What do we become?

This morning, I woke at twenty to six, shut off the a/c, padded downstairs. I unrolled my Yoga mat for the first day of my mid-year-resolution: Yoga at least 4 mornings a week. 45 minutes of Yoga later, I put on the coffee and went out for the Sunday paper, which I signed up for at the supermarket because of the $20 gift card they offered. I unloaded the dishwasher and had coffee and the paper on the porch while the air was still wet, before the sun had her way with all of us.

Little Pearl came downstairs at around 7:30. She got her juice and her freggie and began her day with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory A la Mr. Burton.

I put in some laundry, wrote some lists and planned the menu for tomorrow evening when my sister, Ellen and her new boyfriend, John will join us for Dinner. Then I remembered the Challah I bought the other day and made some french toast for our breakfast. Pearl still preferred a hot dog or Dog!, though she fed her toast to the air and the couch.

We saw Kung Fu Panda. It was great.

The point of this minutae is that I am really happy with this day. 8 hours later, I'm really still energized from my Yoga with Shiva Rae, and I'm looking forward to dinner at my parents' house.

A friend just told me on the phone about his, er, encounter with a young lass on a Porche 911 in an alley in our Fair Nation's Capitol. A few months ago, I think the tale would have made me rather jealous and nostalgic for my own days of steamy encounters. Today, though, his story made me worried and glad that I no longer have those worries.

I've been giving myself space and permission to really hate men lately. To really bad-mouth them like my angry-bra-burning-super-political sisters and mothers of yore did. I have been angry in a way I never wanted to be, in a way that would have disgusted me because of the ways in which "feminism" seems to fail to notice or accept responsibility for the way it has affected (ahem, confused) men. I am still disgusted, but I am healing. It is easy to be angry at men because I work with a lot of them. It is also easy to pity them. And it is easier than it has ever been to fancy myself in a domestic relationship (with a man) wherein I accept the "female" role. It is easier to get peace with the hate when I indulge it. It is easier to see ways around it, to imagine the possibility that not all men are ridiculous swine.

I hope this process seems obvious to some of you. I hope that more of you have never felt the need to hate men, though they are loathesome creatures on a great many levels. I imagine some men feel the very same way about women, and with good cause. But they are not allowed to express it. If they do, they are suspected of the desire to beat women or to rape them, and these are unspeakable things.

I used to romanticize unhappiness, depression, self-hate. I have always been able to barrel through those periods of my lfe, but lately I have been seeing fewer of them.

So what do we become? Are yoga and a slow morning the answer to all of my problems of adulthood? Of identity? Where does this peace for today come from? I have become, in a short almost-four-years just about EVERYTHING I never wanted to be. A mother, a (looks like) permanent resident of South Central Pennsylvania, sentimental--openly and sloppily, a junior spinster, a man-hating feminist, a car-salesperson, a manager, celibate, complacent, a fan of chick flicks, fat and happy.

I suppose the good news is that I have not actually become my mother. Yet.