FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

Well, I am back on the road again shooting the last chapter of my new film about a Tibetan Buddhist Master (more to follow about this subject). I feel a bit like I just jumped from the frying pan into the fire. My schedule looks just like what people have come to expect of me – Zurich, Rome, Moscow, Tuscany, Romania – all in the next four weeks. And this is just the month of July!

So, what I have been thinking about surprises even me: I am happy being back on the road shooting a new film — and I don’t seem to mind the fact that I don’t have children and probably never will.

‘Now wait a minute,’ I can hear you saying, ‘what is this about? It sounds like a feat of self-deception!’

Many of those who know me know that for the last ten years I have been trying to have a child. I woke up to this desire in my mid-thirties, quite late in life, after not wanting one at all through my twenties. When I did start wanting a baby, I wasn’t in the kind of relationship that could support one. I kept waiting for the perfect relationship to conceive, but even that concept passed. By the time I was in my forties, I had decided that with or without the ‘right’ man, I wanted a child. I then had two miscarriages with my boyfriend. Afterwards, we decided we wanted to get more serious and went through two rounds of IVF unsuccessfully.

It was clear that I was simply too old to have a child with my own eggs. The doctor suggested using donor eggs and said that my chances of having a baby this way were very high. My boyfriend and I considered this option, but something didn’t sit quite right with us – although we have nothing against it for others. We have also considered adoption. In truth we are still considering it….

But something strange has been happening to me lately. I have spent a lot of time playing children: with my nieces and nephews, with friends’ babies, and even with strangers’ kids at the playground. I have enjoyed being with children a lot. But I have slowly begun to think about what it would be like if I never have one of my own. I have been considering this role of perennial ‘aunt’. To my surprise, I kind of like the idea.

Simultaneously, I have been regarding my own life: this strange, exciting, traveling working, artist woman I have spun myself into. I have also been looking at my relationship. For a long time I wondered if we could survive without kids. Now I have been noticing how much fun we have as a couple alone, able to enjoy ourselves at whim. I have started to wonder, could we survive with a child?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that it wouldn’t be great to have children, but since I can’t now, it’s time to face the reality. I know without a partner dedicated to childrearing (meaning a male version of a wife), I would have to curtail my career in a big way. Since my current boyfriend doesn’t want to give up his work, we are both stuck. Clearly we would both have to cut back on our jobs, but do we really want to? I want to be able to make the films I want to make and to travel when necessary. I know that if I had a child, my work would be the first of the two of ours to go. I have no fantasy that he would suddenly become a ‘house husband’. Moreover, being a woman, I know I wouldn’t be able to stand the guilt of abandoning my child for my career (see my previous post). I am pretty sure I would do what almost every woman I see around me do once she gives birth: take a part-time job to have time to raise her children. And I can’t envision being able to make films part-time. Meanwhile, I can easily envision the anger I would feel if I have to stop my art. Suddenly, I see a situation that so many women I know fall into after having children, I’d probably end up furious at my partner for all I’d lost to have our joint dream of a child.

OK, I know I have just spun a scenario in my head that doesn’t exist yet, but the strangest thing is that for the first time, I am beginning to see that being childless has been and could continue to be a wonderful thing. I am starting to realize that I like my life and the freedom I have. I can enjoy the children around me, without having to do all the work that the women I see have to do. I never thought I’d get to this place. I never thought that the desire to have children would pass and that I would feel fine as a childless working woman. But I do. Let’s see if my feelings hold…

I had a fight with my mom this morning. I received a call from an old friend last night, and while I was trying to have a conversation with him, my little daughter Hannah was tugging at the phone, singing at the top of her voice – making it impossible for me to hear him. I took her to my mom’s room and asked if she would look after her so I could continue my conversation. A few minutes later Hannah started howling and I had to end conversation so I could fetch her. I noticed my mom seemed upset but didn’t pay too much attention.

This morning as Hannah and I are leaving the house in our usual rush after spending too long eating breakfast, brushing teeth and bundling her into her coat (it’s cold and wet in this part of the world) I notice my mother is very obviously upset, in fact, she’s not even paying Hannah any attention. . . so I ask what’s going on and she says that last night I said to whomever I was speaking to that “ I also have to deal with my mother’ – which I most certainly did not. I did not speak about her once!!!

