Paralysis of the Heart

Paralysis of the Heart

May 10, 2012

I WAS driving my 11-year-old son, Joe, to school. It had been one of those mornings. He was singing opera and doing hip-hop moves when I needed him to put on his shoes. 

As we pulled up in front of school just in time, I snapped: “I can’t start our day this way. This kind of stress is going to make me sick.” 

He burst into tears. “Don’t say that!” he yelled. “Promise to never say that again!” He raced out of the car, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. 

On more than a few occasions, he has expressed his fear that something might happen to me. As the child of a single mother, he clearly has been pondering the same questions I do: Who will take care of him if I die? Who will love him as much as I do?

Joe’s fear of my mortality jarred me into reality, and I called my doctor. There actually had been a reason for my harsh statement. My face and arm had been numb for months. I had shrugged it off as stress but then started to get chronic headaches, too.

My doctor agreed to see me right away. After examining me, she said, “If I can’t get you in for an M.R.I. at the imaging center, I’ll need to send you to the hospital in an ambulance.” She explained that stress doesn’t create the symptoms I was having. It could be an aneurysm, a tumor or early signs of multiple sclerosis. 

Someone else might have panicked, but this kind of situation makes me practical. She got me an appointment for an hour later. In that time, I did what any sensible person who has been ordered to get an emergency M.R.I. does: I got the car washed. I wasn’t in denial; there’s just so much time to get stuff done, and worrying wasn’t on my checklist.

Some people are terrified of sickness and death. Not me. I decided to face death head on when I was about 10 and saw a photo spread about AIDS in Life magazine. I declared that one day I was going to help those men. 

And I did. At 20, social-work degree in hand, I applied for a job on the AIDS unit of St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. When asked if I could handle seeing gaunt men with tubes in their mouths, I said “yes.” When asked if I was afraid of watching people die, I shook my head no. 

I was like the naïve teenager who enlists in the Army without any idea of what war is like. For the next two years, patients of mine died every day. After a while the pain caught up to me. If I were going to befriend death, I needed a different approach. 

So I became a sky diver. Then a motorcyclist. I climbed rocks. Canoed in Class-5 rapids. Bungee jumped. And most harrowing of all, I moved to Los Angeles to become a writer. I hoped all these experiences would give me something I desperately wanted: fearlessness.

I walked into the imaging center. In the waiting room, I got down to business on my cellphone. I made arrangements for my son to be picked up from school and got a friend to take care of our dog. I like things that can be checked off a list. Kid, check. Dog, check. Custodian for my son should I die, check. 

The technician called me in. He was kind and covered me with a blanket. I almost told him I loved him. Some people might dread an M.R.I., but lying down in the middle of the day without anyone asking me to do anything is a single mother’s dream.

The technician asked, “Have you ever had an M.R.I. before?” 

“Yes.” 

I got pregnant in 1999. I was 26. At the beginning of my ninth month something unimaginable happened: I had a mild stroke. A small bleed in the front left lobe of my brain took away my ability to speak and control the right side of my body. They rushed me to the hospital. I didn’t remember reading about sudden paralysis in “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and I wanted my money back. 

In an instant I got a glimpse into how vulnerable motherhood was going to make me. My usual hubris turned into humility. I did not like it one bit. 

Just before putting me into the machine, the technician handed me a red rubber ball, explaining that if I needed to communicate with him, all I had to do was squeeze it. He reassured me that while I might feel alone in the tube, I wouldn’t be.

I could have used a red rubber ball back when Joe was 10 weeks old. That’s when his father left. Feeling lost, I fled New York and went to Miami to live with a friend. On my back I carried a pack with five weeks of clothing for the two of us. On my chest I strapped my baby in a Bjorn. In my left hand I held his car seat. In my right, his stroller. 

I looked like a soldier. Walking through the airport, I felt more alone than I ever had. No one offered to help, and why would they? From the outside it seemed as if I had it all handled.

My brain and neck scans were done. It took three hours longer than I expected and it was too late to take Joe to the movies, the promised reward for his stellar report card. 

