Is changing who you are when you date someone really a bad thing?

I remember yelling it out in the middle of an argument, “I DO NOT want to be your camp counselor!”

I was married then, and it was some disagreement we’d had a thousand times over more than a decade together. But it was the first time I’d said that one thing aloud. It was the first time I saw my role in our relationship so clearly.

I had a metaphorical clipboard and it was holding stacks of Post-It note to-do lists and unpaid bills and books on parenting and doctor appointments and retirement strategies and recipes for meals all of us could agree on. I was tired and overwhelmed and the only thing I could do in that moment was blow my whistle. Loudly. And hope that the camper I was married to would step into a leadership role.

That’s harsh, I know. But it was our dynamic. And it was even harsher a year later, well into my divorce, when I realized how accountable I was for promoting myself into the the role of Camp Counselor and then keeping myself gainfully employed there for so many years.

I trashed the clipboard and whistle and dated with the intention of never being the Camp Counselor again.

To some degree, I was successful. However, in shedding my Camp DivorceAMonga t-shirt and plastic friendship bracelets, I didn’t realize I’d be so open to wearing different (and maybe equally as concerning) identities.

I wanted to date different kinds of men, try on who I was with them, see what life was like with a corporate lawyer, a photographer, a much-younger man, someone older. That was good for me, and it stretched out my expectations of relationships. Plus, it was fun. Camp Counselors don’t end up eating a dinner of candy and cheap beer with a 26-year old hipster at midnight. They are too worried about the plan for Sunday morning to stay for the 2 a.m. jazz show at an underground club. Camp Counselors roll their eyes at attorneys on the other side of a pharmaceutical class action lawsuit.

Keep reading here to find out about the men I chose and what they brought out in me. 

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Crossing borders

My passport expired eight years ago. How in the world did that happen?

It happened because of grad school and having $20 in my bank account for several years in a row and then meeting someone and being in love and even more broke, then having a baby and not being able to conceptualize how in the world to get us all somewhere anything other than a drivers license might be needed. These would have all horrified the 22-year old who applied for her first passport just in time to backpack across Europe with her best friend after college graduation. My passport was supposed to be a living, breathing document of all I was learning and doing and seeing on my own, all of my big and humbling experiences. 

But then, I also swore my hostel card would be used many, many more times after that trip. I haven't since slept in one of those foldover sheets on a disgusting mattress in a room full of people I hope don't steal that passport off my body in my fitful sleep. I haven't ever again bought a beer from a vending machine in a hostel lobby or thanked goodness I was eligible for the under-26 places to stay.

My world, on that European trip, exploded. And when I went to graduate school, it got bigger still. And maybe when I met my ex-husband, it zeroed in on him. It shrunk for good reasons of happiness and faith and belief in the expansiveness of love. I wanted an enormous life. I just didn't see at the time how small I was making myself in it.

But that has changed. Last month, I asked my parents to dig out my old passport from my file. I was apprehensive to open it, remembering it hadn't actually been stamped in each country whose borders I crossed, and that I hated the picture, taken in haste to get the application downtown in time. 

It was as bad as I thought. But now that I am 40 and will be dyeing my hair monthly until I am a fire-engine-redhead wheeling through the nursing home, I have a hard time judging that lady too harshly for the moussed up layered bob. And God help any of us who were hitting our stride in the early 90s -- please don't make your mind up about me based on that embroidered vest (with a tank top and most likely, an ankle-lenth wrap skirt with granny boots. 

But the boozy look and Lucky Charms cheeks? Go right ahead and snicker at those. I did. Good lawd.

That year was 1994. And now, 18 years later, I've surrendered the whole passport for something new. It's time to cross into new territory.

This time, I am taking a trip with two girlfriends. This trip, we're celebrating being 40. Our tolerance is lower and there won't be hostels or late-night lingering with men with accents from those hostels. There won't be hiking across ancient cities and -- thank you, Jesus -- I will be rolling my suitcase instead of heaving it on my back. 

No mix-tapes and Walkmen to make the transport there go more quickly. Nary a sleeping bag. No strategy about how to see the world on $50 a day.

This trip I am rushing off to will only involve settling into beach chairs in the sand and lingering over dinner, laughing hard about how happy we are to be where we are in our lives. Oh, and People Magazine. We will be laughing over whatever is in People Magazine. 

You know what will be the same, though? My new passport pictures are terrible, too. 

