Invisible Ink and other recipes for faith seeking feminists

The art of making a good pie is the crust. I learned this from two sources, the 4-H county fair rulebook and Martha Stewart. Maintaining a small farm means at various times of the year there is too much of some one fruit ripening so... jams and pies. These are universally loved items in rural America for what they represent most; an abundance of sugar. JK. What goes into the pie, the filling, is freedom. JK. The middle of the pie is the baker's choice, but a good crust is scientific and also, it will let everyone know just how much love you have in your heart. If your pie can beat the competition at the county fair it probably means you listened to Martha or you have a direct line to God.

Crust comes from three main ingredients; flour, butter and ice water. Similarly, menopause also revolves around three main ingredients : friends, booze and ice water. What nobody except Martha tells you about good crust is that once the dough is prepared it needs time to get chilled in order for it to relax so it can properly stand up all the filling that gets poured into it. A solid, Snoop Dogg chillaxin. Ditto for menopausal women. But, after a two years in the home field penalty box of quasi-quarantine, all the baking, homeschooling, zooming and pondering pie crusts amplified a fun fact that disappearing is easier than relaxing but also it is less restorative. What goes up must come down because you know, gravity. I slid into that middle age pause, smack in the middle of a global pause undetected. And, now after two years of rest and contemplation (offset by panic and worry) my first response on the slingshot back to "normal" is to want more chill out time. WTAF? Oh, Martha. You must be 80 by now, you've lived through this feminist of middle earth part and and you did pretty well, aside from the prison thing. What's the frequency? How do we normals dial it in?

Whelp, turns out Martha's recipe for aging gracefully is one part marketing and two parts lies. Still, when I read or watch Martha, she speaks directly to me. She emits about more than being the purveyor of perfect crust. Her anglo-Saxon-y purr comforts my traditional feelings about faith, food and feminism. She gives me hope for some courage to start Act three of me. She photoshops the path, with filagree and flair and shows us the way of the mellow and calm. From her tenor of her voice to the ease with which her business acumen and crafty home decorating effortlessly combine to become the centerfold centerpiece she is ~ Martha is, the ultimate illustration of chill from the peak of capitalism to the valley of anti-feminism. On pie and also on people she's clear-eyed; 1. less is more 2. no need to knead anything or anyone too much. 3. trust the process. Que sera sera. Just don't "overwork" it, please. The more you knead it, the more it starts to really cure. Right? I like her in spite of the allness of her profile or her refusal to be interviewed.

I guess that in the next few weeks we're all leaving home after being on ice by this virus for 666 days since March 13, 2020, today being January 8, 2022 for those still counting. The outside world feels a little different, looks a little different. It's a little bitter sweeter from all the death and chaos. All the teenagers are 'they', our husbands are feral, and we're still not doing enough somehow. My daughter is 15 and the books she and I have read aloud together, mostly about how to be being a strong, courageous girl, just feels a bit reductive now. Hers is a time of fluidity. Freedom from all stripes are on the lips and sharpies of all her peers. Ironically, she's awash in my teenage timeperiod, the 80's, from fashion to films, drugs to disorders, Stranger Things to Wonder Woman, music to the mullets. Everything 80's has made a reprisal with 'them'. Even Martha, I'm sure, would advise testing that recipe a few more times before carting it off to the fair now that in person social life is making a comeback.

For me, somehow, something weightier, though, feels missing, and I don't think that it's the heavy stones of freedom or responsibility. At least once a week I feel a phantom itch on that missing. A gap in my feminist construction perhaps? A void that sends out vibrations at quasi feminist mile marker posts. It's as faint as a little feedback buzz that signals check engine lights on the fitbit or 'ignore time limits' for social media or shopping, usually at bedtime. Or, it comes through loud and clearly pounding like a sonic boom of rage against the patriarchy. Where some of my women friends might hear a calling to stand up and resist, fight or post, that vibration seizes me with guilt about my foggy feminism. This same frequency that exposes patriarchal unfairness nags at my sense of civic duty, the one responsible for motivating calls to Congressional offices. It implores me to do something. But, it's not always tuned all the way in, and there's enough static to miss the point. Like is this feminist thing just a branding exercise? I'm not really a writer. My husband is a writer. My daughter is a writer. I was once interviewed by Laura Ingraham and I wrote an angry letter to her afterward, but that's as close as I ever got to 'professional writing' before this. Maybe it's because we're living in bumper sticker times of alternative truths and I love a good alliteration, but, sure, definitely, this wavelength I am feeling is navigating me towards the black tent for SRL's menopausal militia training and away from a far softer, easier pharmaceutical path of tranquility intended to trick us Martha-style into the breach of a mellow menopause. What happens if someone actually reads this, then what? Not that I'm worried, this is invisible ink right?

