On Glass Houses

And the stones we all throw (at, from, to, pick your preposition) them.

I’m a modern woman.

(A nod here, as to the cadence in which this is to be read. If you’re blanking, missing out on the cultural easter egg, check out the man himself. Here we go.)

I’m a modern woman, iPhone-touter and blue-tint eyeglass wearer. Yes, I own a Garmin smartwatch and measure my caloric expenditure across workouts. Notetaking is thruppled most days—a battered SWAG notebook some NGO placed on my desk, Notion databases and WhatsApps to myself. Opinionated on subjects I know little about, content enthusiast, vaper, entitled like no other generation before mine. I journal.

I’m hyperpolitical, hyperaware, hyperoverwhelmed and hyperactive—but not on meds.

I’ve been in therapy, yes, and I know the term BPD art hoe.

I like Joe Rogan, but hate most of his guests, charge my AirPods frequently, wait 90 minutes for daily coffee intake, retweet to get free templates, avoid TikTok, and accumulate cat stickers. Make my bed first thing in the morning because JP told me to. Worry about dental health and aluminum in my deodorant. Seed cycle. I fast, intermittently.

I dress monochrome, eke out a side gig, cardio, meal prep, reading windows and time with friends—which is the best analgesic to 21st century life. My nails are roughshod, vaselined, my lips are chapped. I do not have a Finsta. Independent, career-oriented, able to have it all (they say!), not defined by my girly parts.

Marvel represented a critical period in my life. As did Obama’s legalizations (Happy Pride, all!). I worry about pronouns and words made verboten by people living in mansions at far higher income brackets. Millennial to the core, jaded, tired too often, an expert eye-roller, twitchy, losing hair, etc.

Dear Sir or Madam, I hope this finds you well are words I type out three or four times a day. I know what grounding is. I’ve been meaning to get around to meditating. No cold plunges or sauna yet, but I would like to. Do them, I mean.

I'm a modern woman. Words mean things, but more and more seldom do they. Watch out what you say, you might get cancelled. People have feelings, distinct and gelled out into the real world, and I am meant to tiptoe over them, to avoid getting stuck. Nuance is a dangerous term. Cable news is dead. I know all of this, and I know I should put my phone down but I don’t.

And yet, I am not modern in the slightest.

I try to attend mass—properly, listening, confessing really embarrassing things—and live out the principles espoused there (if you’re blanking, missing out on the cultural easter egg, check out the man himself). I kind of want to have a truckload of children and chase them about as they turn into interesting and scarred humans. I definitely want someone to get the bill; no reach.

It is a constant tug of war. Adapt to the artificial intelligence of an online environment, leave behind the brick-and-mortar wisdom of defunct social systems, which degraded, segregated, castigated the brilliance of human independence. You couldn’t vote a century ago, girl! Now it’s your oyster. Be an engineer. Create things. No, no, don’t become a nurse, or a mother—not that there’s anything wrong with that—but it’s ok not to want to have kids, to want to become a CEO. Pay gap’s decreasing. You got this. Slay, queen.

But queens do not move. They are the immoveable boulders, vestiges of propriety and outdated tradition, stuck in a previous decade’s ways. They remain idle. Their main concern is to not offend, to not cause ripples, to avoid motion in any direction. Stay put, on your throne, and gaze down, but not condescendingly. I don’t want to be a queen. Right?

How can I be, in a way that is good, and wholesome, and not wholly exhausting?

I can’t ask the people around me, whose lived experiences are different to my own, whose values run perpendicular and screaming in the opposite direction, who drop n-bombs and say things like the whoredom of a woman may be known in her haughty looks and eyelids. Or that it’s a shame that I don’t know how to make rice yet.

These are strong women, robust, boasting their childbearing hips and bruised knees, a hoard of cardigan harpies who smile tightly when they glance upon my bicep tattoo. They drink their way into early menopause, sneering at an occasional ‘drug’ habit. They sacrifice plenty: their dreams, hopes, aspirations, even the thought that they’re allowed to have any of those things. They relinquish small parcels of dignity in chores and routine in exchange for the comforts of a home and a protector. They pray for me.

As they pray for like sinners.

And not pray pray, in the Catholic sense, although sometimes a Hail Mary gets wedged in there; rather, theirs is an endearing castigation that permeates the sociosphere. I imagine the stream of commentary like a moth, papery, fluttering in the breeze, getting into all sorts of places and remaining there, still, until it is ready to infect the next place. This is how judgment travels. Pest-like, fluidly.

In my context, especially, where social capital is akin to paper currency, where everyone knows everyone’s aunt and godmother, where we attend the same weddings with the same people at the same three venues. This is Honduras (a privileged, bubble-like Honduras, I’ll grant), the matriarchy of all matriarchies—women run rampant in their living rooms and nowhere else, they hold court over afternoon tea and equestrian meets, they send Instagram posts with surprised emojis—they talk and talk and talk and judge and talk and then resume their careful postures.

Oh did you hear about so-and-so, that poor thing.

The nerve of that girl.

If my daughter ever.

It’s just not right.

Like that, but worse. I’m struggling to paint a too-dour picture, but these are the brushstrokes that stand out to me, a once-American, once-German, once-Honduran cultural mess of a middle-aged gal. Perhaps it is only fair to compensate ‘the hating’ with dulcet tones: like Sunday lunches with the entire family, or the fact that someone can always help you out with that errand you need to run, and even that when my dogs go missing, the newspaper vendor on the corner is looking out for him. Yes, tight-knit society does have its perks, and a mature, reasoning, able mind should tally and divvy up squarely. Only more often than not, I find myself dwelling.

It is not the judgment that unsettles. Nor the unreasonable expectations of a leisure class that precedes us—witness to two recessions, an actual physical war, and offshoring on steroids—and expects similar behavior in dissimilar circumstances. It’s not that they’re out of touch or prudish. It is the hypocrisy of the whole thing.

Because these edifices our women-folk have so proudly built upon good Christian values and old Spanish names are made of glass. They’ll know this one, I’m sure, this old adage: don’t throw stones.

Talk about defeatism, talk about eating your own.

The same women that urge you to be independent and beautiful (and calorically deficient) will chain you by the pearls. They will instigate you to adopt modernity but judge your resulting quirks. Understand that they too, deep down, yearn for the things that make a woman modern—pantsuits and reactionary opinions and nose rings—but their operating system is static, non-updateable. And it’s only because antiquity was so awful to their kind. Consider the baseness of that housewife who is shackled to an unfaithful or abusive man. Consider the professional spaces where women’s voices were chuckled at, if they ever had the chance to raise them. Consider lowering your head and choking out a garbled yes, sir.

This ought to provoke compassion in the modern woman. She ought to sympathize and take their judgments in stride. Laugh about it, even, if she’s reached a certain plateaux of zen and Buddhist-like affability. Glass houses, heavy stones.

I’m a modern woman, but I have yet to develop this modern mindset of understanding and profound, genuine empathy. There is something amiss here, some hint of resentment at the older generation’s murmurs. I perceive that burden of theirs as a privilege, somehow. That the lack of choice constituted the greatest kind of liberation. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, says my girl Janis. Slay, queen!

My mind keeps returning to Betty Draper whispering to her then-husband, children bunched up near her long skirts. She stares, superior, a dainty smile on her crimson lips, and says to him, We have everything. I am haunted by these words because no we don’t. Not now, anyway, not as women, straddling two impossibilities; the one, a future of normalcy and etiquette, wherein we assume the awesome responsibility of making people, and the other, wherein we assume the assume responsibility of making ourselves. Can you bridge the gap, stretch out far enough to do both?

And what will the girls say when I do?