My mother is known for holding grudges – one of my friends calls her ‘granny with a  grudge’ and when she feels she’s been wronged (as she most certainly does now) she can give me the cold shoulder for days!

I feel like I’m 15 again – same dynamic. I’m 34 and my mom and I still have the same patterns except now she’s 70 and in addition to all her grudges maybe she is also having trouble accepting that we’re stuck with each other – I know I have trouble accepting it! Aargh!

As if I don’t have enough to deal with! Ha ha! Good thing my mom doesn’t know a thing about the internet – imagine her reading my blog?

For most of my life I would have told you that I didn’t feel guilty about anything – and it would have been true. I didn’t feel guilty for rejecting my mother, Gram, and aunt. I didn’t feel guilty for my career. I didn’t feel guilty for the sex I had with men, or the abortions I had when my birth control failed. I guess you could say I was a poster child for liberation. That is, until one day I woke up and realized that I wasn’t liberated at all, I had just cut off all my feelings to escape that very thing from which I thought I was free. Because the more I let in my feeling towards my mother, the more guilt I suddenly had. So loving her was synonymous with feeling guilty.

Does this sound strange? Or too much like psychobabble? The reality is that it is not a concept, but my direct experience. The more I have allowed myself to feel my female side, the guiltier I have become. Going on the road and talking to women around the globe made me realize that I was part of a female community, and therefore related to women everywhere, but also to those in my family. That means that, along with letting in my mother (and realizing we have something in common), I have also let in a flood of guilt. I now feel guilty for everything: for not spending enough time with her or my aunt (because if you don’t let them in, you don’t have to feel guilty about being absent); not spending enough time with my long term boyfriend (because if you don’t commit to a relationship, then there is nothing to feel guilty about); not working hard enough (because if you don’t spend time with your mother or your partner you have more time for work).

You could say that my whole life now revolves around guilt! In fact there is not much I don’t feel guilty about. (Oh, and did I mention the abortions I had when I was so young? Try getting to an age when you can no longer have children and dealing with the fact that you didn’t want them when your body did…) So when I read my girlfriend Theresa’s blog about how she feels guilty as a single mother, I had to ask myself – is guilt the female curse? It seems like all women are raised to believe that we should fulfill everyone’s needs perfectly, minus our own, and that we are not good women if we don’t. This seems to be a universal problem of women around the world. Just look at the symbols of femaleness that have haunted us through history: wife, mother, and whore. All of them are about servicing someone else before our selves and seeing our value in the reflection of another. And we can never be good enough, now, can we?

I’m not sure if it’s my Catholic upbringing or what, but I am so riddled with guilt all the time.

My recent single status is taking some adjusting. From the simple every day things like not having someone to help with chores, taking the trash out, buying groceries, helping to share the load with Hannah, etc., to the more substantial things like having someone to talk to – sharing highs and lows. I just had my 34th birthday and it was a rather gloomy day but ended up being lots of fun. Met some friends for drinks after work. Got home somewhat tipsy and cried into my pillow!

But all the while I felt so terribly guilty that I hadn’t seen Hannah since I dropped her at school that morning. My mother, of course, didn’t help by adding that Hannah had waited up for me because she ‘wanted her mommy to kiss her goodnight!’ I imagine this guilt will be a regular thing. Already I have an invitation to join some girlfriends for drinks on the weekend and I will have to leave Hannah with my mom again or stay at home forever.

I’m a working mom so I don’t spend that much time with Hannah during the week anyway which, of course, I feel guilty about. I feel guilty that right now Hannah doesn’t have strong male role models, that I will eventually date again and she will have to get to know someone new who may or may not stick around. I feel guilty that I can’t afford to do more fun stuff with her, to take her (and me) on holiday. I feel guilty that she doesn’t have a mom and dad who live together in a cute little house with a garden and a dog!

I want to believe that in the end all that matters is that Hannah is surrounded by people who love her and that I can only do a good job as a mom if I take time out for myself and on good days I almost succeed – if only I could find a way to rid myself of the guilt!

