I was starting out with a sleep deficit. I feel the need to say this because I had a hunch this day was going to be a rough one from the moment I tried to peel my eyes open and found they were glued shut. When I feel tired like I did that morning, everything feels like it’s one part removed. Like I’m just barely off track. I feel like my son’s shirt when he’s missed the bottom button so the end result is that one side of the collar is higher than the other. The misplaced juxtaposition makes everything feel a little off.

I went through the motions of a day. In mid-afternoon I drove to my husband’s bike shop to drop off a drink and say hi. Sitting at a light, I rested my head on my hand, my elbow propped up on the edge of the car window. My window was down. I got the feeling someone was looking at me, so I shifted my eyes to the left – not my head, just my eyes. From this peripheral perspective I got a glimpse of a guy who looked to be about 18 with tattoos on his very tan arm. He too had his head propped on his hand, with his elbow resting on his car window which was also down. He was staring at me.

I stared back. It was peripherally, and I had my big sunglasses on, and I was peering through the fingers of my hand, so it felt like a nonchalant way of meeting him unblinking glare for unblinking glare. But he wouldn’t stop staring.

Now I’ve tried really hard to figure out what felt so violating about that sort of stare. Was it the sleep deficit? Was it the smirk on his face? Was it the way he was frozen there, gaping, like if we both stayed in that position drool would  inevitably start running out of the corner of his mouth? Was it because I could hear his friend laughing?

Later I would ask Tony, “Why did that feel so uncomfortable? What is the fine line between beauty and distortion? When does a gesture relay appreciation and when does it say, ‘Why hello there you tasty piece of meat?” And when, when can you be sure that you’re not just the butt of a joke?  It used to be that I would think I had done something wrong. I had been too flirtatious in my presentation of myself. OR if they were making fun of me, it was for some great fault of mine. Some failure to display my womanhood properly. Some code of femininity I had broken and how dare I? But now, now I’m okay with me just being me, and so I’m really trying to figure out why that felt so humiliating. Why didn’t that make me feel beautiful? And even more, why did I care?”

Tony wanted to hurt them. I wanted to set them free by feeling it all. I wanted them out of my head. Find a way to let their car drive off into some eternal sunset instead of the continuous replay of the car right beside me, trapping me.

When the light turned green I casually looked forward and started to drive. We were both turning left, so side-by-side we turned. My girls were in the backseat and started laughing. “Mommy, I think that guy thinks your pretty,” one of them called out loudly. They couldn’t stop giggling.

If this is how pretty feels, then I don’t want to feel pretty, I thought. If this is supposed to feel complimentary, if this is something that I should say thank you for, then I don’t want to feel pretty. But I do, I do want to feel beautiful, unapologetically beautiful. And I am able to do this, more often than ever before. So how do I maintain my beauty, my dignity, with some ogling guy and his laughing friend?  

“Look how he’s staring,” my kids kept saying. I smiled a grin that made me feel grotesque. An uncomfortable grin like your body has learned to force out in a situation where everyone thinks something is funny but you. I stepped on the gas pedal a little harder trying to get ahead of the guys in the car beside me. They sped up as well. I slowed down. They slowed down as well. I fought off the urge to run my car into the side of theirs.

“Oh my gosh, he’s still staring at you!” My kids were all laughing now.

I turned right into the parking lot of Tony’s shop, willing for them to follow me, so I could introduce them to Tony. They didn’t. I parked and sighed a deep exhale. I was glad that was over. I wondered why I felt I needed Tony to set them straight. Why does a man have to deal with a man? Why can’t a woman stand up for herself against a man? That day I felt like a woman kicked into the corner of a man’s world.

But I didn’t feel sorry for myself and I didn’t feel broken. And I didn’t feel stuck. Well, I did momentarily, but like my friend Valerie said, I know eventually that corner I felt kicked into just won’t exist for me anymore.  I’m noticing this new desire to feel the uncomfortableness of something, but to not feel lesser-than because I didn’t know how to deal with it. To just let the hard things flow through and to look at them and ponder, like I’m watching an interesting film in a theatre and it’s making me think. To write and create from it all.

I’ve been told my whole life my heart is too big and that I read too much into things, but I don’t believe in “too much” anymore.  My heart was made like this for a reason and I’m not weak because I feel and contemplate and express both. It feels liberating to wonder why and how and when. It feels liberating to not need the answer. It feels liberating to maintain my posture of vunerable beauty somehow transmuting that aura of ugly that saturated that one tiny moment. It feels liberating to walk this planet with just enough detachment to keep walking.

“I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.”

- Rilke

“In my next life,” I told him, “I’m gonna be able to fix anything, just like you.”

“Is that right?” He said, walking out the door to his truck to get a hammer and some nails, leaving me to wonder why I’d just blurted that out.

