For All The Single Ladies....

More thoughts on being a woman in 2011...

A Little Matzoh...

Jeff's cousin, Kathy, is visiting from Denver. We joined her at the Brisbane synogogue for the first night of Passover last night. There were about 75 people there (and as many people from Israel as from Australia it appeared). We sat next to two young women (early 20s?) from Israel who were doing some round-the-world travel.

Kathy and the mighty matzoh

They had been up at the beach last week. But, with Passover approaching, they wanted to celebrate with the Jewish community so they came down to Brisbane and volunteered in the kitchen at the synogogue.

It was wonderful to talk with them. They were the picture of groundedness, assurance, confidence, and self-awareness. They had thoughts and opinions on most everything that was discussed and could express themselves -- in English, which is not their first language -- well and clearly.

They both did their 2 years in the Israeli army as 18-years-olds and could talk intelligently about that experience, about Israel's challenges, and about women in the military in general. They were informative about gender relationships in Israel (Kathy's sister just became engaged to an Israeli man this past weekend so Kathy wanted the lowdown on Israeli men). And, yes, I had to compare them in my mind to the young women I wrote about a few weeks ago that I encountered on a city bus.

Because there was no comparison. Same age, same gender but they presented completely differently.

Why is that? Is it culture (Israel vs. Australia)? Is it life experience (university or jobs vs. military service)? Is it family? I don't know. I just hope that the future of women looks a lot more like these Israeli girls than the girls we met on the bus.

A Little Sweat....

Two weeks ago, I signed up for a "bootcamp" being run by a personal training group at the end of my street. Very cheap -- $70 for 12 weeks -- and very convenient -- end of my street at 9:30 in the morning.

Why did I do this? I've noticed in the last month or two that my arms and legs are significantly weaker than they used to be. I noticed I'm avoiding anything that requires me to get down on the floor (like tying my shoes) because it's hard to get back up. I'm also concerned that the weakness in my arms will affect my ability to return to massage when I get back to the States. My friend Angelique loves her bootcamp so I thought "what the heck".

The biggest surprise is how muchI'm enjoying myself. It's a small group -- anywhere from 2 - 7 -- of women and one trainer (a guy). The PT mixes up the exercises, keeping them short and simple. Best of all (and one of the things that kept me from considering bootcamp): no yelling.

Really, what kind of person gets motivated and excited by having a stranger yelling at you at the crack of dawn? Not me!

Yesterday we did all of our excercises in boxing gloves because one of the stations was boxing exercises. I learned that I have both more and less coordination than I thought but at least I didn't hurt myself.

At one point I looked at the woman in the room (30s - 50s I suspect) and marvelled at how comfortable we all were there, sweating and hitting and grunting. My mother was involved in weight loss and exercise efforts from her 30s on, generally unsatisfactorily. I tried to imagine my mom looking as sweaty and disheveled as we did (t-shirts and shorts, for the most part) and wearing boxing gloves and hitting the trainers padded hands as hard as she could.

Gotta say, the image didn't come.

There was a time, within my lifetime, that women just didn't sweat (well, unless they worked on a farm or as a cleaner or in a factory...OK, middle- and upper-class women didn't sweat) comfortably. In the 80s it got a little more popular as long as we were clad in colorful outfits and made it sexy.

Now it's not even a suprise to see a room of women sweating as hard as a man, hitting things, pushing their physical limits, and grunting with confidence. Believe it or not, that's a freedom, to be fully physically present in our bodies, including the messy bits. Yeah, we're still too motivated by trying to look like we're 30 when we're 40 but it's still progress.

That's happened in the course of my life, in the last 50 years. I'm glad for it. I wonder what the next 50 years will bring.

The real cost of food?

Went to the grocery store today for our weekly re-fill. It seemed that, on a per serving basis, fruit and veg are a lot more expensive than meat or grains. So I did a little calculating on our groceries.....

