Pond Muck

Wearing my purple leopard tankini with the turquoise stripes, I stand at the edge of the pond. I look down at the muddy green water watching the little fish playing in my shadow among the pebbles. Then I look out at the brown muck that creates a five-foot wide ring that hugs the edge of the pond in front of me. A frog croaks from somewhere within the secret world of wreaths that have cotton corn dogs on their tops.

I place a toe into the murky water and the fish that had gathered around their hopeful meal darts away. The muck has to be waded through to get to the swimming. My mother does a theatrical, arms in the air, hopping dance through the muck, letting out little high bursts as she acclimates to the water. My aunt does a graceful half dive over the muck, but her thighs, calves and bulky ankles still get tangled in the mess. In a moment I see them sitting on the dock in the middle of the pond, peeling the web-like algae off of their shiny bodies ... Pulling it off of their bodies like strings of green and black pearls.

My small body, smaller than the length of the muck moat, will have to wade through the dark substance while trying to keep my head above the water, while my toes try to help by grazing and pushing the mushy bottom of the pond. Hoping it’ll be over soon, but feeling every tickle of the slime and coil of its tentacles around my peach fuzzed legs.

I put both feet in the water and begin my journey.

So why start this essay with that story? Well, because what monster doesn’t love the visual of an upstate New York summer day, the sky dotted with puffy clouds, above a vibrant mess of green trees. Our heroine, a tanned, frizzy haired, newly five-year-old girl taking a plunge into her most dramatic life obstacle—a pond full of muck.

Well besides that it’s a lovely little piece of my life I like to consider my Expecto Patronum moment. It’s also an excellent metaphor to leapfrog into this saga, pun intended. At the time of the pond story, my best friend was a bowl cut boy named Daniel. We’d play ninja turtles on a scratchy rug in a prewar apartment, and then run down a long hallway to watch Beauty and the Beast on repeat. Gender, or sex, or whatever the current PC term is, wasn’t a twinkle in our minds. To really drive our gender free stake into the ground, every day at preschool Daniel, myself, and four other boys and girls would lift up our skirts, pull down our pants, and show off our cartoon clad underwear. Comparing and showing off superheroes and Disney princesses, giggling at the fun of it all. Not noticing the shape of what lay underneath the Red Power Ranger’s face.

This essay isn’t new, or particularly interesting, or beautifully written, and I won’t pretend it is. I’m a realist and I think that will come out the more you come to know me through this piece. But sometimes things happen in your life that shake you, either a happy overflowing shake or a shake that’s so rough it hurts your core. And the only way you know how to express that shake is to cry, or write it down, or do both. Make art, make noise.

This essay has a lot of back story and I’ll keep it brief, almost like bullet points. I favored boys’ company to girls’ growing up. I was accepted as one of the guys, either through my unfaltering presence or through my sarcastic and cutting sense of humor. My father called me his boy Hank and loved my tomboyish demeanor. I chose to go to an all women’s college as immersion therapy. I had girl friends growing up, but I wanted to make friends without that tense air of competition. To this day I wear jeans and a t-shirt as uniform, but love me a good cocktail dress.

Ok, that’s enough back story. You get it. I’m a not-totally figured out young woman who has an expired membership card to the boys club. I fancy myself confident and my friends have told me such, so it came as a real shock to me when I wasn’t invited to my cousin’s investor party. Yes, this entire essay is based around the utter shock that I wasn’t considered a “young professional” because I didn’t have a penis, or I didn’t pretend to have one. I have long shed that persona, and have been working toward the comfort of intellectual and powerful womanhood. Don’t get me wrong. When a group of guys are sitting around sharing their glory stories, I’m not shy to trump their stories with conquests from my Tinder days. But I digress.

The basic outline of this first episode goes as such; our cousin is starting a business. My husband and I invested from our joint savings. My cousin was hosting an investor’s cocktail party, and I wasn’t invited. None of my female cousins were invited. *Gasp.* How could this be?! We’re all investors, we’re all smart, educated people who have opinions and street smarts. You get it. I was enraged because I didn’t fit the profile.

Four years of being empowered as a woman in college, washed away by one sloppy, poorly planned party invite. I did end up going to the cocktail party, and it was sad and lackluster. I’m not just saying that because I went out of spite, but because it actually was a waste of a good Tuesday night. I won’t go into detail, because I do love my cousin, but he knows what’s up.

Now how does one move forward from this? That is the issue at hand, how to move forward as a young woman. How many times, growing up in New York, have I been catcalled? A little kissy noise from the guy sitting on the upside down crate at the bodega, who will most likely never move on from his perch on that crate. Bodega guy’s afraid to leave his crate, Bodega guy’s afraid to leave his crate!

