Mom’s Rare Smile

I turned the house upside down yesterday looking for this photo. When I found the negative I was so relieved that tears came into my eyes. This is a rare photo. In it, my mom is smiling.

One of the things the automobile accident took away from Mom was her ability to laugh. Though she was gravely injured, she was left with just enough understanding to know that she wasn't the same person as she had been. That made her cross, most of the time. With her emotional self control nearly gone, her anger often came out in violent ways.

I can count on one hand my memories of Mom's laughter.

The first was pre-accident: she had lost her car keys, and was running around the house singing, "Where's my key-key, where's my little key-key…" I must have been around five or six years old. I giggled and my sister (five years older) was scandalized: "key-key" was the family euphemism for "vagina."

The next memory is from many years later, when I was in high school. I recall Mom, my boyfriend David and I standing at the bottom of the stairs, laughing hysterically; Mom was laughing so hard she had to lean against the wall for support. I have no idea what we were laughing about, but it was probably something David had said. He was one of the few people who could make Mom smile.

The third and last time I heard my mom laugh was a few months before she died, when she was in her eighties. I had escorted Mom's sister Joyce to visit Mom at her home in Ohio. Though it required some advance planning, Aunt Joyce and I took Mom to a doughnut shop. As the three of us munched doughnuts, Aunt Joyce and I joked about the practice of replacing "Cs" with "Ks" in names of businesses: "Krispy Kreme," "Kut & Kurl," "Koffee Korner." Mom maintained the silence she had descended into several days ealier. Aunt Joyce changed the subject and talked about her church's choir. "Is that choir with a c or a k?" I asked. Mom suddenly brightened up and laughed, and for a moment my own sadness dropped away.

This photo was taken 21 years ago. It's of Mom, my daughter, and me. What I like best about it, besides Mom's smile, is that she has her arms around Meredith and me. Grandchildren made Mom happy. Though she didn't always smile, she always made a fuss over her grandchildren, and they remember her as a loving Nana. Somehow, my sad memories of Mom — her violent rages, normally directed at me — are eclipsed by this photograph and those three memories of her laughter. When I see it my sad memories of Mom drop away, just as they did in the doughnut shop that day.

When I located the negative for this photo, I took it to the photo shop and had several prints made.

Deep Medicine

A couple of people have asked me about my subtitle:

It’s late. Do you know where your medicine is?

Hint: it is not a humorous reference to getting older and forgetting to take my thyroid medicine.

The question concerns another kind of medicine; not the kind that comes in little pills, but the deeper kind that heals the physical, emotional, and spiritual body. Each of us need to find his or her own deep medicine.

It’s getting late, in our history. The dominator model of civilization has led us into war, environmental disaster and economic collapse.

Do you know where your medicine is?

Alfie’s Salad Days

 My dog eats salad. Really… I have photographic evidence!

 

technorati tags: salad, dachshund

Remembering

My dad and I have never been close. Dad has always kept himself isolated from others; he prefers to arrange his world around himself and his needs, and keeps to an absolute minimum the messy business of relationships with others. He prefers not to know about the lives of those around him, even his own children. This has not changed since he came to live with me and my family. His sphere and mine overlap only at meals and at other times when he needs my assistance.

So it has developed that most of our conversations take place in the car, when I’m driving him to medical appointments.

A couple of days ago, when we were returning from his appointment with the cardiologist, Dad and I reminisced about my mother. It was January, and the third anniversary of her death. I’ve heard all of Dad’s stories about my mom; in fact I’ve heard them each at least a dozen times. But this time his story about first spotting her amidst a noisy group of college girls in a soda fountain seemed more vivid and immediate. For a moment I imagined what she must have been like. “She was the leader of the group,” Dad said, and I thought (but did not reply) how strange that seems to me. I never knew my mom to be like that.

To me, mom always stayed in the background. She couldn’t socialize, get to know new people, hold a job, meet my teachers, or go anywhere without my dad. Her brain, and her life, were irreparably damaged in an automobile accident, when she was only 45 years old.

