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For the Week of June 18, 2016: Becoming “Father”

I miss you every day–the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.

(From:  “Father” in Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser)

It is an old photo, retrieved from the dozens of pictures taken in the summer of 1972, one that makes me smile even now.  In it, my first husband and his brother are clowning for the picture, a seventies version of a “selfie,” achieved with the shutter lag of his camera.  But it’s the faces of my daughters—ones that once ignited a young mother’s anxiety — that make us all laugh, remembering the oftentimes “wild and crazy guy” their father was.  My youngest, nine months old, is sliding toward the floor from her father’s arms, alarm on her face, while the oldest, by just a year and a half, is crying loudly as her grinning uncle grips her arm tightly.  It was intended as a “happy” group photo, but the younger members in the picture were not smiling, even as their father and uncle laughed and counted the seconds to the flash and shutter click.

The picture appeared  last night, posted on my daughter’s Facebook page  with the words, “My hero; I still miss you, Daddy.”  And she does, even though he’s been gone for 35 years, his life abruptly ended in a drowning accident when my daughters were just nine and ten.  Yet their memories of “Daddy” are still alive, as are mine.  I see his smile, hear his voice in one daughter’s face and the other’s penchant for political discourse.  We all carry vivid memories of him, stories that have been told and re-told.  “Death,” Jim Harrison wrote, “steals everything but our stories.”

For several years after his death, I was mother and father to my daughters, weathering our shared grief and loss and navigating the sturm and drang of adolescence as a single parent.  “Daddy” became larger than life in the girls’ minds, and, not surprisingly, they grew close to their father’s parents in the subsequent years, helping one another keep his memory alive.  It was during their teens that I met and later married my husband, John.  Although he’d been married before, he never had children.  I worried, as our  relationship began, that my two strong-willed adolescents might frighten him away, but John weathered their ups and downs with more patience than I thought possible.

He never tried to assume the moniker of “Dad,” honoring their undying love for the father they’d lost and always encouraging of their stories of him.  Gradually, the bonds between John and my daughters grew.  He became “Bubbie,” responding to them with patience, affection and the ability to dance that conflicted tango of step-fatherhood:  “I love you”—“don’t even think that I love you.”

He taught them to drive, visited my eldest daughter on her first work-study program in rural Thailand while on a World Bank project in Laos, and drove cross-country from California to New York with my younger daughter when my career took me to New York City.  Little by little, and without any fanfare, their relationship deepened and their bond with each other was cemented.  “This is my father,” my eldest daughter said as she introduced him to a former high school teacher three years later.  My heart skipped a beat, but John simply extended his hand and said “hello,” although I saw his tears glistening in his eyes.  He’s been in their lives now for 29 years and has firmly rooted himself as stepfather to my daughters and “Grandpa” to their children.

Even though there were video calls and Father’s Day gifts for John this morning, I know both daughters always remember their dead father on this day–and many other days of the year.  They miss him even now, as I do my own, but they are generous in the love and affection they have with John.  I am deeply grateful for how John he loves my daughters wholeheartedly and how he has so willingly embraced them in his life, demonstrating as much concern and commitment to their growth and well-being as any birth father.

He wasn’t hard on us kids,
never struck us…

He used to sing in the car
bought us root beers along the road.
He loved us with his deeds.

(From: “A Father’s Pain,” in A River Remains by Larry Smith)

Writing Suggestion: 

The memories we hold of our fathers or the father figures in our lives are full of feelings and of stories.  For example, take a look at the range of poems about fathers featured on the Poetry Foundation site.  What stories do you carry about your father or a father figure?  Why not write one that is especially important, humorous or poignant?

I salute you all, the fathers, stepfathers, grandfathers, all the men who have played a loving role in a fatherless child’s life.  Whether you helped to birth a son or daughter, or were “like” fathers to any child, teenager or adult, Happy Father’s Day.

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Happy Birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you.

Happy Birthday dear Gramma.

Happy Birthday to you.

I awakened to that familiar song early this morning.  An enthusiastic duet by telephone from two of my grandchildren.  Today is my birthday, like it or not, and the mirror has already confirmed what my brain refuses to accept.  I’m  getting older, despite that in my head, my mid-forties are where I prefer to hang my age for the rest of my life.  But that’s a grand self-deception, because my body announces itself a little more definitely each year, confirming my forties are long gone.  Drat!  Yet I will tell you that I wouldn’t trade a birthday cake with 45 candles on it for this morning’s long distance serenade and followed by a lecture on Florida marine life from my seven-year old grandson!  What greater gift could I possibly receive?

