Finding My Badass Self Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Sherry Stanfa-Stanley

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-290-1

  E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-291-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937953

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  Cover design by Mimi Bark

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: The Beginning

  SUMMER

  Chapter 1: Bellying Up to the Dance Bar

  Chapter 2: Stranger of the Bride

  Chapter 3: The Princess and the Pee

  Chapter 4: Of Bunnies and Batteries

  Chapter 5: Pizza Pie in the Sky

  Chapter 6: Church Hopping

  Chapter 7: I Will Survive

  Chapter 8: Creepy Crawlers

  Chapter 9: You’re Getting Very Sleepy

  Chapter 10: If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don’t Want to Be Right

  Chapter 11: The Woes of Waxing, Not So Poetic

  Chapter 12: Just Shoot Me

  Chapter 13: Hair Today—Gone Tomorrow

  Chapter 14: Out on the Street

  FALL

  Chapter 15: A Match Made in Hell

  Chapter 16: From Meetless to Meatless

  Chapter 17: Riding Shotgun

  Chapter 18: A Coulda-Been or a Wannabe

  Chapter 19: Revolver

  Chapter 20: Get Thee to a Nunnery

  Chapter 21: Old Folks and New Friends

  Chapter 22: Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah

  Chapter 23: Rocking It as a College Mascot

  Chapter 24: Much a Doo-Doo About Nothing

  Chapter 25: Honk If You Pretend to Like Mimes

  Chapter 26: Baring It at the Beach

  Chapter 27: Dining in the Dark

  WINTER

  Chapter 28: I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)

  Chapter 29: You Can Ring My Bell

  Chapter 30: Crying over Spilled Paint

  Chapter 31: Unplugged and Amish

  Chapter 32: Frozen

  Chapter 33: Turn Me On

  Chapter 34: It’s All Happening at the Zoo

  Chapter 35: Let It Roll

  Chapter 36: Tiptoe through the Tulips with Me

  Chapter 37: Stranger Things Have Happened

  Chapter 38: We All Float Down Here

  Chapter 39: Pajama Party of One

  SPRING

  Chapter 40: A Sitting Duck

  Chapter 41: On the Ropes

  Chapter 42: Catching a Flight to Nowhere

  Chapter 43: An Italian/Irish/German/French Woman Walks into a Bar…

  Chapter 44: Going in Circles

  Chapter 45: Coming Full Circle

  Chapter 46: My Big Fat Greek Party

  Chapter 47: A Segway into Catastrophe

  Chapter 48: Running for My Life

  Chapter 49: I Do Believe in Spooks

  SUMMER

  Chapter 50: Catching the Buzz

  Chapter 51: Speed-Dating: Solo-Style

  Chapter 52: Up, Up, and Await

  Epilogue: The End—And a New Beginning

  Acknowledgments

  To Jorden (Son #1) and Kyle (Son #2): Being your mother has been more rewarding than any experience in this book. There. Does that make up for the embarrassment I’ve caused you?

  And to my parents, Denny and Gloria Stanfa: Thanks for teaching me the family motto, “When it’s too rough for everyone else, it’s just about right for us.”

  “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”

  —JOAN DIDION

  “Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

  —CHRISTOPHER ROBIN TO POOH

  “Shoulda, woulda, coulda is way more terrifying than ready, set, go.”

  —LEIGHANN LORD

  Prologue:

  The Beginning

  Often, life serves us vanilla ice cream, and we’re fine with that. Vanilla is sweet. It’s generally satisfying. From time to time, that vanilla is exactly what we want.

  Until one day, we crave something different. Perhaps a new flavor. Or maybe, a sprinkle of nuts: a crazy new experience, say, exfoliating a rhinoceros or going on a raid with a SWAT team.

  But I digress. Let us back up.

  My life had taken the prescribed and expected route in many ways: I graduated from college, married, made a couple babies, and embarked on a long and arguably successful communications career near my hometown of Toledo, Ohio.

  Then, stumbling into my fifties as a divorced empty-nester, I found myself simultaneously unsettled and too settled. I’d lived in the same house and held down the same job for twenty years. I realized I’d spent most of the last three decades doing the same ordinary things.

  I wouldn’t call it a rut—more of a crater.

  I knew many people in a similar situation, particularly midlifers or else young mothers who spent more than their share of evenings folding clothes in front of the TV, daydreaming about the world out there while they contemplated having that second bowl of ice cream.

  So, I sold my home of twenty-one years, bought a condo, and dropped thirty pounds. (Disclaimer: I later regained those thirty and lost them again. Rinse and repeat. Ahem.) Then, I pondered how else I might shake up my life. I needed something more radical.

  Why this epiphany at this time in my life? Was the anticipation of turning fifty-two some significant or magical moment? Maybe I was simply bored. Perhaps it was midlife hormonal psychosis. Or maybe I was subconsciously driven by the fact that my father died a week after he turned fifty-three.

