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Tag: social fear

Of Thee I Sing

I recently realized that my lifetime struggles with singing mirror exactly my lifetime struggles with self-acceptance and self-expression. What a cliché.

saved from my-diy-crafts-tuts/.blogspot.com

From the age of 5 or 6, singing was a source of joy, of wings for me. Apparently, my rendition at the age of 6 of My Favorite Things, from The Sound of Music was notable enough that my camp counselor pulled over some of her counselor friends for a repeat performance. But just as I was always scanning my family, friends and peers for cues that I wasn’t quite up to par, I was also always very sensitive to any negative criticism about my singing, and it always trumped whatever genuine smiles I also sometimes elicited. At my Bat Mitzvah, one of my 13 year old guests told me after the ceremony that the Kiddush was not meant to be sung with vibrato. Not ever having had a voice lesson, (or even really understanding what vibrato was) whatever vibrato I had was naturally present, but apparently that was a bad thing. It didn’t help that during my high school years the choral director was an ornery old man with a bad temper and no business working with students. He called me out once in front of the entire choir for singing nasally. He had me sing the phrase “Christe eleison” over and over, slamming his baton each time while he mocked me with an excessively nasal rendition, but never bothering to explain to me how to open the sound. Mercifully, after the third time, I magically, and without any understanding of what I was doing differently, landed on an a clear resonant sound, and he actually raised his arms and proclaimed “Hallelujah!” I understood, of course, that everyone’s mortification was not due to my nasal singing, but due to the dreadful awareness that this could have just as easily been them being humiliated. But I also understood that there was something pathetic, inferior, about my singing. I doubted it constantly.

The problem was, of course, I cared too much. Singing made me soar. It gave me a means to express my heart, my understanding of pain, love, sauciness, peace, and confusion. And somehow, it also became an offering of myself, so that any shortcomings or rejections were a dagger into my own breast.

borzui.tumblr.com Alireza Borzui

I sought voice lessons with extremely unqualified people, who taught me no technique whatsoever, and was consistently placed in the second soprano or even alto sections of choirs, due to the vocal strain I’d exhibit whenever I tried to go into the soprano range. The problem with this was that I had no strength in the alto range either, and so, with a weak sound, limited range and no understanding of my abilities, I lamely persisted, trying to achieve flight, still sensing just out of reach a joy like no other, and yet also feeling clipped, inadequate, and confused as well. In other words, singing became a very emotionally fraught activity for me. A minefield. I was as sensitive and wounded as I was determined.

For a few years, I seemed to find my place. I sang with an a cappella group in college, doing standards with complex harmonies. My group, The Chattertocks, had an old-fashioned sound, and provided a home for my particular kind of singing, gentle and sweet. As my confidence grew, a few friends of mine noticed and actually told me that I had a beautiful voice, making me happier than they could ever imagine. But once I graduated from college and went into the larger world, my singing tapered off dramatically. I had none of the training or technique for classical singing, the only kind I found available for amateurs, and a short stint with a chamber choir was nothing but a continual fight for my life. In one strange moment, the conductor pointed out to the entire group how I was the only one on my part who consistently came in at the proper time, and how this should shame them all since I the weakest at sight reading and had the least musicianship of the bunch. Yikes.

