Naeema Kausar runs her beauty business out of the parlor floor of a two-family brick row house in Midwood. For Women, From Women: Jazeeba Beauty Salon is a cozy, inclusive haven where Muslim, Jewish and Christian patrons are all welcome to dip their heads back into the wash sink, exemplifying the best of what Brooklyn offers.
I invite you to celebrate some different ways in which we express and receive love, in 14 Valentine’s that Remain Close to my Heart, my own love letter to the holiday we celebrate on February 14.
14 Valentine's That Remain Close to My Heart
Christmases past make me think of my father standing on a ladder, cutting corners by zig-zagging the pre-LED lights back and forth on only the forward-facing side of the ten-foot Douglas fir. And my mother, bracing the ladder below, making him take them all down and start over, going round and round clockwise, taking care not to leave any back branches bare of colored bulbs. Same Advent drama, year after year, and in the end, same glorious, trimmed tree.
Valentine’s Days past do not call to mind any such ritual, however. Apart from those 15 years of marriage when I received, without surprise but still with appreciation, one dozen coral roses on February 14, it’s been different every year. I am an unblushing opportunist on this day of doily hearts and boxed chocolates. Depending on circumstances, and the people who happen to populate my little off-axis world at the time, I reinvent the meaning of love each year to suit the situation. I make the throbbing best of it, with or without the male protagonist. In fact—not to sour the sweet—-but some of my best Valentine’s Days have been spent loving friends, not lovers. Which is a good thing to remember as I face Cupid’s arrow this month as a single mother in her mid-fifties.
Here are fourteen stand-out Valentine’s Day recollections, not “sensual” but “scent-ual” experiences all, twinkling GIFs in my ever-growing text thread of memory, leaving behind a trail of heart-eyed smiley emojis.
1. As a teen, receiving a single truffle heart from Teuscher Chocolatier in Rockefeller Center, in a keepsake box from my first man, Daddy. I have probably eaten a heart-shaped bathtub full of chocolates since then, but that one, wrapped up all on its own, from one father to one daughter, is the one I remember the most
2. Also as a teen, in the kitchen with mom, unmolding individual coeur à la crème crustless cheesecakes from French porcelain heart-shaped molds, then spooning strawberries on top. We used the wedding china and the real silverware that Valentine’s night I’m sure. The texture, I recall clearly, more like cottage cheese than New York cheesecake, felt continental to my teenage tongue. And now this strained dessert, involving cheesecloth and imported custard cups, has come to symbolize the love and creativity my mother has always put into getting dinner on the family table for fifty-eight years of marriage.
3. As an eight-year-old, at the dining room table, addressing small envelopes enclosing Peanuts valentines to my classmates in Miss MacIntosh’s third grade homeroom, then sealing them with heart stickers. There was something about working in miniature this way—small hands, small cards—that felt just right. The anticipation of giving each one out, then getting 25 odd ones in return, of spreading the love and having it returned exponentially to my class cubby, well it’s up there with waiting for Santa, or the first day of summer vacation.
4. As a freshman in college, obsessed with a senior who was, in turn, obsessed with Dylan, I took a skein of blue yarn and went at his dorm room, tangling it up in blue, from ceiling light fixture to dirty tube sock under the bed. He didn’t know what to make of it, or of me, but I remember how happy it made me while doing it.
5. In my early twenties, showing up on my boyfriend’s doorstep—La Petite Coquette— in only black bra, garters and fishnets, to which I’d rigged pink bows, while holding a giant heart of Russell Stover caramels, bigger than his Greenwich Village studio apartment. I was ravished.
6. In my late twenties I started sending Valentines to friends and family by way of Loveland, Colorado, where volunteers would intercept each envelope and postmark it with a Valentine verse. My valentines still go this circuitous route as volunteers are still ready with the red stamp to add an original stanza every year like:
St. Valentine started the trend —
A special day to reach out to friends
Loveland, Colorado picked up the cue,
Sending heart-felt messages to you.
