Category Archives: Relationships

Rock A Bye Marriage

Feminine, Film, marriage, Relationships

In the third episode of Scenes from a Marriage, Jonathan reads his therapy assigned morning pages, written in the third person to his ex-wife Mira in the characteristically calm, low and soothing pace he uses to sing to their 5-year-old daughter before bedtime in the third act. He reads to her about discovering the source of his inability to be truly present in their marriage. When he describes Mira as one of the first people whom he feels truly sees him, it works on her like a dysfunctional aphrodisiac. She is then moved to initiate physical intimacy with him on the carpet of the living room in the house they once shared. In an overhead shot where Mira rolls over on top of him, we see Jonathan’s eyes open, revealing his internal emotional struggle as they writhe together on the floor, overcome by this reignited passion. It’s consensual for a brief nail biting few seconds. And then Jonathan tells her they need to stop, that this is not good for him.

For Jonathan, formerly a strict orthodox Jew for whom the better part of his formative years as a young man were spent being separated from women and who appears to take ritual, commitment, and parental responsibility very seriously, the sustainability of his marriage to Mira and the thing that held it together never seemed to just be about sex and physical passion. But this is just my read from having only watched the 3 episodes available. It’s hard for me not to adore and want to cuddle every bit of Oscar Isaac’s screen performance. He never rises to anger without reason. He’s giving. He’s responsible almost to a fault. And are we supposed to not notice that Jonathan is hot dad central? I mean that man is settled as fuck! He’s not going anywhere! LOL! But maybe this is part of why Mira felt like she couldn’t take another second with him. Perhaps his steadfastness and emotional repression, shed too bright a light on her selfish, unstable and self centered behavior.

All I kept thinking about was how she said she wasn’t attracted to Jonathan anymore in Ep2 just before storming out to spend 3 months in Israel with her lover, Poli. And now here they are rolling around on the floor together and she tells him she never stopped loving or wanting him. Sooooo…try as I might I really can’t find a shred of empathy for homegirl. She’s messy af. And if Mira is written to be a deeply frustrating character then Jessica Chastain is doing a hell of a job.

Levi Hagai is not a director I’m familiar with but I do like the way he takes the viewer through a series of shifting and intense emotions in such a short amount of time. Whenever it feels as if Mira and Jonathan have made a solid and intimate connection somewhere, everything crumbles again under the weight of tremendous, unresolved pain.

In the scene near the end of this episode we see Jonathan singing to their daughter who wakes up in the night while he and Mira are arguing. We watch him walk her back to her bed while asking Mira to hold on until he comes back. He’s really asking her to hold on to the hope that they can salvage their life together. All I can think while watching him sing, is how present he sounds, how fully present he is for his daughter, while his relationship with her mother balances on a precipice.

And for Mira…I feel nothing.

Not yet anyway.

Dinner is Served

Black relationships, Relationships

Confession time: I have not been cooking dinner for quite some time now. My husband cooks dinner for us like 99.9 percent of the time. And that would be fine except that he does most of everything else too while all I really do is work at my day job and then part time in my creative job.

It wasn’t like that when we first started living together. Before we got married, I cooked all the time. I used to grocery shop on a regular basis and get really excited about making new things. I would get obsessed with making something like pesto, or roasted red potatoes with rosemary and then after a few too many times I would get tired of it. But I never stopped cold. And it never ever felt forced or obligatory. I never had to remind myself to cook that night. I just knew it was time to cook dinner. I think it was because it was my first time ever living on my own and  this free and liberating feeling was so nice.  Getting to share meals with my husband and spend time with him and get to know what he liked helped us to bond more deeply and that was a very liberating feeling for me.

I used to make fun of him on occasions when he cooked because he would just heat things up in a pouch or defrost and heat something and I didn’t consider that cooking. But it was dinner.

Now, many years later, we’re married and in our second apartment together and he has become like a master chef. No lie. He loves to cook. Naturally, he doesn’t like doing it every single day! But he really has a knack for it. And I have a knack for eating sooo…. LOL!

A few night ago, for a change, I cooked us a meal. Nothing big, just pasta and salad. I cooked a pasta that was a shape I’d never used before. Gemmeli. It’s cute. Aesthetics in food matter to me.

