"And so this is Christmas"

"And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear"

Oh my head is stuffed with so much these days, it's hard to stay focused. I am up and I am down and I pace and try to do something useful every day but simply doing what one must to stay alive most often overwhelms me. I want all to be beautiful but it is impossible... but then again, I believe that I was able to give something perhaps not beautiful but heart-warming to each of my children and Rob for Christmas. I asked each one what they wanted from me and Gill's request was the most daunting. She wanted an essay on what it was like to be her mother. I poured over old journals, blogs, her letters and such and wrote and rewrote, edited and then edited again, adding and subtracting, and it turned out to be as much of a gift to me as it was for her. I asked her permission to post it here and she agreed. 

So, although I have not posted anything the past month, you'll understand that I have been writing - not my novel which is giving me a lot of grief but writing - and all feeds into the story of my life and how I read it.

"Bringing up Baby"  

 “What has it been like being my mama and watching me go from a baby to a woman?" Gill asks.

That's a big question, little one. I've been your mama for over 34 years and you sugar and spice with your great big heart through thick and thin have always been my dream daughter.

***  

When you are five months old, I write in your baby journal: “You have a wonderfully happy, tranquil disposition and are easy to care for…." At six months, I note that “you are coming along beautifully… a perfect cherub… [with] wonderful smiles.”  A week after your first birthday, you take your first step and a month later, you conquer walking: “You are still very easy going… I love having you my little one, my daughter! When you raise your little arms to be picked up - which you do often - I can’t resist you.” 

You are now almost two. You are sitting in the bath, your hair tied back in a braid: "I still can’t believe I have a daughter and she is so sweet," I write. You are now talking, forming simple sentences and love saying "no, mom". You are quieter, less physical than your brothers and mimic me more than they did. You love washing walls and countertops. Jokingly your father says you'll probably be an airhead. I say you're going to be a doctor or lawyer, whatever - you will always be special.

When you are almost four years, we move to France for the year and, unlike your brothers, you do not speak French or complain about missing your friends and home comforts. The only time I am aware that you are aware of language difference is when you ask, “how do I say ‘give me back my toy’ in French?”  By the end of the year, you speak French as well as the village children. One of my sweetest memories from this year is watching you with Susan. (How happy I am that she can teach you about the natural world - a subject I know little about.) In my mind’s eye, I see you plodding after her in fields of wild flowers and when she points out a particularly unique orchid, you exclaim, “how clever you are Susan to find such a beautiful flower.” Once, when the two of you are sitting on a grassy hill in the hot sun drawing, Susan removes her blouse, and you tell her: “my mother has nicer breasts, Susan.”

You are my sunshine.

We return to Canada and you begin French Immersion kindergarten. We walk to school each day because I read that children who walk to school rather than be driven are better grounded. Often, we sing and step to the rhyme “left, left, I had a good job and I left. I left my wife and 48 children just because I thought I was right, right” our left and right feet touching ground on the appropriate word. I believe you love school, make good friends, have play dates, are happy. A few years later you join an early morning walking group and the leader tells me that you are noncompetitive, are never shoving to be first, you take your own sweet time, you chat to whoever, you are a delight.

You teach me how to be a better mother. I am angry at you because you won’t do your school work. I yell and you cry. I say “Gilly you have to allow me to yell sometimes.” You say “you have to allow me to cry.” We shower together and you look up at me and say, "aren't vaginas beautiful?" You are already leaps and bounds ahead of me. 

Before you are ten, we become travel companions. I see you still, trudging behind me pulling your small green suitcase. In those days, we go cheap and don’t make reservations. We stop at small inns and examine the room and decide if it is good enough, clean enough. Once we are invited to Italy to stay with a family who has a daughter your age. We go but that year it snows, the house is cold and the mother has a hissy fit and books her family into a Hyatt in Rome. We decide that we will go to smaller, more affordable cities. I am befuddled and you suggest Pisa and Verona. We visit the two, wander, share meals and beds. From that time to this, I love travelling with you.

(Years later, you want to see the Mediterranean. I drive for several hours and park by the sea. We walk and talk, sinking into sand and soaking in the water, and forget to search for a hotel until it is too late. No vacancies. We drive out of this town to the next. No inn. Finally, when I can drive no longer, we spend the night in the car, in a hotel parking lot off the autoroute. I am miserable but you, daughter of my heart, tell me "it's an adventure” and make me laugh. Forever after this, when we find ourselves in trouble, you remind me that life is an adventure.)

You are a pre-teen and your brothers are well into their difficult teens and test me often. I worry that you are too sweet, too kind, too ready to please, and worse, too like me. (Throughout my early life and well into my teens, my friends’ mothers called me “Little Mary Sunshine”: I was so smiley, so polite, so “tamed”.) Around this time, we have our first real confrontation. You buy a very skinny stretchy black skirt for a choir recital. You try it on to show me and for the first time, I see that your body is changing. You are still very young, you barely have breasts but you are sexy. This sexiness worries me. I seek a friend for advice and she tells me that I am right to be worried. There are men who prey on little girls. I tell you to buy a larger size and you cry and ask if I think you a slut. (As some one glibly told me “with boys you only have one penis to worry about”.) 