This time, I care even less. This time, I probably won't get stamped. This trip, I will probably come home sunburned and loaded down in cheapy souvenirs rather than inspired to change the world and tour every single castle in Ireland. No vests with tank tops, either. I promise.

I am just so ready to get back out there again. To show that girl that this way of traveling, all this time in between passports, isn't so tragic after all.

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His first attempt at fake shaving

He got his first shaving kit a couple of Christmases ago. It came from a neighbor, not an antiqued silver set with a badger brush all tucked in a velvet-lined box, but the plastic kind emblazoned with Lightning McQueen and including strawberry fluoride smelling shaving cream and all enveloped in and impossible-to-open molded plastic casing and wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper. I thought it seemed cute. He wasn't interested.

And then I cleaned out the cabinets under the bathroom sinks, found the box, and placed it on the edge of the tub for Lil E to see. That simple clearing of clutter coincided with an interest in shaving -- not of man faces or even his dad, but of lady stuffs and particularly arm pits.

He is fascinated by who chooses to have clean-shaven underarms and why that mostly seems to be women. Since it is just Lil E and me most of the time, the business of being a lady doesn't faze him. He's used to it. There's evidence of it in many corners, drawers and conversations in our home. It's strange then to catch him staring off, squinty-eyed and wheels clearly turning, only for him to confess he's cranking away on who decided women should shave under their arms and men shouldn't and why "the ladies don't want the tickly stuff that's kind of fun to feel under there" and if they didn't shave, if all that hair would get crazy out of control in some kind of zombie or closet-hiding monster.

Pit perseveration, it's the really good stuff of six-year olds, I guess.

Given that's where his head has been, it surprised me that when he finally chose to unwrap the bladeless razor and test it out on his baby-soft skin, that it went on his face. Of course, he's seen his dad shave on many occasions. But according to Lil E, he's still using the same electric razor method he did during all of the years I knew him. I'm not sure where he learned to lather up or if it was just some kind of mysterious testosterone instinct at work, but there was no question that if he was going to be fake shaving, it would be across his cheeks and shimmying over his lip and carefully rounding his tiny cleft chin.

I had to help him a bit, showing him how to turn the little mountain of pink goop from the Lightning McQueen spray can into a cloud of cream in his palm. He looked in the mirror I pulled out for him while I helped smooth it out where one day, sideburns will be. Then I placed my hand over his hand over the hollow razor and gently pulled down and swept up, showing him the rhythm I've seen the men in my life do a million times. The one I hadn't yet been able to imagine my own boy doing one day years from now. Certainly not one I expected to show him.

He shaved his perfect, sunkissed, sweet face clean. He beamed a big, proud smile at himself in the mirror and then at me, his dimples etched out under the last remaining lines of shaving cream.

He will forget this moment, I imagine. And when the time comes for real, he will scoff at his mother, giggling or maybe even weepy to see him skimming his face to shave away errant bits of fuzz. He may keep wondering about the things women do and the rituals ascribed to gender, and perhaps will choose to follow his father's way with the electric razor rather than using blades. Real blades.

Even as the images of those future shaves flashed through my mind, I let myself believe that it is all very far away even though I know, we all know, that of course it isn't.

Then, because he is six and his face and his confidence and feeling about himself were all smoother than ever from fake shaving, he did something else I didn't expect.

He swiftly poured out a palm full of shaving cream, lathered it up and smeared it all over his....chest.

"Do men or ladies ever shave all the crazy hair off of their chest?" He said it more as a statement of enthusiasm than a question. I answered anyway.

"Well, yes." I said. "Some men do shave their chests."

I was trying not to burst the bubble of his squeaky-clean confidence by laughing and it wasn't easy.

"GOOD! Because I am probably going to be super hairy like Daddy and when I am a man, I am really going to have to take care of that!"

And with that, he pulled and swept that little red plastic razor up and down his concave first-grader chest and arond his half-outty belly button and right up to his clavicle.

If I would have turned to grab a washcloth or wipe up a puddle of water outside the tub, I might have missed it -- the moment when he came to his armpits, the briefest blip in his fake shaving time, when he paused, processed, decided something I'm guessing has to do with being a real guy who shaves his chest but stops short at turning his underarms into something ladylike, who draws some kind of internal line between swiping the chest and face clean and getting all grunty about the gender division of stubbly bits, and then chooses to leave them as is, opts to let that super hairy, crazy, tickly  zombie stuff shine like an emblem of his someday, future, please-God-faraway manhood.

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