Like many, so many of my sisters who fly on the Wonder Woman invisible airlines, I feel as though I have nothing but the truth lasso to hold onto during turbulence. There may or may not be feminist iconography on the uniforms, but the engine, like the plane itself is powered by memes. Menopause makes memory go missing. I think in the WW movie 1984 she goes back to the future or she flies to the past but she's back and forth all over the place a few times and the movie is fuzzy about the truthy rope getting tied to any one specific variant of feminism, lest it pull all of us down to Earth and past the fourth wall to all that 80's merchandise. God forbid. Since I'm a browser, ok lurker, and not a post-er I can skim along the world wide web's seas of choice on how to look, feel, think, buy or reverse engineer my body into improved womanhood without sticking to much of anything feminist let alone accidentally having one style of feminine power get stuck to me in the process. But, WONDER WOMAN? I mean c'mon. The back door for me, by focusing on disappearing, to lose the me and meme of it all, means that bouncing back and forth can stay outside of time so that what might have be gained by brandishing a feminism label as part of my identity in my 30s can stay relegated to theory in my 50s. If an IRL situations calls for the disclosure of calling myself a ___feminist, any label can serve itself upon me like a subpoena and force me to suddenly find courage enough to declare it, temporarily. But, then will I be able to still use that label as a shield? Hmmmm. Does joining one of the modern temporal movements and becoming a ___ feminist mean I can use it as a cover up or a defense against or a catch all to impress upon or explain about? Will this f-talisman promise to aid or enhance my Self? Or, just the humans who come in close contact with it through me? Is my fearful feminist morass welding itself into a feminist label of its own making that will merge with my own current brand of disappearing and beget yet a new superwoman? And, how will all that fit on a flag to warn off those who would seek to tread on my womanhood? I wonder.

When I was little, just a little kitty, the word "woman" was almost like a swear word to me. I don't remember why, I just remember that "lady" was the preferred noun to define the grown up version of people like my Mom. One day that dirty noun would be used to describe Me2. Fate acquiescent. For now, whatev(s) the reason(s), the need to fly a flag does in fact persist. It persists at my lady parts telling me "you're not a real lady... yet". Being a grown up is for the future, a time when you're ready to be done, cooked, crusty. When you hit that place where you can walk through the room without being noticed, I think you're no longer a lady then, you're a woman. Diminishing pheromones be damned, walking through phases of ~ 'nosce te ipsum' ... needs not to turn heads. Like so many of my 80's ladies friends, we of the 'have it all', we the very tired, we the now middle aged ladies are expected to know thyself AND allow for the feminist principles of the moment to execute a hostile takeover in order to remain 'strong'! That's a pre-bra-burning sentiment. Yet, we are goaded into staying angry at every opportunity, then promptly vilified for it. Circularity.

Invisibility just feels nicer and not necessarily less courageous but personal like a very small club should be. I've seen how it comes in handy, for example, if there were say, pre-digital memories from or around 'college years' that got triggered in, let's say, a Supreme Court Justice hearing. Just, as an example. If I were watching something like that from a safe invisible distance, would I see that tsunami climb out of its depth and crash over millions of us? Yes, I would. Would I witness how the pain destroys more like a mudslide than a wave? Could I see how injustice moves slowly and even more ruinous the second, third, or hundredth time around the collective memory hole? I would. Should that make me angry. It should. If I could build an invisible bridge and invite the other small disappeared club members and hold all their hands and walk across the fields of that scorching molten lava far, far below us, never looking down until we simply just floated ever skyward into the light seamlessly merging with silence. I would find that even ladies who are not even in the survivor club can still relate honestly to that certain specific trauma inspired brand of feminism. But, probably, like I keep inferring, since I'm cowardly and more worried about what O.P.P. (other people's perceptions), like my parents, think than what current actions are actually required, well, then, this isn't the translation of feminist power I'm seeking to weaponize either. Outside of my close sisterhood of disclosures I'd find that it's not the outloud kind of feminist tag for me. I've already established I have not a clue where to look, my personal trauma isn't the missing ache. It is not an erasure or a denial. It's more like the smudge on the paper when the pencil eraser is down to the nub and rubs a hole right through the paper and then you never get back to that dream you wrote down that one time when it was just right. Not missing out, missing... also.