At fifteen, you tell me that you want to go to school in another country, to be the new girl in class, to wear a uniform, and to be intellectually challenged. You have searched the internet but it will cost too much. You sigh: “most of all I wanted to see if I could make a dream a reality.” I think of Langston Hughes:  “Hold fast to dreams/  For if dreams die/ Life is a broken-winged bird/  That cannot fly.” This is too important to ignore, I think. Several months later, you are the new girl, wearing a school uniform and being challenged intellectually in Lisburn Northern Ireland. We celebrate your 16th birthday at an Italian restaurant. You walk home from school with a tall good-looking boyfriend. He disappears. It is a long grey wet winter and you are unhappy. You lose weight. You write me a note: "Sometimes a cold lonely apartment on Bachelor’s Walk seems like a lot compared to this non-stop chaos and drama. But even when I am not stressed, it’s almost like I need to create it… I respect you more that I knew I could respect. I respect very little in this twisted world.”

I am dumbfounded: I say “let’s go home”. You say, “no, I said that I was going to do this and I am.” We still watch movies and read poetry snuggled into each other in bed but you are pensive. 

We return to Canada and you re-find friends and complete high school. You have grown intellectually and physically in Northern Ireland. You are writing poetry and prose. You challenge teachers at school. A steady stream of your friends come to our house and eat our leftovers. You appear happier. You are beautiful. You graduate. You will soon leave home for school in Toronto. I can no longer watch over you and keep you safe. One morning I find a package of black licorice, tied with a ribbon, and a note from you in my bathroom drawer, thanking me for rescuing you when your spirits were down. You include a poem that you wrote in Northern Ireland:

"I return home to my mother

who still hasn't eaten her scone

from the bakery that's shut down.

She's praising a poet

reminding me to dream big,

to earn my own living,

not to underestimate myself.

She sees some power in me

that I don't acknowledge

no matter how hard I squint to see.”

***

By this time, I have been a mother for nearly 30 years. I began when I was 29 years old. I feel as if I turned around three times and voila, I’m in my late 50s. Raising children is the hardest work I’ve done. Have I been good enough I ask myself? I often feel like a child myself and see, in truth, we have been growing up together. I cannot imagine myself in the world without you or your brothers. This reminds me of Sharon Olds’ poem “The Planned Child” as all three of my babies were planned:

“… when a friend was pouring wine

and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,

I took the wine against my lips

as if my mouth were moving along

that valved wall in my mother's body, she was

bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then

bearing down, pressing me out into

the world that was not enough for her without me in it,

not the moon, the sun, Orion

cartwheeling across the dark, not

the earth, the sea--none of it

was enough, for her, without me.” 

***

You attend university for one year and then spend one year in Paris as an au pair before returning to school. I visit you in Toronto (December 2006) and write in my blog: “Every time I see her walking toward me, beautifully groomed and dressed… I think Paris, my favourite city has changed her, left its mark. She is so much taller, thinner, more confidant than I was at her age… And though I worry about her restlessness, sleeplessness, I do not worry that she won't find her passion… We talk for hours. When we are sitting, she curls into me. When we are walking, she links arms with me.”

A year later, I write: “I want to plant a seed in her brain that may take years to sprout. Nothing she does or doesn't do will stop me from loving her… I don't expect perfection. I know she is human… She doesn't have to be better than she is. I don't want her to despair as I have. Yet, I know I am powerless in this realm. She will despair.”

Susan tells me not to worry about you, to let you be: "Gill's clever." (I thank the heavens for all my strong female friends.) I let you be. You write me: "I feel as if I am always searching for something I

can't find. Anything within reach will never do." One professor tells you that you must decide what you want as you excel at all aspects of the program. I cannot advise you. I do not want to risk suggesting something that will divert you from your true path (if there is such a thing). I worry. I commiserate. I support you as best as I can but know you must find your own way to be alive.

 

In your notes, letters, and tributes, you paint me, with words, to be some wonderful wise creature and I have tried to live up to the picture you have painted with your glowing reviews but in true, I struggle. I am indecisive. I don’t know what direction to take myself. Paula Meehan says  it so well in her poem “I am not your muse”. 

I’d like to leave you in love’s blindness,

cherish the comfort of your art, the way

it makes me whole and shining,

smooths the kinks of my habitual distress,

never mentions how I stumble into the day,

fucked up, penniless, on the verge of whining

at my lot…

***

After graduating, you work hard. You blog. You visit your grandparents. You fall in love with a man who owns a boa. You create an in-home dinner club. You sparkle and shine. You leave boa man and meet television producer. I feel powerless to stop what is supposed to be the most joyous ceremony in your life. (I see clearly that your husband-to-be is an unhappy man, a lost soul, a drunkard.) I question myself even now: Is there anything I could have done to stop it? 

You learn quickly that if you do not leave him, he will crush you. You return to me. You become a gypsy. You find work here, there and everywhere. You re-educate yourself. You experiment. You find love again. You move to a new country, learn to drive, follow dreams, create your own business, and over this past difficult pandemic year, you have developed a social conscience, re-educating yourself yet again.

