I haven’t posted in awhile. But not because I haven’t had anything to say. I have had so much to say and yet nothing to say that’s worth reading. I’m a white woman with time on my hands and a loud voice, and I have struggled with what to do with these two (dare I say three) things in the weeks after the murder of George Floyd. I have spent the last two weeks raging. Crying. Praying. If you know me, you know I’m a talker, and for once in my life I’ve been quiet. I’ve been listening. And I’ve been reading. Among the many things I read was the opinion piece by CNN’s Christy Oglesby https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/opinions/george-floyd-cry-for-mama-hits-home-oglesby/index.html, where she writes, “I’m tired of being scared for him (her son). I’m tired of reading about Ahmaud, Travis, George and so many others. The list never stops. I need to the white mamas to share this burden. I need my white friends to love me and mine enough to come running, too.”

“I’M HERE!!!!!” I scream, scrambling to put my mom shoes on, and I’m halfway out the door to my mom mobile…and then I stop. Because shame. Shame over how I’ve handled situations of racism in my past that make me wonder if someone who failed to be part of the solution then is really worthy of leading the charge now. I have cried “white women’s tears”, and that makes me feel so gross, I can’t even tell you. And so I ask—-Is there a place for imperfect white people who carry with them the guilt of past mishandlings and unintended micro-aggressions? And if there is, what is it?

Many, many years ago, I found myself in a circumstance where I failed to do the right thing. I heard someone say a terrible, terrible thing, and I just stood there, silent. I was paralyzed with fear and powerlessness. I was horrified that seemingly “good” people could say such things, yet I was unable to open my mouth against it.

I’m glad I had this experience, as ugly as it was. It taught me early on that standing as witness to racism and not calling it out is complicity. It’s not enough to not join in, because evil doesn’t need enthusiastic sycophants to thrive. Evil, and its ever present cohort fear, will interpret any lack of resistance as tacit agreement. There is, in fact, malignancy in our silence, and every time we don’t challenge racism we actually foster an environment that allows it to metastasize. We are telling people it’s ok by not saying anything. Calling out the person who said those terrible things, on that person’s turf, in front of a group of people who felt as they did, would have taken courage, as I was wildly outnumbered in my outrage, and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t have that kind of courage until much later in life. But the thing is…., maybe I wouldn’t have been outnumbered at all. Maybe God would have protected me in that moment if I had spoken against their hate and ignorance. Maybe he would have been like “Oh hallelujah, Coletta is going to shut this nonsense down. Good girl.” I’ll never know.

I’m a lot older now. And a lot has happened since that day in 1994. I have become a mother, and I think that alone has bought me more courage than any other life event could. I don’t know, guys. Maybe there’s something about growing a human in your body for 9 months and then launching it into the world that makes a person not give a fuck anymore what anyone thinks. Maybe it’s the knowledge that 25 years of shame and regret is really hard to live with. I have made it a priority in my life to be teachable, to accept when I’m not perfect and to be grateful when people love me enough to tell me when I’m wrong or misguided. (You know who you are). There have been times when that’s been hard to hear. There are times when trying to be “cool”, I said the wrong thing. But I am grateful that braver people than me were willing to tell me so that I could grow and do better. I believe that my super power is my massive, bleeding, dare I say hemophiliac, heart. But if I don’t use it for change because I’m ashamed that my racial justice record isn’t perfect, then that’s one more white mama who isn’t out there screaming and marching and writing and talking and learning. We need everyone in this effort. And perfect is the enemy of the good. Acknowledge that you have much to learn. And for God’s sake, don’t try to enlist your Black friends as tutors. That’s like asking a robbery victim to teach you how to stop breaking and entering. There’s a ton of resources out there. Books, podcasts, essays. Find them. Ingest them. The syllabus has been made available. Forgive yourself for not being braver in the past and commit to being smarter in the future.

I will end with this…I had a great talk with Henry last night, my 14 year old son. He was sharing with me his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement. “I don’t understand how people can talk about having to respect differences of opinion in this case, (referring to people who assert that “all lives matter”). This is a case of simple right versus wrong. I shouldn’t have to respect your right to be a racist”. When I was his age, I lived in a world where we couldn’t talk about race. And we couldn’t live out loud if we were gay. Sam had a friend come out as trans last week, shared with their whole friend group in a group message, and everyone was like “ok, cool”. And then they resumed playing their online video game together. No big deal. When I was that age, we couldn’t speak our truth. We couldn’t even whisper it. I think about the soil in which my children are growing versus the dirt from which I grew, and I have so much hope. The kids today are already miles ahead of where we were then, loving on their friends who couldn’t have even whispered their truth 30 years ago and begging their parents to take them to BLM protests. Thank God. I don’t mind this getting older business when I see how worth it is to have change in the world. And even with all the technology that we fear is rotting their brains, they are already so much more thoughtful and more compassionate than we were. And brave, so much more brave.