Then two developments occurred that contributed to my shutting down. One was that my new husband didn’t seem to enjoy my singing very much. He told me fairly early on in our relationship that when I dreamily sang standards to myself in the car in his presence it was a presumptuous imposition and he’d prefer it if I stopped. The other was that my daughter began singing at the age of 4 and had the voice of an angel. Many years later she told me that it was my singing to her at night that instilled a love of singing in her own heart, but all I could see was that she was a young and vulnerable little girl whose only area of unquestionable confidence was her lovely voice. My focus shifted almost completely to celebration of her unfettered expression. As she grew and faced the painful challenges from being a wonderfully peculiar outlier on the bell curve of uniformity, her singing was something that called to everyone, awkward outliers and popular middlings alike. Even the most scornful peers and parents were moved and had to grant her this acknowledgment – she had a beautiful instrument and naturally knew how to play it like a master. I was so happy for her; she got everything I ever wanted for myself–people to feel something when she sang – and it made her happy as well. I encouraged immediately her interest in private voice lessons, and to this day cannot recall whether that interest generated from a seed planted by her middle school chorus teacher, came to my daughter on its own out of her love of singing, or was all but assured by my constant praise of her voice, and the beaming smile on my face only and barely kept in check by my desire to ensure that my dear girl wouldn’t forget how to remain humble. I never risked diminishing her by conveying that I thought my voice came anywhere near hers, and indeed I never believed that it did. And I daresay, she grew to become as confident in her sound as she was in her face, the other possession of hers that stopped people in their tracks. Which is to say, she became vain. And I was helpless to curb it because I knew she was right. Her own high opinion of her voice was the truth. She was that good. But her vanity and her impatience with lesser practitioners led her to criticize my occasional forays into song and to point out where she could do a better job. It was a one-two punch: Keep your own bird’s song quiet so as not to detract from your child’s, and then hear her chide you for your failings in voice. The vulnerability and honesty in my voice – the expression woven into the notes of my love for her, or whatever particular emotion I dared offer- did not seem to affect her. She heard only the uneven support, the slight wobbling, the occasional sharp or the collapse of the palette.

So, with my less than enthusiastic husband and virtuoso daughter, I stayed more or less silent for over 20 years.

found at http://goingoutsidethebox.tumblr.com/post/14320430113/shyness Endless Downstairs

Then about 5 years ago things began to change. One night at synagogue services I was approached by the conductor of the choir and the lead cantorial soloist. To my secret delight, the conductor told me that the soloist had heard my voice, having been standing close to where I sat, and had gone to directly to her afterward to tell her that the choir should recruit me. I was all at once happy beyond reasoning and also humbled, for the soloist who pronounced this had a beautiful voice indeed. The next thing I knew, with my children grown enough for me to make the time for rehearsals and services, I was in the choir. That led me to me sitting at one of the choir services near a woman I knew loosely from various activities at the synagogue. When we talked about what led each of us to the choir this woman mentioned she was getting voice lessons from someone she recommended highly, and she encouraged me to think about getting lessons as well, if I were seriously interested in reviving my singing. And so I called the voice teacher and began private lessons. These things don’t happen by accident. I must have really wanted to sing.

Over 5 years later, I am still studying with the same teacher. This wonderful woman, a professional singer and cantor, trained at the best music schools in the country, immediately understood things about my voice that no one else seemed to: I didn’t know how to use it and I was blocked. She helped me unlock an entire additional octave in the soprano range, where I actually belonged, simply by patiently and kindly showing me how to let go of my tightened tensed throat and jaw and my deep-rooted fear. At first, at recitals, I was so afraid to sing in front of others that my heart palpitated and I grew white as a sheet. But I persevered. I persevered without little more than an extracted and somewhat strained compliment from my husband or a careful remark from my daughter, encouraging but with the spectre of all the things she wasn’t saying (and let me know without words that she wasn’t). I stopped asking them to attend my recitals and chose to believe my teacher’s insistence that I had a gift to give others. I just needed to accept it for what it was and use it how it was meant to be used, instead of trying to emulate or compare myself to other singers and believing always that I fell short. My dear sisters would occasionally come to hear me sing, smiling and silent but always nodding, fully present and encouraging for the earnest and clearly important struggle, even while they perhaps wished I wasn’t quite so invested and therefore so easily crushed, and even though they might have been hard-pressed, if someone asked them, why it was so painfully important to me. And over the years, little by little I could sing with less and less of the constriction I had always brought. I began asking for, and receiving parts in choir songs. I was asked to sing at my friend’s occasional religious celebrations in her home for the Jewish holidays of Sukkot, Chanukah and Shavuot, and listeners would approach me afterward to tell my how lovely my singing was. The conductor of the synagogue choir invited me to join an elite women’s choir she directed, and the next thing I knew, I was challenging myself and enjoying the stretch for works by Handel, Thompson, and Rachmaninoff. And slowly, ever so slowly, I grew to appreciate that I did have something others enjoyed. A sweetness, an old-fashioned yearning that carried my heart across, and they began telling me that I moved them. They did not focus on the technical failures, the occasional dropped support or forward sounding note. They focused on what I could do for them, and, sure enough, that’s what I began to focus on as well.

