Sweetney Archives

The dawn burst a halo of light around the city, a thick, orange glow slowly warming its patchwork architecture, a puzzle of ancient cut stone and gleaming metalwork rambling out around me in every direction. From where I was standing, on the balcony of my parent's modern twenty-sixth floor apartment, I could see men in long white tunics and head scarfs herding squalling goats from their daily drink of the Nile, the animals pressing on through four lanes of hysterical, shrieking traffic, their heroic journey to end only in a cramped, makeshift holding pen in the Bulaq slum.

Other men hung on the riverbank swinging fishing poles fashioned from broom handles, angling these to catch whatever now survived in those polluted depths that was to become their family's only meal that day. Some of these same men spent nights moonlighting as animal control officers for the city, rounding up the least cunning of the city's burgeoning population of stray dogs and spraying them with bullets in a concrete-walled yard beside my parent's building. And so it is that I know for certain that the memory of a sound can be infinitely worse than the memory of something seen, more visceral and gut-level, its reverberation finally clawing right into your bones and imprinting its anguish there forever.

To my left, the spiral of a minaret shot up into the sky, and in the night I often woke to the muffled sound of a man's voice bellowing the call to prayer from its canopy — a rough, alien lullaby. To my right, across the Nile and into the desert, the Great Pyramid's peak flared, gloriously alight with morning sun. Behind me, the door that would let me back into the safety and air conditioned comfort of my family home. Before me, an unlived life, an unwritten book, chance, opportunity, and always, fear.

Directions: Use your pencil to draw a line connecting each question with the most appropriate response. You will have five minutes to complete this task*. Keep your eyes off your neighbor’s work. God help us all, amen.

Questions:

1. Can I have a credit card?
2. What does a Philosopher do?
3. Did God die?
4. What do you write about?
5. Where do I go when I sleep?
6. When can I drive?
7. When you die, will you still be able to talk to me?

Answers:

1. What?!?
2. I have absolutely no idea.
3. Ask your father.
4. Umm, no.
5. It’s complicated.
6. [choking sounds]
7. Would you like a cookie?

*If you need a hug, a tissue, or a shot of bourbon at any point during the allotted five minutes, please just raise your hand.

The only thing worse than being confronted with the physical bludgeoning of a hangover the morning after is waking to the drained and dehydrated exhaustion one feels after a long night of hysterical sobbing.

Oh hai, and welcome to my morning.

I spent most of last night slogging through a few hundred pages of the young adult novel Twilight, which I have Catherine and Dana to resent loathe thank for (that book is, as Dana so aptly put it, “a 500 page goth fantasy vibrator.” BE WARNED). But around 1:30am I started feeling drowsy, and so decided to call it a night.

That’s when the weird stomach and chest pains started. It felt as if my torso were seizing and contracting inward, my body morphing into an enormous fleshy Chinese finger trap, squeezing and clenching my organs from the outside in. I went into the bathroom and took some antacids, thinking maybe this was some kind of extreme heartburn episode. I sat down on the toilet and inspected the white ceramic tiles of our bathroom floor, rubbing my chest. And then it hit me.

I was having a panic attack.

It took a few minutes for that to fully register because it had been a while since I’d had one, but in that instant of realization one single, solitary thought rose to the surface of my mind with terrifying clarity: M starts Kindergarten Monday.

And this is around the point when the hysterical sobbing started.

It was like some wall inside of me came crashing down. I’d been repressing my anxiety about this to such a degree that my feelings were almost shocking to me, even as I found myself doubled over the bathroom sink, swabbing my runny face with tissue after tissue. I felt like an idiot, like a horrible cliche, like That Silly Woman Who Cries Over Childhood Milestones. When, exactly, did I become such a fucking pussy?

Eventually I crawled back into bed next to J, trying (but failing) to regulate my breathing so I’d stop doing that weird weepy repetitive gasping thing, as if I was coming up for air during a long bout of drowning. J bolted up suddenly and looked at me, his eyes squinched up into tiny question marks.

Him: What… what’s wrong? Are you okay?

Me: (gasp) Noooo (gasp), I’m having a (sob) panic attack! (gasp)

Him: Oh no… what’s going on?

