I don’t understand why we have to wash our hands after we use the bathroom. I have been using the bathroom for quite a while now and I hardly ever pee on my own hand. It is one of the many social norms that I just don’t get….personally I think that hand washing should happen directly after hand shaking, I have no idea where your hand has been…what smorgasbord of ickyness you may have dragged your fingers through…. Hand shaking is a disgusting way to greet someone in my opinion, It’s like saying, ” Hi nice to see you, mind if I wipe the dirt of my day off in the palm of your hand” course I like touching so much I’m not gonna turn down a filthy handshake… I just prefer we go straight to the shoulder rub for our greetings.  The stranger to shoulder rub greeting is not a social norm….not yet..but I am working on it.

    High heeled shoes and clean shaven armpits, the expectation that we not nap at the table or cry at the grocery store are collective expectations of our communities.  I think about them a lot. You need to fit into these sizes, be small enough to fit into this chair, one shoulder dresses are popular this season and therefore an attractive look…. I think about what our society believes, and question if I believe the same things…or am I blindly going along for the ride.  I think one shoulder dresses look like attempted rape dresses, like you just escaped having your dress torn off,  they confuse me, is this a toga party? But then I don’t write for Vogue, I am not in charge of what our society believes is attractive…not yet..also,working on it.

In my Junior High school yearbook, Bobby Philips wrote  “You’re cool , I guess, because you don’t care what people think about you” I revisit that sentence often (  ” I Guess “? Whatever Bobby..,you know I was totally cool ) …also it is not really true, I do care what people think..a lot.  And I have always wanted to feel like I fit in, just not enough to change my behaviors…My choice of dress in Junior High (hobo/little house on the prairie/ lumberjack clown/pajama chic) My style of hygene (iffy) My taste in music ( the oh so popular Ragtime) My hobby ( collecting other peoples toenail clippings ) …yeah in Junior high I pushed the boundaries…But curiously it has taken me 20 years to really rebel against the social norms.  It was not until recently that I realized how damaging an unchecked societal rule can be, how it can pervade a perfectly normal experience and taint it with imperfection.

There are two Social Norms that I have started to raise my fist at.  I hurl a giant “Ef You” when I feel their presence creeping in my head.  I don’t subscribe to these antiquated ideas…I just don’t.  They don’t fit in. They don’t fit in me…this is the real morph I have been looking for.  The desire to fit in has tormented me…the real challenge is not ” hey do I fit in here” it is ” Hey do these ideas fit in me” Here are the ones I reject today.

1) Divorce will damage your children…What an insidious idea…who came up with that.  First off..everything damages a child…Existence in general is like taken a pristine thing ( baby ) and hurling it through a meteor shower we call life.  Everyone gets dinged up in the gauntlet….So it pisses me off  this idea my Divorce will somehow cause more damage than the school bus bully, or the disappointment of an ice cream scoop leaping from its cone ( a true tragedy ).  And yet we believe it, we feel guilty. This is what we are told. I believed it. I even thought I was a little lesser than, growing up a child of divorce I remember feeling somehow broken. Hushed tones of sympathy shaped my belief….But now I just don’t buy it. My kids have Parents that are both striving to be their authentic selves,  two families that love them, they had two Easter baskets this year for christ sake (literally)…they are learning to adapt to multiple rules, to be flexible, to interact with different personalities..It is a gift and there is nothing sad or “less than” about that reality.  When the thought creeps in that maybe there is. I stop it at the door. Sorry social norm, you don’t fit in here anymore.

2) You need a man to be happy….Society is very uncomfortable with the untethered woman.  A single man can revel in his Bachelorhood. He can play darts in his living room with his pizza boxes and his beer fridge…But a single woman….is a sad thing.  I BUY INTO THIS PARASITIC THOUGHT..I feel it even though I think it is total bull.  Only .00005 % of us are born conjoined twins ( I looked it up) The rest of us come out all by ourselves. I think this is an indicator that we can survive independently…and yet Im Bridget Jonesing it with the ice cream, I belt out “all by myself” tears streaming down my face…..Because I have been taught being alone is wrong.  Watching fireworks without an arm around my shoulder, eating a meal in silence at my kitchen table facing an empty chair you only see such lone people in commercials for anti depression medication….really.  I do not like being alone and I curse the societal norm that I think is responsible for that feeling.  Love has its own schedule and until it gets around to me, I am waging battle on this idea that aloneness is bad, desperate, or unacceptable.

I have drawn the conclusion that there are a lot of collective views in our society that I really value, I like how we don’t all spit at each other or defecate on the sidewalk, we collectively value kind things and feel good stories, we call firemen to rescue kittens out of trees.  These things that aren’t laws, these guiding principals they manage the chaos of our humanness, they put us all on the same page…But some of them need to be re-evaluated, taken off the shelf and tried on. A few of our Norms just don’t belong.

note* occasionally some people do defecate on the sidewalk…now THEY should be washing their hands after.

** also note..whenever I use the word “society” I feel like I am trying too hard to sound sophisticated, like when I was a kid and would say “thou” and ” manifest”, so I apologize…its a snooty word , especially when you “air quote” around it…but there are not a lot of ways to say the cumulative whole of us without using it.