The company we rent our home from has used the same fix-it guy for the last three-and-a-half years. We’ve seen him go through cigarettes, a stroke, stitches, and a switch from a white van to the white truck he has now. My older kids used to follow him around, now they’re more just annoyed that a strange man is in our house. One of my kids think he’s a liar because he never took them fishing when he said he would.

Regardless of their thoughts, the man is brilliant at fixing things. I had a pretty substantial list this time of small odds-and-ends that needed fixing – normal wear and tear on a house that happens when you’ve lived there for going on four years with a family of six. I did fix the toilet paper roll holder myself though. It’s been off for over a year, but when I got ready to ask them to come to our house to fix things, I started to get paranoid that maybe it’s something I could fix myself. And so I sat down with a pocketknife and that toilet paper roll holder and I got it figured out. I was pretty proud of myself, but still, I’m no fix-it guy.

There’s that one fix-it guy in Wreck-It Ralph, a movie I watched recently with my kids. Fix-It Felix is his name and he goes around with this magic hammer and fixes anything that Ralph Wrecks. I knew right away when I watched that movie who I was. I’m the wrecker. I tried to be a fixer for about 30 years of my life, but I’ve resigned myself. Like Ralph says, “There’s no one I would rather be than me.”

Maybe this is why I blurted out what I did. I mean, it looks fun to fix things. Everyone always loves for you to show up at their door. In about an hour-and-a-half, our fix-it guy had fixed everything on my list, and that included three trips to Home Depot for pieces and parts. It didn’t matter what the problem, he had a solution. When you’ve lived with shoddy blinds, a loose toilet seat and a broken closet door for months, and suddenly that’s all fixed, why you start to think you’re Cinderella and that fix-it guy is your fairy godmother, minus the puffy skirt and all the glitter. The little annoying quirks to our house got cleaned up in one afternoon, and I didn’t have a clue how to do it. If you’d asked me, I would have called it pretty near impossible.

I know why I said I wanted to fix things in my next life. It’s because I don’t want to fix them in this life. I could, technically, go to school, beg to be someone’s apprentice, check out books at the library about fixing. If I wanted it bad enough, I could become a fixer. Saying you want something in your next life is really saying, “While that fascinates me and while being like you would be like being the exact opposite of me, and while it would be really amazing to be that for a day, I’m not interested enough to do it my first time around. It’s not me. For it to be me I’d have to be re-created as something I’m not now.”

Because what I am now is a wrecker. I’ve wrecked virtually everything stable in my life. I’ve set it all on fire. I’ve said, this is not working for me, so I’m going to need to burn this down and see what remains. I’ve wrecked the formulas I was told would work. I’m left with a life that doesn’t look like the packaged life I thought I once was buying off the shelves. I’m left with unknowns, questions marks, and darkness. The crazy thing is, I like what I’m left with because it’s mine. So what if I’m a little less Barbie and a little more Monster High.

I didn’t set out to wreck. I set out to fix. But in the meantime life was wrecking me. I had expectations and life was a wrecking ball taking them out one at a time. Wrecking God. Wrecking my faith. Wrecking my marriage. Wrecking my parenting. Wrecking my art. Maybe it is true that if you can’t beat ‘em you join ‘em because once I saw the pattern over and over again, I got tired of playing by the rules of “good” faith and “good” parenting, and “good” {fill-in-the-blank.}

I started throwing my own body weight against things, seeing how stable they were. Conventions, status quo, standards, models, diagrams, religions, protocol – they started to crumble like a brick wall made out of shoe boxes. A pretty facade that looks fairly substantial as long as you make no sudden movements. As long as you play nice. As long as you don’t plan on making waves or asking why or letting your soul pull out its magnifying glass and get a closer look.

It was easier when I was a fixer, but it wasn’t better. It was easier when things could be cleaned up in an hour-and-a-half, but it wasn’t better. It was easier when the little annoying quirks and the shoddy pieces and parts to my life could be prayed away or counseled away or patched-up neatly with a scripture, but it wasn’t better.

There is no better. Both are just ways of seeing the world. Dealing with the world. Walking through the world.

My wreck-it life is this life, and my fixing life will have to wait for another lifetime, because I want to see this wreck-it life through first. I want to see that I can let others be them, honest to goodness them and I can let me be me, honest to goodness me. The me that will need to punch every brick wall I’m ever faced with again to see if it crumbles or if it makes my fist throb. The me that has gotten used to making a home among the rubble. The me that believes whole lives are spent trying to wait for things to be fixed when the beauty can clearly co-exist in the wreckage. The me that can’t keep things clean or fixed or spit-shiny perfect. The me that is watching things fall between my fingers because clearly there are things that I cannot hold on to if I am to enjoy this wrecking life.

The me that has nothing to show for myself: no golden medals, no people waiting eagerly at their front doors for my arrival, no solid foundation to stand on or to offer up as proof. Just me, with my pounding fists and the only thing pounding harder than my fists is my pounding heart.