Monthly Archives: July 2007

Sunsets


I love to watch the sky these days. Hard as it is to believe, it is different from the one I watched back in Iowa.

My daughter and I have always been cloud watchers. On the drive to and from her daycare every morning, she would invariably point out some interesting shaping of the clouds or a particularly beautiful coloring of the sky they were set against. She loved to catch the sun and moon in the sky together in the early morning or in the early winter dusk. “The sun is chasing the moon,” she would tell me and sometimes make up a story to explain why this was so.

I have seen the moon at noon here in Alberta. It happens often Rob tells me. And I still can’t get over how it appears that the sky is closer to the ground or the way the horizon and the sky seem to meet on a curve. In July it is barely dusk at ten in the evening and some nights it seems as though the sun is merely a night-light for the world, never really setting but glowing like the embers of fire in the distance.

The other night the sunset was so beautiful that both Rob and I had to run outside with our cameras to snap a few photos. The pinks, purples and oranges just have to be seen by the naked eye because the camera lens just cannot do them justice.

I love it here.

Manscaping


In the Edmonton Journal today there was a piece in the Life section about the grooming of male body hair, particularly of the back variety. I read with great interest for a number of reasons. First, my husband is quite the furry mountain man. I remember vividly the first time he took his shirt off and I ran my fingers through all that hair. My inner teenager was shocked at just how pleasurable an experience it truly is.

I don’t know about all women but this woman was once a 15 year old girl who sat aghast with her best friend watching the shirtless neighbor mow his lawn. At least from that distance we could tell he was shirtless. From a house or two farther away, he just looked like a crazy man sweating in a coat as he struggled to finish his yard-work in the mid-evening summer heat. At that point in time, I couldn’t think of a single bigger turn-off than back hair, or front hair for that matter (and just to complete the tmi here, I didn’t yet know about the amount of hair below a man’s belt).

The second reason I read the article was to ascertain if I was truly a freak for loving my man with hair. And it turns out that I am, though I should have known this upon reading the posted responses on the widow board when one of the women posted a link to a dating profile where the gentlemen posed shirtless and proudly furry. The ewwwww chorus was unanimous and unequivocal. I wanted to chime in at that point with a comment about the utter sexiness of body hair on a man, but figured it would be lost on most of them. They still see themselves as 20 somethings and secretly envision taut and hairless young men in their mind’s eye. Back when I was so young and so much more inexperienced, they were the type of boys I thought attractive too. How I got from Shaun Cassidy to big, brawny and hairy is a mystery, but here I am.

The final reason I read the article was to  ascertain what, if anything, men did about too much hair in places that women found unattractive enough to make them self-conscious. The answer is little. There is shaving, waxing, exfoliating with depilatories and zapping the little guys with lasers.

My husband firmly discounts them all. I am not sure my enamored reaction to his fuzziness has sold him entirely on having become, in his words, a “sasquatch” because he would frankly have preferred it not to appear in almost direct proportion to the loss of hair on his head. Still, he is far too much of a man to care overly what the world at large thinks about his appearance.

Displacement


The new fun thing to do on the widow board these days is to take male profiles from a dating site called Plenty of Fish and post them to the social forum for other women to see and comment on. The comments are invariably cruel. The kind of stuff that passed as fun back in one’s high school or college days. It really wasn’t acceptable back then either, but there comes a point in a woman’s life where it crosses the line from dubious fun to simply a telling commentary on what kind of a person she has become over the years.

One of the less helpful side-effects of emotional pain, of any origin, is the tendency to redirect it. Often we take aim at those closest to us, but our targets can be stereotypical too. If we are suffering from insecurities related to our physical appearance, we might develop a habit of poking fun of the overweight in the form of jokes and snide remarks. People suffering rejection in matters of romance and relationships fall back on unflattering gender stereo-typing and bashing. When we see ourselves as completely misunderstood, we gladly cloak ourselves in martyrdom.  The professionals refer to it as displacement and, lately, I seem to have less and less patience with this in others and in myself.

Try as I might to always put a correct name on the vagueness that is my grief experience now, I am still not always successful. A week ago I turned fear into homesickness and as a result upset my husband rather needlessly. We talked it through and as it turns out I was homesick, but I wish I could sort out my emotions in a more articulate manner. Words are a timesaver that I don’t appear to have when it comes to how I am feeling and it frustrates me. When I watch the schoolgirl boy-bashing on the board, it occurs to me that it would be more productive for those engaged to just admit that they are afraid they are too old or unattractive and with personalities that are an acquired taste for any man to be attracted to them now that they have been thrust unwillingly back onto the “market”. It would certainly be easier to tell them to quit being so stupid if that were the case than to try and wade through the thinly veiled loathing of their situations, and point out to them that what they are doing by ridiculing these poor men is tearing them down in an effort to build themselves up. And that just can’t be done. Self-esteem is not built on the crushed bodies of others. How do I know? I used to be one of those women who engaged in similar sorts of slamming. It was before Will. And it didn’t make me a better person. Nor did it fix the real problem, which was me.

My problem now is to find a way to express what seems inexpressible. Those moments of sadness that feel connected to my now and aren’t. Take today for instance, I had to drive into Sherwood Park to the RCMP to have my fingerprints taken for a background check that Immigration needs to process my residency card application. For some reason, I felt like crying after it was all done. And it had nothing to do with being homesick, though I am a tiny bit, or with Rob and our relationship because I can’t imagine myself anywhere but wrapped up in his arms. What it comes down to is that it is another step away from Will and that past. The trigger was not the fingerprinting, but a conversation with my daughter before we left for the police station. She wanted me to dig up her father and bring his remains here, so she could have a place nearer by to visit him. The other day she insisted that we call him “Will” now instead of “Daddy”. One step and one step more. Thankfully I was able to track down the source and talk with Rob about it when he came home for lunch, and I felt better. It’s not always that easy. Caregiving as long as I did and watching Will die for as long as that took, I couldn’t allow myself to feel everything that wanted or needed to be felt in the instance that it did. Feelings were diverted and renamed for survival’s sake. Useful at the time. Not so much now.

Knowing what is wrong is half-way home to fixing it, I guess.