One reads Salon.com and wonders if there is some sort of dial-up agency where you call to find post-millennial, postmodern, Marxist, Middle-aged Sob Sisters? Women who like to vent their spleens about their latest intestinal eruptions. Salon has a plethora of them like Susan Shapiro and the ever-tedious Amanda Marcotte. Today’s eye roller comes from Melissa Giberson with her essay, “Am I Gay”? I won’t make you read the article and I’ll try to make this fun. I promise.

It used to be that middle-aged men got bored with themselves and dropped out, bought an expensive sports car and/or found themselves a young, hottie. By looking in the eyes of their nubile girlfriends, they avoided looking in the mirror and seeing their own gray hair and soft middles. The receding hairline, ponytail guys got me. There seemed to be a metric ton of these guys in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Greenwich, New Canaan, Darien and Westport were their main haunts. They didn’t know what they had and threw their lives away with both hands. No creativity, no introspection and no perspective. Worse, no anchor or main truth in their lives. Sad.

The battle whine of today’s feminists is “It’s not fair that only men should get to suffer!”. The feminists want to claim a portion of mid-life crisis too. Look, we know that no one is perfectly happy all the time. Well…honest people are not happy all the time. When we have a bad day, week or four-year Presidential term, we should pray or meditate. We should help others. Sometimes, the smallest things really help. I was having a pout the other day. I remembered one of my neighbors talking about missing snapping beans with her Mother and she wanted to snap some with her daughter. I picked about a pound and a half of pole bean and took them over to her. That made me happy. I never wondered if I was Gay. Which brings us to Melissa, our unhappy author of the “Am I Gay” article. Her opening:

It was in the locker room of the gym when I saw the woman, standing with her back to me applying lotion to her legs. She was naked. I was mesmerized. With the quickness of a snap, the hold on me released and the question emerged from the fog, “Am I gay?”
I was 44 and the proverbial chalkboard of my life boasted many checkmarks: college—check; marry a nice man—check; house in the suburbs—check; career—check; kids—check and check. Throw in a couple of cats and a yearly beach vacation and my blackboard was worthy of the A-plusses Ralphie imagined on his Christmas theme paper in the 1983 movie “A Christmas Story.” Just as his fantasy disintegrated by seeing the big red C along with the comment, “You’ll shoot your eye out,” so was my blackboard erased as I entered liminality when I leaped into the unknowing in search of an answer to the question.

This is such a sad life. The “proverbial chalkboard of my life boasted many checkmarks” is pitiful. Her checkmarks “college—check; marry a nice man—check; house in the suburbs—check; career—check; kids—check and check. Throw in a couple of cats and a yearly beach vacation.” Her life bores me. I’ve done all of that except the cats. We’re all allergic. But, that description is vile. Thinking of marriage and children as chores to be done and checked off. Oof. Can you imagine being that self-absorbed? Here are more clues:

Having realized the life I wanted—husband, kids, career—I couldn’t imagine another one. Yet the nagging sensation that something was missing lingered. Steeped in the life that growing up in the 1970s and ’80s prepared me for, any unrest I felt throughout my 19-year marriage led to searching outside of myself—returning to school, immersing myself in motherhood, boosting my career, and diving into my inherited faith. Each new program enrollment and Gymboree class held a promise to ease my restlessness.

Doesn’t Melissa sound like a dancer who learned the steps but never the dance? Her “searching outside of myself—returning to school, immersing myself in motherhood, boosting my career, and diving into my inherited faith. Each new program enrollment and Gymboree class held a promise to ease my restlessness” were all movements without meaning or depth. She was bored and probably boring to be around. So just chuck off that heteronormativity.

What followed that question I asked myself in the locker room was a journey inward. And while the catalyst for my self-refection was a woman, turning in is common in midlife, a time during which women desire to reinvent themselves.
A later-in-life sexual awakening is likened to a second adolescence. Indeed, crossing the threshold to a new orientation awakened feelings from my deepest recesses. Once I tasted that exhilaration, all I wanted is the freedom for more.
The countless women I met along my journey as a late bloomer offered unique stories of the circuitous path they traveled before arriving at their redefined sexual orientation, along with a redrawn roadmap for their life’s second half. Some women knew they had same-sex attractions but suppressed them for fear of the messages they had heard, like, “You’ll burn in hell.” Some were subjected to exorcisms. They rightfully feared being disowned by their families and shunned by their communities and bristled with the homophobia that was deposited within them from an early age. Some remained solidly single while others did what was expected of them—married a man and had kids.

Melissa even makes being OUT sound boring. She’s like receding hairline, ponytail guy driving a new sportscar. It’ll feel good for now, but one that old empty feeling will come back. The boring is in you. It’s not just about the steps, it’s about the whole dance. Or the “integrity” like Jordan Peterson says:

Integrity in your relationships means that you just don’t dance on top of the steps. Or, if a neighbor needs pole beans, you pick some pole beans. Integrity.

Featured Image: Juanky Pamies Alcubilla/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons