Odd Inspiration

Every morning I scramble up three egg whites as a part of my healthy breakfast. Sometimes I add a little goat cheese. Occasionally a handful or two of arugula. Or, if I’m feeling particularly adventurous at 5:35 in the morning—once every five years or so—I’ll sautee some mushrooms and onions and make a sort of egg-white-goat-cheese-scrambled-omlette-goodness. And, although I still sometimes freak out that they are actually unborn chicken babies, I have to say, man, are they delicious. These little incredibly edible eggs stabilize me for the morning, giving me stamina to remain calm in the face of my classroom full of pre-teens, stabilizing my blood-sugar to avoid any unpredictable spikes in my frustration levels.

Recently, I have discovered that more inspiration lies in these perfectly-packaged little gems than I first thought. In fact, they have recently taught me two very valuable life-lessons.

As I told you in my last post, I had been walking around in a new pair of shoes, purchased from online, for the past six weeks. A sort of Birkenstock-y pair—comfortable but not quite in style; sensible, but not quite inspiring. And I also told you that that pair had felt a little off on our last date. A little hard to wear. A little snug on the swollen feet of my swollen hope.

Well, dammit all, if my intuition wasn’t right. As an aside, I really hate it when my intuition is right. I really wish that I could tell you that every time I’ve felt that something’s-just-not-right-here lump in my belly that it was the worry-wart in me just over-reacting. Just being overly cautious before my jump out of the Just-in-the-Liking-Phase plane and into the stomach-spinning, death-defying Tumble of Love. But, alas, every time in my dating life—every single time—it has been right. That little voice. Whispering at me from within my gut. “He’s distant, Heather. He’s changed. Too bad you already jumped,” it sniggers. “I told you to keep your parachute on. I told you to count to ten, stupid girl. Time to prepare for the crash-landing.”

My phone has not displayed his name in over a week. He left me last Saturday night with an “I had fun; I’ll call you” and an uncomfortable feeling in my belly.

I think it was Albert Einstein who once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. As a physicist, I’m not really sure what expertise Einstein had in the mental health field, but, to a certain degree, I agree with him. And the only part of my life that feels insane is my love life. I feel like I am constantly butting my head up against a brick wall, only to find that my head, although strong and heavy with a beautifully sharp—if I do say so myself—brain, is not in fact strong enough to shatter mortared block. Instead, my beautiful brain gets bruised. Bruised by the confusion of having one expectation only to find that the actuality is vastly different than what I had assumed.

These men are not falling for me as I am falling for them. And, even though they are casting out nets of affection and catching me in them, those nets are not nets with which they are looking for ever-lasting companionship; they are holey nets with which they are catching temporary food. Silly little tuna me swims willingly into the trap. My brain now made pea-sized by the school of other woman with whom I swim. All of us, a mass huddled together, seeking the same ending.

Back to Einstein. This disappearance of the latest in a line of six-to-eight-weekers has forced me to stop and think. Stop dead in my dating tracks. I have stopped to think about the patterns I have either created or allowed myself to be part of. And so my egg-inspired realization hit me. At various points in these dating relationships, mostly when I sense the pulling back, the retreat into the distance cave, I find myself scrambling. I scramble to get their attention back. This scrambling can take the form of one too many text messages or a too-soon-after-a-date phone call or an extra kiss on the cheek or a home-cooked salmon dinner or a “hey, let me get the bill this time”… oh, how embarrassing it is to unearth my list of scramblings. My list of doing too much to prove I am worth it. How pathetic I must appear to these fishermen as I flit my fins in their nets! Now, before you call me and tell me that I am not at all pathetic, that I am a wonderful person, and those stupid dating games are just stupid games, save your cell minutes. I know all of this. Truly, I do know that I am a lovely, smart, successful woman. But I also know that something is amiss. This pattern of my scrambling stymies any chance at love because it does not allow me to be me—the beautiful, sassy, confident me—the me who looks as smooth and miraculous as a not-yet-cracked egg. What they are left to see instead is the slimy scramble. The muddied me, no longer pure white and marigold yellow.

