Renee, Bono, and you

So, Renee Zellweger got a new face. Megan Garber already wrote what I wanted to say and did it better. But you know whose face no one seems to be writing about with as much criticism and doubt? Bono. Bono who just told us about his face after 20 years. He copped on the Graham Norton Show to having glaucoma. He finally explained how the signature sunglasses he's been sporting to meet Congressmen in their offices and to woo fans onstage are actually his shields against irritating lights.

So Renee, whom most people would likely recognize on an awards show but might not immediately notice in an elevator, becomes a tabloid bat girl overnight. We can't stop looking and studying and doing a fair compare. The?

But Bono, whom most people would walk into an elevator and pass out from the star encounter, gets to throw shade for 20 years. When he finally feels ready to share, we say, Sure, dude. Glad you're getting the treatment you need. Then we go back to eating our Luna Bars and hearting all of Instagram with its filtered pics.

You might say, yeah, but Renee changed her face permanently. Bono just put on a pair of specs. It's not the same.

Or did she? Or did he?

Why don't we want to believe the stories people tell us about themselves? Why do we believe ourselves an authority on others' lives? Why is there only one acceptable narrative, until the better, truthier one emerges? What if Renee is just really taking better care of herself, getting more rest? Do I believe it? Why does it matter?

I asked my newsreporting students: [tweet bird="yes"]What is the question you get asked that immediately puts you into a box?[/tweet]

Women and men alike responded...

"You're so tall--why don't you play basketball?"

"You have a disability--will you be able to get a job?"

"You're from Nigeria--do you know my cousin from the Congo?"

"You moved here from New York--how has your adjustment been?"

It made me realize: Sometimes we don't like the answers we're given because we aren't asking the right questions, or we aren't waiting for the right time.

Or maybe--maybe the answer isn't ready yet. Maybe it's going to take another 20 years.

6.75 years

Dear Baby Girl, Last week you were bucked off a horse, and seven days since does not allow me any further eloquence...

I can tell you this, though: there is/was a space between the time I realized what was happening and the time I was picking you up from the ground as you were gasping for air when I was changed.

In between the time I was trying to figure out if the horse was going to trample you and the time I was trying to figure out if you would be paralyzed--I leaped over a few lifetimes.

My love deepened in a way that is different from the eyelash winking increments that it grows for you each day. It plummeted to the depths of someone being thrown from a building. Of a six year-old being thrown off the horse.

In that space, in those seconds that felt like the worst nightmare looping in slow motion, my heart reaffirmed something. I'm not sure if the heart spoke any words but if it did, they would have sounded something like, "Mine. Beloved. Will fight."

Within moments of my picking you up, you proclaimed, "That is the last time I ride a wild horse! I am only riding Western from now on!" That was sort of snobby of you, but we all decided to forgive you, since you had been thrown off a large animal and all which probably addled your brain a bit.

In the days since, I have been trying to memorize your face, your sweet face just as it is. I now know more acutely how quickly you could be snatched from the safety of this moment, a false safety if ever there were one.

And the truth is that you are being snatched each and every moment from me. The moments are taken, seized without warrant. I should be used to it by now. In parenting we are forever straddling our own little heaven and hell at the same time; the heaven of the moments we want to preserve, the hell of having to will these moments away to cruel time; the hell of wanting the hard times to pass more quickly, the heaven of looking back on things when they felt so much simpler than the complicated present.

I will return to the horse and to you on the ground and I will pick you up thousands of times in my mind and my heart will reaffirm millions of beats more resoundingly that you are, indeed, my beloved and I will never stop fighting--time, distance, darkness, pain--to make sure you know that wild horses couldn't keep me away.

Love,

Mama

Hanging out with Lena Dunham

It was so good to hang out with you today, Lena, and I would like to thank Terry Gross for facilitating the conversation and asking most of the questions I would have asked and some I wouldn't have thought of but was glad she asked you anyway, snorty laughter notwithstanding. I am still dancing around in the echo of what you said about how oversharing is a "gendered term." You said men who share about their experiences are deemed brave, but women are relegated to oversharing. I agree. I've sat at plenty of lunchtables with men talking perversion and misogyny and using expletives every other word and I got the impression that I was just supposed to hang. Whereas women asking for a tampon at anything above a whisper is considered gauche. I don't know if this is a battle we will ever win, dear Lena, the war of who gets permission to share true things, but that reminds me of something else illuminating you said. You explained how Hannah, the character you play in "Girls," is the one who feels charged with saying all the true things out loud, except she forgets that there are social constructs in place for a reason.

I feel this way. All the time.

I live in reaction to a very private family. I think my temperament is also pretty no bologna and having spent a decade in New England, I'm wicked blunt. But to my family, I'm all, "Okay, people, I'm calling everyone onto the floor who is still wearing a scrunchie from 1994" and my family is sort of, "Anybody care for some tea?"

So what I'm saying, Lena Dunham, is that I think we get each other. Also, did I say how cute your hair is looking on your Vogue cover? Ah, and by the way, congrazzles on the rave reviews of your book. Michiko Kakutani? Girrrrl.

Full disclosure, though: I couldn't get into "Girls" and it's not for the lack of trying on my part or a lack of talent for writing and acting on your part. It was just one of those salt-in-the-wounds reminders of how I sort of forgot to live in New York in my twenties and how I cannot fathom how many sexually transmitted diseases would be involved if life were really like that. That's where my brain goes. Everybody else is, Look how brave! Look how true! And I am tar-heeled paralyzed in the corner, pondering whether or not all those characters would be filling prescriptions for crabs.

Was that the sound of me oversharing again?

::presses publish because knows Lena Dunham won't mind::