When Joe is testing my patience, it’s difficult to be alone as a parent. But when he does something amazing it’s even worse, because there is no witness but me to mark the milestones. No one else who will know and remember all the funny, lovely things he says and does.

I HAD the M.R.I. because I was numb, but my numbness actually started long before, when Joe was a baby. I needed my eyes and ears to be vigilant if I was to single-handedly care for him. But I didn’t need a heart to feel. It was safer to focus on the details and forget that my baby was more intimidating than caring for dying men and much scarier than hurling my body from a perfectly good aircraft.

With Joe, I wasn’t fearless. Quite the opposite, I was petrified of how much I loved him. Death was something I had grown comfortable with; it was life I wasn’t so sure about. The problem with numbness, though, is that you don’t choose which parts not to feel. You don’t get to block out pain and suffering but keep all the good stuff. You get everything or nothing. That’s the deal.

The night of my M.R.I., I walked into Joe’s room one last time before going to sleep. It had been a long day. Safe and sleeping in his bed, he had one hand on his left cheek and one on his right. It reminded me of when he was a baby and we shared a bed in Miami. He’d wake in the night and find my face with his tiny hands. With one he’d hold my left cheek and with the other he’d hold my right. Only when he’d found both would he fall back to sleep. I was his red rubber ball. 

My eyes welled up. The enormousness of my love swelled bigger than any fear. The terror of potential loss flooded in. But so did the joy of connection. Joe hates to see me cry, but he was sleeping so I figured, why not. 

I thought about the fact that eventually one of us will stand at the other’s funeral. That day will come, and no amount of list making or numbness can keep it away. I didn’t know if the moments between my sitting on his bed and a funeral were few or many. All we can do is make the moments we have matter. 

I put that on my list: savor our time together. Check. 

Like how he still holds my hand. Or hangs out in our front yard in his plaid bathrobe, holding a fake cigar in his mouth. Or how he nicknamed me “cita” for mamacita, and how I always wanted a nickname from someone who’d love me enough to give me one.

Suddenly I saw that his eyes were open. He had caught me loving him. And his eyes had tears in them, too.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“Because I’m happy,” he said.

“Me, too.”

And just like that, he fell back to sleep. 

I knew I was happy, because even though my face and arm were numb, my heart wasn’t. In two days I’d get the message that the M.R.I. was normal. But in that moment all that mattered was that Joe was alive, and so was I. And we were happy.

My U-Turn From Isolation to Intimacy

My U-Turn From Isolation to Intimacy

Nov. 4, 2016

There is a moment when your child gets too adolescent to cuddle. For me, that moment arrived when my 14-year-old son, Joe, headed to theater camp for a month. He was so eager to get there, he asked me to drop him off at the entrance. But there are papers that need signing when you entrust your child to strangers. Nonetheless, I was hoping for a goodbye hug.

After depositing his bags onto his bunk like a Nepalese sherpa, I reached to hug him. He ushered me to my car instead, where he bent down and gave me a peck on the head accompanied by a loving, but definite, shooing motion.

As a toddler, Joe was affectionately called a “space invader” for wanting to hug and touch everyone, especially me. As a single mother, I nursed him until he was 2. Then he became a 33-pound growth affixed to my hip, and finally a sleepwalking child who found his way into my room almost every night for years. In between the moments of treasured closeness, I often got pawed when I needed a little space.

Then we traded places, and it was Joe who needed space.

I accepted this as a normal part of his growing up. But it wasn’t just that I no longer got affection from my child; I also hadn’t been touched by a lover in years. Having this month to myself with Joe at camp was the perfect opportunity to remedy that, but there were no contenders. I was tired of futile attempts with online dating, and my free time wasn’t worth risking.

I remembered the advice a friend’s therapist gave her when she found herself in my position: Call an ex. At the time, I thought this was terrible counsel. But in my desperate need to feel connected, I sent a provocative email to one who lived nearby, and he obliged.

Later, however, as I drifted off to sleep by myself, I still felt unseen, untouched. He may have touched my body, but he hadn’t touched me. I recalled an Indian doctor I once had who said: “People in this country get sick because they live alone. They don’t get touched enough.”

