The Tale of a Very Large Zit

First of all, I promise funny on Friday because that entry is about St. Patrick's Day (I know, FINALLY) and that night had good stories.

But today I really want to talk about this: Pretty Babies.

Firstly, let me say that I know mothers who engage in this behavior, though perhaps not as extreme as this article lays out. But I do know mothers whose eight year old daughters get manicures and eye brow waxings. I surely do. And worse yet, I actually think those little girls look adorable with their perfect pink nails and their perfectly sculpted eyebrows. Much like I think that ear piercing in little girls is cute. And to a certain degree, I hate myself for thinking that because I'd like for little girls to just get dirty, too. And I could not promise that if I had a little girl, by the time she was 10 she wouldn't have been dolled up like that. But I'd like to think that I had trained her to be dirty, too.

Dirty in the play in the dirt way. Stay with me.

Okay, so, the first thing that happened in that article was this brilliant line about what happens when we make girls too pretty, too young ... and "How, without the ugly years, will girls learn to accept themselves?"

And I agree.

My "ugly years" were in my early to mid twenties, kind of that last year or so of college and the first years of San Francisco. First, I gained some weight, people. Seriously. I was smoking a lot of pot near the end of college, which of course means extra weight - especially when you live in a college town where half of the economy is driven by pizza delivery that happens after 3:00am - no pun intended. And then I moved to a city where the 3:00am shwarma is king and Victor's Italian was right down the road and my life become more sedentary because I had an office job. My clothing size was almost double what I currently wear, though I guess in fairness I was also wearing my clothes baggier.

And my skin went bad. My skin has always been temperamental, but when I'm stressed out about something my immediate physical reaction to it is to break out. And I was stressed a lot during those years, so there was always some skin issue of varying degrees going on. And sometimes it was embarrassingly bad. Bad like the "before" stories in a Proactive infomercial. AND I WAS USING PROACTIVE AT THE TIME AND IT DIDN'T HELP. For example, one day when I was living with (I Love) Paul Jack, I woke up one morning and my skin was broken out so excessively that I couldn't even physically open my mouth. I had to call a doctor and drink through a straw for a day.

I'm probably remembering most of this as worse than it was - but that's not the point because I'm sure that a teenager who goes through her ugly years then remembers her breakout and unibrow as worse than it was too. What I know is that I felt insecure and unhappy about the way I looked, and I had to find other ways to like myself. Or, at a minimum, because that may be an overstatement, I had to be able to look in the mirror at my big, fat butt or my incredibly broken out face and just be angry about it, not hate myself for it.

And eventually the weight fell off. That's not true. Eventually I worked the weight off through changing my late night eating pattern and making it a point to work out.

And eventually, though I still respond to stress with a big zit here or there, my skin pretty much cleared up through better product, better birth control and a dryer climate.

So, back around Super Bowl time of this year, I was very stressed. Because as you know, for the last several years Super Bowl has been one of my most stressful times of the year. And I developed a stress zit. Actually, it was more like a stress boil. Actually it was more like an alien child trying to birth itself from a pod on my right jawline. It was bad. It actually literally was about the size of a quarter and took about two months to completely heal/drain. You couldn't look at me without seeing "Frank the Zit" first. *I* couldn't look at me without seeing it first. And I am single and ready to mingle and a huge blemish on my skin is not ideal.

So, ToniK and Mike and I go to the Super Bowl. And we're hanging out in the RV one night and "Frank the Zit" decides that this is when he wants to explode all over my face, meaning that I will now have a big, draining, scar-ridden cyst for the next two days while surrounded by hot available men at the Super Bowl.

And my response to this?

Literally...

My response is to shrug it off and say, "I mean, you know, whatever. If I were a super model, I wouldn't be hanging out in an RV with you yahoos at the Super Bowl. And that would kind of blow."

But most importantly, I meant it when I said that.

And I mean, the point is, if from the time I was a tiny tot I'd had perfect nails and perfect skin and perfect eyebrows, would I still be able to kind of shrug off the BIGGEST SKIN BLEMISH ANYBODY HAS EVER HAD - EVER and not think that it was something that really detracted from the awesomeness that is me as a whole? I mean, who knows, but probably not. I probably would have stressed about that stress zit for weeks and spent money better spent on saving starving African children on treatment after treatment and whined like it was the end of the world.