Once, in a lovely cloud of 17-year-old drunkenness, a cat caller got the best of me. I heard the kiss, followed by the god bless, and then the attempted hello. I turned, really, I whipped around, and locked eyes with the man. I asked him in my most venomous voice—did he really think that would work? Did he really think my high heel clad, made up, teenage face and body, was going to be swept off my feet by his cowardly attempt? He obviously called me a bitch, I obviously said something I can’t remember, so I’m sure it wasn’t that amazing, and we both went on with our nights.

But see, I started that anecdote with, he got the best of me. Because as a child I was told to give over my wallet, to not make eye contact for more than three seconds, and to never respond to catcalls. But WHY?!! Why was I taught to remain silent? I mean I know why. Because one of those guys might be crazy and might attack me, and it’s better to be quiet than raped and dead.

So let us compare the cat callers to the cocktail party. I am strong, I am smart, and I am more innovative than some of my male cousins who were invited to that party. I was placed in the women’s group because I didn’t fit the vibe my cousin was going for, which was no women, serious men only. I was cat-called simply because I was a woman. I know they’re not perfect comparisons, but I think my reaction to both puts them at least in the same camp. I didn’t whip my fresh bob around and look my cousin in the eye and tell him what a mistake he was making. How he would rue the day that I somehow would hurt him in the same way he disgraced me and the relationship I thought we had been building. Instead, like I was taught, I remained quiet in fear of the potential attack.

I looked to my male counterpart, my husband. The man who has declared me his equal. I looked to him to understand why this small, probably unintentional diss shook me so much. He said he got it, he listened to me cry and shake and heave, attempting to express my utter frustration. I bottled up any idea of him calling our cousin out and fighting this fight for me, and let it fade.

The Black Lives Matter movement was born my junior year of college. I remember listening to a black classmate of mine try and explain how exhausted she was. She was over having to explain her frustrations to white people. How it wasn’t her job to teach white people about their offenses, they should figure it out on their own. Now, before everyone freaks out, I’m not comparing my life to hers. I am borrowing her concept of ... I don’t want to explain to you the struggles of women and how I am not an equal in many people’s eyes and how I am not welcomed in circles or seen as strong. I don’t want to explain that every time I enter a male space I have to push myself through fucking pond muck! Ha! The metaphor plays!

Episode two in bullet point-esque form. My husband and I want to find a weekly learning group. He goes to shul and asks the Chabad rabbi if there is a more advanced group that we can join. I was not present for this conversation, so I do not know if the royal "We" was used. The rabbi is enthusiastic and invites us(?), just my husband(?) to a group the following week. My husband, with equal enthusiasm comes home to tell me the good news. When my husband then texts the rabbi to say how excited we are, it comes out that this is a men’s only learning group and that I am not welcome. *Gasp.* How sexists, how patriarchal!

Now how do I move forward? Seriously, I am asking, how does a woman move forward from here? Do I turn to my husband again? Asking him to play messenger? Ask him to not be involved with this rabbi anymore because clearly he does not understand how disturbing his actions are? Do I continue to explain that as a woman in the Jewish world I am not welcome in many spaces. Besides the physical separation during the services, women are hidden behind a screen or curtain because god forbid a man should ejaculate at the site of my wrist, but also that after services, if I want to speak with the rabbi, I have to physically move around the partition and wade through the circle of men, only to reach the rabbi and not be able to shake his hand! Religion is for another essay.

This story ends with my standing on one side of what you can call a kitchen island, muffling tears, while trying to explain to my husband why I’m still not over these episodes. Of course they fade and another life obligation takes their head space, but they remain. They sit with the cat calls and the friendships that were ruined by a kiss. They hang out with the slut shaming and the last picked for dodgeball memories. They brew and simmer in my gut, adding to my bullet point lists of why being a woman is hard.

So I look to my elders, my sisters and mothers, and aunts and friends. How many of the strong women I know had to walk on tiptoes, pushing their head above the muck, trying to make it to the clear water? Or, how many attempted to swim under the muck, holding their breath, only to realize that it goes all the way down to the pond floor? The answer is all of them. How exhausting. And you hope that once you get to the dock and pluck the pieces of slime off your body, you can create your own dock club and be happy in the sun, jumping in and out of the cold, clear, fresh water.

How much I didn’t put into this essay... I could write forever about all the episodes of wading through the pond slime. I could write more metaphors about how I used to take that muck and make slime pies on the flat rocks, coming back the next day to see how they dried. How it became a play thing. So I apologize that this does not have a happy ending. My mother hates sad things, and I hate to disappoint her, but I am exhausted, and have to get back to shore, and figure out how to get through the muck again tomorrow.