Alone but not lonely

As the year creeps to its inevitable close, I have been feeling very lonely. I had hoped by this point, there would be someone in my life to share my life with, even if it’s just a Saturday night at a time. Someone to hold me and love me and… yada, yada, yada. I’ve been wading in self-pity - not yet wallowing but that was coming soon. Bemoaning the lack of love in my life, whining about not having someone special. Yikes. How could you all stand me?!

The past few days have shown me otherwise.

Simple gifts of grace have touched me in small and silly and wide and wild ways.

First, my new Buddhist family (Soka Gakkai International) have embraced me and made me feel so very welcome. From the simplest thing - Christine lending me a book about the Lotus Sutra, which I was trying to rush through to return to her and then her telling me that it was a gift and to keep it; the way that I was greeted when I walked into the meeting this week, like an old friend; Brad lending me a really great magazine on how to start this whole new adventure, which, again, I thought I needed to return and he generously gave to me. Silly, I know, but those little gifts mean a lot.

And the simple generosity of the kids I teach. Many hugs, much praise for how much they love me as a teacher. As much as I wish I made more money, nothing pays you back for your work than the look of pride on a nine-year-old’s face as she puts her heart into a Sisley duplication and she knows that she’s making a masterpiece. The smiles on my students’ faces today as we painted and draw and colored and played cannot be cashed but it made me feel like the richest woman on earth.

The gift of my beautiful, talented, brilliant cast on “The Jamb”. I know I say this about many of my projects lately but, to me, it just shows that I am making better choices, not only about what I direct, but where and with whom. These actors and crew fill me with pride and passion whenever we’re together. Half the time, we end up just hanging and talking after (and occasionally during) rehearsals. There is this sense of not wanting to leave because what we’re doing is wondrous and pleasurable. They make me feel loved.

And then, out of the blue, the simple generosity of someone who I am not very close to brought me to tears. She knows of my financial struggles and my family struggles and tonight, she gave me an envelope, saying merry Christmas. I opened it later and was stunned to find $50 in the envelope and a beautiful, touching note about how she had been thinking of me since we had a discussion a while ago about how I couldn’t pay my bills and about my family and so many other things and how she felt compelled to help me. Her gift will allow me to actually drive to work this week (I am teaching a lot this week and have to drive probably twice as much) without watching the gas gauge and trying to figure out how to sell a kidney to get to work. I can buy a few groceries. I could even treat myself to drive-through as I head between studios tomorrow, working a 12 hour day. She may never know how deeply her gift touched me, I think mostly because it was so unexpected.

So in this moment, this hour, this day, I feel surrounded by protective forces, which is part of what my journey into Buddhism is about. I am blessed with incredible friends, both close ones (Monica, Beth, Brad, Kerr, Zadra, of course, and so many more I can’t even list) and those not so close. I am blessed with a fascinating journey of discovery through SGI and Buddhism. Not sure where it will go but I’m certainly enjoying the scenery. Blessed by being a member of a company like Eclectic Company Theatre, where my talents are appreciated and supported and fed.

I may not be close to my family but I have an amazing family here. I don’t promise I’ll remember this tomorrow when I wake up and things may be ridiculously wrong again, but, for now, I am alone but not lonely.

Tough fit

I am 47 going on 25.

I don’t want to dress like Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep.

I am not a cougar. I have no desire to date a 25-year-old, despite the fact that I feel like a 25-year-old.

I want to wear styles that are featured in the junior’s department. I just would like longer sleeves to cover my upper arms and maybe a little longer cut to cover my slightly pudgy belly. But otherwise, I like the curvy cuts of those t-shirts, as opposed to the t-shirt cuts of what a woman my age should wear.