Still you have dark moments when you doubt yourself and all is gloomy. I want to reassure you, to tell you not to go there, that you are too warm, kind, intelligent, beautiful to indulge in self pity. Or if you must, know that it will pass, that it’s good to be human. I love how you aren’t afraid to expose your human side in your writing, how you pour it all out as if saying, take me as I am. I do.

You remain my dream daughter. 

You are home for the holidays. You call out to me “there’s a monkey in your bed.” and you silly-Gilly are laughing under the duvet on my kingsize bed like the child you once were.

“More than gems in my comb box shaped by the God of the Sea,/ I prize you, my daughter”     -  Eighth-century Japanese poet Otomo no Sakanoue Iratsume 

 

 

Too Old for Sex?

I admit I'm pathetic. Now that I have all the time in the world, I'm finding it difficult to alight and write. I putter, doing odd chores, reading, ironing and, once in a while, jigsaw puzzles. In France, our movement is quite restricted. I am allowed out to assist vulnerable people so once or twice a week, when David goes down to the garden, I sit with Susan and we drink wine and talk about her books or my draft or sex. Just because I'm in my nineties, she tells me, doesn't mean I've stopped fantasizing and dreaming about sex. 

In the second volume of her memoirs, Susan explains, at length, about the destruction of the pleasure society that was based on imagination and play instead of rivalry and violence.  To return to it, she writes, that "[w]e will have to start small, with that first thing the myths say went wrong, women's talent for pleasure."

She suggests "A school for grandmothers! Learning to be like Baubo! We have what it takes. We are practical and worldly wise, we have sexual experience and boldness of spirit. We are more untrammelled by convention and less anxious about our sexuality than young women. We are angry like them; they are angry to be considered just women. We are angry not to be considered women any more, just a sort of disembodied bodies. Or we are bitter and punish ourselves for what others have done to us by saying we are old and asexual and tired of the whole thing. But this can be made to work for us. It is physiologically quite untrue because women's sexual sensibility and capacity grows with age, and if we can be taught to see it differently we will be eager to tell our grand-daughters how to avoid our embittering experiences."

This is such a weighty topic that I will leave it to Susan to elaborate but I should explain that Baubo - the Goddess of Mirth - is an old woman in Greek mythology. She was bawdy and sexually liberated, and when people laughed at her, she didn't mind. Laughter is good, she said. Susan tells of Baubo dragging her clitoris in the sand which reminded me of a magazine article I wrote in 2007.

 The Omnipotent Clitoris

Yvonne Young 

If the most liberal mothers buy their daughters condoms, do the most enlightened buy them vibrators? The thrill of seduction is nothing compared to the earth-moving quake of the female orgasm. Unfortunately, young women exploring their sexuality aren’t learning this fundamental truth: the clitoris or “magic cape” as Natalie Angier calls it in Woman: An Intimate Geography, alerts as well as ignites in the heat of the moment. While men have been discussing its properties for centuries, the owners of this palatable treasure are ignorant of its power. 

Sixty-seven years, after Christopher Columbus set sail to discover a new world, Renaldus Columbus (no relation) claimed he’d discovered the route to a woman’s sexual pleasure. His claim was rejected by Kaspar Barholin, a Danish anatomist, who insisted that what 

Renaldus chose to name “the love or sweetness of Venus” had been known since the second century. Whoever discovered the clitoris, Georg Ludwig Kobelt, a German physician, was the first to document its structure and function. In his text of 1844, he writes that the glans cliteroides is “the primary locus of sexual arousal... which will make women want to have intercourse despite the dangers of pregnancy and the trials of motherhood.” 

Although women now know more about their bodies than in Kobelt’s time,
they are still ignoring danger for the sake of romance. Furthermore, the thrill of danger – the high of risk itself – is being substituted for the pleasure of orgasm. When Dr. Carol Cassell, a leader in the field of sex education, asked a group of 125 women, all family-planning professionals, whether they’d ever had unprotected intercourse when they weren’t planning pregnancy, much to her surprise, every single one of them said “yes.” When she asked them why, they answered, “Romance... Spontaneity... There is nothing more awful than premeditated sex.” 

According to a friend, in her early twenties, part of the pleasure of sex is the danger. Last year, she spent her days and evenings working and her late nights and early mornings frolicking in bed with a young man. (She didn’t know a person could get by on so little sleep.) At the beginning of the relationship, she insisted that her lover wear condoms but as time passed, she became more lenient. To avoid pregnancy, she didn’t allow him to ejaculate into her body “most of the time.” After several months of passionate coupling, she missed a period and almost drove herself crazy with worry until her next menstrual cycle began. When I asked whether she’d become more cautious since this pregnancy scare, she said no.