Today’s post  is borrowed, in part, from previously published posts over the last several years.  It’s inspired by little more than the relentless march of age, the retrospective look at life that  birthdays often trigger.  I love birthdays, but lately, it’s  my grandchildren’s birthdays I celebrate with the enthusiasm of a wildly in-love, grandmother, remembering when I felt as much excitement over a birthday as they do now.  I remember the little girl I was so long ago, the one in an old, faded photograph, blonde hair curled for the occasion and topped with a giant hair ribbon.  The picnic table nearby is piled with gaily wrapped gifts and a chocolate cake sits in the center, six candles aflame.  I sport an ear-to-ear grin on my face.  Those were the long ago years I eagerly counted the days until my next birthday, becoming a “big” girl with each year promising many more possibilities than the one before.  I was ready then, even impatient, to claim older age.
Are we ever ready for the changes life presents to us?  It’s never either/or.  Each stage of life has challenges, but there are rewards too.  I’m quite content to embrace the title, “Gramma,” but on the other hand, I am less enthusiastic about some of my physical changes—the relentless pull of gravity, loss of muscle tone, and the silvering of my hair.  I balk at regular visits to my cardiologist, reminding me of a condition I thought belonged only others, elder others like my grandparents.  Ready or not, you can’t escape aging.
“Ready,” the title of a poem by Irene MacKinney, begins with a memory:

I remember a Sunday with the smell of food drifting
out the door of the cavernous kitchen and my serious
teenage sister and her girlfriends Jean and Marybelle
standing on the bank above the dirt road in their
white sandals ready to walk to the country church
a mile away, and ready to return to the fried
chicken, green beans and ham, and fresh bread
spread on the table…

Every birthday reminds me of ones past.  Memories come alive:  the scent of chocolate as my mother baked my birthday cake, the candle flames dancing as everyone sang to me, eyes shut, wishing as hard as I could for something I wanted to happen.  That “Happy Birthday “sung enthusiastically over the telephone by my grandchildren sent my mind racing back to not just those joyful celebrations of a grade school girl, but some that were less celebratory, marred by difficult events in my life at the time.  Birthdays are full of story…ones that are, as mine have been, triggered by that simple song, “Happy Birthday to you…”

I’ve used an exercise in my writing groups borrowed from Roger Rosenblatt’s wise little book, Unless It Moves the Human Heart (Harper Collins, 2011).  Rosenblatt would ask if anyone in his class had recently celebrated—or was about to–a birthday.  Then he surprised the class:

I…then burst into song:  “Happy Birthday to You.”  They [his students] give me the he’s-gone-nuts look I’ve come to cherish over the years.  I sing it again.  “Happy Birthday to You.  Anyone had a birthday recently?  Anyone about to have one?” …just sit back and see what comes of listening to this irritating, celebratory song you’ve heard all your lives” (pp.39-40).

When I tried the exercise, my students looked at me with curiosity as I began singing before laughing a little and joining in.  “Now let’s write,” I said as our singing ended.  “What memories does “Happy Birthday to you” inspire?”  I wrote too, memories of the highlights of birthdays past: a blue bicycle waiting for me the morning of my seventh birthday, a surprise party my husband and daughters managed to pull off few years ago, the long-ago headline in my small town newspaper’s society page:  “Sharon Ann Bray turns six today,” (my aunt Verna was the society editor), one memory spilling out after another.

Everyone in the group had the same reaction, so many memories and stories were shared that morning.  As inspirational as his exercise was, Rosenblatt isn’t the only writer who used birthdays as inspiration.  Go to www.poets.org and you’ll discover William Blake, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti and many others inspired by a birthday as a time for retrospection.  I’m especially fond of Ted Kooser’s “A Happy Birthday,” a short poem that captures how a birthday triggers retrospection.

This evening, I sat by an open window

and read till the light was gone and the book

was no more than a part of the darkness.

