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Defining Childhood Event

Defining Childhood Event

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Saturday Slant (ok, yeah, a little late)

Defining Childhood Event
If asked to pick just one, what event of your childhood most shaped the person you are now? We are all the sum of our laughter and tears. As children, events occur in and around our lives that shape our world forever more. Which one event—for better or for worse—might you say shaped you? Why was it significant? How do you feel about it? How does the effect of that event reach across the years to influence your adult life now?

There are a dozen or so such events, having to do with being involved with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with changes in socio-economic class and with important support and influences. If I were to choose the event that most shaped the person I am now, I would be hard-pressed to choose. I don’t think I can do it, really.

I’ll pick one that is in the top five – my parents’ divorce. It isn’t the most unusual or even perhaps the most interesting, but everyone needs to keep a few secrets.

My parents divorced when I was 9. I remember that my parents actually told me that they were getting a divorce, but I didn’t know what a divorce was – I had some idea that it was something like a business trip. One day, my father (who I feared and adored) was just gone – along with a lot of our stuff. For some time, I thought he was coming back. After a while, we started to see him on either Saturdays or Sundays.

We moved into a new apartment and I went to a new school. In place of a wonderful yard with lilac bushes and a big swing on a huge crabapple tree and wild grapes and the freedom to range around in the neighborhood, I looked out on a backyard that was simply a sandpit full of dog excrement. The neighbors were.. um.. less friendly. My imaginary world turned away from the extensive fantasies I had projected onto the outside world – no more worlds of the faery and the magical. I started to play the piano and to dance and to read, spending almost all of my time indoors. The public library was a block away, and I spent a lot of time there as well. My mother was working all of the time and we became latchkey kids. I took over responsibility for my two younger brothers – whether to the good or not they would have to say. Truth tell, I was a little bossy, when I paid attention to them at all. At 9 and 10 and 11 – I wasn’t ready for a parental role – I did my best.

My relationship with my father was troubled, partly because of his own problems and vulnerabilities that I didn’t grasp at all. Like many children, I felt that if I had been better he would still be living with us. This feeling was compounded by the complications of being a Jehovah’s Witness – a matter too convoluted to get into here, but suffice to say that the feeling of not being good enough was only amplified. My image of God became a lot like my “father” of the imagination (one more reason that I prefer other metaphors for God than that of the father). For many years, I had a very twisted idea of what had actually happened between my mom and my dad, and even now, even now, I’m not sure that it’s all settled inside me. The one thing that has become clear is that blame is pointless and that it takes two to make or break a relationship. My parents subsequently remarried, leaving me with steps (and later ex-steps, since they both eventually divorced their second spouses as well) that could be the topic of many more strange and awful posts of the future – unlikely that I will write about them, actually.

Between the divorce and my parents’ other issues, I began to feel that no matter how good I was or how smart I was or how well I did anything, that I would never be good enough – not good enough for anyone to truly care about me or love me, not good enough for God, not good enough for myself. I became at once tremendously insecure and extremely critical of others, holding them up as well to the impossible standards that I had internalized.

My orientation is still critical, and one of the things I’m always working on is to become more patient, welcoming, compassionate and forgiving of myself and others. That I am intelligent only makes this more difficult because I more easily slip into a perspective in which I feel I’m surrounded by idiots. Then I have to remember that I’m an idiot too and that there are many kinds of intelligence. To the extent that I accept myself I am able to accept others. It is surprising how long it took for me to reach what seems like a simple piece of wisdom.

My concern with contextual ethics – that all sides of a situation be voiced, and as many perspectives as possible explored before making judgment – stems from this stormy time. My lifelong insecurity and the nervous laughter that still infects me from time to time also dates from this period. I am thankful that I have finally understood some of the dynamics, but I also have many regrets, including the gap that was never entirely healed between my father and myself. He died in December 2003 and although I sought his love and acceptance all my life, I never really acknowledged the ways in which I continued to keep him distant until he was gone.

The divorce changed everything, everything. I think it has a lot to do with why I was a “serial monogamist” for so long, and with why I was in my 30’s before I was able to have a healthy loving relationship in which I felt confident and secure. My terror of abandonment, my feeling of being unlovable and my inability to allow love had complicated things for a long time.

I understand that some marriages are very destructive, but I also understand how profoundly divorce affects kids. I also understand how difficult it is to be all alone in raising a child or children – this very difficulty may well have influenced my mother’s choice for our stepfather.

Now, a mom myself, I look at our son and I can finally understand how wrong I was about myself when I was young. Ben has taught me more than any study or introspection or analysis.

In my imagination, I travel back to that little girl, hug her tight, and tell her it is going to be all right… and it is.

Ben-isms

Ben-isms

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My mom used to say “ugga-mugga” when we rubbed noses. I don’t know why.

Ben does not like “ugga-mugga” so much – he much prefers his own variation:

“Nugga-nugga”

It was while Ben was talking to my mother (his gramma, of course) that he stated rather matter-of-factly that your “toenails keep your toes from falling off”.

We live at the top of a hill and at the end of a street. Our driveway is quite steep. Every morning Ben announces that he will look down the driveway for cars so that we don’t have to watch.

Ben used a horrible insulting word this evening. When we told him that we didn’t want him to use that word, he insisted that he had only just then thought of it. He didn’t hear it anywhere – he made it up.