I was living in New York then, where at least my legs and arms grazed those of other commuters on the subway. I doubted that doctor would approve of my life in Los Angeles, where we spend so much time alone in our cars, sealed off from everyone. But I didn’t have a choice about that until the day I crashed right into someone.

A few weeks after Joe got home from camp, I was making a U-turn on my way to pick him up when suddenly the driver’s side door of an oncoming vehicle appeared in front of me and I was staring into the eyes of the young blond woman at the wheel.

My adrenaline surged. Luckily, I missed smashing into the door, where I might have crushed her, and hit her car’s front wheel instead.

I got out of my car, leaving it in the middle of the street.

“Are you O.K.?” I asked.

“You just crashed into me,” she said, as if she didn’t quite believe it.

“I didn’t see you,” I answered. And the truth is, I didn’t. Was it the afternoon glare, or was I so disconnected from everyone and everything that I failed to take a second look at oncoming traffic? I didn’t see her; that was all I knew for sure.

Both of us were shaken up, with sore necks. And we seemed uncertain of what to do next. But because it was my fault, I took the reins. We moved our cars to safety. I called my insurance company and told her to call hers. I took photos of both vehicles and made sure we had each other’s information.

My phone chimed. It was a text from Joe, asking why I was late. It hit me how much I missed him. I had been looking forward to our 10-minute drive home all day. I texted back, explaining about the accident and asking him to walk over and meet me. He replied, “I’d rather go home,” followed by a second text, “Please.”

Feeling disappointed, I arranged for a neighbor to get him.

I looked up from my phone to see the woman standing on the curb, crying.

“What do I do now?” she asked, her voice quivering. “I’m not sure I can drive my car.”

There were no words to express how sorry I was, so I hugged her. This moment of intimacy was unexpected and involuntary, just a human reflex, like reaching for your child when he falls. But somehow that simple gesture allowed us to face what was ahead.

I called the local body shop. The owner, a sweet older man I had met before, answered. After asking if everyone was O.K., he agreed to wait for us despite it being closing time.

I locked my car and got into hers, and together we drove to the shop. When we arrived, the owner explained what repairs needed to be done, and a few minutes later, her boyfriend came to pick her up.

He got out of his convertible and wrapped his burly arms around her. I watched her melt in his embrace. When she was tucked safely into the passenger seat, they drove off, leaving me alone in the body shop with the owner.

I put my head down and hurried into the bathroom, where I fell apart. Big, heaving sobs. My job of being strong and efficient had ended, and I was left with myself — my shame, my sadness. How could I be so disconnected? How could I have not seen her?

I walked out, and the owner saw my tears. He had a tentative look on his face. He reached out and hugged me, waiting until he knew it was O.K. When I didn’t pull away, he relaxed and said: “I know, it’s always after everything is over. That’s how it happens.” He held me for a long time.

The collision broke my fender and the wheel of her car, but it also broke down the boundaries we walk around with every day. It pulled us out of our metal boxes and into each other’s lives and arms, where we experienced kindness and community, touching each other in a deep, personal way. And while I wished it hadn’t happened, I was changed because it did.

When I got home, the house was empty. A little while later, I heard the door open, and Joe came in. He glanced at me cautiously, and I saw relief wash over him.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” he said, looking guilty. “I know I should have come, but I was afraid of what it might look like.”

“It’s O.K.,” I said. “I understand.” He reached out for a brief hug before telling me about his day and his opera audition. Then he went into his room and closed the door. Listening to the click, I realized that even though our relationship had changed, our connection remained.

I went into my own room and rubbed ointment on my sore neck and side. I thought about the young woman I had hit and hoped her boyfriend had massaged her back before climbing into bed next to her. I remembered all the nights of longing I had endured, nights when I pathetically calculated that even my friends with partners who complained about having sex only once a month still got it 12 times a year.

Though I want that kind of physical intimacy as much as the next person, it was touch, not sex, I needed most. Touch solidifies something — an introduction, a salutation, a feeling, empathy. The next day, I kept asking myself if there was any way to experience that kind of closeness without crashing into someone.