7. As a new mother, my thoughtful sister-in-law gifted my then husband and I with a certificate for a dinner out. Our toddler son sucked buttered linguine and tugged at mylar balloons tied on the backs of every chair.
8. With the birth of our second son, my then husband presented me with a golden locket holding photographs he’d hand-colored of our boys, posed in chubby-cheek profile. Here they were, finally birthed at thirty-eight and forty-two, after years of false starts and fertility treatments, twin hearts facing one another, now nestled against my breast bone. Not made of pure gold, but gold tone instead, the locket’s surface has dulled with wear, but not the contents.
9. As PTA mom at a Valentine’s Day Bake Sale, standing behind a bridge table, in heart-shaped deely boppers and smeared to my elbows in pink frosting, selling all those damn cupcakes to second-graders waving dollar bills in my face. I remember my toddler sat beside me on a folding chair, well-behaved for hours, content or catatonic, through a patina of rainbow sprinkles. That was a good day, standing shoulder to shoulder with parents who had kids in my son’s class, selling silk roses that would go home in backpacks, then be presented to other mothers that night
10. As a forty-four-year-old at the dining room table, experiencing deja-vu with my first-grader, as we sat addressing Snoopy valentines to all his classmates in Ms. Lombelino’s first-grade classroom. Among other things, I remember thinking, this is what I’m meant to do with my life.
11. As a fifty-year-old divorcee, when both sons come home from their school bake sales with gifts for their first sweetheart: a Valentine’s mug and a duck plush which still sits on the dashboard of the KIA. That duck has fallen to the floorboard and been returned to the dash too many stoplights to count
12. As a fifty-one-year-old, redeeming a soon-to-expire gift certificate to a storefront massage parlour, for the best deep tissue kneading of my lifetime. My then boyfriend, and still friend, gave me the voucher because he knew he’d never use it himself. I still meet up with this man at white elephants and book fairs, where we swap stories on raising teens. I remember leaving that spa limp all over, in such a good way.
13. As a fifty-three-year-old, dabbing my pulse points with a scented oil that my next boyfriend, and also still a friend, had blended for us at a legendary fragrance shop in lower Manhattan. Based on his description of our personalities, the perfumer mixed up a unisex roll-on that really did suit us both. That perfume lingers in my olfactory receptors, and this man and I, both foodies, swap recipes and alert each other to good deals on avocados today.
14. At 54, this upcoming Valentine’s Day is already making sweet-smelling memories. They say the pre-war bathtub is the poor woman’s spa. A Google search didn’t pull up this expression, so I must have invented it. I’ve been mixing up batches of bath bliss for those I love, and have already started hand-delivering my bath salts. My dermatologist seemed startled, then smiled: “You know I hate Valentine’s Day.”
I get it. For some, it’s a loaded day of filled chocolates and full of regrets. For a spate in my twenties it was that for me, too. But this year, just like these thirteen heart days which precede it, I’m not biting into Valentine’s Day and returning it to the box, disappointed. I love this day. A time when we fully experience the well of a love which surrounds us. With luck and a little focused attention, we carry this goodwill into the spring. But not the cynics, who believe this holiday is confined to the borders of a romantic love which eludes them, nor the forgetful, for whom this loving feeling only lasts until midnight on the fourteenth day of February, until the tree comes down in their hearts. I bought a two-foot living tree with a root ball this past Christmas. I’m not forgetting this year. My dermatologist’s surprised smile helps me remember.
Why do I surround myself with adolescents 24/7? Explore all that’s lovable in humans who fall within the seven special years that end in teen in Did I Ask You?, my first story appearing in The Good Men Project.
Charcoal Drawing by William Fahey
What is it about artists? Why do creatives consistently capture my heart and lay me low? I invite you to explore the profound sex appeal of arty types.
Slay Me With Your Art
By now I’ve either dated, dallied with, or been in an actual relationship with an artist of one ilk or another: actor, cartoonist, cinematographer, filmmaker, lighting designer, musician, photographer, poet, stand-up comic, writer.
