Never Walked In High Heels

I’m one of the most non maternal women I know. Its not that I don’t like children, its just that I don’t really know what to do with them. Some many of my friends talk about how they were “born to be a mom” or are willing to manipulate their careers so that they can have children and, truth be told, I’ve never been like that. If you were to ask me to phrase my expectation of having children into a economic philosophy, it, like so many of my views, could best be described as laze fare.. If kids happen… they happen and I’ll rebuild my support system accordingly.

The problem is that as an only child, I didn’t grow up surrounded by little ones. A therapist once told my mother to never speak in baby talk around me in order to force my vocabulary to expand. While it worked to some extent, an above average vocabulary had another effect. Other children steered clear of those people who used particularly big words. So between not having siblings and not having an entourage of friends, I grew up surrounded by the language of adults.

I’ve not yet hit thirty and today I decided I do not like the language of adults. When I was young I used to long to understand every word of the grown-up world, the simple statements of my peers seeming flat and almost primitive. They just said exactly what was on their mind, without regard to cadence, alteration, or even tact for that matter. The adult way of speaking seemed so complex and exact. I couldn’t wait to hear that language my entire time.

And then I grew up myself.

Everyday, now that I’m in the grown up world, I see that it is this world that has the barbaric language which lacks imagination and beauty. Scoring high on the vocabulary sections of my entrance exams for universities, the are some leaflets I receive in my mail box which I stare at blankly trying to figure out what on earth the advertisers are trying to say in them. Or the words are unnecessarily large that just the sounds of them slice through anyone who doesn’t have a shell instead of supple skin.

“Patient’s gait is uneven and massively unstable with unpredictable movements and often staccato breathing when fatigued.” I live with the condition and I am not even sure what such an analysis actually means.

Last month I found myself visiting an old friend and her two young boys. They were squirrely and much past cleaning up after them, I had no idea what to do with them. Despite my friend’s aggravation at this fact, I didn’t particularly feel the need to learn what to do with young children. Just let the boys do want they want, and cleaning up after to make my friends life a little easier. I was clearing the table when the youngest boy climbed up on his mother’s lap and whispered in her ear. Intrigued, I looked at my friend.

“He says you walk like a dancer.”

The dog is nervous because he sees a suitcase on my bed. It’s fully packed and my last remaining hours of visiting my family in Vegas are quickly coming to a close, and I look forward to getting on the big plane that will take me back to London where my work is. Getting ready to board a plane is always a slightly surreal experience. Mom ties my shoes and brushes my hair before pulling it back in a tight braid so it will not be in my way during the flight. Dad comes home from his job at the office to make me lunch and feed it to me as a sort of last meal. These are the rituals I take to board the exact same plane over and over to get to the exact same place at the exact same gate, take the exact same road back to my flat, and even plop down on my bed before undoing the shoes that Mom tied, the hair she braided, and realizing that my last real meal was yesterday with my father. Travelling this route works like a machine. Many cogs put it together to create something that you would never suspect would happen unless you looked at the bigger vehicle.

When most people who I knew from my childhood hear that I currently live and work full time in London, they are in shock. Ex-teachers, therapists, family friends, relatives, immediately begin peppering my mom with questions about how I survive in a foreign country so far away. The fact that we share a common language doesn’t seem to make any difference with regards to me being a foreigner. How does she eat? Who ties her shoes? Who washes her hair? And to tell the truth, this reaction, although on one level understandable, on a certain level is surprising. The more I think about it the more I wonder what they are expecting me to make of my life? It seems too obvious that I’m meant to be in London doing what I’m doing. After all it was their influence from a young age that taught me not to fear the world but embrace it and explore all the corners of the world I could possibly get to.