“I feel like this takes longer to cook than spaghetti. Is this as big as it’s supposed to get? Is this cooked enough yet? Here try it.”

“Did you time it?

“No, I never time it. I just try it.”

“This is good. One more minute and some more salt and stir it a little so…”

“Did you want cheese? Cheese and pepper?”

“Pepper?”

Pepper, You know like ground pepper.”

“Oh, just a little. More cheese please”

“Of course”

“You know there’s ground pepper right?’

“I know but I just like to grind it myself. I like the whole peppercorn. I also like the way it feels to grind it. I like the grinding feeling.”

“Oh I need more dressing”

“So the secret to your salad last night was that you drowned it?”

“Hahaha. No! I didn’t drown them. I just drizzled on a few coats…and then one more

“LOL!!”

I made an IG Stories Boomerang post of me pouring the drained pasta from the colander into the pot and showed it to him. He nodded in authentic approval, which felt really nice and then he directed me to one of his favorite shows that he watches every week about tree house building. There was an animated portion showing the layout of a tree house being built for a couple.

“All I see is a really bad storm coming along”

“But you wouldn’t live there.”

You mean it it would be like a vacation from your house house”

“Yeah”

“When I think about I that way I really like it”

“Yeah!”

“You could have parties there…”

Yup!”

“Retreats”

“Mhhmm…”

“Wouldn’t it be cool to have Black People’s Bed and Breakfast Treehouse”

“Yes!

“They could just be pampered and chill in nature, go for walks on the trails and a few would lead to like a lake or some body of water…

“Exactly!

“Have some guided meditation…”

This lead me google random images of Black people in nature which lead me to the discovery of Outdoor Afro “Where Black People and nature meet…”  It also made me think about how nature walks and just being in nature, which I have loved since a baby have always been framed and appropriated as being a “white people thing.” The same with bed and breakfasts. And we know for a fact that during segregation, there were not only Black bed and breakfasts but entire hotels and inns that provided lodging for Black people travelling from state to state because there was literally no place else they could go! And that made me come to the realization that segregation had to be better for Black Businesses.

If you’re looking surprised right now, remember that a while back I also said it took me years to realize that integration didn’t work for Black people.

So I realized that making dinner for my husband is not just about food or being fed in the most practical sense, which is of course really important. Sometimes it’s also about the inspiration and revelation that can only arrive through that level of safe and open connection that happens when you’re breaking bread together. I need to start cooking dinner again more often. LOL!

Take my phone?

Comedy, Relationships, social media, , , , ,

 

Through a my good girlfriend, I had the fortunate opportunity to see Chris Rock’s Total Blackout Tour a couple of times at a secret showing in Brooklyn last month. And I was thankful to see it there at the BAM Harvey theater because it was nice intimate setting and a Very Black experience. Oils, cocoa butter, Spike Lee, Toure’ (Toure’ is always there. LOL!) and like my husband said when we went the second time, Black people show out when we show up for someone we love so the show is in the audience as well as on the stage. It’s just beautiful all around.

The set was hilarious, and though I haven’t always agreed with him, I’ve loved Rock’s comedy for a long time. Many of his jokes from this set stayed with me long after we left but there’s one that I’ve wanted to write about for a while, one that I keep turning around in my head. Like all good jokes, it’s obviously more than that.

Rock, in his candid discussion of his divorce (he was married for 16 years!) and the reasons he felt it occurred, said that his parents has been married for 40 years, and yet because of technology and social media, he feels that he was had more contact with his wife for more of time that they were together and that essentially he and his wife had been together longer than his parents. LOL!!

He went on to explain that his parents didn’t see one another all day and when they finally saw one another after work was done they had “pertinent” information to share with one another. There was no face timing, texting, liking, posting. They were apart for hour and hours in which all manner of things could have happened to them or their families (especially in pre-civil rights America)  and they would not have been able to get word to one another until the end of the day. Rock said that with technology and social media, there’s no way to miss anyone these days and that missing people you love is important for the relationship.

It really made me think. Social media is always touted as a tool for connection across so many barriers, real, imagined and constructed. And in many ways I believe it is. But in other ways, I feel like we’ve never been more estranged, isolated or lonely as a society.

