memorial day

I wonder if I'll ever stop being surprised: Surprised that, no, I cannot just keep living my life the same way, no matter how productive I am, if no one is paying me. That, yes, the boy from when I was seven and the boy from when I was twenty-seven and my sorority great-grand little sister (or something) all got married in the same weekend. That the people I was surprised to see get facebook-divorced are engaged again. Surprised that my friends were trying to talk us into what was not necessarily a scheme but was, undoubtedly, a pyramid. That I can stay calm enough to actually be helpful when my baby brother calls from the Caribbean to tell me he is throwing up blood and on the way to the hospital (and that my credit limit might have actually been helpful, if it had come to that). Surprised to find out in a single day that two of my friends-- real friends, college friends-- are having babies soon (one on purpose, and both very excited).

I wonder when I'll stop being surprised to be a grownup.

We took off. We escaped to the beach with a swimsuit under my clothes and a tent and a cooler and sunscreen and all the things to make s'mores. We were going to camp, though it wouldn't really have been roughing it to sleep in the back yard of a house we had all to ourselves and I'm not sure it counts as camping when you've got a kitchen and two bathrooms and a washer and dryer and a television and a piano. But I got a cold, and we slept inside and that was fine, too. It was good to get away for a few days.

~b

happy

I could hear his heartbeat, with my head on his chest, watching Veronica Mars. The gentle scents of fresh paint and reheated stewed okra mingled in the air. . . . Whose life is this? So far away from where I was a year ago. Everything is different from two years ago. But this is how we spent our Sunday-- one year and 363 days after the Sunday we first met-- after we painted our new bookcase.

For all my falling apart lately, some days our life feels like a movie montage or a commercial for a home improvement store. How do I look playing one half of a Young and Happy Couple? I've been experimenting with new ways to braid my hair.

~b

is this being a grown up?

Living with a boy is the weirdest. There are some questions I've just stopped asking because I either know the answer or there is just no good answer:

How could you forget that we have two brushes specifically for the bathtub?

Do you want to watch this David Tutera wedding show?

Do my arms look chubby?

Remember that episode of Sex and the City?

Why was there a copy of the New Yorker and a strawberry-banana yogurt on the lid of the toilet when I came home?

Are we keeping this snake thing preserved in a bottle of liquid?

Do you want to have sex?

~beatrix

Doubles

"Being two people is harder than just being one person. Being with someone is harder than being alone."

I regret the words. We were in the car in a tunnel, and I was still twitching with the anxiety of my first freelance job, which had been over for approximately fifteen minutes.

It's not true. Being alone is hard and there's no one to put the extra sheets on the high shelf or listen to my bougie problems (like, seriously, who puts coffee in styrofoam cups that are squishy and spill-y) or pay the bills when I quit my job. He's so much to me; I don't want to not keep up my end of this bargain.

I've never been much of a team player. Selfish has always been my way of life. But I'm working on it. I am working on being an us.

~beatrix

is nothing sacred anymore?

I had the best idea. Me and the boy could get civil unioned and then we could share insurance without having to get married for boring, practical reasons. Getting courthouse married would also mean either keeping it a secret from our parents or making them really angry at us for ruining the fun party part of it. And we could still get married later and get presents. And it just makes sense as I’m pretty sure we are civil unioned in practice.

As a special bonus, civil unions in New York are a bargain-- only $35.

I am brilliant. Brilliant.

Except.

The boy’s work doesn’t count civil unions unless they are between same-sex couples. So one of us would have to have a sex change to make it work and that probably costs more than insurance and I wonder if his insurance covers that because then it would have to be him and I’m not really sexually attracted to women (it’s this catch-22 situation I can elaborate upon later) and I don’t think he’d agree to it anyway. . . .

So at any rate, we can’t share insurance because we are straight.

(I mean, please don’t think I’m some awful person. I realize we have the right to get married which is cool, and I think we all deserve that. But right now I’m just pretty sure that we all deserve the rights that come from marriages or civil unions because that would mean that my plan had not been totally thwarted.)


~beatrix

unromantic

Quitting my job means quitting my insurance.

My boy’s boss has a wife. The wife is from Portugal. They got court-house married because that one piece of paper saved them from so, so many more.

It’s easy to get married. In New York, it costs $40. Forty dollars is such a deal on insurance for forever.

I can’t believe we are having this conversation. But it makes sense, and we wouldn’t even have to tell anyone. It seems like a good idea for about ninety seconds until we realize that it is just too practical.

~beatrix

let's go for a swim

I became a freelancer.