Per Serving, from low to high:

couscous: .43

spinach pasta: .45

canned tomatoes: .53

broccoli: .59

apples: .83

cottage cheese: .86

yogurt: 1.06

kransky's: 1.40 (an Aussie sausage Jeff has fallen in love with)

lamb chops: 1.49

grapes: 1.50

avocado: 1.75

chicken thighs: 1.90

kale: 2.12 (called silverbeet here; because it cooks down so much you have to buy a lot to get one serving)

fruit juice: 2.59

Pepsi: 3.29

So, it's not as overt as I thought standing in the check-out line but there are some surprises here. Anyone have any ideas how this would compare to prices in the US?

The Ex-Pat Marriage

When Jeff and I first started talking about living and working overseas 12 or 13 years ago, we imagined the adventure of it. We imagined being immersed in a different culture. We imagined food and sights new to us. We imagined new friends. We imagined our horizons being broadened. We imagined becoming wiser or at least more world-wise.

What we didn’t imagine was us, the real us, and how the cauldron of being uprooted would affect us.

In our normal day-to-day lives back home in DC, we are suspended, as a couple, in a robust and complex web of relationships -- brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, godchildren, parents, neighbors, co-workers, friends, his fellow sailors and my fellow Lutherans. Perhaps you envision marriage as a distinct unit set apart from other relationships. It isn’t.

Well, yes, it is in a way. The only two people that truly make a marriage work or not work are the two people in it. Yet unless those two people live a life devoid of other relationships, their marriage also happens within those other relationships.

Those other relationships feed each of us in unique ways. Those other relationships encourage us in our married-ness by the simple fact that they treat us as an emotional and logistical unit. They give us an outlet from each other when that is necessary. They laugh with us, they listen to us, they challenge us, they let us bitch and moan when we need to, and they celebrate our milestones and grieve our losses with us.

And 8 months ago we walked away from every last one of them and moved 10,000 miles away with only each other to provide that support, encouragement, etc. etc. etc. Skype, Facebook, and e-mail help maintain the connections but they aren’t anywhere near as useful as the face-to-face connections.

If you don’t think that affects a relationship, I can only say you’re wrong. All those things that other relationships provided we now expect and need each other to provide. That’s asking a lot -- a hell of a lot -- from a partnership. There is a myth that a husband/wife is really all you need in the world That the two of you against the world will stand strong, that marriage will be a bulwark against all the woes of life.

A good marriage is a profoundly valuable gift but being married these last 10+ years has also made me appreciate the limits of a good marriage (and I have one). I can’t ask Jeff to be my everything. He can’t expect me to be his everything. But, sometimes, we’re all we’ve really got here.

I’d like to tell you we have both risen to the challenge with grace, love, and imagination but, ah, if you’re reading this the odds are that you know one or the other of us (or even both of us) better than that. J We have struggled at times. Homesickness made everything harder. We yearned for missing connections and wanted the other to provide them. But I can’t be his missing sailing buddies and he can’t be my missing church friends. Just can’t.

We entered into this with a pretty solid marriage and, here’s the good news!, we’ve still got a pretty solid marriage. We’ve worked through (and continue to work through) the tricky times. As with most relationships, the tricky times served to illuminate ourselves to ourselves. I said a long time ago that the down side to really loving somebody is that it holds a mirror up to you at your worst. You see the effects of all the immature, fragile, and half-baked aspects of yourself through how they affect the one you love.

So does being an ex-pat.

An example….

I’ve got a temper. When I get pissed off, I can be a hot poker straight into your left eye. As more than one friend who’s experienced my furies has said, at least you know where you stand with me! At home, I’ve got…outlets for my anger. Or at least I can spread it around. J Here, not so much. Jeff gets the brunt of it.

I’ve been thinking about anger a lot in the last 6 months or so, after a stressful trip back to the US last September. Most of my friends are, frankly, terrified of anger, anyone’s anger. The funny thing is, so am I. So is Jeff. We respond in different ways. Yet anger is a pretty normal emotion. We all experience at some time or another. It’s…normal.

I hate to watch Jeff disconnect from me when I get angry. He does it to protect himself, naturally enough, but I hate it and I’ve got nowhere else to go with it. So I’m spending time paying attention to what makes me angry, what I need from the world around me when I get angry, what I need from Jeff and want I can honestly expect from Jeff.