At first, when I announced that I was headed to England immediately after graduating from university, I was in a way lauded. “Everyone should take a year off and put some maturity under their belt,” they told me. I could still see the fear in their eyes but understood that there was more than this. Several of them did exactly that after their graduation, joining the Peace Corps to live in a remote part of the world and visit a place where they could lend a helping hand. One teacher from high school even encouraged me, saying in an email, “You are entering your wandering years… Don’t let the careerist itching common to our breed start to itch at you. The 20’s are a searching time… Look at this time as the fruit of your ancestors’ hard work. You owe them the best.” Below is a quote from John Adams in a letter to Abigail, as if such a quote was proof of the wandering years he suggested. But, at my age, the gap year between college and real life should have ended several years ago and the fact that I received a degree in London just recently, points to roots that are slowly beginning to grow away from home, raising the eyebrows of so many.

But why is the fact that I’m still in England so shocking? As I mentioned earlier, I was raised around individuals who came to America from foreign places to pursue their own dreams. I am as much the Brazilian woman who taught me to dress myself as I am the fact that I still need magnetic buttons to close my coat. I am made up of the European woman who taught me to speak and suggested to my mother that someday I would not just master English but other languages as well. I am the Hungarian woman who came to our summer camp every year in order to serve children with a disability, and I am also made up of the Canadian atheist who went into the mission fields of Mexico with me not for claiming what I believed but realizing that I should be able to proclaim it myself. These individuals,  as far as they came,  a piece of themselves was given to me as well as making the woman I am today. Part of being who they were was the love of travel and adventure. That’s where my love of the same travel and adventure came from.

I always feel a bit nostalgic as I untie my shoes once I’m back in my flat. I immediately miss whoever tied them last, wanting to keep them tied as a sort of keepsake. But, I know that the person who did so did not raise me to sit still and cling to loved ones in one place. The people who brought me up taught me to explore,  even despite all the potential difficulties that may come of it. I am thankful for the person who tied my shoes last, realizing the irony of not being able to tie one’s own shoes but yet flying halfway around the world. I am in communion with the person who will tie my shoes in London, living life where we are in the present moment, and I wonder who will tie my shoes when I become restless and seek to travel again?

“He who says it cannot be done should not be the person doing it” –Chinese Proverb

I used to think that every man wanted to see progress in the world. When I was little, I simply saw things getting continually better. Computers got better, sleeker, more responsive, we celebrated men like Martin Luther King Jr. and learned about the appalling slave trade of the South. History for me was a progressive march towards finding man’s rights and making the world more livable for all. And so I thought, this is what everyone wanted—that we all work together to make the world a better place.

A friend of mine this week told me that my dream was impossible. Just flat out no, if, ands, or buts, it was never going to happen, so I should quit trying now, impossible. And though it was the first time, coming from him, it was not the only time in my life that I had heard that something was, “impossible.”

People who say things are impossible are more often than not proven wrong. The company IBM used to say that someday there would be a market for as many as 5 computers in the world, and at the time I can see why people would think having multiple computers in one home was impossible. It’s not that I believe they were vicious; it’s just that they didn’t know any better. Can you imagine what folks said to the Wright brothers as they built their airplane or NASA for that matter? Again, ignorance and a lack of imagination are often two of the greatest things inhibiting progress.

However, I didn’t realize until recently that most people are really quite comfortable remaining ignorant and having no imagination. This is the newest disturbing fact I’ve found in my adult life. Rather than reaching beyond what they think they are capable of, people stay stuck, sometimes for perfectly good reasons like putting food in their family’s mouths, but they are stuck nonetheless and then resent others who fight to remain unstuck. Change does happen beyond the wildest dreams. If you could go back in time and tell Harriet Tubman that we would one day have an African American president, she would probably have been shocked. Or what about someone recent as Martin Luther King Jr, who made his “I Have a Dream” speech exactly 40 years before Obama received the democratic nomination at the national convention. He probably would have laughed—they both would have, and chances are they wouldn’t have believed it. My entire life, people have told me that things are “impossible,” and recently I heard it from a close friend—someone who I thought would never say that word to me. After 25 years, I would think folks would know better then to begin to tell me that something is impossible. Everything is possible, and particularly for those of us who are willing to sacrifice what it takes to reach for it. Dreams of justice and equality, honest representation, and balanced creativity for tomorrow, must always survive the inadequacies of today. Dreams worthy of coming true will always come true.

