My Voice

While making recent vacation plans for the summer months, I kept returning to a simmering question. It is a question of two lives. And I considered each as I picked a time for vacation while editing a manuscript, and chose a cottage at the shore while writing a proposal. You see, for most of each year, I have one life where I am a writer, wife, mother. Responsibilities and work and obligations beckon. Right now, I am completing that nonfiction proposal. Notes and files and research inform my writing and editing. This is my passion; I look forward to each day’s beginning.

Then I have this other life for a brief time each summer at the beach. When I first walk into the cottage, it is all that matters. I am at the sea with my family. Work stops. Responsibilities idle. I immerse myself in the salt air, the sea, the sunshine, the peace.

I have a friend who, every time she sees me, feels the need to say, “You look so skinny.” The first time she said this, I took it as a compliment. I thought that she was giving me kudos for the good care I take of myself with three healthy meals a day, exercise, stress management tools like yoga, walks by the beach, romance, and good sleep habits. However, now that this is the greeting I get every time I see her, I am beginning to wonder about the motivation behind the comment.

When you greet a friend or colleague you wouldn’t say, “You look so fat.” Granted being “skinny” in our culture is a little more accepted than being fat, does this make it okay to tell a woman she looks “so skinny” when you greet her?

A good friend revealed to me recently that when she first got married, she found herself doing all sorts of “Little Miss Homemaker” things. She was ironing her husband’s shirts, making him lunch, and waiting for him to come home at the end of the day. “I have never ironed in my life!” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.” This was a woman who had been on her own for fifteen years, was successful in her career, and was what most would call an “independent woman.”

Something shifted though when she got married. She began to lose her sense of independence and started to crave being protected and cared for by her husband. She started losing focus on her career, would often second-guess her decisions, and felt her ambition dwindling.