The final breakthrough came to me about a year ago. It dawned on me that when I let go completely of the fear, I indeed connected – both with my voice and with the audience. When it became about them instead of about me, I was freed. I was able to stop worrying about all that I couldn’t do, all that my mistakes revealed about my inadequacies, and just feel that sense of joy that comes from laying it all out there and, becoming a vessel for the listeners to willingly sip from. I could see them clutch at their hearts or mist up. And the more I saw their honest and receiving reactions, the more comfortable I was revealing my voice. The emotion, the vulnerability, the aching. It wasn’t a frightened plea for acceptance anymore; it was a brave gift. People enjoy singers and songs because they express baldly and without abashment all the emotions we feel constrained from expressing ourselves. When listening to a singer communicate a broken heart, or confusion, or flirtation, or over the moon love, people lose themselves and allow themselves to feel what they otherwise might disguise during actual communication. Once I understood that, once I understood that most people are just as constricted and afraid as I had always been, I could feel more at ease revealing not just my voice but who I am.

borzui.tumblr.com Alireza Borzui

For this opening up of my voice paralleled in time my slow but insistent opening up (or perhaps reopening) of my nature. And the more I relaxed and revealed without embarrassment that true nature –my giggling, my honest appraisals of what was being said or what I was observing, my desire for friendship or my off-beat sensibilities – the more it seemed that people reacted favorably. More favorably, it turns out, than they did when I tried to blend, tried to remain unseen, smooth and flawless. I discovered that far from being alone in my pained self-thwarting, I was in a sea of people who stay muted because they, too, are afraid to be found wanting. They hang back not because they don’t like warmth and playfulness, but because they don’t want to be branded foolish or undignified or weak. And when I offer myself without nervousness, without dread of rejection, without standing there like a mirror that calls attention to the fears in all of us, it puts them at ease and they respond.

I’ve heard time and again that singing is one of the most vulnerable activities one can do, and, for me at least, that is true. So is being one’s self. And though this journey to my true voice was very long and painful, I don’t regret the time it took or all the misgivings.

pinterest.com, pinned by Anne Krüger

I am instead just so happy to take a deep breath and know that I’ve found it.

May 28, 2016
You Like Me!

People of a certain age may remember that moment in 1984 when Sally Field won an Oscar for her performance in Places in the Heart. In her acceptance speech she was overcome with emotion. Barely but beautifully managing to remain coherent, she expressed her profound happiness and amazement that despite not having had an “orthodox” career (after all, she was Gidget and The Flying Nun), and wanting so much to be respected as a serious actress, she was now being recognized as such. Or, as she more succinctly put it: “…I can’t deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!!” Immediately there were jokes on late night comedy shows, teasing remarks in the media, sniggering banter among the general public, all indicting poor Sally for being so unabashedly preoccupied, apparently, with whether people liked and respected her acting. “How embarrassing! How neurotic! How nakedly needy!” went the chatter, and all nodded in agreement. It became something of a meme, pre-internet, and even resurfaced nine years later in The Mask, a bit altered but still clearly a grotesque homage to the original, when Jim Carrey’s Loki character suddenly receives an Oscar in the midst of his violent encounter with the bad guys. Carrey tearfully and vehemently grasps the statuette and sobs, “You love me! You really love me!”

Even at the time of Sally Field’s speech, I remember feeling a bit peeved by all the ridicule, mainly because it was Sally Field for godssake and who doesn’t love her? So what if she gushed something that sounded a bit too self-revelatory when she accepted her Oscar? It was an unbridled moment of shock, joy and gratitude. Who can be poised under those circumstances? Oh wait, we can. At least, that’s the myth, the standard, the expectation we all accept as gospel. No matter what, don’t reveal uncertainty, insecurity, or a care of any kind for what people think of you or how you are coming across, for that is weakness. And what do we do when we see weakness? Mock it, cluck our tongues, or thank god we haven’t displayed it ourselves. We align ourselves, so we imagine, with the strong, the confident, the unconcerned.

Now, however, on the back end of my presumed 100 years of life, I realize keenly that the myth is its own form of weakness. To be so comfortable in your own skin that you are truly unconcerned with how you come across, so that you neither avoid nor pretend away displays of uncertainty, doubt, or even idiocy is the sign of real confidence. It is the deniers, the mockers who are the poseurs. Their derision highlights their fear of being caught in the act of not being self-assured. The people who actually know me best may understand that this is certainly what I’d like to believe, anyway, for they know or at least suspect that I’ve been preoccupied for a good chunk of my life with how I come across to others. Huzzah! I’m free from it now. Finally and irreversibly free from that concern, but oh, how it plagued me! And I daresay it plagues a lot of people who never admit their affliction or even fully understand that they have it.

