Professional Widow
This is unusual for me, I suppose. I just want to meditate on a single song and write here. Specifically Tori Amos’ Professional Widow.
It is a song I have carried around in my consciousness for a considerable time. I always assumed I had connected with it, at least originally, because I was an angsty angry teenager and that singing the somewhat explicit lyrics was a good way of blowing off steam. But really it plays into a lot of things I’ve come to believe about the world and about myself.
Even that this character, this woman, is a widow in a professional capacity resonates deeply. There is a certain permanence to this arrangement. There are always these other people, these men, in her life and they’re always in the past. They’re always “back there” somewhere. It never works out. It cannot, else she would stop being the Professional Widow and become someone else entirely. There is no romantic fulfillment. There is no ‘happily ever after.’ Whether she is literally killing off her suitors hardly seems important to the reality of the relationships.
I wondered a few weeks ago if I connected to the song so intensely because I identify with the Professional Widow so keenly. I mean all hopes at romantic fulfillment are back there in my past, scarcely revisited except under keen microscopes… as if to perform autopsies. To wonder what went wrong. To assign blame and shame and judgment. Maybe this isn’t something I am supposed to do or have.
The song itself seems a funeral procession hymnal to all relationships in the widow’s life, not merely the romantic ones. Tori sings:
starfucker just like my daddy
just like my daddy selling his baby
just like my daddy
gonna strike a deal make him feel like a congressman
it runs in the family
If you want to know what I truly believe it is that I cannot win. It is that I will never be good enough, that I will never be able to please anyone. And I had that demonstrated for me tonight, and that is why I am writing here now and replaying this version of this particular song with organ grinding and banshee-esque screams. The worst part was that I could see that person’s brain ticking over. They couldn’t even make the connection between what they had expressed and how it affects me. How it makes me feel. If you trivialise a core aspect of my being you effectively trivialise me. And the worst part is that I’ve come to expect this from people around me. I sit around waiting for the axe to fall. I wait anxiously for the day that people decide I’m not worthy of love, that I’m less than human.
I don’t feel like I can rely on people. I don’t feel like I can trust people. I want to. I want for nothing more than to have someone constant and stable in my life. And like the widow I can only take solace in the hymn. It doesn’t particularly matter what it is or who it is to. It is mine, it is known, and it is unchanging.
Poor you – looks like someone really messed with you. But they can only mess with you as much as you let them. Don’t let them. You are better and stronger than that.
You know John, the surprising thing is that people accept others pretty easily. I’m a bit of an arsehole but I do alright, and others who I consider far more arseholish are often just as loved, as long as they’re not a paedophile or anything. That’s not to say you’re not worthy or anything, just that it’s not really about that. Everyone needs affection, interaction etc. and pretty much anyone, and certainly you, are a very fine candidate for that if you can be in the right place at the right time.
Oct 10th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
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