Year of the Rabbit

When you’re 49 and you got married at 22 and you’re carrying your overnight bag into your parents’ 8X10 extra bedroom for the first of probably 240 nights until the divorce is final, you don’t feel great. You might feel a little relieved, but you don’t feel like a success story when you can’t even afford a crap apartment. No matter how nice your parents are about it.

My sister usually stays in this room when she visits. It has a twin bed, two white dressers, and 70 rabbit paintings and figurines. I counted them one night.

One of my first nights here (March 2023) I remembered that it had just become the year of the rabbit. I’d just read an interesting article by Dan Reid about it on the Terry Dunn’s Tai Chi for Health Facebook page. “Well, it’s definitely the year of the rabbit for me!” I thought. According to Reid, “The rabbit is calm, refined, affable, and yet ambitious.” Promising! I have plenty of time to study the rabbits around the room while I’m doing Terry’s tai chi warmups. There’s quite a variety. Realistic ones, metallic ones, white ones with blue flowers painted on them, even one Peter Rabbit.

According to the internet, this year of the water rabbit is about adapting and creative solutions. “You don’t say,” I think, looking up from my phone at my tiny room and wondering how the hell I will be able to afford my own place. More part time writing jobs? Sub credential? Wondering whether I’ll lose the part time jobs I already have to ChatGPT. Wondering how my adult kid still living at home will adapt. Wondering whether my husband and I will still get along well enough to go to movies together with our kid after mediation.

Usually before a new year starts (the December new year, not the lunar new year) I think of a theme for my year. I started doing this five or six years ago. My first themes were Confidence, Bravery, and Don’t Look Down. They’ve pretty much all been along those lines. Once, I was going to pick Freedom but I didn’t want my husband to think I was going to leave him. Instead I picked No Limits and he didn’t like where that was going either.

But when 2023 rolled in, I had been very sick for about two months and could not think of a theme. I was just too tired. I thought maybe one would present itself at some point during the year. And in March, as I looked around the room I’d be sleeping in for perhaps the entire rest of the year, I named my theme. The Year of the Rabbit.

Here are two little bits of background about me. 1: When I read Watership Down, by Richard Adams, my freshman year of high school, it became my favorite book. I still didn’t consider myself extra interested in rabbits, but I used to make myself wait a year or two before rereading it so that I would enjoy it more. (Normally I would talk about the book’s gender roles here, but I don’t want to take the time. Look them up if you’re interested.) Though I didn’t think the book gave me a special affinity for rabbits, I do think it gave me more to think about when I entered this year of the rabbit. 2: When I got so sick at the end of 2022, my doctor actually set me up with 8 counseling sessions to deal with it so I didn’t keep calling her. I was having trouble sleeping, and since the illness had begun with a vertigo attack while I was driving, I was afraid to drive. But a few weeks into the sessions I decided to use the time I had to talk about my marriage. Why was I still in the marriage, my counselor wondered. I will refrain from saying what she said about the relationship, but she did ask me if I had somewhere to go and then keep saying, “Your parents have a room.” Why was I still married? Fear. The themes I picked for each year clearly point to what I believe has held me back my whole life. In this case, I was afraid, among other things I won’t mention, to not have my husband to take care of me. My therapist said, “There’s no guarantee that he always will anyway,” and “Your kid will be okay and this will actually be setting a good example,” and that’s when I told my husband that I’d be sleeping at my parents’ until we could talk things out. The talk was pretty simple. We agreed that we weren’t going to be what each other wanted. I don’t know if he would think that sentence is an accurate encapsulation, but that’s the best I can do without going into detail, and I don’t intend to go into detail. This blog is about the year of the rabbit.

Last weekend, a beautiful Sunday toward the end of May, I went to the Sonoma County fairgrounds for the first ever Indigenous Peoples Gathering. It was open to the public, but I felt very white there. Before I sat down to take in the fragrance of the smudging and the dancing, drums, voices, ankle rattles, shining women’s clothing, feathers, and messages of unity, women’s safety, and spirituality, I slowly walked through the booths of jewelry looking for something rabbit-related. There were turtle, eagle, snake, and elephant rings, but I didn’t see any rabbits. What I did see was a book called, “Animal Energies: Interpreting the Messages and Warnings of Animals.” I checked the table of contents. Rabbit! Page 174!