I’m a sucker for a right hemisphere dominant guy. But why? Why do I prize crazy-talented over all those other hyphenated adjectives which may be better predictors of long-term love—you know them: self-aware, emotionally-available, highly-empathetic, health-conscious, fiscally-responsible, mentally-stable.
Here’s why:
Art ignites: Let’s start with the obvious: art is passionate.
Those sparks of creative expression that reach my eyes and ears kindle fires deep inside me. A love song, a sonnet, a canvas painted in gold leaf, a sweeping pan of a waterfall, a hand-colored photograph of a girl in a slip perched on the edge of a bed. Beauty, rage, anguish, despair, hope, love, oneness. These things move me, and move in me, from my head, to my heart to my hips. And now there’s a name for what happens to me: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Like a steamy washcloth, an ASMR both invigorates and relaxes at the same time. It’s the crisp scent of 99 44⁄100% pure ivory soap bubbles in my grandmother’s bathtub, and the sensation they create as they break against my skin. It’s my scalp pulled tight as nana twines my wet hair into a turban, then it’s those follicles relaxed, blood flowing back, as I’m walked outside, unbound, and set to dry in the sunshine. Now that I’ve connected my own engagement with art to personal rapture, I chase ASMRs any chance I get. And dating artists—as well as just hanging with artists— does set me up to experience this wellness euphoria more often.
Art excites: “God bless the child that's got his own.” Lady Day had it right. When a guy I’m seeing has something going on that lights his fire, it’s dynamic, living, forward moving. And it’s not about me. And that’s good. These men are not retired in their own minds, they’re evolving, growing. They’re dreamers, always dreaming, and that’s dreamy. It’s a creative mindset that I’m drawn to wherever I encounter it, and not just on dating sites, but on the subway platform, in a steel drummer whose lost in the concave surface of his drum, oblivious to trains arriving and departing. Or in a painter friend’s apartment, watching her at the canvas, a brush in her right hand applying Naples yellow, and six more brushes in the left, jutting out at all angles like a star burst. She’s lost too. Gone! Wholly unaware of me, just five feet away. If someone I’m seeing is not sometimes lost pursuing his passion, I find I’m not falling that hard. Shallow? Maybe. But my heart likes what it likes.
Is it also shallow to admit that I’m sometimes the dreamer too, imagining the person I’m with enjoying a splash of celebrity, where I get to throw on a little black dress and hang on his arm at a screening, or an opening, or I dance my ass off to his bright brassy notes on Lincoln Center Plaza, barefoot and wet in fountain spray? It’s sexy to me. It’s also embarrassing to confess to this not liberated mid-twentieth century fantasy of displaced female ambition. (Even while I dream of seeing my own name added to the masthead of P.S. I Love You.)
But honestly, while my collection of little black dresses hang mostly unworn, the reality of my experience dating artists has been pretty great. It’s been enough to just witness someone’s process up close, and sometimes, to even be thrown into their mix of muses, singing back up to their Terpsichores and Calliopes. To experience someone’s art in the making, in the mistaking, and then in the actualization. Well that sends tingles up my fishnets.
Art challenges: I’m a literal thinker, a literal writer, and a planner. My google calendar is color-coded by family member. I come from a line of women who don’t flake and don’t tolerate “fart brains.” I cut to the chase and break things down into understandable parts. Sometimes this is good. But often not. When it comes to appreciating art, I often miss that point. I try to force meaning in an unappreciative way. Art is a barbed-wire enigma, not to scale recklessly with mock heroics or to throw yourself against, like an inflatable bouncy castle. Dating artists has taught me that. To be fair, artists I haven’t dated have also expanded my thinking here. In my youth into my forties, if I didn’t get a painting or a poem, I just gave up. Walked away. But knowing more artists has challenged my approach. Sylvia Plath may elude me to the grave, but I’m doing a better job of letting all that’s non-figurative and freely-versed just wash over me. I’m giving meaning-making a rest. And by extension—I’m letting more things in life float by me, unscheduled and unresolved. And Lord it’s easier.
