Pancakes Taste Like Poverty: And Other Post-Divorce Revelations (26 page)

I know it isn't true. But among ladies it
feels
like
you
can't be pretty
and
smart
and
approachable. It feels like you always have to
choose two. You can be pretty and smart, but you'll be intimidating
and alienate people. You can be smart and approachable, but probably
because you're not
too
pretty. Or you can be pretty and
approachable because other people think they're smarter than you.
I
know, intellectually, this isn't true. I can name lots of women who
are smart, pretty and approachable. But something deep in me sort of
thinks that won't apply to me.

I feel like I've been performing. I've been zany
and goofy and a loose cannon and brash and tell-it-like-it-is as a
technique for disarming people. All of that
is
a part of me
but I feel like I crank it up when I meet new people so they
know
I'm down-to-Earth right away.

I hide behind this blog because I can just say
what I want to say and say what's real and true without having to
make you comfortable first. I live online to reveal the real me with
all the thoughts and feelings and flaws and grump. I can't count how
many female friends said to me, back in the pretty days, "You
know, when I first met you I thought you'd be stuck up because you're
pretty but you're actually really cool."

Uh....

Well, shit.

So I act like a bumbling fart of a person to just
get the disarming part over and done with so we can get to being
friends. I exaggerate my ogre-ness in order to cut straight to
getting real. How's that for backwards?

But back then, when I
was
"pretty"
I did it by being vulgar and brash. Now I do it by being chubby and
having Beetlejuice hair. I keep weight on because chubby black women
are associated with warmth and wisdom. I keep it on because it keeps
men away. I keep it on because it helps me avoid thinking about all
of
this
.

It's baffling, when I step outside myself, how
something so innocuous and out of my control creates so much shame
and guilt and fear.
I feel shame because I feel like attention
for being pretty is attention I don't deserve. I didn't
do
anything. It's not an accomplishment.

I feel guilt because I feel like I should embrace
and enjoy it and make the most of it. Like I won't be 31 forever and
I'm a young looking 31. I should probably appreciate it more.

I feel fear most of all, though. Attention from
men straight up paralyzes me. I am afraid of men. Genuinely. And as
long as I am fat and nappy-haired they pretty much leave me alone and
I don't have to deal with them.
Some of the most painful things
I've experienced have been a direct result of my being attractive and
appealing
,
and not having
the words or framework to create a clear boundary. Almost all the
painful things, actually.

I'm fighting a hard-wired, visceral, PTSD-like
fear. And it's real. I feel it in my body. My throat closes and my
chest feels tight. It's not some random tape I've just gotten used to
believing. It's a real, live demon. My means of defense - aside from
being fat and fuzzy - has been kind of acting like a "bro"
when I meet guys.

Typically, they only see that side of me. The
bawdy nerd in shlumpy baggy clothes. I
am
a bawdy nerd. But
I'm
also
a total softie romantic and really malleable and
snuggly and sweet and bubbly.

I wouldn't dare let any of
them
know
that. I'm way too scared and, based on results, I have no reason
not
to be.

I know that at some point my desire to feel love
will have to overcome my fear
,
and I hate that dealing with this shit is probably the first step to
getting there.

Ugh...

I was high on dealing with my issues for a while
and took a big break and felt like "Welp I'm all done making
myself a better person" and meanwhile My Personal Vulnerability
Issues were tapping me on the shoulder and saying *ahem* "I'll
just be sitting over here when you're ready."

Well, I'm not ready, but I think the random woman
I met is serving as a catalyst from the Universe. So here
this
shit goes.

Selfies

I've been taking a lot
of selfies lately to get myself used to my face and to see what my
face does when I'm not distorting it.
It's like exposure
therapy.
I know it's commonly perceived as being egotistical, but
I kind of need it right now so I can just get comfortable with how I
look.
I'm not thin anymore. I look the way I look. And it's
okay.
Santa – December
2013

These struggles and my writing have connected me
with brilliant bold women across the country. And right now, just for
shiggles, we are all playing Santa.
This isn't a soul-opening
piece. This is just about friendship and commonality and community.

I've been friends, both virtual and in-person,
with a group of women from around the world. Some are married, some
are single, some are single moms. But all are giving, open-minded,
honest, respectful and emotionally mature and willing to grow. They
have become one of the only soft places I have to land.

Usually we just gather online to vent about
ex-husbands, children, boyfriends or talk movies or feminism or share
pics of hot men. But we decided to do something amazing. We are
playing Secret Santa.

So this year while some of us are painting on
smiles for our children, or some of us are bullied by in-laws, or
some of us are painfully single we have something to look forward to
- some small connective love token from a soul sister miles away.

Some of us have never even met but we are sending
boxes of love across hundreds or thousands of miles for each other.

I got my secret Santa assignment and can't wait
to find or make a special gift for her.

This weekend was particularly rough mentally for
me so to have solace in a group of women who aren't using me as their
token wise black woman, who challenge me and help me grow means more
than the world to me.

I spent the morning having stress-related chest
pains and, with my Santa assignment, get to end my day with a smiling
heart.

Candyman

You came by
and I made you something sweet. That does not mean I’m a
candyman.
Something strange happened recently as a result of my
blog and I’m going to try my best to express how it makes me
feel.

So in recent weeks a lot lot LOT of people have
called me for advice or support. Most of these people only know me
through virtual means through the blog or through Facebook. One woman
in particular came to me for some advice about her life and I gave it
to her. She didn’t like it and proceeded to call me a fraud for
my “love and light” image that she felt was apparently
false.

