The Grass is Green on Both Sides of a Gray Fence

I’ve done it. In the first month of this year, seven days after my 40th birthday, I have met the man I am going to marry. Guess who it is? It’s Zipper, from my last blog entry. No, silly. It’s the homeless guy I met at Ralph’s grocery store earlier today. He thinks I’m pretty. He asked me, “Why are you so pretty?” Of course he said this after he told me he was hungry and needed some food and asked me if I could buy him some. I offered to buy him an apple, but he said, “I don’t like apples. I want a donut.” Then, that’s when he asked me why I was so pretty.

What’s sad, is that I have really bad luck with offering apples to homeless guys. I always seem to have apples, they are my on-the-go-food, and I am not afraid to offer them, obviously, but homeless folks don’t seem to want them. One time I offered this other guy an apple (maybe he was homeless, maybe he wasn’t), who was begging for change outside of Taco Bell, and he didn’t just have a thing against apples, he hated all fruit and told me as much—with zeal. Then, he gave me a dirty look for offering him something so healthy. He wanted Taco Bell, damn it. How dare I?

And today, I offered an apple to yet another homeless guy, even before I got to Ralph’s and got buttered up with flattery (this other homeless guy stands on the same street corner day in and day out right in front of the coffee shop on Pacific Coast Highway and 7th Street in Long Beach) and he didn’t have anything against apples, per se, he just couldn’t eat them. No teeth. But, at least he was gracious enough to smile his toothless grin and thank me. Now him, he deserved a donut.

What I have concluded from all of this, is that when a homeless guy asks you for food, he doesn’t want an apple, and when he asks you, more than once, “Why are you so pretty?” what he is really asking you is, “Why won’t you just get me the F’n donut, biach?”

Will the real man of my dreams please step forward? Da dada da tada…behind door number three we have Mr. Adorable Italiano (who is also from my last blog entry). “How can that be?” you say. Mr. Adorable didn’t ask for my number, you protest further. This is all true. However, my friend Willamina convinced me that I shouldn’t leave well enough alone, even when I fervently suggested that I should. She said that I owed it to the love Gods to pull one of those same-time-same-place moves, and that I should get my tooshy back to the breakfast joint counter where Mr. Adorable and I met, and I should give him a chance to show up and ask for my phone number.

Sounds desperate?

I couldn’t agree more, which is what I told Willamina along with saying, “I don’t think Mr. Adorable is it, Willa.” But, given the fact that I’d also shared with her many other things that the psychic told to me, aside from telling me that I’d meet my husband this year, Willamina made me promise that I’d humor her and…just friggen do it! A promise is a promise. Plus, when two people remind you that you need to learn to be a girl, a friend and an amazing psychic, who, by the way, predicted another friend’s marriage, you start to take heed.

It was hard, hearing Willamina regurgitate to me, again, what the psychic had confirmed, that men are afraid of me. Not afraid of me like I’m going to eat their head off of their shoulders with my metamorphic, alien, giant-sized mouth, but afraid of me like they don’t think I need them so they feel emasculated by me. It was probably necessary that I be reminded, because it’s kind of, um…true. I know I can be scary independent.

I’ve never been good at being the damsel in distress. My mother told me that when I was a little girl if I was sick in the middle of the night I would sooner get up and change my own sheets and put the dirties in the laundry than letter a whimper loose and ask anyone for help. The only time I climbed into my parent’s bed when I was a kid was during a massive lightening and thunder storm. Let me tell you, I still remember that monster storm. If one like it hit again, I’d be looking for someone’s bed to crawl into right now.

What’s sad, is now that I am an adult I know that asking for help is an amazing strength to have, but, among all of my strengths, that is one that is underdeveloped in me. This I am trying to change. We accomplish more when we work in solidarity rather than solitarily.

That said, it is probably true that most men don’t get the impression that I even want a man in my life. I got it when the psychic said that while it is essential that a woman gets in touch with the goddess side of her nature, and taps into her strength, beauty, and sensuality (while maintaining her brains), that strength can sometimes become a weakness if she does not let others, namely in my case: a man, give her their strength back.