Excuse me, but I’m off to talk with some mamas (some white, some not) about how we can support racial justice and what our role might be going forward. What are you going to do?

Note: An earlier version of this post told the specifics of the incident that happened 25 years ago. While everything about the story was true, I regret that I hurt someone I care about by sharing it in such detail. The viewpoints expressed by the offending person were theirs and theirs alone, not condoned by any one else I was with in the original story, and certainly not condoned by my family members who were present. Sometimes our stories are not just ours, but shared by others as well, and I realize now that I need to do a better job of respecting the privacy and truth of those I care about. I wasn’t as sensitive to that as I should have been. As someone who is new to this, I am learning as I go, and the overshare was an inevitable part of that process. My initial plan was just to pour myself out into this blog and see what materialized. It was my truth, after all. But with that comes some responsibility to honor and respect the privacy of the other people in my life, and I am sorry that I neglected to do that. I know now that this space is for my story and my story only. And I guess that only further supports the title of this post. When we know better, we do better.

“It would have meant so much to Courtney to know that you are here”.

I am standing in an AME (African Methodist Episcopal) church basement and I am here for my childhood friend Courtney’s funeral.  I am 26, and I am offering my condolences to her mother after the service.  As her mother speaks, I hear so much more than a fatigued response.  I understand immediately what she is trying to tell me.  She’s not saying “it would mean so much to Courtney that you were at her funeral”.  She is telling me that it would have meant everything to Courtney to just once have seen me standing in her world.  “Here”.  In her black community.  In her AME church.  With her “family”.  Because Courtney had spent her whole 26 years of life standing in mine.

I grew up in Boardman, Ohio.  It’s a suburb just south of Youngstown, but it might as well be 100 miles away.  While Youngstown was a gritty, rust belt city, dotted with abandoned steel mills that stood witness to better days, Boardman was an oasis of 1980’s mall culture boasting good schools and low crime.  It was 99.9% white.  Youngstown was quite a bit less so.  When we ventured into Youngstown, which was pretty rare, as you had everything you could possibly need in Boardman, you locked your car doors.  While you were still in the car.  I remember distinctly, whenever we drove past a certain point on Market street, I always heard the familiar “click” of my dad locking the automatic door locks.

When I was in fifth grade a new family moved into my neighborhood, just one house behind and over from ours.  And they happened to be black.  At that time I was hanging out quite a bit with a neighbor girl named Allison, and I decided that she and I would go knock on the new family’s door and ask if they had any kids who wanted to play.  I imagine the reason I did this was because only just a year earlier, I had been that “new kid”, as my own family had relocated to Boardman the summer before fourth grade.  I guess you could call it “paying it backward”?  I don’t know.  I do know that the fact that they were black wasn’t really here nor there to me.  This new family lived practically in my back yard, and Allison lived way down at the end of the street, and I was prepared to dethrone Allison for someone closer.  Besides, they had a pool.  When you are 11 years old,  a friend with a pool is worth three without.  Simple math.

Allison and I stood on their doorstep and I rang the bell.  And then Allison ran.  She took off.  I don’t know if it was because they were black or she was too shy to participate in my shenanigans any longer.  I just know that I was alone on that doorstep when Mr. Spires opened the door.  “Hi”, I said, “do you have any kids?”.  And I was introduced to Courtney, and Courtney became my friend for the next 15 years.

Courtney was the only black student in our school.  I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like for her.  To be new is hard enough, never mind the obvious race difference.  I mean, think about it—she was the ONLY black kid in the whole school.  Can any of us fully appreciate what that must have been like?   No, we cannot.  But she fell in with everyone so seemingly effortlessly that I frankly never gave it much reflection.   And we proceeded to plant and nurture our little nerdy corner of the middle school universe.  We had a club, a secret club, and we all had secret names.  (And don’t ask me what ours were, because it’s a secret.)  Courtney played the clarinet, was an excellent student, and had a slightly bawdy sense of humor, not unlike my own.  (I will never, ever forget when we were reading aloud in Mr. Konya’s science class in 8th grade, and I saw the word “organism” coming up in the paragraph that Courtney was about to read and I thought “oh no, she’s going to say ‘orgasm’ by mistake”.  And to my never ending delight, she did.)  She had a wonderful, big laugh.  She loved horror movies.  I remember she tried to make me watch a zombie movie at her slumber party and I wasn’t having it and I spent the better part of the night in the kitchen chatting up her mom. In fact, if I’m honest, the only time I ever really thought about her “blackness” was when we had those slumber parties, because Courtney always got picked up early on Sunday mornings to go to church. She was the only one of us who did, and so I came to believe that the church was a really important thing for black people.  While all the rest of us white kids were chowing down on pancakes and orange juice out of a freezer can, surely going to hell in a handbasket, Courtney was off living her “other” life.  Her other “secret club”.  A life we weren’t a part of.  Her life as a young  woman of color.  It was a life filled with lots of extended family and friends and a vibrant church community.  She would mention this life from time to time, telling us about her cousins, or a boy from church who she thought was cute.  But none of us ever actually set foot into her world.  None of us ever even thought to ring that bell or knock on that door.