I could easily have switched on a lamp,

but I wanted to ride this day down into night,

to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page

with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

Poems about birthdays reflect the passage of time, aging, even the opportunity for change, for example, Joyce Sutphen’s “Crossroads:”

The second half of my life will be black
to the white rind of the old and fading moon.
The second half of my life will be water
over the cracked floor of these desert years.

Writing Suggestion:

This week, let birthdays be the trigger that gets you writing.  Hum the birthday tune, or if you’re feeling brave, sing it:  “Happy Birthday to you…”  Or begin with a sentence such as “On the day I turned ___, and keep writing.  Take of the memories, good or bad, a birthday ditty evokes.  Whether you’ll soon have a birthday, recently celebrated one, or joined in the birthday celebrations of family and friends, explore your memories of past birthday, remembering that within each memory lurks a story or a poem…   Write one.

(As for me, my husband promises a carrot cake (and candles) will be part of my day and shared with a few neighborhood friends.  I don’t mind candlelight—it will soften the physical evidence of growing older.  I might wait a little longer before I try to blow them all out!)

 

 

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Memorial Day:  celebrated on the final Monday of May, it honors all U.S. troops who have died in war.  Originally a holiday intended to honor the soldiers who lost their lives in the Civil War, the date was chosen by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, apparently because there would be many flowers in bloom—flowers to place upon the graves of the Union and Confederate soldiers’ graves in Arlington Cemetery.

I admit that I didn’t understand the full meaning of Memorial Day when I was a child, believing it was simply a date meant to honor the dead—no matter how they died.  It was a belief formed by an annual tradition of the extended Bray family, numbering between forty or fifty aunts, uncles and cousins, who gathered each Memorial Day, for a potluck supper, followed by a visit to the family graveside in Northern California, just miles from the Oregon border.  Although my father and his brother were veterans of World War II, the day seemed to have nothing to do with remembering those soldiers whose lives were lost in war; rather it was focused on their deceased parents and siblings.  The aunts placed flowers on their gravesites, while we restless children turned the cemetery into an adventure, romping over the different headstones dotting the grounds, challenging one another to find the marker with the oldest dates engraved on it.  We knew nothing about the lives or the stories of the people whose remains lay beneath the earth.

But I understood a little about the tragedy of war, poring over the pictorial volumes documenting World War II that belonged to my father for countless hours, mesmerized and revolted by the images of dead soldiers and civilians pictured on so many pages.  I grew up with a singular belief, perhaps influenced by those photographs, that war was wrong and in the sixties, joined in the youth movement protesting the Vietnam War.  I knew or understood little about the young men and women who, by choice or by the call of the draft, were sent into that war.  And, unlike the war my father and uncle knew, the Vietnam War polarized a nation at home and did not welcome the returning Vets as those of the Second World War.

I remain a pacifist, against war, and deeply troubled by the fact of the continuing war and bloodshed—whether on battlefields in far-away countries, or the more covert and fearful brand of terrorism that continues to spread throughout the world.  Violence, destruction, death—the cost of war exerts a terrible toll on the human spirit, on anyone who has fought in or had their lives torn apart by war.  I am touched by the bravery of those individuals, whether soldiers or refugees of war, and I am deeply humbled by their stories.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed The National Moment of Remembrance Act,” calling upon all Americans to pause at 3 p.m., local time, on Memorial Day and remember those who died fighting for this country.  In the midst of whatever celebration you may enjoy this Memorial Day, I hope you, too, will take a moment to pause, remember and respect the bravery of all those who have died—much too soon and too young—in war.

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

(From “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” by Dylan Thomas, 1933)

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“Before you know what kindness really is,” poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells us, “you must lose things…”

feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

(From “Kindness”, by Naomi Shihab-Nye in The Words Under The Words ©1994)

When cancer or other serious illness strikes, life as we once knew it will never be the same.  In the loss that comes with the sense of self, the body we once took for granted, the landscape between those regions of kindness, does seem desolate.  But in small acts of compassion that we experience from others, hope somehow finds a way back in, solace is given, and we begin to heal and find our way back to life.  As Shihab-Nye says,

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore…
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

As many of us have discovered during serious illness or life hardship, kindness can exert healing power to our wounded spirits.  If we’re paying attention, we often discover kindness when we least expect it, from people we may not even know.  It’s in those small acts of kindness that we discover hope and gratitude for the small gifts in life, ones we might even have overlooked or barely even noticed before.

