Game On

It was the kind of Saturday I would generally spend at the beach: sunny, mid 80’s, clear blue skies.  Perfect.

Instead, I was wearing camouflage, driving a car full of teenagers, listening to Tenacious D and heading for a paintball facility an hour north of any place where the surf laps at the sand.

Yep.

Paintball.

Me.

Ms. Peace-Love-Harmony-and-Kate Spade.

This was a deal I’d been suckered into by The Sibs.  I’m the oldest of seven kids.  Five of us are “adults.”  We’ve got spouses and kids.  We’re a wild, crazy, diverse bunch, and we’ve been known to undertake a wild, crazy and diverse assortment of activities.

The paintball outing had been suggested by the brother-in-law we affectionately call Dodo.  (His real name is Dylan.  And yes, now you know something about how affection works in my family.)  My son - a/k/a The Boy - leaves for college next month, and Dylan suggested a paintball outing might be a fun activity for a few of the guys and The Boy before his departure.  My sisters and I bristled at the implicit exclusion of us females.  After all, this was an opportunity to purchase cute camo outfits and strike Charlie’s Angels poses, no?  We were IN!

We arrived at P&L Paintball ready to roll.  Dylan had made a special tee shirt for The Boy: neon yellow with a red bullseye on both the front and back.  The Boy good-naturedly put it on.  We paid the fee, claimed massive boxes of paintballs, and headed out to the field where we’d collect our weapons and helmets.

This was when it became clear we were in over our heads.

The place was massive.  Acres of sprawling fields and woods full of elaborate gaming areas lay before us.  There was a Wild West-style ghost town, a dystopian arrangement of towers and satellite dishes and even the remnants of an airplane, a stark field full of paint splattered cable spools.

And then there were the people.  For starters, there were so damn many of them!  Far more paintball enthusiasts than I ever would have imagined existed in one small corner of Massachusetts.  And holy crap, the gear they had!  Fancy camouflage suits and vests. Helmets with skulls on them.  Shiny, space-age-looking paintball guns.  They had teams and strategies.  One guy was roughly the size of Andre the Giant.  He was dressed in full camouflage and combat boots and looked as though he took it all very, very seriously.

We hadn’t even started the game, and we’d accomplished the family-bonding mission.  We all moved closer to one another.

"I think we made a mistake," one of my sisters-in-law said.

I nodded.

"What did they say the fee was for us to play as our own group?" I asked quietly.  "You know - where they keep us away from the, um…general population?  I’ll pay the fee."

"Don’t be a wuss," my brother Mo said.

No one calls me a wuss.

And so it was game on.

The first game was played in the dystopian landscape.  I quickly realized I had nothing to fear where paintball hits were concerned.  Wearing long sleeves, pants, and a helmet - all while toting a surprisingly heavy paintball gun and running in the blazing sun from the cover of one shelter to the next  - I was sweating so profusely you’d have thought I’d jumped in a swimming pool.  Clearly I was going to pass out before anyone shot me.

And then I was hit.

When you’re loading paintballs into a gun, they look kind of cute and fun, sort of like squishy little marbles.  They’re deceptive.  Let me tell you: those little fuckers sting.

The first one hit me on my right wrist.  While I was shaking my arm and cursing, completely oblivious to the game, I took a paintball to the ribs.

"Get down," someone said firmly, and I obediently dropped behind a barricade just as a barrage of paintball fire hit.

I looked over.  It was the Giant.

My hero.

From there on out, I tried to stick with him.  If nothing else, I figured he made a great human shield.

In time, though, I realized I was having fun.  I liked the challenge of trying to advance on the course, running and diving instead of hiding at the back of the pack.  The paintballs didn’t seem to sting quite so much after the first few hits (though the welts I’d have later would tell a different story).

In our final game, I was huddled behind a cable spool, trying to figure out if I could make it safely to the next shelter.

"Excuse me, ma’am?" a voice said.  It was one of the team-and-strategy guys who’d impressed me all afternoon.  "There’s only one shooter in the tower now.  If you want to advance, I’ve got you covered."

I DID want to advance!  And how about that?  A hardcore paintball guy had me covered!  They were letting me play their reindeer games!

I ran, dove for cover.

When it was game over, my family and I all chatted away with the folks around us as we shed our gear, took pictures, showed off battle scars.  I was sweaty, filthy and sore.

I was also asking the Giant where I could get a paintball gun and vest like his.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

My naive pre-paintball selfie…

AFTER the fun and games...

With The Boy and his tee.  Guess who took the least hits of anyone in our group?

Good Girls, Bad Girls, and the F-Word

If you’ve read my novel Fifty Ways to Leave Your Husband, you know that (1) there’s a fair amount of sex in it (it’s not for nothing that my mother refers to it as “Karen’s sex book”), and (2) the sidekick steals the show.  Tamara is the BFF we all want: fun, vivacious, loyal, nuttier than squirrel shit, and with a MOUTH.  She drops F-bombs like Margaret Cho on speed.