Searching for the missing is a sort of noble endeavor though isn't it? The desire to locate and pin myself to bridges is one metaphorical way to fight off an inevitable deterioration of the shiny struts into rusty rails. It's an infrastructure thing. For those of us living inside our own decomposing material, it's tough to look at the cracks and not see danger that surely something like being a feminist could fix. To be a 50+ lady is to witness up close and personal all of the hazard signs blinking inside all this early software engineering, especially in the foundations laid by the 80's, that is some shady brickwork. The built in obsolescence disguised as sadness was a core feature set to the middle age feminine human for the Gen X babies. Things break. Updates are late or incompatible. I think I'm looking for a feminism that will help me to cross that most awful divide of judgement. The great mask war of Covid times has pointed out how assuming the worst in others brings out the worst in myself. I see it.

My arrival here to this place, living it up in the thin hard to breathe filtered air of the two thousand twenties, living through my fifties where nosce te ipsum is no longer a thing because we have facebook. There are no directions, no keys and the doors are all locked from the inside. Menopause is an escape-room that's configured on metabolism, alcohol and other people's perceptions and facts like death by low blood sodium are on my radar. Only Pamela Alden knows the combination to the decayed tumbler lock of menopause and she's in the off season RN so I make due with the reruns for salinity. I've started my daughter on the downslide lessons early by watching Better Things with her slowly and often. Thank you Sam Fox, she will be prepared, damnit, she will be prepared.

I've not pinpointed the phenomena that describes my middle age disappearing in the any of the self help books or the human condition improvement apps downloaded so far, but the movies do it well. You'll recognize it being expressed by such salient piranhas as Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, or Julienne Moore (simultaneously at once in this testimonial). I'm not preternaturally drawn to darkness or suicide per se but disappearing in a splendored symphony of knowing is alluring AF. We know. We see right through it. In the Plato inspired version of the Martha-meno-neo- lexicon of virtuous, racial, spiritual, and ideological fluidity, my mid-life personal bio-marker of meno-pause might've been called "me time" if I had employed better writers early on. Also, had we all done more better, sooner and not skidded into self-imposed a climate apocalypse and viral endemic at the same time, this could've been a good time for a third act by a whole lotta women my age. And yet, the feels generally according to millions of us is that we are being remaindered in a sort of stasis; physically, mentally and financially without a manifesto.

I do want a feminism for all, for everybody. You are gone far too soon from us Ms. Hooks, may you be in peace and love forever. Maybe it's just me but the totems scroll by hyper fast and flat, like a desperate last chance at disguise or an embrace depending on the music. While my biggest worry with trying my hand at writing is that I might appropriate that which does not belong to me is a solid anxiety that works well as a salve or a warning, like stinging nettles. I still really like being in the kitchen trying to make a decent crust. I will start slow and test my theories scientifically with a pinch of faith. Maybe, an emoji, something not too un-p.c. Something just f-enough to be casually dropped into to women's empowerment group texts as my personal A/B/F test.

Onward. I will search for a promotion on feminism that offers free shipping. Here I am dedicating 2022 to find the especially well built bridges made by the hearts and hands of women who actually do mind the gaps. I join them and if I can't seem to write something salient, I'm going to keep it strictly personal. After all it's only invisible ink. I'm ready to jump onto any sleeper cells that breaks away from the main rink and just hang on as the rage and passion rips right through this menosphere without a logo. Let's go.

La la lalala La la. Lala. The more I suffer, the more it shows I really care. Right? Yeah yeah yeah.