Allowing vulnerability is good. I have never denied the gift of a friend’s strength in my life before. However, it’s been a long time since I’ve met a man who has enough of his own emotional strength that he is not afraid of mine. Again, I am not saying I am the epitome in emotional wherewithal, but I do know that, for better or worse, I have spent a lifetime being strong for others. Somewhere along the way I learned how important it is to let others know that they can count on you. That characteristic has, in many ways, become predominant in my nature, among other characteristics that do not spell out: I-will-let-you-help-me to a man. I am sure that some of my breakups have also left me with some residual armor I’m not conscious of. It’d be stupid to assume that many of the men I’ve encountered are not picking up on that.

Thankfully, in recent years I have felt a lot of my energy shift to a much more open, available, and vulnerable space where men are concerned. But, I can imagine that before this inner alteration, which almost always has to happen subconsciously before one becomes conscious of it, the previous energy, which has left so many men with the impression that I’ve got it all figured out, has prevailed. The men I have encountered have likely thought: This chick is taking care of herself and others. She doesn’t need me. The problem is, no matter how good I am at looking after myself, that doesn’t mean that I don’t also want someone to care for who can also watch over me.

That’s why when I saw Mr. Adorable walk into the breakfast joint I felt I had another opportunity to be a better flirter, to be a better, softer girl. I wasn’t going to go wearing pink or anything, but… Alright, I’m am so friggen lying again. Mr. Adorable never showed up. But, I did finally figure out why I lie so much. It has nothing to do with a blow to the head as I’d previously ascertained. It also has nothing to do with me being an actual liar, because I am, in reality, a pretty darn honest person.

It’s as simple as this: I’m a writer who has never written the truth before. Meaning, I usually start out with the truth, as most writers do. I draw a basic story from the truth and utilize the emotions that follow. Then, in much the same way that a painting speaks to me as soon as I put the first stroke of color on the canvas, the story calls out to me. It asks me, like the painting does, not just to create it but to listen to what it has to say for itself. The color in my paintings and the words in my stories, they talk to me. They tell me what they need and where I should go next. I listen.

But my life, this telling the truth as it is happening business, it seems to require that I become somewhat of a reporter—a teller of chronological events—rather than an imagine-ista who get’s to listen to the whispers of hue, saturation, and nuance, or who gets to cast out a word or a sentence and see what kind of an adventure fish takes the bait.

Before this blog, I’ve never done that, this going with just-the-facts thing. Maybe I have done it, reported stuff, in my emails to friends, but not as a writer. Going with only the truth in this blog is still strange as hell to me. It feels like putting bacon bits on vanilla ice-cream. BTW, I don’t even eat bacon or ice cream. There’s too much salt in bacon, which is bad for my blood pressure, and I am lactose intolerant. So? See how difficult this is?

And, the whole truth is…this life of mine, it ain’t the movies. No one’s life is. We don’t get what we want in approximately 1 ½ to 2 hours—standard movie length. In our lives, there are no ten minute introductions to all the pivotal players—heroes and zeros. We cannot count on the meet-cute (boy meets girl) playing out in the way Hollywood contrives these encounters. No. Our got-love/lost-love, got milk/get drunk, it all plays out as successive steps getting us closer and closer to the lessons the universe wants us to learn in order to fulfill our ultimate potential in this life. Which is why we totally miss out on the 90-minute build-up of the rhetorical: Will they? Won’t they? When we know, stylistically and statistically (because it’s a romantic comedy, duh), that: They will!

So just get on with it, already. Hurry up with the stock argument, the fight, the misunderstanding AKA: the turning/breaking point, and get to the last 15-20 minutes of resolution that ends up in a kiss, a marriage, or at least a car driving off to Mexico, and role the damn credits. Then, we can throw our popcorn tub and empty soda cup onto the ground just underneath the seat we borrowed for a bit, because someone’s getting paid to pick that crap up, and we can go home to our lives where, if we’re telling the truth, may not be as tidy or as interesting as the diversion we just paid almost ten bucks for.