Tamara brings to mind one of my favorite freedoms:

Freedom of the sort of expression that would have earned you a bar of soap in the mouth as a kid.

Confession time: I love to say, “Fuck.”  I think, properly used, it’s one of the very best words in the English language.  And I use it - properly, of course - quite a bit.

To be clear, I’m not tossing the F-word around during work hours or in the presence of small children.  I don’t break it out at cocktail parties or Christmas dinner.  Everything has its place.  I get it.

I also get that I’m maybe not quite the sort of girl you’d expect to be so fond of the F-word.  Take a look at my promo pics.  I look like a Good Girl, don’t I?  

But here and now, I’d like to divest myself of the Good Girl label.  I’d like to do what my protagonist Eve does and ditch the Good Girl suit of armor - and all the heavy fucking baggage that comes with it.

I’d like you to do the same.

Because here’s the thing…

Being a Good Girl has no real value.  In fact, I think the label does a whole lot of harm.  Because if there are Good Girls, there are Bad Girls, too.  And heaven knows, we’ve got a whole slew of words for that kind of girl.

A couple of days ago I was reading a great article by Melissa Gira Grant entitled, There Is No Such Thing as a Slut.  “Sluts take up more space in our imagination than in anyone’s bed,” she writes.  More fully to the point, she illustrates the ways sluttiness is a myth - a “form of sexual privilege” - and perhaps worst of all, the way we women use the term/concept to leverage our power against one another, all the while foolishly undermining our own goals.

Someone like me, for example - white, middle class, able to determine on the basis of a lifetime of social schooling how to dress and when to bite one’s tongue - might come across as a Good Girl, while someone from a lower-class background or an unestablished ethnic minority might lack the social grooming to dress and speak so as to avoid unwanted labels.  Yet there may be absolutely no correlation between our public presentation and our sexual promiscuity.

In fact, statistics indicate otherwise.  Statistically, Good Girls know they can get away with more - and therefore, they do.

(I’ve got you all thinking naughty thoughts about me now, haven’t I?  Oh, go on…)

In the fictional world of my novel, Eve appears to be the Good Girl, while Tamara seems the foul-mouthed hussy.  But when one examines the situation more fully - (spoiler alert!) - Eve is out on the beach fucking a stranger while Tamara is home with her husband and kids - we get a better picture of how irrelevant labels truly are.

In my recent body-issues post, The Size of It, I suggested that we women could literally change the world for our daughters and granddaughters if we just were more careful about how we speak about our self-image.

I think the same is true here.    

My favorite blogs, books, films and Netflix fare celebrate and explore female experience with humor, an unflinching eye, and often a foul, foul tongue.  These writers and artists are not your stereotypical Good Girls.

They’re much better than that.  

That said, join me in bidding farewell to those polarizing, useless myths: the Slut and the Good Girl.  I’ll leave you with a few fun links from ladies who kick ass, talk and write sex, and yes, drop the occasional F-bomb.

I fucking love them.

Aussa Lorens redefines talking dirty in bed.

Shannon Bradley-Colleary talks about hot married sex (no, it’s not an oxymoron…or a misprint).

And Wanda Sykes’ Detachable Pussy routine remains my very favorite, funny-as-hell way to unload all that female baggage.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

The Unicorn at the Dog Beach

He was tall, pale, and soft around the middle in that endearing way that forty-something married-with-children men tend to be.

He was wearing the very same swim trunks as every other father of small kids there at the beach - the ones stocked by Marshall’s within easy reach of wives headed to the checkout.

He’d expertly wheeled a cart loaded tidily with L.L. Bean bags and sand toys and umbrellas and chairs, staked out his patch of beach, and begun to unpack.  Then he stopped, dropped everything, and chased after his small son - a boy of about 3 or 4 years old, I’d guess.

"Hey, buddy," he said, corralling the kid under the umbrella.  "Gotta get sunscreen on first, right?"

He slathered the boy with sunscreen, then secured a hat on his little blonde head.  He sent him off with a playful pat on the tush.

"Why don’t you take that shovel and start on our castle," he suggested.  "I’ll be over to help in a minute."

Ladies, he had my attention.

And apparently I wasn’t subtle about it, because - to my horror - he addressed me.

"Oh, I’m so sorry," he said.  "We didn’t mean to disturb you.  We’ll try to keep it down."

Yup.  Courteous, too.

I waved off his apology and stuck my nose into a book.

I couldn’t help but keep my antennae tuned in to the activity at the beach blanket next to mine, though.  This guy set up camp like a pro.  He pitched in on sand castle construction helpfully.  He addressed his son with nonchalance and respect as a variety of issues arose.