Physicists talk about singularities–the no man’s land inside the event horizon of a black hole, beyond which we can make no predictions and reality itself is alien. Mom’s accident is a singularity in the life of my family. We speak of it in capital letters: The Accident. Before the accident my family was normal, routine, imperfect, but relatively happy. After the accident we were dysfunctional. I tolerated things no child should experience. Prior to that December day, in 1961, we would not have imagined what our family life was about to become.

In the car, after telling me how vivacious Mom had been, Dad softly remarked that he wished she had outlived him. The neurologist had told him, Dad said, that Mom would age prematurely. And though Mom lived to be 86 years old–a long life by any standard–I knew exactly what he meant. That accident did cause premature aging. After the accident, we saw Mom recover a little bit, for a time. And then, it seemed, we watched a very long, very slow decline.

I remember standing out in my parents’ driveway, a few years ago, talking with Dad and our family friend David Boyer. When David was a young man he had driven the ambulance that carried Mom to the hospital in Columbus. “How many years ago was that accident?” He asked. Dad and I replied, simultaneously, “Thirty-seven.” Thirty-seven years since the singularity. Dad and I and my siblings, we always know how many years have passed since that day. This November will be the 45th year. Mom died in year 41–nearly half a life lived inside a broken mind.

In the driveway that day, and in the car coming back from the cardiologist last Friday, Dad and I were of one mind. We hardly know each other. But inside this singularity, we are family.

Wishes

I’m currently reading Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves by Clifford Pickover. I have especially enjoyed the chapter about wishes. Pickover talks about people’s wishes as if they are To Do lists. He apparently is going through his own list (a pretty long one, I think) wish by wish, fufilling them whenever possible and checking them off.

I’ve always thought of my wishes as unattainable. Until reading this book it never occurred to me to consider that some of my wishes could actually come true.

When I was a kid, especially when I was a teenager and I Dream of Jeannie was popular on television, I sometimes imagined what I would do with three wishes. Naturally, if allowed, I’d wish for more wishes — an infinite number, if possible. But assuming I’d only be allowed three, my list remained the same for years:

• First wish: My mother would be well again; not brain damaged from an automobile accident.
• Second wish: World peace.
• Third wish: An end to poverty, everywhere.

Okay, maybe these are not the kind of wishes you can put on a To Do list. I knew the first wish was impossible. But I figured the other two are possible in principle. And I’m still holding out for them.

Here are ten more, along the lines of Pickover. I’m going to start working on them, one by one.

1. Learn to speak French.
2. Play one prelude and one fugue from The Well Tempored Clavier.
3. Take a Yoga class.
4. Write about my memories of my mother and her partial recovery.
5. Travel in France, Italy, and Greece; visit Paris, Rome, Pompei, Athens, Eleusis.
6. Experience the mysteries of Eleusis.
7. Read War and Peace.
8. Co-author a book with my daughter Naomi.
9. Finish the Believe counted cross stitch pattern.
10. Hike part of the Pacfic Crest Trail.
11. Take a road trip to Civil War battlefields with my brother.

Hmmm, I couldn’t stop at ten. And there may be more.

Fish Quilt

Quilting is a process of cutting fabric up into little tiny pieces and putting it back together again. It’s a bizarre activity.

First, you buy some perfectly good fabric. Often the fabric is beautiful; lots of design effort has gone into it and it’s manufactured from the highest quality cotton.

Next, you spread it out on your cutting mat and cut it all up.

Then, you try to reassemble the pieces into a work of art.

It’s a perfect example of destroying in the act of creating. Like when you decide to clean a closet and begin by unpacking it and littering a room with its contents. You begin by increasing entropy.

This is why I keep a small figurine at my sewing table: Kali, the goddess of destruction. She’s the dark face of the goddess; the reverse side of the birth-giver/creator.

The “F” Word

No, not that “F” word. The word I’m talking about is “feminist” — as in, I am a feminist. And until my very first experience communicating on the Internet I did not know that anyone other then a troglodyte would jeer me for saying that. I got my education about it on Brin-L, aka the Brin list, a science fiction discussion list that in my opinion is one of the best places to be on the net. But I digress.

