Yet Another Single Gal

There is a hidden beauty in teaching adolescent girls.  I consider the 8 hours a day I spend amidst my 8th and 10th grade students a way of keeping my ear to the street.  My finger on the pulse of the young, the fiercely hip and clueless.  A recurring reminder of how we, as a nation, are simultaneously failing and succeeding in developing awkward, inappropriate girls into confident, powerful women.  I go to the girls often when I am confused about the world in which we force them to live and expect them to make sense of without our guidance.

In the midst of the first Twilight book, I had questions.  So, I went to the girls.  I was disturbed by the protagonist’s self deprecation and painstaking commitment to her vampire boyfriend.  I wanted to know why sweet, awkward little Bella responded to “warnings” her boyfriend, Edward, gave in the most bizarre ways.

I asked the girls, “So, you know that part when Edward says, ‘You should never be alone with me because I might end up killing you and sucking you of all your blood…by mistake’ why does Bella tell him how beautiful he is instead of running away like he tells her to?”

The girls spoke slowly as they patiently explained the way things were: Edward had low self esteem and thought he was really a bad guy when he wasn’t.  Yes, he could kill Bella, but that was exactly why he kept warning her so he WOULDN’T kill her.  He warned her because he loved her, you see.  And because he warned her and made sure they were never in a situation where he could kill her, then he was really a good guy.

I can be slow sometimes and this was one of those times.  I needed more clarification.  “But, I’m on page 300 and Bella has almost died like 3 or 4 times?”

But, one or two of those times EDWARD saved her, the girls reminded me.  

“Yes, but EDWARD was the reason she was almost killed in the first place.  How does his saving her from the near peril he caused her redeem him enough for her to keep hanging out with him?  He keeps telling her he might kill her!  Like every hundred pages or so.”

The girls were beginning to lose interest in helping me understand such an obvious concept.  He DID NOT kill her.  And he wouldn’t.  He loved her, for goodness sake.  One of them pointed out that not killing Bella was terribly difficult for Edward.  It took a lot of his energy not to react to the scent of her blood and gobble her up.  He had to struggle with it.  Therefore, Bella wasn’t the only one who suffered, you see.  

I didn’t.

Needless to say, when Chris Brown nearly killed the woman he loved and the picture of Rihanna’s bloodied, bruised face made its rounds on the internet, I went to the girls again.  I was confused.  I assumed they were, too.

I asked the girls to watch the follow up show Oprah was doing on the Chris-Brown-beating- Rihanna-like-she-was-a-grown-man-who-stole-something incident.  The next day, we sat in a circle and shared our thoughts about the show and the incident itself.

I got a lot of what I expected.  “I can’t believe she went back to him.”  “How could he do that to her?” “Well, if she forgives him, who are we to judge either of them?”  “Damn, what was she doing when he was hitting her like that?  I’d try to kill a dude who was beating me like I was some dog!”  (This last comment obviously came from a girl who has had the great fortune of not being locked in a seat belted torture chamber with her head half way out of the door of a speeding car as her boyfriend tried to push her onto the freeway…while punching her repeatedly as she flung about, trapped in her seat belt.  I’m happy for this young lady, actually.  She has lived a charmed life thus far.)

When I  saw the discussion turning into yet another round of useless retelling of gory facts, I brought things back to the statistic Oprah mentioned several times on her show.  One out of three teen girls will find herself in an abusive relationship.

Why do you think this is, I asked the girls.

The answers reminded me of all those times the girls tried to make me understand that Twilight was just a fictional story.  That I shouldn’t “get all o.d. and worried” because it wasn’t that serious.

The girls said:

1. A lot of teen girls REALLY want a boyfriend.

2. A lot of teen girls think boyfriends are not perfect and do stupid stuff all the time; this doesn’t mean you can’t at least try to work out problems in your relationship.

3. If your boyfriend is really, really sorry, then he might be worth the forgiveness you grant him.

4. Sometimes, the girls do pick, pick, pick at the boy just to make him mad.  “I’m not saying it’s right to hit a girl, but why you gon keep getting in his face when you know he has a problem with his temper?”

5. Sometimes, the boy has been through some messed up stuff and the girl understands that he is not a monster; he has his own stuff to deal with.  If she loves him enough, she’ll probably try to help him with those issues.

