Women are like hairbands
Elastic until they break
I received a call from a metaphorically close, but geographically distant girlfriend who is starring down the barrel of a second traumatic breakup. The first heartbreak was senior year when the boyman she dated our entire collegiate career decided to simply not show for our final sorority formal. Cue Enya’s Only Time. This second one-two punch occurs many years and many boyfriends later, but on a much more serious playing field; that of canceled of engagements and dashed wedding plans.
“At least they didn’t put down a deposit,” my mom tittered from her end of the line, 500 miles and two emotional leap years away.
That’s not the point. Money (or lackthereof) offers little compensation for the broken promise of domestic bliss and fertilized eggs.
All the typical advice I’d offer — oscillating wildly between “you are a strong, independent women who don’t need no man!” then again “eat some ice cream and get back out there” — fell flat against the pavement of emotions that transcends sadness; hopelessness.
“Is something wrong with me? Please, you have to tell me,” my friend sobbed whispered into the phone. Collateral heartbreak, I felt my own tears squeezing down my face like some macabre clown. There is only so much reassurance, so much metaphorical saddle-getting-into that we can eek out as a friend who is happy to a friend who is suffering. I’ve never had a wedding canceled on me, who am I to dole out advice? I rummage through my mental Rolodex of cliches and “atleast”isms I could muster — something about fishes in the sea, starving children in Africa, cancer, you probably dodged a bullet — but if someone said any one of those things to me, I’d drink a bottle of wine and punch a wall.
“I don’t know if I can keep going. I feel like I’m going to snap.”
This obviously leads me to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, arguably the greatest movie adaptation of all time. The scene where Bilbo wistfully thinks of toast and confesses, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
Women are like hairbands, elastic until they break. Much like spider silk has incomprehensible flexibility, the muscles of the vagina are the stuff of war-legends. They stretch and bend and tear to accommodate things going in and out. Which other part of the human body can hold in a tampon and also expel a watermelon? In a similar but less graphic vein, (stay with me here) the female heart expands and contracts to the rhythm of hope and hopelessness. First boyfriend UP, first breakup DOWN, marriage UP UP, divorce DOWN DOWN, miraculously birth of a child UP UP UP, child that promises to run away and never come back and actually does DOWN DOWN DOWN. Yet all through the millennia, the woman suffers but returns. She is defeated, yet she remains. Something something yet she persisted.
But what if she doesn’t? What if she just folds in and gives up? What if she becomes a shell of a person, someone that I call regularly but whose silence and aloofness drives a wedge of hot metal between us? So my weekly phone calls turn into weekly texts, turn into monthly check-ins, turn into I’ll call her later and later ends up being next February? Because I just can’t handle the sadness by proxy and I have a life to live too, you know! Because my baby is colicky and my grandma has cancer and that’s the real heartbreak, not some dipwad that had cold feet months and months before a wedding, and was it actually a formal formal engagement? Like, who did you tell? Because I don’t remember a social media rampage. Did you take photos in a park with a blanket and champagne flutes? No? Ok, well I just got a letter from the IRS that said I may or may not be audited and I swear I never trusted Turbo Tax in the first place so I’m going to have to table this theoretical conversation for later.
The hairband that sits on my bathroom counter is on the cusp of meeting its fate. Some people prefer telephone-cord hair holders that lay limply in a knot at the back of your head, but I prefer the type that actually holds my hair in place, even at the cost of a few lumps and cricks. They start so strong, thick enough to leave welts on my wrist where they wait in anticipation. The first week my hair is perky and tight, through work and workouts and road trips to the beach. Salt and sweat and buns take their toll, slowly expanding its comfortable reach. Where once two loops would do I must now use three. Finally, the fabric starts to tear and I peak the pale rubber soul, exposed like subcutaneous fat under a wound. Sometimes, I don’t even wait for it to snap before I throw it into the garbage. Because, unlike my sad friend with her weary heart, I have at least 100 more.