At home, I read the introduction before flipping to the four-page rabbit section, which by the way calls Watership Down “marvelous.” The book is meant for looking up animals with which we feel an affinity or have had an encounter with, be it physical, in a dream, or otherwise. According to authors Sherry Firedancer and Gary Buffalo Horn Man, the rabbit’s message is “It’s time to confront and overcome a fear.”

I could just stop the blog right there. I mean holy crap.

Rabbit’s warning is, “Feelings need not control us.” Who, me? In the few small paragraphs after the message and warning are the quotes “Is the safety of the familiar, even if it is ultimately wrong for you, more comforting than the possibility of something new, and perhaps better?” and “People tend to dislike the fearful parts of both themselves and other people, but virtually everyone likes Rabbit. We need to look upon our own fearful side with the same compassion we have for Rabbit.” Rabbit who first freezes in fear, and, if that doesn’t work, dashes away in a zigzag pattern. Who, me? I don’t want to type the entire four pages, but I feel like it! Every word spoke to me. When I looked at some of the other animals in the book, I found the messages interesting, but none seemed so meant specifically for me at this moment.

I didn’t mean for this blog to be simply a book recommendation, but do buy this book.

I did mean for this blog to answer everything about my life, past, present, and future. I meant for the search for meaning with rabbit guides to empower me and by extension you. I meant for it to reignite the impossible burning belief that there are answers–creative solutions–and paths, and guides, and, if you can adapt, happy endings.

This 8X10 room doesn’t have a closet for any of my stuff, should I come out of mediation without the house, and there’s no shower in the guest bathroom, and though I enjoy my parents’ company, I know this is probably temporary. But the fact that it’s the year of the rabbit makes me feel sure that this is where I’m supposed to be right now. I have already faced some fears and adapted, if only a little.

And physically, spiritually, and metaphorically, for you and for me, it’s only May.

Manboobs

After more than a decade of Facebook ads targeting me as a woman who must want makeup and hair dye and weight loss products, for some reason today I started getting ads for Men’s Health magazine. First of all, they’re much funnier than the women’s magazine ads. I kid you not, in ONE day they posted “cumming to your senses,” “the short and schlong of it,” and “masturbation myths.” And that was just in the headlines. I didn’t click, but just judging by the headlines, women’s mags need to step it up.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Among the ads was one for an article about getting rid of manboobs. And the picture with the ad was a shirtless man. You couldn’t see his face, but he had a little chest hair. And manboobs. One of the comments said, “Those are C cups!” I couldn’t argue with him.

But here’s something I will argue. Women should be able to go topless if men can. I commented that if I cropped the article photo I would probably get banned from Facebook. For a visual aid, I screenshotted the pic, cropped it down to the boobs (just below the chest hair) and went to post it in the comments. Facebook told me that what I was about to post looked like other posts that gone against their standards on “nudity or sexual activity” and asked me if I wanted to delete it. I fucking well did not.

Then I posted the cropped pic on Instagram with the caption, “This is a man. Why is this okay but my chest is not?” Instagram informed me that my post had been removed, also because of “nudity or sexual activity.” (Side note, I hope the manboob model is getting some sexual activity. I mean, what a modeling job.) Instagram asked me if I wanted them to review the decision. I clicked yes. They replied, “We’ve reviewed your photo and reposted it. Thank you for your feedback.”

It just makes no sense to me. Many women’s boobs are smaller than that. What is the difference? Further, with transgender rights at the forefront, will people who were assigned female at birth but who identify as men, or transgender men who have not had surgery, be able to go topless? As soon as I had this thought, I realized that women might very soon be able to go topless, and I realized that I couldn’t be the first to have thought about the transgender angle for this law. So I took to the Internet. One thing I found was a tweet from The Blaze earlier this month which said “Female lifeguard applicant who identifies as male exposes ‘bare breasts’ in front of ‘several dozen children’ at city pool.”

First of all, there are some problems in that headline, but second, FUCK YES. This is what I was talking about. It happened in Jacksonville, Florida. Now this is a Florida man I can get with. But the Jacksonville mayor said in a statement, “I believe it is wrong for our public pools to be a place where Jacksonville families are forced to explain to their children why a person hired to protect the public safety is exposing her breasts.”