Kindness, the simple act of friendship, compassion and generosity to others, has a long history in humankind.  It was one of the “Knightly Virtues,”a set of ‘standards the Knights of the Middle Ages adhered to in daily living and their interactions with others.  Confucius urged his followers to “recompense kindness with kindness. Across cultures and religions, acts of kindness are valued. The Talmud claims that “deeds of kindness are equal in weight to all the commandments.”  Iman Musa Al-Kadhim, seventh after the prophet Mohammed, wrote that “Kindness is half of life.” Paul of Tarsus defined love as being “patient and kind”(I Corinthians), while in Buddhism,  Mettä, one of the Ten Perfections, is most often translated as “loving-kindness.”

Kindness is an unselfish act, defined in Aristotle’s Rhetoric as “helpfulness towards someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself… “ Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher, described kindness and love as the most curative herbs and agents in human intercourse.” Larry Dossey, M.D., writing in his book Meaning & Medicine, (1991), stated “Altruism behaves like a miracle drug… It has beneficial effects on the person doing the helping … it benefits the person to whom the help is directed…”  Dr. Wayne Dyer, bestselling author, agrees:  “the simple act of kindness directed towards another improves the functioning of the immune system and stimulates the production of serotonin in both the recipient of kindness and the person extending kindness.”

As many of us have discovered during serious illness or life hardship, kindness can exert healing power to our wounded spirits.  If we’re paying attention, we often discover kindness when we least expect it, from people we may not even know.  It’s in those small acts of kindness that we discover hope and gratitude for the small gifts in life, ones we might even have overlooked or barely even noticed before.

“Finding God At Montefiore Hospital,” a poem written by cancer survivor Lorraine Ryan, illustrates the power of kindness.  Ryan writes about Juan, the man who mopped her hospital floor at night:

I remember the rhythm of the dunking;

The mop going into the pail

Juan squeezing the mop

The mop hitting the floor with a whoosh…

With every move, he looked up:

“How’s it really going?”

“Did your boy come up today?”

“How is he doing without you at home?”

 

Sometimes I couldn’t lift my head

off the pillow—

when vomiting and mouth sores

wouldn’t let me speak—

the swish of his mop

bestowed the final blessing

of the night…

 

(In: The Cancer Poetry Project, Karin B. Miller, Ed., 2001)

As Ryan’s poem illustrates, kindness helps us find our way out of darkness.  It helps us heal.  Compassion and caring, are often manifested in small acts of concern:  How’s it really going?  This is kindness, the small everyday acts that go a long way to healing ourselves and others.  Kindness not only helps us heal; we become better—kinder ourselves– for experiencing it.  The world could use a little more kindness between people, don’t you think?

Writing Suggestion:

First, take a blank sheet of paper and list all the acts of kindness you remember, ones that brightened your day, eased your pain, and made a difference in your day.  Perhaps you played it forward—because of the kindness you received, you were motivated to reach out to other friends, acquaintances or even strangers in need.  Write about how an act of kindness eased the desolation, sadness or loneliness you experienced during a difficult time.

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Every morning, when we wake up, we have 24 brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these 24 hours will bring peace, joy, & happiness to ourselves & others.– –Thich Nhat Hanh

For a few moments yesterday, I flashed back  to an earlier time in my life when every gathering, whether social or business, was dominated by the same question:  “What do you do?”  The answer, of course, was a title, a brief job description, something that placed me in the world of business and career, an answer that gave me “credibility” in the larger world.  It was an identity badge that said very little about me, my life or what I held to be important and meaningful.  Today, however, I was introduced to a new acquaintance at a neighborhood gathering, and naturally, we began with a question to one another, but it was “how do you know B?”–the neighbor to introduced us.  Not fond of large social gatherings, I actually enjoy our neighborhood get-togethers.  There are always familiar faces as well as new ones– people recently buying or renting one of the nearby houses.  The greetings are  friendly and warm.  The once frequently asked“What do you do?” has been replaced by “Which house is yours??” or even recognition:   “Oh yes, you’re the woman we see walking the little terrier each morning.”  Rarely do we find out what each other does until  later in the conversation, and sometimes, not until the second time we meet.