Art collaborates: For years, I teased hair and applied false lashes on models for my ex-husband’s photo shoots. Before marriage, I’d held microphones on long poles, revised scripts, dressed sets, and stood perfectly still while a director of photography tinkered with clamp lights. And post-divorce, a conceptual artist had me look over what he drafted to run alongside his latest work. I felt privileged. I’d only blogged about dead pets and consolidating breakfast cereals in my pantry. I knew zilch about attaching words to visual art, much less to those less “accessible” artworks. But here I now was, curled on his Indonesian daybed in my tag-sale kimono with my red pen, up inside his head—thinking about his art, then with him on the page, holding his words like thin-shelled eggs, those chosen words, pregnant with meaning, pointing them with crimson arrows to paragraphs above and below. Very cool, and, very sexy. Stretched my thinking and opened me up to new experiences with non-figurative art. Maybe grew my own writing too?
Art gets at truth: Great art isn’t phony. Even artists who play with illusion are going for something real below the gesso surface. And it’s that truth that touches some spot beneath my solar plexus. It’s the thrill that kills me every time. The artists I have known in the screening room as well as the bedroom have shone bright stars that light the way to something pure, beyond description, but deeply felt.
When it ends, am I upset? Devastated. Our light goes out. But then it flickers and flares up into a parting gift: a song, a poem, a painting, a photograph. A memento to mark the commonalities that we shared. The truth of their art remains, as does our connection. I mattered to them, then and now, as they did, and still do to me. And their art matters to me, it’s on my wall, or in my playlist or on my bookshelf, or on a scrap in my bedside table. The art that artists and I have experienced together—as givers, receivers, collaborators—it lives on. And that’s killer.
courtesy of rockawave.com
For a few tide changes now, I’ve been a girl on the curl, surfing online dating sites for that one Starkist Tuna. Sorry Charlie, to make you tread water until I drift into your current, but while we wait, know that I’m sharing the waves with some terrific tunas who are teaching me to be no Chicken of the Sea, and to enjoy riding this one long wave to you… Read how I’ve been handling the board while balancing work and home. Thanks for the read.
Surfing Love Sites as a Single Mom
Disclaimer: Why write another “How To” on charting the choppy waters of online dating? Especially tips targeted to single moms, who may already feel judgy eyes on them when it comes to how they enjoy their shards of time not spent at a desk, in the produce aisle, or on the soccer, softball or football field? That’s the last thing unattached moms need—a faceless freelancer telling them how to date.
So why bother? Well, because this writer is in the same boat—single parenting while trawling dating sites, off and on, for a few years now. She’s made mistakes and she’s also made friends.
“A wise person learns from other people’s mistakes,” my mother likes to say. If true, then at fifty-four I’m still dumb. With the help of a smart therapist however, and gal pals who continue to pry my fingers off the IG accounts of hopeless causes, I am starting to learn from my own mistakes.
Here are some takeaways from time spent dropping my line on Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid and, say, Episcopaldating.com (the weirdest by far.)
Be discrete
I get it now, but I didn’t at first. It matters who I invite over to dip into the popcorn bowl on family movie night. One ex-boyfriend met my kids right away and two didn’t. Guess which break-up was messier than the other two? As I see it, it’s a lose-lose set-up for Mr. Maybe to meet my sons before I know he’s Right-on. If the guy is kind of jerky towards mom, kids see that, or if he’s a keeper, but for whatever reason doesn’t keep, then kids—and boyfriends—experience that. Messy. For now I don’t have the head space or the counter space for that blender model. I’m sticking to the every-other-weekend man plan, until I get the internal memo from heartquarters to move forward.
