The Total Femme

This morning when I was walking our extremely important little dog, I passed a neighbor who was getting into her car. She gave us a friendly greeting, then said, “All snug?” The dog was wearing his most excellent purple wrap, so yes, he was indeed, all snug, and she and I shared a chuckle.

I noticed she was wearing a wig. I noticed she was carrying a book. It reminded me of when I was getting chemo, except I had a snuggly hat, not a wig. I wondered if she was sick. I noticed. I wished her all the best.

As I walked on, I thought about how much I’m always noticing. I got to wondering about it.

Don’t we notice, sweet sisters? Isn’t it a part of our survival technique? Seeing below the surface, being aware, keeping our wits and our senses about us. It’s second nature to me, reading the room, reading the straight people, especially the straight men. Eyes wide open all the time. Working all the time. Up against homophobia, transphobia, capitalism, extraction, always showing up in spite of very bad return on investment, in the face of mysogony, racism, but you can get married now, aren’t you fine? Don’t you have everything we think you should want?

I notice in order to survive. I notice out of desire to connect.

I loved that the neighbor noticed the dog (very proper – he is wonderful), but I can never take it for granted that I’m at all in view. Over and over, it turns out that I’m not for so many people.

 How much energy it takes. How little we get back – not always, but so often. Invisible.

Currently, both Tex and I are struggling. Not in our relationship, thank heavens, we’re strong and solid there. But in other areas of our lives, work, health, family, community. So much so that I wrote in my journal last night, “It feels like me and Tex against the world,” and this morning Tex wondered mournfully, “What the hell did we do in our previous lives to deserve this?”

Chronic shit just builds up, doesn’t it?

And sometimes, making lemonade, finding ways to be grateful, looking on the bright side, doing affirmations, all of it, sometimes that’s good and right and helpful, and sometimes it’s fucking shooting yourself in the foot and facing the shit wounded and limping.

Sometimes, it’s good to be aware and angry and not going to fucking take it anymore.

My complex, glorious, valuable, extraordinary femme heroines, where are you trying to connect and it’s just eating you up? Maybe you can’t get out of the situation(s), but at least you can be aware. And maybe you can take down the wires. Disconnect on your end, string them up somewhere else.

Somewhere where you can be all snug. Relaxed. Yourself. Seen.

“We’re moving to a new neighborhood,” a friend recently told me. “And we’ve promised ourselves we won’t present as helpful homos the way we did in our old neighborhood.”

Good! Good for you!

We are up against it, my darlings, and we have to be aware and protect ourselves, find our community of lovers and friends and family and colleagues and not take it anymore.

Why?

Because we need to be loved and cared for as our full selves. Noticing and noticed back. Connected and connected.

This morning, with my important little dog by my side, thinking these thoughts about noticing, being noticed, connecting, and disconnecting, I found a dime in the park. Made me think of the Nichols and Elaine May skit I grew up listening to, and I will leave you with it. Listen to the whole thing. I promise you it’s worth it. To me, it’s a reminder of how hard we work and how we get fooled into relaxing and believing the Man when really:

BELL TELEPHONE DOES NOT NEED YOUR DIYUM!!!

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com

When I went to visit my mother today, in her wonderful memory care unit, she was clutching a small squishy plastic kitty in one hand. As we made ourselves comfortable in the lounge, luxuriating in the lush stylings of the jazz combo currently playing, I asked what she had there. She wasn’t sure. I asked her if she’d like me to put it away, and she said “Yes!” so readily it made me laugh.

            “Are you feeling responsible for this kitty?” I asked, and again, she said, “Yes!”

            “Well then, I relieve you of kitty responsibility,” I said, whisking it away to my purse.

She thanked me, visibly relaxing.

            Where did she even get that kitty? Did someone give it to her, thinking she might like it? Is it part of some kind of ergonomic elder hand therapy? I mean, what’s that kitty for?

            I don’t know, and I doubt she does either, but there it was in her grasp, weighing heavily for all it didn’t weigh more than an ounce or two.

            My mom is 92, and she has let go of so much. She did not need that darn kitty.