Me: (fully sobbing) SHE’S GOING TO KINDERGARTEN MONDAY!!! (GASP)

Him: Oh god, I know, I know.

Me: (still sobbing) I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M SUCH A SAP! (gasp) (blows nose)

Him: Yeah. But you are.

GEE THANKS, J.

But it’s true. I am. I laid there for hours, thinking thoughts only a ridiculously melodramatic mother would think. Thoughts like: My baby! My baby is going to Big School! And: It was just yesterday she was an infant and  I held her in my arms… And: What if kids are mean to her, I can’t protect her anymore! Suddenly, I saw her drifting away from me. Suddenly, it seemed that, come Monday, my girl would no longer be my girl, at least not as she’d been before. That her life would be so different, and that I would be farther outside of it than I’d ever been before.

Okay, I’m going to start crying again. Breathe, breathe. Dammit.

I know most of this is just in my head. I know I’m blowing it all out of proportion, being needlessly dramatic. I know that nothing is really changing, that it’s all symbolic and that she still has a long way to go before she stops being a little kid. I know that, intellectually.

Still, I’m keeping her home with me today, and canceling a trip I’d scheduled for this weekend that would’ve kept me away from her. I need to hold onto the preschool version of her, for just a few more days, a few more hours. I need that time to reassure myself that something isn’t really ending. I need time to convince myself that all this stupid growing up doesn’t mean I’m losing my little girl.

Her: Mommy?

Me: Yep?

Her: Here, I drew this picture for you.

Me: Oh! Awesome! What is it?

Her: [points to figure] It’s a picture of you. [points to other figure] Killing a ninja.

Me: Really? I’m a NINJA KILLER? Wow!

Her: He was a bad ninja.

Me: Oh, of course!

Her: And he only has one leg.

Me: So… he’s a bad, hobbled ninja?

Her: Yeah.

Me: Well that doesn’t seem very sporting of me. Is he also blind or something?

Her: He has glasses.

Me: Perfect. Disabled myopic ninjas are my favorite kind to kill.

Her: [points to figure again] And he doesn’t have any pants on.

Me: Okay that’s quite enough, lady.

I often wonder what my daughter will remember of her childhood. How much of all of this day-in day-out-ness is truly "sticky," and how much of it is like torrents of clear water lightly rippling over and past her, leaving little to nothing behind?

I’ve been thinking about this more lately, perhaps because my own memory seems so objectively flawed and twisted. I have some truly weird, freaky memories of childhood, and have come to think of myself as a dubious source of factual information regarding my own experience. I mean, sure, I tell a good story (to myself), but how much of that shit really happened? Some of my childhood recollections are clearly fanciful fabrications, while some tread that thin border between the imagined and the possible. Still, they all seems so real, so much like actual remembrances of things past, that I have a hard time sorting out the things that really happened from the things that I imagined really happened.

For example, I vividly remember, during one particularly bad thunderstorm when I was around M’s age, sitting in front of my second floor bedroom window watching a Manhattan-skyscraper-sized giant — a figure plucked straight from a fairy tale book, wearing beige sackcloth rags that were clearly of Middle-Ages vintage — stomp past our neighborhood. And as bizarre and unreal as it sounds, this feels, in my mind, like a regular memory to me, no different from common childhood recollections of playing in the backyard and slurping popsicles in summertime. The clarity of the imagined memory is indistinguishable from my "real" memories.

So what does this say about memory, then?

Back when I was in Grad School studying Literature, we often talked about the various kinds of narrators present in novels and stories, and debated whether or not they were "trustworthy." When I first started studying Lit seriously in my undergraduate days, this new approach was startling — to think that we should question the honesty and reliability of the authoritative voice telling the story, that we were supposed to wonder if perhaps this narrator person wasn’t trying to sell a version of reality that suited them or supported their cause(s) — it was revelatory. As I continued on in my MA and PhD studies it became second-nature to think critically about who was telling a story and why, what they might be adding or omitting, always recognizing that the act of creating any sort of narrative from experience invariably involves all manner of tweaking.

