Category: Inside Lane

I have written before about my date rape experience, and why I support rape crisis centers.  I’m pretty much an open book when it comes to all that.  I don’t mind talking about it because I’ve worked very hard to heal the damage done, and because my voice might mean the difference between hurt and health for another person.  I also don’t mind talking about it because Raped is not who I am.  Rape is only something that has happened to me.  Lots of things have happened to me, and believe me, 90% of those things eclipse that one night.

I’ve tried to write this post about six times now.  I’ve been very long-winded.  I’ve been very brief.  I’ve been gentle and I’ve been strident.  And, I’ve had to admit that as much growing and healing as I have done, I’ve still got some to do.  I’m trying it one last time.

You see, a couple of months ago, a man came into my office and sat down at my desk.  It wasn’t too long before I realized that the reason he looked so familiar is because the last time I saw him, he was laughing about how he had just forced himself on me.  Twenty-four years had added brawn and gut, and his hairline had receded like low tide, but it was him.  The only thing separating me from the adult version of the teenager who had done so much damage was about three feet and a hundred hours of therapy.

My panic default is Charm School politeness*, so once I was assured he hadn’t made the connection to me, I switched into Stepford mode, got through the encounter as swiftly as possible, then ran into the bathroom to hide until my heart quit pounding.  I texted a most trusted ladyfriend, and called on my cyber-posse, who all made me feel better with a lullabye of what kinds of terrible things could be done to him.

Then, I pulled myself together and went back to work because…what else was I going to do?  I couldn’t very well hide in the bathroom for the rest of my career.

I went home and told my husband, then spent a few days worrying, but decided to deal with it the way I had the first time.  Quietly.  I called our employee assistance hotline and I asked for some advice.  They were mostly concerned with getting me to a rape crisis line, so I had to explain repeatedly that the incident was a quarter of a century gone by–that I have coworkers who weren’t even born when it happened–and that I just needed an idea of what I could do to avoid future contact.  They weren’t really equipped to advise me on that.

Who is?  I mean, the guy didn’t recognize me.  I never pressed charges.  It isn’t like he’s a convicted felon, or I have any reason to request him being barred from our office.

I waited another couple of days, and I told my manager, asking for confidentiality.  I didn’t want my coworkers to know.  I didn’t want to have to explain it all again.  There’s the kicker.

While I don’t mind talking about what happened to me in the context of:  This terrible thing happened once, and I overcame it.  I totally hate talking about in the context of:  This terrible thing happened, and this is making me feel vulnerable again, and I am afraid–not of him, because Lord knows I am a different woman today and I would not hesitate to take off an ear, gouge out an eye, and remove his favorite part–but of how seeing him dredges up all the old panic, hurt, and reminds me of how helpless and weak I was.  I do not like looking weak.

So, I tried to laugh about it.  I tried to make it seem like it was nothing.  Whistling in the graveyard.  Lalala.  No big deal, just FYI, you know?

Last week, he came in again, and he came to my desk with another request, and this time he called me by my name.  My name is not on my desk, and I was not wearing my badge, and there is no way he would have known my name other than having been previously introduced.  After I concluded the business by passing him off to my manager, he came back to my desk, called me by my name again, thanked me profusely, and left.  It was a good ten minutes before I realized he had recognized who I was.

This time, I didn’t run to the bathroom.  Instead, I rounded up my coworkers and I told them who he was, and why I wanted help avoiding him.  And I accepted the hugs, and the hand holding, and took my sympathy lumps because these are good people who care about me, and who hate that someone hurt me, so my pride has no place between them and me.

But it is embarrassing!  And I think that’s something people don’t understand.  You get raped, and you are embarrassed by all the accoutrements of the violation.  When you say the word rape, you are including a whole list of words you don’t normally share with people, and you expose yourself in a way that comes with more baggage than a celebutante on vacation.

The great news is that a transfer has come through for me, so I won’t be at that office much longer, and while I am there, my coworkers are watching out for me.

What’s kind of funny is that for the past several weeks, I’ve been dealing with depression and some serious self-esteem issues (all while I was at LTYM and should have felt like a rock star!) and I couldn’t pinpoint why.  Him coming back into the office put a fine point on it, and it hit me tonight that it was just all the old stuff coming up again.

Back to work on myself for me, it seems.

Still, I faced him and it didn’t break me.  That’s huge.  I’m not broken.  I am strong.  And I’m still me.