And there is. Ever since the accident, I’ve noticed myself having many more moments of touch. Sometimes the touch is physical, sometimes it isn’t. It can be a simple smile exchanged with a stranger on my morning run or taking the time to meet the checkout person’s eyes when he bags my groceries. It’s petting our dog. And some days it’s even my own teenage son resting his head on my shoulder after a hard day.

I am not unseen or untouched. In fact, people seem to be noticing me more than ever, or maybe it is I who is looking up more, well aware of the risk of not seeing someone who’s right in front of me.

And while I could never have predicted it, a byproduct of all this has been that my persistent need for a lover has lessened. The kind of connection I have learned to cultivate since the accident is not something to tide me over until the real thing arrives. It is the real thing.

‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’: Pleasure as a Path to Wholeness

‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’: Pleasure as a Path to Wholeness

Michelle Fiordaliso, July 2, 2022

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“Do you masturbate?” Sarah, an older woman I trusted, asked me when I was 18.

“No!” I said, giving a definitive answer.

“If you can’t give yourself an orgasm, no one else will.”

I thought about this exchange while watching Good Luck to you, Leo Grande, starring Emma Thompson as Nancy Stokes and Daryl McCormack as Leo Grande. The film tells the story of a widowed woman who hires a young male sex worker to experiment with in ways she never did with her husband—the only person with whom she’s had physical intimacy for three decades. But the film is, among other things, an exploration of whether women due to internal and external messaging, are allowed to pursue and attain sexual fulfillment. The fact that Nancy has never had an orgasm answers that question.

In a world where we’ve started discussing the critical importance of sexual consent, and in the wake of #MeToo, we must address women’s pleasure—making this film not only entertaining, but necessary.

So, why can’t women enjoy these amazing bodies we’ve been given? For one, our concern with how our bodies look from the outside affects how, and how much, we feel on the inside. One study shows that at age 13, half of American girls say they are “unhappy with their bodies.” This number grows to 80 percent by the time girls turn 17.

Just as sexuality is blossoming, it’s nipped in the bud by intrusive, and often obsessive, thoughts about how we look to others. And issues with body image don’t go away. Nearly 70 percent of adult women report withdrawing from activities due to negative body image. These thoughts keep us women in our heads and if we’re in our heads, we can’t be in our bodies which is where we must be to feel pleasure. The media makes all this worse because only 5 percent of us women will meet the physical ideal presented there.

With all this focus on our size, age and appearance, we forget that the most remarkable thing about our physical form happens on our insides—that our bodies are, as Nancy says, “a thing of wonder, a playground of delight.” The clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings, twice the amount as the penis and is made up of 18 distinct parts. My 22-year-old son’s sexually savvy friends speak openly about their sex toys, yet the ones with vaginas don’t know that their clitorises have legs—called the crura—the knowledge of which would make their erotic reach even more mind-blowing than the USB rechargeable-oral-sex-simulating feats of technology found today.   

Body positivity and sex toy advertisements on the New York City subway are progress but can’t quite counteract the effects of sexual assault and rape. Eighty-one percent of women report experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime and 20 percent have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape.

Sexual trauma in my youth presented two conditions that for years prevented me from feeling good. One was vaginismus, an involuntary tightening of the vaginal walls brought on by fear of penetration making sex painful and even physically impossible. And the other was anorgasmia—the inability to have an orgasm. I could relate to Nancy’s plight. Statistics show that 95 percent of straight men reported having orgasms to straight women’s 65 percent. We, bisexual women, had a 66 percent rate, and for lesbian couples it was better with women reporting a rate of 86 percent. Five to 10 percent of women have never had an orgasm at all. So, what’s keeping any of us who wants a climax from having one? It’s clear.

Seeing our bodies as flawed and experiencing sexual violations prevent us from feeling pleasure. At 49, I am no longer an occasional visitor to this body, but a full-time resident. It took a whole lot to get here. For years, I punished my body by vacating it, but the more I lived in my body and loved it, the more pleasure became possible. It’s as if pleasure carved out new neural pathways—the more pleasure I allowed in, the more healed and whole I felt.