This way of seeing ultimately became part of the way I operate outside of school and books, and I’m always aware that we each see the world through two eyes that are distinctly our own, imperfect and filtered. Even when telling what we believe to be True and Real, we are really only providing an interpretation, an impressionist painting of the objective world rendered in our own unique brushwork.

So maybe "real" and "imagined" aren’t so far apart, and maybe I shouldn’t care so much about making those separations. I’m not saying I really saw a giant when I was five or anything, just that perhaps our memories are more infused with our imagination than we think, and that this doesn’t necessarily falsify them, or make them any less "true." Honestly, I hope M’s memories, her version of the truths of her childhood, are packed to the gills with imagination — talking flowers, flitting fairies, stomping giants — whatever, you name it. Maybe even more than "reality" or "fact," I want her to remember a world alive with hidden magic and bright with possibility — a world like the one I still hold fading shards of in my own memory, the world I lost when I had to grow up.

Second verse, same as the first.

As before, I humbly present to you a sampling of my recent reads, for your psychoanalyticalization and deconstructionalistic enjoyment. The premise, in brief:

I suppose you could say that I look upon people’s choices in
literature, film, and music as unguarded glimpses into their identity,
into what makes them tick and how their mind works — as small but
telling artifacts of the true unfiltered self, if you will.

…Following the train of thinking described above, what might
one presume from my selections about me, I wonder?

Exhibit A: “1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus” (Charles C. Mann)

– Still feels sorry for that crying Indian guy on TV
– Applied for, and was summarily rejected from, Peace Corps service
– One-time moderator of usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.oppression.crackers.eurotrash
– Does not celebrate Columbus Day, aka “Motherfucking Asshole Day”

Exhibit B: “Party Of One: The Loner’s Manifesto” (Anneli Rufus)

– Described by neighbors as “friendly” but “quiet”… Maybe a little “sinister” and “menacing”
– Enjoys knitting, scrabble, classic romantic comedies, constructing compact, easily-concealed explosive devices
– Will admit to “kind of having a thing” for Jodi Foster

Exhibit C: “Never Suck A Dead Man’s Hand: Curious Adventures Of A CSI” (Dana Kollmann)

– Member in good standing: The Gil Grissom Fan Club Of America
– TiVo Season Passes include: Forensic Files; Medical Detectives; Dr. G: Medical Examiner; Bizzarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern
– Has girlfriend in Canada. No, seriously, her name is Allison.

Exhibit D: “The World Without Us” (Alan Weisman)

– Is quietly constructing elaborate backyard “freedom bunker”
– Motto: “Preparedness does not equal paranoia… But why do you ask? Who are you working for?”
– Into survivalism, cold war history, the entire Mad Max film series (but let’s all agree that the whole “Thunderdome” thing might have been taking it a little too far, m’kay?)

Exhibit E: “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In A World Out Of Balance” (Laurie Garrett)

– Is quietly constructing elaborate backyard “antibacterial bunker”
– Subscribes to CDC newsletter Infectiousness Today
– Secretly dreams of wallpapering entire home in lemon-scented Clorox Wipes

Exhibit F: “Goodnight Bush: A Parody” (Gan Golan, Erich Origen)

– Has bumper sticker on aging sedan bearing the Howard Zinn quote: “Dissent Is The Highest Form Of Patriotism”
– Pinko, stinkin’ commie
– Actually felt a heart-twinge of sadness upon reading: “Goodnight democracy, And goodnight privacy / Goodnight old growth trees, Goodnight detainees”
– Is so fucking glad that 8 years of this crap is almost over

I’m going to wager that you don’t need me to tell you which of these is based in fact. Uh, right?

. . . . .

PS: Just to prove I don’t only read depressing, calamitous stuff, here’s the new batch of books I bought yesterday, full of positivity and uplift, dammit! (well, sort of):

The pressure to write about BlogHer is, quite honestly, giving me writer’s block.

And the only way I know to get past The Block is to write through it, however crappily.

SO.