Enjoy meeting people
Five years post-divorce and surfing the riptides of online dating with a better feel for the board, I’m starting to have real fun with it. It began when I chose to ride that wave of gratitude. Think about it, how else would an over-fifty single working mom in the bowels of Brooklyn, meet eligible bachelors? I don’t even drink anymore, not that meeting males in bars ever worked out that well (except I did get fourteen good years, a set of Wedgewood, and two shining sons out of that last pick-up.) Where else, but within the glowing rectangle on my palm, could I be thrown into conversation with an accomplished man who can teach me a thing or two about some cool profession or unusual past time? In the small talk which comes before pillow talk, I’ve learned how to scramble a super fluffy egg and new strategies for experiencing conceptual art. I now know who Ram Dass is, where Cyprus is, and how to light a menorah. I know how to crash a Christie’s auction and act nonchalant as bids spike over a Basquiat. I’ve discovered a weather app I like more than the default that came with my iPhone.
It’s not a popularity contest
When I bemoan an empty inbox, my shrink reminds me, “You’re going for quality over quantity,” then drops his not-so-scorching term: “life partner material.” Last December, my friend met who-she-thought-was-a player, on what-she-thought-was-a-hook-up, and wound up joining the June brides at the altar. She likes to point out that “it only takes one.” So I’ve learned to be less afraid of the ones that fall off. I no longer noodle why some threads—despite batting my lashes with my best banter—break free anyway. After my autopsy on a dead thread comes back clean, I move on.
Limit It
I hop on about eleven, and I’m off before midnight.
It’s the last thing I do before smoothing on that face oil and reaching for the bedside light switch. Late night works for me. Because getting into it on my lunch hour with a Redwood timber tycoon—who may not turn out to be a Redwood timber tycoon—didn’t.
Get clear on what you want.
If I’ve learned anything riding the high seas of romance on the world wide web it’s this: people want different things. Setting aside the crazies, who can’t weave words into sentences that make sense, most folk will tell you where they’re at—if you bother to ask.
I no longer assume everyone is on the same long board when it comes to friendship, love and sex. This goes for female surfers too. My gal pals surprise me all the time. It’s taken lots of doggy paddling and a couple of wipe-outs to drift closer to how I really feel about things. News flash: people, however they may self-identify, have different attitudes and priorities, which can change over time. Just how long ago the ex rolled off the California King and moved out of the house is a question worth asking. I’m pretty clear now that I’m looking to make friends first, people who value my company, no matter the outcome, as I value theirs. Eventually, I hope to ride that one long wave into shore...
Find a Surfing Buddy
I have two gal pals jumping the waves with me right now. Looks like one may have found a real starfish, but even if she disables her account and shimmies off into the sand bar with him, she’ll still want me to float my prospects by her. Which is good. When it comes to the hapless heart, reality checks from real friends help filter the silt out.
Keep Doing You
“Patience is the key to paradise…” or so the Turkish proverb goes. If you’re at the point where you’re trawling deeper waters for this “life partner material” (who is still super hot in his own way) then this could take a while. Or not. (like the friend who married “the one” only seven months after they met on that innocent hook-up.)
It takes what it takes to lure true love, so for now, after I check off childcare, chores and chasing at-risk teens back into their classrooms as a teacher’s aide, I’m buoying my bark during the long trawl by making time for what that matters to me. Like putting up pots of squash soup, and bending that morning bod with perky mid-life Aussie Amazons on YouTube. And with all the waves I’ve made over the years to keep bad romances afloat, instead of funneling that energy into my own writing, well, I could have written my debut novel, its prequel, and six sequels. Today I’m writing daily.
So until I catch the same current with that big-hearted sailor whose got both oars in the water, and who causes me to bite my wrist involuntarily at the sight of him in a full-length leather coat—you know the type— the one for whom I find myself doing Crest white strips before every date, while I’m just treading water, waiting for that one to join me in the jet stream, I’ll just keep doing me.
Some people seem born into their callings: priests, doctors, fire fighters, social workers. From the time they can form words, they can tell you what they want to be when they grow up, and how they’re going to help out around planet Earth. That was never me, until now. But hey, better at 54 than never! Here’s an inspirational read for all late-bloomers.