I will close by addressing the men against innovation and progress. Perhaps you are one of the people who insist on living in fear, or perhaps your horizons stop with the limitation s you see before you. Either way your world is small. And while people with small worlds have an important and practical place in society, you do not know the entirety and vastness of the universe. None of us can. How can you begin to say that something is impossible when you’ve simply never seen it and never dared to explore what it would take to achieve it? Just because it is something you have never seen does mean that it does not exist. You have chosen your world and it is compact and probably serves you well, but please let us choose ours.

At what age can you disagree with people who used to be your elders?

During a recent conversation, I had to listen to a former tutor of mine essentially tell me how to run my life. He hadn’t seen me in three years and the difference between a 22 year old and a 25 year old is often striking- or at least I hope it is. Every argument he made, I knew as according to my own life, that factually he was wrong, but he didn’t want to hear about my successes. He only heard in his mind that I was a failure and needed to get out of the situation that I was currently in. Eventually, I intended to hang up on him, but decided this would be disrespectful. He was after all, a great mentor of mine and had helped create me as the woman I was—even though currently, that woman was highly irritated.

The problem with correcting your elders is that to them you’ll always be young. You’ll always be in need of their advice and mentorship, and they will always –numerically at least- have more life experience than you. As a kid I was constantly reminded to be respectful of my elders. Phrases such as “Don’t talk to him in that tone young lady” or “He’s done a lot for you. You might want to show a little gratitude once in a while,” continue to haunt me when I want to speak out against bad advice. So more often than not, even though I’m opinionated, I keep my mouth shut and try to let my superior come to his own conclusions.

But any relationship across generations, be it parent to child or student to teacher, changes as the younger individual grows up. It has to. If the adult doesn’t let the relationship change, it will be forever damaged, and if the younger doesn’t force the relationship to change he will be forever coddled by his mentor. Growing up across an intergenerational relationship can prove to be extremely difficult and damaging to both parties, but it has to be done. The switch between a vertical relationship (for example, teacher and child) to a horizontal relationship (such as peers) has to make that switch in order to still function.

But at some point during that switch from vertical to horizontal, you realize as you grow up that no adult has all the answers. In fact, many of them have just a few more than even you do. People make up their lives as they go, and that’s okay as long as they give you the freedom to do likewise. That moment where you realize that nobody knows everything, can be a combination of one of the most frightening but also liberating moments you will ever face. At that point, the world is truly yours, and we, regardless of age are all equal and trying to get by.

Older generations will always try to warn you against their mistakes, which is good, as well as fruitful because your mistakes should always be your own and if that means repeating the exact same ones that your parents created, at least make sure that you put your own special stamp of dysfunction on it. Don’t let people use you to fix their own past. What that is, is what I call a recycled life. People who didn’t succeed at living their lives for themselves that first time, and so they will try and make you live their lives now. And sometimes you may even have a revelation before one of your elders does, and that’s okay. If they are honest with themselves and with you, they will admit that they are still learning to grow up as well.

Hope is, by definition, something born out of adversity, slim chances, and unquenched desires. We do not hope that our loved ones will come home on time tonight when they’ve been on time every night for the past year. Unless there is a specific reason as to why tonight is different, we merely expect them to be on time. This is not hope. Hope does not come without the considerable risk of disappointment. Despite what any politician, inspirational speaker, or salesman may want you to believe, you cannot offer people hope without running the risk of them facing disappointment; the two will always go hand in hand.

Now there will be many who will respond  to this by claiming that there is a world of difference being giving hope for someone to obtain a reasonable goal and encouraging someone to reach for an unreasonable goal. In the upcoming weeks Sue was challenged with this statement plenty. In addition to roller skating being an unreasonable goal, it was deemed something even worse: not useful. After all. What possible use could I have for roller-skating? Wouldn’t my time be better spent learning to climb stairs or walking on gravel? Shouldn’t I be conquering something which would otherwise prove to be a hindrance in the real world?

