Submission–

25 Wednesday Jan 2012

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is Pandora’s box, is a false bottom, is essential. Is an open palm–even if pried, finger by finger–and an open mind–even at the risk of losing it altogether. Is to relinquish what you were certain was all yours: free will; personal space; emotional independence; your art. Is an uncomfortable exposure, a public nakedness, an objectification.

Submission is the virgin’s dive into the volcano.

*     *     *

Over months, perhaps even years, the pen has courted the page. One gave, one accepted. They were gracious; they were at odds. They were unabashed, then apologetic. They created a life, then left me with it. They’ve moved on to other mating rituals, other memories; the pen and the page are migrants, gypsies, pilgrims.

But the life they’ve left behind is my responsibility, and I have been dutiful, keeping my promises, even after I had grown too attached to simply let go when the time came, as I told them I would.

It was whole, fully formed, complete—or complete enough to survive without my constant tending. Its paragraphs no longer needed pruning. Its sentences could manage their own cowlicks. Its chapters crossed their legs and sat properly. It behaved, but also knew when to rebel.

I re-read it once, this living thing, this manuscript, this daughter. Just once, for errors, for reasons to hold it back. But at all turns it held up, held its own, and I knew it was time to submit.

I gave it, like Hannah gave Samuel: freely but with great trepidation.

*    *    *

There is something sacral in the ending. You reach it and do not know how it arrived. Now here you are, with something arduous and wonderful behind you, and some great and glowing mystery ahead. The prospects, both for what you have just accomplished and for what you are about to undertake, are exceedingly vast.

And becomes clear: whether you are ready or not, someone will publish you. Someone will read and represent you. Someone will advocate for the proliferation of your work—even if that someone must be you.

This is only the case because you have been brave. This is only the case because you have submitted.

*    *    *

There are people to thank. We achieve nothing alone–and gratitude should not be reserved only for the inner flaps of published books. It should begin at the inception of a battle, not held until after a victory. It should begin long before the page reserved for acknowledgments. It should be ongoing.

Thank you to each reader. Thank you to those who have commented. Thanks to the people who’ve alerted someone to this blog’s existence. Thank you to PostBourgie and  HuffPo and Clutch and the other publications who’ve provided me with a platform, however temporary, or who have allowed me to feel what it’s like to be monetarily compensated for my creative writing (which is, really, all I’ve ever wanted in my professional life). Thank you to the woman I’ve never met who heeded her dream and the voice that told her the dream was about me; thank you for sending the gift. Thanks to my daughter for being a wellspring and an education, to my mother for helping me raise her, to her father for being gracious about my need to tell our story; to my nana for being a stalwart; to all of my family for their continued investments, both financial and emotional. I can be difficult, and you are all lovely enough to overlook it.

I am thanking you now, because thanks is owed you. I would have submitted nothing–not time, not vulnerability, not perseverance–were it not for you. I would have succumbed to everything–to fear, to shame, to self-doubt, to second-guessing–were it not for you.

When the manuscript I’ve finally finished writing is picked up—and because many of you have told me it will be, I am choosing to be courageous enough to believe you—just know that it absolutely would not have been (because I would’ve been too terrified to submit it to anyone at all), without the encouragement and engagement of every one of you.

Gradient Grace.

13 Friday Jan 2012

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The gift is stunning, arrayed in scarlet satin, adorned in gilded bows. Here, says the giver, presenting it with relish. I have chosen this especially for you. I am giving it according to your need. There is no other occasion, no other motive.

You believe him; your need hastens that decision—for as you open the decadent package, you see it is a platter piled with money. There is no promissory; this is not a loan.

You fall at the giver’s feet. I am overcome. You kiss his ring, tell him he is a pillar, a paragon. I do not know what I would do without kinsmen like you.

But it is only this last part that perks the ear of the giver. There are others? I am not your only source? I am not your sole rescuer, your singular kinsman, your only salvation?

You are not my salvation at all, is what you think, but before you utter words, you rise and stand at full height. No. Of course you are not, you state with certainty, for the people who love and care for you cannot be numbered, even if they do not have the means to help you stave off your personal hellhounds.

The giver is deeply displeased. He reaches into his satchel and brings out a cluster of cords. Here are my strings; they are many. Accept them along with the gift or you will depart with nothing.

