Tiny Beautiful Things (22 page)

You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to be “hot” in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don’t have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits.

You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say,
“I’m right here.”

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It’s the one place we can’t leave. We’re there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn’t, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn’t do that?

That’s the question you need to answer, Wanting. That’s what will bring your deepest desires into your life. Not:
Will my old, droopy male contemporaries accept and love the old, droopy me?
But rather:
What’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin?
What fruits would that particular liberation bear?

We don’t know—as a culture, as a gender, as individuals, you and I. The fact that we don’t know is feminism’s one true failure. We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades, but we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans. There are a lot of reasons for this, a whole bunch of Big Sexist Things We Can Rightfully Blame. But ultimately, like anything, the change is up to us.

The culture isn’t going to give you permission to have “robust, adventurous sex” with your droopy and aging body, so
you’re going to have to be brave enough to take it for yourself. This will require some courage, Wanting, but courage is a vital piece of any well-lived life. I understand why you’re afraid. I don’t mean to diminish the enormity of what’s recently ended and what now will begin, but I do intend to say to you very clearly that this is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.

So let’s talk about men. A whole bunch of them will overlook you as a lover because they want someone younger and firmer, but not all of them will. Some of them will be thrilled to meet a woman just exactly like you. The sexiest not-culturally-sanctioned-sexy people I know—the old, the fat, the differently abled, the freshly postpartum—have a wonderful way of being forthright about who they are and I suggest you take their approach. Instead of trying to conceal the aspects of your body that make you feel uncomfortable, how about just coming out with it at the outset—before you get into the bedroom and try to slip unnoticed beneath the sheets while having a panic attack? What would happen if you said to Mister Just-About-to-Do-Me:
I feel terribly self-conscious about how droopy my body is and I’m not sure if I even really know how to have good sex anymore, since I was frozen in a boring pattern with my ex for years on end
.

In my experience, those sorts of revelations help. They unclench the stronghold of one’s fears. They push the intimacy to a more vulnerable place. And they have a spectacular way of revealing precisely the sort of person one is about to sleep with. Does he laugh and say he thinks you’re lovely so just hush up, or does he clear his throat and offer you the contact information for his ex-wife’s plastic surgeon? Does he
confess his own insecurities or lecture you appallingly about yours? Is he the fellow you really want to share your body with or had you better walk away while the getting’s good?

I know as women we’re constantly being scorched by the relentless porno/Hollywood beauty blowtorch, but in my real life I’ve found that the men worth fucking are far more good-natured about the female body in its varied forms than is generally acknowledged. “Naked and smiling” is one male friend’s only requirement for a lover. Perhaps it’s because men are people with bodies full of fears and insecurities and shortcomings of their own. Find one of them. One who makes you think and laugh and come. Invite him into the tiny revolution in your beautiful new world.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

Last year I met a guy who is wonderful, though I recognize he has a lot of growing up to do (he’s twenty-four). We get along well, have a similar sense of humor, and have great sex. After nine months, I still get a tingle in my gut when I see him. Our relationship started casually, but over time we got to know each other and became ourselves around each other. We can cook together and be silly and go on adventures and read to each other and have sex on the floor and then make a cake and eat it in bed. In the beginning, I was okay with us not being monogamous, but once our relationship became more than a fling, I wanted a commitment. We talked and he told me that sleeping with just one person could get boring, but that he clearly likes me or else he wouldn’t spend time with me. He said he was afraid I would change him somehow—turn him into someone he’s not
.

I didn’t understand him then, and I still don’t. Am I just dense? He likes me, but not enough to say he likes only me? Maybe it’s that simple
.

We still see each other pretty often, just now without the sex. I care for him, but I don’t know if I’m foolish to stick around to see where it goes. Am I torturing myself by keeping him a part of my life?

Best,
Needs Direction

Dear Needs Direction,

I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on at length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core:
Can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is no.

The sad but strong and true answer is the one you already told yourself: this man likes you, but not the way you like him. Which is to say, not enough.

So now you get to decide what you want to do about that. Are you able to be friends—or even occasional lovers—with this man who is less crazy about you than you are about him without feeling:

If the answer is not yes on all three counts, I suggest you give your friendship a rest, even if it’s just for the time it takes you to get over him. There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.