So I see the author's point. It's important that we're not always perfect on the outside so that we don't start to expect ourselves to be perfect, either on the outside or the inside. Or, more accurately, if we start to expect ourselves to be perfect on the outside, the degree to which we're imperfect on the inside will grow.

I hope that Sadie and Rayna and Cienna all have ugly years. I just hope that they don't have the kind that scar them for life but instead the kind that make them closer to perfect on the inside.

And I hope that the next time I get a big old stress zit, it's on the right side of my forehead so that I can brush my bangs over it and just conceal it.

 

Five Perfect Moments

I'm doing this exercise in therapy where I make a timeline of all of the individual moments in my life that I remember as being perfect. Seriously? I have A LOT. A lot more than a girl deserves. Some of them, we'll cover periodically here as they come to me.

Remember the Spin Doctors?
One summer, Pookie and I went to see the Spin Doctors. Part of me thinks that we may have had J-Flo with us, but I'm not sure. And I'm not even sure why we went to see the Spin Doctors, because they had all of two songs. Hell, I think that they still have all of two songs. But it was summer in Western Pennsylvania, and we all know that summer nights in any part of the midwest are more beautiful than summer nights anywhere else and there's possibly nothing better than dancing to live music on grass with stars above you in the then-Starlake-now-CocaCola amphitheater during those nights. Anyway, I'm pretty sure we went to the Spin Doctors' show with very little expectation. And it ended up being this perfect night. You know how sometimes you're at a show, and the band actually just connects with the audience, and everybody is feeling it? And you dance with strangers and sing at the top of your lungs and then people fall asleep in the car on the way home with the windows down? It was that kind of night. And months later, Pookie was watching MTV in Pittsburgh and I was watching MTV in Indiana and we both saw the same news report with the Spin Doctors. And the Spin Doctors said that their favorite show on the tour was in Pittsburgh. And Pookie and I were both like, "Yeah."

Speaking of Driving in the Midwest
Which is one of my favorite things to do, driving in the Midwest. These long roads lay out in front of you and you can just move, cover ground. This one time, Catwoman and DivaMae and I were taking a road trip where Catwoman and I were going to drop DivaMae in Indiana to visit his brother and then the two of us were headed to Louisville. It was summer. And we decided to drive all night. As the sun was coming up the next morning, Catwoman and DivaMae were both dead asleep in the car. And I was having a "moment." It was summer. We had driven all night talking about relationships and dreams. Two of my best friends were asleep in the car and the sun was orange and coming up over the cornfields and all was right with God. And just as I'm having this moment, DivaMae wakes up, reaches over to the cd player and turns FREAKIN' LORDS OF ACID ON AT FULL VOLUME, waking up Catwoman and destroying all the peacefulness in the sunrise. And yet, somehow that moment was perfect.

Speaking of DivaMae
One night, DivaMae and I decided that every time we heard the song "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails, we were going to strip our clothes off. And so we did.

Speaking of Being Naked
Wait. I don't even have one for this, and it was the only logical place that I could take that last one. Let's restart.

This one time, at band camp...
Band camp being one of my favorite times of the year every year in high school. And I was a freshman and TimR was a senior and a REBEL and he drove this blue drug van and everybody who was cool would have lunch in the drug van and sneak liquor after band camp moved to the football field during the second week. And I got invited to hang out with the cool kids in the van and then the next day TimR drove me home on his motorcycle and my mom FLIPPED OUT. That was a good summer.

Speaking of TimR....
There was a marina that his mother owned in Five Town that was named after him, and one day J-Flo and ChuckA and some of our other friends took J-Flo's boat out onto the Mon with more liquor than any group of 18-year-olds should ever have. And there was Zima. And ChuckA and I both drank so much Zima that by the time we docked at TimR's marina we were sick and embarrassing to be around AND we never drank Zima again in our lives. But I remember that that was one of the last days that we were able to all spend together as a group before people all started leaving, and it was sunny and fun and I still remember it.

See how I cycled from J-Flo back to J-Flo? We'll jump to another time era later.

 

Your Weekend Five: I Turn a Bend Ya'll

1. Uganda is KILLING me already. Oh My God. Have you ever tried to book a flight to Entebbe? WTF? Two days of air time through Amsterdam. Buy a small library before you leave, but make sure it's all crap because you don't want to haul that stuff home with you. Unreal. Don't worry, Lis! I have it under control, especially since I can't get a replacement passport without a travel itinerary. Thanks US government! Oh, yes, did I mention I've lost my passport and now must get a re-issue? Expedited, even! Like, months ago, I was like, "You know, I'm not sure I know where my passport is." Yep. Totally lost. I wake up in the middle of the night looking for it. Can't find it. Awesome.

