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July 9, 2006 :    My Beautiful Friend and Myself

I have a friend who is beautiful, inside and out. I very much doubt I would have a friend who was beautiful only on the outside, but I have to say that she is inside to be honest about her. She shines apart in both ways. I like to think I might as well. Perhaps we have this in common? I do know that no one will throw rocks at me and call me ugly if I walk into any room! I had a very smart and kind man call this sort of frame about one’s body, the pleasant frame, a physical handicap, and it is. I was so excited to hear him say this that I would have married him right then and there! Too bad we were on the phone.

My friend is beautiful and hurt. I’ve been so myself and as if in degrees I am a bit myself, (hurt and beautiful,) although on a scale, she is hurting worse, perhaps. This combination, outward and inward beauty that is hurting, makes us/her “tragic.” It is a special category used for only some women. I am quite certain it is for men as well, but I am using women as my example here. An actress who was once beautiful and successful who is poor and worn out, or a model who is beautiful and died of an overdose, such as Gia, is “tragic.” We get a “tragic glow,” about us and it, if not for our concentrated efforts, can make us examples as to “never,” be, do, etc… like us.

I refuse to allow my friend to obtain this title for herself and have it be her last one! Like me, she has been “sweet,” “successful,” “beautiful,” “lucky,” “conceited,” (by the judgment of others of course, not a real trait,) “selfish,” and among these names they have for this sort of women, my sort, we are also sometimes called “whores.” We are the stuff that imaginations love to use to feed an otherwise boring life. My friend is not going to be a statistic if I can help it and she will not have this “title,” as she fought all the other negative titles pushed upon her!

If we have children, and this is true of my friend as well, our “friends,” will say and pray, for example, “She will loose her figure now. Not. It did not happen, not to her, not to me. If we get divorced we are “over,” no, not her, not me. Oh, and we are always

“unfit mothers.” I have had people wait for me to be 30 and wait until I was 40, as if miraculously I will turn into some frog and my skin will be frog like, wrinkly and my legs will be frog-like, bow-legged. I am pretty sure they have hoped I would go bald, and yes, die. I have been wished dead for my outsides. My friend knows of this pain. Like myself, she has cried and not understood why her own sister, for example, could hate her so much and do what she does to my friend. We are puzzled. I tell her that if we knew we would be like them!

If we knew why they did these “ugly,” things to us out of jealousy, then we would have to think like them, therefore we would relate to them, and finally, we would emulate them. Horror of horrors, we might even make the fashion choices they make and LOOK like them! NO! My friend said she would not want her enemies lives so I guess she is stuck, like I, with being called naive along with all the other names. How stupid can we be to let these people hurt us? I feel I covered this in my blog post: “Pure love, rants and missing people we love.” I’m keeping my naiveté’, and whatever anyone else does will never change my mind!

It matters not how hard we try to be “good mothers,” we just are not in the eyes of many people. If we so much as paint our nails we are inept mothers and conceited. If our plainer counterparts have their nails done, all will circle around the kindergarten door as we wait for our children to emerge for the day, and rave and congratulate that woman and even tell her that she needs to “do more for herself.” My friend has a career in which she takes care of people, but if you were to ask a person what they thought she did for a living, one might say, “Hm, a sales person?” “A secretary,” or “she doesn’t work. She works hard, so do I.

When I dance, I dance 6 hours a day. Every day, no matter what, I am there, dancing and perfecting. I cried from pain and frustration like any other little girl while learning the ballet barre. When out of alignment, I was hit with a stick. I lost my toenails, every one of them at once, from dancing too much. Let me be clear: I lost my toenails because they were bruised from the bottom of my toe all the way through to my toenails where the blood gathered and I lost my toenails from the pressure of the blood, they popped off. When I needed a ride to class, my sister’s boyfriend drove by. He stopped but did not take me to my class. My toes were falling off at this time. He did not take me because my sister would be mad. I agreed with him totally.

That evening after I walked an unknown amount of blocks from class, I made it home with such painful feet, I sat with my feet in the tub of my new studio apartment. I had just left the husband that hit me so hard in the head, ( a punch,) that he knocked me out. I left because he told me he was not sure if he would get made enough to kill me or not.

That night, my step mother called me and was angry. She said that my sister told her that I was “hitting,” or “coming on,” to my sister’s boyfriend!

I was mad enough: I said that “first, I would NEVER touch her lousy taste in men, and two, IF I had came on to him, he WOULD have said “yes!.” My step mother accepted this as the truth, and it was. I was out because I had dared divorce my husband who told me he had to “hit you to have sex.” I told my friend, I knew about sisters, and I had two. I felt very bad for my friend. Then again, I was happy my friend was free of her husband’s evil.

In “their language, if one says “you need to take time for yourself, the translation: “You need to do more for yourself, loose the weight!” It may also be: “You are hopelessly out of date, stop buying yourself all those sports cars that have no sizes and get yourself some clothes. (Shoes don’t count, feet do not gain weight!

My friend knows that if she has her nails done, and if in RED, if she dared, these women would not be her friends anymore. What’s more, all of these woman will be getting their nails done as well within two weeks and probably by the same manicurist! The only difference between my friend and myself is that I went ahead and had that manicure early, and she is making the appointment.

Once, when younger, my friend tried to gain a lot of weight, she also dressed as bad as she could. She tried to go without make up for years in her marriage and much, much more to avoid the jealousy of her husband and the judgments of others. Myself, I cut all my hair off to 1 inch all the way around. Alas, she told me what I already know: Men still bothered her, just bigger men! Don’t I know it!

My friend tried to defend herself from an abusive husband in a

Small town. She decided that was that and she would fight back. She had tried taking pictures of herself with bruises, as did I, but it didn’t matter to the police. She had tried other means to leave, she is an educated woman, but he said he would take the children and tell e everyone, (all those people she didn’t talk to so he would not beat her,) tales. Tales like she was a drug addict for taking medicine for depression and panic attacks that came from his regularly administered scare tactics and attacks upon her person that she never saw coming. She tried the therapist but what could she do? Like I, if she let the “cat out of the bag,” the woman may want her to leave and then he would do all of those things, and they would work. I know, I was there, in her shoes. People believe men. And women who have been abused enough to not be able to have friends have no record to show, no one that they told, and no person to turn to. We/She try the shelters but we think of our children there, instead of the comfy home “Daddy,” made for them, (on our backs,) and she realizes she will have to leave them there with him. Dead ends. Everywhere..

My friend had enough that day and picked up that knife to scare him. She was arrested and held in jail over night and her ball started to roll down hill.

That jealous sister? The one who always asks us for fashion tips, criticizes us, and tries to steal our clothes because she is less pretty, less thin and had fewer boyfriends, that one? Well, my friend’s sister moved in with her husband and into her bed! Finally her sister had something of hers. Her sister had her family! I must say that my sister was quick to flirt with every man I’ve know but would draw the line at that move because of pride alone. It seems my friend’s sister had no pride. The thing that bothers me the most is that my friend in not getting that manicure and blowing the lie all to hell, found out that the affair had been going on for years, even before she had the last of his children, who was now 8! My friend was busy, working double shifts, mothering four children and she missed all the alcohol he consumed and all the evenings her sister wanted to “help out.” She even thought that if she let her sister into her life, it might help her drunk and drugged sister get her life together. I can’t blame her, I used to think that way.

I need my friend to be “okay,” and you know what? She will be okay. She will not because of what other’s think, and they think it will be a man who will come along and “save her.” It will be because she no longer has to take care of 6 children, her four and her sister and her husband. It will be okay because that “happy family,” that is forming down the street somewhere in America made up of a sister’s husband, a sister and one woman’s children, will be busy.

They will be busy taking care of that family that the stole. The one my friend is arranging visitation with the court at this time. That is all her teary eyes can bring her, no matter what she looks like: visitation.

I can share with her that when a woman becomes pregnant from “date rape,” before it is even “date rape,” visitation is all you need, and to do it over the state line is almost perfect.

Best of luck to my friend’s former family, and please say your prayers for my friend. I, and my friend, still love flowers and are surprised… Why?

They tell us that some men are evil.

And so are some women. The problem is: We do not know how to be evil, so we cannot see it coming until it hits us.