Headlines

I’ve been closely monitoring the Justin Bieber-Hailey Baldwin engagement.  It’s hard not to.  Every time I scroll through the news, there’s a new picture of the young couple with headlines updating the world to the status of their relationship.  I first noticed them when headlines announced that they were re-united on the streets of New York.  Just two months later the headlines were shouting about their engagement.  Occasionally the spotlight shifts to the Ariana Grande-Pete Davidson engagement, which is equally entertaining.  The last few headlines have updated us all of the possibility that Justin might try and obtain his American citizenship before the wedding and even speculated that the couple was actually already married.  The most interesting stories on Hailey and Justin offer little tidbits of insight into their love for one another, like Justin being overheard murmuring, “I can’t wait to marry you, baby…”

My interest in the Bieber-Baldwin engagement has nothing to do with them as individuals.  I’ve never been a Belieber and, as for Hailey, I’ve never seen her modeling work.  I actually avoid looking at models whenever possible.  I think I’m fixated on their engagement because they are everything that I am not: young, rich, and in love.

I guess I shouldn’t be resentful of Hailey and Justin.  It’s not as though I have never been anything like them.  I was young once.  Truthfully, I didn’t even really start to feel “not young” until recently.  The shift from young to old seemed to come suddenly, without any discernible transition.  I never felt "in between" young and old. The realization that I was not young felt a lot like walking out of the bathroom with your skirt tucked in your hose. Up until you realize you are ass out to the world, you feel great.  Only to have that ‘oh shit’ moment, where you realize what you must have looked like to all the folks you've passed.  Humiliated, you wonder how many people saw you in your blissful ignorance.  My not young self felt this—ablaze with embarrassment for acting young when I clearly was not.  I felt the immediate need to cover up and begin the wrinkle shrink of retirement.

The realization that I was not young highlighted the fact that, unlike Hailey and Justin, I was also not in love and would probably never be rich.  Just as I wasn’t always not young, it’s not like I’ve never been in love.  I’ve had some romance—I was even married once.  I certainly have felt the intensity of connecting with another human being.  I too have been so overwhelmed with love that I felt like I could not get close enough to that person, no matter how tightly we clung to each other.  Perhaps its this knowledge of what love feels like that makes the current absence of love feel so bad. 

Compared to youth and love, the money isn’t that much of a loss.  However, as the news broadcasts Justin’s estimated $265 million net worth, I can’t help but consider how different their life is from mine.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I am jealous of all that they will see and do in their lifetime.  One can’t help but wonder how the universe divvys out its rewards.

I can smother the jealousy with the universal truth that we all share—even Justin and Hailey—that nothing is forever.   Things change and disappear and something new arrives it its place—new feelings, new ideas, new love…new understanding of self.

Fingers Crossed

Sometimes I buy lottery tickets.  I know it’s dumb but I do it anyway.  My ex-husband calls it the “Losery.”  No, that’s not why we got divorced.  Back when we were married, I bought lottery tickets far more frequently—weekly, sometimes even twice a week.  I can quantify just how many lottery tickets I bought because I saved them all.  I hoarded these tickets because, in part, I was afraid that one of them was actually a winner—that I had somehow misread the ticket.  I think I also held onto them because I absolutely hate the idea of wasting money.  The act of throwing away the losing tickets seemed to highlight the idiocy of playing the lottery.  I didn’t want to admit that I was pissing away money every week, which is something very contrary to my nature. I am a cheapskate.  For example, I refuse to buy clothes at full price—my wardrobe is comprised of ill-fitting hand-me-downs or thrift store “treasures.”  I never leave lights on around the house unnecessarily or run the water with reckless abandon.  My poor daughter is racing the clock every time she is in the shower, with me periodically yelling up to ask if she’s almost done. These are all symptoms of my fear of wasting my money to the point of not having any.

I’ve always been frugal, but my thriftiness increased in severity after my divorce.  When I moved out, I was practically destitute, renting rooms from strangers and struggling to meet my most basic needs.  I had been writing for a magazine for six years and had been supplementing that income with odd jobs.  While I was married, my income was of no real significance.  My husband was the primary breadwinner.  I worked mostly because I wanted to, not out of necessity.  However, as a separated woman—this income was required. Ironically, as soon as money became a necessity, it promptly disappeared.  The magazine folded with no notice.  Contributors were left with no explanation and in my case, with no back pay.  The magazine owed me $6,000 which I never saw a penny of.  The current supplementary odd job was as a helper at a woodshop, which in some sick twist of fate also went under, owing me a considerable amount of money.  I was forced to find another job and also forced to be really careful with money from that point on.

