Things that make me go BOOM (from journal entry 7-17-11)

Today is Sunday, July 17, 2011 at 7pm. I am at Ms. Brenda’s house in Altadena. If you haven’t guessed it by now, no, Brenda is not her name. I’m sitting on her couch watching Law and Order. Yes, I like Law and Order at the end of the day (and the beginning and the middle).

I have just given Ms. Brenda her dinner (well, not just, but an hour ago). Baked tilapia and cabbage, cranberry juice and two cinnamon graham crackers (her favorite snack). Ms. Brenda is usually my least favorite client. It’s not her. It’s me (and ok, some of her). I feel like I’m walking into a landmine when I come into her home. Her beautiful home. With white carpet, crystal, China cabinet, plants, garden. Her home is filled with emotional booby traps I fall into sometimes and get triggered. Ms. Brenda is ninety-nine years old. Sharp, walks on her own, uses the toilet (the one in the bathroom, not the one I bring in to some of my clients).

Ms. Brenda is a black woman. An old black woman. She is my grandmother and the old women at church. As I was writing church here in this black and white composition notebook with a red pen. I accidentally spelled church, chuch. As I scratched out chuch I realized that those are the old black women to whom I am referring. The ones from chuch. With their wrinkled brown fingers pointing at me because I “forgot” to wear stockings. Because my shoulders were showing, my hair nappy, my whatever whatever. Breaking me to fix me. Thickening my skinny thin skin. In the ways they knew how.

I often felt awkward. Being told who I was, what appearance was acceptable. I always knew that I would be a writer. I always knew I had a voice. Sometimes I felt that my writing was the safest place for me to use my voice. I could scream as loud as I wanted, “Back off! I love you! Stop touching me! Let me wear what I want to wear! It’s my hair, so what if it’s nappy! It’s beautiful! No, I don’t want to get my hair pressed! I can wear plaid and paisley if I want to! So what if this song does not mention Jesus!” I didn’t feel emotionally safe enough to say those things out loud. This seems a long way off topic from Ms. Brenda, I know. It is, but not really. Just ride, dear reader. Please ride.

I was probably nine years old when my grandmother and I were loading the bags of groceries into her brown station wagon in the parking lot of Alpha Beta Market on the west side of Long Beach, California. She closed the “trunk” and walked around to the driver’s seat and started the car. I was standing at the door pulling the handle to open it when I felt the car moving. As my grandmother backed the car, I started to scream. I don’t remember the words. Probably “Wait!” Maybe “Don’t leave!” Mostly my memory recalls the tears and a scream.

She backed up a little. I ran to the car. She laughed. The grandmother belly laugh. She backed up. I cried. Repeat about two more times. I’m not talking more than maybe a few feet and not even a few minutes. I don’t remember the time. I didn’t care about the time or distance. I remember, I cared about wanting to get in. Mostly it mattered that she laughed. That there was a moment I felt unsafe. A moment I screamed. A moment I called out. And it was funny.

“Now Robin, you know I wasn’t gon leave you.” I know now. But in the moment I was embarrassed. The joke was at my expense. Delivered by someone I should run to when the joke is at my expense. And then it kept being funny. When we got home it was repeated again and just as funny. “Robin so sensitive!” “Aint she?!”

I got quiet. Often. Sat on the couch and practiced my cursive. Sometimes with Ms. Brenda when I put this here or that there and see her chuckle before correcting me and hear her call me “Raaaabin” I’m that little girl again. Trying to be as perfect as I can. Trying to have the joke not be on me and knowing that it is. Again.

But today was cool with us. Really cool. I wasn’t the little girl who became too good at taking it and not having the experience of dishing enough out. Today we laughed. We shared. It wasn’t deep. It just was.
I needed good today. Yesterday was not. Yesterday with Clara, my ninety-eight years old white client in Los Feliz. I’m not with her often, but when I am, it is in twelve hour shifts. 7am to 7pm. As I said, she’s ninety-eight and white. And no matter how much she needs me to lift her. To cook for her, give her medication. Change her briefs, clothes, shoes, keep her safe. Talk. Listen. Care. No matter how much she needs me to help her live her everyday life, she forgets to be kind sometimes. Sometimes in fact, she is horribly mean.

In this moment, I don’t choose to go into Clara’s racist rants but yesterday, breathing through the nasty of her took more energy from me than I have had to muster for anyone in a long time. Perhaps she was a test of the Universe pushing all of my buttons at once. And she jumped her one hundred ten pound self on button after button.

Yesterday was my first night in my new apartment. I’m still not unpacked. I had a photo shoot earlier this week and I still have to edit the photos. By the time I got home it was almost eight thirty. I was tired. Of giving. Me. To. Any. One. Else.

I called my friend Laura and asked her to “hold a trash bag open for me and give me five minutes to dump into it.” She held it and I summed my day into five minutes and dumped it. We hung up and I felt much better. I prayed. I let it go. I breathed.

I called Lynette, or she called me (whatever) and we talked. I shared some of my day with her and in the sharing I revealed, or it was revealed to me, what I long for in a relationship. Last night I didn’t long for a man’s arms around me. My fantasy did not include how he could undress me. The sexy things we would whisper. Last night I wanted him (my him. My him I don’t know yet) to listen. I wanted him to tell me that he didn’t know what to say but that he loved me for being big enough to be there for Clara. Last night I fantasized that I mattered to him (my him. My him I don’t know yet).

This him. My him. My him that I am emotionally safe with. We will have days that are hard and we will breathe through them together. We will know each other bigger than the world outside our walls knows us. We will be bigger than our jobs and our jobs outside our jobs. I have never known this relationship. This emotional safety in a romantic relationship. Where I speak and my words and secrets aren't used against me later. He will just know when to touch my breast and when not to. Know when to lean against the opposite wall with his glass of wine (or whatever) while we use our words, our hearts and ears and energy. To know.