I am a (recently) single mother of a beautiful 28-month-old daughter. When I say recently single, I mean it’s been just over a month. And it’s been awful. After a couple of weeks of crying myself to sleep I thought I’d made some headway with this grief process but today I’ve hit a low.

It’s Monday and I’ve survived another weekend. Weekends are hard. They remind me of how alone I am, everywhere I look I see couples or see activities advertised that are best suited to couples. I really wanted to go a concert this past weekend. Womack & Womack, Ashford & Simpson, Caiphus Simenya & Letta Mbulu – romantic stuff for couples.

I’d forgotten how obsessed the world is with couples. I’ve been on my own for such a short period of time and already the jokes are there – about how long it’s been since I’ve had it, which guys would be right or wrong for me. don’t get me wrong – I’m not the victim here - I make fun of myself, put the pressure on myself.

But the truth is I am terrified that I’m going to have to do this all over again. Find someone new to be with because I know I don’t want to be alone and I know that in time I’ll see things differently and still I am terrified because I don’t know how many more painful, heart wrenching break-ups I can endure.

My friends all tell me that I am strong and I know I am – I’ve weathered a few storms in my short life – but that’s just it – I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of believing that love is enough because it so obviously isn’t. It wasn’t enough to pay the bills, to soldier on and fight for this relationship. It wasn’t enough to keep him with me and my darling daughter he said he loved so much. Love is NEVER enough.

My whole world feels out of kilter – my flat is a mess. I come home to my 70–year-old mother and 2-year-old daughter every day. There’s not enough space for all of us – I feel like the walls are closing in. I know there’ll be better days but right now it sucks!

“If I only knew then what I know now” – something I have heard adults say throughout my childhood – is a phrase I have always hated. Yet, now that I am in my forties, I find myself wanting to utter it too sometimes, but knowing that it won’t work for me any better than it worked for them. Honestly, I am not even sure what I would want to tell my young self if I could.

Then two days ago I was out with my girl friend Pat Cisarano for dinner in Soho and she said:

“Oh my god I saw a picture of myself in my twenties, and I realized I wasn’t bad looking, I was actually pretty.”

I felt like saying, “Duh!” but I controlled myself because she still thinks she is ugly today and the same thing could be applied now.

“But you know that fat thing…” she continued, “It was always hard to think I was pretty when I was overweight.”

Of course, I see Pat’s attractiveness – I am outside her inner story. Pat being heavier than the twiggy American ideal doesn’t detract from her beauty; it is and was always part of her beauty.

Pat’s comment made me think of my Aunt Shirley who always dressed meticulously and has never let her weight get over 105 pounds at 5 feet 5. I recently saw a super 8 movie of my mom and dad returning from their honeymoon on a ship from Bermuda. Greeting them at the dock were both of my grandmothers and my aunt, who must have been about 28 years old. All of them were dressed to the nines, with white gloves and little hats and their patterned dresses cinched tightly at the waist. My aunt was gorgeous; she looked like Elizabeth Taylor with black soft curls and big brown eyes and an hourglass figure. She was giggling and flirting with the camera (my father) in that oh-so-feminine way that took my breath away. This was my aunt who never married and who considered herself the ugly duckling compared to my mom (even to this day). I wonder what her life would have been like if she could go back and change her feeling about herself when she was younger.

Recently I enrolled in a writing class with the writer Martha Shulman at the Open Center . Last week she assigned us an exercise, and I began writing it as I always do. It went something like this: “Homely child makes big effort, and therefore gets boyfriends, who always leave her because she isn’t pretty enough.” It is true I was never a great beauty, but looking back now (as with my Aunt) I wonder what choices I would have made differently if I didn’t think I was so ugly and unlovable? Trying to write this story memoir for Martha’s class, I realized that the reality of my life actually contradicted what I felt: because from a young age there was a stream of boys and men that were attracted to me, leading to a continuous line of relationships (in which most commonly I broke up with the men) to the present.

I actually was shocked at this sudden new picture of my history. How could that homely girl attract the opposite sex all her life? Why was it that boys and men wanted to be with her (even when she didn’t try, because half the time she was so sure she would fail that she didn’t make any effort)? I have carried around this “ugly girl” story around like a precious parcel until now.

