Category Archives: Relationships
Barometric Change
I fell asleep next to the open window, listening to the deep, distant rumble of thunder. The sky flashed like paparazzi bulbs in the south. Finally, finally, after 4 weeks of drought, the rain came all the way down to earth. In the morning, it hung in the air like a smothering wet blanket. I dreamed that I was sitting in the bottom of a sleeping bag, zippering the top over my head. My sinuses were heavy, and I couldn’t open my eyes. My body felt a sea change that I had anticipated since yesterday when my temper flared unexpectedly at a chaperone scolding a young child. Tension gave way; I sank to the bottom. I could feel Steve beside me like the earth feels the sky when it finally comes down in a shower of healing touch.
In 33 more days, I will turn 50 years old. I feel more connected to nature than I ever have. I am more aware of my nature, physically, mentally, and spiritually, and more aware of the Universe around me. I am more aware of my partner and my children. I feel peaceful and mature, young and ancient at the same time. I feel good. Really good. I am in love with my life…at last.
Family Milestone
I have been absent from the blogosphere for a few days in order to be present at a family event. My oldest, Susan, and her First Mate, Andy, invited a small contingent of family and friends to support them in a Handfasting ceremony. We gathered in a woodland setting to witness their vows and verbalize our advice and wishes in a ritual with varied symbolism. The result is, finally, that they are engaged. They will now begin to plan the final steps toward Marriage, which for my daughter has been a big, scary journey into never-ending adulthood that has made her skittish for years. This social event has her two sisters and at least one future sister-in-law completely ecstatic, and sent them into a frenzy of beautifying and picture-taking that reminded me of their school days on the cheerleading and pom-pom squads…
Girls will be girls
My son was much more restrained and tired from his night shift job and travel, but he surprised me by looking more like his dad than ever before.
For Susan, the event put her in the spotlight in a way that made her very nervous and vulnerable, but to her credit, she was aware of the neurotic nature of that anxiety and owned it with humor. Which only made her more adorable to Andy.
During the ceremony itself, I really wanted to pay attention to the real time emotion and meaning of the moment. While others snapped pictures, I put my camera down and watched the expressions of my daughter intently as her beloved read his vows and she read hers. Together they fashioned a three-stranded cord and allowed themselves to be bound together. I was in tears watching and hearing and feeling and believing right along with them.
Afterwards, of course, we had feasting and drinking and gifting at a Chinese restaurant.
If we all look like we are glowing and flushed, I can assure you it’s not because of quantity of drink so much as the fact that it was almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and it was, after all, an outdoor event.
The heat wave continues, and the wave of good feelings does, too. My daughter is grown and growing; she is building a very strong, very loving, very supportive relationship with a person she has admired since she was 11 years old. And it is very good. I suppose I can now take a sabbath rest for a day…I’ve been given tomorrow off from work because of the hot weather.
Interesting Inconsistency vs. Efficiency
People are inconsistent. We must be; we’re alive, living, responding, changing. Funny thing is, in the West we’re often taught that this is a bad thing. It isn’t efficient. It isn’t dependable. It goes against all kinds of Protestant ethics of order and purpose and such. But in Eastern cultures, it’s often celebrated. “If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him.” When the Buddha becomes a monolith, a never-changing dogma, it is no longer a life-giving source. I look to historical information and try to understand why people did what they did for a living now; I’m a historic interpreter. I keep fighting this penchant for landing on the “right answer”, the one that describes order and purpose and makes sense. I’m learning more that the joy of interpreting history is found in saying “we don’t know why”. We’re quirky; isn’t that marvelous? We change, we evolve, we digress, we’re capricious. In many cultures, gods were like that, too. It was acceptable, maybe expected. But in Western theology, that became a bad characteristic for a god, and immutability became important. We want something dependable, something stable, so much that we’re willing to construct it and enshrine it. Why? Because it allows us to stop trying to be responsible in the world? The effort of responding is perhaps a constant drain, and we are lazy by nature? I think of cultures that are resilient, flexible, responsive to the environment, and I think that consistency is maybe not that important or beneficial after all.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1830
What made me think about this? I was looking into Wisconsin history, and the history of the Upper Peninsula, and came across the story of Henry Schoolcraft. His first wife was half Ojibwa and helped him in his scholarship of Native American cultures. His second wife wrote a popular anti-Tom novel in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous book and disapproved of mixed-race unions, thereby alienating her stepchildren completely. Why would the same man be married to both of these women? “I don’t know why.”