*****************

I have a cousin, Lillian, who is my opposite, not just because she has fair, straight hair and brown eyes and freckles, but because of. . . everything. She perms her bangs. She was practically born wearing sensible shoes. When she was 14, her dream car was a minivan. While the boy cousins and I spent our summer nights catching milk jugs full of tree frogs and playing sardines in the dark, she was probably watching The Sound of Music again. She played with dolls until. . . . Actually I’m not sure she ever stopped.

Lillian is a teacher for 4-year-olds. She’s slightly overweight and is married to a very overweight man and they have two obscenely overweight dogs and they all sit around and watch NASCAR. She eats fast food and posts inappropriately personal things on Facebook. She lives in the same small town she always has, in her husband’s house where she moved from her parent’s house when she got married.

I loved to dive when I was little: stretched out full and eyes wide open, even off the high diving board at swimming lessons. Lillian, though, with her goggles on tight and her nose held and her little toothpick jumps, still got nosebleeds in the pool about once a week.

And once, when she thought I was still under water, I heard her say, “I wish we could all be as brave as Beatrix.”

****************

I became a freelancer, which is to say that I quit my job.

It was a brave thing to do, I think, but it’s a fine line. What if we take a dive off the highest cliff, not because we aren’t afraid of the water below, but because we are terrified of what might be up there with us?


~beatrix

29 or the revolt

I think they’re on to us.

They use to be so content-- blissfully unaware in their drug-induced stupor, emerging only one week out of four into a zombie-half-wakefulness, begging for chocolate, Google-ing puppies in baskets, and occasionally making me cry for no good reason.

But I don’t think I can trick them for much longer because lately. . . lately, they’ve been waking up, announcing their presence, coursing with impatience, becoming increasingly insistent in demanding more than pictures of puppies, and making me cry for what seems like a very good reason.

My ovaries have been going through the motions, faking it for more than a decade. I started taking birth control in the spring of 2000, ostensibly to clear up my still-teenage skin and to regulate my unpredictable periods. So I haven’t ovulated since I was 18, when Bill Clinton was president and we’d never even heard of Survivor.

And suddenly, or not so suddenly, after years under our strict regime, we fall out of step at the sight of a tiny foot. We Google our egg supply’s rate of decline. We feel womanly in ways that are embarrassing.

I just turned 29. Ted celebrated by taking me to one of my favorite restaurants on the Lower East Side; the universe celebrated by seating us next to a toddler singing Old McDonald where we were waited upon by a tall, blonde, and beautifully pregnant woman. And I felt old.

Because 29 is so close to 30, impossible to ignore, impossible to pretend it’s mid-20s and impossible to pretend there’s all the time in the world. And maybe all those years of forcing my hormones into hibernation has just been pushing snooze on my biological clock, and maybe if my ovaries are trying to wake up, maybe it’s time.

There was a short list of things I made, once, of things I needed before I was ready: The walls I’ve got, in Brooklyn of all places, where people come when they need space for a stroller. The health insurance is taken care of. And I’m pretty sure I’ve found the person I want to do it with. There was that time my mom laughed at me when I told her I’d rather have a washing machine than a baby. Well, I’ve got my washing machine.

My body, my choice? My education, my career, my bank account, my city, my boyfriend, my Better Judgment. . . It’s not my body that is making this choice.

I keep chemically regulating, shutting down, postponing. But at 29, the math is hard to ignore, and so is the hollow yearning that makes me feel like one of Those Women. Women, not girls anymore.

And I’m sorry I cried, sorry I got impatient, sorry I wanted more than what we have right here, now, in this apartment that feels like it chose us. I’m greedy for a lifetime of things, but most of all I want you. It’s that that makes me feel ready, and that that makes me willing to wait.


~beatrix


p.s. I do not recommend leaving this tab open on your computer for at least a week like someone might have: http://nymag.com/news/features/69789/

it was worth $12.99

I warped the cutting board already.

~beatrix

tear quota

“Why?! Why don’t you want me to have my cutting board?”

It’s not like I wanted to make a scene in the kitchen chairs section of Ikea; it just felt necessary.

It was $12.99 and I needed it and I know we have cutting boards already, but I’m tired of my broccoli all falling off of them because they are from the tiny-kitchen days. (How quickly things become nostalgic from a cozy, white, fold-out sofa across the bridge.)

Once my Aunt Stacy told me she cried because she wanted some kind of floor in her bathroom that my Uncle Mac said wouldn’t work.

“What did Mac say?”
“Nothing. But I got the floor.”

I thought it was silly at the time, but I might have cried for this cutting board. It’s kind of like all those tears I might have cried for lonely nights or boys who didn’t call back have to go somewhere.

And I love my new cutting board. My broccoli doesn’t fall off and it even almost fits in the sink.

~beatrix