Another young friend reminded me that there is more at risk than unwanted pregnancy. Last fall, while I was living in France, she was hiking around Europe. She dropped in for a visit and stayed a week. From the moment she arrived, she couldn’t stop talking about the places she’d been and the people she’d met. Then, casually, she let it drop that she had spent one night in a Spanish hospital in agony. The doctor, without examining her, had prescribed medicine for a bladder infection. Although she’d taken it for three days, she was still having trouble urinating. Several days later when her condition still hadn’t improved, she finally went to the village doctor for a second opinion. She returned in tears. Although the doctor wanted laboratory proof, she was almost certain my friend had herpes simplex II or genital herpes.

Like my other young friend, this woman is well educated and cautious about sexual encounters. Before becoming intimately involved with a man, she insists he is tested for disease. When she travels, she carries a supply of condoms. But one starry night on a beach on the Costa Brava, she lost all reason and made love, without protection, to a fellow traveler. She cursed herself. She cursed him. How dare he not tell her that he was infected?

I have since learned that between two-thirds and three-quarters of people with genital herpes show no symptoms and are unaware that they are infected. The tiny blisters and open sores that mark the disease can appear at any moment, disappear, and reappear again and again. More disturbing still, the virus can cause central nervous system damage or death in infants born through the birth canal. Unlike other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, or candidiasis, which can be arrested with antibiotics, there is still no cure for genital herpes. My friend, like those who carry the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) or the more lethal HIV, will always have to protect herself during sexual encounters or risk passing the disease on to others. 

Women often fail to protect themselves during sex, Dr. Cassell explains in Swept Away: Why Women Fear Their Own Sexuality, because they have been raised to play the passive role. She believes that unless women first admit that they are sexual beings, that they want and are going to have sex, they will continue to put themselves at risk. Her theory matches Nancy Friday’s.
In Women on Top: How Real Life has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies, Friday elaborates on the “swept away” syndrome and women’s unwillingness to protect themselves during sex. “Being contraceptively prepared goes against a lifelong addiction to love, a state of mind that includes sexual feeling but has never been differentiated from it.” Although it may be preferable to love the person with whom one makes love, Friday admits, it is more important
to recognize the difference between sex and love. One way to recognize the difference, Friday insists, is by masturbating. Although many women feel more comfortable about touching themselves than they did when Friday’s first book, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies was published in 1974, she suggests that there is still a considerable number who shy away from pleasuring themselves. Friday encourages mothers to tell their daughters to masturbate because, she believes, when a girl or young woman touches her own genitals, she learns more about her anatomy and becomes a more intelligent owner, more in control of what is hers.

Naomi Wolf, in Promiscuities, suggests that young women would also benefit if older women gave them information about contraception and sexual pleasure so they could learn to value their sexuality: “We can teach our daughters that shame belongs to the act of abusing or devaluing female sexuality, not to that sexuality itself.”

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, men such as Columbus and Barholin had a vested interest in women’s sexuality for they believed that without female orgasm, there would be no conception. Not surprisingly, women didn’t challenge this belief. Although medical science has changed men and women’s attitudes towards sex, some things remain the same. Most men love driving a woman to orgasm. Most women love the sensation. In the throngs of passion, however, many women ignore or forget that it’s the female body that incubates the next generation and, as Dr. Genuis points out in Risky Sex, is more seriously injured by the majority of sexually transmitted diseases. 

Many women don’t realize, Natalie Angier writes, that they are endowed with a protective device, “a magic cape.” The clitoris, unlike the vagina, does not respond when it is frightened as in rape, or when it is hurried or harassed. Under ideal conditions, its 8000 nerve fibers (twice as many as the penis) swell with pleasure and then “it is a taut little baton, leading the way, cajoling here, quickening there, andante, allegro, crescendo, refrain.”

If young women are to benefit from the sexual revolution of the ‘60s—when their right to birth control was established and their right to decide their own future was won—they will become more aggressive and responsible in and out of bed. They will push themselves to move beyond the “swept away” syndrome. While there may be pleasure in danger, there is much more fun to be had with self-knowledge.

In her chapter on the clitoris, Angier notes that she uses the terms “clitoris”, “female orgasm”, and “female sexuality” almost interchangeably. She would most likely endorse the idea that mothers who value their own sexuality would want their daughters to be easily and super orgasmic. Such mothers would gift- wrap vibrators as well as condoms for their daughters.

 

Yvonne Young has published stories and book reviews in “The Diarist’s Journal”, “Fugue”, “The Vancouver Sun”, the “North Shore News”, and the “Kings County Record”. She was short-listed in The Canadian Literary Awards contest and won second prize in the “West End” literary contest.

 

References


Angier, Natalie. Woman: An Intimate Geography. New York: Houghton Mif in Company, 1999. 

Cassell, Carol. Swept Away: Why Women Fear Their Own Sexuality. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.


Friday, Nancy. Women on Top: How Real Life has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.


Genuis, Stephen. Risky Sex. Edmonton: KEG Publishing, 1991.


Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1990.


Morrison, Ken, editor. Safer Sex Guidelines: Healthy Sexuality and HIV. Ottawa: Canadian AIDS Society, 1994.


Rubin, Lillian B. Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution? New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.