And that, my friends, is why I find myself constantly staring down the what-really-happened path, while my imagination, that big story fish, which says, “Hey! I’m over here. You could say this instead!” and gives me a run for my money. I find myself wanting to take you on a journey far less pedestrian than the goings-on in my life.

But, as you’ve seen, I sometimes have my amusing moments. Take Zipper, for example. I’ve never made a puppet out of a man before. Telling you about Zipper in my last entry has a little more grab than what happened today. Today, I took the same-time-same-place challenge Willamina indentured me to, and I went to breakfast with my friend Chloe (I needed a beautiful buffer of a friend to go with me, thnx Chloe) and I waited for Mr. Adorable (well, I meant to wait, but I got so caught up in my conversation with Chloe I honestly did forget why we’d gone there for breakfast in the first place), but Mr. Adorable didn’t show up, my oatmeal was cold, and my toast was soggy.

At least it never felt right that Mr. Adorable was my man in the first place, so I didn’t feel let down.

It would have been far more interesting if Mr. Adorable had shown up, though. That’s why, for a sentence or two, when the story begs to take me somewhere else, as this one did, I always want to go with it. Except, this is not a story, it’s my life. I have to keep reminding myself that. So, what I’ve been calling lying is really just imaginative creative writing. However, I am going to make a deal with you. So that you won’t start to think that I am forever the girl who cried wolf, I’ll try not to be imaginative for a while.

Something I do not have to make up, is that when I, in passing, said to someone I work with that I was going to meet my husband this year, I was looked at as though I was, indeed, an incredibly pathetic, desperate woman and not at all the assured, spiritual, self-fulfilling-prophecy of a positive woman I liken myself to be. So, to set the record straight, I have few things to say about that. (Not that that negativity-cow, who I barely know, who broke into my conversation with a real work-friend to interrupt, and look at me weird, is going to read my blog, anyway, but it’ll make me feel better to get it off my chest.)

First, let me explain, in more depth, why it is that I have been mostly single for so long aside from wanting a really wonderful man for myself and being unwilling to settle for less. About seven-ish/eight years ago a friend of mind said that I should enjoy being single and not having kids. My first reaction to this statement, even though I’d spent most of my life being single as opposed to being in a relationship, was to cry.

I was in my early thirties. I’d just broken up with a man who’d wrangled half of my identity from me. I was searching for someone else to give me that identity back. I had no idea that looking within would do the job better than any man could do for me. And, I believed that I might never meet the right man in time to have kids. In short, single made me sad. I was good at single. It’s what I’d mostly done. But, I didn’t want it for the rest of my life, and my break up with the man I’d given half my identity to had me believing I would be single forever.

Then, miraculously, three years later, I took the friend’s advice. It didn’t happen over night, and I never meant to enjoy being single, because I thought it was impossible, but for that three years I began to ease into it. I had started to take pleasure in being on my own. Accepting my single status, without knowing how long it would last, was foreign at first. Again, the whole reason I’d always been single was because I was unwilling to settle, not because I wanted to be alone. And, although I was still afraid of being alone forever, I was no longer afraid to be alone for months on end anymore.

Ultimately, whatever fight in me there was against being single started to diminish. I still didn’t want it; but I was getting better and better at it. Then, something switched in me. I began to enjoy it—really enjoy it. I began to relish having the bed all to myself and sleeping in. I started to realize that my company was not only pretty damn good, my company didn’t require me to put make up on or wear a bra.

I always got to watch what I wanted on TV or at the movies. If I didn’t want to cook, I didn’t have to cook. If I wanted to eat bad, good, or somewhere in the middle, no one was going to argue with me or tell me if I was pack’n on a few pounds. I was the only one seeing me naked. I was spending my money and my time how I wanted to spend it, and I was working on the most important relationship of my life. I even realized, through my spiritual growth, that if I was meant to have kids I would have them. If I was not, I wouldn’t. Either way, I was okay.

That acceptance surprised me most. There was a time all through my late twenties, and in my early thirties, where if you’d asked me if I would be fine if I never had kids, when all I’d ever wanted to do was to be a mother, that I would not have been able to answer you through my tears. You would have taken my bellowing emotion as a definitive ‘no’. No, no, and no. I was not going to be anywhere near okay if I did not have kids.