Courtney died when we were 26.  She had started taking Fen-Phen, a popular weight loss drug in the 1990’s, and after successfully losing a lot of weight, she passed suddenly of a heart attack in May of that year.  Fen-Phen was taken off the market in September of 1997, 4 months later, because it was found to cause heart valve issues.

This is how I found myself in the fellowship hall of an AME church in Youngstown, Ohio in May of 1997.  How I finally found myself in Courtney’s corner of the universe.  And her mother’s words still rattle around in my head to this day.  What if I hadn’t taken it for granted that it was easy for Courtney to live in an almost exclusively white community?     How much would it have meant to Courtney to have had the chance to invite us in and maybe even show us around her life?  That’s not much to ask, is it?  To share our experience and to be seen?  I think that’s all any of us really want.   Courtney was a young woman of color.  Did anyone of us really see that?  Or did we just assume she was  a darker hued version of ourselves?  Did any of us ever try to appreciate the emotional and mental jujitsu it must have taken to juggle both these worlds?   No, we didn’t, because it wasn’t our burden to bear.  We had other things to worry about, like boys and who got carnations on carnation day.  Besides, Courtney seemed just fine.  I realize now, some 30 years later, that maybe she wasn’t.  Maybe she was tired.  Maybe she was lonely. Maybe she felt the jabs of micro aggressions every day.  I will never know, because I never asked.  I didn’t knock on that door.  And that’s the one I really wish I had.

 

 

I am currently in the middle of a divorce.  And we, all of us, are currently in the middle of a global pandemic. I know, our timing was terrible. Divorce during an international pandemic is not nearly as much fun as it sounds.   However, I am safe, healthy, loved and grateful.  But I am also feeling alone in a way that is profound, existential and uncomfortable.  It’s lonely for all of us right now, regardless of our relationship status, but on my bad days I tend to think I’m a little more alone than the rest of you, if only because it makes me feel special.  And I like to feel special.  In fact, I’m kind of special in the way that I need to feel special.  This fact may or may not have something to do with why I’m getting a divorce.

Anyway, for argument’s sake, let’s just all agree that I’m uniquely alone right now.  But here’s the really strange thing—for the most part, I am not lonely.  I am feeling quite whole, complete and, dare I say,  intact.  Do I have bad days?  Of course, absolutely.  Days of grief, sadness and overthinking.  They drop in unannounced like annoying family members, wanting to be entertained and fed and asking why there are no hand towels in the bathroom. I try very hard not to let these days make themselves at home.  I might order them a pizza, let them sleep on the couch, but I try not to let them get too comfortable.  And then there are the days that I am content and satisfied.  (I love the idea of being satisfied as a metric for happiness. It’s not some unachievable expectation, like “do I have everything I want?” or the especially troublesome “do I have everything I deserve?”.  It’s “do I have everything I need?”.  Am I safe?  Am I fed?  Am I sheltered?  Then I am satisfied.  I have enough and I can be at rest in that.) I try to be deeply hospitable to those days–I welcome them and change the sheets for them and treat them to a good meal.  (This, by the way, is what is known as gratitude–knowing you have something good while you actually have it in hand). They remind me that the lonely, sad, despairing days are not permanent squatters.  Those bad days are much more like the weather.  They are a cold front of tumult, change, unrest, passing over my consciousness.  West to East, left to right, the agreed upon dance of all meteorological events is actually not a cha-cha.  It’s more of a conga line, never lingering for very long, but marching across the planet, bringing its foul funk to someone else next week. The wondrous thing is when it rains in Cincinnati and moves on east to Columbus, it doesn’t circle back around to Cincinnati again.  It keeps going, past Columbus, to Zanesville, to wherever is east of  Zanesville. Sadness is kind of like that.  You know those days where you just feel “off”? On those days, I like to think that my soul is the blue sky, and the twister trifecta of “restless, irritable, and discontent” is just a storm system moving through.  I hunker down inside, and like any good Midwesterner,  I wait it out.  And when it passes, I am always greeted by the sun, because the sun actually never left.   Not that there won’t be more bad weather, because there will be.  The world is a complicated place and part of living in it is accepting that with love comes loss.  There is no negotiating out of that part of the deal. And I’ve decided I’m ok with that.  I still think the returns are worth the risk.