Tsena, C. Howard; Villanueva, T.Guilas; and Powel, Alvin. Sexually Transmitted Diseases: A Handbook of Protection, Prevention and Treatment. California: R & E Publishers, 1987. 

Wolf, Naomi; Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood. Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 1997. 

Outrageous for Lisa

To beautiful Lisa who reminds me of Japanese Haiku:

“Between our two lives/ there is also the life of/ the cherry blossom.”

"You are filled with doubt/ of the magic inside you,/ but it's all I see."

Something "outrageous" (or not) for your birthday

When my friend Susan Reid left academic work, she asked herself "What are you really interested in?" The first thought that popped into her head surprised her: "I am interested in women's cunts". This led to her work on women's sexual language and this, in turn, lead to her talisman "I have a big cunt".  When stressed or anxious, she whispered this phrase to herself and "poise calm and dignity descended".

Soon after I arrived in France in 1989, Susan asked if I would accompany her to her garden below the village to pick fresh figs. I was in a sad, tear-stained state and said little as we walked so Susan filled the silence with a monologue about her first and second marriages. Her first husband had been her university professor at Oxford and, at first, his age and authority delighted her but she soon discovered he was arrogant, condescending and a womanizer although he had one agreeable trait: "He loved cunts. He found each one unique and beautiful." I must have looked shocked, as Susan paused and explained that no one word describes the whole of women's genitalia. She would like to dispel its ugliness and bring "cunt" back into fashion. (Six years later, Eve Ensler, in her play the Vagina Monologues, also wanted women to reclaim the word.)

Although I trust Susan implicitly, cunt is a powerful appellation and I had to push myself to use it especially in my blog as my mother and father read me daily. (Later, my father commented on my "filthy" language. ) Sadly, I still find it difficult to write about cunt. In languages other than English, it does not have the same potency but as Germaine Greer argued in 2007 cunt "is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock".

"I tried to take the malice out of it. I wanted women to be able to say it. The same way I would say: “You think cunt is nasty? I’m here to tell you cunt is nice. Like "Black is Beautiful”. Cunt is delicious. Cunt is powerful. Cunt is strong.

"Ah - it didn’t work. And now, in a way, I’m sort of, perversely pleased, 'cause it meant that it kept that power."

In her poem "Hypocrite Women",  Denise Levertov notes women coddle men as if they cannot handle the truth but women too don't have the guts to admit our own harsh truths: 

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak

of our own doubts, while dubiously

we mother man in his doubt!

And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees

the sweet rain drifting through western air

a white sweating bull of a poet told us

our cunts are ugly - why didn't we

admit we have thought so too? (And

what shame? They are not for the eye!)

no, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,

caves of the Moon...             and when a 

dark humming fills us, a

coldness towards life,

we are too much women to

own to such unwomanliness.

Whorishly with the psychopomp

we play and plead--and say

nothing of this later.          And our dreams,

with what frivolity we have pared them

like toenails, clipped them like ends of

split hair. 

Her description of the cunt and women's attitudes toward this precious part of our anatomy makes me despair. In adolescence, I too thought it as ugly as sin, when the hair started sprouting. I thought worse -that it was smelly, and once a month bloody-awful. 

This was so unkind and such a lie.

I don't know how young women think about their cunts these days. 

I remember when my daughter was a little girl, she looked up at me in the shower and exclaimed "aren't vaginas beautiful, mummy?" YES. 

If this is of interest at all, I recommend reading Susan Reid's autobiography in three volumes. The first is titled "About Being German; Speak to me: recollections of growing up in Germany, 1927-1948: Volume 1" 

Inspiration

 Just when I sink feeling blue and hopeless, inspiration arrives. Thank you wholeheartedly Lisa and Brendan.

and

Dearest Marlene

 I received your email this morning and I know too well that I haven't posted here in a long time. Every day I tell myself to write a blog and every day I find reasons not to. I am writing. I am pretty good about writing myself a letter in the morning as a way to get through my day. When I don't, I am a scrambled mess. I have continued to write my novel though I have no idea how to write one. Oh I do have a number of books outlining a step by step approach but I don't want to take the time and besides, I want to create something original. Susan and David smile and frown at me when I discuss my progress or lack of it. It's so easy for others to say "do it". At times, I am astonished at my bravery and at other times, I despair because I have so easily deluded myself and am an idiot. I am reading Smart's "At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" and Anais Nin's "Henry and June" for permission to say whatever I want. 

Yesterday I wrote down this Smart quote: "To deny love, and deceive it meanly by pretending that what is unconsummated remains eternal, or that love sublimated reaches highest to heavenly love, is repulsive, as the hypocrite's face is repulsive when placed too close to the truth."

Oh, I have been so repulsive. And yet, there are startling moments when I return to see what I've written the day before and I grin and think myself pretty fucking amazing. Unfortunately these moments are rare but aren't the greatest moments in one's life rare and startling and beautiful when they appear in the most ordinary of circumstances?