You remember your pining for more than the crusts of bread, for a well-soled shoe, for the luxuries of a parlor’s grooming. You wince at the echoes of creditors, cringe at the memory of the computerized self-checkout voice barking a grocery total that staggers you. You calculate the balance of days that your daughter will spend wearing diapers.

I will fasten myself to your strings, but only for a time.

The giver grins. Then this is to be an indentured servitude. I will alert you when the racks of my conditions have been cleared.

Years later, you still rub your wrists. You are better off; no one is after you. You can walk with your head held aloft, owing nothing. For all intents, for every purpose, you are free; you’ve the papers to prove it. But the cosmic damage has been done.

Now, when anyone offers to help you, you are wary. You recoil from beautiful packages; you tremble at the hand that proffers an unearned check.

Every generous gesture is greeted with a bemused half-smile and a polite, but resolved, “No thank you.”

It is better to give than to receive. It is easier, too.

They mistake it for pride, the new givers. Just learn to take a compliment, a gift. No reciprocity is expected, they insist, their patience wearing thin.

But they do not know the grace it requires to accept without distrust. They do not know how desperately you have to parse your gratitude. It must be pulled from the uncompromised parts of yourself; you must find it in the unbroken places, where the last giver could never seem to shatter you by calling you a “user” or an “ingrate.”

It amazes you that you are even still capable of such grace, and anyone who knew the serfdom you’d escaped would grant you the gradation you will need to achieve it. You will learn to open your hand, without expecting the sting of a lash. You will recall the small flourish of curtsies. But you will not apologize for the years it may take to do so. And you will never again be so clouded by need that you will extend your gratitude and graces to wolfish givers.

Counterfeit Forgiveness.

11 Wednesday Jan 2012

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Beloved, you will find that in this life, you will often be called upon to provide others with absolution. They will come to you, either truly contrite or else out of obligation or duress. They will either offer a specific apology, quite clearly aware of the hurt or the slight they’ve inflicted, or else they will say they are sorry you misunderstood their intent, implying they do not intend to assume responsibility for whatever they did that upset you. This latter is called non-apology, and non-apology is a semantic labyrinth; if you are not careful, you will find yourself at a loss as to who should be doing the absolving.

This will only exacerbate the offense.

The act of pardoning should always give you pause. To exempt someone from the fallout of their actions is a weighty, unwieldy thing. It can be like offering to clean up after the volcano whose lava has obliterated the homes of your family. It can be like deciding to keep as a pet the pit bull that bit your baby. Neither the volcano nor the dog knows the destruction it has left in its wake. Neither the volcano nor the dog can comprehend the acts of apology or absolution. To forgive, then, means nothing to the offender.

This does not mean forgiveness will always be difficult. After all, the person in a position to forgive holds the cards, holds the keys, holds the power. She has everything to gain and nothing to lose. And so, initially, you will feel quite like a royal raising her scepter: All is forgiven; your debt has been cleared. Go forth and offend no more! And you will feel quite emptied and cleansed by the act of it.

See, it is rarely that first offense that is challenging to forgive. It is rarely the second that singes us when memory reignites it. It’s that seventh insult; that fifteenth incident of neglect; the third lie or the ninth or the twenty-seventh. It is the arrogance that allows your offender to believe himself exempt from apology. Or the strangely righteous indignation that seeks to insist that you are, in fact, the offender and any anger you feel is your fault.

These are the conditions under which bitterness best takes root. These are the conditions under which forgiveness seems nearly impossible to impart.

At this point, you are likely wondering why anyone would continue to offer her company to the type of person who would offend her thirteen or thirty times. She wouldn’t, unless her ties to him were essential. She wouldn’t unless, for every offense she could number, there were five rescues, three gifts, ten acts of love.

In my life, this has been the case, exclusively, with family. Their slights hurt more than anyone else’s, their investment in and hope for my success far greater than anyone else’s. They can give so generously with one hand and then take so cavalierly with the other.

The past year, in particular, held more than its share of offense. And I have struggled more than usual to excuse it. To ensure that this new year holds none of the hurts of the last, I have been reading about forgiveness—or more specifically about counterfeit forgiveness. Apparently, counterfeit forgiveness is defined by five distinct characteristics: stoic numbness; minimization; psychoanalyzing the offender; holding one’s breath emotionally; or being an overachiever.

I am guilty of four of these things.

I spent much of your first year, either numb, minimizing, excusing someone’s psychological damage, or sucking up all that I should’ve been letting out. I said I was okay when I wasn’t. I said things were no big deal, when they meant everything. I complied with my offenders’ need to “just drop it and move on.”