It’s not that we’re uninterested in each other’s work lives—we get around to it after a while—but our work and private lives blend into a fuller picture of who we truly are.  I remember how, in those rush-rush years of career climbing, how rarely my different worlds intersected.  My outer life may have seemed prosperous and successful, but privately, I was filled with stress.  My other life—wife, mother, neighbor, writer was often neglected, parched and dying of thirst.  I rarely had time to “feed” it as I ran from meeting to meeting.  At night, as I re-entered the world my other life, I was often weary and unable to shut off the demands of the work day.  More than a few times, I stared at my image in the mirror and wondered who, exactly, was staring back at me.

We  have the unique capacity to inhabit several different “worlds” at any given time. We live our lives on many planes, as Patrice Vecchione describes in her book, Writing and the Spiritual Life.  Even if we’re not  aware of it, our inner and outer lives are always interacting; affecting and informing each other as we move between those different worlds each day.  Yet in the busy, demanding work lives we sometimes lead, it’s easy to move between one world and another, barely aware that the needs of our inner lives are being ignored.  Sooner or later, it catches up with us.

I once moved between my different worlds—professional, volunteer, friend, mother, student—as if they were separate, without giving much thought to the way in which those different aspects of my life interacted.  It was as if I was on a virtual elevator, constantly in motion, racing between floors.  Push a button, the elevator moved up or down, and stopped to open:  “Second floor, family life.”  “Third floor, workplace.” “Fourth floor, Business lunches and dinners.  Fifth floor:  Volunteer committee meetings.”  I remember the constant rush of the pace I kept, moving up and down several floors each day—“Ding, office.”  “Ding, meetings.”  Ding, clients.”  “Ding, Board volunteer.”  “Ding.  Family.”  “Ding”…  In my very busy and important life, I moved between those different worlds quickly, and the distinction between the floors blurred.  I was barely aware that my spiritual life, which seemed to be housed in the basement and wasn’t getting much attention.  I rarely pushed the elevator button to stop below the first floor.

“I know I walk in and out of several worlds every day,” poet Joy Harjo wrote in her autobiographical essay, “Ordinary Spirit” (in:  I Tell You Now, 2005).  Although Harjo was referring to her mixed race, in part, and the struggle to “unify” her different worlds, I was struck by what she said.  The struggle I had in unifying my different worlds, inner life with outer one, wasn’t address with any sustained effort–not until I heard my doctor say “cancer.,” I was lucky; it was very early stage and immensely treatable, so gradually, I began to slip back into an “old” way of being.  Then an unexpected episode of heart failure left me unconscious on the sidewalk, my dog’s still leash in my hand.

The heart failure episode got my attention.  Any predictability I felt about life was scattered to the wind.  Where I once felt I had some control over the course of my life, I now felt as if I was in free fall, an unwilling passenger in a wayward elevator, moving randomly between floors.  Fear and depression colored my days despite my cardiologist’s reassurances.  I sported a bump just to the left of my breastbone, a defibrillator housed there, underneath the skin, and a constant reminder of what had happened and the need to change my life. Unbeknownst to anyone, I began praying every night, sending silent pleas to some higher power, struggling to find hope where fear resided.  It took time, and it took change—mine. I was forced me to think differently about my life and what, above all else, really mattered to me.  .

I took steps to change my life, often repeating Ticht Nhat Hanh’s words as a morning mantra: “Every morning when we wake up, we have 24 brand new hours to live,” trying to do a better job of integrating  my inner and outer selves, and blending my separate worlds into a whole as best as I could.  As I did, I realized it was “only an illusion that any of the worlds we inhabit are separate ,” as Harjo had stated in her essay.”  This “new” world, the one where I had suddenly become a heart patient, living with the knowledge how abruptly one’s life can end, indeed, how capricious life can be, affected all other “worlds” of my life in deep and significant ways.

This redefinition of life is something I witness repeatedly among the men and women in my expressive writing groups.  Cancer ignites a crisis in everyone’s life, beginning with those fearful words, “You have cancer,” ones no one wants to hear:  All the different parts of your life are affected.  You move, numbly at first, through second opinions, treatment decisions, treatment regimens, appointments, aware that always, lurking in the background is that demon fear.

All that you are—who you have thought yourselves to be—in mind, body, and spirit–is thrust into upheaval.  You can longer inhabit the different worlds in one’s life with the same assumptions you once did.  What was once familiar now seems strange.   And when the elevator finally ceases its terrifying ride and the doors open, and you are often confronted with a new and sometimes confusing landscape.  The challenge, as I discovered, is to make sense of it and find a path to wholeness and healing.