During our discussion, the phrase, “Sometimes you choose to forgive” came up several times. So, did the phrase, “I know he was wrong, but did you hear about what he went through when he was a kid?”  One or two girls admitted that if Chris Brown was really sorry and she was sure it wouldn’t happen again, she might go back to him, too.  But only if he was sincerely sorry for beating the shit out of her and threatening to kill her for calling the cops.

I asked another question: Why should Rihanna repeatedly sacrifice her dignity to save Chris Brown’s?  No one seemed to really get my question.  I elaborated by explaining that a man who subjects you to that level of violent torture is a man who probably has done and said several things before the seat belted torture chamber to take away your humanity.  To make you feel like you are worth less than the lint on his shirt.  Why should she expose herself to that in the hopes that he “heals his wounds?”

Most of the girls came around.  They swore that they would not let a man take away their dignity.  But in the back of the room, I heard one girl whisper to another: “Seriously, though, she HAD to have done something?  Why would she go back to him after he did that to her if she wasn’t at least a little bit at fault?”

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I’ve had two conversations with friends that have been hanging out in the back of my mind for a while now.  Each had, at its root, a distinct topic and context; however, after I’d rolled the conversations over in my mind for a while, I realized that at the root of each conversation was the same theme.

Friend #1 (lets call her Marie) was trying to convince me to find my way back to the Seventh Day Adventist church in which we were both raised.  That isn’t really accurate, actually. I don’t want to paint Marie as an intolerant proselytizer who was trying at all costs to re-convert me.  After one of our trademark 2 hour-long phone conversations, we had somehow gotten on the topic of religion and she’d begun explaining why she strongly believed every word in the Bible to be the TRUTH and a direct edict from God.  I admitted what I had never had the vocabulary (or courage) to verbalize when we were good little Christian girls in Sabbath School: The Bible has kernels of truth in it that can provide guidance and order to many lives;  it is a document written by men who sincerely believed they were called by God to bring his word to fruition.  I, personally, am not so convinced of its divine inspiration.  I, personally, believe that the many sects of Christianity foolishly believe in its total ability to keep things “in order” a bit too much.

Marie and I went back and forth to no avail because what it all came down to was she chose to believe in Seventh Day Adventism and religion as a whole and I simply didn’t.  Marie is an intelligent, rational woman so she didn’t doom me to hell or patronize me by implying I was lost and she would try to help me be found.  Since we have a long friendship, this very heated debate didn’t end in a nasty tone at all.  As a matter of fact, it ended in an exhausted one because it was about 1 a.m when we both were like, “Damn.  I’m too old to be talking to you until all hours of the night.  We ain’t 13 no more.  Bye.”

What stands out in that lengthy conversation, though, was something Marie said.  When explaining why she believed so strongly in the Bible, she mentioned, “Each and every time I didn’t do what God said, I got nothing but pain.  Nothing but heartache.  I should have followed his word.”  When I offered that perhaps part of the beauty of being a human was encountering pain and making ridiculous mistakes so one learned from them and formulated a life path that made sense for her, Marie stood firm and insisted: “No…EVERY lesson I learned when I was not following Him, I wish I hadn’t.  The pain and heartache I caused myself was not necessary.”

What I heard underneath that: “If I remain a faithful Christian, I will exempt myself from pain.”

Friend #2 (let’s refer to her as Pam) and I were commiserating about what every single gal commiserates about: dating and the tedium and time involved in engaging in it, particularly in New York City.  Particularly, when you are in your 30’s.  The problem: We were encountering men who were charming, respectful and genuinely interested in us, just disinterested in  committing to anything remotely long term.  The usual scenario: He is happiest when I expect nothing more than what we’re doing now.

Pam seemed to have developed what she thought to be a fool proof plan to not “have my time wasted.”  She had implemented  into her dating lexicon the policy of not sleeping with a man until they were in a committed relationship.  She spoke of several men who didn’t like her plan and off handedly asserted: “Yeah, he didn’t want to go out anymore because I wasn’t sleeping with him after we dated for three months.  But, he didn’t want to even answer me directly when I asked him where he thought this was going.”  I had no problems with Pam’s no-sex-until-you’re-my-boyfriend rule.  I’ll be frank: I didn’t plan to follow her lead, but I could understand why she’d implemented this into her strategy of snagging a boyfriend.  I did innocently ask, though, “Well, what if EVERY man is not meant to be your boyfriend?  What if some of them are just meant to be temporary companions.  Not that you have to have sex with them, but just because you want to ultimately end up in a committed relationship, does that mean you can ONLY spend time with a man if it looks like he is THE ONE?”  Pam saw this as a waste of time and implied that I was a little immature if I could do that.  She seemed to insist that simply going out with a man (sex or no sex) who just wanted to show you a good time was a stage that women in our demographic should be over?  When women did that, they were putting themselves in danger of getting too wrapped up in the guy and then disappointed when he wouldn’t commit to something “real.”