A high pressure system moving across Indianapolis will always find its way to me eventually.  But I know that the sky is still blue behind it, underneath it, beyond it.   Pain is a transient.  It will grow bored and move on. And my soul’s little sky will endure and see another season.

 

 

The other day I was listening to a live stream conversation between four very famous conductors discussing the future of live music in a mid/post Covid-19 world. These were some of the most powerful people in classical music, wildly successful titans in the arts, and surely they would have fancier crystal balls than those of us in the rank and file.  Will we start back playing live concerts in September? Will we be able to salvage our 20/21 concert seasons? Will orchestras still tour and engage international guest artists? I sat back and listened, confident that by the end of the hour they would reveal the answers to these questions, allowing me to go ahead and plan my life accordingly.  I, like all of us, am tired of this rollercoaster—it’s slow and not very fun and I’m ready to get off.

As a cellist, I’ve come to rely on playing concerts not only as my primary source of income, but also as a bulwark against insanity. I’ve managed to walk through some pretty tough things successfully because the one place I could always go and be still and centered in the midst of pain and loss was “work”.  I know, I realize that sounds insane. Who feels that way about their job? But to me, there is no more healing place on the planet than in a chair on a stage, surrounded by 80 other souls holding their “lovies”(their instruments), collectively speaking yet ANOTHER soul’s (the composer)’s deepest, darkest secrets.  (Incidentally, that is what most music is.  It’s the stuff so deep and dark and sometimes hideously true that it can’t be spoken.  Things can be too beautiful and too terrible to be said out loud, but the same things can be expressed “in code”–with sound.)   It’s magical actually. And it is my personal belief that it is also God. But beyond being a sacred experience for me, it also serves a practical purpose. It keeps my hands, eyes, ears and soul happily contented, distracting them from the unproductive mischief they might indulge in otherwise. You know what they say—idle hands do the devil’s work? So in many regards, society is safer when I am playing cello because it keeps me off the streets and out of my own head. Music is “essential” to me and my well-being, and thereby indirectly essential to everyone around me.  I cite every August as evidence of that. Every summer, usually in August, symphony orchestras “go dark”, which means they take a break from performing concerts.  I predictably end up having a conversation with my close friend, who is also a musician, about why I’m feeling “off”.  This conversation inevitably arrives at the fact that “it’s August and you get this way every August, Chrissy”.   Well, I’m here to tell you, this has been the longest August of my life.

Back to the conductor conversation. It was fascinating. Turns out there are no adults in the room and we’ve all been left home alone without a babysitter. These people were as scared and without insight as I was. All the talent in the world could not give these people any more answers than I already had. While I was comforted by the fact that we are indeed all in the same boat, it was also alarming to hear that they had no bloody idea what was coming down the pike either. How will the arts survive? Will we be forgotten or deemed unnecessary as the world emerges from this? Will Chrissy have to resort to a life of crime?

One of the conductors must have been reading my mind, because he offered the following thought:

“(Musicians and artists) ARE essential workers. We are the garbage collectors of the soul.”

Yes. Yes. Yes. I knew it. This was what I came for.  The comforting words I had hoped to hear.

Think of it this way—I have insanely high cholesterol. It’s been steadily going up for the last 10 years. A year ago, after reading my lab results, my doctor said “I have never seen cholesterol this high”, and I now take statin drugs that have brought my numbers into the normal range. For those of you who are curious, at its highest, my total cholesterol was 393. Yeah. That’s stoke/heart attack territory. The “good news” is that my “good cholesterol” is also high, which is why we didn’t treat it for a long time, as I have other mitigating factors that lower my heart disease risk (non-smoker, female, healthy weight and blood pressure). What I learned in this whole journey is that “good cholesterol”, the HDL, acts as a garbage collector for the bad cholesterol, the LDL. It scoops up the bad stuff and takes it to the liver so it can be flushed out of the body. My “good cholesterol” was a garbage collector that kept me alive all these years. It protected me. But the one thing the “good cholesterol” cannot do is eliminate the bad cholesterol. It cannot make it go away. It can only follow behind and clean it up. Kind of like I do my kids…

Art, music, dance—–they protect us. They allow us to process the pain and joy that we ourselves may not have the vocabulary to express, so that we can be healthy, so that we can move forward. Bad things happen. Grief happens. Loss happens. We can’t prevent life from unfolding in all its chaos and mercurial ways. And sadly, there is no way to fully insulate ourselves from the brutalities of the human experience. But “art” is our HDL, it Helps (us) Digest Life. It cleanses us, sweeps through us, flushing out our psyches and restoring us to functionality. It holds our hand and takes us on the emotional journey that we desperately need but don’t always know how to start. And it reminds us that no matter how misunderstood we may feel, we are not unknowable.