This argument suddenly kept popping up more in my life when I decided to become an actor.  Was me being onstage really a reasonable goal? After all “you’re just so intelligent, performing seems like it would be such a waste. Have you thought about being a lawyer instead?”

But the argument of anything being a reasonable or even useful goal depends on the honest answer of a single question: according to who? Like anything else, is the judgment of a single person (or even a group) enough to make that declaration true? Someone may judge a dream unreasonable because they are unwilling to make the sacrifices it would take for it to come true. One man may deem it as a waste of resources simply because qualities such as intelligence, strength, and specific abilities are not his to offer or make use of.  But that doesn’t mean that a goal was ever unreachable. It simply means that that person was unwilling to do what it took to attain it. But one man’s limitations should never be placed on another, self imposed or otherwise.

At the age of four, just before I started working with Sue, my mother sat  in a meeting with my school’s administrators in which she was informed that I would never be encouraged to walk during school. Their justification was that encouraging me to walk was an unreasonable goal. Despite my mother’s protests and evidence to the contrary, none of the administrative experts or physical therapists would concede. Finally a student teacher raised her hand and said that she would give up her lunch hour to teach me skills I would need for walking. She never got to see me walk without the walker that she had to tape my hands to. She never saw me on roller-skates. But something told her those efforts were not wasted.

One wonders what the reaction would be if my mother had  brought in a pair of skates.

I took my first independent steps shortly after I was ten years old. Unlike our apartment, our new house was  mostly uncarpeted, which, for someone who is used to crawling as a major mode of transportation, this small detail constituted a major lifestyle change.  The difference between crawling on high pile carpet and tile for young knees meant that I learned to walk independently very fast to avoid the inevitable pain of pressing your knees into a completely unforgiving surface. And although I was well on my way to learning how to walk by this point, my mother has later admitted to me that she knew that a tile floor would provide me with the additional incentive needed to learn rapidly.

Of course, I’ve never been one to do things by halves, so looking back I’m always a little surprised that people had such a reaction when, nine months later I had saved enough from my allowance to buy a new pair of pink roller skates. The following week I took them to the therapy center and announced to my physical therapist, Sue, that I thought learning to roller skate should be my next therapy goal.

Perhaps this is where I should back up to explain, my version of “walking” at this point, can best be described by that scene where Bambi is attempting to get his feet under him. I wasn’t really walking at this point so much as I had learned to maintain a consistent direction during a controlled fall.

But Sue, the woman who taught me to walk, bought it the idea of roller skating as a therapy goal.

She reached for the roller skates that very afternoon and put them on my feet. Bambi was now trying to maintain a tentative balance while on wheels on ice with a film of motor oil underneath her to make life really interesting. In addition to being on wheels, I was two inches taller than I had ever been. And, having only walked independently for less than a year, I never realized how important having your feet directly underneath you really was.

As soon as we went from the treatment room to the clinic hallway, the questions from other therapists began. “What on earth are you doing? Sue, she’ll never be able to learn to roller skate. That’s not a reasonable therapy goal.”

What is the difference between allowing someone to hope, and setting them up for disappointment? I’ve been challenged with this question often by people who are trying to make me “see reality.” These people then hide behind the statement “I just want to protect you from disappointment.” What they don’t see however, is I’ve been hurt already. A lot. And as anyone who has suffered though agonies can tell you, reality fiercely slaps you in the face before you can see it.

              Missy unpacked her book bag in front of me. School hadn’t even been going on for two weeks and there were already crumpled bits of paper at the bottom of her bag, even a permission slip she had forgotten about. It was easy to see why her mom hired me as a temporary math tutor. She then pulled out her math text book, dropped it in front of me, flipped it open to the answer pages in the back, and started copying down the answers. I quickly asked her what she was doing.

              “If I don’t have the answers, how do I know if I’ve done it right?” I can’t help but smile at this honest and yet completely practical answer. Its a question I’ve wondered at often in my own life, now that I’m older. If I don’t know where I am supposed to end up, how am I ever going to get there?