The look of contentment Nancy has as she gazes upon her naked body in the final scene is less about how that body looks and more about what that body is now permitted to feel. In an interview on NPR, Thompson said, “She’s seeing [her body] for the first time as her home.” And like a house itself, her body is illuminated from the inside out. Beauty doesn’t come from the outside like we’ve been lead to believe—it radiates out from self-acceptance and love. In fact, real beauty comes from our ability to feel—it comes from pleasure.

For Nancy, it takes more than half a lifetime and 93 minutes of a 97-minute movie to come. While it took me a little less than that to go from zero orgasms to being multi-orgasmic, it’s worth mentioning because on the other side of my painful struggle I can say with certainty that pleasure is each of our birthrights no matter how we look or what’s been done to us.

What my friend Sarah said all those years ago was correct. “If you can’t give yourself an orgasm, no one else will.” An orgasm, after all, is not something you give someone; it’s a gift you give yourself. Only we can decide to let go, to receive, to empty ourselves of all the crippling beliefs and thoughts and past violations—and be filled and full with pleasure.

For this reason, midway into the movie and for as much as I loved the adorable Leo Grande, I started hoping that our protagonist would give herself her first orgasm—and I was so grateful when she did, because pleasure starts with ourselves. It’s a decision. A choice. And as Nancy says, “Pleasure is a wonderful thing, it’s something we should all have.”

BWW Exclusive: My Experience at THE INHERITANCE

BWW Exclusive: My Experience at THE INHERITANCE

The play examines AIDS a generation after the crisis.

by Michelle Fiordaliso Mar. 12, 2021

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A year ago Broadway went dark. It's been a huge loss to Times Square, the artists, the city and theater-lovers, but it's more than that. The theater can be the place where the seeds of societal change get planted. You see, a collective gets formed there. A never-to-be-recreated group comes together to experience something. It's a short-lived community of fidgeting, laughing, crying humans. And it's nothing less than alchemy as mere mortals transform from separate individuals into one golden audience.

On Wednesday, March 4th 2020, eight days before New York City theaters closed, Broadway was booming. I had tickets to see Matthew Lopez's, The Inheritance. It'd be a decadent seven hours - part one at the matinee, followed by a dinner break and then part two. Every seat in the house was taken. I settled into my lucky single-ticket-buyer's spot, stage left, third row orchestra with my maroon puffer coat cocooned around me. I sat between a man on my left and a woman with curls on my right.

The play examines AIDS a generation after the crisis. As a social worker on the AIDS unit of St. Vincent's Hospital at the peak of the epidemic, I was still putting the pieces of that time period together myself, constructing a narrative with all the fragments of what I saw and what I felt.

At the intermission, I chatted with the woman next to me who was too young to have seen the AIDS crisis firsthand. We talked about the play and I shared how eager I'd been to see it given my past experiences. She listened with interest.

When I was growing up in Queens my immigrant parents had the good instinct to get a TDF membership. I realized early on that the theater is more than entertainment. And while I didn't have words to explain it back then, researchers at The University College London Division of Psychological and Language Sciences have since found that audience members' hearts synchronize while watching live theater. With hearts beating as one, an audience can access an unprecedented feeling of communal empathy and empathy can lead to powerful social action and change. Reading about The Inheritance, I knew other people in the audience had also lived through the AIDS crisis and could relate to my feelings, but I hoped for something even more transcendent because I know the magic of theater.

Sharing my struggles in therapy often left me feeling exposed and ashamed, but at the theater it was different. When childhood sexual abuse got revealed in How I Learned to Drive the audience gasped and that's the moment I knew I wasn't alone. And in Jagged Little Pill the limitations of how Americans see consent and see race are explored and the reaction I heard, from us, the audience, gave me hope that outdated and unacceptable thinking was dying.

That winter day in March I watched The Inheritance on the edge of my seat. It took me to unexpected places-sublime and sorrow-filled. In his review Ben Brantley said, "I challenge any theatergoer with a heart not to cry during the sun-saturated scene that concludes the first half." I guess I have a heart, because I did cry. As the first part came to a close with a poignant display of all the beautiful and irreplaceable lives we lost to AIDS, my sobs came, loud and heaving.