I knew I was preoccupied with the judgment of others from an early age; I kept my head down as much as possible. I was quiet with my peers, constantly scanning for whom it was I needed to avoid, or not antagonize, or win over if I were to evade being found out as the strange, uncool, uncertain creature that I was. My first taste of blissful freedom from this preoccupation came at age 12. It was then that I went to sleep away camp. It was a rough and bumpy first 3 weeks. What everyone chalked up to homesickness was actually misery and fear from being among peers who might brand me a loser. It was a misery I experienced all through 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grades, culminating in that summer at camp. I spent a good deal of time in the bunk of my 15 year old sister, sitting on her bed during free periods, learning macramé from the other girls in her bunk, or asking her to let me brush her hair (and surprisingly she did!). I never was so worshipful and doting and meek toward that particular sister as I was that summer, desperately subduing anything remotely pesky lest she banish me and I be cast adrift in the sea of my own bunkmates, all of whom seemed more self-assured, more popular, and more cool than I. Then, at the end of the third week, something extraordinary happened. I overheard two cute, adorable girls, whom everyone respected and admired, conversing about how nice I was! What happened was this: I was using the bathroom in the bunk when this girl Pam thought it would be funny to spy on me from above the divider. I was so surprised and mortified to have my private appointment with the toilet thus invaded, that I literally fell off the seat and cried out, resulting in a rush of girls to the scene. To my amazement, they started berating Pam for being so gross, so mean, so invasive, instead of laughing at me. In a dazed sort of aftershock from the whole affair, I wandered outside to the porch and sat down on a bench. Across the way were the two bunk darlings, Arlene and Mindy. I sat down just in time to hear Arlene say, “I really like Elisa, she’s so nice,” and Mindy answer, “Yeah, I really like her too, she’s so sweet.” They then looked up and saw me sitting there, and we all started laughing in sheepish embarrassment. Except I wasn’t just embarrassed. I was amazed, over the moon, astonished, delighted, so profoundly happy and confused. Could it be? These girls whose imprimatur of acceptance I could have only dreamed about actually enjoyed my presence? It was a seminal moment in my life. I transformed into a happy camper, literally, and proudly mixed in with my bunkmates as one of them. Camp became a place where I was free from the warfare of the cliques and popularity and meanness I witnessed back at elementary school, and it became so dear to me that I cried when it was time to leave. As I had been crying to my sister and my mother for the first 3 weeks about how I wanted to go home, this was somewhat perplexing to them, but nevertheless a huge relief for my mother who no doubt had been fluctuating between guilt and exasperation.

From that moment on the bunk porch, when I metaphorically clutched my own little award – I can’t deny, you like me! Right now, you LIKE me! – I developed greater ease, and a perspective on the wider world of social opportunity sufficiently broad enough to start looking for friends with whom I could connect. I stopped worrying about or trying to impress kids I really had nothing in common with and certainly didn’t genuinely respect. And in that effort I had wonderful success. I ended up having around me the most amazing authentic friends I could have hoped for. I was comfortable enough to be my goofy self. My more or less emotionally brave, honest, loyal, genuine, and caring self.

Then college happened, and once again I was thrown into a sea of young, uprooted and somewhat unsure and often posturing youth. My radar went back into primal overdrive. My information was distorted of course. I believed that everyone had someone to go to dinner with, everyone felt connected, everyone was cool, and everyone had a troupe from his or her freshman hall to rove with. Everyone, that is, except me. It never occurred to me that many others, if not most, had the same concerns of appearing easeful and smooth. And while, over the course of the four years, I slowly, slowly recovered from that setback and convinced myself I wasn’t the complete buffoon I feared, I never quite made it all the way back to that state of grace I found in high school among my dear, dear friends and family. And then, in a still somewhat overly self-editing and internally awkward state of mind, I unfortunately launched into law school and after that a corporate law firm (GAK!), a magnet for aggressive competitors and desperately posing associates who only know about half of what they pretend to know. Even the law partners, who must convince everyone and themselves that that are authorities, because verdicts or millions are at stake, know what they are doing only about two thirds of the time. I know this now, especially after having been married to one for a couple of decades. Not only that, I now understand that this is true of just about everybody. People can only do the best they can, and sometime they are doping it through like everyone else. (Except for blockheads who insist on things they know nothing about instead of actually opening up their minds and taking in information. Those jackasses only know what they are doing about a quarter of the time, if that.)