I had an amazing, deliriously joyful time. My panel went better than I could have hoped for (audio on that when it becomes available), and I met so many amazing women I think their awesomeness scrambled my brain a little. It was also, I must admit, unbelievably exhausting — almost physically debilitating, in fact. I talked to more people in a 48 hour period than I normally do in a 6 month period. It made my mouth hurt, the talking. But every person I met was gracious, kind, and embraced me in a way that was, quite frankly, startling. That so many people knew my blog and actively wanted to meet me was something I found both baffling and humbling. Thank you to everyone who made a point of coming up to me and introducing yourself, or who bellowed at me across rooms and down hallways, or gave me fabulously warm hugs. All of it means more to me than you can imagine. I’ve never felt so connected to so many people, so appreciated, so loved. sniff.

And good thing too, because getting to San Francisco was a dread nightmare of EPIC proportions. It was the kind of experience one might consider handing down to their kids as a part of family lore, an oral history bearing a moniker like The Dark Day Of Darkening Blackish Unlit Doom. Catchy AND ominous, no?

It started with me getting lost on the way to the airport — something of a feat, since I’d been there like 20 gazllion times before, and had in fact directed other drivers on how to get there in the past. I guess the excitement of the day (BlogHer! Friends! San Francisco! Drunk-puking in Guy Kawasaki’s pool (god willing)!) kind of got to me, made me all directionally dumb and stuff. So I ended up having to take the most circuitous, time-sucking route imaginable just to get back to the general vicinity of the airport, and became so frustrated with myself in the process that had I been in possession of a bag of hammers I surely would’ve beat myself with it. To sum up: the whole getting lost thing? I don’t recommend it. TWO THUMBS DOWN.

And then, just when I’d turned myself around and gotten back on the right road, I promptly got a flat tire. Because God hates me.

This is when things start getting a little hazy for me, as I think I had what you might call a teeny-weeny nervous breakdown at this point. I was on this middle-of-nowhere road out in middle-of-nowhere airport land with only about an hour until my flight because I’d killed so much time getting lost on the way there (oh god, BAG OF HAMMERS WHERE ARE YOU?). On the bright side, we have AAA. On the not-so-bright side, I’d purged my wallet of all (ha!) unnecessary (ha ha ha!) cards and paper before leaving for the airport, and so was no longer carrying my AAA card.

My cell phone call to J:

J: “Hello?”

Me: “GARRGBBLGLAALAAAAAAAGGHH!!!”

J: “What’s wrong?”

Me: “CAAARRRRRRRR BAAAAH WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

J: “Okay, here’s the number for AAA… You might still be able to make your flight.”

Me: “Blarrgh? WAAAAAAAAAAH. sniff.”

J: “And call the airline and let them know the situation in case you do miss it. Okay?”

Me: (sounds of hyperventilating)

J: “Okay, call me back when you can.”

Me: “*gurgle*“

I spent the next twenty minutes openly weeping on the phone at the unlucky call center folks at both AAA and US Airways. Both were as helpful as they could be, but both also essentially admitted that, all things considered, it was likely I was going to miss my flight. Which meant getting into San Francisco much later, and possibly missing throwing up in Guy Kawasaki’s pool as a result. My heart? BROKEN.

Then this dude showed up.

I don’t know how to refer to him except as “this dude” — he never gave me his name, or told me anything about himself except, randomly, that he was from Colorado. So I guess I could call him “Colorado Dude”? ANYWAY, I’m sitting there in my car weeping, when I see a pickup truck in my rear-view mirror pulling up behind my hobbled Camry. Enter Colorado Dude.

Colorado Dude, through driver’s side window (imagine an appropriately deep-throated manly voice): “Hey, are you okay? Need some help?”

Me: “YES OHMYGOD YES. I have a flat tire…”

Colorado Dude: “I can see that. Do you have a spare?” [begins inspecting the open trunk’s contents]

Me: “Yes, in the trunk… I’m trying to make a plane… OHMYGOD THANKYOU.” (sob)

Colorado Dude: “No problem, I’m happy to help.”

…At which point I kind of melted all over the Corinthian leather, waves of relief washing over me. It was possible to still make my original flight, to not miss out on my Date With Puking Destiny… for everything to, in an instant, get back on track and turn out okay. THANKS, COLORADO DUDE!

