Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Scorecard
Her children are doing great, one is an accountant, another in law school, the last in Central America on a break from college,resumes folded in her purse to show me if I asked. I turned away from the contest, knowing I would have to say that, of mine, three are happy and one not so much but that probably changes day by day. I stopped keeping track of their accomplishments or not and now settle on whether I want to have lunch with them and whether they can tell a decent joke or get one, which one of them I would trust to show up if I was stranded, no questions asked. This is hard to explain standing amid the Christmas candles in the department store so I just keep it to myself and say goodbye.
Lady Godiva
The landlord gave me thirty days.
The letter came out of the blue. In the mail. An official letter with a return receipt attached that I had to sign so the mailman could tell the sender that I’d gotten the letter, held it in my hands. My eviction notice was delivered to me. I was dumbfounded, paralyzed.
The landlord’s daughter lived downstairs. My daughter and I lived in the upper flat and she and her husband lived downstairs. Once a month I drove six blocks and put my rent in her father’s mailbox. He lived in a house with a porch sagging on to the front lawn. I never knocked on the door or rang the bell. I just put the rent in the box and fled. I didn’t ever want to see my landlord. I just wanted to be on time with the rent.
And I was on time. Every month. I had lived in my upper flat for five years, since 1977, and in those five years I’d gotten divorced from the man whose name was on the lease, I sent my daughter to the grade school a block away, put together her bicycle by myself on Christmas Eve, took all of her friends ice skating for her birthday and came back to our flat for tuna casserole and cake that I made from a box. I drove a yellow Volkswagen. We had a cat named Raindrop.
What had I done wrong? Oh, the landlord said, there’s nothing wrong. My other daughter needs a place to live, he said, that’s all.
And so she would take our place. And we were to have no place. Everything would have to change.
I was frantic. In the years since my divorce, I had tread water. I’d asked my husband to get me set up in a new place before we split up, asked him to put his name on the lease. I kept his last name and lived a long time as if my husband was just away rather than gone. Even though I was the one who wanted a divorce, I lived life as pending. It made no sense.
I wanted him to come back and find us a new home. I wanted him to make sure we were safe and then leave again.
I found an apartment several blocks away and gave the new landlord the security deposit and first month’s rent. And then I found another place that would let us keep Raindrop and I asked the first place for my money back and the guy said no. So then I asked my father for money, something I had never done in my life, and he sent me a thousand dollars telling me it was unwise to loan money to relatives so it was a gift. I never told him about the cat.
Two men from work helped us move. They argued outside in the rain about how to load our furniture in a station wagon, each one wanting to be more expert at moving than the other. I yearned for my ex-husband or my father to come take control.
As it got later that last night when the landlord said I had to be gone, we piled more and more into boxes, balancing things that were precious to me, taking chances that things would break but being more concerned about complying to the letter of the letter.
I had been evicted. I had to leave and take my broken things with me.
And learn how to fix them on my own.
Tradition
At Lambeau Field, fans wear hats their fathers wore because they brought good luck once and might again; those with new hats defer to history, their sameness mass-produced offers scant chance of inheritance.
Saturday Afternoon
Sometimes you have to wonder if completely losing control of one’s temper to the point of beating on the steering wheel of one’s car might possibly be therapeutic like having a colonic or one of those facials that extract every morsel of unpleasantness from your pores or if it’s just another in a cascading, decades-long list of over the top reactions to things going wrong.
I fill my tank with patience and maturity every day. Last week, I almost posted on Facebook that I had somehow lost the itching, incessant need to call out every asshole in the landscape. I was struck, probably after a long walk through a big park, by my mellowness, my attainment of calm, achieved without yoga or meditation, only by walking my dogs, being fully with them as they sniffed every tree and peed on some. It calms me, my dogs’ pace. And from that, I figured I’d finally changed my personality. But I knew better. There had just been a long stretch of placid, the doldrums of mood.
I didn’t grow up in a house with wild tempers. When my parents disagreed with each other, they sent out signals to the wallpaper which then sent a silent radioactive message to all of us. There is tension in the house. Beware. When my mother was upset, she would go silent, speaking only five or six words a day instead of the usual ten.
My brother and sister got into it, unbeknownst to my parents. Nine and six years older than me, they fought a lot but only when my parents were gone. The fights were over chores or who watched what on television. The arguments could get vicious, snapped dish towels and much yelling, doors slamming, but no fisticuffs. I cowered on my bed, aligned with the stronger of the two but careful in my demonstration of my alliance since I shared a bedroom with the weaker one. She would pass it on if she didn’t feel complete neutrality in me, the little nine-year old Switzerland.
So where does this come from, this steering wheel pounding rage? It comes from a tiny warehouse, a u-store-it space, rented for $100 a month, where everything that ever happened is crammed, where everything a person has tried is inventoried, every disappointment cataloged, all of the aching heads layered like compressed ferns and the insects in amber at the natural history museum. So much is in the tiny warehouse that the door won’t close and because the old, stuffed bins are full of the toxic mix of hope and reality, the door blows off. It blows completely off.