But back to my immersion in the larger adult world at the age of 25. In this toxic soup of competition, insecurity and posing, I floated. In a new city, far away from family and friends, I began the process of trying to swim, to find my authentic center all over again. Only this time, I didn’t make it anywhere near as far. Let’s just say I entered a prolonged period where I carried the fear of how I was coming across like a block of stone on my back. A fretful monitor in my brain carefully edited my choice of words in the nanoseconds before they came out of my mouth. It scrupulously screened my gestures and manners for anything remotely coarse, naïve, unworthy, insecure. I was consumed by insecurity over seeming insecure! I went over things that happened or that I said after the fact and shrank with mortification over how I could have been such a dolt. I met and married someone floating in that same toxic stew, and we moved to an affluent suburb of carefully practiced gentility, where we felt even more like poseurs. Where parents boasted about their genius children, and tried to appear nonchalant entering or living in huge country versions of mansions with extensive grounds. Where it was so easy to believe that everyone but you always remains assured, elegant and graceful, self-possessed in their movements and tone of voice, even behind closed doors.

What was it that freed me finally and irrevocably from all the dread and self-editing? Well, I do still edit myself somewhat, but these days my only filter is a desire to be kind. It took me until I was 52 to really, really understand that pretty much all of those overly self-assured people are full of shit, and that the truly, truly cool genuinely don’t care if they seem clueless, awkward, or temporarily needful. They are unembarrassed to seek approval or support. They know that everyone is unsure some of the time and it’s no big deal to admit it. I can’t be sure what it was that suddenly led me to open my eyes. To see and even hear the uncertainty and false bravado in so many people around me. To thrust off the expectations or standards of acquaintances and even friends who themselves are worried about the whispers and opinions of others. Maybe it was my utter exhaustion. Maybe it was the journey I went on to find out what it was I really cared about. Maybe it was watching my own children struggle with these same issues. I want them to know that the truly cool, ironically, are the very people who think nothing of proclaiming in moments of absolute joy and relief and gratitude, “You like me! And I’m so glad!!”

The final irony here is that once I was completely free from the worry of whether I was poised and likeable, whether I blended, I started putting others at ease. I started cracking more jokes, and making more honest or personal remarks. I started expressing my uncertainty about something in the most forthright way, and to my astonishment people responded with relief! With gratitude that I expressed something they also felt but didn’t want to admit! With unsolicited compliments about how natural, genuine and comfortable in my own skin I was! In short, they gave me awards, and in my mind I happily accepted them. You like me! You really like me! It was so freeing. So easy! I could be myself. And I wish I could tell her. I wish I could say, “Sally, you are my hero! You deserve an award! Not because you risked being so naked, but because you didn’t hesitate to consider it a risk at all.” If only I had understood way back then.

August 15, 2015
Summoning Up

When I was old enough to be driving, but young enough still to be living with my parents, I was returning with my mom from a shopping trip at the mall, when I drove over a mouse in our garage. I don’t know how the exact timing was possible, but his darting out of the way didn’t take him far enough to miss the slowly rolling tire, and I crushed the back half of his body. I discovered this when I opened the door from the parked car, and heard squealing. Squealing that was quiet enough to be barely perceptible, yet still ear piercing. Soul piercing. I craned around and saw the mouse, still alive, pinned there under 2 tons, his head and chest now reaching out from under the wheel, straining for a reality that was no longer possible. I instantly reversed out of the garage, straining for that same reality and then rushed out of the car to see. But no, there he was, half pancake, half mouse. I retracted around the huge fist of a feeling that punched my gut and started wailing and whimpering just like that mouse.