Your second year has already been different. I have learned to lay the axe at the root of offense. I have stated, in no uncertain terms, that I am displeased. I have refused to be baited into unnecessary conflict.

One can never truly argue who argues alone. Daughter, we have so much ground to gain and to recover. I have no energy to expend on assuaging the bruised egos of others. I cannot afford to entertain every hurled accusation, every thinly veiled aggression, every insidious rumor. If I did, I would become like a cursed fig tree, small and shriveled, unable to grow.

These declarative statements have been a step, but they are not yet true forgiveness. That will take a bit longer this time. But I will acknowledge the lava, will hold its magma ‘twixt my fingers. I will cry out to God and ask why. I will cry out again when I have allowed myself the time to grieve, accept, and understand.

Rejoice, Rejoice, Rejoice.

16 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in Constants for the Wanderer, Faith, Nonfiction

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Christmas hasn’t been a favorite holiday of mine since I was a child. It feels claustrophobic and excessive and so, so impossibly gaudy and red. But the pocket of time between 25th to the 1st has always been hallowed for me. I treat it with seriousness and give myself wholly to reflection: on the Nativity; on the subsequent Massacre of the Innocents; on those who go hungry; on the children who have to square their shoulders, lift their chins, puff their chests, and let their eyes become stones, when they awake on Christmas morn to the same bleak cots in a shelter, to the same loss or absence that claimed a parent near some Christmas past; to the same dearth of gifts or of cheer.

Joy does not always come easily to the world these days. And despite our best efforts to tinsel over everything that ails us and others, there are many who cannot forget their struggles through caroling or office holiday parties or heavily spiked punch and nog.

What is so heartening is how vigorously we try. Every year, we volunteer; purchase that extra unwrapped toy to take to the nearest giveaway station; write checks for international causes; give bonuses to civil servants; reconcile with estranged loved ones; make peace with our long-feuding neighbors; light candles and place them in our windows, as if to alert to all who pass by: Cheer is welcome here. Hope is present here.

If you read this blog often, you know well that I am big proponent of hope. And the last week of a year seems to be when mankind is most open to it. We have suspended our cynicism, in preparation for the swell of possibility every countdown to a new year provides. And suddenly, the world’s ills seem solvable. Galvanization seems sustainable. True love seems well within our grasp. And every dream in default is made current.

The New Year is the Great Equalizer. Even for those for whom the holidays feel unbearable, there is a great sense of relief at their coming and going. It means that there is something we can definitively put behind us. It means there is a mystery. For all we know, this is year we will finally feel at home; we will sail the seas; we will find a job; we will beat a repossession, a foreclosure, an eviction; we will graduate; we will marry.

This is the year that will satisfy some large and persistent longing.

For me, the end of the year is about eradicating regret. It’s about our realization and, perhaps, our relief that we come here, to this earth, in part, to falter. It is the only thing that earns us empathy and humbleness. Whatever the next annum will bring, it will certainly include our mistakes. Often, the mistakes–more than any of the things we get right–are what carry us to the next year’s shore, altered, enlightened, matured.

And that, more than lit trees, wrapped gifts, and a cheery array of confections, is worthy of the effort it may take to rejoice.

A Blues for Emanyea.

06 Tuesday Dec 2011

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Let me paint you two portraits.

The first involves a twenty-year-old, walking down an unfamiliar DC street at dusk. She’s on her way to a concert at a church and fears she may’ve hopped off the Metro at the wrong stop. The street is deserted for about a block, and the young woman feels increasingly vulnerable. Then, about 100 feet ahead, an old man materializes. She’s relieved, hoping to ask him for directions. But as she parts her lips to speak, he cuts in–making lewd references to her mouth and his genitalia, his eyes hungrily sweeping up and down her body. The whole exchange lasts 15 seconds, and years later, she will not remember his exact words, but she will never forget the eerie, demeaning humiliation of being propositioned on a city street.

This is sexual harassment.

Here is the other image: a nine-year-old boy shows up to his fourth-grade classroom and finds a substitute teacher standing at the front of it. His eyes dance with that childhood light our culture seems so intent on prematurely extinguishing, and he feels something small but powerful unfurl inside him. It is the green, translucent sprout of a crush. When he’s older, he will know plenty of phrases that can describe this sensation. Some will be poignant and flowery, others lewd and blue. But at nine, he knows only one word that captures his feeling about this impermanent, pretty presence standing behind his teacher’s desk. He leans over and whispers the word to a friend. The word is “cute.”