Artists and musicians, we are in the emotional sanitation business.  We haul away the pain with our bows and our breath and our bodies.  What could possibly be more “essential”?  It may take some time to sort it all out,  and it may not look like it once did. But garbage always piles up if you don’t take it out, and when it does, we will be there, ready to dance and play and sing and restore you.  And restore ourselves in the process.

I started playing cello when I was 10 years old because my best friend, Anne, already had started violin and I was determined to be wedded to her side forevermore.  Not in a budding lesbian way, but in the way that young women adore each other at that age. I thought Anne was the coolest, but she also made me feel smart, safe. I felt like bad things couldn’t happen to Anne, and so staying in her orbit was simply a wise move, like not standing near flagpoles during a lightening storm.  Wherever she was, that was where I wanted to be.  So as fifth graders at Glenwood Middle School, we had to choose between band, orchestra or chorus for a mandatory two year “tour of duty”.  Anne, had already chosen orchestra, which conveniently narrowed my decision by two thirds and now I simply had to make the micro decision of “which stringed instrument?”.  I could already see that it would be hard to distinguish myself among a sea of violinists, but there were fewer cellists, thus increasing the chances that I might emerge as “special”.   Plus, cellos never had to stand,  their butts firmly married to chairs. Cello it was!  This was literally my criteria.  I wish I could tell you it was something far more magical, like “I heard the cello and instantly recognized it as my soul’s ancient, aching voice, the dialect in which my heart could speak its truest truth”.  Yeah, no, it was Anne, and being able to sit on my keister for ad infinitum.  Thanks, Anne.  Really, I’m serious.  Thanks.  It’s been the most wonderful life, and my heart has indeed spoken its truest truth and revealed its deepest yearnings many times with a cello in hand.  A terribly pragmatic and seemingly unemotional decision resulted in this wildly impractical yet fantastically fulfilling world I’ve lived in now for almost 40 years.  Sometimes the greatest romances do indeed start with friendship.

So when my great uncle Bob got the word that I was playing the cello, he had things to say.  “Tell her that she needs to be ‘hard-nosed and egotistical’!”.  Um, ok.  That seemed like kind of weird advice to give a 10 year old girl.  I should explain that my uncle (my grandmother’s brother) was himself a pretty famous cellist.  He was a prodigy, having picked up the instrument as a teenager after my grandmother refused the lessons her parents wanted her to take.  Only a few years later, in the late 1930’s, he joined the Cleveland Orchestra, one of the greatest orchestras in the world.  Growing restless after several seasons of that life, he and three other young bucks left to start a string quartet and begin an international concertizing career.  He was a BIG DEAL.  So who was I to argue with this advice?  We also shared the same birthday, 60 years apart, further substantiating the cosmic connection my mother believed existed between us.  (If only he had been dead, my mother would have eagerly believed I was his reincarnation.) Of course I would be a cellist.  It was written in the stars. And I had been given my marching orders: hard-nosed and egotistical.

I understand now what he was trying to say.  The classical music world can be a bit “dog eat dog”.  Opportunities are few and far between, and sometimes you have to don a emotional “bulletproof vest” in order to weather all the self doubt, rejection, and imposter syndrome that try to work their way into your brain. Performers are only as good as they have convinced themselves they are on any given day, and insecurity can prove deadly to career success.  Self doubt is like water that seeps into your house foundation.  It expands and contracts, causing fissures in your self esteem, weakening your logical thought and what you know to be true in the rational universe.   I have played the cello for 40 years, longer than I have done ANYTHING.  If there’s something on this planet that I come anywhere close to being an expert at, it’s playing the cello. And yet, sometimes I still get scared when I have to perform.  “I’m not sure I really know how to do this”, gurgles the fetid water in my foundation.  That’s not rational.  Of course I know how to do this.  And so, one way to combat this bullshit is to subscribe to my uncle’s advice-be hard-nosed and egotistical.  But I think we can all agree that’s not a very becoming “look” on a 10 year old girl.  While I appreciate his words, I kind of wish Uncle Bob had just said “practice your scales and arpeggios and keep your head down”.