She again stressed how that was wasting her time and much like Marie, made a statement that stayed with me: “So, he gets what he wants and I get to keep going out with him without a commitment?  And then when’s he through, he moves on.”  Underneath that, I heard: “I have developed a way to not get hurt or disappointed in matters of the heart.  If I just don’t have sex too soon, I won’t be disappointed by men so much. Thus, I will lessen the chance of painful heartache.”

Perhaps I am reading more into Pam and Marie’s belief system than they would like.  Or I could be completely misinterpreting them, but the subtext of both of their rationalizations seemed to be that if I do this, I will save myself from pain.

In my humble estimation, that is ridiculous.

Although life is a wonderful journey full of moments of triumph, it is also cluttered with unavoidable moments of sadness, distress, darkness.  Yes, we can make choices that lessen the dark moments, but the fact remains, pain is weaved into the very fabric of the human existence .  It is a natural and NECESSARY part of the human experience.  How can I explain to Marie that she can follow every rule – the Big 10 and the myriad number of minor ones – and she will still find herself nursing a wounded soul at some point in life?  She can be a faithful Christian, but the fact is…the world, like humans, is terribly flawed and she should expect to be disappointed/hurt/downtrodden even when everything she’s doing should lead to nothing but rewards.  

And Pam…I know there are many theories on how WOMEN can control and modify the behavior of men.  If women______, then men will___________.  If women don’t ________, then men won’t ___________.  While these theories sell millions of relationship books and may result in the rare woman modifying her particular male’s behavior to meet her needs, the simple truth is: If you plan on canoodling with those HUMAN men, there is a great likelihood that you will be hurt, disappointed, heartbroken regardless of how you have pain-proofed your encounters with them.  If you have sex with him too soon, there is a chance that you will be hurt.  If you hold out until he anoints you as “the one,” there is a great likelihood, you still will be hurt.  

How life works?  It is a marriage of joyous, exquisite moments that will bring tears to your eyes and cold, bleak moments that will reduce you to tears.

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I read all the time that 21st century Americans are delaying traditional rites of passage.  Thanks to the rising costs of college, the increasing uselessness of a mere Bachelor’s degree and the disinterest that many educated Americans have with being tied down to one company for longer than 5 years, adolescence has been extended until the mid -to-late twenties.  A woman marrying and having children before age thirty is becoming such a rare occurrence that we question those few who do shamelessly flash their rock while still 20-something babies.  “Wow, she’s only 24 and she’s getting married? Weird.”  And as for retiring…well, do people still do that?  Can they afford to?  And for those who do manage to save enough to retire comfortably, are they willing to go silently into that good night?  Or do they simply leave the job they only tolerated for the security (and pension) and jump right into the job they really wanted to do all along, relieved to finally have the luxury of pursuing their passion?

50 is the new 40. 40 is the new 30.  30 is the new 20.  Despite all of this reported Benjamin Buttoning of society, I, somehow, have managed to fall into the dull routine of a cranky, middle aged woman during this, my “new 20s.”

Okay, some might simply call it a rut.  I go to work.  I go to the gym (sometimes).  I eat.  I write.  I have brunch/dinner with friends.  The same friends at the same restaurants.  I see a movie with those same friends.   I have the same drink (mimosa/mojita) at a lounge and talk about the same damn topics with the same damn people over and over and over again.  When I break from my routine, I have a late night snack at a jazz lounge with the same damn people, drinking the same damn drink and then reflecting on what we have just done in great detail.

Yeah…it’s a rut.  And while I understand how most people get stuck in them, I do not understand how 30 somethings who live in mega cities like New York find themselves in ruts?  

There’s a lot of shit happening in this city.  Right now as I type this, there are cool, courageous people out there doing totally outrageous, totally new stuff with diverse, original people.  When I first moved here, wasn’t I one of those people?  