"No, no - you shouldn’t put that in your nose."

"Well, if you really need to poop, we’ll go to the potty.  Only doggies can go on the beach."

"Sure we can have lunch.  Let’s just go wash our hands first, okay, buddy?"

This was something I had missed out on as a single mother.  This variety of man amazed me by his mere existence.  And I knew from my girlfriends who were married with small children that they were all too rare.  Far too many fathers out there failed to notice objects going into little noses until emergency room extraction was required.  They thought all the world was a bathroom.  And washing hands before eating?  Good luck getting the dads to do it, never mind their offspring.

This guy was a FIND.

And clearly, I was staring.

As he settled his son into a beach chair and carefully unwrapped the little guy’s sandwich, he struck up a conversation with me.  He was probably trying to ascertain that I wasn’t a loony about to steal his small child or boil his rabbit, but whatever.  It was a nice conversation.  I learned that his wife was home with their 3-week old baby, which only endeared the guy to me more.  He understood that his wife needed a break!  That she needed time alone with her new baby!  

Then he told me his mother had come to help.

Aha!  I’d discovered it!  His fatal flaw!  His poor wife was stuck home with the mother-in-law.  She was probably wishing for a natural disaster to put an end to her “help.”

"Will she stay long?" I asked sweetly.

"Oh no," Perfect Dad said emphatically.  "My mother doesn’t like to impose.  She’ll just do some laundry, look after the baby a bit so my wife can take a nap, and then head home."

A MIL who didn’t want to impose?  Dear lord, even she was perfect.

"Well," I said wistfully.  "I’ll let you get back to your beach time with your son.  Congratulations."

And then, as father and son sat nibbling apples, their profiles and mannerisms so similar I nearly laughed, I went back to my book.

With - truly - a little bit of a crush.  And the sense that I’d seen something not unlike a unicorn.

The Size of It

It was like one of those nightmares where you wake up naked in public, only worse.

Because it was real.

I was in a department store fitting room.

Trying on swimsuits.

The first thought that came to me was the same one I have every time I enter a fitting room. What the hell is up with the fluorescent lighting?  Don’t they realize women would buy far more if they weren’t looking at themselves in the least-flattering light possible?  Why has no one in marketing figured out that soft lighting - and heck, maybe a drink or two - would make sales of women’s clothing (especially swim suits) positively soar?

Sadly, it was in the absence of such a marketing epiphany or kindness to shoppers that I found myself trying on tiny swaths of Spandex in a brightly-lit cubicle.  There was something called a “Miracle Suit,” which I decided was because it’s a miracle if you can breathe while wearing it.  There was a sports suit that gave me an alarming case of monoboob.  There were a half-dozen tankinis, each of which fit on either the bottom or the top, but never all over.

As I agonized over the way the latest suit failed to conceal my squishy middle, I heard a voice from the other side of the door, a fellow shopper in distress at the communal 3-way mirrors.

"I can’t possibly go out in this!" she cried.  "I’m so fat.  Look at these rolls!”

I admit it.  I left the safety of my fitting room and ventured out, pretending to want a look in the 3-way mirrors.  What I really wanted was to commiserate with this other poor soul, to have a laugh or two about how swimsuits are just not kind to women’s bodies.

What I found at the mirrors stopped me in my tracks.  A pretty girl of about 15 or 16, slim by anyone’s definition, grabbing at her middle and scowling at her reflection.  I was afraid she was going to remove skin, pulling on herself that way.  The “rolls” she spoke of were nonexistent.

I wanted to go over and tell her she’s beautiful just as she is.  I wanted to lift my tankini top and show her what rolls really look like.  Luckily, my brain kicked in and I realized pushing my bare flesh and compliments at a minor in a dressing room would likely end in arrest.  I slunk back to my fitting room.

But the incident stayed with me.  We females are so damn critical of our bodies.  Sure, we’re taught to be that way.  There’s no escaping the messages in society that tell us thin is better, sexy trumps smart.  But the bottom line is that we have to start being better to ourselves.  We have to stop beating ourselves up.

I was bulimic in my late teens and early twenties.  I have too many friends and relatives who have suffered from eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, and other body issues.  A very dear young friend of mine nearly lost her battle with anorexia, but has worked tirelessly to get well.

Ladies, we can end this bullshit one thought and one word at a time.

As you may know from earlier posts, I love being outdoors and active.  I “tortoise along” in road races and sprint triathlons.  One thing I’ve noticed at every race I’ve ever participated in is the wide variety of female body types competing.  I’ve seen every shape, size and age imaginable cross the finish line.  And you know what?  You truly cannot judge these books by their covers.  I’ve been left in the dust by women twice my size.