If losing lottery tickets could pay the bills, I would have been straight.  I had jars stuffed full of them.  In order to put them to use, I started to try and make “art” out of them.  This would make them feel more like a useful expense.  I was buying art supplies—not deluding myself into thinking that I would strike it rich.  The art became a commentary on my relationship with the lottery.  I folded and assembled the tickets to make a picture of Jesus and another of praying hands.  These stupid tickets were to be my Salvation from the fear of failure.

I don’t really buy lottery tickets that often anymore.  Every once in a while, when the jackpot gets grotesquely large, I buy two.  I still hear my ex-husband’s voice as I buying them and feel moderately ashamed.  The kind of shame that you feel when you are buying tampons or Imodium AD.  The purchase tells someone else a little bit too much about who you are and what you are going through.

The funny thing is that I don’t immediately check them after the drawing is announced.  Sometimes I will wait weeks before I confirm that I’m still not a winner.  I guess I don’t want to be woken from the temporary fantasy that the lottery provides.  I like to sit in the daydream of financial security for as long as I can, imagining how my life would be different—what I could do for myself and for others (yes—I would be the most benevolent lottery winner ever).  Eventually, I do wake up and stuff those tickets into the jar with all the rest.  I’m only left to imagine how they can be useful.

Quitter

Throughout the last 7 years I have quit a lot of things: a marriage, several subsequent relationships, alcohol, cigarettes, dairy and coffee.  Each of these things was uniquely challenging to abandon—particularly my marriage to my husband and my marriage to alcohol. Self-pity has become one of the few things that I have been left to over-indulge in.  That, nicotine gum and nail-biting. 

I am still addicted to nicotine gum.  I chew it all day long.  It’s almost more expensive than smoking cigarettes at this point—which is really the only reason I feel compelled to quit it. That being said, I do recognize my flawed superiority over smokers and vapers.  Chronic gum chewing is also kind of unflattering.

I’d like to blame Kroger for the intensity of my addiction to nicotine gum. My local grocery store was recently remodeling and they set up a clearance aisle to purge products they’d no longer be stocking. As luck would have it, they decided they would no longer be selling nicotine gum.  I was shocked by this—it seemed irresponsible—like deciding to no longer carry condoms.  They were toying with the fate of smokers in a five mile radius.  However, I was one smoker that would benefit from their reckless disregard because I had stumbled upon a clearance shelf loaded with nicotine gum. 

Each box was emblazoned with a bright yellow sticker that yelled “WOW” and compared the original price of $25 to the clearance price of $6.  The one downside to my nicotine windfall was that these boxes were the 4mg dose, and I had long been gnawing away at 2mg pieces of gum.  I decided to bite the bullet anyway and I put every one of those clearance boxes in my basket.  All told, I was about to be the proud owner of 600 pieces of nicotine gum. 

While I checked out at the register I felt the lingering gaze of the cashier.  She seemed to be attempting to discern what a day in my life looked like.  What type of person needed 600 pieces of nicotine gum, a smattering of discounted “all natural energy drinks,” some Crunchy Nuggets cereal, and a carton of spinach?  I tried not to let her judgment rain on my nicotine parade.  I was feeling like I had won the lottery.  I was investing, at a discounted rate, in my future as a non-smoker.

I guess it’s true that nothing is ever truly without cost though.  In the weeks that followed I chewed that gum with the reckless abandon of a lottery winner.  Piece after piece disappeared into my mouth without any of the usual efforts to monitor the time between them.  Like any good addict, I was indulging without considering the consequences. In the blink of an eye, the party was over.  I was out of clearance nicotine gum and my mind and mouth demanded that I replenish it—at whatever cost.

My fingers are the other thing that I can’t keep out of my mouth.  I’ve been shoving them in there since I was a toddler.  I remember my parents discouraging my thumb-sucking by drafting a pretty intense behavior modification chart.  The prize for quitting my thumb?  The hottest commodity for a child in the 1980s--a Cabbage Patch kid. It worked and I earned my Cabbage Patch kid.  However, adolescent anxiety directed my hands into my mouth once again. 

Since then, my hands have remained in my mouth.  When I wasn’t smoking or delivering bottles of beer to my lips, I was biting my nails.  Anxiety, boredom and hunger were all reasons to nibble my nails.

My 12 year old daughter exhibits a similar compulsion. “I want to quit biting my nails,” she confided one day.  “Why do we do that?” she asked.

