Smug

Anne Sexton, one of my all-time favorite poets, has a poem called "Her Kind". You can hear Sexton herself read it at the link there; she has a slow, deliberate voice that I think reminds me of someone (maybe myself) reading poetry.

The poem is one that expresses the way a woman can look at another woman and feel the ways that we have been that woman. The last line of each stanza repeats a similar refrain: stanza one: "A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind." and stanza two: "A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind." and stanza three "A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind."

It's a poem that I have always loved, for many reasons, not the least the way it deals with the concept of the old misunderstood woman as an "evil" a "witch" that other women could relate to through our moments of feeling that way. A woman that someone could also hate enough to hang, or burn, or whatever a culture does with witches and old women when they are deemed useless, out of time.

I thought of this poem today when I was at the grocery store. I'm going to be 35 in a little under a month. 35 isn't really very old-- but when I was 17 I would have said it was. When I'm 45, I'm sure I'll think 35 a walk in the park. Last year at about October I noticed the first crinkley wrinkles around my eyes-- they were much deeper than I imagined the first wrinkles would be. They look like my mother's eyes-- and you can rarely freak a woman out more than telling her she's turning into her mother. (Sorry, mom, you know it's true-- no offense, but....) :)

I don't mind getting older. I always tell people to consider the alternative.... since you can't get younger, or stay the same age, the only other alternative is death. Yup. Older sounds better to me! Sometimes, though, I am reminded of myself as a young woman. Usually it's when someone younger than me says something casually cruel. They don't mean to be cruel, I think; they're just young and don't know that it will cause that pit in the stomach feeling for the 10 (or 20 or 30) years older woman across the table, or reading her blog on the internet, or walking next to her in the pharmacy to pick up a batch of sudafed.

But the cruelty is there anyway. They, secure in the bloom of youth with plenty of time to imagine those options-- oh yes, I've got loads of time to have kids, finish school, be discovered, get married, climb Mt. Everest. I'm only... (insert age). They can toss off a casual comment that will reach deep into the heart of the woman who is beginning to suspect she no longer has plenty of time and twist. And it's even more cruel that they aren't even aware they're doing this.

When I was about 17, I remember I wore this dress to work. I worked at K-Mart (a nice one) as a cashier and I had borrowed my best friend J's peach clingy sexy dress, with a little ruffle on the butt, hitting just above the knee and tapering a bit to grab the hips like a lover's first dance. It was spandex/cotton. It was totally inappropriate for work. I didn't think so at the time, but now, looking back, I sort of cringe that I wore it to work. It was meant for going out to a club, wearing Fuck me pumps and fluffing the hair coated with perfume. It was a sex dress. It was not for ringing up bottles of shampoo and Jaqcuelyn Smith sweaters and tampons. But I wore it anyway, secure in my 17 years. No bra. White pumps.

While wearing this dress, I was happily walking next door to lunch while on my break. It was a bad Italian place, but pretty much all there was. My hair, which then was pretty fairly auburn and shoulder length, worn in a pageboy style bob, was blowing back in the wind. I was young, and quite secure on a "feeling pretty" day. A woman walking the other way said something like "Aren't you just gorgeous?" The way she said it was a compliment-- not meant to be catty, not meant to be mean. I know this now because I've thought the same damn thing seeing a 17 or 21 year old girl in the blooming sex-ready youth and not said it. I was very happy to hear it-- I rarely heard in my youth any compliments about my looks and was very insecure. I remember saying Thank You! But I don't remember what the woman looked like. She, whether she was pretty or old or what, was sort of (and I hate to admit it now) invisible to me in the power of my youth.

I know now that my unwitting sex stalking dressed up in the wrong clothes at K-Mart (of all places to run into a vixen) was one of those moments for that woman. The pit in the stomach awareness that a woman, with lines beginning to show around her eyes and a pouch on her tummy that no amount of aerobics gets rid of and maybe, just maybe, not enough time to do all those things she really means to do, will feel.

Yes. I have been Her Kind. She, though, has not been mine. But it will come. Oh yes, dear. And you will not be ready for it. Invisibility is sometimes worse than old. So I try, really hard, to feel glad for their youth, their smugness. But sometimes, it's hard. And I try really hard to see older than me women who would think a few crow's feet a minor complaint, and smile, and really SEE them. And not be smug about it.