I worry also that I have left it too late, that my weather-worn brain will fail me or is failing me or is not up to the challenge. I was afraid of reading Anne Truitt's third journal "Prospect" because the second spoke of aging and its limitations but I am now into it and instead of being disheartened, I am encouraged. She quotes Cicero born in 106 BC - I am always amazed that old wisdom is still wise:

"Age does not steal upon adults any faster than adulthood steals upon children... I regard nature as the best guide... Since she has planned all the earlier divisions of our life expertly, she is not likely to make a bad playwright's mistake of skimping the last act.

"Great deeds are not done by strength or speed or physique: they are the product of thought, and character, and judgement. And far from diminishing such qualities actually increase with age.

"Age has to be fought against; its faults need vigilant resistance. We must combat them as we should fight a disease - following a fixed regime, taking exercise in moderation, and enough food and drink to strengthen yet not enough to overburden. However the mind and spirit need even more attention than the body, for old age easily extinguishes them, like lamps when they are not given oil..."

I struggle every day trying to create a regime that works for me, and trying to go easy on myself when I fail. For example, this morning I wrote: "Rob has gone to pick up our car with its new perfect body (hopefully) and I am wondering whether to attack my novel, write a blog, do my morning pages, vacuum the upstairs while Rob is out and so on it goes - the everyday demands and then the extravagant personal self-indulgent writing, and the craziness of reading three books at the same time. I drive myself crazy trying to be productive, establish a routine, and never feeling fast enough, quick witted enough and at the same time, telling myself to slow down that, in the end, it doesn't really matter."

I fear my dear Marlene, that I haven't quite conquered my "addiction to perfection". I should possibly read Marion's book again too but how much can a greedy person like myself absorb? 

Kahlo says it for me

I’m not going to ask you to kiss me

Neither ask for forgiveness when I believe that you have done wrong

or that you have made a mistake.
Nor am I going to ask you to hug me when I need it the most
or to invite me to dinner on our anniversary.
I’m not going to ask you to go around the world
to live new experiences much less
ask you to give me your hand when we are in that city.
I’m not going to ask you to tell me how pretty I’ am
even if it’s a lie or that you write me anything nice.
Nor will I ask you to call me to tell me
how your day was or tell me you miss me.
I’m not going to ask you to thank me for everything I do for you,
for you to worry about me when my moods are down
and of course I will not ask you to support me in my decisions.
I’m not going to ask you to listen to me when I have a thousand
stories to tell you.
I’m not going to ask you to do anything,
not even to stay by my side forever.
Because if I have to ask you
I do not want it anymore.

xoxo

The Year was 2003

This was the year of the first writing workshop in our home in France. I had invited Marlene who I recognized the moment I laid eyes on her in an autobiography class at UBC. She was the facilitator - a fellow reader, lover of words, listener extraordinaire, who wanted to help women find their voices. This workshop was pure magic, a gathering of 17 women from Canada, the United States, England and France who met in our 13th century - yet-to-be-renovated - house. It just so happens that that was one of the hottest summers on record. We met every morning and as the days progressed, the air became stiller and stiller and the heat was so overpowering that every woman present dressed in lighter and lighter garments and many of us forewent undergarments. What did this do our writing? Most of us wrote hot steamy tales. This is the one that I composed on such a day - very much like the weather we're experiencing now in France.

WLADYSLAVA INSPIRES ROCOCO DAYDREAMS

by Yvonne Young

Sharon painted a life-size image of Wladyslava, cigarette in mouth, seated with legs spread, elbows on thighs, eyes confronting the viewer. “Don’t mess with me,” she appears to be saying. 

Those who viewed Sharon’s painting thought Wladyslava an imaginary character. I knew otherwise.  The real woman or “seductress,” as she called herself, was—still is for all I know—a professor of economics at a northern university in France - but she dressed like a tart, neckline low, lace bra showing, tits thrust up and out. She craved attention and, if her dress didn’t attract looks, she would rub the palm of her hand back and forth over one breast, then the other until her nipples hardened, and then run her tongue over her lips as if eager to taste, to ravish every male within her eyes’ radius. 

When Wladyslava moved, she never walked or sauntered. She strode, head up, nose too, arrogant to a fault, magnificent, like Delacroix’ figure of Liberty.  

I meant to discuss Sharon’s image, not the subject, but Sharon has captured Wladyslava so well that every time I mention the painting, I think of its subject and here, in the south of France, where I first met Wladyslava, it seems natural that she come to mind especially since, on this hot hot day, I am wearing my wench top, breasts spilling over, one shoulder strap fallen, long skirt, with no underwear. I feel a little like a seductress myself. 

I included Wladyslava in another story, written in first person, one that inspired Sharon to paint the shameless hussy. The tale takes place in Venice where I had escaped with John, my lover, my hater, my partner. I refuse to use the words “my husband”—although I am married to John—because the possessive article and noun suggest ownership and I refuse to own or be owned. To paraphrase William Blake, “I must create my own… [language] or be enslaved by another man’s.” 