I can’t read another self-help book. “Eat, Love, Pray” got thrown across the room due to its ridiculously unrealistic, unrelatable, totally fantasy approach to mid-life. Mine isn’t being spent running around the world, trying to find myself while living lavishly, with more money than God, apparently. I found myself. That’s why I left my marriage. I don’t need to go and explore and find me. I’m right here. So don’t tell me what to eat, how to love and how to pray. Tell me how to pay my rent and how to re-start a life practically. Tell me how to go back to where I was when I met him and before I threw away my life on him. Tell me how to reconnect with that misfit 25-year-old that seems to have reared her beautifully coiffed head in my heart.

I can’t see another Nora Ephron, Nancy Myers mid-life movie. Yes, I admire these women greatly and I know they have paved the way for women like me who want to make movies. I love their sense of humor and how they stick to their guns. But I won’t be putting my $6-$12 down to see “It’s Complicated”, despite being the ideal demographic for it. Why? Because I just can’t relate to those women, those films.

In my head, I’m 25 again. I remember being this excited about life at 25. I remember looking forward to the next 25 years of my life. These books, these movies about these women have them looking back at the last 25 years of their life and trying to justify it. They never really seem to look forward at their lives unless there is a man they’ve found to save them from being alone at 48 and having to spend the next 25 years trying to figure out how to live without a man.

At 25, I thought I would never love again. I had determined that I would be single the rest of my life because I would never love anyone as much as I loved TS. And I still hold that true. That first love is the purest, most powerful love you can ever have in your life. And I’m not sure much can top that.

But maybe at 48, after having two failed marriages, maybe I can find that love again, that pure love, that “first” love. However, the entire focus of my life isn’t searching for that love. Yes, I want it. Yes, I am so incredibly, ridiculously lonely some nights that I can barely stand it. Yes, that leads me to unceremoniously throw my heart in front of the proverbial romance bus and get it run over. But my life isn’t hollow and meaningless and empty because there isn’t a man in it. My life is full and blessed and beautiful, maybe because there isn’t a man in it that can fuck it up.

Let’s talk about the men in my life for a moment. I have been lucky to have had some amazing men in my life over the past four and a half years. Some of them have left me behind as they’ve moved on in their own adventures. And that makes me sad. I miss them so very much - my dearest Chairman (probably miss him the most), AJ, Peter. They saved my life when I was first on my own. I guess that was their purpose - catch me before I fell and made sure I landed on my feet. I still love them so very, very much, even though they are so far away, even in the same city. And I always will.

There are new men in my life. Ranger Smith. I smile every time I think of him. He loves me, regardless of being married and having a beautiful daughter. He still loves me. He makes me feel like a billion dollars. He is a walking hug on two feet, that man. Ranger. Hehehehehe… Kerr, who has been an amazing friend and collaborator. Almost as ambitious as me, totally ready to jump off the cliff creatively with me. Talented, funny, twisted, the best kind of man. Brad. Wow. Brad. Possibly the most talented actor I have ever worked with. Now that’s saying a lot. Facile with his talent, generous with it to everyone he works with. Powerful, delicate, exquisite. And that’s just his acting. Beautiful man, inside and out. I wish I could order one of him on HSN and have him delivered to my door.

I will probably always have great men in my life because I love great, talented, brilliant men. I won’t lack for male company as I have always had great male friends. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel the need to go all Diane Ephron Meyers Lane Keaton on my life. I don’t “need” a man to make me complete because I have so many around me who make me complete without making me crazy. Okay, so maybe one or two make me crazy in different ways. But mostly, these men fill so many emotional gaps that I don’t have to spend my time and energy trying to find someone who makes me feel beautiful and talented and amazing and funny and smart and sexy and brilliant.

Okay, sorry, sidetracked by the men. Always happens.

Most of the people I hang around with now are at least ten years my junior. A few are a bit less, but most are around 35. I don’t think I have a single close friend here that is my age.

Maybe because I don’t know what my age is. Or what it’s supposed to be. Or I am defying what it’s supposed to be.