I could commiserate on my rut and how easy it becomes to rely on it, justify it, even.  But, commiserating on ruts rarely results in climbing out of them.

Soooooooooo….

For the past few weeks I have been engaging in this experiment.  I call it the “George Castanza stance.”  For all those fellow Seinfeld feins, you know where I’m going with this.  Whenever my mind tells me, “That’s so not you; don’t do it,” I pretend what my inner voice has really said is: “Whoa…girl, that sounds like something totally friggin’ awesome” and I do it!

It has been interesting so far.  

I traveled to Miami to see a former co-worker who I had always assumed was more of an acquaintance than a friend.  Furthermore, making the effort to get to know her and make her a friend seemed too bold and required too much weird vulnerability that I hesitated to make the trip, assuming, of course, it would make me look corny.  I took this trip with a co-worker who I liked, but again assumed that making an effort to get to know out of work was too uncool and dorky. And required a lot of effort with little pay off.  (What if, after all, she liked to have dinner BEFORE the movie?) 

In Miami, in the middle of winter…I wore a tank top (day and night) and got a tan in 70 degree weather!  

Rut be damned!

I stopped in a local Starbucks to get a drink and catch up on my beloved New Yorker.  A random guy strikes up a conversation.  When I hear “Damn, I don’t feel like engaging this dude/there’s a great article on Mumbai slums in this magazine that I have yet to read/while I love men, dating them is becoming increasingly tiresome, etc. etc. etc,” I force myself to think, “Hey, a respectful, well-mannered greeting from a relatively attractive and seemingly sane man…FRIGGIN AWESOME!”  So, I save the saga of the real-life “slumdog” for later and I engage the Starbucks gentleman in conversation.

For about an hour, I have the most interesting and informative chat I’ve had all week.  There were chuckles and full-fledged laughs involved.

When it is time for me to leave the Starbucks and return to my rut, the charming gentleman asks me to brunch the next day.

I immediately hear: “But, tomorrow is Sunday/you’ve got rewrites to do and the gym/you don’t like doing things on Sundays because well, work happens on Mondays/ damn, you haven’t even started your lesson plans yet/you have to cook the lamb chops before they rot, etc. etc. etc.”  I force myself to think: Food!  With a really cool dude who doesn’t appear to be a serial killer.  FRIGGIN’ AWESOME!!!!!

I tell the gentleman that I would love to break bread with him.  Even throw in: “It sounds like fun.”

And…here is the kicker:

It was fun.  There was some damn good french toast and some hilarious insights on child-rearing, overly dramatic females and men who do stupid stuff (repeatedly).  I had a BELLINI with my french toast.  It was friggin’ awesome.

Rut be damned!

I will be continuing my George Castanza stance.  While it has not turned me into a wild and crazy real 20 something who actually travels to Brooklyn after 9 just to go to a hot party, it has slightly altered my dependance on the familiar, the easy, the safe.  Taking a mini-vacation to visit a friend and making last minute plans with a relative stranger are not terribly imaginative, I admit.  But, I will say they have put me steps closer to being the woman I fantasized about when I was in high school. A woman who enjoys and actually LIVES life instead of a woman who observes and then writes about life.

Rut. Be. Damned.

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Age is a bitter sweet component of womanhood. It is like weight and dress size; an “evolved” woman intellectually knows that neither number holds much significance in the scope of a life, but her “evolvement” does not preclude her from being acutely aware of those numbers regardless.  So aware of them that she could rattle off either number quicker than she could cite the number that appeared on her most recent checking account statement.

I am becoming more aware of my age. I do not lie about it or anticipate “counting backward” once I hit 35 or 40 or 50 as I’ve heard friends joke. I am proud of my age most of the time.  I am awed by it all the time.

33.

Really?

When did that happen? No, seriously.

When did I transform from a happily delusional 22 year old with a futon, a second hand car and semi-regular encounters with men who only guaranteed a few hours of fun memories into a 33 year old almost-grown woman with a mortgage, a JOB with a capital J and complex relationship problems that get resolved and re-hatched with no true resolution in sight? Did it really happen over a period of 10 to 15 years or did it happen in about 25 minutes. It feels like the latter.

I know women who have these moments of incredulity on birthdays or when they have to check off their appropriate age demographic on any number of forms.  Me, however…my awareness of the number 33 has some rather unlikely triggers.

