Girl Talk: After Divorce

It hit me that we girls don’t talk a lot about something that happens when we go through divorce: people we used to be friends with stop talking to us.

I have been divorced for many years, but I can still remember when, after the divorce was final, how the friends I thought I had stopped inviting me to their houses, to their parties and picnics. Friends with whom both my husband and I had shared really precious times sort of, it seemed, erased me from their lives.

It wasn’t only friends, either. It was people like the guy who had been keeping our furnace and air conditioner in shape for years. All of a sudden, when I’d call him, he wasn’t available. No matter how many times I called, he never called back.

Needless to say, some of the people in the church regarded me as a sinful woman. I was a pastor, after all. How in the world could I be trusted to preach to my people, and even more be trusted to give marital and pre-marital counseling, when obviously, I was lacking in character and in knowing how to keep a man?

I couldn’t figure it out. Some friends who were divorced stop speaking, but more, it was friends, my lady friends, who were NOT divorced whose silence and distance puzzled me. Was it because I was now viewed as a threat? Were they afraid that my failure as a wife was somehow contagious, and that they would get “the illness” if they remained close? I only ask because years after the divorce, some of those friends, all of whom are now divorced themselves, have been gingerly moving back toward me, making contact.

Seriously?

As I have listened to women over the years go through divorce, I realize that it isn’t just me; too many women have the same story, but it would be great if we women wouldn’t back away from each other at such an awful time. It’s precisely at times like that, when your life is falling apart and the ground on which you’ve always stood falls from under your feet – no, more accurately, crumbles as you stand there, that you need your sister friends most.

I ached as I read the story of how the late Elizabeth Edwards, betrayed by her husband, was so crushed by his affair that she yelled at him in public and bared her chest, which showed the scars of breast cancer. How horrible for her to feel that depth of pain! I found myself wondering if her pain was exacerbated by friends who simply disappeared as she and her husband went through their pain, oh so publicly.

I don’t know what it is about us that makes us shy away from each other in critical moments, any more than I understand why we so often stab each other in the heart and/or back when it comes to getting a mate, but I can say that, during divorce, the friend who is real is the friend who sticks with you through it all.

A candid observation …

Girl Talk: Honoring Ourselves

I call it “breakthrough” when we as women finally learn to accept, honor and love ourselves as we are.

Iyanlya Vanzant wrote a book and a poem by the same name, One Day My Soul Just Opened Up. At the beginning of the book is the poem, and one verse reads:

One day, my soul just opened up

There were revelations, annihilations and resolutions

feelings of doubt and betrayal,vengeance and forgiveness

memories of things I’d seen and done before…

Vanzant’s book takes readers through a number of things people in general, but women in particular, seem to struggle with: self-acceptance, acceptance, setting boundaries, dealing with disappointment…and she offers exercises that readers can do to begin the process of doing whatever we need in order to have …souls that open up.

Dealing with those things, “things of the soul,” as they were, are those things which can help us know and love and honor who we are. That book, along with Wayne Dyer‘s latest, Wishes Fulfilled,” have been food for me.

From the beginning, I always compared myself to others. I was too tall, too skinny, I had a giant gap between my two front teeth, I was smart, but not as smart as “the smartest” in the class. I continued making comparisons and subsequently rating myself lower than I wanted to be …until fairly recently, when “my soul just opened up,” and, as Ntozake Shange wrote, “I found God in myself.”

There are reasons why we women tend to compare ourselves, but none of them make much sense. I find myself wondering if our lack of respect for ourselves in this area is the same reason or lack of respect that keeps us in relationships, romantic or otherwise, that are not good enough. We remind me of Edith Bunker, who really was not treated very well by her husband Archie, but who was always running to serve him. I mean literally running. No matter how much she ran or showed obeisance to him, she was never worthy of him treating her like a wonderful woman. She was, instead, an “object,” his wife. She acted as though she felt she had no inherent worth, and that all she was good for was serving her husband.

There isn’t anything wrong with having the kind of love Edith had for Archie, but not at the expense of honoring ourselves. I am a pastor; I honor the people I serve, but I realized I was suffering from the “Edith Bunker” syndrome, honoring the people I serve more than I honored myself…and I realized I was doing myself great spiritual damage and was not doing my ministry any good, either.