You know what would make you not have to explain that? NORMALIZING WOMEN’S BREASTS. As we have already discussed, they are the same as men’s. Often smaller. There is no logical reason women shouldn’t be able to go topless. And don’t tell me it’s because women’s boobs turn men on, because men’s smiles turn women on, and turnabout is fair play. Mask up, George Clooney!

Actually, the laws about women going topless are more complicated than I thought. Most states do not have a law prohibiting women from freeing the nipple, but cities within them have ordinances. Which are unconstitutional, according to GoTopless.org. Also according to the same website I should have been able to Google the name of my city and “nudity” and find out my city’s law, but I didn’t see anything helpful. I did see some results that made me feel like my laptop might be confiscated soon. It seems to me there should be an easily found list of cities where women going topless is legal. If such cities do in fact exist, it’s pretty lame that society frowns upon it so much that no one does it. Even I, when I was young, would have been uncomfortable seeing it. But why?

I’m going to be 50 this year. Life is not long enough to figure out all the crap rules we follow from birth and fix them. I wish it were. I always talk about wishing men would do things in solidarity with women more often. Maybe they could keep their shirts on in public until women have equal rights, or at least this one. That inconvenience might make some of them more vocal for women’s rights? A little reminder to them? Better than having to undergo my year-long pregnancy simulation in solidarity with women who are losing their reproductive rights, yes? I digress. Until women’s nips are free, I say you cover up those manboobs. Seem arbitrary and unnecessary? Welcome to our world.

Dear Women Getting Married, Have Your Own

Dear Women Getting Married,

Have your own toothpaste. I know it sounds obvious, but when I got married, we argued about which toothpaste to buy. Part of it was that our parents had shared toothpaste, and part of it was that we didn’t have money. We went without a lot of things including a second tube of toothpaste because we were dead set against going into debt. Then, years later when we tried to get a mortgage, we had been too responsible, which made it harder to get a loan. We found out you’re supposed to have some debt. Charge the fucking toothpaste to the credit card.

Have your own name. I’m kind of surprised women are still taking men’s names. I can’t believe how flippant, how excited I was to toss my name aside. Once the newness of my married name wore off, I was left feeling not myself at all. His family didn’t feel like MY family. MY family still felt like my family. When people met me, they asked “Are you related to [husband, husband’s brother, husband’s other brother, husband’s dad]” instead of “Are you related to [people I was actually related to and had gotten used to being asked about.]” It was jarring. Of course, this is not even a decision you have to make if you decide not to get married, but if you’re reading this you’ve probably decided to get married, and you don’t know me from Eve, so I’m probably not going to change your mind. Oh God I just remembered there’s some breakup song where the guy says something like “I was ready to give you my name.” Like what a HUGE honor, dude. Do you know how inconvenient it is for a woman to change her name on all her fucking cards and shit? Is your name Mountbatten-Windsor? Or Disney? Or Rockefeller? Please.

Have your own personality. If someone marries you, it feels safe to assume they want you to continue to be your same quirky self. If your hilarious or serious or political or super honest social media posts are suddenly too off-color or too depressing or too political or too revealing to the person who didn’t mention it before you were married, stand your ground. If the you at parties was cute before you got married, they shouldn’t expect you to change into some wife they imagined, superimposed over the real you while you dated. Some wife who acts like a totally different person at parties. Maybe you didn’t even go to parties before. Why should you now?

Have your own friends. Ones who will keep your secrets and have your back and aren’t “couple friends.” Tell them everything. Otherwise it could take you years to figure out what your friends could have nipped in the bud the day it started. “Girl, no.” Therapy maybe, too, but sometimes friends get to the point faster.

Have your own time. I don’t mean one night a week. I mean whenever you want it. I mean “I’m not going to church today, I feel like some alone time.” I mean “I know I went out with the girls last night but I feel like a sunset on the beach by myself tonight.” Think about how much alone time you used to have. This is an insane adjustment. Don’t feel guilty for wanting to stare at a wall for two hours if you want. By yourself.