2. Everybody's Blogging These Days: My stuff is trite. Go read something valuable.
- Read about San Francisco's hip-as-hell band scene at World Famous in San Francisco.
- Or, read about a man with a perfect life and some 18th century aesthetics who save the universe at The Applesauce Blog.
- Or read about parenting, politics and the life changing power of the desert at Ocotillos and Politics.

Let me save you the trouble. Ocotillos is a stunningly beautiful red desert plant.

3. Make sure you read the entry BELOW this one: Otherwise don't blame me when you log on and this site is full of pictures of my boobs.

4. Kelly Clarkson: Chick who says "Fuck the man, I know what's right for me" or "Girl on the way to a slow-roll, Britney-like implosion?" Discuss.

5. So the long one is for last, right? As Candy would put it, I've rounded the good bend. And so the other day, I caught myself saying that it was June already, and the first half of my year had bit it big time. And then I really thought about it, and that's so untrue. I had all of these amazing experiences in the first six months of this year. I had several wonderful, blissful girls' nights out, both in Manhattan Beach and Las Vegas with cocktails to die for and Willie Nelson wigs and twins and the Imperial Palace and uninhibited fun with women you trust. I saw Chuck and Luci for the first time in years. Tyler came into my life. shamus and I got to troll around Pittsburgh while I looked like a homeless crack addict buying $5 cupcakes and calling Moon cute. Dana and I had a steak dinner and sent Ferris camera-phone pictures of the food he was missing out on every five minutes. Pookie turned 30 and a bunch of people I love all had beer in a church, wine in a vegan cafe and hard liquor in a karaoke gay club. I ran a marathon with two of my favorite people, and I'll never forget the sight of the mountains that morning. I had many happy nights watching 90210. I rocked a red drag dress on my birthday and got fed lemon pie. I got to spend an entire week with Ashleypooh, Toni and Emma now that they're all grown up and super fantastic women. I was loved and felt love for this wonderful group of people who make up my life. I started a new business that some of the most awesome marketers in Vegas believe in. I went to the Rose Bowl. Sanjaya Malakar. Elliot Yamin. Ryan Shaw. A crazy amount of wonderful new people coming into my life and teaching me so much. And, fuck it, let's throw New Year's Day into the mix, because that was pretty special and I'll hold on to that one no matter what.

And I was really like, fuck it. Sure, I cried more in the first six months of the year than I have in the last six years, period. But even with all that, I still had an awesome life. The truth is, there were enough other things that made me laugh that I probably laughed as much as I cried over the last six months. I'm just used to not crying at all. In the end, I have to refuse to let the way that person treated me define what should have gotten logged as a great six months. How many people would kill for all of those blessings, right? Crazy. How did I lose so much perspective on it?

That said, just to cover my bases, the second half of the year has been intentionally structured to kick your ass: home for the Fourth of July, summiting Mt. Whitney, Uganda with at least one and hopefully two of my best friends, rocking this new business, and you don't even want to know about this year's Christmas project which is the most heartfelt thing I've ever made you all.

 

Let's Go Crazy: Or So My Therapists Suggests

Let me warn you of two things:
1. I really did have a top five list for Monday. We may return to that later, but I had an interesting therapy session today and want to talk about it.

2. Because this is about therapy, it will be AWESOME. Seriously. You don't even know. He cancelled two appointments to continue this conversation because he's so sure he's got my "issue" finally figured out. This after over five years of therapy together, but still.

I shit you not, today what my therapist INSISTED we talk about is the following. Do I:

a. Actively seek out men who, while they will love me deeply, will be incapable in every way of making me feel valued, safe, protected, important or cared for. Or do I...

b. Simply, in the face of the love of a man, respond in fear and immediately find a way to throw the away rather than admit powerlessness in the face of it. Or do I...

c. Actively seek out men who, while they will love me deeply, will be incapable in every way of making me feel valued, safe, protected, important or cared for because I know that in the face of real love I will fear my powerlessness against it and find a way to throw it away; therefore by partnering with men who can never really give me what I need in any way I ensure that when I do recklessly throw their love away I can be safe in the knowledge that I could not have been happy anyway.

Right? So clearly my therapist thinks that I'm a mess. And recently he's had good reason to. But still. I would probably find this a fucking fascinating conversation if it weren't about me and I wasn't pretty convinced that he was on to something.

I have been incredibly fortunate to have had four men who truly loved me (and whom I love(d)). I have, in all four cases, been the one who walked away and put the final nail in the coffin in all of those relationships, which is not to in any way say that I did not feel heartbreak. Because in at least two instances I did. But, in all four cases, by the time I walked away, I had been mentally and emotionally beaten down to a point where, at best, I was making a conscious decision to protect myself from further pain and, at worst, I was instinctively (and in the last case insanely) trying to create safety for myself.

I have hurt all four of them. But then again, all four of them hurt me, too. In three out of four cases, I have been happier and healthier without them. The fourth one is debatable and yet to be seen. With two of them, I am now best friends, though it is sometimes very hard. With one of them, we do not even speak. Ever. Though it is still my greatest wish that he is happy, and that someday he will forgive me. With the fourth one, the ways in which we hurt each other were so extreme and damaging that I find it hard to imagine a way to a healthy place for us, for either of us. On the other hand, I miss him every minute.

My therapist, convinced that I -- Oh, I can't type this out again, see "c" above -- spent the day with me today doing my favorite activity: Finding patterns. I'd like to say that we were successful and now, issue identified, I can get out of a repeating cycle. I don't really feel that though. This will not be one of those entries where I have some therapy and then there's an epiphany and then I'm like, "I won't be ultra demanding any more because I understand the source of that is not pure." It'll be more like "Here's all the stuff we threw against the wall. Ask me again in a couple of months what stuck."

We talked a lot about the point in a relationship in which I realize that the person I'm with can't give me what I need versus the point in the relationship where I get out. Now, I'm sure that for everybody there's a lag time between that type of realization and freedom because it's very hard to walk away from love. My lag time seems to be excessive though. Twice it was in excess of a year. Once it was in excess of two years. In my last relationship, it would be generous to say that I realized I would never be important enough to him to feel anything but fear about being powerless in his love in February. It would probably be more realistic to say that I realized it on December 2, 2006. I stayed until I imploded in March, and then I happily tried again in May, but by then, you know, probably too late. There's a lot of lag time there, right? So why do I stay in these situations, knowing that, while I hope that the elements of the relationship that are tearing me down will turn a corner, the probability is that the longer I stay the more long term damage I am doing to my heart? Why is it so hard for me to say, "He may love me, but he doesn't need me enough to make me the most important thing." And if what I fear is being powerless in the face of love, then why do I consciously choose to make myself more and more powerless even after I've realized that I am giving away power to men who will most likely be incapable of doing anything but hurting me?

I'm making your head hurt, right?

There's a somewhat lame argument in here that I immediately shut down that I don't so much actively seek out these men as I do attract them because the Jocelyn that the world sees would lead people to believe that I cannot be hurt in those ways. I'll concede some of that, maybe. Meaning I wish that, though that is a part of me, I could find somebody who would take me seriously when I say "You can hurt me. I am vulnerable. I do need for you to protect me." I'm not really so sure that's so crazy to ask.

The situation probably gets worse as I get older, right? Or at least that's what my therapist thinks. That the more times I allow men to shred up my self-esteem, the more I fear being powerless in the face of a man's love (ie the more I perceive it as a threat). And that because I, for whatever reason, partner with men who can love me but not value/protect/prioritize me, I become more and more subconsciously convinced that the trade off of love is pain. Nice, yes? Increasingly, I am becoming a fan of people getting married when they are 18 and religious beliefs that prohibit divorce. Increasingly, that's sounding more healthy to me.

Anyway, the theory is that I fear powerlessness in the face of love. Therefore I actively seek out men who will love me deeply but not be able to provide the other emotions I need in a relationship. Then I become full of pain and unhappiness and I bolt, usually in flaming fashion because usually I have tried to express my unhappiness and needs extensively and have had them ignored. I have been too patient, and I have been not patient enough. I have broken and been repaired and then broken again. And I am not sure that even if my brilliant therapist has uncovered my "cycle" that I will be able to get out of it. And at the moment, I may just be too destroyed to try again any time soon.

