Stanfa-Stanley - Finding my badass self: a year of truths and dares

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.

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 Ive caused you?

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

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

JOAN DIDION

Promise me youll always remember: Youre 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

O ften, life serves us vanilla ice cream, and were fine with that. Vanilla is sweet. Its 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. Id lived in the same house and held down the same job for twenty years. I realized Id spent most of the last three decades doing the same ordinary things.

I wouldnt call it a rutmore 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, thats 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 Id 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 laughat 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 endoften 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 wasnt certain whether Id be opening the door to an exciting new life or opening Pandoras Box.

Turns out, the two are not mutually exclusive.

SUMMER

H eres 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 Id 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 dont let this end in a public recital.