The woman sitting in front of me must've heard my intermission conversation because she turned, looked into my eyes and whispered, "Thank you. You must've cared for some of my friends-so many of them died at St. Vincent's." She was crying, too. We all were.

The play ends without a curtain call. We're left with the impact of the moment. And even though it was over, my weeping continued. I'd rappelled into a ravine of un-grieved grief. Of remembrance and loss. Of love. I'd been there before, but this time I wasn't alone.

The woman on my right, curls framing her warm face, asked, "Is it okay if I touch you?"

"Yes," I said and she put her arm around me.

The man on my left had gone, leaving an empty seat beside me and the woman from the row in front of me replaced him, putting her arm around me on my other side.

These two women held me until the house emptied and I was out of tears.

Being held by strangers might seem odd and peculiar, but in just over a week from that day, Covid would make it seem dangerous, too. I think about the Ethel Barrymore theater and all the theaters. Silent and still and lifeless for the last three hundred and sixty-five days.

I didn't need theater to close to cherish it. The day I saw The Inheritance captured exactly why it's so important which is why I know what's at stake in its absence. Not just a fun evening or a bit of folly, but one of the ways we evolve as a culture. The catharsis we can have together. The power of words heard as one audience. And how those words and the feelings they evoke can heal us and change us.

Not everyone will have the extraordinary experience I did of being held at the theater, but the theater itself holds us all, providing a space where our hearts can sync for a few hours. And that collective sigh or gasp or laugh or sob of hundreds is transformative. When theater returns, I hope we value the community that gets created in those darkened rooms and realize how much we need it for our humanity - now, in fact, more than ever.

Moroccan Fish & a Healing Night of Sex led me Home.

Moroccan Fish & a Healing Night of Sex led me Home.

Michelle Fiordaliso, January 12, 2021

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There was a man in the kitchen cooking for me.

I had heard about Moroccan fish, but never tasted it. The sauce was red: paprika, dried chilies, white pepper, cilantro, and turmeric.

Since I consider myself to have an educated palate, I delight in finding foods I haven’t tried. The fish was being prepared by big, meaty hands. A former soldier. A builder. A father. A man who ate with his fingers.

I’d met him at a women’s workshop, of all places. At home, I was a single parent who played both mother and father from the beginning. The stereotypical roles of protecting and providing won out over nurturing, but my son had just turned 18 and was going off to college, so the heavy-lifting felt finished. At work, I coached Ivy League-educated C-suite executives. I was accustomed to being strong and smart there, too. The course was an opportunity to explore parts of myself I pushed aside.

At the end of the weekend, men were brought in to pair with us for an activity. My eyes moved from one to the next. Different ages. Different races. Different body types and faces. There were three who I felt drawn to. But after an icebreaker, I was clear that I didn’t want to partner with any of them, which probably explained why 157 online dates hadn’t worked—my first instincts aren’t always accurate.

I chose someone else—the man who was now in the kitchen chopping herbs. At the end of our exercise, we said we’d find each other on Facebook and we did.

I liked being cooked for. We found a rhythm in the kitchen. While he finished the meal, I filled glasses and set the table. It was summer on the West Side of Los Angeles. A heat wave with no air conditioning. The 100-degree temperature along with the spice of the food made me melt. Tension of any kind had no chance of holding on. It evaporated instantly.

The eating led to kissing. Sweat from his brow made his glasses slip until he took them off.

“Alexa, kitchen off,” he yelled.

The room grew darker. I laughed. He found my face, my hair, my arms.

“What do you want?” he asked.

I knew he had studied tantric sex. He knew how to hold space for a woman. To be present. To help release the years of trauma contained in the pelvic floor. All the messages we women get in words and sideways glances about who we should be and how much pleasure we’re allowed to have.

There was trauma in my pelvic floor. A huge iron anchor. A grip.

“Would you like to come into my bedroom?” he asked.

I offered my hand and let him lead. The air was dense and hot.

“Alexa, hallway 50 percent,” he yelled.

“You could be nicer to her,” I offered. “Okay,” he said, kissing me.

“Alexa, hallway 20 percent. Thank you, baby.”

“That’s better.”

The room was dim. It made the sound of our breath louder. Almost visible.

“Tell me what’s happened to you,” he said.

I recounted the trauma. The assaults. The violations. He listened. And then it occurred to me that these obvious abuses were not the things that left me feeling empty and aching.

“What hurt the most were the men who carried out their agenda while I remained invisible. They never saw me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We don’t know. Nobody teaches us.”

He didn’t get defensive. He didn’t resist blame. Instead he owned what had happened to me for all men. I kissed his lips, remnants of the spices remained. He found the rest of me. The incarnate—and the infinite.

Forgive them, for they know not what they do. I had heard those words countless times but I finally understood them. It’s ignorance more than evil that makes us commit unthinkable acts.

That night, I started to open. To find safety. For those next months before my son and I returned to the East Coast, I let this man in, but not just him. I softened and strengthened in the world. I grew less suspicious. I found more compassion for the hearts of men who have also suffered and felt unsafe.

Even though I was leaving the home where I raised my child from a boy to a man, leaving the golden light of Santa Monica for good, I was found. This man gave me experiences I had never had—the meal of Moroccan fish and the gift of finding a home inside my own skin.

~

Commentary: Wonder Woman and Alice Waters are perfectly fine role models for boys

Commentary: Wonder Woman and Alice Waters are perfectly fine role models for boys

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Wonder Woman made a comeback in the past few years — not only the movie, but the icon, the archetype. The world needs Diana Prince more than ever.

Most recently she was featured in the viral Halloween PSA “My Heroes.” We see two siblings — one male, one female. They carve pumpkins. Their parents hand them superhero costumes. They’re seen from behind trick-or-treating. The end reveals that the boy was dressed as Wonder Woman and the girl as Batman.

The PSA, co-written by Alexander Day and Brian Carufe and directed by Almog Avidan Antonir, is about acceptance, but it may also speak to role models and gender norms as much as gender identity issues. Ten years ago my son Joe was in fourth grade. At the public school he attended in Santa Monica, California, the students were given an assignment to become famous Californians. Their task was to research that person’s life, come to school dressed as them and do a presentation. Joe chose Alice Waters. 

The following year his teacher called me. Unrelated to the issue that prompted the communication, she said that his record indicated that he’s transgender. This news wouldn’t have fazed me, but since my son had never expressed gender identity issues, I was flummoxed.

When I inquired she said, “He loves musical theater, most of his friends are girls and there was the ‘Alice Waters incident.’ ” I hadn’t realized it was an incident. Given options like Richard Nixon and the fact that Joe loves cooking, his choice seemed obvious. Why can’t our role models and heroes be anyone worthy of admiration whether we share their identity or not?

Why wouldn’t the boy in the PSA pick Wonder Woman? If he wants to grow up and be Diana, great, but if he wants to grow up to be a cis male who embodies some of her superpowers like extraordinary humanity and compassion, that’d be respectable too.

Wonder Woman was born in the mind of American psychologist and writer William Moulton Marston who also invented the polygraph. It was World War II and Marston wanted to create a figure who could triumph, not with fists or firepower, but with love. His wife, Elizabeth, and their life partner Olive Byrne — the three were in a committed polyamorous relationship — suggested the figure be female. Not only would she possess extraordinary physical strength but her strength would come from empathy for humans and animals alike. It would come from honesty even if it took the lasso of truth to eek it out. And unlike the damsels in distress we’d seen before in comics who required male superheroes to free them she’d have the ability to free herself from bondage. 

It’s no wonder then that Wonder Woman’s image graced the cover of the second issue of Ms. magazine in 1972. It was time for women to free themselves. No one else could do it for us. But as someone who’s both fierce and nurturing, Diana is a role model for any person. Period. 