*Charm School polite only comes out when I feel threatened personally.  When it’s my family being threatened, I turn into this Tasmanian devil of Alabama ugly.

In my head, I am a really good skater.  I could tell you exactly what you need to do to accomplish intermediate moves, exactly which muscle groups should be lighting up as you execute them, and where your center of gravity should be at all times.  But, put me in the skates and I’m really good at going forward and backward, and look like Bambi trying to do anything else.

Nah, I’m better than Bambi because I can stay on my feet, but I do tend to sling my arms around a lot.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between being able to do, and being able to teach.  I could probably teach you to do a skating jump without ever leaving the ground myself.  I hate the adage that suggests teachers can’t “do”, so they’ve settled for something less than.  Doing is one hell of a lot easier than teaching, as anyone who has ever attempted to show a child to tie a shoelace can attest.  I think velcro strap shoes were invented by a mother who just gave up.

Full disclosure:  After years of trying to teach my son to tie his shoes, I quit.  He preferred me doing it for him, so he would fake not being able to do it himself.  I decided that eventually peer pressure would light a fire under him, and he’d figure it out when his social group shamed him out of velcro.  That worked.  He ties like a pro now.

Thor and I were talking about differences in how his father and I approach things, the other day, and I said, “You know, Daddy and I are patient in different ways.  For instance, Daddy is much more patient with you when it comes to homework and school work.  He’s really good at helping you learn from books, and he is very, very patient with that.”  That’s the truth.  I’m a terrible homework mother.

I get frustrated because I feel like the child is being purposefully obtuse (and because experience with things like tying shoelaces has taught me that he will pull a fake out) and my reaction to that ruins the learning environment.  I’m much more patient with other people’s kids when it comes to book learnin’.  I might expect too much out of mine.

Teaching is hard work because it requires knowing how to do The Thing, being able to break The Thing down to its smallest parts, and being able to rebuild The Thing from the bottom up in such a way that someone else can follow along with you, and then do on their own.  It requires an understanding of how to communicate each of those abilities in a variety of different ways, to reach a variety of different learners.  And, it requires the ability to manage different personalities all at the same time.

Teaching is a juggling act of the highest order, and requires a mental coordination that rivals any choreography.  A good teacher can be the difference between life and death.

I’ve written before about Mrs. Mendina, the teacher who refused to let me ruin my education.  In my sophomore year, I decided–and I mean made a fully formed, thought out, carefully considered willful decision–to stop being the Good Girl and to rebel.  Mrs. Mendina presented the first opportunity for me to test out my badness, and when I made my move, she jerked me up by my boot straps so hard, it left my head spinning.

I’m no quitter, though, so I tried again.  And again.  Finally, she told me she didn’t know what was going on with me, but she was not going to let me fool around and hurt myself.  And she didn’t.  And I didn’t.  Much.  I did fail P.E. that year.

Here’s how you fail P.E.:  Don’t go to class, and when you are offered the opportunity to write an essay rather than participate, sit in the library reading Voltaire and sulking about how no one understands you instead of writing your essay.  Then, on the day your essay is due, swear up and down that you slid the essay under the gym teacher’s door, and insist someone must have accidentally thrown it away.  Swear. On. Your. Life.  Refuse to back down.  Refuse to back down, even with the vice principal tells you point blank that he knows you are lying, and threatens you with video evidence.  Even when the P.E. teacher crosses her arms and calls you a liar–because you are a liar!  Swear.  Refuse.  Cry.  Make up the details of your essay on the spot as evidence that you know what you are talking about.  And fail.  That’s how it is done.

Don’t fail P.E.  It isn’t worth the stress.  Just go play the volleyball, and sulk that no one understands you while you spike balls into the backs of people’s heads.

I wish Mrs. Mendina had taught P.E. as well as American History.  I might have passed.

First, I have no intention of dying any time soon.  This is not a goodbye note, or a cry for help.  Just putting that out there so I don’t end up getting sent to the school counselor again.  No, Betty Draper’s instructions to Sally, and one of my LTYM castmate’s essays put me in mind of it, so I figured I’d take a load off my family and let you all know how I’d like to be celebrated in the end*.

1.  Cremate me.  Cremate me as cheaply as possible.  Please make sure I’m good and dead first because it would be horrifying to wake up just as I was being sent into the crematorium, but once you’re sure I’m off to greener pastures, fire up the oven and send me on my way.

