casting director for the next Rock of Love. I like going into a bar where I can actually hear the conversation I am engaged in. I like decent food and decent wine. I like something close to my house. Remember, I am actually an introvert forced into extrovert tendencies. As I thought about it, I realized she was right. The bar probably could be construed as a cougar trap. Then I was horrified. Given my new age, did this make me a cougar? I decided that in spite of the bar’s—ahem—demographic handicap, I still liked the place. I figured as long as I wasn’t contriving some bizarre Mrs. Robinson scenario with my 19 year-old pool boy, I could still host my party there, hold my head high, and embrace the advancement of middle age surrounded by the people that I love. We don’t have a pool, so I figured I was safe. Plus, I have yet to cough up a fur ball.
Lately my fridge has had an odor. A simultaneously sweet, sour, and rancid odor. This situation is somewhat remarkable given the fact that the fridge was nearly devoid of food—save for a few baby carrots, Sierra Nevada, and yogurt.
Ah…the content of my current fridge just took me back momentarily to my mid-twenties. Sorry for the digression. The fridge was almost empty because my recent work trip out of state meant that I had missed my mid-week “refresher” market trip. Usually, I make an effort to stock up before heading out of town, but this time that didn’t happen. And, as a result, the girls ate enough pancakes that my four-year-old announced today that she was tired of pancakes. But, today my lovely husband informed me that he was (ta da) going to make a trip to the grocery store. I tried to relish in this unbelievably shocking news, but he caveatted his proclamation with a “This means I need your help cleaning out the fridge.” Now, let’s keep in mind that said fridge is usually my responsibility to both fill up and clean out. I usually do this just prior to a grocery store trip in an effort to identify unidentified needed items like tartar sauce or shredded Parmesan cheese. I often pull everything out, marveling at how unidentifiable sticky substances manage to adhere themselves to the shelves (what is that stuff, anyway?). Nonetheless, his request that I clean out the fridge left me feeling somewhat defensive. Defensive because it was an indication that as a busy, working mom (who frequently travels for work) that my fridge stocking and cleaning had been inadvertently shirked. After a few minutes of stewing in my defensiveness, I came to a realization. He is, actually, capable of cleaning out the fridge. I reminded myself that he was, in fact, single for 37 years before marrying me and—I surmised—likely cleaned out his prior fridges many times in the past. Instead of throwing this back in his face, I waited until he was out of the house and cleaned out the fridge. I also tried not to get annoyed when three hours later he arrived home and pointed out that I had not gotten all of the cooties out of the fridge—proof of which he waved at me from the kitchen—a package of hermetically sealed feta cheese one month past its due date. I don’t even like feta. It was his stupid feta. A while ago, I attended a birthday gathering for a friend of mine. It was a small group, comprised of about eight women, plenty of wine, and a to-die-for jalapeno dip. Most of the women had known each other for a while, a decade or more of friendship. As an outsider of the group, I had a great time watching the dynamics and getting a chance to meet everyone. The group was relaxed and easy without pretention. And…did I mention the wine? Two of the women held the distinctive title of Published Authors. They were funny, spunky, self-deprecating. Most of the rest of us in the room considered ourselves Writers of Nondistinction--bloggers, journalers, clandestine storytellers without the confidence of publication behind us. For me, at least, the Published Authors seemed to have an unattainable, unimaginable status that surrounded the women like the effervescent, pre-Raphaelite glow of the Lady of Shallot. These Published Authors were wise. They were experienced. They had insight. They had literary agents (Cue the angel choral) A couple of the guests, including myself, spent about 40 minutes trying to nonchalantly ask questions…questions that might give us a clue to their success but wouldn’t appear too eager or pushy. “Do you write on a computer or in a note book?” “Whom do you let read your drafts?” “When do you know when a book is done?” “When your agent gives you a deadline!” quipped One Author. The Other Author just sat and looked frazzled, exasperated. Somehow, this last question had resonated. She went on to explain that after eighteen months, she had recently finished her most recent novel. Fine. Finito. She had packed it into a zip file, and with a self-congratulatory sense of finality sent it off in an email to her author friends, her non-author friends, her literary agent. (Cue the angel choral) Except, the moment Other Author hit the “send” button she realized her mistake. The novel wasn’t done at all. In fact, it was woefully un-done. So un-done that she panicked, tried to retrieve it from cyberspace. Once that option fell apart, Other Author started to edit. Edit like crazy, eventually eliminating 250 pages from the manuscript. “250 pages?” I gasped (not even being able to imagine writing 250 pages) “What was left?” She looked sheepishly at me and sighed “That’s when I knew that the book was s*&T. When I could cut 250 pages and it didn’t make any difference to the story.” One Author piped up in protest. She explained that Other Author was exaggerating. She explained that she had read countless drafts of Other Author’s book and it was good. Really good. Other Author was simply being too self-critical. I thought about this on the way home that night. How often as women and mothers do we stress and freak out over things that we try and pull off with perfection? Birthday parties for our kids, holiday plans, work responsibilities, laundry, meals, craft projects, whatever our neurosis of perfection is—we just need to learn to let it go…to know when good enough is good enough. We need to learn to listen to our friends when they call us on being too self-critical and we need to remember to call them on it when they are doing the same thing. |