The twenty year old in our first portrait is now the 32-year-old author of this article. She has heard many words used to describe herself and the women she knows that were designed to harass and hypersexualize. Those words have been demeaning, pejorative, and explicit. They are familiar to far more women, young and old, than they should be.

“Cute” is not one of them.

In the context of elementary school, cute is often considered the highest compliment a child can give or receive–and in that pre-pubescent environment, it is the also most innocent, the most benign.

This is what made the suspension of Emanyea Lockett, the boy in our second portrait, so deeply disheartening. Brookside Elementary School in Gastonia, NC barred him from attendance for two days, on the grounds of sexual harassment. In a local news video, Emanyea confessed that he had no idea what sexual harassment meant—nor should he, at nine years old, unless he’s inadvertently committing it.

If his own account of this event is to be believed, he most certainly wasn’t. He wasn’t even skirting an inappropriate line. Sexual harassment involves intimidation, coercion, and unwelcome advances of a sexual or solicitous nature. It can be subtle. It can be unintentional. It can result in misunderstanding. But under no circumstances is the one-time description of a teacher as “cute”—or even as “fine,” as the school’s official letter claims—an example of it.

Now that Emanyea has been told that it is, now that he has been formally accused (and convicted, by way of suspension) of sexual harassment, his elementary school is forcing him to confront language, definitions, and situations from which all nine-year-olds should be insulated. They’ve labeled him a delinquent. And perhaps worst of all, they’ve criminalized that most universal of childhood experiences: a crush.

Post-millennial black boys are having a hard enough time developing healthy and untainted attitudes about love, relationships, and sex. In fact, if the ubiquitous studies and statistics on these matters have any validity, we all are. In an age when, by most accounts, academics, news anchors, and psychologists are routinely stacking the odds against him reaching adulthood with his optimism intact, the last thing Emanyea Lockett needs is his elementary school telling him that it’s dangerous to call someone cute.

The Thin Line Between Wise and Foolish Virgins.

01 Thursday Dec 2011

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Daughter, we are not endangered, but by all accounts, we should be. It is true that there is something hardy coded into us: a kind of eye that can observe the grotesquery of a husband’s flogging without scaling over, without growing dim; a kind of breast that will still produce milk for a mistress’s infant, after it has been forbidden to nurse its own; the kind of womb that manages not to expel a child even as it churns and bumps and wrenches its way through the Middle Passage. But we are not invincible. We are still disproportionately susceptible to ailments that weaken, maim, and kill. Even those of us who live to a ripe old age find themselves accosted, if not by physical ravages, then by bureaucratic ones.

It is no small feat, surviving black womanhood in this country.

But you are not without your powers–and the powers you possess are substantial. This is particularly true, when it comes to HIV/AIDS. Because African American women account for thirty percent of all new cases of HIV/AIDS in this country, and because 85 percent of those cases are the result of heterosexual sex, we can be assured that though few assaults on our bodies are as deadly as this one, there are even fewer that are this preventable.

Today, you are sixteen months old. If all is ideal, the decision to have sex will be entirely yours to make (many, many, many years from now). It will not be thrust upon you by predators. It will not be as the result of a callous boyfriend’s months-long erosion of your self-esteem. And most mercifully of all, it will not be stolen, as it is for so many girls of color abroad, by a man who believes that sex with a virgin will reverse the effects of his own virus.

If all is ideal, you will always retain your autonomy. As your mother, I would be remiss if I did not do everything within my power to ensure this. And so this is what I can tell you about sex: it mystifies. It inspires a wide range of philosophies. It has been known to factor into the collapse of empires. It can create human life; it created you. It is an exchange of bodily fluids, through which a great many infections can be carried. And occasionally, it results in the contraction of HIV which, coupled with other opportunistic infections, has caused the untimely loss of some of the most promising minds this world has ever known.

It is quite likely that you will not remember all of this, under the prom night stars. It may not spring to mind when you have surrendered yourself to a potential lover’s sturdy embrace. You will not recall it as you kiss him, won’t necessarily think of it when you invite him up for coffee. And should you decide to abstain until marriage, your honeymoon suite will not ring with the echoes of my admonitions about AIDS and other infections.