Now around the same time, I had discovered a book in my parent’s things.  It was a volume published in 1948 called “Miss Behavior–Popularity, Poise, and Personality for the Teen-Age Girl” by Bernice Bryant.  And it was almost certainly given to my mother by my grandfather in an effort to prepare her for polite society and keep her from becoming a slut. I tell you, I was fascinated by this book.  I devoured it, as, from a sociological perspective, it was a window into less evolved times.  I felt like I had dug up a literary fossil.  But I was also genuinely curious; how does one actually morph into a lovely adult female from the awkward cello nerd I currently thought I was?  But fear not, because I was one of the lucky ones—while most of my friends were simply “winging it”,  I had excavated a map. It was a 30 year old map that had been stomped on and obliterated by the sexual revolution, civil rights and the women’s movement, but it was a map nonetheless.  Plus, I had come to grips with the fact that I liked boys, and this book practically guaranteed popularity with boys.  Here’s a sample of Ms. Bryant’s wise counsel:

“You never hear a golden-voiced tenor or a velvet-toned bass sing about the smartest girl in the world or the strongest girl in the world or the most sophisticated girl in the world. No, they tweet (how could she have seen the birth of Twitter in 1948?) about the sweet.  Thus it was, and thus it is and thus it always shall be.  Why?  Because that’s the plan of things.”

Well, crap.  Now I have a problem.  I can’t be both “hard-nosed and egotistical AND sweet”.   How would that even work?  And do I want to be a good cellist or do I want to be someone’s girlfriend?  Because judging by what Uncle Bob and Bernice have to say, it doesn’t sound like I can have both.  Can you imagine what confusing times these were for me?  Does it surprise you at all that it would be a long time before I would attain either of these goals?

Leave it to Bruce Lee to untie this mental knot for me.  He said, “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”

There’s a time and a place for Uncle Bob’s advice. When I’m about to walk out on stage, that’s the ideal time to be hard-nosed and egotistical.  I need that confidence in myself, that showmanship, that unwavering belief that what I’m about to share with you is totally awesome.  But when I’m off stage and in relationship with others, that emotional flack jacket has to come off, or I’m not going to be able to relax into my fully authentic self.  My children have no use for a “hard-nosed and egotistical” mother.  So that’s a perfect example of “adapt what is useful”.  Thank you Dragon.

Now, Bernice Bryant’s advice—-that falls into he category of “reject what is useless”.  I think we can all agree that her world view depends on all men looking for the same boring thing in a woman—-ease and malleability. I feel kind of bad for all those teenage boys in 1948 who may have wanted a girl who could be an intellectual playmate, a partner, when all they had to choose from were girls who read “Miss Behavior”.  And how is anyone to successfully choose a partner anyway when we’re all learning how to be our authentic selves from imbibing the advice of others?

Which brings me to the only part of Bruce Lee’s advice that I would change. I would START  with what is specifically your own.  I would state that first. Otherwise you will be working backwards your entire life to find what that is.  Or at the very least, writing blog posts in an effort to find her. 🙂

 

 

 

My father, Daniel Angelo Coletta II as he was formally known, was a cement salesman.  An Italian-American cement salesman.  In Youngstown, Ohio.  I’ll give you a minute to put that all together.  I know, it looks bad.  Based on that information it may surprise you to know that he was, in fact, not in the mafia.  But, he was very, very loosely associated with people who were.  But honestly, it’s hard to live in Youngstown and not be.  I mean, everyone there was within six degrees of separation from someone who may or may not have a cousin who’s connected.   And if you weren’t, you kind of wish you were because you never know when that might be useful.  We all want to be able to at least say “I know a guy”.  Kind of like “there’s an app for that!”,  –it’s simply being polite and offering to help. You have a problem?  No worries, I know a guy.  Not that you’d ever need to call the “guy”, but it’s nice knowing where to find him if you did.

My dad knew a few “guys”.  Like Mr. G, who showed up at our house in a luxury tour bus to take our family to Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh to see the Steelers play from private viewing suite.  Yeah, he was later indicted.  And then there were the sausage making parties.  I kid you not.  A bunch of my dad’s business associates would get together to make homemade sausages.  I have a picture somewhere of my dad at one of these parties, smiling, wearing an apron, high on testosterone. Normally this wouldn’t raise any eyebrows—“oh, how cute,” people might say.  “Alpha males wearing aprons and bonding over cooking!”. But put it together with the other undisputed facts (Italian-American-cement company employees -Youngstown), and even I have to admit it starts to look a little sketchy.  Anyway, one of these “sausage guys”, Michael Carlo, was the owner of the cement company my dad worked for.  That “guy” eventually went to prison for tax evasion, bank fraud and embezzlement, but not before my dad was subpoenaed to testify against him in a lawsuit brought by one of their customers.  One July night, the summer before my junior year of high school, we all were awakened by the sound of glass shattering.  The whole family ran downstairs to see that someone had taken the rocking chair off our front porch and smashed it through our living room windows.  A warning.  Don’t testify.  After that, my dad was understandably pretty shook up. He hired an off duty police officer to sit in Mr. Worland’s driveway for several weeks.  There were no further incidents, and it is my understanding that my father did testify.  Dad left his job and worked for a Canadian cement company for the remainder of his career.  Sadly, Daniel Angelo Coletta II had attended his last sausage party.