Bookshelf at the Raspberry School, Old World Wisconsin
I recognize in myself a tendency to try to put my partner in a box, to figure out the consistent rules that will help me predict his behavior. There aren’t any, really. But he is hardly a sociopath. He simply wants to be allowed to communicate his thoughts and feelings as they arise, to be understood in the moment, known intimately for the authentic and complicated man he is. He is more than willing to talk and reason and explain honestly and even to make promises and act on them in order to gain my trust. Perhaps it is simply my natural laziness that wants to put labels on him and save myself the trouble of paying attention. Truly caring about a person requires great effort. It is hardly efficient. It necessitates all kinds of little adjustments. And that is a valuable process, a craftsmanship of sorts. Which reminds me of this clip my brother-in-law sent me which he titled: Precision East German manufacturing in the workers paradise. I’m not sure if he was trying to be cynical. I think it illustrates a very authentic part of human process.
Keeping Cool – Old Style
We haven’t had rain in a few weeks, and things at Old World Wisconsin (the outdoor living history museum where I work) are very hot and dry. We closed down to a skeleton crew on Thursday because the heat index was over 100 degrees. Only 25 visitors came the entire day. I worked both yesterday and today, and now I have my swollen ankles propped up on the couch. I don’t have air conditioning at home, either, but I do have a ceiling fan and a strategic plan to keep the house cool. That plan involves making it as dark and cave-like as possible. Here are some other tips for surviving the heat:
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cheat on the number of petticoats you wear (I went down to only one, but I don’t think anyone knew).
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hide a wet dishcloth under your skirts or drape one around your neck.
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plunge your hands and wrists into cold water from the pump.
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skip the corset, if you dare (I haven’t tried this yet).
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move as little as possible. This means I opt for sewing over playing the pump organ.
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drink lots of water and stay in the shade (well, that’s obvious).
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take a cue from the oxen, Ted & Bear, and get a friend to lick your ears. Strategic evaporation, you know.
Hmm. That sounds rather interesting….I think I’ll go find out what Steve is up to. ‘Bye!
The Root of the Issue
I love this fence. It’s made from the roots of trees that were cleared to make farms. It’s in the Finnish area of Old World Wisconsin. I wish I had photographed it earlier in the season before the roadside weeds grew so tall.
Tomorrow, I have a day off, and I’m looking forward to being able to spend some time with some issues that have surfaced (again) in my inner life. Grief is always there; I had another dream with Jim in it that made me wake in tears. Existential angst is there; today, I found myself embroidering “Alle Menschen ist der Grasse” on my sample cloth. And the differences between me and my partner Steve are always there. I had a vision of this a few days ago where I saw him as an archaeologist in a deep quest for something, sweeping away at an artifact to remove bits of dust and reveal some very important discovery. I saw myself as a widow who had lost everything, sitting among shards of broken glass, saying, “Oooh, sparkly!” to whichever bit caught her attention. To be honest, I attribute some of this mood to the hormonal cycle that still influences every month. However, cycles are natural, and to be brought back to a place of regular introspection is a good thing, I think. Anyway, I may have something more poetic and cohesive to say about the meaning of life….later.