Have your own bank account. It doesn’t need but a night’s hotel money in it, but have it. Have at least one bill in your name. Sometimes you need to prove you live in your house.

Have your own “thing.” Once, after years of not gigging, I was playing in a band again and a woman came up to me after we were done. She was in her 50’s, maybe 60, and she was with her husband. They knew my husband and heard my last name when the band leader introduced the band. (“Are you related to…”) She said to me, “It’s nice you have your own thing.” I thought it was a weird thing to say, and part of me probably thought I’d rather hear that I sounded good, but whatever. But later I thought, “That poor woman has been married for probably 30 years without having her own thing. She’s here with her husband probably like she’s with him every other night, going with him to his things.” It can happen so easily. Join clubs, enter contests, take classes, become an expert in something, have at least one place where it’s YOU everybody knows. Before I joined that band, it was always my husband talking to people at the store while I stood smiling pleasantly. We lived in the town he’d grown up in and was now a teacher in. (Side note, do you know how many people teachers know?)

Have your own blanket. I think I saw an article about this recently, but I discovered it years ago. I spent years having trouble falling and staying asleep because my husband liked the fan on and kicked the blankets down. Separate fuzzy blanket wrapped around my shoulders, problem solved.

The Bible says “One flesh.” Luckily I don’t follow the Bible any more, because guess whose flesh that is? Not the woman’s. It’s not going to magically be 50/50. I would call us a two-headed creature, but the Bible says the man is the head. I was a skin tag on the flesh of this weird new creature with my husband’s head and face and legs. He was his old self and I was dangling from his arm like something that needed to be checked by a dermatologist. Have your own head. Have your own thoughts. Have your own legs that can take you to a different party than he wants to go to one Friday night. You don’t always have to decide together where to go.

I know it seems obvious. But things happen. They happen over time, like the frog in the pot, or they happen immediately, and you say “But” and he says “This is marriage” and you make your choice. Make the right choice. Have your own. He’s going to have his.

Woman Still Standing (in Front of a Jazz Band)

It’s been seven years since I wrote the only blog I’ve ever had go viral. (Let’s not argue about the definition of “viral.” It was read by thousands of people on each inhabited continent, and I got comments from people who don’t know me or my friends or their friends. I’m calling it viral!) The blog was about how I went from being the lead trombone player in the California state honor high school jazz band to dropping out of jazz three years later before I finished my music degree. And it was about how I was going to start a jazz improv class for girls. It’s been seven eventful years to say the least, and I thought it was past time for an update.

As promised, I did start my jazz class in the summer of 2016. I had four sign-ups right away, and that soon turned to six. We talked about chord spelling and voice leading, we learned songs and played them along with the iRealPro app, and we listened to women jazz instrumentalists on YouTube. Some men, too. We played games like “What color was I thinking of while I soloed” and “What Marvel character was I thinking of while I soloed.” We laughed a lot. We were about to have our first woman president in the U.S., and I thought I would soon be changing the numbers in the all-state honor band and beyond. It was all happening!

The group didn’t grow bigger than that, and we were sorely disappointed about the president thing (understatement of the century) but I was proud of myself. Starting things is not in my nature. We loved our time together at Music To My Ears, the music store where most of the girls took private lessons on their instrument. I didn’t seem to be able to recruit beyond that.

I was also getting my own jazz chops back in shape after 20 years of almost all classical–not even gigs, just keeping-in-shape classical for teaching lessons. I had been mostly being a mom and not thinking about gigging. Then, totally coincidentally, in the beginning of 2017 a guy from my church asked me to play with his band. For the next two and a half years I had a blast with the jazz girls once a week and gigging with that band a couple times a month and soon a couple times a week. Five-piece soul/blues/jazz group. I was the only woman.

Even though I was the only woman, none of the men in the group caused me any problems. In fact, they made sure to tell everyone about jazz girls, including the times we were interviewed on a local radio show and on a cool podcast about local bands. I gushed about these guys. I loved the original music and I loved traipsing around the county finding venues from seedy bars to fancy wineries to rich-people yards. I sometimes hated my solos, but I felt like I was back where I was meant to be. I loved the unquenchable creative drive. I loved the guys themselves. Outside of my family, they were the people I saw the most.