In the back of my mind, I have always attributed any male attention to other causes: they like me because of my girlfriend, Pat (who is a cool musician); they like my profession, filmmaking (also very cool); they like my family, American, (which, when I was younger, it was still cool to be); they like my loft, which is big (and again, way cool); and of course there was always the possibility that they like me because eventually I was willing to have sex, (which of course was the coolest of all); the list goes on and on. Never did I ever think that a man really liked me for myself or that I could be alluring as I am.

And of course when I was younger, I traded sex to make up for my perceived ugliness. And sex goes over well with boys. I thought that if I didn’t give sex, no guy would look at me - but now I see that I may have been wrong. My self-perception led me down many roads that perhaps I never would have traveled if I had thought differently. I am still struggling to integrate the idea that my “story” may a different one than I think it is. Because if this story, the one I’ve been telling myself my whole life, isn’t true, then who am I? I wonder… what would it mean for all of us – Pat, My Aunt, and me (and most women I know) – if we saw our beauty in a real way?

Tonight FLYING is playing on the Sundance Channel again, but I figure I’ll let it run without me this time. I left the TV off in the other room and turned off the lights in my loft; having crawled into my messy bed, I am near sleep.

So many people who watch FLYING want to know more about my Aunt Shirley. Well, honestly, my aunt is a very private person. But there are things I can tell you about her without violating her privacy… I’m not sure if this is obvious from watching the film, but I adore her and always have. Growing up, she was playful, imaginative, funny, loving… and always interested in me. She would sooner hurt herself than hurt one of us children. I can recall the time when she was left alone overnight to baby-sit my older brother and me (who were, at that point, archenemies). Usually it was my Gram who took care of us overnight – she knew how to handle us little monsters – but for some reason my aunt was left all alone with us that time. As soon as my parents left, my older brother and I started fighting. Aunt Shirley mumbled feebly, “stop that…stop that….” And before we could escalate to our usual high-pitched furor (which included scratching, kicking, biting) she had already taken to my mom’s bed with a migraine. My brother and I spent the whole night putting warm compresses on her head as she moaned and tiptoeing around in the dark room, whispering to each other. Oh, she was clever!

Aunt Shirley never married, and as far I could see, she never wanted to. She also says she never wanted children of her own, and I must say, I never felt she wanted them either. She was not a woman pining for a man or family; instead, I think she just wanted to work. My dad always told the story that she went to New York alone when she was very young, a radical decision for a woman back then, to become a singer. He always spoke about how talented she was. She spent a year in the city, living in an all-women boarding house, taking singing lessons, and performing in clubs. But in the end, she was stricken with laryngitis for three months and went back home to Florida to live with my grandmother, grandfather, and mother. She says performing wasn’t for her and she always hated it; it scared her to death.

Soon, when she was still in her early twenties, her father would die and my mother would marry my father. My aunt and Gram moved together to Philadelphia where my mother now lived with her new husband and Gram and Aunt Shirley continued to live together their entire lives. My aunt later wrote and performed TV ads, and was able to do special voices. When I was growing up, I remember her always entertaining me with different characters she made up. My favorite was Matilda, the fairy, who spoke in a high, raspy whisper and lived in a matchbox near Aunt Shirley’s bed. Matilda would always visit me when I stayed alone overnight with her at the Mayfair House, my aunt’s and grandmother’s apartment, for the weekend. I would always long to visit them and have my special time with them, but once I arrived, I would get scared and homesick. Invariably, Shirley would ask Matilda the fairy to come and comfort me. Even though I couldn’t see Matilda, I could feel her. She would talk to me in my aunt’s room while I lay in my aunt’s bed, which she had given up to me for the weekend.

We all knew my aunt was brilliant and could do anything - everybody whispered that when she was out of the room. For example, she could see a dress in a magazine, copy it, make a pattern, and direct my Gram to sew it for her; then she would show up at our house in an outfit worth thousands of dollars that had only cost her a few bucks to make. My aunt could have been or done anything, but she really felt the shackles of being single and the world’s harsh vision of her female lot. It hurt her knowing that the world saw her as a spinster, which implies that she wanted something other than what she had, but it was very hard for her to break free.