It was clearly a breakthrough, and I was able to see how my behavior had spread into all areas of my life. I was honoring people who did not honor me, and I was making some people a priority in my life, who had made me an option in theirs.

It is amazing how many of us as women keep ourselves in self-imposed spiritual and emotional prisons. Our souls are not open, but are, rather, closed tightly. Behind those closed doors we keep so many feelings that are instrumental in keeping us at the edge of life instead of being immersed in life, while we yet have the chance. For the longest, I knew something was off-center in my life, but didn’t know what it was…not until recently. As a child, I didn’t feel honored or liked in my family; it seemed that I could never do anything right; I looked funny…and all that baggage became feelings that I carefully folded and carried around inside me.

Life is a little too short for that.

And so, for the rest of my days, however many those may be, I am going to “walk in myself.” I am going to appreciate my gifts and use them, and not worry about what I don’t have and what I cannot do. It really doesn’t matter. There is plenty I can do…and will do.

This morning there was a thunderstorm here, and as the rain fell and the thunder and lightning played an amazing symphony of sound, I realized that we women have symphonies in us that nobody has ever heard; they don’t have a clue there is so much in us because we have kept those parts of us hidden. We have sublimated our gifts, trying to please others who cannot or will not be pleased, and trying to be what we will never be.

God is waiting for the symphonies.

A candid observation …

White Men Behaving Badly

I have watched and listened to the real-life drama unfolding as a discussion about contraception has morphed into first, an accusation against President Obama, that he is waging a war on religion, and now, into a war on women and women’s rights.

And what I am seeing is white men behaving badly in an all-out effort to “take back” America.

At first, the cry heard from Republicans to “take our country back” seemed squarely aimed at President Barack Obama. Though nobody wants to admit it openly, there is a fair amount of resentment from many Republicans that President Obama, a black man, is in the White House. South African playwright and writer Athol Fugard said the same in a recent interview with Charlie Rose on March 1, 2012: “Much of what President Obama is going through is because he is a black man in the White House,” Fugard said.

The resentment against President Obama was predictable, but this war on women, and a crude one at that, is a bit of a surprise. Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Georgetown University Law School student Sharon Fluke are no less than sickening and repulsive. To call this young woman a “slut” and a “prostitute” is childish, but one wonders, listening to him, if many Republicans are angry that women, as well as blacks, have gotten just a little bit too much freedom in this country?

Much of this got started, or the hot embers were ignited by, GOP candidate Rick Santorum. He began the tirade that there was and is an attack on religion and religious freedoms being waged by the Obama administration. With deep passion he has argued that secularism is on the rise, the fault of this president and his administration.

To make it possible for women to get contraception is a part of a war on religion and religious freedom, Santorum has said. The waves from his passionate sharing of his beliefs has grown into a tsunami that is revealing just how deep is bigotry against anyone who is not white and male, and, ironically, Protestant (though Santorum is a Catholic) in this country.

In a 2008 speech, Santorum said that “this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism – and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is a shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.” (italics mine.)

Santorum moved from attacking the president and his “phony theology” to observations on women and their place in society. In an interview with John King on February 8 of this year, Santorum said that he had “concerns” about women in combat, saying that in such a situation “it could be a very compromising situation where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved.”

His apparent disapproval of the freedom of women to “choose” came through loud and clear when he said in 2006 that he didn’t think contraception works, and said “I think it’s harmful to women. I think it’s harmful to our society to have a society that says sex outside of marriage is something that should be encouraged or tolerated.”

Only, apparently, if that sex is engaged in by women…

Santorum is gaining support in his bid for the Republican nomination for president, and there has been no outcry for the voice of Rush Limbaugh to be stilled; this is America, after all, and we have freedoms.

But what is becoming increasingly clear is that a great number of Americans are apparently very resentful that too many people have too much freedom! Politicians of the past have said in the open, and now I suppose they say it in private, “this is a white man’s country.” Indeed, when the words of the Constitution were fashioned, saying that all men were created equal, there was no thought or understanding that that phrase included or was intended to include blacks, women, or even all men. The phrase was specifically describing the freedom of white, Protestant, property-owning, men.

It appears that what Conservatives want to conserve is their idea of what America was always intended to be. They understand that freedom, or premium freedom, was never meant to be for the masses. “We the people” are confused.