So while Colorado Dude was changing the tire I got back on the horn and gleefully told AAA I wouldn’t be in need of their services after all, and confirmed with US Airways that I would, indeed, be rushing to make my original flight.

Once the spare was on, I asked Colorado Dude for his contact information, rushing as I was to get back on the road to make my flight, with no time for appropriate niceties. “Why would you want that?” he asked. I told him I wanted to send him a proper thank you of some sort for his kindness. “Tell you what” he said. “Instead of thanking me you go on and do something nice for somebody else, and maybe it’ll keep going.”

Yeah, that’s right. Colorado Dude was a fucking superhero in disguise. Man, I love that guy, whoever he was.

And then I was back on the road, motoring hard into airport parking, running to catch the parking garage bus to the terminal, running faster and faster into the terminal and up to the ticket counter. I had twenty minutes to spare. I was frantic, breathless.

Me, to US Airways Counterlady: “Hi! I got a flat tire on the way to catch my plane and it leaves in 20 minutes so I’m wondering if I can–”

Counterlady, interrupting: “TWENTY MINUTES? (Rolls eyes) Oh girl, you aren’t going to make it.”

Me: “Oh no, please, I’ve just been through… and I ran… and I talked to the US Airways people on the phone and they said…”

Another Counterlady, to first Counterlady: “Did she say twenty minutes? Oh no, you’re going to have to get booked on another flight, honey.”

Me: (Bursts into tears)

I stood there and openly cried while they changed my flights, checked my baggage, and handed me new tickets. I felt crushed, thwarted, beyond disappointed. Could this day get any worse?

Oh yes, it most certainly fucking could.

While I was feeling sorry for myself and wallowing in the accursed purgatory that is Airportworld, USA, I got a phone call from J telling me that his aunt Carol — who had been ill for some time — had suddenly taken a desperate turn for the worse and might not make it through the night. So he was grabbing M and both of them were heading directly to the hospital.

At what point does a “teeny-weeny nervous breakdown” turn into something darker, something perhaps in need of heavy sedation? Oh FYI, THAT POINT WOULD BE NOW.

So I was truly and officially a mess — physically, mentally, emotionally — and barely remember boarding the plane that got me to Charlotte, NC. Upon deplaning I promptly entered the Charlotte terminal’s Chili’s and slammed down a $12 margarita on the rocks (fucking airport highway robbery). And I HATE Chili’s.

On rare days like this, there comes a time when you just start expecting shit to go wrong, for everything to be capital letter B Bad. You start, like, bracing yourself. Flinching before the next blow lands square on your jaw. Anticipating the dominos falling, continuing to fall. I was pretty much there I guess, so it didn’t phase me much when the following flight — the one from Charlotte to my final destination, San Francisco — ended up sitting out on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting for international passengers who’d gotten stuck in customs. And then, when we’d finally taxied out onto the runway, and the captain announced over the cabin’s loudspeaker that there was some kind of weight-distribution issue going on, and that we weren’t going to be able to actually take off until they worked it out, I was still fairly OK-ish. And when we continued to sit there for another 30 minutes, buffeted by warm recycled airplane air that appeared to have been drained of all actual oxygen, I was pretty much taking it all in stride.

But when they said that after all of that we were going to have to go back to the terminal and somehow find a new pilot, because the one on-board had “expired” (apparently pilots have an hour-limit per-day that they can spend as a airplane pilot, and after all the delays this one had reached his and promptly turned into a pumpkin)… well, that’s when my brain just plain old flat-out EXPLODED. BOOM.

But an hour or so later (who’s counting! hahahahaaaa!), we were in the air, headed to California. I drank two tiny bottles of white wine on the flight, if you must know. I also cried openly — possibly to the point of scaring other passengers — at the jittery in-flight movie, “Finding Neverland.” And when we landed in San Francisco, against all odds, my baggage appeared miraculously in the baggage claim area, though I’d fully expected it not to. I then quickly caught a not totally unpleasant shuttle over to the hotel. The hotel, unbelievably, had not given my room away yet, though I was at least 5 hours late. In other words, Life — which had been crapping on me voluminously and with great enthusiasm all day long — had magically taken a turn for the better.