So it is imperative that you do not wait until these moments to broach the subject. And it is equally important that you do not wait for him to. Your health is not his responsibility. Procuring condoms should never cause you shame, nor should vigilance about protecting yourself suggest promiscuity. Any man believes you should be embarrassed about openly discussing any aspect of who you are is not the man that I wish for you, is not the man you should accept for yourself.

It is the rare HIV-positive man who knowingly or spitefully exposes the virus to his partners. What is more common is that he does not know he has it. What is more common is that he is afraid to find out. But it is not your responsibility to allay his fears; his ambivalence about his own health should not become your albatross. What is absolutely imperative is that you can confirm that you will not be exposed to a life-threatening illness, should you decide to sleep with him. Occasionally, your insistence on this evidence will result in a relationship-ending row.

This will be for the best–and if I succeed in adequately preparing you for womanhood, you will know this, even as you watch him leave.

Above all, dear heart, in matters of health, be proactive, be preventive, be aggressive, if need be. Remember the parable of the virgins. Five were wise, and five were foolish. The line between them was thin. The line between them was preparation.

How To Fight Self-Sabotage.

21 Monday Nov 2011

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Turn 32. Recognize the Day of Birth in ways you did not before. Now that you are a mother, understand that this day, that this life, is not yours alone. There is a debt you must pay to the people who brought you here. There is a debt you must pay to the girl your body opened up–like a whale expelling Jonah–to release.

Know now that the time you have spent convincing yourself of an intrinsic unworthiness was not yours to waste. Those interminable years you whiled away, in conflict with yourself, could well have been spent slaying dragons, climbing Everests, loving deeply and well. Reset your internal clock accordingly.

Recognize that your worries–about the traction of your ability, about the accessibility of your talent, about your value–were the shallow trifles of the bourgeoisie. Women like you cannot afford to laze about on a chaise lounge of loftiness, noshing on the bon-bons of inaction. You–the gypsies, the transients, the intermittently penniless, the debt-laden, the mothers–must walk the length of deserts, must fashion a bridge of rejection letters, must set sail away from inadequacy, tossing overboard inattentive men, and finally, upon a new shore, must drill down to the marrow of your souls and extract the dreams you’ve buried there.

Remind yourself that this painful drilling need never have occurred, if only you’d kept your goals at the fore and tended them the way you do the face you so constantly lament isn’t lovely enough.

Repent of the audacity it has taken to thumb your nose at God. Tell Him what he has given you is potent. Your words evoke tears, evoke action. They occupy hearts, link arms, sit-in, sing songs that overcome. They stir the reader, alert him to the need for revolution, compel him to broaden his capacity for love.

Shame on you for re-enacting the parable of the talents, for burying all that you’ve been given, because it looked too meager to present before kings.

Beg forgiveness. Promise that, should He be gracious enough to let you keep these gifts, you will treat them as gold, not tin. They will no longer be susceptible to tarnish.

Give more to the world. Do not gaze at its magnificent surface, full of the colorful impressions of history’s trillions, and say: there is no space left for me. Leave your you-shaped imprint; none other is like it.

Concede that the artist is a public servant. But never surrender your growth to the public’s expectation. Should you find yourself in a box, obliterate its walls.

Believe those who tell you they cherish your work. You hear this often enough to trust it. Do not dismiss true praise as hype. Question those who would proclaim you the Next Whomever. You hear this often enough to be wary. Do not mistake hype for earnestness.

Finally, in pursuits of love, be kind to yourself. You were never meant to be the girl who pined for disinterested men. You always did, perhaps because it is easier to court rejection than to give all of yourself to the pyres of love. Be no man’s second choice. Be the echo at the end of the cavern into which he yells, in search of interchangeable women’s companionship. Be the voice he longs to hear again, now that he knows he never will. Do not become a salted pillar for him.

Instead, dance wildly at the water’s edge and bring your little girl. She must see what it means to at last be free from desiring far less than you should have.

Be assured: someone will be watching. And a love unlike any you’ve known will ignite itself within him.

But regardless of whether he approaches, regardless of whether he has learned to circumvent self-sabotage, you must slather on your war paint, with the girl on your hip. Begin to deliver your words to the larger space, honor them in ways you haven’t before, and watch them transform: tiny airless things at first, slowly yawning into giants.

In the Land of At Least.

03 Thursday Nov 2011

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Twice I turned my back on you. I fell flat on my face but didn’t lose. – Yukimi Nagano

1.