2.  Get rid of the cremains.  I don’t really care how you do it so long as you do not keep me, or put me in a place where you feel compelled to visit me.  Ideally, you could just air me out on a breezy day.  I don’t want you to feel tied to a jar of ash, or a man made gemstone, or a locket, or a drawer at the cemetery, or any of the other ideas I found on Pinterest for what to do with cremains.  You don’t need to worry about keeping a piece of me around.  You’ll have me in your memories, and those won’t upset you if someone accidentally knocks them off the mantle, or drops them in a toilet.

3.  Please do have a memorial service.  I won’t care, I’ll be dead, but people sometimes need to say goodbye.  Pick a funeral home where either you feel comfortable, or the place is so creepy it makes you laugh.

4.  At the service, do not play any music you like.  I don’t want you to hear a song you love and have it remind you of my funeral.  So dark!  Instead, play something really twee like Save a Prayer from Duran Duran.  That song is about having it off with a stranger, so it is both grossly inappropriate for a funeral, and impossible to cry over.  Also play Time in a Bottle.  Because I would have requested it anyway.  Or, Girl from Ipanema.

5.  Tell the truth in your eulogy.  Tell your truth.  Don’t feel like you have to say nice things about me if you don’t feel them.  I’m human, and imperfect, so if you need to talk about the imperfections, go for it.  I won’t mind and you’ll feel better.

6.  I would like for someone to pick out what they think is my funniest blog entry, and what they think is the most poignant, and read those.  Read the poignant one first, then say a prayer, then play Save a Prayer.  Then, do my eulogy and play Time in a Bottle.  Then, read the funny blog entry, and maybe play Electric Avenue because that song is awesome and you rarely hear it on the radio, so the chances of my funeral ruining it for you are slim.  And that should be the end of it of the service.  Then, you should go eat.

7.  Please do not do flowers.  Instead, either donate to a food bank, or a women’s group.

8.  Should I shuffle off this mortal coil before my son is an adult, please write down some things you remember me saying about him, and give those to him.  Now and then, if you think about it, remind him of how much he delighted me.  That’s the only thing that bothers me about the thought of dying: Leaving him before I’ve cemented in him how wonderful he is.  Remind him that his being made my good life a great one.

9.  Please go somewhere nice for lunch.  If you are on a diet, please cheat.  Eat the most delicious things on the menu, and tip your waiter generously.

10.  You should definitely make up memorial service programs because it is important for people to be able to follow along and see when this thing is going to be over.  You should use this picture of me:

It took me a long time to get my hair that high, and I want it immortalized!  (That’s another reason to cremate me.  No one else does my makeup as well as I do, and I will haunt you if you put me in the ground looking like some televangelist’s wife.)

11.  If I should die of old age, my obituary should read as such:

Lane Buckman enjoyed life.  She was abundantly blessed with family and friends, laughed more than she ever cried, was happier more often than she was ever sad, and was pretty satisfied with her lot.  When she wanted something, she went after it, and when she was finished with something, she put it away.  Unless it was shoes, or the contents of her purse, in which case she left those lying around indefinitely.  She appreciated all the people around her, most especially her son, who lit her entire world.

12.  If something else happens, use the obituary above, and add the following:

While she would liked to have hung around longer out of curiosity and sheer enjoyment, she lived happily and fully, and only regretted that truly unfortunate perm, and having worn that one outfit to the Billy Idol concert in 2001.

I think that about covers it.  Again, I don’t plan on dying soon, and now you’ve all got a blueprint for how it should go down when the inevitable occurs.  How about you?  What would you want for a funeral?

*Because I am a 12 year old boy on the inside, I snickered the whole time I typed that.

Family lore has it that a post in my great-grandparents’ fence was marked by hobos, to indicate a soft touch.  During the Depression, down on their luck people knew they could stop by the Williams’ dirt farm and get something to eat.  There wasn’t money to give out, but Jim and Lola always made sure there was something to eat.  They didn’t have much, but they shared what they had.

Jim and Lola’s daughter, Ettie, would go on to marry my grandfather, John.  John grew up as a giver, so he and Ettie quietly continued in the same vein.

“When I was still living at home and working,” my mother told me, “a woman was laid off from work.  She had three kids, and her husband was gone.  I went home and told Mother and Daddy about it.  Daddy asked me how many kids she had, then he went to the freezer and he started shopping our groceries for her.  Then, he went to the store, and he picked up whatever else he thought she needed.  They took care of that woman until she was able to find another job and get on her feet.  You don’t leave kids to starve.”

