SpiritMaa

Pounding the Pavement – a book about being out of work in your twenties, dumbing down your resume, flubbing interviews, wondering if you will find something before your unemployment runs out. Not wanting to settle for something – is that crazy – waiting for something that feels right?… Sounds the same as looking for a job in your 40’s, ahem… Only there doesn’t seem to be so much time left to wait/waste. Although maybe for a 20 something in this market it feels almost as scary as it does to me with a PhD!

Same goes for dating, and looking for a man – it all seems so much more urgent in your 40’s than it ever did before. Ok, let’s be real.  Even if you can pass for 10 years younger, really, who ever thinks they would be playing the dating game at this point in life???? On the other hand, I could say thank God/dess I’m playing the dating game – because I SURE wasn’t playing anything of the sort until I left the west coast and came to this second lining, brass banding, river delta gumbo mix of a place .

Not completely surprised about the job hunting thing because it’s been the price of following my bliss… Finding a job after my 2 years of volunteering in south Texas only took 4 months. Finding a job when I came back from Guatemala only took 3 months. Those were the 90’s though… Finding a job after I got my Ph.D. took two YEARS! Never mind that my dad was sick and I was free to go back and forth visiting him. Still, here I am again, 11 months after leaving the west coast, wondering, wondering… Identifying with the out of work twenty somethings (!), distracting myself with dating, but in the back of my mind hoping all this education and experience will count for something!

I can even identify with the 18 year old who wants to go to mortuary school instead of college in the book Putting Makeup on Dead People. See that title already makes you want to read it, doesn’t it? The loss of her father at a younger age makes her oddly comfortable with all things death related… Everyone around her Catholic family thinks there is something wrong, but in my mind it was easy to see she was just a budding Tantric death priestess (maybe because I’m a Goddess worshiper myself?) Not much to my surprise, there is an eccentric witchy New Age aunt, as well as a Grandpa- like funeral home director (the one who presided over her father’s departure) - who both support her in her quest. The witchy aunt tells her that her future is right in front of her...

Could it be that easy? To see what is right in front of us? It sure seems fuzzy to me right now – I’ve in fact been told to get more clarity on what I want – but it’s one of my strategies to leave my ‘happy match’ job up to the universe. Because I’ve found that in the past, what I thought would really suit me turned into something I didn’t like at all… So what is right in front of me now? Reading thought provoking novels and going out to the lake to meditate and hitting festivals for yummy food and funky brass bands… Is there a job that pays you to do that? 

And Dirty Girls (Sucias) on Top bring us back to the issue of self esteem, size and relationships. Listen to this ‘My body is mad hypnotic, right? Five four, a size twenty curved up in all the right places, 33 years old and men still be begging me for a piece, okay? You know I got it like that, girl…’ And ‘They say the average woman is bombarded from the minute she gets up to the second she goes to sleep with images of skinny women in this country, nena, and… most of us are plenty messed up in the head as a result. You gotta have some psychological armor up to get past all that starving nonsense, okay?’

How’s that for knowing the power of your body and throwing off the dominant cultural forces of female disempowerment!... About someone she is having an affair with, and the complexity of the heart ‘now I’ve discovered that just because one man goes in your heart it doesn’t necessarily mean that the other one is going to get his ass up and leave.‘ Love this – because aren’t I having the same experience, that I can care for more than one man at a time? Maybe that’s just normal (!) - and what ISN’T normal is the thought that women should be monogamous!...

And the sex blog for gringos written by her, a plus size Latina . Who, btw, spent most of her 20’s deconstructing the Catholic guilt thing before she could come into her own sexually! Sound familiar? I’m still doing it in my, ahem, 40’s! How damn long does it take for a woman to feel free to be sexual on her own terms?... And one of her friends, making love to a woman for the first time, and likely only time, says ‘with men, it’s simple, in out, up down, and do it enough times and they get to where they need to go, pop off. But with women – the dance of it is so beautiful. The tensing and releasing, the circular motions, the eternal connection to the creative forces of the universe…..Women are intrinsically holy. We are sacred. We are holier, and more sacred than men. The universe made us like that, and men know it. That’s why they work so hard to contain our power… ‘ Well put, girl!

Of men sharing in a single parent group – ‘they always seem to want to take over every group they participate in, and far too many women allow them to. Men seem to think everything they have to say is more important than what a woman might have to say, and I find the way in which most women simply let them take over to be incredibly frustrating…’ Well, there you have it. The reason why I didn’t want to have men attend my recent dark goddess class. Named in a pop culture chick lit novel – gotta love it!

Want a reminder about how much freedom women DIDN’T have in the last century? Read Girls at the Kingfisher Club. Set in the roaring 20’s, 12 sisters kept in prison in their own home all their lives, and you know something’s gotta give! The oldest takes charge, with their own mother dead after birthing no male heir, and figures out how to secret them out, a few at a time, for a night on the town, dancing all the latest dances they have taught themselves. Though they dance in illegal speakeasy clubs, dancing is what saves them, literally – keeps them from going crazy or from running away...  At some point their father, who knows only a couple of his daughters by sight, sees something in print about a group of beautiful dancing girls that only go out at night.  Suspicious, he decides to marry them off to ogres like himself before they can ‘besmirch’ his good name.  When all hell breaks loose and it becomes apparent that instead the father is going to send them all to the mental hospital, the eldest gives the signal to run. And run they do, separating and spreading out over the city. A bit worse for wear, in the end they find each other, and they are all together again, dancing for their lives…

How dare men treat women like property?? How dare men treat women like slaves?? How dare men treat any human being like a slave?? You see how this conversation devolves into a discussion of gender, race, class, and misuse of power? It’s all related!

And what about On the Right Side of a Dream, where a woman in her 40’s steps out of the Mother role she has had for so many years, moves from the east coast to Montana, makes a new life for herself AND goes exploring around the country? Yes, this book seems to be saying, you can have adventure – you can choose freedom and adventure - at any age! She demonstrates that women in their 40’s can be romance heroines of their own lives. They can be sexy, attractive, and smart, just like their younger romance heroine sisters. And she recommends they also be flexible. In fact Juanita says ‘you have to be able to change course quickly. You never know when the road will get rocky or the flying carpet will change direction… life may turn out the way you’ve planned, just be ready to change the plan a few times along the way!… This is good food for thought right now for me, who just made a huge life change moving to a new city, and is sitting here almost a year later wondering where her job is…

And Juanita asks some interesting questions for a romance heroine. She says living with the rough spots in life is the hardest part. They fester , they scratch, they rub… They stick with us; it’s a test. Can we still smile and love and rejoice even though we have a sore rubbing against the back of our foot? Can we?

Then we have the jewel of the group – Amy Falls Down – a wonderful book about a ‘washed up’ reclusive writer in her 60’s who trips in her yard, hits her head on a birdbath, gives a wild off-the-cuff interview while she’s concussed to the first reporter who’s been interested in talking to her in 25 years, and well, hold on for the ride . It’s not what you think. Her old agent, still alive – barely - gets in touch, people are curious, radio stations want interviews, the buzz begins to grow, she finds herself being witty and no-nonsense without trying, people actually leave comments on her website, and she starts writing again! And we the readers get to see, from the inside out, how one plot device, as Amy would call it – one accident can make all the difference in our lives. Fascinating!