Alice Through My Lens
Blue eyes. That was one thing that made her unique among 4 sisters. She had our father’s eyes. She was the shortest among us; I believe I grew to have at least a half an inch over her. But that took a while. Since she was 3 years older, I trailed behind her most of my life. I definitely didn’t mind following in her footsteps. I adored her. She was the sweet sister, the kind one, the one who loved children and animals and had friends. She somehow spanned the gap between being a nerd and being popular. Not that she wasn’t picked on early in grade school. We all were, and she was very sensitive to it. When she was 10, she ran away from a boy who was chasing her down the sidewalk. He caught up to her and managed to grab the back of her coat hood. He yanked her down hard, and she fell backwards onto the sidewalk, hitting her head and fracturing her skull. The boy was sent to military school, and Alice recovered amid cards and gifts and angels surrounding her bed.
She started dating first among us, though she wasn’t the oldest. I wanted to learn how this “boyfriend” business worked, so I watched her very closely, sometimes through the living room drapery while she was on the porch kissing her date goodnight. She modeled how to be affectionate in the midst of a distinctly cerebral family, shy about demonstrating emotion. She gave me my first pet name: Golden Girl or Goldie, and then the one that stuck in my family, PG or sometimes Peej. By the time I was 16, we were very close friends as well as sisters. She invited me to spend Spring Break with her at college, and enjoyed “showing me off”. She told me that the boys were noticing me and that she’d need to protect me. I was thrilled!
Alice and Mike in Los Gatos, summer 1979
We spent that summer at home together in California. I introduced her to my new boyfriend, who eventually became my husband. She begged our parents to allow me to be her passenger on a road trip back to campus at the end of the summer. She had just bought a car, and although I couldn’t drive, I could keep her company, sing with her along the way, and be her companion. The road trip was a travel adventure flavored with freedom, sisterly love, and the sense of confidence and brand new responsibility. We flopped the first night in a fleabag motel in the same bed. She woke earlier than I and told me as I roused and stretched how sweet I looked cuddling the stuffed bunny my boyfriend had bought me. Then we stayed with her friends in Colorado. Our next day’s journey was to go through the heartland of the country and hopefully, if we made good time, get to Chicago for the night. We never made it.
Nebraska is flat and boring. We’d been driving for 6 hours. I was reclined and dozing when we began to drift off the fast lane, going 80 mph. Alice over-corrected, and we flipped. She had disconnected her shoulder strap, and flopped around, hitting her head on pavement through the open window. Her fragile, gentle head, with two blue eyes. She was dead by the time we came to rest in the ditch.
Life is an experience, a journey of unexpected and unimagined happening, a verb in motion, not a noun. Alice was in motion, at 20, and may be even now…somewhere, in some form. I still taste her sweetness floating near me from time to time.
Three of four sisters, Christmas 1978
I Promised My Mother-in-law
I promised to dedicate a post to my mother-in-law for her birthday, which was the 16th. The last time I saw her alive was on her birthday in the year 2001. She died sometime the following week, alone in her apartment, while we were traveling. That fact is consistent with the mystique I associate with remembering her. I’ll never be certain who she really was, although I have many theories. I have been told that she was a concert pianist as a young woman and that she played for Rachmaninoff when she was 16. I have seen the signed program portrait that he gave her. I did hear her play as an accompanist for our community theater. She was definitely capable, even with arthritis. I wish I had known the passion of her younger years. I saw in her such a mixture of joy and anxiety as a mature woman. She had a playfulness and sense of humor that I found completely amusing, so much more casual than my own mother’s. She was a grade school teacher with the ability to relate to people in a very natural way. She was sentimental about cats and dogs and friendship and children. As I learned more about her relationship with her mother, though, a very painful history emerged, steeped in shame and punishment. I’m sure that was the root of the depression that lingered throughout her life. She carried scars and secrets with her to the grave. We only learned about them when her sister-in-law spoke up after the funeral. I imagine, though, that she would have liked to allow the sunniest parts of her personality to shine through unclouded. It was her ability to laugh in the face of fear that I illustrated at her memorial service when I told this story:
In June of 1992, she came out to visit us from California. We had only been living in Illinois since August, and Jim had been through an emergency cardiac procedure that January. She came out eager to see him recovering and to bask in the hugs of her four grandchildren. He had a scheduled check-up during her stay, and learned that his arteries were even more clogged than in January. He was advised to undergo double bypass surgery as soon as possible. He was 31. She decided to extend her stay indefinitely and see what happened next. Her anxiety was tremendous, and so was mine. Her sense of humor, however, surfaced much more readily. It was her coping strategy, and it matched his perfectly. The day of the surgery was stormy and dangerous. A tornado touched down in the vicinity of the hospital and cut out power just as he was coming out of surgery and off the breathing machine. A frantic nurse grabbed a mouth tube and bag to squeeze air into his lungs. Marni and I were shaking all over and clutching hands as we watched. Moments later, the generators kicked in and a calmer air prevailed. Jim was breathing unassisted, and he was motioning me to come closer to tell me something. I leaned in to hear him say in a hoarse whisper, “They found out what was wrong with my heart.” “Yes, dear…” “When they opened me up, they found this!” His hand moved under the bedsheets by his side. I looked down and discovered that he was clutching the broken figure off of one of his bowling trophies. “The Bowler” was a running gag we had started the first year of our marriage. He surfaced in Christmas stockings, random drawers, and even in the bouquet of roses Jim brought onstage after my senior voice recital. How in the world did Jim manage to stage another practical joke on the day of his heart surgery?!! Well, he had an accomplice, of course. His mother, who smiled mildly and innocently at the end of the bed while I looked around in utter amazement. Then we all tried to keep from laughing too hard, only because it was so painful for Jim when he tried to join in.
Recovering from heart surgery, smiles intact.
So, whatever troubles lay at the core of my mother-in-law’s psyche, I appreciate that she had the desire to live happily and tried to do that as much as possible. She truly loved her children and grandchildren and enjoyed so many pleasures with them. She shared what joy she found with a lot of kids during her lifetime as a teacher, and I’m sure many are grateful and remember her to this day.
My Favorite Fathers
The obvious blog subject of the day here in the U.S. of A. is Father’s Day. I have two stellar examples of fathers prominent in my thoughts and conspicuously absent in the flesh. My husband, the father of my four children, died in 2008. My father, who had 5 children, died in 2010. What they have in common is that they both felt woefully disappointed by their own fathers (at one time) and were determined to do better. I’m glad to say that my husband had the chance to improve his relationship with his dad over the years, whereas my father did not. They both had an internal sense of the kind of father they wanted to be, and were clear in their values. They were incredibly dependable, stable providers of basic things, although in slightly different mixtures. My husband was far more of a “warm fuzzy”, emotional Teddy Bear. My father provided more structure and logic. I’ve come to realize that these are not opposite qualities in parenting, they are important components. There are as many ways of concocting a life-giving balance as there are fathers.
My favorite memories of my dad contain literary and educational aspects: his voice reading aloud from story books, the ballet and opera and museum tickets he treated us to regularly, the vacations and nature walks we went on. My favorite memories of my husband as a father are visceral and physical: how he held them, laughed with them, cried with them, sang to them, praised them and worried over them. When a man is giving the best he has to his children, it’s a beautiful thing. Well worth celebrating, whatever flavor it comes in.
You gotta give Dad a tie on Father’s Day…
(Okay, photographers, clearly the slides taken by my father’s Leica in the 1970s came out better than the prints from my Canon AE-1 that I scanned into a dusty screen. My brother-in-law converted the slides to digital images somehow; I love how sharp they are!)
This Space Reserved
Today’s date is reserved for a blog about my mother-in-law, who was born on this day. However, I just don’t have time to do Marni justice, since I didn’t get home from work until 6:30, made dinner, walked to the market and am now eagerly anticipating the arrival of my oldest daughter and her First Mate for a sleepover visit and Sunday breakfast, after which I go back to work until 6pm again. I apologize for the disappointment, but promise to do my best to honor her at a later time. Here’s a teaser about this beloved person: she was a concert pianist. She played for Rachmaninoff when she was 16. Yeah. And as a grandma, she was a computer game geek. You’re gonna love her.
Jim, his mom, and Ach du Wee Bear.
scillagrace 