And, so, I salute you, eggs. I salute you for teaching me valuable life-lesson number one. No longer will I scramble after these men. Scrambling is for eggs, not for women. I am better than that. Heck, it’s about time they do some scrambling for me.

The second, and perhaps more important and maybe even more embarrassing lesson that I’ve learned about eggs comes not from the eggs we eat, but the eggs that make new ones of us—the eggs that live in women’s ovaries and threaten to dry up before those of us who are still single in our mid-to-late thirties find love. I think I speak for all of us who thought we would be moms by now—who would have laughed at you if, ten years ago, you would have told us we wouldn’t have kids yet—when I say this sucks. It sometimes feels like I, like we, the non-moms who want to be moms, are stuck on a carousel. We ride this carousel around and around and around. Meanwhile, the other women in our lives move forward, not in circles. They bear children; they raise them; they love them. Yes, they struggle and they envy the ease of my life. But the truth is that they have done it. They have been part of a miracle. I can honestly say that I do not begrudge them their happiness. I would not wish for any of them to have any different situation. And I truly feel great joy for them. I really do. But here I am. Strapped to my stationary but spinning horse. Circus music playing. But I am not giggling like I did as a girl…

…until I think of Peggy Bundy. Yes, the Peggy Bundy from “”Married with Children”. Well, not really Peggy but the woman who played her, Katy Segal. Much to my mother’s chagrin, I loved that show when I was in middle and high school. Although compared to today’s television where people can say the word “bitch” without the suited-censors even batting a wrinkled eye, that show was raunchy. And I loved it. I loved its pushing of the envelope. What does this have to do with eggs and babies, you ask?

Well, for those of you who know me, you know that I have Muscular Dystrophy. And, although it is a mild form and I am stronger than anyone expected me to be, and many who first meet me have no idea, it still makes being pregnant after thirty-five dangerous. And so you can imagine the hammering of my biological clock. It pounds in my ears. In the background, something ghoulish laughs. It taunts.

And yet, I don’t want to get married just to have babies. Married life and motherhood are hard enough as it is.

I want to get married for love. And I want to have babies for the same reason. So, I’ve kind of thought that maybe it’s time to retire the dream of having a family of my own. Maybe it’s just not meant to be. Maybe the over sixteen hundred, and counting, students that I’ve taught are enough youth for me to influence…

But Peggy Bundy begs to differ. I recently watched an interview with her on “Chelsea Lately”. In the interview, she revealed that she recently had a baby via surrogacy. And she’s fifty-three. Fifty-three. And the egg was hers!!

And so, I salute you, eggs and Peg Bundy, for giving me the inspiration to sit back and relax. For telling me to hold my horses already. And even for inspiring in me the realization that perhaps motherhood is not in my cards, but that I am worth far too much waste my time with worry. Far too much to scramble myself into something that even I don’t recognize.

Goodbye, most recent pair of shoes. And even though you were the one who stopped contact, I have deftly maneuvered from your emotional straps and am off in search of new adventure, in search of a new pair of shoes without so many dang uncertainties.

The Joys and Headaches of Shoe Shopping

I, like most women, love to shop. Especially for shoes. What I love most about shoe shopping is that feeling of possibility. You know, that moment when you have in your hand a brand new pair. The shoes. The ones that will finally bring you happiness. The ones that will make you feel eternally sexy. The ones that will bring endless compliments. The ones that will hug your darling feet and make them feel like they are the most special, safe feet in the world.

Sometimes they really do fulfill the hope. They really do go above and beyond normal shoe duties and give that extra bounce in the step, that extra inch in the posture of one’s pride.