I don’t want to wear baggy, bland, boring clothes and spend the next 25 years sitting around, waiting for someone. I don’t want to be a soccer mom, yet I am so terribly, desperately regretful that I never was able to have children. My biggest, hugest, worst regret ever. Although I guess God didn’t want it to happen. And it’s probably for good reasons. And I don’t know how I would fit in with soccer moms anyway. The mothers of the kids I teach sometimes confound me with their lives. Is it wrong that I think a 45-year-old woman should not be as caught up in “Twilight” as the tweens I teach are?

Yeah, I can’t do “Twilight” or “New Moon” or whatever drivel they’re coming up with next. I can, however, do “Sherlock Holmes” and “Iron Man 2”.

I now drive a killer blue convertible. I guess it’s required for mid-life, although it’s not red and it’s sexy and adorable and perfect. Bette Blue. Love her to death.

I am often mistaken for anywhere from 28 to 38 but never, ever, ever 48, which I’ll be in four months. I had a Mary Kay consultant inform me that her $150 cleanser set would make me ten years younger and I kind of laughed in her face. She thought I was 35. Thank you, $6 Oil of Olay.

So what’s the point of this?

The point is that, while I love my life and it’s beautiful and amazing and incredible, I still don’t know where I fit in.

No, wait, I do.

I fit in when I’m in the director’s chair, figuratively. Driving to rehearsal for “The Jamb”, the new play I’m directing (check out http://www.eclecticcompanytheatre.org for more info) with the aforementioned Kerr and Brad, I realized that, maybe more than anywhere and any time in my life, directing is where I belong, where I fit in. I have grown into the director that I’ve always wanted to be. I no longer really second guess myself when I’m working on a project. The work gets deeper, as does the pleasure of doing the work. When I’m doing a show, all I want to do is that show. I hate that I have to go to work and actually stop working on the show while I do the pay-the-rent thing.

I looked in the rearview tonight as I was thinking about this and I liked the woman who looked back at me. She was someone who didn’t care if she fit in because she couldn’t be fit into a box. She doesn’t belong anywhere yet she belongs everywhere. She doesn’t care who’s around her, as long as they’re funny, smart, talented and just plain good humans. She loves her car, her dark hair, her twisted sensibilities. She embraces her quirkiness and her masculine/feminine struggle -- actually, she doesn’t struggle. She knows who she is and it doesn’t matter what anyone else sees.

And that’s the fit. I love standing in that woman’s shoes. I love the way that feels. I love the way the men in my life look at me when I’m in those shoes, in that place.

That’s where I fit. That’s where I belong.

How does that apply to the rest of my life? I don’t really know. All I know is that as long as I’m growing and working and creating as a director, I will be happy. The real me, the woman in the mirror, lives for that state. And as I learn to be comfortable in those shoes and not really care whether they’re in style or not, then it will no longer matter if I fit in because there will be no “in” to fit into. There will just be me, with my beautiful boots, my boot cut jeans, my men’s shirt and my long dark hair standing here, standing now, making my own space to fit me.

As best we can

You loved me the best you could. I see the evidence of that occasionally. The little porcelain boxes I unpacked today showed me that you loved me as best you could. The overflowing basket of flowers that I threw away when we left the apartment that last time showed me that you loved me as best you could.

Looking through the photos as I moved them showed me that we did the best we could. We tried to be happy. We tried to do what was right, what was expected. We smiled when we thought we should and we put the face on that people wanted to see.

We lived through our struggles and we tried to get through as best we could. We tried to talk, we tried to laugh, we tried to live as best we could.

I loved you as best I could. I tried to be what I thought you wanted me to be and tried not to feel the pain that doing that cost me. I tried to perform as your wife as best I could. I hope you see that in the moments, in the times when something brings on the memories, the echoes of our life. I hope you can see that I loved you as best I could.

But the best we could wasn’t enough. We were missing the tools, the power, the… something. Something that could help us not hurt each other. Something that could protect our hearts as we struggled to find our way through the hard times. Something that we could use to get us through the “as best we could” times and get us to the other side of that. Our families, who did the best they could, left us without the ways to fill in the holes, fill in the blanks, and understand how not to destroy that tenuous, delicate, fragile thing that love is.

And now…

We live as best we can.