The routes to healing, to wholeness, are different for each of us:  faith, meditation, yoga, writing, music, art—what form it takes hardly matters.  It’s the search, the seeking for the internal peace, acceptance of this new and altered life that matters.  You have to learn now to inhabit a new world, one that integrates  all the other worlds that have shaped you into the person you are.

I sometimes look back to that overworked self of more than two decades ago for whom stress was a steady diet, and who was caught up in the upward climb of a fast-moving career.  I didn’t even like it, and yet, it was seductive for me and so many of my colleagues.  I kept shoving my unhappiness aside until one day, as I walked to my corporate office, a spacious one high in the MetLife Building, overlooking Park Avenue in New York City, I caught a glimpse of image in a store window.  Grim-faced, briefcase held tight against my body, shoulders hunched forward, stress oozed from every pore of the person looking back at me.  “Who had I become?”  The many worlds I inhabited every day were as unbalanced and separate from one another as they could be.

Change isn’t always easy.  Trying to live intentionally is a conscious decision I revisit every single day.  I still fumble sometimes, but not for long, remembering how cancer and heart failure brought me up short like a horse’s snaffle bit.  I don’t want to relive those times.  I stepped away from the stressful life I was living and chose a different way of living.  That choice was only been only the beginning.  Daily, I have to reclaim my spiritual life and consciously work to my life harmonious and whole—24 brand new hours at a time.

Her first steps, though cautious, began immediately to reinforce her faith in greater possibilities.

– George MacDonald

Writing Suggestions:

What about you?  What different worlds do you inhabit each day?  What are the many roles you play in your life?  How do they influence each other?  Were your “worlds” affected by cancer, loss or another unexpected hardship?  Write about how you’ve moved in and out of different worlds or the many roles you have played before and after your life was altered in unexpected ways.  What has changed?

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For the Week of May 8, 2016: What We Learn from Our Mothers

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point…

(From: “What I Learned from My Mother, by Julia Kasdorf, in:  Sleeping Preacher,  1992)

There’s much that I learned from my mother, just as you may have, much of it more useful as I grew into adulthood, but not the lessons she might have intended for me.  I learned less about the domestic tasks Kasdorf describes and more about my mother’s struggle with the prescribed roles of wife, mother and homemaker.

My mother had two faces and a frying pot   

where she cooked up her daughters 

into girls 

before she fixed our dinner…

(From: From the House of Yemanjá” by Audre Lorde, in:  The Selected Poems of Audre Lorde, 1997)

My mother was not like the mothers  my friends had.  She was different, even difficult.  She wasn’t the most versatile of cooks, nor did she  inherit her mother’s talent in the kitchen.  In truth, she took little pleasure in producing the daily meals for her family.  She preferred physical labor, daily scrubbing and housecleaning, yard work and gardening, and in turn, she believed those tasks were necessary to build good, solid character in her children.

We were assigned daily tasks and chores which had to be completed before school or play.  Every Saturday, we protested and complained as we were forced to scrub walls and floors while our friends waited impatiently for us outside.  Of my parents, Mother was the strict disciplinarian, and she prided herself on the role.  She was quick to remind us that any successes we had in school or life were due to the discipline she imposed.  My father, naturally playful and soft-hearted, had my heart; my mother had my obedience, but also my embarrassment and rebellion.

Many years later, as the mother of two strong-willed daughters, I began to understand some of my mother’s struggles more than I had in my earlier years.  I weathered the storms of adolescence as a single mother, experiencing their affection one day and rebelliousness the next, all while I attempted to parent, earn a living and build a career.  I developed greater empathy for much of my mother’s struggles—and much greater appreciation of what it meant to be a mother.

I see her doing something simple, paying bills,

or leafing through a magazine or book,

and wish that I could say, and she could hear,

 

that now I start to understand her love

for all of us, the fullness of it.

 

It burns there in the past, beyond my reach,

a modest lamp.