 

It's a New Day, It's a New Dawn, and Today I'm Feeling Good

So this was my horoscope today:

"Within a week or two, your outlook will have altered significantly and your situation will have brightened tremendously. Right now, though, you are dealing with a difficult set of circumstances and you fear that you are not coping well. Actually, you are doing brilliantly - better than anyone else in such circumstances could ever do. Just continue making a valid effort to do your best. Despite your fears and concerns, in the long run you'll be glad of all the sacrifices you have lately had to make."

And also this:

"Someone of consequence may enter your life now and you would be well advised to open the door and let him or her in. You could be taken on a thrilling ride, but you must be willing to learn and grow. Travel may be on your agenda, whether it's in your mind or in the outer world. Either way, be open to having a partner for your upcoming adventure."

Which is funny, because those are both very much feelings I've been getting in the past three days anyway. Good things are suddenly happening. It's amazing what happens when you open doors back up that you had previously shut. I had started to forget how big the world is and how many possibilities are out there.

If I could erase the last two months (maybe more, I'm still working it out), I would. I mean, I wouldn't, because I learned valuable lessons about where my limits were and that I could, absolutely, be driven to do things that are out of character for me. Out of character is an understatement. Things that fly in the face of every way I've chosen to live my life. I definitely learned that if I don't protect myself better, I can be turned into exactly the kind of person I never wanted to be. And I learned that it's possible for me to let myself go to (be taken to?) a place that leaves me emotionally, mentally and physically ill in the end. And I also learned that, for me, the only way to actually close a door on some things it to actively decide to open new ones. And I learned that the universe will forgive me two months of not being the best version of myself and help me find my way back, and will send some amazing gifts my way once I open the door to possibility.

And, of course, I got reminded of how amazing the people in my life are. And their love really helped me remember who I am.

McD, who is going through a far worse time than I am, actually called me to see how I was holding up, when in reality that should be working in the opposite direction. And then he said, "And I have season two of 90210 and Melrose Place for you," and a bright light shone in front of me like God was present.

Kolodny, who has way too much on his plate to worry about me, took the time to write a really long email offering all kinds of amazing support and advice. And he called me the big sister he never had. And I cried over that one, because I agree.

(I Love)Paul Jack and (I Also Love) Dex sent me a box of product from Origins. I didn't cry. I took a really long bath. They know how to make a girl feel better.

shamus and Larry both tolerated hours of IM's. HOURS. And they both told it like it was, even when how it was wasn't what I wanted to hear. Pookie actually got on the phone, which is not so much his style. Ferris tolerated my playing with him on MySpace. AshleyPooh and Toni made lots of threeway calls to me to check in on me.

My mom did the best thing she could do, which was give me space. Which I know was hard for her.

And my girls. My girls were all so amazing. Catwoman guided me spiritually one way. Red Delicious another. Candy said the hardest thing that I didn't want to hear ever, but which was true ("This will never make you happy. If it were going to, it would have by now."). K-Rock laughed with me about everything. All my LA girlies reminded me the big, big world I was forgetting about. Carrie came out of the woodwork to listen to me babble via email for paragraph after paragraph. K-Yo distracted me with stories of sexism. I'm sure I'm forgetting people who were awesome. But in the end, my friends reminded me of who I am and how I needed to get back to being that.

And also, in near perfect timing, Hilary has launched this, which I'm hoping will be a pathway for all of us on some level or another.

I guess I'm saying thank you. I'm such a lucky girl in so many ways.

 

Defective Merchandise!

Firstly, we're in Salt Lake City today getting ready for Saturday's race. It's beautiful here. Like, stunningly beautiful. I think it'll be a great run by default of feeling inspired by all of the beautiful mountains. It's a little colder than I'd like for it to be, but I have lots of disposable running gear with me. It's 5:oopm right now, and I'm like, "I need to be in bed in three more hours max so I can get up and jog and do some yoga in the morning." If I can just adjust my sleep cycle in that one day, I think I'll be fine.

But on to the defective merchandise!

So, ChriSS was here for a conference last week. And we had dinner on Sunday, during which as we were swapping stories we talked about, what else, me and boys and babies. And then we had drinks again on Wednesday night. By Wednesday night, ChriSS had had lots of time to think about my issues with boys and babies, and this was the conversation.

ChriSS
You're a marketer. You have professional marketing training.

Me
Yes.

ChriSS
I think we should look at your issues with boys and babies and apply your marketing skills to it.

Me
Oh.My.God.