And when I checked in at the hotel, this was waiting for me at the front desk, from J:

I call it The FTD “I Feel Sorry For You” Bouquet.

And what, me worry?

. . . . .
*Nods to Obi Wan.

I’d like to take a moment and talk about Meg Ryan. Humor me.

Remember this Meg? The pouty, long-faced, imperfect-yet-somehow-impossibly-cute-as-a-button Meg? The one from back in her When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless In Seattle, You’ve Got Mail heyday? Back when she looked, errm, normal and a human being of this planet earth ?

Yeah well things have rapidly gone south from that, I’m afraid.

I started thinking about Meg Ryan at some point this past weekend, upon reading in a magazine that her most recent on-screen work was a flimsy direct-to-DVD comedy entitled  “My Mom’s New Boyfriend” co-starring Spain’s de-animated answer to Pepe Le Pew, Antonio Banderas. Here’s a clip from the movie (if you can call it a movie) — which I refuse to embed on my site, for fear that it might give my blog cooties. Or an STD. Or, you know, eye leprosy or something.

Anyway, I come not to mock Meg Ryan (no, really!), but instead to try to understand just how all of this happened. How exactly do you go from being Meg Motherfucking America’s Sweetheart Ryan of the 1980s-90s, to, well, THAT?

I have a few theories, and I’m sure you have a few as well. But what I keep returning to in my mind is that regardless of whatever personal tragedies might have befallen poor Meg (cough-RussellCrowe-cough), and the ravages of time on one’s girlish appearance, there is one truth these images speak that cannot be denied: Girlfriend had some seriously fucked up plastic surgery work done.

And why? Why did she do it, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because she thought we’d like her better. That’s the truly heartbreaking part. See that second photo above? See those bulge-y fish lips, the botoxed-all-to-hell forehead, the oddly incongruous tauntness of her entire facial area? She did that for YOU. Because she thought you’d think she was prettier, fresher, and more worthy of your movie-going dollar. She thought you didn’t want her to age, so she tried not to. For you.

It almost makes me want to cry, honestly.

And it makes me want to cry not because I’m some huge closet Meg Ryan romantic comedy fan. No, what gets me is that someone who was so downright objectively lovely just as she was was made to feel insecure enough about her appearance and her inevitable aging that she willingly chose to do this to herself. She CHOSE to fuck her face the hell up (and, as a result, mangle her own career).

It’s sad. It makes me feel horrible for her. And for US. For women.

Because listen, I don’t care what anyone says about the pressure in Hollywood specifically to be thin and beautiful and forever young, to aspire to some ideal that most women on planet earth had no hand in concocting and could never possibly achieve, even if they had access to all the packaged pre-made and pre-measured dietetic meals and personal trainers in the whole wide universe. Because let’s be real: it isn’t just Hollywood, and that particular pressure isn’t reserved just for actresses — it’s everywhere, bearing down on all of us. And how we respond to that pressure has more to do with how we feel about ourselves — about our self-esteem and the strength of our character — than it does about our chosen profession and whether it is entertainment-based or not.

That any woman, seeing as we all have just how often plastic surgery goes horribly wrong (or at minimum produces much-less-than-hoped-for results), would still volunteer themselves for something like lip implants boggles my fucking mind. It borders on masochistic, doesn’t it?  I mean, just how desperate for approval and attention do you have to be to reach that point — the Hells yeah, sign me up for Trout Lips! point? And shouldn’t there be some kind of strenuously objecting intervention on the part of caring friends and family members before you reach that dark, dark place?

Obviously this strikes at my insides deeply because I too am someone who struggles regularly with body-image issues (and okay, for serious, do I even need to declare that up-front anymore? As a western woman between the ages of, like, zero and DEAD, is that not goes-with-the-territory type material for ALL of us?). Honestly, I don’t know a single, solitary woman who wouldn’t like to be thinner or more toned, or have a different nose or eyebrows, or who doesn’t fret endlessly about some other perceived failing in her own physique, however vague/obscure it might appear to others. We look at ourselves in the mirror and see flaws and defects staring back at us. We each believe ourselves to be inadequate and in need of fixing to some degree or other. Even if nothing could be farther from the truth, we persist in believing that.