Mmmk, let’s just get something straight
while we’re all here.

I have always written for
me
. My marriage,
my divorce, my kids and I were on fire. I had nowhere to put my
feelings so I started a blog and put my them into the ether so that
they were out of my body. I chose a public forum because a friend of
mine had a blog after her divorce and reading about
her
experiences made me feel less alone. That is the most I hoped for my
blog.

What I did
not
intend was to become is a
life coach.

I feel like some people find some blog posts
particularly wise and then they say “oh wow, Jessica Vivian is
a wise woman and she’s brown and that feels like a hug. I will
seek her out any time I need strength and comfort”

But I’m just a person with my own wagon of
nonsense to pull. Jenn helped me work it out in metaphor and because
I love metaphors I’ll share it now:

So let’s say I’m just a little chef
in a meat pie shop making delicious meat pies every day. Then one day
a customer comes in while I just
happen
to be making myself
some candy because I’ve had a crap day and I need some.
I
decide to share some of the candy with the customer and the customer
leaves and, despite having walked into a
meat pie
shop,
assumes I’m a candyman.

This person goes and tells all her friends how
great the candy shop is and just dreams about how great the candy is.
As far as the customer is concerned I am Willy fucking Wonka.

So the customer comes back with money in hand to
buy some candy.

But I don’t have any because I’m a
chef who makes meat pies. The meat pies are great. But the customer
is
angry
at me for not selling her some candy.

That
is what I’ve been dealing with.
People who choose to elevate me to Sensei levels who are
angry
with me when I’m not the ever-available “Mother Earth of
Wisdom” that they needed. Or I’m too contradictory and it
annoys them. A sad side product of being open-minded enough to be
willing to change your opinion when new evidence presents itself is
that you always look wishy-washy. My words are scanned and I am
appointed to positions and put into boxes without my consent by
people I do not know.

On
their
end, through reading all my
thoughts, they feel a closeness that I don’t get to feel on my
end. But they forget that.

So some near-
stranger
will
want me, their personal Jiminy Cricket,
to coach them through
their relationship problems and when I am not as funny or warm or
maternal or wise or as they expected they get angry.

Angry.
And
go rant on their Facebook statuses about how mean I am.

Je ne comprends pas.

But there is a lot about humans I “ne
comprends pas” so I’ll just keep making my meat pies
because they are savory and delicious and fulfilling to
me
and
I’ll even keep sharing my candy. And the next time some angry
woman gets my job confused I will shove a meat pie into her entitled
face.

The Groom

This
is a cautionary tale about a predator, but not the kind of predator
you think.
As a single mom, I am well-versed in the methodology
of sexual predators. I am hyper-aware of the act of grooming.

For those who don’t have children, grooming
is the act of taking specific action to establish closeness, trust
and emotional connection with someone to make it easier to abuse that
person. But I generally thought, as I think many women do, that
grooming was an act that was reserved for sexual predators only.

I never, ever believed or was trained to believe
that it was possible to be groomed by a friend and yet, that is
exactly what me and about forty other women recently experienced.

I have written before about my Facebook group.

Originally, I was in a Facebook group for single
parents.
We lamented our single-ness but, more importantly, we
saved each other’s asses.

There was one member, however, who caused the
hairs on everyone’s neck to stand up and whose histrionic
episodes caused the group to implode.
I refused to let that stop
me from giving love.

After struggling so much in the beginning of my
single parent journey I vowed to myself that NO woman or man
connected to me, who is a single parent, would struggle so
needlessly. I would find a way to soften the blow.

So I started
another
group on Facebook and
the love and goodwill started anew.

There was one member in particular, however, who
raised the hairs on the back of my neck the same way the other woman
(who I’d recently friend-divorced) did.

She was so sweet and seemed so fragile. I’d
never met her, in real life, but she seemed to really see something
in me that she needed. She called me her “machete mama,”
a reference to when I wrote about how single parents are like
castaways on a deserted island hacking their way through the jungle.
Someone’s up front, with a machete, cutting down brush and
clearing a path. I guess, in her mind, that was me. And while that
title felt burdensome, I didn’t mind being someone’s
champion.

I never mind.

Which makes me the perfect magnet for personality
disorders.

But despite this sweet, idyllic long-distance
friendship there
were
things that, for lack of a better
term, skeeved me out.

She told me she loved me often, which was creepy.
Despite having the group to share in, she would always text me
directly with her problems, which felt like an invasion into my life
and space. She planned a trip to stay at my home despite us having
never met. We did video chat once, which was nice, but she was oddly
familiar with me during our chat. At one point she panned the
computer and was not wearing pants. She responded with a casual
“whoops.”

She wanted to video chat because she needed
advice on whether or not to involve herself in the criminal
prosecution of her former rapist. She also shared with me the details
of said rape, which was possibly the second most horrifying rape
story I’ve ever heard, with a kind of detached casualness that
I found odd.

But, I’ve never been raped so I thought
maybe it was some sort of normal dissociation that happened with rape
victims.

Anyway, a few days before Christmas I received a
text that she’d been raped again by the same guy. Her story was
that he’d found out she’d been involved in this whole
legal rape case and singled her out and punished her by raping her
again. She sent me a picture of the choke marks and bruises around
her neck.

Naturally, I was in a panic.

But I was very confused as to why she
just
told me.

I thought, if she is in real pain or danger why
wouldn’t she call on the emotional support of the
entire
fifty-woman group?