yearning for yang
by freya richardson

I’m 53 and men are a totally alien species to me.

I know kangaroos about as well as I know men….and I mean this literally. For some unfathomable reason, they have been almost totally absent in my life. I did have a father for a short while, but that’s about it. No brothers (big or little), no husbands, no sons, no nephews, no grandsons. I do sometimes see men on the street. Read a book about one once. Or was that a kangaroo?

I feel like an alien species myself, living a life virtually without male influence. It’s a bit like walking lopsided or having only one eye. No, you know what it feels like? It feels like when you were a kid and so much of life was a mystery. When I was a first grader, I could not fathom “home room”—it simply did not compute. And French kissing: “They do WHAT? Who told you that? You must have heard that wrong!” And sex…………early descriptions of it clarified almost nothing. (Actually, the first time I saw the real thing, I asked my poor mortified parents “Are y’all playing bunk beds?!”)

I know no more about men at 53 than I knew about boys at 5. The very few men I know seem to live in some kind of parallel universe. Their perspective on what’s so is so radically different from mine, I am fairly certain they are (or I am) suffering from a sort of intellectual/emotional dyslexia.

And their bodies! What I want to know is, where do their penises go when they sit down? And my friends tell me men enjoy peeing outside—that they will actually leave the house to go pee in the yard. Is this true?? WHY? And what is this writing in the snow stuff?

We aliens, sometimes we choose to laugh about the almost total lack of male energy in our lives. And sometimes we cry. Sometimes we wonder what it feels like to have a man’s arms around us … what it feels like to be loved. And what it feels like to grow in partnership, to feel the interplay of yin and yang as we grow into fully functioning human beings. We aliens, we have an empty half—a hollowness that echoes through the long dark nights. No wonder our gait is lopsided.