LILITH

Some of us are late bloomers.

I’m so late I’m having trouble negotiating the goth phase, at 42, because I’m concerned what the kindergarten teachers will think if they find kiss prints in black lipstick on the kids’ faces.

I’m so behind the curve I just thought of a comeback, 28 years later, for the English teacher who told me my poetry was “trite.” [I did not. Please send one. It’s important to my growth and that woman deserves to shrivel.]

I’m so delayed that I’ve never driven too fast, except when the instructor told me to at the track camp where my father took me specifically so I could learn to be a badass. [I failed: I did everything they told me. Also, when my dad encouraged me once, while learning to drive a manual transmission and out on an open road at 16, to “put your foot on the floor,” I obligingly removed my foot from the accelerator and put it on the floor of the car, while he blinked and then shouted it again, and the car mysteriously sat sort of rolling to a stop in the middle of the road.]

In college, when my roommate was a drug dealer who called me “Princess,” I was so accommodating to her routine—which involved ambient electronic music or else Nine-Inch Nails playing loudly at all hours of the day and night and I hated it so much I wanted to set the dorm on fire—that I didn’t say anything when I woke up to find a man I didn’t know in her bed, across from me, without her anywhere in sight, just this dude sleeping in the room with me, a few feet away on the bunk we’d taken down and wedged next to mine on the floor so that she didn’t have to crawl up while drunk and high. I went back to sleep and later asked her about it politely, whereupon I found out she had no idea who he was. She shrugged. “He seemed happy enough,” she said, “so I went back out for the night.”

I haven’t yet begun sneaking out to the fire pit at night to drink, though, because I can’t find a child monitor that will reach that far. Hot tips welcome.

I did manage to tap in to some small measure of the angsty, sultry sulk my teen years might have luxuriated in by way of some stolen time with artists like Tori Amos, Tracy Chapman, Sarah Maclachlan, Fiona Apple, Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ani DiFranco, Dar Williams, Indigo Girls, and the lot, but the thought of actually going to a music festival when I was 17 would have sent me in a panic straight under my bed, and that was a place where I had only recently stopped believing harbored velociraptors.

I did manage to go to a Tori Amos show in Syracuse when I was a newly minted teen, and I sat silent in the back, wide-eyed at the wild and keening thing before me, thinking thoughts like “what if that keyboard falls over when she throws her hair?” and “Should she really be sitting with her legs that far apart?”

Listen, it’s funny, but I’m also incredibly pissed off. Regular girls and women—and boys and men and others, of course— are STILL trying to figure out how to feel like humans, much less humans with permission to be alive. In whatever ways occur to them. I’m half way to dead and only just figuring out, in part courtesy of my children, how to be. As I am. And who knows what that might be, in any given moment.

Here are a few pieces of my advice, so far, because I think it’s probably better to take advice from someone who sucks but is improving than to take advice from someone who’s always been amazing at things:

Kate Bush.

Yellow boots.

Bad jokes.

Replace “I’m sorry” with “thank you for _______.”

Try not moving out of the way and see what happens.

Treat every day as an experiment, because it is.

Try being different characters.

Mostly, no one cares.

Loud earrings. Loud anything. Loud laughing.

Sit in car and cry at music you like.

Admire people out loud.

Ask the questions you actually want to hear the answers to.

I was talking to a poet friend yesterday and he was struggling to formulate a plan for encouraging his students to stay away from AI-generated papers. He was narrating a speech about weight lifting, wherein the students were trying to build the muscle of writing, and came to the part where he asks them how would it be if he just put a post-it with their name on it next to a machine that was doing bench presses? Would it be ok with them that that machine with a post-it note on it was standing for the work of their muscles before they die?

YES, THE DEATH STICK, I yelled, inside the coffee shop. Fortunately, the people around us were buried in their headphones and computers. (See above: mostly, no one cares). I told him I’m SUCH A FAN of reminding students we’re all going to die. Not because I’m morbid (maybe) but because it’s a very useful way to reorient to your life and desires and choices.

Maybe there’s something about raising five-year-olds that brings this all into focus, partly because they refuse to conform in general and partly because they tend very much to do and say exactly what they’re thinking and feeling and then some.

This week is spirit week at school, as if I can even find regular clothes for my kids in the morning, and today is “dress like a book character you love.” My daughter has decided she will be a leopard. “Which book is that from?” I ask her. Turns out there’s no book she can remember in which a leopard is featured. She just wants to be a leopard. After some mild attempts to talk about some of the books she loves and some of the costuming available, it was abundantly clear that she would not be entertaining anything other than the leopard. You can bet a leopard in a way-too-tight fleece suit is going to school today, with half of the spotted fleece jammed into a tiny clueless wedgie, and it’s anyone’s guess what book this leopard is from.

My son recently discovered the “session partner” function on my husband’s early 90s keyboard, and has been “hosting” “dance parties” generally at inopportune moments. All I could focus on was how loud the damn thing was and how disruptive this activity was to the function of the dining room and living room area (“what if the keyboard falls over when she tosses her hair?”), but it soon became clear that my son’s priorities were so genuine and so deeply of the heart that I should really take a goddamn hike, when he finally wandered into the kitchen and said, utterly crestfallen, “I haven’t had any guests at my dance party.” Before I could pick up the pieces of my own heart to form an answer, he had already moved on: “So I guess I’ll practice my moves until someone shows up!” He ran back out and really focused on getting some arm-strikes into the air and a few impressive squats right.

I’m kind of in my practicing my moves era, I guess. Buying nail polish I like whether or not it’s in my best beauty interests. Running the miles I want and need to run, at whatever pace I want and need. (This has meant embracing the “SlowAFRunningClub” which: highly recommend. If you run, you are a runner. Period.) Listening to songs that rend me on repeat, crying at red lights without the sense that I should necessarily stop. Curling my hair, yeah, you heard me, curling my hair, if I want to. Occasionally taking twice as long as I technically need to get ready. Smelling good sometimes. Who knew.

We gotta practice having a will. We gotta practice the reality that we are, in fact, here. We’re not figments. Unless we let ourselves be.

So yeah, I’m running to Kate Bush and Ani DiFranco now, on repeat, bitches, and I’m finally in the presence of both the power-rage AND the beguiling beauty of the female artists I once intuited as important but really couldn’t inhabit, because I was still too worried about whether it was OK that I’m here. It took me so long to get here, but here I am.

Listen, get practicing. And let Leopard and DJ Caveman know when you might be showing up to the dance party. They’re waiting. They’re so hopeful.

Thank you to my readers who like, share, comment, become free or paid subscribers, or recommend. It really helps. I started with 30 subscribers and am now approaching 400, which makes me absurdly happy. If you like this stuff, even these slap-dash, embarrassing-but-true transmissions that I somehow manage to crank out before 4:30 and 6:30am on Thursdays, I encourage you wholeheartedly to join the dance party. Really nail that squat. xo, Caveman Caro.