My mother, Joan, kept up the work in a multitude of ways (and my dad).  The most lasting impression for me was a couple of children who would show up at the Hardees to beg.  My mother bought them food.  The manager told her that the mother was outside, and she sent the kids in to beg, and suggested it might be a grift, but that didn’t matter to my mother.  What mattered to my mother was that kids were hungry.  She fed them.

I’ve grown up with the same attitude.  I rarely carry cash, so I can’t always help when I see someone on the roadside, but when I can, I feed people.  I cannot abide the thought of people going to bed hungry.  I cannot abide the thought of a mother knowing she is putting her child to bed hungry.  I cannot abide the thought of children, or elderly not knowing where the next meal will come from.

Summer is upon us, and that means school will be out.  For some children, that will mean hunger.  For some children, a school breakfast, or lunch is the only meal they can count on in a day.  Summer vacation means not knowing where the next meal will come from.

Please consider this when you are grocery shopping, and please participate in any food banking your grocery store does.  Please donate cash to your local food banks.  And, please, if you see a family that is begging, even if it might be a grift, find a way to get some food in their hands.

There is nothing wrong with being a soft touch.  There is everything wrong with people being hungry.

A few years back, a friend invited me to a Korean spa.  At the time, I just didn’t have time.  Then I didn’t have the inclination.  Then, when a new spa (SPA CASTLE) opened up about ten minutes from my house, I started eyeing it with wary interest. After hearing good things from trusted acquaintances, I decided to give it a go.

The main draw for me was the fact that there are napping rooms at this spa.  You can go and just take a nap.  There is no down side to that.  In fact, the only down side to the whole concept of the Korean spa is the required nudity.  Yes.  Required nudity.

See, the spa is split into three parts:  Female only, male only, and errebody up in this place.  In the gendered areas, if you plan to get into the spa baths, you’re going in buck naked.  Part of this is cultural, part of this is practical, all of this takes some getting used to if you’re the kind of person who changes in the gym like a Mormon switching sacred underpants.  Like me.  I can count on one hand the number of people who have ever seen me stark naked.  Well, I could three hours ago.

If you want to use the shared baths, you wear a swimsuit.  If you want to use the shared saunas, lounges, restaurants, and have run of the coed section of the facility, you wear a spa issued uniform.  Boys get a blue Tshirt and baggy gray shorts, girls get pink and gray.

You might think that being naked was my main concern.  My main concern was that I would be issued a uniform that would make it look like I was trying to squeeze into my gym shorts from junior high.  Naked looks better than ill-fitted, and I am vain.  I would rather let it all hang out, than look like a sausage with rubber bands wrapped around it.

I am happy to report that the spa uniforms, though absolutely unattractive, fit fine.  They were also soft and smelled really nice.

What drove me to the Spa Castle today, was the realization that Molly Maids would be coming around 9 this morning, and the last two times I’ve had days off when they’ve come, I’ve spent an hour hiding in a bathroom, then hiding in the other bathroom after having made a huge nuisance of myself trying to help them do their work.  In order to avoid that same situation, and since Spa Castle is open 24 hours, I thought I would just go directly over after dropping Thor off at school.  I thought I could avoid chickening out of going by booking a spa treatment, so I scheduled myself a body scrub for 9am.

The website tells you to be there 30 minutes ahead of time, so you can soak in a hot tub before getting scrubbed down.  I got there an hour early because I figured it would take me that long to get used to the idea of being naked.

It took like ten minutes.

A big part of that was the fact that everyone was stripped down.  It isn’t like the gym where there is that one lady who prances around, kicks her foot up on the bench beside you, then bends over to touch the foot she left on the floor, daring you to make eye contact with her anus.  No.  It was just a bunch of naked people.  Fat people.  Skinny people.  Old people.  Young people.  Light people.  Dark people.  Hairy people.  Not-hairy people.  CLEAN people.

Clean is a big deal for me.

Normally, I avoid hot tubs because I don’t like the idea of sitting in a hot chowder of other people’s filth.  Human stew is not my idea of a good time.  If I can see gunk floating on the water, all I can think about is how it is surfing toward me, looking to dry dock on my shoulders and crawl up into my ears.  Gross.

Spa Castle was clean, clean, clean.  And they have showers everywhere.  You shower with soap before you get into a bath.  You shower like you mean it.  You shower like it’s Silkwood because that’s the only polite way you’ll be ready to get into a bath.