I think this is the reason she always told me stories of adventure, travel, and alternate worlds into which I could enter: she really wanted something more for me. She wanted me to explore foreign lands, even as she herself was afraid to do so alone. Even now, it is my aunt who wants to know every detail of every place I go, the food I eat, the clothing they wear. She says to me in a whisper when no one is looking, “good for you!” and “you’re the only one in our family who is famous!” Of course, this is not true – but far be it from me to correct her. Everyone needs someone who idolizes you and thinks you are special. Thank god my aunt never married or had children. I am very lucky to have had her, and to still have her, to myself for all these years.

These are the facts: FLYING has screened in countless cities across the United States and around the world; I have been at many of those screenings; I have heard reactions from viewers of all shapes and sizes and ages and colors; I have had people come up and hug me and thank me for the work, and others walk out in the middle of a screening, shaking their heads and mumbling to themselves; I have heard every kind of question about my personal life from absolute strangers without blinking an eye, and I have answered them matter-of-factly, as honestly as I could; and, somehow, in all of this, I have still felt myself able to hide, to withdraw behind a screen of safety, to imagine myself private, invisible, able to disappear in the blink of an eye from sight.

But facing the first broadcast of FLYING on the Sundance Channel a few hours ago, I suddenly felt (don’t laugh) horribly exposed. Because no matter what it must seem like watching FLYING, I am actually a very private person. Yet, even as I write this, I try to figure out a way to explain the obvious contradiction.

Last night I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge at 7 pm with Ptah, my dog. The sky was clear and it was a glorious evening. We arrived at my girlfriend Pat Cisarano’s basement brownstone apartment at 8 pm, armed with beer (for me) and cookies (for her), to watch the premiere at 9 pm.

Pat was one of the impetuses to make FLYING when she faced a brain tumor operation that changed her life – and also my life because I love her. It seemed only right that we should sit together, order take out vegetarian Chinese food, try to hush her two small dogs from barking at my big dog, and gossip and talk over the film for two hours. After all, we have both seen it – and I must admit that watching my own film is something I haven’t done in a year and half touring with it. But being with Pat made it all survivable: The comments about our friends that appear in the film; Her comments about the things she wishes she never said; My asking her every ten minutes if she thinks the film is playing slow; Her responding with a Brooklyn accent, “It’s playing at the same speed it always played at, dummy.”

It didn’t stop the anxiety, nor the horrible feeling of having been dragged out into the light naked. ‘What did I expect?’ I can hear you asking, whoever you are. And after, all you have a right: making a six-hour film exposing your life, the life of your family and friends, and the women you meet is not accidental. But I didn’t expect it. I just did what I had to do - at the time, what I thought was right. I didn’t think – can I handle this? I thought: I will handle this.

When I left Pat at midnight, we stood outside on her tree-lined street waiting for the car service to arrive to take the dog and I back to Manhattan. I complained to her about how I was working too hard, and she gave me her oh-so-Pat straight talking advice about what I should do with my life. The same advice that I have depended on since we became friends when I was twenty-one and she was twenty-six.

A lot has changed for her and I since we met, and even since we made the film, yet the fact remains that just being together on this night of such vast exposure for both of us, was just where we both needed to be. Neither of us talked about it much actually – unlike in the film where we seem to discuss everything. Tonight, we were just old girlfriends, not much to say, lots of water under the bridge, lots of knowing.

To hear some of Pat’s original music, please visit her website at: http://www.myspace.com/patcisarano

Well it is 4:14 am on Saturday morning, May 3, and I am wide-awake. After tossing and turning in bed, since 2 am, I finally got up and came downstairs to the main room of my loft, so as not to wake my partner sleeping soundly. I am at the dining room table typing on my laptop in the dark. The soft light of the streetlamp pours in. Dark is never dark in the city.