I’m also going deep into my own fear of anger. If I’m not literally afraid for my physical, emotional, or psychological safety, why am I so twitchy around someone else’s anger? A friend here in Brisbane talked recently about her same struggles. She said she finally had an experience where she was able to say “his anger is not mine and it is not about me and it will not hurt me. So I do not need to be afraid.”. She said it was one of those life-changing aHA moments and she’s been able to be calm in the face of anger since then.

I want to learn that. I want to learn to not be afraid of other people’s anger. I also want to be able to recognize the validity of expressing my own anger when I am not threatening someone physically, emotionally, or psychologically (which, honestly, I rarely am).

Would I have explored myself like this if I had remained in DC? Maybe, eventually, over a long time. Here, it moves higher on my priority list because I can’t help but see the effects on someone I never ever want to hurt.

Leaving home…a mirror allowing us to see ourselves when we’d really rather not. J

The White Hair Blues

As most of you know, I dyed my hair purple as a fundraiser for the leukemia and lymphoma society of Australia. Very very deep purple. I called it "beetroot" in honor of the Australian love of that veggie.

That was about a month ago. It is fading and is now a sort of brown-ish purple (actually, not a bad color) and longer, so I think it looks a lot better.

I was having a few drinks with our neighbors last week and one of the neighbors commented quite a few times (she'd also had a few more drinks than me) that it took 10 years off my looks. As I sit here looking up into the mirror above the desk where I'm writing, I agree with her. It reminds me of my natural hair color from 20 years ago (the brownish, not the purple) and I have to admit I like it.

Which is a problem for me.

I dyed my hair full-brown for a year or two in my early 30s (I started going white in my late 20s) but gave it up. It was too much trouble and too expensive. You have to really keep on top of it and I just couldn't be bothered.

And, as I explained to my neighbor, I consider dying my hair to hide the fact that it's naturally white to be an act of deception. My hair is no longer brown. It's white in front and gray in the back.

News flash for a lot of people: that's completely normal for a 50-year-old. Completely normal. You may not realize that because the bulk of 50-year-old women who have natural gray/white hair are dying it. It's also very very common for women to start graying in their 30s. Which is when most of us start dying it.

I am also....amused by the fact that I should be flattered to be told I can pass for 40. When I was 40, I was supposed to be flattered to be told I could pass for 30. So......is it a good thing or a bad thing to look like I'm 40? Oh, right, the good thing -- for a woman -- is to look like anything but what you are. What you are is never good enough.

When you're 15, you want to pass for 20.

When you're 20, you want to pass for 25.

When you're 25....well, actually, 25 is probably the one age when it's OK to look like what you are.

When you're 30, you want to look like you're 25.

When you're 40, you want to look like you're 30.

You get the picture. And that annoys me (when I'm not finding it amusing). When is it OK to the world around me for me to be what I am -- 50? I guess to the world around me, that's never OK. Do you men get this happening to you too? My assumption is this is mostly a woman's problem.

Here's the other reason I don't dye my hair brown -- at some age, it will look comical that I still have brown hair. It will be patently false. What is that age? No woman I know can tell me but they are all sure they'll know when they get there.

I think they are fooling themselves. I can all-but guarantee that they'll all go too long, unwilling or unable to recognize that they are "there".

And how do you gracefully go from youthful-brown/black/blond/red to tastefully white? From a purely technical perspective, it's gotta be damned difficult. I've never seen it done without going through an unattractive two-tone (white roots, whatever other color on top) period. Unless you want to spend a few years experimenting with dying your way to white. Too much trouble.

So why not let nature take her course now and get it over with? My hair is white rather than gray (at least in the front, which is the only part I can see so it's mostly the only part I care about). White is prettier than gray. And I've at least been trying to adopt a persona of older and wiser to go along with it. Some days, it even works.

The fact that I'm also pretty fair-skinned doesn't help, though. The white hair looks better on those rare occasions when I've got a tan but that's pretty, well, rare. My eyebrows are also now going white. I can look pretty .... white sometimes. Occasionally kinda invisible.

So, here I sit with a hair color that's tricky to replicate, and expensive, and I like it and I'm going to go back to white because it's the truth, it's what I am (in addition to cheap and lazy). But don't be surprised if, in a year or three, I show up with it purple again. Or pink. Or blue. Or green.....