I want to make it clear that the eight days I spent in Venice with John were no wife-husband ode to tourism. They were the sexiest days that I have ever spent with a man. We couldn’t stop fucking. (Is this important to the story? I have too many stories. I simply want to explain how the words seductress and Wladyslava became synonymous.) One day, waiting by the Rialto Bridge for John, I noticed a number of male heads turning to stare at me. Me? Wladyslava instantly came to mind.  I decided to be her. I threw back my head, thrust my breasts forward, crossed my legs high at the thigh, leaned back on my hands, and eyed every man as I would ambrosia on a dessert tray. More than one turned his head so I fell more and more into the role of seductress. 

My eyes kept exploring the male scenery until, in the distance; I spied a gorgeous specimen of masculinity. His jet-black hair and rugged full beard reminded me of Giancarlo Giannini in Lina Wertmueller’s “Swept Away.” I felt an inexplicable desire for this stranger. How did he know? He hesitated, changed direction, and strode towards me, halting two inches from my feet. As he stood staring down into my eyes, my heart started racing. I couldn’t avert my eyes. My tongue, much to my amazement, escaped and wet my lips. All my force had to be summoned not to be outdone by him. I won. He blinked first and then walked away. 

I do not tell this to brag but to illustrate Wladyslava power. 

No one would buy Sharon’s painting. Although women liked it well enough, men either loved or hated the strong woman confronting them.  After a time, Sharon realized that the men, who hated it, were bores, not worth her time. The men who loved the aggressive female figure were dynamite, in and out of bed. Finally to save time, Sharon would show a prospective lover the painting. 

As a birthday gift, Sharon gave me a replica of Wladyslava’s mouth with cigarette dangling that looked as if she had cut out a segment of the larger painting. I hung it in my writing room and every time I enter, those lush lips, that defiant cigarette, confront me.

(written in Castelnau de Montmiral, summer 2003) 

COVID19

The other night, I had a dream that upset me so much that it stayed with me throughout the day, made me so miserable I didn't go to the village market because I didn't want to put on a fake smile or open my mouth. When I told Rob about it, he said that it did not sound that scary and, in telling it, it didn't but still, I felt horrible.

I appear to be at a beach that has a long boardwalk running through its middle. A long line of people are walking casually along, laughing and talking. I stand off the walk, in my mask, waiting for the people to pass so I can cross safely when I focus on this young woman, taller and stronger than me, approaching. When she reaches me, she stops, looks me in the eye sneeringly and grabs my hands. I am horrified and try to pull my hands out of hers but she holds tight and won't let go. I struggle for what appears to be a long time and finally, realizing that she is too strong, I begin to cry. She laughs and leaves me.

I think about my powerlessness throughout the day, trying to think of what I could have done or said to change the situation. One response could have been: I have COVID19. Another is: You'll be sorry if I die because of you, but I know both responses are weak: I doubt either would have moved her.

Some days, I feel as if I'm in jail and will never escape. Other days, I think this lonely life is good for me: it forces me to stay put and design a way of being that gives me pleasure. I have begun yet again to write my novel. Susan and David are urging me on although yesterday Susan said that she would not live long enough to read it. I said you never know. You may live to be a hundred. When the writing is difficult, I worry that I am spending my last days doing something that is beyond me, that will never be finished.

I have a pile of books on my desk - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I jump from one to another, depending on my mood. I smile at myself. I am doing what I've been doing all my life - trying to find a way to live.

Bad Habits

I just found this piece that I wrote many years ago and I have no idea if I wrote it for anything specific or not - could have simply been an exercise for my writing group. I'd say I've been a closet writer for years.