What is used as justification of their views, and even of their treatment of some people, is the U.S. Constitution and, alas, God. Those who do not believe as they do are condemned as “secularists.” Santorum blasted a 1960 speech by fellow Catholic and then presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy, who said he believed in total separation of church and state.

Kennedy was trying to assuage a nervous American society about what they might expect if a Catholic got into the White House. Would the pope have the ultimate power? Kennedy’s speech, it seemed, sought to calm their nerves.

But Santorum, trying to conserve an America that was formed by people seeking freedom but which systematically denied freedom to blacks, women, and so many others, blasted Kennedy’s speech and appealed to a yet again nervous America which believes that the wrong person is in the White House and that women have gotten beside themselves, out of line with the divine will.

The word “Christianity” is being thrown around like a hot potato, appealing to the fears of some under the guise of religious righteousness. Being crass and rude to a young woman cannot be in the will of God, who in the Hebrew scriptures decried how badly people treated each other and yet thought they could appease God by pious religious services. “I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies” God says in the book of Amos (5:21)

It feels like this God would not like what is being done to people, or said about human beings with rights, including women and blacks. Freedom of speech notwithstanding, it seems that God would not approve of Rush Limbaugh’s crude and tasteless comments about a young woman who is seeking to help protect the rights of all women.

In this election cycle, white men are behaving badly, using the Constitution and God to justify their actions and their words. It is very, very sad to watch.

A candid observation …

Girl Talk: Getting Older

Fuck You AARP (Photo credit: martymadrid)

Some things about getting older are funny as hell.

Like, when you turn 50 and you get the AARP card in the mail. I resented it when I got mine. Did I ask you for this card? Turning 50 was interesting enough without getting that little reminder. There’s something about being half a century old that takes a few minutes to get used to.

But other things are funny. Like gray hair in the eyebrows and eyelashes. When you’re younger, you don’t think about the fact that all hair on one’s body has the capacity to turn gray. I first noticed a gray hair in my eyelashes while I was driving, and looking for hairs on my chin in my rear view mirror.

Those, too, are funny.

But my eyelashes? Seriously? Once I saw that, I would do a witch hunt every day, looking for the little unwanted visitors, tweezers in hand. And yes, I did tweeze them until I realized they were not really growing back, gray or otherwise. While I hated (and still do) the gray eyelashes, the alternative of not having them at all was not acceptable.

Chin hairs! What in the world? They come onto our chins, again uninvited, and stick out, like little sticks. There are gray ones there, too. Sometimes you cannot see the little gray ones, but you can feel them. I thought about making it explicit that when I die, whomever “does” me makes sure the chin hairs are gone.

I am fortunate; I don’t have stiff joints, and my health is good, but the physical signs of getting older have truly amused me. Once, when I was a tad late in getting the rinse on my hair to get rid of the gray, a guy came up to me and said, “look at all that gray!” Oooh! Needless to say, I left church and went to get my rinse.

Then there are the wrinkles. I have deep wrinkles in my forehead, so I have gotten a couple of creams to see if I can lessen them. How about NOT? Every time I hear the commercial that says, “Is your anti-wrinkle cream gone…but your wrinkles are not?” I laugh out loud. I am not going to do Botox, and walk around with a frozen face, but the deep creases in my forehead kind of make me laugh. They are stubborn and are here to stay.

The cellulite is pretty interesting. How did that happen? I can remember seeing “old” women with “funny looking legs,” and now I am one as well. Seriously? Will doing my ballet stretches help to alleviate that? Time will tell…but geez! Who invited the cellulite? It came stealthily, quietly, and when I look at my legs, I promise it looks like the cellulite is smiling at me, victorious.

This process of transitioning from what we used to look like to being “older women.” is immensely interesting …and funny! My sister said she passed a mirror once and backed up and looked again, asking, “Who is that old lady?” How about I know that moment well.

Everything changes. Our necks change, and Kathy Lee Gifford says that we get “peach pits” instead of sexy cleavage. That hasn’t happened to me yet, but I suppose it’s coming.

I am not complaining. I am glad to be older, yet alive and healthy. I do not think being attractive or not looking old is the ticket to having a good, full life. I have plenty of friends who are not so old, and who are very attractive, who have empty lives. Mine is not empty, nor will I allow it to be.

But it is funny how this physical part of getting older thing just kind of crept up on me. I concentrate on eating well and being active so that no matter how old I am, I feel good. There are some things I’d like to do before I get too old to enjoy them like I’d like to, things like visiting the Pyramids, and the Great Wall of China.