Here’s a good example, still related to the Chris Rock Show.

I’ve been to plenty of live show tapings before but this was the first time ever that I was at a taping where we were all asked to lock up our phones in a pouch that could only be unlocked again once we left.

Oh, it’s like that?

I was game as long as I could still keep my phone on me. LOL!

I’m not gonna lie. I’m a photographer so the first time I went with my girlfriend,  my eyes were consuming the set like a meal at various points during the beginning of the show, thinking of all the amazing angles and shots I could have taken. But slowly I began to just take in my surroundings, take in the show and be fully present.

The second time I went with my husband, they took longer to seat everyone so I just looked at all the people shuffling in, the beautiful hair styles, the unique and eclectic outfits, the way people moved, greeted one another, waving at friends, dancing, yelling, hugging, dapping. Plus the people in our section smelled amazing. LOL!

During one of the opening sets by a Black woman comedian I tapped the woman sitting next to me who was there with her bae and asked if she had heard the comedians name. She didn’t and tapped her bae to ask him. She said the woman’s name was Janelle James.

No biggie right? If I had my phone I probably would have just googled what I made out phonetically. If I had my phone I might have been in it the whole time and hardly ever looked up and anyone. If I had my phone I definitely would have been bitching about the time and when the show was going to start.

By the time Rock came out the entire audience was on their feet clapping and cheering. No pictures could be taken, no recording, none of the material or anything about the experience could be leaked. And I think it was a great advantage for everyone.

All of the jokes, stories and setups I remember from Rock’s show were from memory alone. Of course I did see it twice but still. LOL! I made a list of notes afterward.

I know I use social media to avoid and distract myself from a lot of things. But sometimes I’ll be watching YouTube or scrolling through IG and it will hit me that I’m only looking at moments in time, edited moments, some contrived, including my own. My husband will tag me on ten things throughout the work day but when we get home, we’re often tired and rarely ever talk about any of the stuff we posted. We hang out in different spaces of the internet and so much happens, so much information is consumed and shared that it’s not possible to process or discuss it all. It’s not even necessary. More than half of it is just junk food, click bait, fodder, waste.

When did so much waste become so much more important than finding time to connect with one another?

Rock joked that after all this social media engagement with their SOs women have the nerve to say something like “We never talk anymore!” to their husbands.

“I know everything you did today!” He said. “And I know how everybody felt about it.” LOL!

But do we really know how we feel?  I have to schedule time to check in in real ways with people I care about these days in ways that used to happen all the time when I was younger. Most of my high school years, before cell phones and Facebook, I spent actual time with people I cared about. If we hung out, it would be to really interact, to share an experience, to sit down and eat together. There was nothing virtual about it. And there were a lot of feelings! LOL!!!

Nowadays it’s like my feelings only get explored deeply with another person when I’m sitting across from my therapist or once in a while with my good girl friends or when I make concerted effort to ask bae when he’s available to have a “talk.”

These days, a lot of our connecting has become all click click, swipe, post, like, thumb up, send, cut, paste and then every once in a while, eyes will meet. Every once in a while, a real conversation will occur. Through social media, we consume waaaaaay more tragedy, intimate detail, emotional drama, celebration, protest, and a variety of other complex performances, and behaviors than we ever could have before.

And it’s exhausting.

But it’s become normalized.

Chris Rock is a youthful 52 and I can tell from what he posts on social media that he’s more of a in the moment kind of guy. He’s had to get used to social media as a business  and promotion tool so that he can stay current and relevant and I totally get that. I mean despite everything I’ve just said about all it’s ill, there is so much I  love about social media. And as someone who has taken on a second job working for an organization run by a courageous entrepreneur, I can attest to how important it is to be consistently visible on social media platforms because much like the physical spaces we used to socialize in before, social media is literally where the major hangouts are now.

Hanging out in virtual reality. Jamiroquai was not lying.

This brave new (keeps getting newer LOL!) social media world is our new normal, just like every technological advance has always pushed society into new levels of communication and exploration of connection. We can’t go backwards. But times like this, sometimes it’s really a relief to have someone else to take your phone away, lock it in a bag, give it back to you and be like, now enjoy the fucking show.