ChriSS
Because if you read your blog, it sounds like you just want a baby making machine. And then the other night, we were in The Burger Bar, and you literally had drool coming out of your mouth over the tattoo guy. And neither of these things, well, you see my point. So I think you're dealing with defective merchandise.

Me
Uh...uh...uh...WHAT?

ChriSS
Not you! No! You're perfect!

Me
Uh

ChriSS
I mean, at least in your own world you're perfect.

Me
Uh

ChriSS
I mean, everybody's perfect in their own world. I'm saying that the defective merchandise is the men you get involved with.

Me
Uh

ChriSS
Let's define what you need in a perfect man. Let's define the product that you're looking for.

And so, we define my perfect man. Who of course is NOTHING like any of the last five to ten men I've been involved with. And so, as I rapidly order a second drink because I'm going into panic over various realizations, we continue.

ChriSS
So, you've been dating men who are NOTHING like what we've just defined.

Me
mumble. mumble, mumble, mumble

ChriSS
And we meet these men...

Me
mumble, bar, mumble, club, mumble, girls' night out

ChriSS
Do you have a gym membership?

Me
Of course.

ChriSS
Since athleticism and understanding athleticism is very important to you, do you meet men at the gym?

Me
I mean, the thing is that I spend all day and most of the evening interfacing with people, and that two hours a day at the gym, that's kind of my personal "Jocelyn time" and...

ChriSS
THAT EXCUSE IS NO GOOD. If you want to meet a man who's appropriate for you, you need to put the time and effort in.

Me
mumble, you're right, mumble

ChriSS
You should do one of those executive masters programs that's overseas, like in Paris or somewhere like that. You'd meet a man who closely resembles your perfect model of a partner for you there. Lives in a big picture world. Travel friendly. Probably athletic because most business types are. Smart. Probably makes more money than you. Probably has a stronger personality than you. Spiritual? That would be up in the air. Optimistic? You don't do an international business program if you're not basically optimistic, do you? Highly social? Probably for sure.

And then there is silence as we stare at each other.

ChriSS
I guess we've gotten a little ridiculous if we're sitting here saying you should spend thousands of dollars on advanced education in an international location just to find a husband?

Me
No, this has been great. I feel like I should pay you $200 for an hour of therapy. But instead I'm just going to buy that glass of wine for you.

And so, I get it. I should cut and burn faster when I realize that I can't get what I want. And I should look for boys in appropriate places, rather than at The Burger Bar because he has a hot tattoo and good biceps. And I'd like to thank ChriSS for calling it like he saw it. I can appreciate that. And I can take it and apply it. And so, we'll see how that goes!

 

It's Warm & It's Natural

The last time I was out with Hott Scott, I got this gem of wisdom about how my attention span is too short for relationships. And he had a point. And I resented that he had a point.

So we went out Friday night, and I got this sterling rhetoric that we can all now bank on.

"Jocelyn, you're like the David Koresh of emotional indictment. You've got the compound built up, there's ammo in the basement and you're like 'I will BURN THIS SHIT TO THE GROUND IF THIS DOES NOT WORK OUT.' "

I picked up the tab. It was the cheapest two hours of therapy I've had since November.


This is how we roll. It's F.A.S.H.I.O.N.

More pictures of the weekend's activities just added at myspace. Rock out.

 

Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and Bob

My mother will read this entry and either a) say "I'm SO GLAD that her therapist is this good" or b) say "I wish my daughter had a more acute sense of keeping private private." Either way, she will cry about 850 times while she reads this. There you go, mom. Make your choice accordingly.

The topic in therapy this weekend was "Do I demand that the men in my life prove that they love me too much and what relation does this have to classical music?"

And the answer was "Maybe a little bit but not as badly as I used to because I'm very aware of it as a habit and consciously try to stop myself as soon as I notice that it's happening" and "It's a direct result of classical music."

By which we, of course, mean that all little girls want their fathers to love them more than anybody else.

It would be simple to say that my father loved classical music more than he loved me, and that would make this a short entry and would have saved me thousands of dollars in therapy because it would have made separating out feelings and reactions much easier. But then, well, it would have been simple and I wouldn't need hours of therapy and meditation and personal writing exercises to work it out to begin with. And probably I'd be a less self-aware person and for sure a less understanding person. And also definitely an angrier person, because if it were just as simple as "My father loved classical music more than he loved me," that would be a reason to be angry. What I found in the end when I deconstructed the whole thing was that I don't really have a reason to be angry, and that was very, very freeing.

