The Total Femme

The other day, I made a serious driving misjudgment and pulled out in front of a biker, cutting it way too close. I didn’t even notice this until he started screaming at me.

“Are you fucking crazy? ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY? Really??”

It was awful. I felt terrible, for the mistake I’d made, the accident narrowly averted, which would have been my fault, the stress on the guy, the shock of his yelling right as he passed a toddler out for a walk with a caregiver, and just everything. Perversely, I was mad at him, too, and wondered if he had to be such an asshole about it. Dude wasn’t even wearing a helmet!

I so didn’t want it to be my fault, but it really was. Not his reaction, of course, but what I did to cause him to react.

In Al-Anon – any twelve-step program — there’s a lot of talk about making amends. I read something recently about the difference between an apology and an amends. Sometimes you can’t apologize, for example, like I can’t apologize to that biker, even though the past couple of days I say, “Sorry, guy!” every time I walk the dog past that block. Today I thought, hmm, should I give some money to a biking organization? It’s an idea. Mostly, I’ve been sitting with the fact that I seriously fucked up, could have caused a serious accident, and thinking about how deeply grateful I am that I didn’t. I’m also thinking about how I can be more careful in the future. Not be quite so comfortable and spaced out as I drive; be more aware of where I am and where the car is and where everybody else outside of the car is.

I want to be able to make it right, but it’s just not straightforward, and there’s no one perfect answer.

Walking the dog today (“Sorry, guy!”), I got to thinking about a certain genre of books I’ve come across lately. Written by men, they feature female main characters and sometimes there are almost no men at all in the story. I’ve been puzzled by this but I’m starting to form a theory: these men are trying to make amends. Perhaps they routinely apologize for bad behavior in their daily lives to women around them, but I’m wondering if they are also called to go deeper and more with their art. So they focus on women. They tell women’s stories.

In the sixties and seventies, white authors would sometimes write novels featuring black main characters – their response to racism. Is that what’s going on with all these male authors? If so, it’s not landing well for me. It feels like another way of taking up space, of talking over the women in the room, of telling us what our lives are like and maybe waiting for us to praise them for their subtle and nuanced observations and renderings.

It feels like I’m sitting in on their therapy sessions, asked to watch them toil away at getting better and spend time reading that story. Perhaps not what they had in mind.

Complicated.

Honey biscuits, cherry pie bites, beautiful summer salads my queer femme sisters, what do you do when you fuck up? How do you forgive yourselves? Is there a way to make it right? What does that even mean, “make it right”? Who are you “making it right” for? What are the lasting effects?

Today, remember how hard you work, how much you want to be a good creature, and how, in the end, that good creature comes back to the fore, again and again, even if you fuck up trying to make your earlier fuck up right. You work so hard. You do so much. Life is so damn complicated.

We humans are always blowing it somehow or another. And then we carry on, don’t we?

We carry on.

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. Would you like to offer up a Meditation of your own? I would love that! Send it along to me at thetotatalfemme@gmail.com