When I Knew I Was a Write
for Julie Martino, CPA
Some people start writing with seashells in the sand at age four, or in secret journals with padlocks at about twelve. Some people just seem to know from day minus one that they want to be writers when they grow up. But that’s not me. It actually didn’t hit me until I was 53. You’d think a strong personal essay that bumped me off the wait list and into my freshman class at college would have clued me in. Or the B-movie screenplay I wrote in my twenties. (That actually convinced me I couldn’t write.) Or maybe when I went for that Masters in creative writing, because something was missing in my thirty-something soul, and discounted degrees were a perk of working for a nonprofit. But that second diploma didn’t stamp “WRITER” on my forehead either. And in my forties, when I started mommy blogging at night because I just had to spill about head lice and classroom pets that died under my watch over summer break, did I see myself as anything more than a sleepy parent and animal killer then? NO. And not when I found my little story on the cobbler from Uzbekistan in print in the local paper either. Not even when my tips for surviving heartbreak sober were published in a nationwide recovery journal. The comments on that story were encouraging. And by now I had a fan base of friends and family who didn’t unsubscribe to my monthly newsletter. Nope, none of this helped me buy into my writer status.
Instead, I have a phone call from my accountant to thank for moving “freelance writer” up to the first line under my job description on LinkedIn. Last March, while preparing my tax return, she called to ask me about a 1099 for six hundred dollars that she’d pulled out of a clasp envelope, along with my W-2 from the City, for working as a teacher’s aide in a high school. “That was for a story I wrote for Bklyner on Marine Florists,” I explained, “plus a piece on a muscle parlor in Flatbush and one on a CrossFit in Red Hook.” “Did you drive to those interviews?” she asked. “Yes? Why?” I asked back. “About how much would you estimate you spent on gas?” “Gas? I dunno. Maybe five bucks?” She went on to ask about my expenses for electricity, wi-fi, print outs, pens and paper. She was treating my writing seriously, like a business, and me like a writer. Of course I was never serious.
But now I am. And here’s how:
I’ve gotten an agent. I asked my poet friend and former editor to be my agent. I started calling her by her surname and promised her a fat dinner out for the next piece published. We’re having fun with it, meeting weekly to edit, strategize and eat everything bagels, for which I keep the receipts.
I write any chance I get. Whenever I can steal a moment during the day, I’m in a google doc on my phone, or jotting a story idea on a paper cup, pressed against the steering wheel at a stop light. At night I’m on the comp, with my eighties YouTube hip-hop and iced 7-11. Or hot Lipton. Or both.
And since I’ve gotten serious, the universe has been meeting me halfway. And here’s how:
I found a great book in the lobby of my building called “How to become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead.”
The pet lizard has crawled into the role of muse and cuddles on my collarbone over the keyboard all night.
I discovered a wonderful community of self-published writers on Medium.
Mind you, I’m not quitting the day job. Not now. Maybe never. I actually love the day job; those teens supply open-ended inspiration. But I’m also committed to writing daily, and nightly, and saying those three words out loud: “I’m a writer,” and not just into the bathroom mirror, but to friends and strangers alike. The kitchen floor hasn’t been mopped in a month, but I’ve never been happier.
I’m noticing that I’ve been doing some pretty pathetic petty larceny lately, stone cold sober. Here’s a little read on why taking a look at this bad behavior—and doing something about it—matters to me, and to my sobriety. Feel free to add your two cents. Thanks!
The Fix was a website covering all things addiction and recovery. It was a great resource for the addict, offering breaking news, exclusive interviews, investigative reports and blogs on sober living and lifestyle. Unfortunately The Fix is is currently dismantled, but hopefully the editors are just taking a break and it will be back up and running soon! Go here to gape at some unsober spills I’ve made in the first half of the year, how I’ve mopped them up, and my strategy to be less emotionally sloppy in the second half of 2019. Thanks for the read!