Now, I don’t even know if I want kids anymore. I am not just saying that, either, as I am still surprised that it’s true. I haven’t stopped loving kids, or being a mothering person, there are just so many more days now in my life where it no longer makes sense that I would have kids. I’ve not become selfish. I’ve become accepting. Admittedly, there are days I’ve so wholly embraced the freedom being single offers that when there is something else I’d rather be doing, or I’m tired, I sometimes get mad at my plants because they need watering. That makes me realize that it’s okay if my life remains simple.

But, there is a middle ground to every path. And, as I’ve explained, I have been on both sides of this journey before I found myself anywhere near a centering point. I’ve been scared shitless that I might not find someone in time to have kids, and have, as such, thought that the grass is indisputably greener when you are standing on it with someone else. I’ve also felt unsure if I even wanted to share my quiet, hermetic state of self-love, and, probably, self-safety, and, definitely, total freedom, with someone else. There is something empowering and magnificent about finding a patch of beautiful green grass that doesn’t require anyone else to stand on it for its beauty to be revered.

Now, I’m where I should be. I’m here Now.

I think eventually, hopefully, every person finds themselves discovering that the fence that divides the grass is just as nice as the grass on either side. That’s where I’ve turned up, on the fence. I’m in that place where most days life’s big questions don’t always have to be answered and all laid out in black in white in order for me to be happy. Going with a little gray, with a little it-is-what-it-is, otherwise known as riding the fence, isn’t such a bad thing.

After all, the grass is only as green, on either side of the fence, as the love and care you put into tending your field. If you never recognize that it is your acceptance, or your inability to embrace That Which Is, that is determining whether you can embrace your life and move forward, it is quite possible that you will remain stuck in the mud complaining without any grass in sight. Happiness is a state of mind not a patch of grass.

Okay, enough with the metaphors. The point is, I found out for myself, in the way I could interpret it best, that whatever the universe lays out for me is what I am going to be happy with because…that’s my path. This understanding has allowed me to peacefully reside in the midst of what-is and come-what-may.

It is from that place that I realize I am ready to share my couch, and the remote, and share my time and my Being, if that’s what’s in store for me. I now have a wonderful life to share. It hasn’t changed much, but how I see this life of mine has, and that’s made all the difference in the world. But just so we’re clear here, the sharing of the bed part is seriously going to be a bitch. I suck at sleeping. We’ve established that. Been this way since I was a kid, and it’s only gotten worse with hormones. So, having someone in my bed who might move their pinky toe a nano-fraction in the middle of the night, thereby waking me up out of my not-dead-but-barely-resting state of sleep, ouch. That’s gonna hurt. But, I’m ready to rally. Let’s do this thing.

So, what I was getting at this whole time, is that negative work cow can get fried. I know what desperate looks like, and it ain’t me. It’s been me, and I’ve been it. That’s how I know it ain’t me no mo’ and hasn’t been me for some time. The me-me? I’m a ready me. I now know that I’m more ready now than I was before when I thought all I needed was someone for me to adore who would love me back even more. (Corny rhyme. I know. But it made the point.)

It’s nice becoming the kind of ready where it doesn’t matter if I meet him this year or in another five years. Whenever I do meet him I won’t expect him to be anything but imperfectly perfect and I won’t expect him fill my divots. There aren’t any holes in my grass, thank you. I got my gaps covered. I might expect him to like apples, though.


One last note, and this is totally unrelated, but I had to share: Chloe and I also went to see the movie Avatar today. It is now one of my favorite movies. It has everything I love in a film: An epic love story that transcends boundaries, a tale of majestic heroism, an out-of-this-world display of science-fiction special effects and gorgeous cinematography/computer animation (it was like a liquid dream, some of the color in this film), and, most of all, a beautiful and spiritual story line with a message in one of the sub-plots dear to my heart, which is that everything is connected. The Na'vi people, they even greeted each other by saying, “I see you.” Oh, that sucked me in good.

Go see it.


Keep being fabulous!