I am writing this because I am hoping that more and more of us women are looking at ourselves getting older and are smiling, not panicking or becoming depressed. The cosmetic industry absolutely counts on us panicking and spending tons of money on creams that will never get rid of our wrinkles, but make us feel like we’re doing something to fight the inevitable.

Rather than spazzing out over getting older, it would be nice if we just “walk in it,” and be as elegant and as classy as we can, kind of like Helen Mirren or Betty White or the late Lena Horne. Better that we thank God for one more day, wrinkles and all, than to waste a single moment being sad that we are going to get older and continue moving away from our young, fresh look, no matter what we do.

We are no longer young and fresh; we are seasoned and mature. We are beautiful, that beauty defined by the trials and experiences we have been through. Better that we bask in that reality than to create or recreate something that will never be again.

Getting older is funny…but a blessing.

A candid observation …

Girl Talk: Finding and Filling Our Empty Places

The Greatest Love of All — Image via Wikipedia

Whitney Houston has been dead a week, and I find myself wondering, still, if she was not like so many of us women: empty of the kind of love we crave.

Why is it that so many of us end up with people who are not good for us or to us? We are not with these people under duress: we choose and stay with people who do us emotional harm, who damage our already frail inner selves, and for what?

I guess men do it, too, but it seems like we women do it more. It seems that the worse we are treated, the harder we hold onto the person who is treating us so badly. We internalize blame for the reason we are being treated badly, and we decide that “if we can just” improve ourselves, do something better, that person whom we love so much will see the light …and there will be a “happily ever after” for us.

I am not saying that was the case with Whitney and Bobby Brown, but it just feels like, from the outside, that Whitney, for all her talent and beauty, had an emptiness inside of her that she was counting on Bobby Brown to fill.

Nobody can fill our empty spaces but ourselves.

It is ironic that Whitney sang the absolute notes off the pages when she performed “The Greatest Love of All,” but in the end, resorted to drugs to self medicate the inner pain she felt from that emptiness that too many people in general, but surely too many women feel.

Years ago, a woman came to my door in the middle of the night. She was bloodied all over her head; she was crying and shaking and said she needed help. I didn’t have to ask; I knew she had been beaten. I didn’t really know this woman, so I was afraid to let her in, but I finally offered to take her to the hospital. She didn’t want to go. She only wanted to talk. She wanted some water, and she wanted to talk, and talk she did, about this man of hers who “really was a nice guy.” As she talked, I couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of her injuries. I finally offered to call the police, but she said, “no. It’ll be OK. He just gets mad sometimes. I’m trying to be a better person…”

Though I had never been physically beaten, I had had my share of experiences with guys who were “really nice guys” but who were oppressive in their treatment of me. They didn’t have the problem; I did, because I took it. I was so interested in having a relationship that I accepted treatment that damaged my spirit. I, too, had been trying to be a “better” person.

I have to believe that we women will find ways to identify our empty places, and stare them down instead of running to or staying with people who will only exploit them. It baffles me that so many of us women are so love-starved that we latch onto people who mean us no good. I find myself wondering what it is we are being taught, even subliminally, as we are being raised. What is it that makes us doubt ourselves and be willing to compromise our very spirits for the sake of being in a relationship?

Certainly nobody wants to be lonely, but we should want to have quality lives while we are yet alive, and there is no quality of life when we are in relationships with people who exploit our personalities. We are looking for something and we are finding it, too often, in the wrong places and in the wrong people.

Kevin Costner said, in his remarks at Whitney Houston’s funeral, that she wondered if she was “good enough” as she auditioned for her part in “The Bodyguard.” She was “the voice,” for goodness’ sake! She was amazingly beautiful. She was smart…and still, she doubted if she was good enough. The “empty place” syndrome that plagues so many of us women plagued even her.

Kevin Costner said to Whitney, post-mortem, “Yes, Whitney, you were good enough.” Maybe that’s something we should say, as women, to ourselves, every day, no matter what we look like: no matter the color or length of our hair, the size of our hips, the number of mistakes we have made in our lives. Maybe we should say that we are “good enough” to ourselves, and in so doing, begin filling up our empty places so that we don’t depend on a human being to do what only we and God can do.

Just a painful…and candid…observation.