  Regardless of our motivations, at some point we decide to either continue sighing at the status quo of our lives or else we open our minds and our arms to embrace change. I chose change, albeit with trembling hands and a wavering mindset. If we want to change our lives, we have to get past what is holding us back. Generally, that’s our own fear.

  Thus was born The 52/52 Project: my year of fifty-two new enlightening, exciting, and frequently just-kill-me-now experiences.

  A bucket list this was not. It was more an unbucket list. The weekly ventures I planned were intended to push my boundaries, discover my capabilities, and change my life. I fought inertia and stared down fear through a year of experiences I’d never before faced, all outside my comfort zone. They ranged from visiting a nude beach (naturally, I had my seventy-five-year-old mother in tow), to babysitting quadruplets, to auditioning for Survivor.

  Aside from choosing experiences that frightened me, I included a number of outrageous items primarily designed to make me laugh—at least in retrospect. As adults, most of us have forgotten how to be silly. The first rule of going outside our comfort zone is learning to laugh at ourselves.

  Just a couple weeks into the project, I began blogging and started a Facebook page about The 52/52 Project. I had no idea if people would care enough to read along, and the
idea of publicly sharing snippets of my stories scared me nearly as much as some of the escapades themselves. But thousands of people, most of them strangers, jumped on board.

  My online readers not only provided the reward of an early and continuing audience, they also held me accountable for seeing this project through to the end—often a challenge in itself. This group of good-natured sadists appeared charged and excited. We motivated each other every day. Together, we jumped the curb, taking a detour from the safe and secure cul-de-sac of our lives, to visit personally unexplored territories.

  At the start, I wasn’t certain whether I’d be opening the door to an exciting new life or opening Pandora’s Box.

  Turns out, the two are not mutually exclusive.

  SUMMER

  Chapter 1:

  BELLYING UP TO THE DANCE BAR

  Here’s the thing about belly dancing: You seldom look as sexy as you hoped.

  Given my middle-aged figure and history of uncoordination, looking sexy was a long shot. The most I probably could hope to pull off was getting a bit of exercise, enduring minimal humiliation, and walking away without any body parts permanently out of whack.

  I knew belly dancing classes, as the first of my new experiences, would challenge both my physical ability and my pride. I did seem to have at least a couple of the physical prerequisites. A well-meaning older girl informed me, when I was thirteen, that my big hips would come in handy for birthing babies, as if this were something every teenage girl dreams of hearing. (The joke was on both of us years later, when I ended up with two C-sections.)

  And, at this midpoint in my life, Lord knew I had the necessary belly.

  But the word “belly” proved to be far less important than the word “dancing.” “Dancing” should have raised a three-mile-high red flag. The last structured dancing lesson I’d taken was a ballet class in the second grade. The song that my seven-year-old self practiced for weeks for our final recital was “I Can Learn to Do Ballet.”

  The problem was, I could not.

  After my recital, my parents never once mentioned re-enrolling me. I assumed the classes were too expensive.

  Forty-five years later and forty-five minutes into my first belly dancing lesson, my foremost thought was, “Holy Mother of God, please don’t let this end in a public recital.”

  The instructor was a full-sized woman my age or a few years older, but far more agile and confident. She seemed to sense my trepidation. She tossed out a trickle of encouraging remarks: “Age, shape, and size don’t matter here. Belly dancing is for women who want to celebrate life.” She also was fond of telling us, “Belly dancing is different from that other form of dancing entertainment not taught here. We are ladies, not hussies.” And my favorite, that first night: “I’ve only had you for an hour. I don’t want to hear anyone say, ‘I can’t do this.’ You can only say, ‘I can’t do this yet.’” During the first lesson, I muttered, “I can’t do this yet,” approximately five times. Or maybe fifty-two.

  I mastered the hip thrust in minutes. It was a surprising feat, considering my romantic life had provided no opportunity for that particular move in a long while.

  But the stepping and the swiveling and the pivoting? And accomplishing them all in a prescribed order? This appeared to require not just coordination but also some sort of geometric or algebraic equation. Math was not my forte.

  “Step, touch—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And back—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.” Blah-blah-blah. If I couldn’t remember the instructions three seconds after hearing them, you can be damn sure I can’t recall them now.

  The swiveling was particularly perplexing, much like hula-hooping in my school playground days. Even now, my ample hips were useless tools when it came to swiveling. Trying to memorize the additional stepping and pivoting sequences gave me the closest thing to a combined migraine and anxiety attack I’d ever experienced.

  I wanted to believe I was faking my way through, or at least keeping up with the rest of the first-timers. My friend, Mary, while finishing off a bottle of wine the previous weekend, had agreed to join me in this escapade. I glanced over and noticed that as she was pivoting left, I was swiveling right.

  I elbowed her. “This is impossible. Are you having a hard time keeping up, too?”

  Mary shushed me, shook her head, and glided across the floor through the rest of the sequence.

  I secretly vowed to never invite her along again.