I punch in my time limit on the treadmill.  I punch in my weight.  The machine asks: Age?  And as I punch in 33, I pause, thinking…already?  Didn’t I just press 27 on a similar treadmill in another gym in another city just yesterday?

I jokingly explain to a student why I am incapable of engaging in a discussion about whether or not Bow Wow is sexier than Chris Brown.  “I’m 33, Sweetie.”  When I say it, I get the same feeling of disbelief I experienced while setting up my treadmill at the gym.  When did 19 year old boys cease to hold my intense fascination?  When did I cease to know every tiny detail about whatever heart throb was fueling the young adult commerce machine?

I watch a movie whose premise revolves around adult children dealing with an aging father.  The father, who is at the beginning stages of dymentia, is cursing out his nurse in the most creative and hysterical manner.  His daughter walks in.  Without skipping a beat, he croaks, “Who the hell are you?”

The daughter appears to be about 43.

I am 33.

My father had surgery for prostate cancer the summer of my 33rd year.  My father was hospitalized for  minor dehydration the winter of my 33rd year.

Although I began watching this movie because it starred one of the most brilliant actors of our time, I become less aware that Phillip Seymour Hoffman is playing the aging father’s son.  I am very aware that I am 33, which makes my father approximately 70.

Again, I can not explain how this happened.  I can not explain how in between my visits home, odd things happen to my father.  His hair greys or thins.  His stroll slows; it  becomes laborious.  His once extensive household activities lessen.  The dogs go unwalked; the gutters go uncleaned.  The grass gets cut by my 35 year old brother every other Sunday when he can spare time away from his 38 year old wife, their 15 year old daughter, 10 year old son and one month old baby.

I watch Philip Seymour Hoffman crudely scream the truth at his 43 year old sister.  “Dad is going to die!  Soon.  Death does not come with the same pretty scenery that these nursing homes put in their brochures.”  I watch his sister crumble.  It is an exquisite unraveling.  She does not shed a tear.  She does not shake uncontrollably.  But, she unravels right in front of her brother.  Silently.  Assuredly.   For 10 full seconds she crumbles into a terrified, helpless mass of flesh, begging to be delivered from what she, intellectually, understands to be an inevitable reality.

I wonder if she saw this moment coming when she was 33.  I want to poke her and ask her what, in this brief moment, has become a question I desperately need answered.  What did you do when you were 33 to prepare for this muted meltdown?

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I am a 33 year old black woman who reads way too much literary fiction.  I live in New York City.  I subscribe to The New Yorker.  I campaigned for Obama.  I voted for Obama.  I have spent more than a few Saturday nights sipping red wine at moderately priced restaurants holding court with other black New Yorkers who subscribe to The New Yorker and read way too much literary fiction.  We talk and talk about world religion, the hypocrisy of fundamentalist christianity, Junot Diaz’s slightly misogynistic, yet brilliantly crafted fiction, the audacity of Prop 8, the absurdity that lies in a group of tax-paying citizens having to fight such a blatantly discriminatory law with such intensity (STILL?) in the 21st century.  We commiserate about how women like us seem to be still longing for something more even as we live lives our mothers could not even fictionalize in their most imaginative girlhood fantasies.

In other words: I am a liberal.  A black nerd.  Which automatically makes me a feminist.  Which automatically makes me tolerant.  Which automatically makes me “progressive.” Which automatically makes me a believer in certain “truths” that we tolerant progressives who still answer to that seemingly outdated label “feminist” defend with all of our might.

I not only believe in a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, but I also hold fast to the notion that it is a right that every woman has the potential to exercise if she is one of the lucky ones who has sex on a fairly regular basis.  Although I have never had to make the difficult choice of whether to abort a child or carry it to term, since I am who I am I do understand why it is CRUCIAL that the right to make that choice remains legal and unquestioned, don’t I?   Because I am a heterosexual woman who is an active member of the club,  it is likely that I could find myself faced with an unwanted pregnancy?  An impossibly difficult choice?

I assumed that I already knew, that I already lived the answers to these questions.  Yes and Yes.   Any woman who is of the child-bearing years lives with the possibility of pregnancy – wanted or otherwise.  Any woman of the child-bearing years, therefore, risks a “slip up.”  An unintended little fetus that she worked tirelessly for many years not to create.  In my logical, educated and tolerant mind, I knew that a woman who found herself faced with the option of abortion was no different than me.  Just another gal of the child bearing years whose body let nature take its course – without her consent.

