Clark Kent Can Kiss My Ass

A lot of wonderful things have started to happen since I left my false identity and ripped off my disguise (mild-mannered secretary). To begin with, I write every single day. I feel like that song, “If I had a hammer.” I write in the morning, I write on line at the grocery store, I write on my blackberry and email it to myself so I can write some more at home.

I have thrown away my purple fringed business suit (no kidding) and 2-inch pumps, and one-word-at-a-time, I am making a super-hero outfit with a thousand pockets for stories and an endless supply of bullet-proof ink.

This is not the only dream to come true for me since leaving behind a few nightmares and villains; if everything goes okay, I will begin the process of finishing my degree in September. (I have a 4.0 and never finished.) I’m not bragging here, if you know me at all, that’s just not my nature – but I am reminding myself that I was good at school and I loved it. Two great reasons to go back and finish.

A few other dreams? Well, probably the biggest dream is that I am fully participatory in my own life. To be honest, working in the city was killing me long before someone stuck a knife in my back. I was gone at 6am and got back at 8pm if I was lucky. I would call my eight-year-old to say, “Have a good day,” and pray to get home in time to tuck her into bed. I missed every single cupcake birthday she ever had at school. Other things suffered as well. Since I was only home on weekends, they became my religion. It was me and my daughter time, which left nothing for friends or anything else. So there was a lot of lemonade in the lemons life handed me when I left my career.

And over the course of a few months, I have definitely landed on the other side of ”there.” Now I still don’t have words to explain what “there” is, but I do know that the childlike pitch to my voice is gone. Maybe you know women like me – forty-year-olds with the ingénue of a little girl. It’s charming, but underneath, without a doubt, that woman is terrified. I know because I lived it. Most of all, I was afraid that you might not like me. I know that sounds crazy at my age, but it is the truth. I had learned to charm and cajole and be kind and smart and do anything I could to be absolutely sure you would like me. Even … if I did NOT like you.

There is no explaining the process of letting that particular disguise go. But week after week, assignment after assignment, it is definitely gone. Sometimes it takes a minute; I still make every effort to be warm and gracious. But after a while, I remember to stop and listen; to use my late-blooming discernment and stand back and decide if I want to use my energy on this particular situation. And if not, I charmingly fade into the crowd and take the nicest, funniest, sexiest, most charming woman in the room with me.


If you have any questions, you can definitely reach out to me, but you may have to come to Monroe and find my sweet gorgeous ass sliding across Mombasha Lake in that magical canoe.

Love always,
Mary Agnes Antonopoulos (Mary Vetell)
Freelance Writer and Spectacular, Uncommon Woman

Signposts To The Virulent Sky

The virulent sky passes over me, alive and moving much more quickly than seems possible.

I stand in the dimming evening light, the wind blows around me. I am beautiful. I am brilliant and joyous and feel much like that evening sky. Life is changing and folding into itself and reshaping much too fast.

A year ago, at 41, I remember thinking that life was halfway over and I had missed it, that my chances were gone. And as I followed that path of personal disappointment, I landed on one image, a pen.

You see, I didn’t need a degree or a job or a rocket ship for my dream. All I needed was a pen and paper. That’s all that I needed, and I didn’t do it. I hadn’t done it. And I didn’t know how to fix that. Forty-one years of not writing (unless under so much sorrow, or duress so unbearable, that if you read what I wrote at those times, your toes would curl).

Somehow, armed just with the shock and despair of hating the life I had created, it started to literally unravel around me. And I just stood there, tossed like the wind, steadfast in my resolve to create a different experience for the second half.

I started writing again, and before I could even completely figure out what I would do or how I would do it, I had three clients. And the whirlwind had begun.
All I ever wanted to do was write. And so now I am writing. And having discovered that anything is possible if you want it badly enough, I started looking at a whole lot of other things that I was too afraid to begin (or finish). I had no idea how to get from here to there, but I was excited to try.

And around that time, I started reading a monthly ezine from Laura Fenamore. She talked about why we DON’T claim the bodies we deserve. She talked a lot about losing weight forever. (Like half of our population, I had lost and regained at least the size of a small family.)

And as things continued to unravel exactly as they should when we stay out of their way, Laura became my mentor. She is literally a Body Image Mastery Mentor, but I think she’s a lot more than that.

I feel like Laura has the signposts to where I’m trying to go. Sometimes she’s just got an arrow (pointing into some bad neighborhoods, like unresolved relationships and pockets of avoidance and denial that must be crossed). Other times, she will stand quietly and hold up a sign that says, “Caution.” There are a load of signs in Laura’s bag of tricks: Too Fast and Too Slow, Do Not Back Up, and Rest Area up Ahead.

Everyone needs this in their lives, an objective mentor to remind them that the road ahead may be less traveled, but it isn’t an unmarked path through chaos. There are roadblocks and there are building blocks, but every step is one step closer to accepting the phenomenal woman that I suspect I may have been all along.
If you need some help building bridges and finding your way, you can call Laura Fenamore at 415-464-1234. www.LauraFenamore.com

Mary Agnes Antonopoulos