  Moments later, the instructor asked a finely tuned returning student to move down the dance line, so “others” could watch her and try to follow along. She was placed directly in front of me. I shrugged off her placement as a coincidence.

  As we continued to swivel and step, I frowned. Each of us had chosen a brightly colored scarf, adorned with gold-colored coins, to wear around our hips. As my classmates danced, the dangling coins from their hips jingled. My own hip scarf remained noticeably silent. A terrible thought struck me: Perhaps the scarf was stretched so tightly around my ample hips that it had absolutely no room to sway and clink. Although it was also possible I was simply the victim of defective coins. I went with that.

  I wasn’t nearly as rattled about my non-clinking coins as I was about all the falling ones. Several coins from our scarves had dropped off and were now scattered across the dance floor. Mary mentioned this to our instructor, who reassured us not to worry about it.

  Not to worry? After all the other dancers chose to disregard these rogue coins, I could think about nothing else but the collateral damage. I kept eying the floor. Each time we enjoyed a momentary break before segueing into a new sequence, I frantically scooped up every stray coin. Was no one else consumed with the fear of slipping on one of these menacing baubles? How would I manage a hip thrust with a broken hip?

  My paranoia was not without justification. Through just a meager handful of physical and athletic pursuits, I had endured a lifetime of accidents.

  During a workplace softball league in 1982, my future and now former husband assigned me the position of catcher. Our romance was still young, so I was eager to please. I crouched down and pounded my mitt with my right hand, as I’d seen professional players do. I was so preoccupied with this vital maneuver that I forgot to keep my eye on the pitcher—which is why the ball slammed straight into my face.

  I’d like to say I crashed to the ground with the ball securely in hand. In reality, it knocked me flat and smashed my glasses. I rose to my feet, empty-handed, sore, and sightless. But I was tough. Besides, my boyfriend/coach pointed out that we didn’t have any spare players. So, I continued playing the remainder of the game, squinting in right field, where my near-blindness had little opportunity to prove me any worse a player than I was.

  As the years passed, my coordination and athletic prowess never did kick in. A rollerblading incident in 1999 ended with a CT scan in the ER, and in my second—and final—attempt at snow skiing, I fell off the chairlift.

  Somehow, I managed to make it, free of any physical crisis, through my first belly dancing class. And through a second one, too.

  When time for the third class rolled around, I reasoned it wasn’t worth investing more of my time or money. Why stick with something I’d given a shot if I didn’t enjoy it and showed little promise? I had other seeds to sow. Other crosses to bear. Other clichés to write.

  Although I became a belly dancing dropout after two lessons, the gig was not without its positives. Except for my nightly hot flashes, I hadn’t sweated so much in years. I lost a pound in water weight over those two weeks.

  That hip thrust could come in handy, too, if I ever got lucky again.

  The point was, I’d tried something new. I’d gone outside my comfort zone, which was the idea behind this whole project. I’d also learned I was indeed a lady and not a hussy, no matter what anyone said.

  I felt no shame in moving on.

  Chapter 2:

  STRANGER OF THE BRIDE

  A little
hint about remaining inconspicuous when crashing a wedding reception: It’s probably best not to catch the bridal bouquet.

  The bouquet toss was the furthest thing from my mind when I cruised party hall parking lots on a Friday night. Seeking another experience for my year of new adventures, I simply anticipated a nice meal, a few drinks, and the opportunity to celebrate the wedded bliss of a wonderful couple. Sure, I wasn’t invited, and I’d never met either of them. Minor details.

  Crashing a wedding reception might have been more fathomable and potentially fun if I were twenty-one, accompanied by a group of college friends, and half-plastered. At fifty-two, alone, and sober? Not so much. Considering most items still ahead on my unbucket list, however, this was one I thought could be enjoyable—in between the panic and paranoia.

  After a half hour of circling the city, I scored with a full parking lot at the third place I passed, one of the most upscale reception halls in town. Surely, I’d struck gold with a three-star wedding. Yet when I stepped into the lobby, the first thing I spotted was a poster with a huge photograph and the words “Rest in Peace.”

  Since when did a party hall host a wake on a Friday night? I stepped back, contemplating my escape. As I reached the doorway, I paused. Crashing a funeral wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it would indeed be a whole new experience.

  And then, I spied a bigger banner, reading “Congratulations,” along with a photo of a happy young couple. Apparently, the first poster was only their memoriam for a recently deceased loved one.

  My shoulders drooped at this tearjerker tribute. My sentiments, however, quickly changed gears. Sure, this beloved friend or family member was unable to attend. But I was alive and on hand to take part in the celebration.

  It seemed so wrong, yet so right.

  I ignored my weak legs and wandered in. I’d morphed into a ten-year-old schoolgirl, wondering just how much I could get away with.

  Next to a pile of scrapbooks on a table, I spotted a basket of tickets for dinner selections. I grabbed the last slip for chicken. “Boneless chicken breast with bread stuffing, topped with a garlic pan sauce.” It sounded scrumptious! I was hungry. And thirsty, too!