If you read my 2016 blog, you may recall that when I quit college jazz so many years ago, the nail in the jazz coffin was something I couldn’t divulge because it involved very personal information about people other than me. Well here we go again, only this time I didn’t quit. I got a phone call after two and a half years of showing up on time and never having any complaints about my playing, and I was told not to show up for that night’s gig. And once again, I can’t tell the story because it involves personal information about someone else in the band. It would make a gripping novel, too. Alas… So all I will tell you is that, to a person, everyone I’ve told the details to has said, “They would not have kicked you out for that if you were a man.” Men and women alike tell me that. This was almost four years ago now and I still can’t wrap my head around it.

I was not nice in my text goodbyes to them. I was not nice on social media about them. But I did not tell the details of what happened much as I wanted to. Within weeks I was writing songs and looking for members to make up my own band. Even though I am not good at starting things. I’d had a taste of the music I wanted to be playing, and besides, I needed to channel my anger into action. I decided on an all woman band. Because I was SICK of being the only woman. It took me months to find kickass musicians (no one could think of a single woman in the county who played guitar or drums?) and I wanted to give up many times, but when I finally found everyone (I decided to have a token man and even wrote a funk feature for him called Token Man) they looked so amazing on our brand new Facebook page and I couldn’t wait to rehearse with them. One more step–the process every musician dreads–the synching of schedules. We finally started to come up with some dates that might work. It was March of 2020.

I know the pandemic affected men, too. I know it affected a lot of people more than it affected me. But [expletive deleted]. I’d had so much trouble getting over getting dumped by my band–so much trouble persevering when I wanted to give up on songwriting and finding band members, and now this?

Jazz girls shut down. Everything shut down. Members of my new band quit music. Other members moved away. I gave private lessons over Zoom, which was surreal, but I was thankful to not lose the income and thankful to see my students’ faces. No one was gigging. Easter 2020 I played “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” on my trombone on my balcony and an unknown neighbor yelled “Thank you!” I auditioned for and got accepted as the applied trombone teacher for my local junior college. I finally got vaccinated. I played an indoor gig and worried about germs the whole time. Signed up to play a musical that got shut down before it opened because Covid went around the cast during rehearsals.

Now here it is seven years after starting jazz girls and I don’t have the heart to put together another band and I don’t really feel like gigging. I have done a couple jam sessions and a couple pit shows of Cabaret, but I just don’t feel settled in my own skin. I sold my horn to a student and got a freebie small bore horn from an old friend just to give lessons on. Meanwhile every year since I wrote that blog about only one girl being in the 2016 honor band there has either been one or zero girls in that same honor band. Every year. I am not good at starting things, but…

So I reached out to the jazz director at Sonoma State University. Can I have a room for jazz girls? Yes! And I reached out to friends and a member of The Ace of Cups and an employee at Healdsburg Jazz. Can you spread the word? Yes!

And now I just need parents to know we’re here, and I need them to understand the situation. I feel like I’m talking to myself sometimes. Your concert band girl CAN be great at jazz. I can teach her! Your jazz band girl IS great at jazz, but she’s going to face extreme sexism when she goes to college and beyond, and this class will be a source of connection, reassurance, jazz theory, and extra practice time. Recently a man who was in my college jazz band with me apologized for the way women in the program were treated. That was nice, but I fear girls today have the same road ahead. Being treated like potential mates and not considered real musicians. Being dismissed. Being bullied. Being assaulted. Then being apologized to twenty-five years later when they’re a nurse or whatever career they switched to.

I am terrible at recruiting. I see women doing great things across the country, from Terri Lyne Carrington and her work with the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice to Lisa Linde and Jazzhers. These women somehow got big things going, and I don’t feel like I have what it takes no matter how much I want to. But…

Who else is going to do it?

Jazz Girls begins again in the fall of 2023, this time at the Green Music Center at Sonoma State. Wednesday nights from 7-8. Junior high and high school girls. Suggested donation of $10 per week, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Come and chill with other girls, geek out on jazz, and play solos at whatever level you’re at. Whether you only know your major scales or you’ve been reading chord changes for years. I’m terrible at recruiting, but maybe we can make it happen together.