“We do it to soothe ourselves,” I explained. “It’s called an oral fixation.  You know things like biting nails, chewing gum, sucking thumbs, and smoking cigarettes—they’re all ways we try to calm down and comfort ourselves.  They’re all oral fixations.”  

Fortunately she seemed to understand, not asking me to delve too deeply into Freudian theory.  She knew that the take away was that we both needed to find other ways to soothe ourselves. No one, including my 12 year old, wants to consider themselves orally fixated—it just sounds bad. If you are orally fixated, the next bit will likely have you very conflicted.  You’ll feel uncomfortable, but won’t want to soothe yourself. 

In his theories surrounding psychosexual development, Freud suggests that children who were insufficiently fed OR overfed might develop anxiety that later manifests as a neurosis in adulthood.  This neurosis appears as an obsession with oral stimulation.  This sounds and is unattractive in itself but Freud makes it worse by theorizing that these afflicted adults often are manipulative in their efforts to meet their needs and resist maturation.  Thanks Freud.  Basically, instead of becoming healthy, independent adults, those of us with this neurosis look to others and to oral stimulation to fulfill our needs. 

Hold on to your cuticles…there’s more. Oral fixation is not limited to putting things into one’s mouth.  It is also symptomatized by what comes out of the mouth.  Talkativeness and sarcasm are both features of oral fixation.

As an infant, I spent time in foster care.  This meant that I never nursed.  In letters documenting my disposition, my foster mother described me as insatiable. I was always hungry, crying constantly to be fed.  To appease me between feeding, she offered me bottles of sugar water.  Though this shocks me and sort of annoys me (you’d think a foster mom would know better), I can’t help but think it could have been worse.  This was the 80s, so I should just be glad it wasn’t cocaine.

Although I know it’s pointless for me to do so, I can’t help wonder how different I would be if I had been breastfed—or maybe just not fed bottles of sugar water.  Would I have been so needy and demanding in the years between infancy and sobriety? Would I have so readily pursued and found comfort in bottles of alcohol?  Would I have been so fixated and pained by the things that I put into my mouth and the things that I have tried to keep out of it?

I’ll never know the answers to these questions.  I’ll just have to serenity prayer my way into tomorrow and try my best to keep my mouth shut.

Dissection

My ex-boyfriend recently laid out his latest thoughts in some texts to me.

“Another thing that’s been bothering me is that we were together a fairly long time and not one person has said we should work it out.  Everyone’s just like, ‘Well it didn’t work out—move on.’”

We had been broken up for months when the texts started arriving.

“I was committed to you, even when we were fighting,” he continued.

I felt my stomach twist with anxiety with the sound of each text alert.  I understood what these texts probably meant.  He was fixated on figuring out our failings and wanted me to help him dissect the problems that we couldn’t solve in our four years together.

I wasn’t just anxious—I was angry.  I was angry that I had to deal with this, even though we were no longer together.  I had bought a house and moved four months ago.  We had been broken up for two months leading up to the move, living at different ends of the same house, trying to avoid one another.  Not once during those six months had he made any efforts to talk, but now that I was really gone, he suddenly felt compelled to.

"I guess the biggest thing I'm struggling with is that I didn't want us to break up."

"I need somebody to care about me."

Even in my anger, I understood his compulsion.  Like him, I was lonely and scared that I would remain alone.  I too was bored and unhappy with what daily life dictated.  But I found myself frustrated with him for being the weaker of us, and reaching out.  He was looking towards me and our relationship as both the cause and the remedy to his suffering.

I wanted to call him out on it—not physically call him—but underline and deliver the truth about what he was doing.  He was refusing to look at himself and his patterns of movement as the reason for his dissatisfaction.  He was refusing to do anything differently but expecting a different outcome. In his previous life as an addict he had sought a lazy solution to satisfaction.  I wanted to draw a for him from this past self to this sober him, still expecting fulfillment to fall into his lap.

I know how this makes me look—like an egomaniac who has it all figured out.  Nevertheless, I wanted so badly to create this diagram to silence him.  I wanted to illustrate these things for him, but I didn’t.  I knew that any engagement on my part would only fuel this escapism into our past.

“I truly feel that we should have done better,” he wrote.

“I felt like I invested a lot of time with you and I didn’t feel like you gave a shit about me.  Is that true?”

“Was I just not that likable of a person?”

Most of the time he wasn’t—but I didn’t tell him that.

The next day his text read, “Do you want to go swimming with me down at the river?”

“I’m at work,” I said. “Maybe another time.”