Let me first say, so that there is no confusion about how I feel about my father, I have great affection for my father. I do not (sorry, mom) love my father. I'm pretty aware of what love feels like and how to share it, and that's not the case here. I have tried to find it in me to love my father, but when asked "Do you love your father?" I cannot make the words come out or the feelings surface. But I have great affection for him. I think that he is a very, very, very good person who had a very difficult time with basic human emotions and didn't know how to be as good a person in action as he may have been inside. And I think that there were a lot of reasons for that.

I could tell you stories about my father that reveal such a sweet person that you would weep. And I could tell you more stories about him that would leave you saying "What an ass. Jesus." For a lot of people, the sweetness outweighed the selfishness (or confusion, however you want to view it). But those people were not his daughter.

But on to the classical music. My father loved classical music. By "My father loved classical music" I mean "My father LOVED classical music." From the time he heard his very first opera, he was hooked. Sadly, I can't remember the actual story about the first time he heard an opera, and I know that I've been told the story a hundred thousand times. Our home was filled with classical recordings that were played AT FULL VOLUME constantly. Literally (because these were the days of vinyl) there were shelves and shelves and shelves of recordings in several rooms. We went to the symphony or opera at least once a month, often more. Entire summer vacations were planned exclusively around opera festivals and schedules.

Pookie and I were forced to spend an hour a day all summer long for the majority of our teenage years being tutored in classical music and its composers and how to identify them and their themes and signatures by our father. This was a particularly sore point, at least for me. I can't remember how Pookie felt about it, but every single time I was dragged in during the middle of a summer afternoon from the swimming pool or playing basketball with my friends or whatever important social activity I was doing to sit at the dark dining room table while my father made me memorize the core theme elements of Brahms' chamber works, a little black ball of resentment welled up in me. And it wasn't because I was getting dragged inside. It was because the reason we were learning this stuff was because he loved it. And of course when I would point that out (because I was that kind of child), he would say that we were being taught these things because we weren't getting adequate education in public school. And then I would get SO ANGRY because I had begged FOR YEARS to be sent to private school. And among other reasons, I was told that I would not be attending private school because it was an expense we couldn't handle. And then I would become uncontrollably furious because apparently we couldn't afford to send me to private school but we could afford...

To take elaborate summer vacations to operatic destinations, to pay for endless tickets to symphonies and operas and to actually SUBSIDIZE an entire chamber music series at the Oglebay mansion in Wheeling. Oh yes. We were this serious. You do the math about how much something like that would cost. And, no matter what was going on during one of those chamber music weekends, I was expected to be there. It didn't matter if I had to give up sports practice or drama practice or weekend trips with my friends or things that I loved. I would sit patiently and listen to chamber music whether I liked it or not.

I'm simplifying this story somewhat into discreet examples, and it's not really that simple. But the point you need to take away is that my father loved classical music in such a way that he was willing to arrange his life in a pattern around it.

And, in some continued simplification, he did not love me in a way that he was willing to arrange his life in a pattern around me.

In fact, he didn't really like me all that much (and my mother's throat closes up here). It was more than once that I heard the phrase either directly or repeated back to me from another family member that my father "loved me because I was his daughter but didn't really like me as a person." But by the time that phrase started getting pulled out, I was already in my teens and already having reactions to having been a little girl whose father loved something else more than he loved her and probably, to him, I wasn't very likable. And I didn't like him very much either. We went the better part of an entire school year, maybe more, only communicating by leaving notes on the kitchen table for each other or relaying messages through my mother. We really weren't each other's biggest fans. And FOR SURE he did not love me in a way in which he would re-arrange his life around me. In fact, it was 100% the opposite. My life was expected to be crafted in such a way that it revolved around the thing that he loved - and that, of course, was classical music.

Now, my mother, I'm sure, is dying to tell me at this point that I have this all wrong and that she remembers it entirely differently. This is for two reasons. Firstly, my mother was an adult at the time and I was a sixteen-year-old. She probably noticed many ways in which this was not the case. I, however, as a sixteen-year-old only noticed that I and what was important to me were not all that high up on my father's priority list and that I was habitually asked to give things up that conflicted with the real true love, Bach. Also, to be fair, my mother is prone to look at things through a pair of glasses that are ever so slightly rose tinted. So, mom, before you send the long email about how I have this wrong, remember that I don't. You can't get something that you actually experienced wrong. But read on, because I'm about to tell you that I understand that dad really didn't actually love classical music more than he loved me.