All of us have to deal with a lot of tedious and real shit whether we like it or not, but how much do we also take on because we think we should or someone asked us or it was just lying there looking pitiful so we picked it up? I know I do that. Those extra impositions impact our health and well being, with their heavy, squishy, smug weight.

            Budlets, spring shoots, snow drops, my every-single-season femme rainbows in the dew, what are you clutching carrying cradling that feels miserable weighty and all consuming? Or maybe it’s super cute and appealing, but is it yours? Do you need to keep carrying it?

            I guarantee that there are things you can release, you darlings, you caring, upright, dutiful dears.

            I relieve you.

            I relieve me.

            Let’s put that kitty down.

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com

In-between library books, I grabbed something off my shelf (note to self: do this more often!) and I’m so glad I did.

We Stood Alone,a memoir by Dorothy Adams, was published in the US in 1944, one of those wartime editions that says in the front: This complete copyright edition is produced in full compliance with the Government’s regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials.

Here’s the story: when she visits to Warsaw in 1925, traveling with a group of delegates from the League of Nations Association, a Boston girl falls in love with a Polish boy against all her better judgement. At the time, according to Adams, Poland was thought to be horribly backwards and deserving of all the ways in which Germany kept trying to “modernize” and “help.” Between the wars, especially in America, Adams says, Poland was seen as a negligible and uninteresting country – something that always happens when those with power ignore the deep and layered history of places about which they are uninterested.

Of course, Adams utterly falls in love with Poland, more and more, the longer she lives there. Throughout the book, she describes the things about her new country that surprise her the most, arguing its case for her readers, the indifferent Americans who have so summarily dismissed an entire, complicated, wonderful place.

The schools, for example. “Corporal punishment, freely practiced in other parts of the continent, was not allowed in Poland,” writes Adams.  “Once, when she was preparing a Friday talk on punishment, Miss “Book” (a teacher friend) showed me with horror a booklet of regulations in German for German state schools, which sanctioned not only beating, but locking children in dark rooms (p. 85).”.

Adams also describes the health care system – something much on my mind as I navigate a miserable new health challenge. Basically, everyone is given free medical care and is included without having to jump through hoops or answer to brutal insurance and hospital and drug businesses.

Then WWII ramps up. Adams’ mother-in-law and husband die tragically in a plane crash. At the urging of friends and family Adams makes the difficult decision to return to America, mostly in order to protect her young son. She doesn’t want to leave. Poland is home to her heart. The storks roosting on the thatches of the houses, the care taken with gardens and food and community and art and music, the quiet perseverence despite adversity, and so much more that she’s come to love – all this she has to leave because war is coming, war is already begun.

She stops there, on the brink of leaving everything she loves, everything she has come to expect from life.

“Our space suits just continue to unravel,” a friend recently said. Diagnoses, world events, accidents, war, natural and human-brought disasters, we are at their mercy and there is no holding them back, no matter our national mania with personal control.

Way back when, I remember my father sitting on the kitchen floor with a magnet, getting rid of all our aluminum cookware after reading something about aluminum and Alzheimer’s. Guess what he died of?

I never in a million years worried about coming down with type 1 inuslin-dependent diabetes. Why would I? No one in my family has any kind of diabetes and I seemed to be doing fine. But guess what I was just in the ICU for?

Happens to me, happens to you. Something or other most assuredly does.

Adams wrote a book.

After spending his whole life driven and moving at the speed of light, my dad lived deeply and happily in the present his last few years. “Look at those clouds,” he would say, gazing out the car window as we drove to the doctor. “Look at that important little dog!”

As for me, I’m staying alive every day, even during those darkest moments when the seismic shift in my life has me in the deepest mourning. I’m writing this post. I’m reading, and sometimes the universe gives me just the book I need.

Usually it does.

Sweet and dandy, lovers and oh-so-alive my darlings, my femme sisters, we are not alone out here. We are accompanied by ancestors, siblings, family, friends. What happens looks very different, how we maintain, survive, go on, revive, repair, despair and then look up again, all very different the one from the other but don’t we do it, don’t we sometimes still lift up our spirits and soar again?

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com