My mother too had been taking in this whole scene, whatever horror she was experiencing enhanced by factors from watching her daughter, her baby, so tormented by something that could not be undone. For a moment she stayed in the horror with me, no doubt incapacitated as I was, but also, it soon became evident, summoning up something colossal. Something so out of her normal way of existing that I felt it happening. I felt her straining against the weight of her nature, 2 tons, just like that car, as she strode with almost too much purpose, just to avoid faltering, to the hanging tools on the garage wall and plucked the heavy metal shovel from its hook. “Stand back!” she commanded, but I could hear the doubt and torture in her voice, as though she wondered without words just how she would be able to do this. In that one fleeting moment, I saw my mom, really saw her, partly crushed by years of doubts and conventions and limitations, and partly alive and strong and defiant. For her baby, for me, she did it. She lifted the shovel high over her shoulder and came down in one fast, unwavering arch of a swipe, right on the mouse’s head. And though the mouse was no longer squealing, his head was not flat like the pancake half of his body, so, the blows coming easier now, she lifted the shovel and slammed it down twice more in quick succession to be sure. Then she stopped, and I beheld her, the horror of the mouse’s fate at my hands supplanted by the awe I felt for my mother. I understood without words the wild and brave extremity she achieved, for me. Not that the mouse was forgotten. Horror, which of course is that feeling you get when confronting something awful and against every value you hold dear, but about which, in that moment at least, you believe you can do nothing, softened into a still difficult but more manageable sorrow that I would recall all my life. But the horror of that moment was dramatically and completely swept aside by the vision of my mother, standing there with the shovel handle clenched in her fists, breathing fast, somewhat overwhelmed and sick to her stomach, trying to regain her composure and a normal blood pressure. Somehow, she did what she had to do: put the mouse out of its misery and thereby smash its and her daughter’s horror completely and beyond reach. In her act, I saw just how much she loved me. For it is one thing to care for and minister to the needs of a child. It’s another thing to do something that requires heaving off one’s own horror. To break through the command of the primitive part of our brains, that renders us afraid and frozen like a threatened gecko. To strain wildly against debilitating, irrational paralysis and manage to act.

We make up all kinds of rationalization after the fact for our debilitation in the face of horror, because it is shameful to us. We know that we were too weak to overcome it; we were completely ineffectual. And when the horror has to do with the social behavior of others our inaction is even more shameful. For we know on some level that paralysis in the face of witnessed violence or physical injury is more excusable than paralysis in the face of witnessed rude, insulting or insensitive social conduct, which after all, presents no actual threat to our bodily integrity. So we paint over such moments with the justifications of societal conventions, “supposed to’s” and staying out of the way and not making a big deal, but afterward we recriminate ourselves silently and repeatedly for having been overpowered by fear. That’s what it is after all. Our residual but still very powerful primitive instinct to freeze in the face of callous or insensitive treatment of others or ourselves is fear.

I have had many, many moments where I failed to act when I witnessed rudeness or insult, whether to me or someone else, and I still feel the shame of those moments so many years later. In the case of mistreatment of my children by ill acting teachers or nasty parents of schoolmates, I managed to summon up at least enough courage not to remain silent, but I didn’t call things out exactly for what they were. I didn’t say, “You grabbed my child! How dare you! Don’t you ever touch my child again!” Instead I said, “My son says you grabbed him by back of his neck when he tried to get something from his cubby, and I’m very concerned about that.” I didn’t say, “Do you realize how twisted and mean, and damaging your sarcasm is to my eight year old? To most eight year olds?” I said, “Your way of interacting with the students doesn’t work for my daughter and I would hope as the teacher you would consider that.” And I didn’t say, “Are you nuts? All the other parents think your kids are the nastiest, most conceited, and crassest kids in the entire school, and you have the nerve to tell me that my kids are defective?” Instead I said, “Well I’m sorry to hear that my kids are doing things when I’m not around that aren’t’ very nice, but that doesn’t give your son a free pass to do something mean that has my daughter feeling sick.” But watching my 21 year old daughter begin truly to understand and struggle through the tangle of mistreatment, selfishness, inconsideration, sexism, you name it, that constitute the “jungle” of our society, and watching her wonder whether she dare call people out for the things they say and do, I feel empowered to rise above my own fetters and shout “Yes! You are right! That person was an asshole! This person tried to belittle you! That other person was manipulative! You are not crazy to think so. You do not have to remain pleasing and conflict averse! You do not have to be worried that people will think you are ‘trouble’ or oversensitive because you refuse to let mistreatment, however nicely dressed or camouflaged or even unintended, pass unchallenged.” As I see her recognizing and identifying all the social interactions that stun us, as I witness her paralysis, I am, it seems, finally able to summon up the strength to heave off some of my own.