But only once in a great while, thank God.
I pound the door shut and press on.
Ancient Sayings
One of the great things about blogging is that while people sometimes criticize the ideas in a post, they never criticize the writing. As in, ‘this is really poorly written.’
This is good for me since I have almost no tolerance for criticism about my writing unless it’s the tiniest little pebble wrapped in oceans of velvet hidden behind a heavy drape of compliments. And even then I can’t fathom it, sitting calmly and reading criticism of something I so painstakingly crafted in the thirty minutes between finishing a project and dinner being ready. If a comment ever gave off even the smallest puffs of negativity, I’d obliterate it without even reading the whole thing. I’ve been told I’m overly sensitive to criticism.
I’ve published a couple of pieces that have brought some really vitriolic responses. I was once raw meat for a bunch of adoptees in Australia who hated me for being an adoptive mother who complained about her adoptive kids. Too bad my kids had all left home before the Aussies set out to rescue them from me. Still, as mad as they got and as lengthy, they left my writing alone. There was no ‘you’re a terrible writer’ to go along with ‘you’re a criminal for snatching those poor children from their true parents.’ No advice to go easy on the adverbs or tighten up the character descriptions. They were mum on that front. I could have written the whole piece in crayon as far as they were concerned.
It’s freeing. That idea. Very freeing. Crayons.
A long time ago, a man told me that no smart person would ever tell a woman she wasn’t a good lay, a good cook, or a good mother.
Yes, I lived in the Stone Age. It was pretty there. The caves were beautifully appointed and everyone wore furs.
Anyway, before my misogynist-hating friends and relatives get fired up about the aforementioned nugget from my friend, let me just say that I would add this: don’t ever tell a woman she isn’t a good writer.
No, wait, let me be more specific. Don’t ever tell this woman she isn’t a good writer. She would dissolve into nothingness like the Wicked Witch, leaving only empty jeans and hiking boots in a puddle of writer tears.
It’s a good thing that nobody criticizes the writing on blogs. This protects my giant but fragile ego. But it also creates an unreal world where we, the blogging nation, seem to overlook the 400-line paragraphs, the misspelled words, the strained comparisons, the precious, breathless confessions, and the never-ending self-absorption because, after all, we all write ‘what we know’ and what we know is us, right?
Don’t mistake this for a faux plea for criticism. I am only observing, not issuing a request for critical attention.
I’m way too tender for that. Weak. Vulnerable. Like a blade of grass. Don’t mow me.
A Person in the World
I’m in a stage of my life where I am wanting mothering to have been one of the things I’ve done but not the only thing or even, maybe, the most important thing. Part of my wanting to get out from under the mothering mantle is its constant evaluative dimension. Maybe one doesn’t get tired of being a mother. Maybe one gets tired of being judged as a mother.
Yesterday, a Facebook friend posted that one day she was the world’s greatest mother and the next day the worst mother who ever lived. It sounded to me as if one of her kids was issuing these labels, if I had to bet, I would guess it was her daughter.
I responded to her by saying eventually you’ll end up somewhere in the middle and added “I’m still waiting.”
The pendulum swings about my mothering performance are no longer day to day. The intervals get longer, happily, as my role in my children’s lives becomes less and less central. In this case, the more I am marginalized, the better. I say that only partially tongue in cheek.
This comes after forty years of mediocre grades, notations that Janice isn’t applying herself, that she fails to listen, and doesn’t check her work carefully. But interspersed in her mothering career are moments of extraordinariness, just enough to raise the overall grade from its bumping along the bottom average. She has the potential, the grader says, for greatness if only she would show consistent effort. Which, of course, she doesn’t or didn’t.
I’m not alone here. I’ve met up with other moms in study hall and compared notes. There’s a lot of disappointing grades, a lot of unfairness and frustration being felt. ‘I tried, I really tried, don’t I get credit for trying?’
The judging seems too all encompassing to come from just one source but it pretty much does. We are always, constantly, grading ourselves, comparing ourselves to our own mothers, our friends, Michelle Obama, the mothers on TV, the mother we thought we would be, the mother other people think we are, the mother we should be, the mother our kids say other mothers are like. We constantly adjust our rating, little ladies holding babies on a massive slide rule, zoom to one end when our kid seems headed to Harvard, zoom to the other when jail is in sight. All of this is day to day, very constant, very prickly. A hair shirt that comes with the bounty of motherhood, children who love you and who you love.
Mothers, I think, go through their entire lives with a giant stripe painted down one side of their bodies. And the stripe is there and visible no matter what they are wearing or what they are doing with their lives. I don’t think fathers have a stripe like that. But maybe I am underestimating fathers. Maybe they think about their fathering a lot more than I suspect. I don’t think so. I think they just do it, they raise their children, for better or for worse, and move on. They distance themselves. They don’t walk around with their stripe forever. If they ever had one.