On the other hand, when I said “hell” he told me that was a bad word. I said that it wasn’t a word that he should use at school, but it’s not really a bad word. It’s just the name of an imaginary place that some people like to believe in.

Mother’s Day for Peace

Mother’s Day for Peace

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Codepink, the action group for women for peace, has posted this as a message for Mother’s Day. I thought I’d pass it on to help us think in terms of what Tori Amos calls “a mother of a mother revolution.”

Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Howe was a poet who co-published the anti-slavery newspaper The Commonwealth with her husband (Samuel Gridley Howe). In 1861 she wrote the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” After her experience of the realities of war (Civil War) Howe became active in the woman’s suffrage movement and advocated world peace and equality in all its forms. In 1870, she issued the above call, hoping that women would arise and work together to oppose all forms of war, to transcend national and ethnic boundaries, to recognize what we hold in common above what divides us, and to resolve to achieve peaceful resolutions to conflicts.

She was not able to get formal recognition of a “Mother’s Day for Peace,” but Anne Jarvis (inspired by her mother and by Howe) was able to get Mother’s Day as a “memorial day” going. The first “Mother’s Day” was celebrated in West Virginia in 1907. It spread to 45 states and – and the official national holiday was declared by Woodrow Wilson in 1914.

In 1908 Howe became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

We don’t think of Mother’s Day as being related to the work of peace or the remembering of death and the consequences of war. Maybe we should revive the origins of this tradition.

Fireflies!

Fireflies!

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Just a quick note – our back yard woods is full of fireflies. I don’t remember them being out so early before. The thin bottom crescent of the moon is the perfect touch. Stars are twinkling. Two large owls are chasing each other, with loud hoo-koos and their wings’ whoshing. Despite the thick dusting of greenish yellow pollen covering everything, is cool and bright and luminous. Absolutely magical.

Sleeping Partners and Lovies

Sleeping Partners and Lovies

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My son Ben suddenly stopped calling his stuffed animals “lovies” and started calling them his “sleeping partners.” John and I raised our eyebrows at this. I talked to him about it and he says that’s what they now call them at the church preschool. Very odd.

I explained that sleeping partners are not stuffed animals, but real live people that you sleep with.

His response? “Well, then if you stay with me when I have a bad dream, are YOU my sleeping partner?”

“Um…no,” I say, thinking fast and furious. I imagine him talking to a teacher – “Mommy, my sleeping partner…” No no no.

OK, I try again.

“A sleeping partner is a grownup who sleeps with another grownup. You have to be all grown up to choose a sleeping partner. Little boys and girls don’t have sleeping partners. But you have something perfect for kids – a whole bunch of sweet little lovies to hug and to help you have sweet dreams. (pause) They aren’t partners because partners have to be equals.”

“What’s an equals?”

Sigh. Every try to explain equality to a 4-year old?

“OK, equals are people that respect each other and know that they aren’t any better or worse than the other person.”

“I’m stronger than [his latest buddy].”

“Well, maybe that’s a little hard for me to explain right now – let’s get back to the sleeping part.”

“Are they still my lovies?” asks he.

“Yes, they are still your lovies. And you have lots of lovies.”

“What do I do if they call them sleeping partners at school?”

“Tell them your mommy says they aren’t sleeping partners.”

End of discussion.

So then I talk to the people at the school. They are trying to move the vocabulary away from babytalk. I understand that at a certain point you don’t announce you have go to “poop,” that you then “go to the bathroom.” We all get training in euphemisms as part of the civilizing process. They evidently don’t hear the multiple resonances of “sleeping partners.” Rather than try to explain it to them, I just simply said that it was innappropriate and perhaps they could just call it what it is – whether stuffed animal, lovey, huggie, by name, or whatever. In any case, I informed them Ben was not going to be calling them “sleeping partners” – under any conditions. When he has a sexual partner one day, I don’t want him thinking of Simba and his blue teddy and Barney!

What on earth are they thinking?

Busy Mom Barometer

Busy Mom Barometer

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Thanks to Busy Mom for the Busy Mom Barometer! Here’s mine:

Coffee of the Day: Kenya AA with raw sugar and half ‘n’ half.
Listening to: Kate Bush, Tori Amos, The The, Jane Siberry and the usual suspects on my Yahoo Radio Station.
Thinking: Wonder how I’ll cram World Literature into an 8-week course? The classes are four hours long – wonder if I can bring coffee? Will everyone fall asleep by 10pm?
Wishing: I hadn’t gotten into so much student loan debt. That I hadn’t sent Ben into school with that shirt (I think the sleeves are too short). That I had painted the living room this summer. Wait! All my wishes are negative! Ok, I wish for the vote to turn out for Kerry. I wish for a peaceful resolution of all the world conflicts – and an era of peace and prosperity for all. I wish for a full-time tenure-track position in the humanities. I wish for a car. I wish to win the lottery. I wish for my little boy Ben never to lose that wonderful smile.
Reading: Norton Anthology of World Literature!
Shopping: No car, no cash. What will I do for Christmas? Will have to get Thanksgiving materials on Wednesday. On Tuesday night? Clothes for Ben – he’s down to two pairs of pants that fit. What I really need are some clothes, shoes, underwear for myself. I think a lot of moms do that, shift the priority away from ourselves on shopping. I found a little thing I can send a few people for Christmas – but I can’t blog it, or they will know what it is.