Yours,
Sugar

Dearest Sugar
,

I’m writing to you with half of the answer already in my heart. I felt I should say this up front, since conventional wisdom says that no matter what advice a mixed-up person gets, they always end up following their own. My question is about my upcoming wedding, which my fiancé and I are planning to have at his father’s house in Europe. Because I’m from the United States, my guests will be far fewer and I have to think a lot harder about who merits an invite
.

At thirty, I feel like I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m doing all of the things necessary to move forward without forgetting my past. I’ve been in therapy for the past year, trying to come to terms with a childhood filled with all of the usual pitfalls that cause kids to grow up into bitter, emotionally damaged adults. Alcoholism, drug abuse, physical and emotional abuse—along with a mother who depended on me from the time I was five to assure her that my father wasn’t dead in an accident on some dark road somewhere—all caused me to live most of my twenties on a precarious ridge between responsible living and disastrous free fall
.

But I got lucky. I got away from my family and lived in another country. I found the forgiveness within me to reestablish a relationship
with my mother. I gathered the courage to achieve what I refer to as “normality.” People underestimate the importance of normality. Normality means no one is screaming, fighting, or insulting one another. Normality means I’m not sobbing in my room. Normality means Christmas and other family holidays are a joy. Normality means, for some people, getting married
.

And so here I am, getting married to a sincere, sensitive man with a perfectly normal family who will, for the first time, meet my dysfunctional, fractured, and still very unaware-of-it-all family members. This scares me to death
.

But what scares me most is my father, who is the person at the source of most of the pain I felt as a child. I’m torn about whether I should invite him to my wedding
.

After years of noncommunication, my father, though in possession of many, many, many faults, has recently found his way back into my life. He is a big part of my youngest brother’s life. And now, my fiancé wants to include him in our wedding. The last time I saw my father, he was stoned out of his mind and drunk. He was supposed to drive my brother and me to the train station (and didn’t)
.

So I’m conflicted. I don’t expect my wedding day to be perfect. Part of me feels like, despite all of the drama that could occur, maybe this is an opportunity to include my father in an important part of my life and that this could be healing for him, and even cathartic to some extent. But then I imagine my mother’s face when my father has drunk a few too many, while my fiancé’s family looks on in horror. (My father isn’t the friendly, funny kind of drunk.)

I want to turn the proverbial page, but my hand is frozen, unable to make a decision. The easiest thing to do would be to just not invite him, not run the risk, so I won’t have to be
nervous on “our day.” But I never have chosen the easiest thing. Please help!

Daughter with (Maybe)

Expired Daddy Issues

Dear Daughter,

Every time I read your letter a terrible screeching alarm goes off in my head. Please don’t invite your father to your wedding. There isn’t one word in your letter that tells me that you want to or should.

Let us first dispatch with your fiancé, since he—
not you!
—is the one who’d like to include your father in your wedding. I presume he had good intentions when he proposed this—Hollywood-inspired visions of profound revelations and touching reunions brought on by the magic of the day, no doubt. But you know what? His opinion on this matter has no bearing whatsoever. The decision about whether to invite your father isn’t even a tiny bit up to him. Your fiancé’s suggestion tells me that he has neither a clear understanding of your familial history, nor an awareness of your deeply dysfunctional dad. I suggest you have an exhaustive conversation with him on these subjects rather soon. Like
now
.

I commend you for working so hard to come to terms with your childhood. I know how painful that is to do, and I know how very much richer your life is for having done so. But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. Forgiveness means you’ve found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you
wrong. Sometimes those we forgive change their behavior to the extent that we can eventually be as close to them as we were before (or even closer). Sometimes those we forgive continue being the jackasses that they always were and we accept them while keeping them approximately three thousand miles away from our wedding receptions.

It sounds to me like your father fits into the latter category.

Which means you need to look sharp. If the words
love, light, acceptance
, and
forgiveness
are written on one side of the coin you’ve earned by creating the beautiful life you have in the wake of your ugly childhood, on the other side of that coin there is written the word
no
.