I have to teach early in the morning to a group of ‘at-risk’ teenage girls at the Jacob Burns Center in Huntington. Part of not being able to sleep, is the need for my mind to plan out what I will say before I get there. I will be showing clips from FLYING and demonstrating techniques, literally “passing the camera” with them. I have never done a presentation with young girls and I am excited, but also scared. I had to discuss with Lois the Burns Center programmer, what I could show to them. Was it alright to talk about sex? Masturbation? Violence against women? Abortion? My married lover? The good thing is that Lois felt many topics would be acceptable – “these are inner city girls who have seen a lot” she said – but some of the unacceptable topics surprised me like abortion. As I sit here tonight, I muse how a child who has been sexually abused – as Lois told me many of these girls are ¬– should not hear stories about abortion. It has always been a strange world around issues concerning a girl’s control over her own body and sexuality. With these thoughts, I crawl up to my bedroom and under the covers to try to sleep the last two hours of the night.

Now today about eight hours later, I am in the midst of these youth, most living in a girl’s shelter in upstate New York. I talk, I show film clips, and they “pass the camera”. And there are things that strike me about what they know and don’t know. There are the outspoken one’s who always have their hands up, who always want to hold the camera, and then there are the girls that stare ahead and don’t speak, the one that sleeps, and the one that looks blank at me when I pass the machine.

Things that shock me: I show the clip where Ladawn is talking about divorce and an inter-cut strand of Ladawn’s daughters, Margie and Kait, talking about divorce. Afterwards, the girls are visibly moved. They are able to read the honesty of Kait and Margie, young women their age, in a way that surprised me. “I like the way they were so ‘real’” one girl said, “You never see that on TV, people are all fake.” This gives us an opportunity to talk about what it means to be ‘real’ with a camera present? I ask if any of their parents are divorced? All of them raise their hands. Most of them tell stories of how their fathers treated their mothers badly. When I ask if they think there is a way to change this, they shake their head ‘no’. “Men will always have the power,” they say. I am dumbfounded. I can’t think of a way to rebuttal their pessimism.

I show the clip where I am talking about my sexual abuse with my girlfriends Theresa and Lucilla. They are surprised that it happened to me too. When I ask how many of them were sexually abused. Three quarters of them raise their hands. I show the sequence of the women in Pakistan and they are concerned about how I kept filming when the women ask me to shut it off. I say that there are some times when you think that showing the world something – in this case these women’s fear of men – is more important than their desires. I explain that as a filmmaker you are always making these subtle judgment calls, but you can be wrong. Now, rallying, I try to explain that I believe that films can change things, that I hope by making films I can improve the power relations between men and women. I hope I sound convincing. If I don’t have faith, how will they?

But the real surprise comes when we break into small groups of four and they “pass the camera” amongst themselves for the first time. The shy girls come out and start talking, the sleeping girl wakes up, and the catatonic girl becomes animated. Slowly they begin to speak to each other.

There is one young woman, Ann, who when asked to tell about her life to the camera says, stonefaced: “I have had a tragic life, there is nothing good. My father hit me and my mother didn’t want me.”

The other girls in her group, chorus in: “ I feel you.” And “Same for me.”

They pass the camera some more and end up back on Ann, “Tell us about your day?” Her friend asks now.

Ann begins again, “ I have a tragic life, every day is bad…”

Then the friend says: “But look at you now, you are smiling.”

I watch Ann do a double take as if she was seeing herself for the first moment – indeed she is grinning. “Yes I am.” She says slowly. “Today is a good day.”

I was always short. My older brother was twice my size and used to pummel me as soon as my parents left us alone in a room. Then he would turn around screaming when they reentered, lamenting: “she hit me, she hit me”. My dad would start to yell at me and I would cry back, “he’s lying, he’s lying” - but it would be too late. My dad would decide that we both must be lying and he would punish us both. Not only was my brother twice as big - he was twice as smart, twice as quick, and two years and two days older than me, so two was a major theme. I never could get out the first word.

My grandmother always used to say, “Be glad you’re short; men like short women.”

This always made me angry. “What do I care what men think?”

“Look, this way you can date anyone you want, short or tall,” would be her response.

“You’re crazy,” I would say, “I would never want to go out with a short man!” She would shake her head hopelessly.

“Good things come in small packages.”

But what did she know? My mom was short, like I was – and look at her! It was clear: my Gram was the stupidest woman I knew.

