Cigarettes remind me of my ex-husband. He smoked a pack a day. You know, it's silly the things you miss. I still get sick from the swirl of smoke in the air, but I miss holding him and feeling the heat of the cigarettes coming out of his nostrils down onto my hair. I don't miss how he treated me, but he was my first lover, and somehow the smell got associated with physical closeness.
I am a strange hybrid of a being. On one hand, I value my independent lifestyle highly. I live alone, enjoy being able to come and go as I please when I am not working, and like having space to not clean for a few days or worry about making dinner if I don't feel like it. On the other, having a family with all the demands, time constraints, responsibilities, and obligations appeals to me. I prize love more than any single thing in this life. My personal hell would be to dwell in a loveless relationship. And there in lies the rub.
The tension between wanting to be with someone pulls hard against the angst of not wanting to be with the wrong person. I strike out in this so often because I genuinely want to be loved and valued, and I confuse physical attention for love. I am old enough to know they aren't the same thing, and old enough to realize that I still need my Daddy's protection. No man loves in quite the same capacity as a dad, and my Daddy always told me if I was ever having problems figuring out a young man's intention, to send that gent his way. I started talking him up on that offer recently.
Here is the deal. No man owns me. But I do belong to a family. That family has fought through hell and back for me. There was a time I was stolen away from them, yet they continued to love me the best way they knew how and hope that I would be returned to them again. When I came back, they sheltered me until I was ready to make my own decisions about life and pay the costs for those choices. They invested in my education, my mental health, and my spiritual development. They listen to me regardless of their own political leanings and viewpoints, letting me figure out life through the grand experiment of living it. And giving that up for some dude who doesn't respect my Daddy, well I did that once, and it was hell.
I am not the best at providing for myself, but I do the best I can right now. I don't really try to protect myself. I have a lot of angels and praying mommas for that. And I am always going to need someone to tell me I am doing well at life, that I am pretty and smart and sexy. This is who I am. I want a man in my life, but I want the right one. Sex is easy. Love is hard.
I know my point of view is fading fast, some feel it should have been left solidly in the 1950's. I am happy to have my college education, to be able to vote, to have been allowed to leave an abusive marriage in the dust no questions asked. I value my work, being able to have a bank account, and being treated as an equal member of society. But I am not a man. I am different from my guy friends, different from my ex-boyfriends and lovers. I can't hit it and quit it. Turning my brain off at night is nothing short of an act of God, and sometimes I just want to be held and heard. I don't need a solution. I am a woman, equal and different. I don't want to provide for my family in the same way my dad provides for me. I want to make my contribution to the world, but I have never cared about the money. Sometimes I even do the math wrong.
Not all women feel this way, and I respect that. I just don't want to be treated like one of them. I want to be seen and valued for who and what I am regardless of if we agree or not. Sometimes I feel like I can't breathe when I get treated like I agree with all of the patriarchy oppresses women stuff. I don't feel oppressed; I wish I would have listened when my Daddy said no to my first husband. I love it when my neighbors offer to shoot someone if they try to come after me on my block walk home. I think the most romantic thing a guy has done for me in recent history is to take my hand and walk me 20 minutes in the dark to my front door. Chivalry may be the cost of giving up patriarchy, and I am just not willing to part with it yet. Because I hope that someday, someone will ask my Daddy for my hand and that when he says I do, my Daddy will know I will be loved, cherished, and protected by that man. This is what I want in life. And it may not happen, but a girl can hope.
And no, no one owns me. But I belong to a family. And when I start one of my own, I want it to be with the love, support, and understanding that I enjoy now. I want it all. I still believe in chivalry.
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