              I want to look in the back of the book all the time. What flat should I move into? Will I be fortunate enough to get married? To whom? How can I make my dreams come true? Will I ever have to bare the pain of being abandoned? The list of questions keep me up at night as I see the worst possible epitaph engraved on my tombstone: Athena Stevens – reached her zenith at eighteen. Died at age ninety nine.

              I would have thought that by my age, all of my insecurities and questions would have disappeared or at least I would know how to answer them as I would an algebra problem. I thought that was the entire point of education, to learn how to solve for Z when all you have is X and Y. Problem is, once you have Z, who’s to say you wouldn’t be better of with Z+1 or Z+3? In truth, a person in real life rarely has all the variables needed to solve the equation by the time a decision is needed. You don’t know how many children you’ll end up with when you buy the three bedroom rather than the four bedroom house. You can’t know Cancer wasn’t included when she said “in sickness and in health.” And there’s never a guarantee that something better won’t come along after we’ve made a commitment… or that it will after we’ve rejected one. You can’t skip steps. All you can do is work with the variables in front of you.

              If I had all the answers from the back of some book, I would set out to complete life rather than live it. I guess I’m hoping that I would be able to save time by making all the right choices the first go round. I can’t figure out why else I’d want to do get to the last page without taking in the whole book. Maybe I see it as running into the supermarket just to buy milk. If I get in and go straight to the back, I will get home faster. Or maybe I see life like homework, if I get all the answers right the first time around, I can go outside and play sooner. Then again, being “done” with life rarely gets equated with a sunny afternoon on a swing set.

              At the end of Our Town Emily cries out, “oh World, you are too beautiful for anyone to ever notice you!” Leave it to Wilder to make us notice what we should’ve known all along. If life was about reaching some finish line as quickly and as flawlessly as possible, why do we dread death? Life is about living in the moment, and doing what that time calls upon you to do. Its about waiting to see the final product, while taking all the steps needed to get there. Because any good Algebra 1 student can tell you, you need to cover all the steps, even the counter intuitive ones, if you ever hope to understand how to do the problem correctly.

I’m guessing its rare for most people to have a complete stranger come up to them and be informed that their old home was the perfect spot for skinny dipping. Add to that situation that I was at a wedding when I was informed of this fact and you may get some clue of just how bizarre my life actually is. But maybe I should back up a little bit.

My last year of college I lived on Lake Norman, foreshadowing my obsession with living on water in subsequent years.  We were surrounded by docks and walkways which made for amazing spring evenings and nighttime strolls spent battling bug bites. It was from the back porch that I wrote my thesis and various plays which were desperate to be born. And it was just the beginning of November when my friend Cristi and I discovered that the dock which lead from the back door of my apartment to the middle of the lake not only looked creepy because all of it’s lights were burned out, but also made the perfect place for skinny dipping,

Now I figure if peer pressure can be blamed for kids taking on drug use or drinking alcohol, there must be somewhere in the book that says you can blame it for suddenly finding yourself swimming naked in a lake at midnight just four weeks before Christmas. Our terry cloth bathrobes left in a pile on the planked wood while each of the five of us girls did our best to slip silently into the cold autumn water without giving sign of the icy shock. Our still changing figures cast shadows in the night as we discovered curves and lines we never knew we had. A waist which was still hidden under baby fat last summer, breasts we still crossed our arms to hide, all the insecurities of a teenager were still held up in defense and eventually had to be stripped away through a combination of proximity to other people and water which was so cold, it was violent.

Many of us girls hit puberty at ten or twelve and we look like women long before we feel like it. By college the rest of the world expected me to act like a woman and I had no idea what that was. Refusing to look down when we got into the shower, we hid under t-shirts and basketball shorts or, on some evenings, under the dock in a huddle, as a man with dog walked by. Most people assume that for young women, body image issues stem from a lack of self esteem or a fear of being ugly. I don’t remember it like that. I think my issues came from immaturity. I looked like a woman. I had all the equipment. Problem was, I was still a nineteen year old kid who thought jumping in the lake after Thanksgiving totally naked was a great idea.

