The Total Femme

My ex and I have been getting extremely difficult and troubling texts from Seth the past few days. For whatever reasons, and there may be hundreds, including mental health and substance abuse issues, Seth was and is unable to use the strengths my ex and I had and have as parents. Nothing we have and had to offer seems to have helped him grow into a reasonably happy, healthy, functioning adult (he is 29 now). When I think about it that way, I feel a slight relaxing of worry and guilt, because there is no one I can be, could have been, was, other than myself. With my own unique strengths and weaknesses. That Seth and I, for all the places we connected and loved each other over the years, turned out to need very different kinds of things to situate ourselves in the world is no one’s fault. It’s just luck of the draw.

Knowing that doesn’t really stop me from feeling sorry for myself, as I was over the weekend in the aftermath of Seth’s decision to dump a lot of pain on me and my ex. I am so jealous of parents who get to hang out more or less happily with their adult children, whose adult children understand that everyone is flawed and end up being able to show their love for their flawed parents regardless. I’m so exhausted from worrying about Seth, who lives far away and who sees fit currently only to share his pain in terrifying ways.

I was also feeling sorry for myself for many other reasons: health, other family stuff, work and money, what’s it all coming to and what can I do about it…stressors coming in from all directions, local and global.  

 When I think about the all and everything we have coming at us, sometimes I just don’t even know how we do it. The cards we pulled, the dice we rolled, the color we picked as the wheel spun round – how do we manage when the result is a bolt from the blue, a terrible trouble? We do, though, don’t we. We sure do.

  Oh, look at you! Look at us! How we use our queer femme magic to navigate the waters. How do we do it? Today I am here with you, drawing in the love of knowing you’re out there, making art, making love, making due, making muffins, making your right there and our shared places receptive to more love. You are here with me in your days of what the luck of the draw offered you and how you femmed it into your own precious presence in the minute by minute.

Oh my sweet sips of ice tea, my boba at the bottom, my steaming mug darlings, my hot beverage beauties, oh, you shimmering, shivering, striving queer femme sisters oh sisters, thank you for your every day. Thank you for always coming back to your femme magic, your infectious laugh, your smile that says: hell yes!

Thank you for being the company we need.

             Many a 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.

Do you have a meditation to share? I would love to welcome you here! Email me at: thetotalfemme@gmail.com

The clock ticks. The sun rises and sets. Our pets run on a faster mortality timeline than we do, and they get grey and creaky and they die. Our cells die and are replaced. The time will come, as we know but can hardly imagine, when we, too, will die.

We aren’t very good at thinking about that in this particular culture. I certainly am not. Much of my adult life has been spent in search of things that “work” to stay healthy, aka, young-feeling. Starting with health food in the 70’s and moving on to all kinds of other “answers”, I’ve been an acolyte of everything from macrobiotics to Atkins.

What is health? At 63, having gone through everything I’ve been through, it is no longer acting and feeling like I’m 24, which is the age my brain so often seems to be stuck at. Just now I was lying spread eagled on the bed after finally managing to clean the upstairs bathroom, something that has been on my chore list for the whole week.

“That do ya in?” asked Tex, gazing at me with sympathy from the doorway.

Uh huh. It’s something I would have breezed through when I was 24 and then gone on to do 80 other things, but not today. Today, I have already been the gym after a rough night of diabetes hell, and there was no breezing going on in any sense of the word.

To the best of my ability, at this ripe stage, I would like to do the things that matter most to me, having to do with art, rest, going deeper and ever more loving with friends and family, doing what I can where I can to put more love in the world. And reading.

I was so shocked, as a young femme, when I learned about the concept of planned obsolescence, that evil capitalistic sneak trick. But today when the phrase cropped up in conversation, I started thinking about how it could be applied in a much healthier manner to one’s waning existence. If you plan for it, when things like dashing-about energy and razor-sharp brain shit start to malfunction, you’re ok. You can plan for less get up and go (cuz, you know, that shit will get up and be gone, gone, gone, there is no question) by, say, having calmer, more expansive and restful passtimes like a nice recliner. A birdbath you can enjoy (my dad always said sparrows were the most enthusiastic bathers – what do you observe?). A regular phone date with someone you love but who lives far away. Coming straight home after work, taking a shorter walk, an earlier evening, a puzzle, a game of cards, a nip of gardening or sewing or ukulele strumming or just sitting and watching the evening draw in. Most of all, wouldn’t it be lovely if we could plan to honor everything our beautiful bodies and brains and hearts have been through in our lives, honor ourselves by observing who and where we are now.

Patty pan squash, eggplants, potatoes, blooming basil with bees buzzing, my late-in-life sisters, femme elders and wisers, will you settle in to your where you are with me? Give yourself a break from self improvement or whatever else you’ve been calling it?

Oh, for a moment of peace from the noise, especially the noise from our own belabored thinking.

Oh, to sink into it. Oh, to feel lighter, non-judgmental, less worried, less exhausted.

Will you plan for it with me?

Many a 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.

Do you have a meditation to share? I would love to welcome you here! Email me at: thetotalfemme@gmail.com