BAD HABITS

I am old as old as my friend Maggie was that year before she died.  After disease stole her vocal cords, I visited her almost daily and talked non-stop about my writing, the children, Adam’s work, what I was making for dinner, anything and everything to keep her from crying, although I was the one that minded the tears.  Maggie called them the wine of the gods.
Now I am the old one and Marietta visits me as I once visited Maggie but, unlike Maggie, I am blessed.  All my faculties more or less function, though my eyes strain more often and my ears miss light sounds like the footsteps of Marietta entering my den. Sometimes, when I am reading with a magnifying glass, I look up and there she is, sitting at the table leafing through one of my novels with such reverence that I smile.  I took a lot of abuse over my books, especially Three Hundred Days of Indulgence.  Some called it pornography.  Others worse.  I nearly lost my husband over that one.  Adam didn’t like what he said I’d written about him.  I laughed in his face; called him presumptuous, and insisted the book was fiction.
I lied, of course.  Every writer borrows from life.
He accepted my explanation.  Had little choice.  After thirty years, I was his bad habit.  He couldn’t live without me.
Marietta says my books give her permission to think her wayward thoughts.  She is speaking about sex, of course.  You’d think in this decade that fucking would be as easy as sending an email.  It isn’t.  It still confuses people.  They can’t get naked and have a rip-roaring good time without using that dreadful word relationship, or worse still love.
“All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.”
I can’t believe it.  I sit here thinking my foolish thoughts and when the word  “love” pops into my mind, the Beatles’ song plays in my head.
No.
The music is coming from outside.
I look out the window and there’s Adam singing his fool head off in his beloved vegetable garden.  It’s eerie how often we’re in sync these days.
I wave and grin; and he, poor dear, blows a kiss my way.
I am a hard cruel woman.  I should have set him free years ago.  He is too good for me.
I turn back to my desk and there is Marietta sitting patiently waiting.  She demands nothing but a word now and again, although occasionally she taxes me for advice on some article she’s writing. 
Something has upset her today.  She keeps clenching that pretty mouth of hers.
“What is it, Marietta?”
She takes a deep breath, twists one bare leg around the other as if it were rubber.
“You know Sophia…
She takes another deep breath.
“I thought myself liberated.  I come here and tell you about my sexual exploits, brag almost, feel free and intelligent—gutsy, to use your word; but after what I did yesterday…
She hangs her head like a sorry child.
“Oh come on, Marietta.  I’m too old to plead.  What stupid fool thing did you do? Or think you did?”
She gets up and paces, her long legs more exposed, as she strides, in that treacherous mini-skirt. 
Just when I’m about to yell at her for wearing out the carpet and my patience, she halts and begins in a somber voice.
“A couple of nights ago, I went to The King’s Arms with several colleagues from the office.  It was Malcolm’s birthday.  He’s the skinny one with dark glasses who fawns over me.  After a couple of glasses of wine, I excused myself to go to the washroom.  The new illustrator—beautiful young woman, smart too, but with the craziest eyes I’ve ever seen—said she had to go too.  I went into the first stall, was about to lock the door, when she pushed in, bolted it, and spun round to face me.”
Marietta swallows hard and resumes pacing.
“As I looked into those crazy eyes, questioning, she raised her hand and stroked my cheek.  And then she raised the other hand to my face and pressed her lips against mine.  Those soft wet lips and tongue forcing its way into my mouth took me by surprise. I liked the sweetness.  I closed my eyes and tasted fruit.”
She pauses.
“It’s been too damn long, Sophia, that’s the problem.  I like penises.  I like them inside me.  I’m not attracted to women.  Oh yes, I have fantasies, but that’s all they are.  I love women but I don’t want to make love to them... fuck them, as you would say.”
“So what’s the big deal?  You kissed a woman on the lips.”
“That’s not all.  She put her hands on my breasts and I found myself arching towards her.  Heaven knows what else I’d have let her touch but we were interrupted by a yell outside the door.  I cringe when I think of it.”
Marietta stands there rocking but, by now, I’m as curious as hell and can’t wait for her histrionics to end.
“Yell?  Why was someone yelling in the washroom?  Was someone hurt?”
“No, no.  She was demanding to know what we two lezzies were doing in there.
“Lezzies?  I felt as if I’d been slapped.  I stepped back and shook my head at crazy eyes.  She moved to the wall and I opened the door and left.
“Yesterday she approached me at work and asked if she could come over to my place with a bottle of her favourite merlot.
“No,” I told her.  “I’m sorry but no.
“I could hardly look her in the eye.  I espouse all this—this dogma on androgyny and find I’m too uptight to test the theory.  You told me once that your only regret is that you’ve never made love to a woman.  I thought yes, that it would be nice to feel soft flesh next to mine.  We would know how to please the other.  But, when given the opportunity, I’m too afraid to wander from the straight and narrow.”
She slumps into the chair.
“Balls, Marietta.  Think woman think.  Imagine that illustrator was a man who could fill you to the hilt.  Would you invite him over to your place after one quick grope in a toilet stall?”
 Marietta looks up.  Slowly her mouth breaks into a smile.
This is why I love this young woman.  She can laugh at herself.
“You’re right.  I am overreacting.  I wouldn’t make love—fuck rather—a man on the basis of one wine-infused kiss, no matter where it happened.
“Sophia, thanks.  I feel so much better.  Must run.”
Marietta leaves, slamming the damn door.  How many times have I told her that it isn’t music to my ears?
She’ll learn some day that the intellect is light years ahead of the emotions.  If the timing is right, she might even enjoy a woman in the sack. 
Oh Maggie, how I miss you.  In the end, you were angry with me.  I wanted to leave Adam during my three hundred days of indulgence.  He was so dreary.  And you cautioned me, crying all the while, not to make important decisions when swinging off emotional highs.
Damn, I was wilder than Marietta.  When did I tell her that I’d never made love to a woman?  I did whatever I pleased with whomever I pleased—monogamy equaled monotony—and then vindicated myself by telling Adam everything.  Before long, he was crying too.  I thought I was going to drown in tears.
Who told you that they’re the wine of the gods?  I searched long and hard and found no such reference although Psyche crying buckets of tears over Eros pissed me off.
Why is Psyche or Soul a weak little female and Eros, god of love, a golden-haired boy with a bow and arrow?
A man must have transcribed the myth.
If anyone’s been wounded by love, it is Adam.  He was Psyche crying for me, goddess of love—or so I thought—looking down from my lofty height, feeling sorry for the mere mortal.
I was so full of myself.
When Adam’s tears dried, he made love to me until I had to beg him to stop—another reversal of roles.  Did I say, “made love?” Marietta’s influence… whatever… he knew how to please me.  Still does, if the truth is to be told.  I love it when that old man climbs on top of me. 
I am blessed.