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My mom got a phone call one day from my little brother’s 3rd grade teacher.  “Mrs. Coletta, this is Chucky’s teacher.  I was wondering if your husband would come talk to the class about his job.”

“Umm, ok…”

“I tried to reach your husband at work, but NASA said they couldn’t find a  “Daniel Coletta”, so I hope you don’t mind me calling you at home”.

“Ummm….,well, my husband doesn’t work for NASA. But he could come talk to the class about cement if you like…”.

My little brother told his class that my dad was an astronaut.  I think that’s hilarious.

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I think every child thinks their parent would be just a little more interesting if they were an astronaut.  And I think every parent knows that their child doesn’t even know the half of it.

“Oh Betty, she has the Swenson thighs”, whispered my mom’s cousin Joanie, as I emerged in my bathing suit to join my family on the dock.

We were learning how to waterski at my cousin Reggie’s summer home on Lake Chautauqua that summer. This was all extremely exotic stuff for a 15 year old kid from Youngstown who spent most of her summer days selling fried cheese at Guido’s at the Southern Park Mall.  And to my total surprise and delight, I managed to “get up” on the first try that day, and I was so proud, so triumphant, so grateful, and honestly a little shocked.  I was not a sporty kid, I played the cello, and when I wasn’t doing that I was probably doing my hair.  So this was a marvelous revelation—my body was for more than just being looked at.  My uncle drove the boat past the dock, a victory lap, while my family beamed and cheered.  But friends, this is the part I remember the most—-I had an atomic wedgie from the force of my body shooting out of the water into my standing position, and I’ll never forget weighing the decision in front of me: do I let go of the rope to pick the wedgie and certainly fall, or do I hold on tight and enjoy this ride and not give a damn that my butt is hanging out as we pass by my judgmental family?   It was the first time I had to choose—shame or pleasure?

A few months later, my parents sat me down in the living room and said they wanted to talk.  “There’s a new procedure that’s been invented,” said my father.   “It’s called ‘liposuction’, and we want to get it for you. We don’t want you to suffer as your mother has.”  (For the record, my body is a carbon copy of my mother’s.  Short, very curvy, Swenson thighs.  It is worth noting that I am not overweight, nor is she.  We just have a shape that seems to make some people deeply uncomfortable.)  I was 15.  I had never had a boyfriend.  I had yet to have my first kiss. And the only man I had ever loved, and truly, I adored my father,  just told me I had physical flaws that required surgical intervention.  I remember going back upstairs to my room, the whole world changed.  Because I knew liposuction wasn’t something offered to all 15 year old girls, like some sort of dysmorphic quinceañera.  This confirmed what every teenage girl suspects–something was now officially wrong with me.

I know now that my father was scared.  He was afraid that I would not be loved, that no man would find me pleasing in my current state.  His intentions-to spare me  rejection- were noble, but his misguided effort caused me incredible pain. I wish instead he had told me how uniquely beautiful my mother was.  How lucky I was to have inherited her figure, instead of the tall straight androgynous frame of the women on his side of the family.  But he didn’t.  He tried to control something that was uncontrollable.  This moment haunts me every time I start to say something to my 17 year old son about the sprinkle of acne on his cheek.  “Chrissy, stop.  He’s fine.  You think you’re just helping, but you’re not.  You’re telling him he’s not ok. Remember the liposuction….”

In the years to follow, there would be more interventions by a well meaning world, trying to help me with my physical “affliction”.  My first year of college, I had a cello professor who declared, (with the kind of enthusiasm you reserve for when you discover a new law of physics) “you’re ashamed of your hips and your thighs!” as the reason I wasn’t getting the sound he wanted.  Well, no shit.  You would be too if you had the body I have.  I didn’t say that out loud, but I thought it.

Then there was the time after my first son was born, when Sam was a year old, and his dad and I took a trip to Florida.  We were on the beach, enjoying the beautiful day, and having just nursed Sam, I decided it would be a good chance to get away for a little walk.  I was so happy, so contented with my life at that time.  I had had a great pregnancy, given birth to a healthy 9lb. 1oz baby, and had been successful at breastfeeding. As a result, my body and I had agreed to a cease fire.  It had given me a fantastic, healthy baby, and in return I agreed to stop telling it that it sucked.   I mean, how can I hate something that took such good care of Sam for 9 months and then safely delivered him into the world?  That’s crazy.  Even I could concede that.  As I’m walking, thinking my grateful thoughts, I am interrupted by an older woman sitting on a foldable beach chair.  She beckons me over, and I go, thinking she may need help.