My son Joe grew up to be a cis straight male. It’s not something to be celebrated or frowned upon — just his particular truth. He met Alice Waters at her restaurant, Chez Panisse. She later hand-wrote him a letter saying she’d give him a job someday. He was delighted, but he’s pursuing a BFA in musical theater. And many of his closest friends are still female.

Op-Ed: Has Marie Kondo led us astray on decluttering?

Op-Ed: Has Marie Kondo led us astray on decluttering?

“I burned the letters,” my mother said.

“The letters” needed no explanation. She was referring to the two hundred pieces of mail my parents exchanged in the early years of their marriage, during the time my father was stationed at Army bases in the South and my mother was living in Astoria, N.Y.

I was staying in her house at the time, and in the 10 minutes it had taken me to do my morning meditation in another room, they were gone. Tiny bits of paper lingered under the smoldering logs, but no discernible words remained.

“All of them?” I asked.

“I saved two.”

I was devastated. I remembered the little bundles tied together with bakery string in a shoebox in the cedar closet of my childhood home.

By the time I came around my parents’ relationship was far from loving, but the shoebox and its contents were proof that it had once been different.

Inspired by the Netflix show “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo,” everyone, including my mother, is in a purging frenzy. Newspapers report that thrift shops are being floodedwith extra donations, and on social media there are posts of packed cars and piles of things that were once crucial to own.

But are we going too far?

I understand the impulse. In 2014, when Marie Kondo’s book was first published, I took on the task of going through the modest Santa Monica home and garage that I shared with my 14-year-old son. Despite being a minimalist, I still managed to fill 28 black garbage bags with unnecessary stuff. The most daunting task was tackling the papers from four decades. Bills and taxes. Letters and cards. College papers. Early drafts of essays and novels. When taken from closets and drawers, they filled my entire office. I reduced them to one filing cabinet drawer for important family documents and one small box for sentimental keepsakes. It took three weeks.

I felt lighter. Free. And this past year when I packed up that place to return to the East Coast, it made things easier. So why did I want to throw up over a lost box of letters?

The obvious answer was that I’m a writer and I treasure anything having to do with words. In my own purge, I kept my refurbished Smith Corona typewriter, my composition notebooks filled with tiny scrawl and many books.

My mother doesn’t have an attachment to words like I do. She loves stuff. In recent years, she’s become a bit of a hoarder — a very clean and organized hoarder but a hoarder nonetheless. If you lose a pair of sunglasses, don’t worry. She’s got 40 spares to choose from. And if you need a creamer, rest assured there are 17. Blank birthday cards. Zucchini spiralizers. Countless tchotchkes from yard sales and TJ Maxx. I dread the thought that someday I’ll have to deal with it all.

So, when I set up her birthday iPad and the first show she binged on was Kondo’s “Tidying Up,” I was optimistic. The next day my mother took to her closet with purpose, but eight hours later she had just three small bags to give away.

Burning those letters, though, brought my mother the same feeling of freedom I got from eliminating stuff. “I feel much better. I’m so glad to be rid of all that,” my mother said while setting the table for dinner that night. I instantly teared up, and she took me in her arms. “I’m sorry. I should have asked you first.” And then she said, “But you weren’t even born then.”

She’s right, I wasn’t born. And it hit me — that’s why they meant so much. They were love letters, heightened by separation and the Vietnam War, but without question, love letters. Two hundred pieces of tangible evidence that love did once exist between the people who gave me life. By the time I came around their relationship was far from loving, but the shoebox and its contents were proof that it had once been different.

Then I understood that my reason for wanting the letters was hers for needing to let them go. My parents’ love didn’t last. They fought for decades, then finally divorced. For my mother, it was time to let all that go.

I still endorse having less, but the tricky part about decluttering is that the very same item can mean different things to different people. Is there an obligation to ask or initiate a conversation with others who might care about something being discarded? Or is it the right of the purger to decide for themselves?

Over dinner, my mother and I shared our different perspectives: her liberation, my loss. But I started to understand that they were hers to burn. We empathized with each other. And at the end of the day, that meant more than the letters.

Michelle Fiordaliso is a writer and filmmaker based in upstate New York.