This love is a leaden zephyr: it will always sink but at least it was made in the image of that which can fly.

Long ago, I gave you my heart in a kite. You wound the string around your neck: a floating pendant, an ascot that sailed against sky. And we walked together, two children in grown-up bodies: a girl in an eyelet dirndl, a boy in a sport coat and knickers. Playing school, playing doctor, playing house. You always wanted to be the teacher, always wanted to be the patient, always wanted to be head of the home. But at least I was never made to wear the dunce cap. At least I was not stricken with incurable disease. At least the home that we built was made of air.

Before long you began your proposals. The first was framed as algebra: if I asked you to marry me on your birthday, what is the probability you would wed me before gaining ground in your career?

n is the number of times you have asked for a compromise that solely benefits you. x is the absence of rings.

Solve for y.

You said my heart-kite became a noose. At least you didn’t die.

The bloom has long since fled this bouquet. It will shrivel like a cancerous thing. Its petals, if pulled, will portend our eventual fate: he loves me; he loves me; he loves me not. But at least you chose each flower yourself, at least you picked them from a garden you tend, at least you did not leave our outcome in the cold and scarred hands of a florist.

2.

These inner children have grown. The girl has turned in her dirndl for a rough-hewn maternity smock. The boy is donning track shoes. They are every bit as mature as we’ve always looked and as wary as aging requires. When the sedatives wear thin in her blood and she raises her heels to push, his hands are not the ones that act as human stirrups, his eyes not the first to be laid on their child. He is not there at all; he has left for a gig. But at least he is called when the infant wriggles free. At least he whispers her name through a telephone held to her ear. At least he flies back one month later, bearing diapers, sleepy midnights, and money.

At least when he arrived, she did not say: this is the least you can do. The literal least.

3.

This family is a disassembled mosaic: three shards of brightly colored glass, devoid of base and of hold. We float on the surface of waters, carried east and west on winds we cannot control. You have slit my sails and I have shredded yours; at least we are not without oars. At least we have not been submerged. At least we’re not lost to each other, in fog. At least you do not question the resemblance of the little shard to you. At least, should we ever find meet driftwood and fasten, we will make something beautiful, to be ogled, critiqued, and admired. At least on occasion, you roll a tiny scrit into a bottle. It says: my decision to remain on this water alone has little to do with whether we’ll wind up together. It says: this drifting will not always be, at least.

I know better than to read this as a promise. I have learned how to interpret you, at least.

Acceptance Is a Drug.

26 Wednesday Oct 2011

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Acceptance is a drug: a rock, a vapor, a potion. Some children first feel its rush in the womb, when a mother’s rhythmic, loving touch pulses through skin and blood and fluid. Her voice tunnels down through warmth and darkness. She says: I love you. She says: I can’t wait to meet you. She says: You are mine.

Other children remain unconvinced of acceptance and its potency until they emerge from the birth canal and find a father, beaming and open-palmed, the picture of pride.

And then there are the children whose acceptance has been cut, laced, or diluted. One or both of their parents may be absent or absent-minded; inattentive or attentive to a fault, but only when enforcing discipline or inflicting abuse; or desperately distracted by the pursuit of their own acceptance.

In other cases, parental acceptance, though satisfying, just simply isn’t enough. For these children, the need for notice, for desire, for praise and validation, is all-consuming. They huff high GPAs; snort three-day school suspensions; cook off-handed compliments until they’re concentrated, then inhale them till they swell inside their chests and crackle.

No, for them, simple acceptance isn’t enough. There must be a headier love, love in its pure powder form, love that can be sifted through fingers, run across teeth, licked clean off a surface.

As with any addiction, there is more than enough blame to go around. As with any addiction, blame is futile; it does not yield solutions.

What it begets is shame.

It makes the girl whose chase leads her into the arms of another addict feel mortified when the act she believed to be a private transaction of passion hits the harsh light of day. It makes her feel mercilessly flogged and without safe haven or sanctuary. Criticism stones her in the public square. Men touting themselves at surrogate fathers will screen her one of most intimate, most illegally disseminated moments, then speculate that this has happened to her because her mother is out “being empowered,” rather than providing undivided attention to her child. He will not acknowledge or apologize for his voyeurism, even as he concedes that the exposure and proliferation of the act makes it child pornography.

