generosity

I started growing my hair out again.  I died it a few months back, because everyone else was dying their hair and I guess I was being included ?  I did it and then did it again and then again until finally I tired of the time and effort and vanity in being someone other than myself.  In other words: I missed my gray hair.  

It's different this time around, the streaks of grey are almost white along the right side of my scalp, and I can see where the dye grows lighter against the fuller grey beneath.  It feels like what I expected my hair to be like the first time around, what I was slightly disappointed to uncover last time.  

I wonder how I'll be treated differently this time, as my hair grows more grey.  I love women with white hair, people like House (Minority) Whip Katherine Clark.  It creates excitement about the future that I am happy about.  

//

I was thinking about my old boss, from the part time job that was... actually... scary with the explosive man who sat 12 inches away from me the entire 6 hour shift.  I've been thinking about the fact that this man, the other non-explosive man, was happy in his apartment, in his life he seemed to live in a way that was hidden from the women he was romantically involved with, the mothers of his children.  There was something about his lack of a house that was fascinating to me, the way he seemed to intentionally avoid this prosperity in order to keep it from people he professed to love, staying decidedly ungenerous.

I watched and listened as he explained what I saw as his pattern.  Having a child and then leaving, having a child and then leaving.  Fine, we're allowed to do that, but it was the children's presence in this equation that bothered me the most - the idea of knowing he needed to create a space for them, but only long enough to realize he needed to abandon it.  Jumping from one mother and her child to the next.  One time seems forgivable, but twice doesn't.

I remember coming up to it, as if it was a wall, face to face and feeling the weight and heft of it, maybe even the coolness; it was not something I could move.  

Did I want to move it?  Yes, honestly.  Even though I didn't want - maybe still don't want - a house, but I knew instinctively that I would need this eventually.  "This" being generosity.  Not just duty or obligation, but the generosity of comfort and space in all the forms these things take.

//  

This feels like a carryover from past relationships, this guiding sensation that things were impassable.  It's slightly surprising that I can look behind me and see that I knew what I wanted, even when I felt I didn't know what I wanted.  I think I interpreted this as a lack of negotiation, some sort of void or lack, but maybe it was a space so deeply occupied by what I wanted that I couldn't recover, fallen so far from me that it was, that this space was usually empty for other people - and that it should be empty for me too.