On Brin-L I first encountered otherwise intelligent men who paled at the mention of the “F” word. So far as they were concerned, only ugly, hairy man-haters became feminists. (Since we didn’t post photos they had no way to know that I am, in fact, ugly and hairy.) We had many spirited discussions, and I think we understood each other. And I learned that feminism had fallen out of fashion.

So herein, I explain why the events of my life created in me a radicalism that includes that most radical of beliefs: Feminism, a belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. (Go ahead and look it up.)

I was born in 1953, which means that when I was old enough to get a job — and all teenagers got jobs in those days since we all had to work like dogs and didn’t have it easy like today’s teens — the employment opportunities were scarce. There was a recession going on. Looking at the Help Wanted ads was depressing. I can see it now: four pages, divided into “Help Wanted Male,” and “Help Wanted Female.”

No, I kid not. In those days even the fast food places divided their job offers by gender. The boys got to be short order cooks, and the girls made due with waitressing and cash register work. Naturally, the boys were paid more, since everyone knows that flipping hamburgers is harder than facing customers. And anyway, girls are needed on those cash registers, where they are more available to the dirty old middle-aged men who want to make complete jerks out of themselves by coming on to girls young enough to be their daugters.

Can you guess what my first job was?

It wasn’t bad enough that I had to deal with lechers. I also worked for a boss who thought it was witty to announce publicly and loudy, each time I entered his presence, “Vera doesn’t want to tell me her bust size!” I was shy, soft-spoken, and embarrassed to death every time he made this announcement. But there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, because in those days people thought these things were all in good fun and girls should be clever enough to handle it.

I eventually got other, better jobs. For instance, the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I was selected to be an intern in the office of an actual Member Of Congress. This was thrilling; I was a political science major and internships were few and far between. I was not so thrilled when I was assigned the job of answering constituents’ letters. The division of labor made sense to the congressman’s office manager: female interns responded to constituents; male interns attended committee hearings and took notes so they could report back to the congressman (whom I rarely saw) and fill him in on current events.

I understood the office manager’s philosophy better after the day he locked me in a closet and yelled “I’m not letting her out until she agrees to show her legs!” And when he accused me of penis envy (yes, he actually used that expression) because I objected to his behavior. This time I didn’t put up with it; I quit. I would have preferred getting a new assignment, or getting help from the head of the intern program in dealing with the sexual harrassment, but these were still the old days. My only recourse was to give up the “great opportunity” that I had been so thrilled about.

Such growth experiences were not limited to places of employment. As a member of the first cohort of women admitted to the Yale doctoral program in political science, I was treated to this comment by one of the male graduate students (who we later nicknamed “little nose”): “Oh, you must be one of the women they had to admit to avoid being sued.” I was about a million times smarter than that guy, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was intimidated, which I guess is what he intended, though later I got really mad. And I didn’t finish the program, but neither did most of the women. In fact, I think of our cohort only one went on to actually finish the PhD. (Most switched to other graduate programs; I was seduced away by a little thing called the personal computer.) Looking back, I realize that most of us women didn’t have faculty mentors — a must-have for a doctoral student. The all-male faculty just didn’t know how to “relate” to female students, and we were like fish out of water.

Now, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that my life has been one sexist encounter after another. I have had many great jobs working with people who are truly amazing. And the experiences have gotten better and better: I am more comfortable at my current position at Flock than I’ve ever been. Things have definitely changed. For the better.

But I want these new people with whom I work to understand where I’m coming from (to use an old California expression). I want to explain myself and other women my age, especially ones who have worked in male-dominated professions, who are radically, defiantly feminists, even when people laugh or call us ugly and hairy, or shrill and obnoxious, or whatever the latest stereotype is. When we encounter people who think feminism is a dirty word, or (worse) young women who scoff at the women’s movement and find it irrelevant, we’re likely to get our backs up.

So that’s it. Frankly, I don’t see how I could have NOT become a feminist. And if I’m a little sensitive on the subject, well, I guess folks will just have to love me for what I am — an old-style, second-wave feminist.