There will be over-simplification: The addiction suggests a lack of home training. The addiction is everywhere, manifesting itself in children in exactly this way every day; it will work itself out, if only it isn’t exploited, if only we avert our eyes, if only the children grow up. The addiction requires the help of an agency or institution, it belongs to laundry list of drudgery assigned to social workers, court-appointed counselors, and youth pastors.

It is never a personal problem. It does not require self-reflection. Because we didn’t give or receive oral sex at 14. Because our mamas loved us. Because we had the good sense not to compress our mistakes and our flaws, our naivety and experimentation, onto video and upload them to YouTube.

It isn’t our problem because our daughters are 15 and 18 and 21 and they aren’t yet sexually active. Because we parented them “right.” We grounded them, spanked them when they needed it, set content filters on our televisions and laptops, requested them as friends on Facebook.

But as long as this can happen to one girl, succumbing to the throes of thwarted infatuation, as long as one son thinks he will become a hero through sexual conquest, as long as friends will hold a camera and look on, stifling snickers or sitting in silence, as long as a video of children having sex can go viral within hours of upload, there is plenty of work left for us all.

Marriage, in 30-Second Increments.

17 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by in Nonfiction

≈ 16 Comments

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I’ve been seeing a little too much of this Subaru Outback* commercial these days.

I worked in advertising for nine months. It was my first salaried, full-time, post-college job. I was just a proofreader, and I spent more time blogging and working on a manuscript and IM-ing than I did circling typos. Most of the employees forgot I’d been hired; they were used to proofing their own stuff. And needless to say, I wasn’t what you’d call a go-getter back then.

Still, I learned a lot about commercials there. Successful ones sell you an experience, rather than a product. They make you desire a lifestyle you never considered. They make you long for an emotion you didn’t realize you missed, didn’t realize you could even feel. (It’s the same concept around which the entire run of Mad Men is situated.)

For those 30 or 60 seconds, there it is. Right upfront, right in your home, for you to see and feel and want. And as it flickers like a flash of what might be gold in your pan, then ends before you want it to, the advertisers have left you wondering: Now what are you gonna do about it?

If they’re lucky, you connect that call to action to their product. But when I see that Subaru Outback commercial, I want the experience. In any car. This idea of starting a new life with someone, cloistered in the woods, blossoms ringing my hair, drenched and laughing and escaping a collapsed tent… this is an idea worth coveting.

I had the same experience with this Mitsubishi Outlander commercial in the early aughts. There’s a very brief scene where rose petals are swirling into the face of the driver’s new bride; when I first laid eyes on that in ’03, it was pretty spectacular. (Incidentally, this commercial has some of the best subtle “face-acting” of any I’ve seen to date. And you really get the sense that you’ve watched a character evolve and mature in the minute you spend watching it. I’d enter this commercial as evidence in my argument that a well-executed commercial can provide the same narrative satisfaction as flash fiction.)

The point is: like most unmarried people, there’s a part of me that will always romanticize marriage. If I marry, I will have some minor, irrational expectation that roughly 75% of my marital experience will evoke the emotions these commercials capture. Ideally, I want to be with someone who makes me feel that, regardless of the unforeseen–triumph, tragedy, great gain, profound loss, joy, sickness, treatment, remission–there simply isn’t anyone else with whom I’d rather be.

I haven’t married, in part, because of this. I am expecting something more spectacular than I’ve experienced.

You hear these aphorisms, these “marriage is what you make it”/”it’s a partnership” cliches, and you know there is truth at the heart of them.

So few of us go into a wedded union with any concept of the mundane, of the dying down of euphoria, of the reality that we simply cannot be confident of how our partner will respond to certain of life’s curve balls. We trust that the love we feel in the moment, in the first months or years or even the first decade , will deepen into a mature and constant, if unexciting love, that will guide us into our golden and twilight years, that will end with us at the other’s death bed.

And sometimes, the person with whom we began that journey becomes unrecognizable as the same guy earnestly floundering under a honeymoon tent, willing to soak himself down to the marrow in order to deliver on the promise of a caring, devoted, monogamous, self-sacrificial life.

I find that kind of risk utterly terrifying, and I haven’t found myself in the eye of a relationship that felt worth it.

I just don’t want to marry someone because I long for the 75% these car commercials seem intent on selling me, only to find myself hiding out in a greenhouse, growing increasingly bitter as I mist the potted orchids, until:

*Those Subaru Outbacks are dope, though.

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