(“Mother’s Day,” by David Young, in:  Field of Light and Shadow, 2011)

A dozen years ago, my mother died peacefully in a home for Alzheimer’s patients.  Her descent into senility escalated as my father passed away from lung cancer.  The woman who was always in control of everything –or so we thought—wasn’t in control at all.  My father had quietly been covering the signs of her illness as best he could.  The irony was, of course, that as the disease progressed, my mother became docile, sweet and affectionate in ways we’d rarely experienced her.  Yet out of the darkness, a moment of clarity, the mother we remembered would reappear, if only for a few seconds.  She loved her children as ferociously as she attacked life, yet she remained critical of us even as her mind deteriorated.  She was proud of what we each had accomplished, and yet she had always expected more of us.  She left a legacy of conflicted feelings among her children, wounds that were never healed, and old jealousies bred in the competition she fostered between us.  But I realize now that my mother did the best she could do.  It wasn’t ideal or even good mothering at times, but she wanted the best for us always.

I choose, on this Mother’s Day to remember that she did the best she could and that although her kind of love was difficult sometimes, it was love just the same.  I recall one of the last times I visited her, a month or so before she died.  She had, by then, lost the ability to walk, and she wasn’t aware of much, including me.  I resorted to pushing her in her wheelchair, going round and round the garden of the Alzheimer’s home.  As I grew weary, I positioned her chair by a brilliant red Bougainvillea  and took her hand.  At a loss, I began singing, “Let me call you sweetheart…,” something she had often sung to us as children.  As I sang, she slowly raised her head and looked at me for several seconds before speaking.

“Why, it’s Sha-ron!”  She spoke my name slowly, elongating the syllables.

“Yes Mom, it’s me.  Your eldest daughter,” I said, tears filling my eyes.  I squeezed her hand.

“I’m…happy,” she said slowly, smiling a little, as she closed her eyes.  Then her head fell to her chest.  Once again, she had disappeared into her darkness.  A few weeks later, my mother passed away.

It’s taken me time to sift through all that my mother was and meant to me.  The relationships we have with our mothers can be complicated as well as close.  Mine was both.  Yet she was my mother, and I am her daughter.  There are mornings I look in the mirror and see something of her in my face or expression, just as each of her three children likely do.   If I could, I would tell her now all that’s in my heart, maybe write her that long overdue letter I always meant to write, but like Wallace Stegner, writing to his mother long after her death, it’s too little, “much too late.”

 “All you can do is try,” you used to tell me when I was scared of undertaking something.  You got me to undertake many things I would have not dared undertake without your encouragement.  You also taught me how to take defeat when it came, and it was bound to now and then.  You taught me that if it hadn’t killed me it was probably good for me…

(From: “Letter, Much Too Late, in: Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs:  Living and Writing in the West, 1992)

To all mothers everywhere, Happy Mother’s Day.

Writing Suggestions:

We learn from our mothers lessons of love and life, some of them not appreciated until we’re much older.  What lessons did your mother teach you?  How have those lessons or experiences influenced your life?  If you have since become a mother, do you find yourself acting in ways as you remember your mother did?  Write about the relationship you had with your mother.  Was it close?  Conflicted?  Distant?  Explore the things that made it so.  What do you want to say to your mother this Mother’s Day?

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For the Week of May 1, 2016: , The Changing Body: Grit, Grace and Grey

Which body part will be the next
To make you think that you’re a wreck
That you’ve gone so far over the hill
All you can do is take a pill

(From: Body Parts: A Collection of Poems about Aging, by Janet Cameron Hoult, 2010

Aging gracefully is no mean feat.  Whether the process of growing older or the bodily changes forced on us by cancer and other diseases, our relationship with our bodies, as Jane Kenyon once described, is sometimes a struggle, a “difficult friendship” (“Cages,” Otherwise, New and Selected Poems, 1996).

For the past several days, my body has been in protest.  I didn’t intend to offend it.  It was just a catch of my shoe on the front steps, an accident, and I took flight in an awkward plummet of arms and legs, landing hard on my right knee, hearing the solid “thwack” of it against the concrete before I skidded to a stop, scraping my palms on the gravel path nearby.  I re-discovered, in that moment, a full range of every swear word in my vocabulary before limping up the stairs and calling for my husband to get the ice packs from the freezer.