My father was not good at experiencing or expressing interpersonal emotions. And yes, I just lifted that entire phrase from my therapist because who else would speak like that? This was probably due to a number of things. We can begin by simply leaving it at that we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that my father battled some mental and/or emotional demons most likely of a chemical nature similar to the one I had to deal with. Of course, that was back in the day where we didn't find great natural supplements or know how to control our body chemistry through diet or feel comfortable writing about our therapy breakthoughs on the web, so how those were dealt with was probably less than adequately.

Secondly, my father's family was, as a whole, not good at handling or expressing interpersonal emotions. I think I love my grandmother on my father's side as much, if not more, than most of my other family members. But I never heard her tell me that she loved me. EVER. Or at least that I can recall. And so of course my father would be bad at that. And to make it worse, my father and his family and their lack of expressive emotion was contrasted with my mother's family, who gave me exactly what I craved. My mother's side of the family? They will tell you that they love you when you come out of the bathroom. They will tell you that they love you because there's a pause in the conversation. They will tell you that they love you because you passed the vegetables at dinner. They are ALL ABOUT telling you that they love you, which to my underdeveloped teenage emotional matrix (yeah, I stole that phrase too) made the lack of that coming from my father all the more poignant.

Now, we've established that my father wasn't very good at experiencing or expressing interpersonal emotions, but everybody has love, and everybody wants to experience channeling that love somehow. And so my father found something that he could give his love to and that, at a basic level, elicited emotions in him that made him feel something similar to receiving the emotion back. In the end, it makes sense, because music can make you feel things. So if you're going to have a hard time feeling things for people, at least feel things for an art form, yes? After realizing this, I noticed that this was a totally similar characteristic in a lot of people I know who are overly passionate about, in specific, music. And I don't mean passionate about performing or creating music. I mean about listening to, collecting and adoring music. Anyway, it seems so clear now that that's what he did.

And I think my father would have preferred it if he could have made those emotions and reactions work that same way for me (or my brother, or my mother). But it's harder with people. They talk back, they have expectations, you can't decide what feeling they're going to make you feel before you put them onto the turntable. One thing I've definitely learned is that bad examples about how to share with and love people that get set early stay with people long into their life. I'm thankful every day that I had my mother's family around to make sure that, just like them, I was ALL ABOUT the love. And once I realized that my father really was just trying to compensate for something he didn't know how to do with people by doing it with music instead, I stopped being angry at him a while ago. By which I mean I stopped being angry with him on a daily and intellectual level, because if you get me in the same room with him there is a 99% chance that within 15 minutes I will have either lost my patience with him and snapped or have had to leave the room, but 33 years is a long time to resent somebody without having it surface when you're around them.

So I think that by "I stopped being angry at him" what I mean is "I'm at peace with him being who he is" more than I mean "I look forward to being around him." I think that's something though, yeah?

And so, of course, the resulting question is: "Jocelyn, do you feel like you're always asking the men in your life to prove that they love you more and more and more because you didn't feel like you got enough love from your father as a child?" (And the men in the room who have dated or tried to date me all raise their hands and holler "YES!"). And some of them would be right because that's definitely a habit that I got into. And some of them would be wrong because it's also a habit that I worked very hard to break and honestly what they think is my being demanding is just my refusing to settle for getting less than I give. And a couple of them would even say, "She's done that to me, but then she's caught herself and apologized." And those would be the ones I'm most proud of. Because, people, that took a lot of therapy and a lot of work at recognizing my own emotional patterns.

For a long time in my early twenties, I couldn't listen to classical music without actually getting angry. Literally. I would hear a beautiful piece of music, and it would make me feel anger that I didn't think that I got the love that I should have from my father when I was a child. I mean, I'm sure my mother is composing an email in her head right now about all the ways in which he did show me love. And I'm saying, "Mom, no he didn't. If he had, I would have felt it. I'm sensitive to the emotion. I'm sorry. And I'm not angry about it because I understand it now. But please don't try to convince me that's not how it was." Anyway, last weekend I listened to Chopin all weekend and it was a wonderful experience. Uplifting. Sweet. Blissful.

To me, that's really the sign that I've learned to let go of what I didn't get and focus on what I did. And I feel good about that. And I hope that when my mom closes her laptop after she reads this, that's the part that stays with her. That I grew up to be a really happy girl.