Trash Talk

              
Then there is this other life, layered on top and woven through, the life of passion and pursuit, of my dreams and aspirations, a life of love sought and realized, of beauty and community, of adventure and openness.  It is a life I always want and don’t always have…a life animated in thought and action by the hope that I shall flourish along with my friends and family—that we shall hold each up through our excellence, creativity, and goodwill, a life where we flourish together.  Where humanity flourishes.  The thought of this life fills my heart with love and hope, fills my lungs with breath.
                                        --Nick Riggle in This Life, This Body, This Day, This Time, These People, This Beauty:  A Philosophy of Being Alive
 
I have a neighbor who is about five years older than me.  Like pre-menopausal women whose menstrual cycles align through association, my neighbor and I seem to run into each other on the way to the dumpster.  I don’t know if it is some biological synchronization or just the timely flow of fertile debris before it grows into something alive inside our apartments, but it happens regularly.

When we meet at the dumpster, we stand down wind of the odor of decaying food and poopy diapers. The conversation becomes a purge of trash, problems at work, and the decline of the neighborhood.  The conversation winds down when one of us makes a half-hearted commitment to do lunch “sometime,” the signal that one of us is cold, hot, or has to go.

While I enjoy this wonderful neighbor whenever and wherever I meet her, I am beginning to feel some pressure to dress for these trash-can occasions.  My petite, fashionable neighbor always comes to the dumpster like it is cocktail hour in an upscale Greenwich Village bar.  She sparkles like champagne with her hair styled, nails polished, eye makeup just right.  I am both in awe and suspicious.  I do notice that she seems to have considerably more trash to dispose of than I do.  Perhaps, as I suspected, being beautiful requires a lot of time-consuming work and a lot of products.  I rationalize my own appearance with claims of sparing the environment from all that packaging.

What else I notice about my neighbor, in addition to her lovely appearance and volume of trash, is the way men respond to her, to all petite women, really.  A petite woman can carry a baggy to the dumpster, and a manly neighbor will fall all over himself offering to carry her trash.  Petite women are sexy, sleek little sailboats.  I, on the other hand, am an overloaded cargo ship that has been stuck in the Suez Canal for so long that the bottom has rusted out.  When a man approaches me, it is not to offer aid or flirtation.  It is usually to ask if I will hold up the front end of his car while he changes a tire. 

For women of my generation and the ones before, it seems like it was always a choice between being capable or beautiful.  Smart girls were admonished to keep their hands down and NEVER appear smarter than the boys.  To do otherwise would guarantee spinsterhood.  Of course, all young children were advised to “be seen and not heard,” but there was a time-limit on that for boys.  For young women the advice later became “be seen but not heard.”  Be desirable but not too smart. The images of women who appeared in ads or on television were housewives dressed in fitted-waist dresses, wearing nylon stockings, pumps, and a string of pearls.  A starched white apron was the only evidence of their shared occupation.  These women, if mothers, deferred all parenting decisions until the father got home.

Here I am now old enough to have one foot in the grave (and I can still hold up the front end of a car, thank you very much!) and I continue to confront these messages from my past, the trash talk that shaped my life and opportunities. I look around now at young women professionals and think “Hey, that’s what I wanted!” I just didn’t know it was available to me or even that it was out there to want.  Such models or examples were not present in my every-day environment.  The real professionals that I knew were nuns.  They taught in schools and colleges and operated hospitals.  For me, that was the spinsterhood I feared.

Of course, messages about beauty and appearance still taunt women today, but the messages about brains and opportunity are not as limiting. There are plenty of women who now can claim brains and beauty. They can be mothers and successful professionals.  But there are groups of individuals who continue to receive limiting messages about who they are and what they can be.  To all children everywhere, I say this:

No matter what package you are wrapped in, it is good to raise your hands.  Take a chance no matter what you are wearing or what nouns or pronouns describe you.  Be at home in your body and in your life.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Behold your own beauty.
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And if anyone tells you otherwise, well, that’s just trash talk.
 

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