It might not have been so bad, but for weeks, I’ve been adjusting to the inevitability of an aging body, its stiffness in the morning, the arthritis settling into my knee from an old accident suffered while running many years ago, when I was hit by a car making a right turn and thrown on the hood.  My eyes met those of the shocked driver who quickly braked, sending me flying off and landing hard on my knee.  “You’ll have arthritis in that knee one of these days,” the emergency physician warned.  I nodded politely, but I didn’t believe him.  I was, after all, a young woman—strong, athletic, and– in my mind at least– able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.  That was many years ago.  The doctor’s words have since come back to haunt me.

As I age, arthritis is just the tip of the iceberg.  There’s the gray hair, the need for eyeglasses, the lines and occasional age spots that appear in my magnifying mirror, the defibrillator that makes a lump just below my collarbone, forcing me to discard any scoop neck tee shirts from my wardrobe…my list of complaints grows longer; my irritability increases.  The thing is, my sense of self is being challenged mightily by my bodily changes.  Some days I take it in stride.  Other days, I refuse to accept the inevitability of growing older, but my body says otherwise.

It’s part of life.  Sooner or later, our body changes, betrays or fails us.  When it does, it’s difficult to admit  we’ve taken our physical health for granted—even denied its inevitable aging.  The body, in illness or decline, is often the subject of poetry:  Jane Kenyon’s “Cages,” or  Marilyn Hacker’s, “Cancer Winter,” where  she referred to her body as “self-betraying.”  But it is May Swenson’s poem, “Question,” that lingers in my mind this morning.  Swenson addresses her body as “my horse, my hound,” the faithful one which has carried her through life, but she has realized she can no longer take it for granted:

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick…

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

(From: New & Selected Things Taking Place, 1978)

What I’m working on now is a little shift in my perception about growing older.  I’m determined to keep on, keepin’ on with as much spunk and energy as I can.  My husband patted my back this morning and remarked, “you have grit.”  He’d been listening to NPR and a discussion on “The Power and Problem of Grit.” Gritty people, according to psychologist Angela Duckworth, have hope. They’re optimistic about the future and their ability to improve and affect change.  Well, my optimism and hope vary from time to time, I’ll admit it, especially when I find myself sprawled on the concrete with a bleeding knee, or I catch a glimpse of those fine lines emerging around my eyes and lips, reflected back at me from the mirror.  All I can do is load up on the sunscreen, put on the knee brace, and take my dog out for a brisk morning walk, ignoring the discomfort in my knee.  I can’t change the fact of an arthritic knee or a heart that requires a defibrillator, but I can keep moving and find ways to laugh at myself, and embrace this aging body as best I can.  I don’t know if that qualifies as grit or even graceful aging, but it’s all I can do.

A month ago, I was leading an all-day writing workshop for the Stanford Medical School, and toward the end of the day, I turned the group’s attention to color.  They each chose a color from a pile of paint chips, then took a ten minute walk to find as many shades and images of their color as possible.  Once inside, they began with their observations on a color and wrote for twenty minutes.  All were captivating and unique, but it was the one from Sarah, a third year medical student and a gifted writer, that delighted us all.  She’d chosen grey.  Grey, the color that we older women do our best to avoid for as long as we can.  Grey, in my mind, is synonymous with aging and all the unwanted bodily changes accompanying it.  Not so for Sarah:

 Grey is the color of “yes, life has been here,”

and “don’t you know I have a story to tell?”

Grey is the color of pregnant clouds,

waiting to gift us with all they’ve held up inside…

 

Grey is the color of tree bark,

weathered into cracks, a kaleidoscope of “not white, not black,”

the many in-betweens that show how growth is random –

it’s dirty and imperfect, but up

and a bumpy canvas for green shoots,

for shocking white buds waiting to gain the wisdom of grey

 

White is before, but give me the after

Give me the ninety-year-old under her old grey comforter.

Has she lived? Well, tell me the color of her soul.

Show me the spots of grey, and tell me how you’ve lived,

the story printed dark and true in the deepest, most imperfect,

ugliest and sweetest shade.

(From “Grey,” by Sarah Schlegel, April 2, 2016)

Thank you, Sarah, for helping those of us graying with age to see ourselves and our lives in richer hues.

Writing Suggestions:

Whether you’re wrestling with bodily changes due to illness, accident or aging, write about your body.  Pay tribute or complaint.  Write about its aches or pains or how  your body has betrayed you.  Have you come to terms with a “new” normal?  Have you made peace with your altered or changing body?  How or why not?  What can make your relationship with your body a “difficult friendship?”

 

 

 

 

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