All of my brothers turned out to be tall like my father; even my younger sister, who was nine years younger, had five inches on me. Only I was like my mother. My mother and I shared the same figure, which was even worse than being short. My Gram used to say, “Be grateful you are like your mother! You don’t want to be like me!” She would make a motion of throwing a ball over her shoulder. “Look how big they are? I could throw them over my shoulders.” My Gram told us over and over how she grew up in the flapper era when the fashion was to be flat chested, so her sister used to wrap her chest in cotton so tight that she couldn’t breathe. Everyone back then wanted to look like a boy. She would shake her head and sigh, explaining that back then, women didn’t know how it would ruin their breasts.

But her stories failed to move me. I wanted something else; I wanted cleavage like the black and white women on the TV set that arrived at our house in 1964. But my Gram was having none of the woman on the tube. She used to yell at me: “Your mother is perfect, your mother is perfect!” What did she know?

I was my father’s daughter, and it was his jokes that interested me: “Oh yeah!” he used to say, us five kids sitting at the dinner table rapt with attention as my mom dished out the pot roast, “After I married your mother, I stuck my hand inside her bra but there was nothing there! Flat as a board!” He would laugh so hard and we’d all laugh too, while my mom would turn bright red. I knew how she felt, yet I knew how he felt too - as if he’d been cheated out of something. I felt I had been cheated too. My two-times-me older brother would tease me mercilessly about what I didn’t have and never would have. Not only was I missing height; I was missing something essential to being a woman.

My grandmother would tell me how wrong I was - that the perfect breast should fit in a champagne glass, like my mother’s did. But I had hugged my mother and felt the bones beneath her chest; I wanted to be full and plump and padded like Sadie, who cooked and cleaned for us after my grandfather died. Sadie was round as a ball, but when you hugged her, you felt something. When a man hugged me I wanted to imagine him feeling all warm and enveloped like I felt with Sadie, like I wished I felt with my mother. I didn’t know how my dad could put up with lying in bed with my mom’s bony frame. For a long time, I used to wonder how I could make myself round and cuddly and tall and thin at the same time.

But it didn’t matter what I wanted. Much remained the same for forty years until now, when I couldn’t care less about my height or my breasts. Sometimes I wished I was skinnier like my mom is now – she has shrunk in half over the years. I admit that I have hoped that, being so much like her, I have that gene too; it began for her when she was sixty, so it is not that far off for me. Now I am glad my breasts don’t sag like my friends who have bigger ones. And the champagne glass thing does hold up much better over time – I can attest.

My Gram is long dead and I never got to tell her she was right about some things – about anything. In fact, other than our breast sizes, my Gram and I share a whole lot more than I ever noticed before. To begin, we share the same height as my mother. And I must say, I look more like her than like my mother – we both have long thin faces and big noses. She always thought she was ugly (she was; I am too). But she always thought my mother, her baby daughter, was the most beautiful woman in the world, with her round face and turned up gentile nose. “Your mother can ‘pass’ you know?” she would chuckle, “No one ever knew she was Jewish.” Not like her and not like me.

But my Gram could sew and she was an artist. And she was a good dancer – up to just weeks before she died, she would tell me: “My brother and I would start the dancing in the ballroom when were children; my mother would push us out to the floor to get the guests started.” Then she would show me how she could dance by doing a little two-step. When I was a girl, she took me downtown on the weekends to shop at Wanamaker’s, the big department store in Philadelphia back then. We’d look in all the windows and talk to all the sales people endlessly and go in search of free “samples” in the bakery department, then we’d talk to the baker. My grandmother grew up in a hotel, and her mom used to ask her talk to the guests in the hotel to make them feel at home. Even though she was long widowed by the time I knew her and regulated to be our nurse and caretaker, she still behaved as if the world was one big hotel lobby and talked to anyone and everyone she met on the street.

Now, as an adult, I find myself talking to cabbies, fellow passengers, and street people everywhere as I fly around the world. Just the other day, it dawned on me that I would never be lonely because I can always just go outside on the street, walk into a shop, and talk to the salesperson. Not everyone can do that. My Gram always said having a good personality was more important than the way you looked (that and knowing how to dance). That’s how she met my grandfather, who was exceedingly handsome – so handsome that she never knew why he liked her. I guess when you are ugly you have to think up some alternative skills. That’s what she told me, and that’s how she helped me get by in the world as a short, flat chested, Jewish woman with a big nose.