In the course of our marriage (10 years) Wolfman and I have done a lot of talk about living adventurously, about making our life together as a made thing, building it in our hands, together, making something. We've talked of
WWOOFing in New Zealand or Norway. We've talked of living in a yurt in the Appalachians. We've talked of opening a cafe/herb shop called NAME REDACTED (as in, I don't want to share the name because we haven't given up on that dream, not that the cafe would be called, in all caps, NAME REDACTED).
None of these projects have come to fruition; none have even come close to happening. These have just been dreams we've woven together, aloud, over coffee in the morning, laying together in bed at night. We are dreamers, but too practical and poor. We've loved and made a baby, that magnificent creature who fills and defines our lives, but with the exception of our odd senses of style and creepy, demonic laughs, we've lived a pretty conventional life. We've settled in (what became) Money Magazine's Best Place to Live 2015, worked hard to pay bills and with whatever energy and money we had left over after the working and bills, made haphazard attempts at celebrating our life.
I'm reading Julie Powell lately, poor much-maligned Julie Powell. I finished Julie & Julia (while also watching Julia Child videos on Youtube with my husband and son) a few weeks ago and am now reading her follow-up, Cleaving. Julie Powell is a messy gal, about which she is not shy in admitting and not particularly apologetic. And I don't mean she is messy in that self-deprecating way we're trained to believe will make us more likable and relatable; she is messy in the nitty gritty way that is answered in horrified and disgusted Goodreads reviews. Despite all this, despite even the painful extramarital affair which makes up the bulk of her second book, I can't help but feel Julie Powell is a kindred spirit. I admire her. Yes, following Faith Lehane's "Want. Take. Have." as a personal, life-long, mantra is ultimately not the best way to live (wasn't this the lesson Faith had to learn on Buffy and Angel over and over again?). But, I recognize the impulse to shake up your life, to do something that gives it meaning, and I admire Julie Powell's ability to follow through.
I never worked on a sheep farm in Norway, can barely even picture what that life might have been like. I never built a yurt in the Blue Ridge mountains. I never traveled. I never wrote. I've got all the dreams in my pocket, but I lack follow through. (I cry when I hear Kermit sing "Rainbow Connection," the INFP theme song.) I never get further in these fantasy lives than scribbling in my journal some version of the thing and a "wouldn't that be neat?," "if only."
In Julie & Julia, Julie writes of how perplexed family and friends were as she tortured herself torturing lobsters and roaming the city in search of offal. Why? Why do this thing? And why force yourself to do it in only a year? Why make things hard on yourself? Well, writes Julie, it has less to do with the readers of her blog (though she does cite them) and more with the need to DO SOMETHING, to not resign herself to a humdrum little existence but to shake things up, to give herself a challenge and to discover herself through that self-inflicted adversity and strain. If she didn't do this, if she didn't complete it, if she gave up--who would she be,what would she be? Nobody. Nothing. And, of course, this isn't true. She'd still be Julie Powell, wife and cat mom and doer of the things in her life she did do, but I wouldn't be writing about her now, would I?
And, again, a couple years later, after she'd written a book of her first challenge, after she'd turned the frustration and panic and maggots in her kitchen into a bonafide success, she took on yet another pipe dream--she became an apprentice at a butcher shop. She learned the craft of boucherie for no other reason than that it had always interested and intimidated her and she was bedeviled by the desire to not settle into the status quo.
All I do is settle into the status quo. It is my great burden and my darkest shadow, this incapacitation--which has all kinds of roots and stems and knots which are long and, frankly, boring, and which I will not get into here. But, take it from me, I am a classic settler, with the briefest moments of inspired, spasmodic kicks against the cage I build myself (I married that good-looking man, after all, and we made this beautiful baby together).
Prowlandia is my
Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Tiny Living is my boucherie and charcuterie. And, let me tell you, if you were reading this in my memoir or watching a movie version of this starring a more adorable version of me, Mila Kunis or Amanda Seyfried maybe (oh I flatter myself), you would be saying to yourself "why is she complaining so much, what a whiny drag, even Mila Kunis can't make here likable," and I am sorry/not sorry about that. Unraveling the status quo you've quilted around yourself like a protective cocoon is hard fucking work. I am in the midst of deprogramming a lot of fearful bullshit from my mind that I've been carrying for far too long. And, also, living in a tiny home with a man, a boy, an 80 pound meathead dog, and a cat who just MUST eat at 5 in the morning is hard, even if it's a life you've chosen for yourself, and turning a dusty lot filled with broken glass and, probably, ticks into a Wolfpeople utopia is hard fucking work, too. I'm dealing with some stuff. It's hard. But, I'm doing it. Wolfman and I are making something, with our hands, together, and it sucks, and it's glorious.