Perhaps there’s something in our biology that forces us to focus on imperfections, to always be on the lookout for ways to refine and correct our own physicality, to be better, stronger, faster. Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just that women in our society are, by and large, made to feel like complete and total shit about how they look, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Maybe it’s that women are pitted against ideals that aren’t realistic or achievable (the idealized models and actresses being so artificially sculpted and tweaked and photoshopped all to hell that even The Ideal isn’t ideal until it’s fudged), and made to feel that any sacrifice is acceptable in pursuit of that ideal, including one’s own self-esteem, principles, and dignity. Maybe it is that everywhere women go there is an unrelenting, skull-crushing hum put directly into our ears — a hum generated by film, tv, radio, print, and yes, other women — that chatters to us non-stop about how unacceptable we are, about how our skin will never be clear enough, how our hair will never be shiny enough, and how our clothes will never be never stylish and hip enough to conceal the lumpen horror of our true selves. Maybe that’s it. Maybe.

And so it comes to pass that you end up with Meg Ryan going from sweet girl-next-door to alien pufferfish in what seems like the blink of an eye.*poof!*

What happened to her? The same thing that’s happening to you. To me. To all of us as women. She just happened to have a whole lot more disposable income and, sadly, used it.

In 1982 I was twelve years old. And I was completely obsessed with the movie E.T.

Obsessed, as in see it eleven times in the theater and collect mountains of useless trading cards based on the film. I vaguely recall fretting over weekly box office returns as well, not because the movie wasn’t making ludicrous bank, but rather because in my mind it was absolutely vital that E.T. make more money than any movie ever made in the history of all moviedom, thereby securing its rightful place in the filmic pantheon as The Officially Confirmed Best Movie EVAR.

It’s funny, because nowadays I suppose twelve years old is bordering on the maturity of teenagedom, an age where kids are already putting away childish things and growing ever more concerned with seasoned pastimes, like honing advanced coolness, developing an interest in real estate, and following the stock market — miming levels of maturity I couldn’t even conceive of at that age. No, I was a decidedly very young twelve. I was a barely-into-the-1980s version of twelve. Madonna hadn’t even happened yet, for crissakes.

So yesterday I sat down to screen E.T. on DVD with M — her first time seeing it and easily my twentieth, though it had been at least ten years since my last viewing. And as we watched together I felt my insides involuntarily transforming, melting back to that pre-Material Girl state as some raw, pre-teen version of myself floated up from my time-worn jaded depths, eager to embrace what I now know as a slightly hokey Spielbergian weepfest.

I could never articulate as a twelve year old what it was about the movie that had hooked my insides so, but yesterday I think I finally understood it. At age twelve, I’d longed for the kind of connection the little boy Elliot seemed to have with E.T., a connection beyond friendship, a love almost spiritual in its purity. In the movie, Elliot actually feels the alien’s feelings — his exhaustion, his fear, his joy — and even their physical bodies and organ systems are somehow entwined, tied together by some invisible thread or umbilicus. It’s never completely explained how this happens or how their connection works — it just is. But I wanted that. I wanted an all-encompassing love to connect me and another person, a love that couldn’t be broken by space or time or creepy government agents in Moon Men Suits. Even Peter Coyote and his jangly keys couldn’t come between us, I was sure of it.

Near the end of the film, when E.T. is preparing to jump on his space ship and high-tail it back to Alienville, there’s a moving moment wherein the alien touches the weeping Elliot’s chest and says in his sweet old lady voice, “I’ll be right here.” M didn’t quite get the reference, so I explained to her that E.T. was saying that he would be in Elliot’s heart, always. She looked up at me, with tears streaming down her face, and asked me, in all earnestness: “Is E.T. in everyone’s hearts, Mama?”

And in that moment I realized something. I now have what I wanted at age twelve. I have that connection, that supreme and inexplicable love. I have it. And it’s sitting on the couch right next to me.