Which got me thinking: what if we measured our bodies not by how they compare to some airbrushed ideal, but by how much they do for us?  What if we thanked our bodies for the children they’ve carried, the miles they’ve run, the work they’ve accomplished?

What if we also made it our mission as women to support each other, no matter what?  At times, I’ve been called, “Skinny Minnie,” told I had no right to complain about body issues.  The intention may have been good, but I still felt the sting of judgment.  And that’s the sting that leads to trouble, no matter what the size tag on your jeans may say.

What if we made sure our daughters and granddaughters never heard us judge ourselves or one another on the basis of something as foolish and variable as our physical body?

Yeah, I’ve got a squishy middle.  I could change that.  More salads, less chardonnay.  More planks and push-ups, less hours at the computer.  More long runs, less time with toes in the sand and a beer in hand.

Or I could just find a swimsuit that gives my squishy middle a little more breathing room.

Which I did.

Via online order.

It looks great in the gentle, natural light at home.

And when I’m at the beach or on my SUP board?

I’m having too much damn fun to care what I look like.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

Want to feel better about your body right now?  Check out the Love Your Body Now Project.

And for a fun little reminder about the most important things you can apply before leaving the house, watch this awesome video.

{And PLEASE - if you are suffering from an eating disorder or body issues that are greatly affecting your life, seek professional help.  It works.  Your happiness is worth it!}

Independence Day

We humans are funny about our independence.

Take a look around you right now, and you’ll realize we’re willing to accept a whole lot of baloney, just so long as we feel some sense - even an illusion - of control.  We in the United States have the right to speak freely, to vote, to choose between Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts.  This makes us happy - or content at the very least.  We grouse about this or that, but for the most part we keep our noses to the grindstone.  We ignore some glaring problems in our society.  We show up for our jobs, pay our bills, wash the car, walk the dog, coach the baseball team.

We are good.

But then, every so often, something shifts.  ‘Good’ becomes less of a priority.  We want better.

In 1775, there was no United States.  There was a little grouping of disparate colonies at the end of their proverbial rope with British rule.  No taxation without representation.  This tagline became a battle cry by July 4, 1776, and thirteen pathetic colonies took on the mighty Great Britain.

And won.

The intricacies of why and how have been explored in far too many volumes to compress into a blog post.  I won’t get into it here.  I’m a chick lit writer, not an historian.  But consider the bottom line: an underdog, feeling wronged, sought independence.

And won.

Pretty cool.  Worthy of celebration.  We in the USA celebrate July 4th now with barbecues and fireworks and an overabundance of red, white and blue.  We have parades and parties.  A day or two out of work and on the beach.

For the past ten years, I’ve spent Independence Day in Snug Harbor, a quaint little community that does its July Fourth celebration up big.  There’s a parade with everything from a plethora of town fire trucks to classic cars, a drill brigade wielding fishing poles, and homemade floats towed by golf carts and pickup trucks.

I started small, inviting a couple of friends over to join the festivities with me and my son at our little apartment by the sea.  Years later, when I married and had my own home in the area, the party grew.  My husband and I entertained an ever-expanding group of guests, and over time, the festivities took on a life of their own.  Most guests were awesome.  Some were not.  Some arrived days earlier than invited.  Others stayed far longer than we’d have liked.  There were too many dogs and kids and hungover adults for our small home, too much “togetherness” in the summer heat. The holiday that had been a fond tradition for me and my husband became a great big chore.  

You know, of course, what I began to crave…

Independence.

Freedom from the tyranny of being the hostess with the mostess, the Snug Harbor Martha Stewart.

I was living in Starbucks when what I really wanted was Dunkin.

I had the taxation, but no representation.

(Yeah, yeah.  Too far with the metaphor there?)

This year, I will pass the Fourth of July with so little fanfare I might not know it’s happening.  I’ve chosen to retreat to a writer’s space where I (with my loyal parti poodle writing assistant) will be the only resident for several days.  Right now I have the sense that spending time in solitude, reading and writing and breathing, is what I need.

It’s born of necessity, but it’s also a luxury, the freedom I have to choose this time and space for myself.  A luxury that, in many ways beyond the fact of a long weekend holiday, began in 1776, when our forefathers decided they just didn’t want to take Great Britain’s shit anymore.

None of us should take shit, from Great Britain or anyone else.

Truly, I will miss Snug Harbor’s Fourth of July celebration this year.  I’ll miss my friends.  I hope to come back to it next year, renewed and with a fresh approach, if only because there are few occasions that so perfectly fuse patriotism with excessive drinking and use of Super-Soakers, water balloons, and fireworks.

But for now, I welcome the change of scenery, the chance to look after myself, the opportunity to create and make progress on the path to something better.

I welcome Independence.

www.kcwilder50ways.com