“You know why it’s so hard for you to lose weight in your hips and thighs?  Why you are shaped like that?”, she offers. “It’s a hormonal thing!  When your hormones are out of whack, the body carries fat in those places.”  I’m dumbfounded.  What. The. Fuck.  Who says something like this to a total stranger??  And instead of telling her to take her unsolicited advice and shove it, I thank her politely, and walk away.  Because I am a nice girl, (admittedly a nice girl who likes to occasionally say the word “fuck”, but who doesn’t), and nice girls always make others feel comfortable, even when people are being jerks, and even when it makes us feel deeply uncomfortable.  I’m wearing nothing but a black bathing suit, that up until that moment I thought I looked pretty damn good in.  But as I walk away, I’m ashamed.  There is nothing to shield my butt, hips and thighs from her gaze and I only now wish I had brought my coverup with me on my walk.

You may be thinking right about now, “there is no way all these things happened”.  But they did.  I promise you, every single one of these stories is true.  And I think it’s important to mention that objectively speaking, I am not a freakishly shaped.  I am not deformed.  I’m just “specific”. It took me a long time to figure out what’s going on here and I think I finally have made some sense of it.  God, you see, is an artist.  Everything he makes is art, even if you don’t like it.  I think we can all agree that art is subjective and while one person may hail something as “genius” another may think the same work is “derivative”.  And like all artists, he goes through creative periods, phases if you will.  Picasso had his “blue period”, his “rose period”, his “cubist period”.  Well, I believe God is the same, and on the day I was made, the most beautiful thing he could think of was, well, me.  And on the day you were made, the most extraordinary expression of himself he could think of was, well, you.  I happen to think God was in a sort of “Rubens” phase around the time of my conception, which totally explains my thighs.  Supermodels are all part of a different artistic phase that God was in that I don’t completely understand but that doesn’t make them any less art.  Art makes people feel all sorts of things, and sometimes discomfort is one of those.  My body has obviously made some people uncomfortable, but that only further proves my point.  (I would be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge that my body has made some people very, very comfortable.) So, when I go contemplate liposuction, or dieting or exercising excessively in an effort to shave off the parts of me that aren’t to everyone’s liking, it’s akin to someone going in to the Galleria dell’Accademia with a metal file and going to town on the statue of David because they think they know how to make it just a little bit better.   Michelangelo made David exactly how he wanted him to be.  God made me and you exactly how we he wanted us to be.  We aren’t failed attempts.  We aren’t factory seconds.  We are exactly what he pictured and we are beautiful for that very reason alone.

I didn’t get the liposuction.  And I did not pick my wedgie.   And risk not getting another lap around the lake?  Not on your life.

Oh dear, it seems I have started a blog.  I’m not even sure I’m typing in the correct space yet.  Is this the heading?  Or is this an actual post?  God only knows, but I’m just gonna dive in and see what happens. It’s either this or I continue to torture everyone on Facebook with my  BIG IDEAS.
I actually decided to start a blog several years ago.  I was newly married for the second time, a freshly-appointed “matriarch” of a blended family, and I thought I had things to say.  The blog was going to be called “Heplusmeplusthem” (and I thought that was so clever because buried in that title is the word “lust”) and I thought I was going to share interesting musings about being a stepmom, balancing career and family, and the like.     I never wrote a single post on that blog.  I was not ready…or maybe I didn’t think you were ready.  Maybe I was afraid my truth was too much for your sensitive eyes.  Maybe I knew the truth was too much for my sensitive ego.  And it also turns out that I didn’t know diddly-doo-da about any of those things anyway.  That marriage didn’t last, because it turns out no amount of will, intestinal fortitude, and sheer grit can force a situation that the universe doesn’t want for you.  My will, not Thine be done?  Yeah, I tried that for a long time until someone kindly pointed out to me that I had it backwards.    It’s actually “THY will, not mine, be done”.    Ohhhhhhhhh.    I finally figured out that I’m a pretty mediocre cruise director for my life.   My “best ideas” are never as good as what the universe would have for me.  And when I lay back and float, rather than stand there with my clipboard trying to corral everyone into whatever shuffleboard game I think needs to happen next, I’m actually happier.  So here I am, sporting some mighty dope water wings/floaties these days. It’s an international pandemic, I’m an unemployed professional musician, a mom to two teenage boys, and I’ve got nothing but time and an old laptop that I’m not afraid to use anymore.  And, yeah, some big ideas.