My dear beautiful man once told me that a woman of my stature deserves a coffee maker.
I was barely making ends meet. Newly divorced, determined to keep my kids and I in our house, balancing my finances through an ongoing stream of creative math, but somehow making it all land in a place of joy, renewal and love.
Optimism couldn’t plug the silver-dollar-sized hole and subsequent leak in my basement, but sheer will and an uncanny ability to compartmentalize chaos from progress was saving me every single day. It all hung by a thread, but it was my thread, and I swung from it like Jane of the Jungle.
Regardless, having fresh Nespresso in the house wasn’t top of my priority list.
But I did have this lurking suspicion that my overheating Keurig was slowly melting microplastics deep into my organs. “Ok,” I acquiesced. “A woman of my stature deserves a coffee maker.”
My stature.
That’s an interesting enigma.
Is my stature that of a 5-foot-nothing suburban mom? Is it that of the crisis comms wonder woman, swooping in to steady your likely-self-induced corporate existential crisis in a single bound? Is it that of the bulldog protector, who makes the school administrator wince when they see my name in their inbox? Is it that of a quiet bookworm, reading poetry in my hammock? Is it that of a tutu-skirt-aficionado who loves to rock poofy lace on a Monday topped with layers of necklaces? Is it that of a tomboy who can prompt a teamster to blush with a raucous series of meticulously-placed F bombs?
A woman of my stature is told time and time again by male co-workers when they first meet in real life that “Wow! You seem so much taller on Zoom.”
That microaggression has got to be an HR violation of some sort in today’s context, but I’ve been in the workforce since the mid-90s, so – let’s be real – I've experienced much worse, and a woman of my stature doesn't complain about things like that. A woman of my stature looks at that person with pity, and silently wonders what it is that makes him feel small enough to act so stupid.
The evening I signed the papers to buy my ex-husband out of my house, the notary sat by my side at our dining room table, walking me through the legalese page by page. When she got to the section that referred to me as “Stacey Zolt Hara, an unmarried woman,” my jaw dropped.
In the eyes of the Golden State, my stature demanded this contractual demarcation: an unmarried woman. Apparently, I’ve since been mansplained, it is critical to call out that the home was purchased by “an unmarried woman” in order to protect said unmarried woman from a man claiming ownership of said asset. This is the law’s way of protecting me – the unmarried woman – from the burden of my stature.
Anyone who knows me well will tell you that my stature – in all its forms – is not a burden, and that I don’t need anyone’s protection.
But I digress.
One of the things I most enjoy about being an unmarried woman is that I get to decide exactly what a woman of my stature deserves. Though, sometimes, having experienced financial scarcity several times in my life, I need a little nudge to see life through a lens of abundance.
Like the time my son and I were on a Target shopping adventure and I found the cutest pair of black strappy sneaker-style sandals. They cost $10. I stood there for five minutes staring at them trying to decide whether they were worth the investment. At the time, I billed out to clients at $500/hour or approximately $8.30 a minute. “Mom, buy the shoes,” he wisely nudged. “You’ve already paid for them standing here.”
I’ve worn the shoes for four years now, marching them across three continents. A woman of my stature deserved those $10 shoes – even if paying my mortgage was sometimes a stretch.
It’s been nearly seven years since I signed those mortgage papers. A woman of my stature could have boxed up her things when the bottom fell out, called this whole dream a failed experiment, bought a house in a much cheaper locale in cash and resigned herself to a life of long land-locked winters trapped in a community that had very limited ideas about the life a woman of my stature was allowed to lead.
But a woman of my stature stands very tall when she’s knocked down, because a woman of my stature deserves to bask in the sun and paddle in the Bay in January and smell the jasmine blooming through the whole neighborhood each March. She deserves to fall in love over and over again with her beatific boyfriend/not-husband. She deserves sunbeams coming through the window alighting this magical space she’s built for herself and her family.
Sometimes her creative arithmetic makes sense to no one but her, but that’s a privilege a woman of her stature has worked hard to achieve.
A woman of my stature will spend $200 a month on yoga and pilates classes and $300 a month on acupuncture and massage, but eat only eggs for lunch and dinner for a week, because, even with Trumpflation, eggs are cheap protein. A woman of my stature buys most of her shoes from DSW and brings a coupon with her cross country to Boston, because she knows that’s the one time she’ll have her daughter’s undivided attention to shop for prom shoes – which we did manage to find for only $25, thank you very much.
According to my math:
A woman of my stature deserves underwear that is not older than her oldest child.
A woman of my stature deserves a non-stick pan that actually doesn’t stick.
A woman of my stature deserves the bulk package of 100 soy wax votives for no other reason than it brings her joy to light candles all over the house every single day.
Last year, I grappled over whether a woman of my stature deserved new dish towels. Most of the motley crew of tattered and stained dish towels in my kitchen drawer have traveled across homes in three cities over two continents, and many were purchased alongside my wedding registry over 20 years ago.
A pile of the most gorgeous white and black striped dish towels flirted with me at a French warehouse sale last summer. Simple, elegant and – even on sale – $20 a pop. Nope. Too rich for me. C’est la vie.
But in March, two months into my recent sabbatical, I decided that a woman of my unemployed stature deserved to at least scan Amazon for some viable alternative to the gross pile of rags that seemed to taunt me each time I entered the kitchen. Four hours of shop-scrolling later, I found the perfect grey and white striped cotton dish towels: $35 for a six pack.
When they arrived at my doorstep the next day, I ceremoniously dumped the old pile of rags into the trash and meticulously rolled my new matching set into the drawer. Each time I take one out, I smile. Because sometimes a dish towel isn’t just a dish towel, and a woman of my stature deserves new dish towels.
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