And then the condom broke…

The condom broke exactly 11 days after the start of my menstrual cycle.

The condom broke while I was with a man whom I utterly adored, but whom I had only known for about 3 months.

A broken condom told me who I really was.  What I really believed.

It told me that I did not believe in the “accidental pregnancy” theory.  It was the excuse of careless women who did not truly understand the immensity of motherhood and entered into it with cursory indifference.  It was something that happened to silly teenagers who were so captivated by what their boyfriends’ inexperienced penises could do to them that they thought of nothing else when he offered up his “manhood” on prom night.  Slip ups didn’t happen to grown women.  “Ooops, the condom broke” was not a sorry ass response women who were over 30, happily childless and committed to strict birth control were even capable of uttering.  Yes, of course, abortion should be legal and unquestioned, even if some gals abused it.  It was a choice that I might have to make some day?

I could recount all the thoughts that scurried through my head as I sat on the toilet the night this abstract “right to choose” threatened to become something much more tangible.  There were many realizations.  Aside from realizing that I really did not have any desire to squeeze a wrinkly, screaming child from my special place, I also learned that I was a smug “feminist” who believed that women who actually exercised the right I was obligated to support were beneath me.  They were women who were flawed.  Reckless. Impractical.  And here is the kicker: dumb.  Not for deciding to get an abortion, but for ever getting knocked up “by accident” in the first place.  Besides Rachel Greene, what grown ass woman actually produces a baby by way of the broken condom?

“I’ve never been in this position before,” I looked helplessly at my pseudo-boyfriend that night.

He returned my helpless look with one of surprise.  “Really?  You never had one break?  Ever?”

I felt like a true nerd.  Having to admit yet again that I was so square I never smoked/lied/stolen/cheated…the list goes on and on.  What protocol does a woman follow when a condom breaks during sex that is taking place dead smack in the middle of ovulation?

Pseudo-boyfriend didn’t know.  He said we just had to wait and see.  Even though we did experience a birth control defect, there was still a very good chance that I could not be pregnant.  My gynecologist said the same thing.  He actually took a test that thankfully turned out negative.  He did reiterate that the real answer would come when my monthly “friend” did.

So, I waited.

And thought.  A lot.

Was I really embarrassed that this happened to me?  Was I really so self-righteous that I truly believed that I could never in a million years be a woman who really did find herself knocked up despite her commitment to the almighty condom?

I thought about Sarah Palin.

Did I really think of her as a hysterically funny idiot and not the dangerously conservative oppressor she was?  Was she really just perfect fodder for Tina Fey’s comedic brilliance and not potentially the next vice-president of the United States?  A vice president who did not believe I had the right to end this pregnancy, if there was one to end?  Suddenly, the possibility (one that was much more likely than liberals like to acknowledge) of Palin and McCain being in the White House frightened the hell out of me.  Even though Obama and Biden had kicked their asses only weeks prior.  Suddenly, it became clear to me:  Sarah Palin would make me keep this (could be) baby, probably chastising me for “being so careless” in the first place.

I thought about women whose thoughts were much more intense in this situation.  Women who made it pass the broken condom stage and had moved into the five-days-late stage.  How crippling this must be?  How consuming must this notion of “what to do if” be for them.  How can they function while they wait to see if they have to make a choice that can never be the “right” one?  The options suck.  Period.

Why did I think I was immune to this?  

And the most profound epiphany that came via the broken condom?  I. Am alone. In this.  The woman who is in her early 40’s and has a loving husband and two almost-grown kids is alone in this.  The teenager whose asshole boyfriend is not returning her phone calls is alone in this. I, who have a pseudo-boyfriend urging me to calm down and not be so hard on myself, am alone in this.  No matter there were two parties involved in this slip up, only one party will truly bare the weight of the decision that is made.  Even if that decision is to carry the slip up to term, again it is one party alone whose entire being will be transformed.  Her sacrifices will, no doubt, far outweigh his.

The condom broke two months ago.  I have not had to make any difficult decisions as a result.

I have had to think about how honest I am with myself, though.  Not only about the harsh judgments I make on other women, but also about the comfortable delusion I allow myself to live under.  This delusion that  if the world has, in theory, progressed over the decades, so, too, have women’s options.  No, we are not our mothers.  We only have a thin layer of latex separating our choices from theirs.

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