More often than not, though, I realize that those magical slippers don’t really exist. Instead, they gnaw at my heels and give me blisters. They get all scuffed up and stretched out. They slop around on my feet and lose their style. I see them out with other people, happily hugging their feet, making them look lovelier than they do mine. And I am left disappointed. Feeling like I made the wrong choice. Like I should have chosen the other pair. And so I go back to the shoe department and look out at the mass of possibilities. All auditioning to be mine. To be my perfect next pair. And sometimes, at the belly of my belly, I feel a wrenching. What if I choose wrong again? What if I choose the wrong leading pair? And I’m hurt and disappointed again. Maybe it’s just safer to stare at all of the pairs. Just stare and not choose.

And so it goes in online dating. I swear, it’s like keeping a bottle of whiskey next to your gas stove. Filled with beautiful possibilities—whiskey-flavored BBQ sauce, a pre-dinner belly-warmer, a splash of a little somethin’-somethin’ in the mushroom cream sauce—and yet inherently so dangerous. Too keep such a flammable substance so close to the flame.

For those of you who have never perused an online dating site like the popular one that promises you find someone in six months or you get your money back (I’ve got my eye on you, Match), it’s quite a sight. After logging on, all of the faces of those with whom you’ve communicated pop up on the screen. There they are—smiling faces inviting trust, catch phrases that so desperately try to avoid the cheese-factor that they are even more cheesy than if they’d just owned it already, and the time frame during which the person was last active. Oh, yes. You can spy. You’re almost encouraged to do it. To see if the pairs of shoes you’ve tried on, in fact, aren’t quite sure if you’re the right feet for them yet. To know whether or not they’ve returned to the store to see if perhaps there’s a prettier, sexier, more comfortable set. And, Dios mio, there are so many beautiful ones. Every time I log on, I wonder at the plethora of beautiful faces. All so sunshine-y and filled with hope and promise.

Dear readers, I have been trying out a new pair of shoes lately. They’ve been auditioning for six weeks now. By no means are they glamorous. But they are comfy. They are dependable. And simple. And they are, for the most part, far more loving and affectionate than any shoes I’ve owned lately. They felt instantly broken-in.

And yet, I’m afraid they are breaking-in in reverse. And they are setting my nerves a-flutter. I am not used to shoes getting less comfortable. That is anti-shoe behavior.

You see, this new pair and I had a date last night. And they just felt different. Not quite so easy to slip on. My heel snagged just a little and I found myself manipulating the toes to try to get them to stretch out and let me in. And, even though I squeezed my foot in and they relaxed around it, they were different. I didn’t want them to be. And yet, there it was, that knowledge that perhaps these oh-so-comfy shoes no longer wanted to be my pair. Perhaps they wanted to go back to the auditioning room. Because of the online set up of how I met these shoes, I know that they are still looking. Seemingly, they are active every day. Naturally, this nagging knowledge wedges itself into my actions and I’m left to wonder: is it the shoes that shift or is it my knowledge of their continued auditions that make me change around them?

And so, here is the curse of online dating. There are so many possibilities that I think it’s hard, especially for men, to settle on just one woman. And the double curse is that you can find out if they’re still looking. And it’s hard to stay confident when you know that their feelers are still out, sizing you up against all the others.

I guess my gut says to stick it out with this one. Every couple’s story is different, after all. Who knows—maybe it’s better this way. In all honesty, I have been on a couple of dates within these past six weeks and it kind of reminds me of the reverse fading of that favorite pair of black shoes. You know, how you never realize how faded your old black shoes are until you buy brand new ones? And, next to the new ones, the old ones look all scratched up and faded. Quite the opposite has happened with me recently. These brand new ones have only been making my original, six-week-old pair shinier. More authentic. More right.

I guess I can only hope that he’s experiencing the same thing. And I guess it’s in this process that I have to hope that for me and whomever I end up with, that we will find out through trying others on that we are the pair that might not make all of each other’s dreams come true, might not erase all of the pains of real life, but will certainly make each other feel supported as we journey along.