A few days ago, the defining moment came.

My daughter and I were eating at a small neighborhood restaurant in Brooklyn. There we were, me with my gray hair, older skin, manner of dress and overall bearing that announced me as a woman over 50, and she being obviously a young woman in her 20’s, perhaps my young friend or perhaps my daughter. Someone who seemed like the owner waited on us, but in any event he was a man somewhere between the age of 38 and 48. He kept referring to us as “girls” and not in that hammy, flirty way that is intended to be a compliment, effective or not, to older women. It was in the dull, automatic, unseeing and oblivious way that some men refer to women generally. With each utterance of “girls” our discomfort grew. We did not have to say much to each other. We both knew that a man waiting on us was referring to a 53 year old mother as a “girl” in the presence of her daughter and that it was belittling, all the more so because it confirmed an absent, careless and undervalued interaction with customers. “You girls want anything else?” It matters not if someone else would have not taken offense; I did. My daughter saw me struggling. She saw me pinned under convention and yet trying to summon up something, anything, to heave it off. When the proprietor brought our check, said, “thank you, girls,” without even looking at us and walked away, I must have contorted my face in some crazy way, for she whispered, “Mom, don’t. Mom, let it pass.” And when I continued to fidget and struggle, apparently presenting the risk of some kind of uncontrolled, over the top outburst, she said, “If you’re going to say something, I’m getting out of the restaurant.” I was too busy summoning up my courage to respond. So she beat a hasty retreat, saying “I’m outta here. I’m going to the bathroom.”

I sat there for about 5 seconds trying to breathe my way to doing what I knew I wanted. I half couldn’t believe it. I was afraid to say something to this stranger. I was afraid lest he think me a crackpot, a “feminist” an overly sensitive, silly female. The conventions and the “supposed to’s” and the always-at-the-ready “Why make a big deal out of something so little?” rose up in my brain. But I knew that if I didn’t say something, I’d be ashamed of myself and always regret it. Not because I’d have let what was just a careless remark pass, but because I’d have let my fear win. I took that one final deep inhalation, stood up and walked over to the proprietor, my payment for lunch already on the table. I said, “Excuse me, you seem like a nice man.” “Thank you,” he interjected. I continued in a calm voice that at first belied how hard my heart was pounding but then actually managed to help me find my ground. “So I’ll ask you to please consider how a 53 year old mother might feel being referred to as a girl in front of her grown daughter.” In the face of his momentary confusion, I added kindly, “I’m really too old to be called a girl; I deserve more respect than that.” He looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time. Suddenly he was a respectful person addressing an older one. A service provider addressing a customer. He asked, “I called you a ‘girl’?” And when I affirmed that he did, he apologized, perhaps more because now he was afraid, (what if I made a scene?) than out of any regret. I smiled, and thanked him and told him with a twinkle that I left him a good tip just the same. Then I turned and strode out, feeling like I had just successfully completed the pole-vault at the Olympics and joyously caring not one whit whether the proprietor was judging me.

My daughter was waiting for me outside. “Mom,” she beamed. “I’m really glad you did that.”

Huh?? “You heard?” I asked.

“Yeah, I heard part of what you were saying after I came out of the bathroom. I was afraid for you to say something, but deep down really I wanted you to.”

Well, I wasn’t doing something as heroic or dramatic as euthanizing a doomed animal, but I managed to heave off my fear, and she watched me do it with pride and gratitude. It was something I had to do. It was my way of saying “See? You can do this, and, by the way, I love you.” And I think by her comments she got that. It was her way of saying “Thanks, Mommy.” In the end, perhaps it seems ludicrous that I would have been afraid to have said something, or even that I felt compelled to do so, and yet, how many times have we not spoken up merely because we didn’t want to seem silly or, heaven forbid, make the transgressor (who may well be unwitting) uncomfortable? And why is seeming silly so catastrophic, to be avoided at all costs?

My daughter and I linked arms and walked on.

May 24, 2015