This summer I found myself walking around the quays in my part of London most days. The unusually beautiful weather this year meant that I could walk around in a sundress and pretty sandals rather than pulling on some awkward combination of sensible but comfy outfit. Going along the quay one afternoon I noticed that I sat a little taller and greeted the men in the boatyard more confidently all the way around. I felt the breeze in between my thighs, a strong energy sliding down my spine and radiating through my hips. I suddenly wanted a pair of hands around my waist and someone who was as confident as I was to talk with.

Within five minutes I had met a man fishing off the dock and he and I were digging for worms. My sandals had been kicked off and I was eyeing his cooler full of orange soda. So much for being a woman.

At the wedding this weekend I looked from the stranger, who, at some point in time had jumped naked off my back dock, to Cristi in her white dress and veil. It may have been her day but I still needed an explanation.

“I don’t know. You must’ve been at an audition or something. Heck if I know, I did it all the time without you.”

“Cristi, I can’t have random people jumping naked off my dock. Do you know how much trouble-“

“Oh grow up,” said the new wife.

Girls don’t grow up in a consistent and straight line. Somewhere between the age we feel like, the age we actually are, and the age the world expects us to act, there is us, afraid to look down and see that our bodies seem much more confident than we are in them. And there are always women’s voices coming from the shadows of the banks. Strong voices of sensual women promise all the treasures and secrets of being a women. Many girls instantly jump in, desperately trying to grow up way too fast and taste the mysteries which tempt men and women alike. Others hide under the dock, afraid to let go into unknown waters. They do not know if they can swim or survive.

More often than not there are young women who jumped in naked just to be silly, only to realize later that nobody had a map of the lake. We get dangerously close to the sirens at times and then we flee to take refuge underneath the dock. There are entire days spent back and forth, restless and trapped in one’s foolishly mature body.

And there are days when we get closer to the bank than we can ever remember. And actually, we are quite comfortable just listening; we all know we are going grow up someday, but none of us know how to pass through the deep waters directly.

I hadn’t seen my best friend from childhood in just over eleven years when I saw her walk down the aisle. Three weeks earlier I had slung my duffle bag down from college as my mother announced that we would be attending the wedding. This was news to me. The fact that Mary was getting married before she could legally drink was news to me.  If I thought about it long enough, the fact that Mary even still existed would’ve been news as well.

Mary and I grew up together going to zoos and Six Flags Great America. I remember dance was her life and school was mine. We were awkward in the ways that only eight year old girls can be, complete with knobby knees and a palate that could only appreciate the subtleties of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  When Mary got her ears pierced it meant I could too. We went through puberty together, started to become curious about boys, and planned our hypothetical weddings during ten thousand sleepovers.

The Sunday before school started one August, Mary’s mother told us that the family would be moving away. I saw Mary for the last time three months later.

And so I finished junior high, went through high school and half of college rarely thinking of my childhood friend. Thus, going to Kansas to see a wedding of a friend from half a lifetime ago was less than appealing.

I settled myself into the pew, not knowing why I and my family were even at the wedding in the first place. I literally had no idea who the bride and groom were. When the church doors would open, I didn’t even know what she was going to look like. It was the wedding of absolute strangers.

The beautiful bride was halfway down aisle before I realized my cheeks were wet. Where were these tears coming from? I didn’t know her. I certainly didn’t know him. Yet the tears weren’t forced. It wasn’t that I was at a wedding  so I was supposed to be crying becuase that’s what you are supposed to do when the bride walks. The tears were real. All I could think of was us rehearsing our weddings at ten, and how the things we dreamt about in our Barbie sleeping bags were just beginning to happen.

There is something about the dreams and connections of our childhoods which stay with us. Long before we make the comprises and unexpected commitments we dare to aspire to, even to the point of having a sense of innocent entitlement.  And while often these golden rings slip away from us, sometimes they come back in the most unexpected ways. Mary never was a professional dancer. She went into Math. Somehow I ended up being the performer.

But for once, as I was watching Mary and her husband dance the last dance of the evening, everything seemed familiar.