Then, when you are sparkling, you find a tub that suits you, and (if you are me) you wallow around like a happy manatee until it is time for your body scrub.  You might also go pool to pool pressing all the buttons to see what they do, and you might accidentally give yourself an enema if you aren’t careful.  I highly recommend pushing all buttons from a safe distance, so that when a jet opens with the force of a fire hydrant, you don’t find yourself blown across a hot tub by a blast of water that leaves your cheeks flapping.

Spa Castle is 140,000 square feet of intimidating, so before going, I read up on Yelp reviews, asked a bunch of questions, and made my plans known to a select few.  I am glad I did because when I was called into my body scrub appointment, I was prepared for these truths:

1. A Korean body scrub is an intimate and brutal thing.
2. It is performed by a woman in her underwear. (In the lady section.  In the man section, I’m assuming you get a man in his knickers.)
3. It involves such scrubbing as to leave balls of your dead skin everywhere.

You know that scene in Shogun, where Richard Chamberlain is shamed for being dirty?  That’s all I could think about as I watched little wads of my skin slough off onto the padded table where I’d been instructed to lie, while this lady in a sheer black bra and panties (so fancy!) put on the equivalent of sandpaper gloves and went to town.  I wanted to apologize.  I had no idea there was so much dead skin on me!  (And I actually have no idea if that scene exists.  Shogun came out when I was a child, and the parts I saw, I was hiding behind a chair to see.  I remember not seeing the excitement about Chamberlain, though.  He was no Richard Burton.)

When my friend told me the scrub would be intimate, she used the word “labia” and I am glad she did because otherwise, I would have–I don’t know what I would have done.  But I was prepared to be treated like a car going through a wash detail, and that’s about all it was.  First, all the dead skin was scrubbed from my body (oh my lord, the amount of it!), then I was sent to shower.  When I came back, I was lathered up from toes to chin, flipped, lathered, flipped again and lathered some more, then rinsed with a big bowl of water. After that, the lady shampooed and conditioned my hair, patted me on the back, and sent me on my way.

So, to recap that, I was pretty much scrubbed and bathed like a baby.  Everything you would do to wash a baby clean?  She did to me.  I feel like I should buy her dinner, or at least a Mother’s Day card.

The treatment left me feeling slick as a whistle, though.  If you can manage the shock of having someone sandpaper the hollow of your thigh, and take the first layer of epidermis from your sphincter, I recommend it.  If you’re uncomfortable having a stranger wipe your bottom, stay far away.  You will die of embarrassment.

After that, I went back to rolling in the hot tub like a manatee (an informed manatee, who knew which jets to avoid) and then hopped into my swimsuit to go try out the coed pools.

Those were fine.  The saunas were all fine.  There were two I couldn’t make myself go into because they looked way too much like the clay ovens used for making pita bread, and I don’t want to go sit in an oven, but the rest were pretty nifty.  My favorites were the salt sauna and the dry sauna.  I like a dry heat.

I ate lunch at the restaurant and the food was nice, and I padded around wearing my soft, nice-smelling uniform, looking for a good place to take a nap.  I never found one.  That was my one disappointment.  I couldn’t find a good place to go to sleep.  I tried in a couple of different spots, but a bird came to hang out next to me on the patio, and some dude came to hang out next to me in the sleeper pool area.  I could have taken a nap in the nap room in the ladies’ locker area, but it was too warm there.

All in all, I really enjoyed my visit.  When you arrive, they give you a pass key shaped like a wristwatch, and that’s what you use to store all your things in a locker.  That’s also your money pass.  When you buy something (like a service, or a bowl of ramen), you swipe your watch.  At check out, you pay for the total you’ve accrued.  I loved this because it meant I walked around empty-handed the whole time.  I didn’t even have my cell phone on me–because those aren’t allowed in the naked areas.

When I walked out, I called my husband and told him not to bother coming straight home tonight.  I told him to go there and hang out in the men’s side for a few hours.  I told him to get a body scrub–I kind of hope he does that before he reads this because that would be funny.

I found my time to be a great benefit.  I’m relaxed.  I feel good.  And all the weird aches I’ve had lately are all gone.  Scrubbed off, jetted away, and floated out to wherever those go.

Should you go? Depends.  What is your nudity threshold?  Butts are butts, and we all have them, so if you can look past the one taking a shower next to you, get on in there.  It’s $35 to use all the facilities, plus the cost of services, food, and drink.  And kids are welcome.  You’ll just want to have the butts are butts conversation with them before you go.

4.8 out of 5 stars from me.

-0.2 stars because of the enema jet