Because they seem free of thinking constantly about being a father, I don’t think most men have any idea how much weight women carry with them with regard to their mothering, they don’t get how immutable the stripe is. It’s impossible to explain. I’ve tried. It just doesn’t make sense to anyone without the stripe.
I know it is a peculiar thing to have been exceptionally blessed with children, to be proud of them and glad they are alive and well and also want to be out from under all of it, to be rid of my stripe.
I want to just be a person in the world.
That will make sense to some people. Not all, but some.
Nights on the Town
We never much bought into date night. Date year, maybe. It always seemed like so much trouble to go out after having been out all day. Most of the time, nothing seemed better than our kitchen after trying to make a buck in the wicked nonprofit world and wrestling our kids to the ground.
We would stand in the kitchen and talk and talk and talk and drink and drink, but that’s the subject of previous blog posts. In any event, we were never much for going out. It seemed inferior to our own entertainment and it cost money, not my issue but a deal breaker for my husband.
Lately we have taken to going to events like political fundraisers and receptions thrown by corporations who want to score points with nonprofits. Suddenly, it seems like a good idea to ditch the kitchen yakking and go hang with the suits. Tonight, I wrapped up revisions to the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness so I could get fancied up and go eat tiny empanadas and wee mushroom tarts with goat cheese served on trays held by young waiters holding napkins. It is deluxe to eat small food brought to you on silver trays. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It makes unwrapping a Big Mac in the car like licking the lid of a stuffed garbage can.
Tonight there were two events. The first was a fundraiser for an alderman held in a neighborhood bar. Walking in, it struck me that I hadn’t been in a place with so many men in a very long time. “Why are there so many men here?” I asked my husband. He shrugged and went back for more wings. There were a couple of men I knew from a long time ago, one of them playing drums in the corner, wearing a cabbie hat turned backwards. A long time since I’d seen him, decades, but he gave me a a look like he remembered well all the times we’d passed each other in the hallway at the agency where we worked. We had a bond, that’s for sure.
At the second event, the one with the tiny food, I also saw people I knew from long ago. Both of them gave me looks like they remembered something extra endearing about me like there had been some mischief we’d done together, soaped windows on Halloween or played ding dong ditch together. It takes so little to find a bond with someone when you’re in a giant room with 400 people and know only six of them. ‘We once parked in the same lot on Wisconsin Avenue, do you remember? You had a McGovern sticker and so did I!’
I like our new hobby. The food is good and there’s the chance of being endearing to someone different.
What’s not to like?
When Did Vietnam Veterans Become Heroes?
Vietnam veterans weren’t heroes when they came home. When you hear one say that his homecoming was disappointing, that he might have even gotten a hostile reception, he’s not exaggerating. That’s how it was. I know.
Like many people, I viewed the war in Southeast Asia as an illegal war. Simplistic if then thinking meant that Americans fighting there must be illegal warriors. Everything imaginable seemed wrong about the war. The lack of a formal declaration of war by the U.S. Congress, the ever-shifting lines of battle, involving first this country, then that, the blurriness of the enemy – were they soldiers, children, women, villages? The class-based draft that excused college students, the images of drug use, disorder, murky stories about fragging in which soldiers threw grenades into the tents of unpopular officers, the horror of My Lai. The endless secrets, the lies, intentional mysteries. Napalm.
A President who had calmed the country after John Kennedy’s assassination and managed to pass the most sweeping Civil Right law in history sacrificed his legacy to the war. I watched on TV as Lyndon Johnson told the country that he ‘would not seek nor would he accept’ his party’s nomination for a second term as President. The gore and madness of the war in Vietnam chased him out of office.
So when I was assigned by my boss at the anti-poverty agency where I worked in the late 70’s to write grants for the National Association of Black Veterans, I resisted. This was not why I wanted to be in community work. I wanted to help children and families, right the wrongs of social injustice, change lives, not raise money so veterans with bad discharges could appeal. “You hate the war and the warriors,” said the NABV director when he picked up on my bad attitude. He was right.
But I wasn’t the only one. Most of the country felt the same way.
There were real veterans, like my two uncles who served in World War II and my husband’s father who enlisted at age 17 and was at the Battle of the Bulge. There was the old man in my neighborhood growing up who had been captured by the Germans in World War I. There was Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Marshall and the amazing stories of valor about World War II.
And then there were Vietnam vets. Most of the time they just melted in to the population. Sometimes, they got pretty angry about the war and became protestors themselves. After a while, the war ended. Fifty thousand American soldiers dead. Thousands upon thousands of Southeast Asians. With no apparent outcome. So bitter.
But now when we go to our city’s Veterans Day parade, we applaud for every contingent that passes and we applaud extra loud for Vietnam vets. And I think to myself, when did this happen? When did they become heroes? We used to blame them for the war. Why aren’t we blaming them anymore? It’s not a conscious thing, like some new evidence came out that changed everyone’s minds about Vietnam vets. Nothing happened but the passage of time and a couple of other wars.
I can’t speak for everyone but for me, when I see the Vietnam vets march by, most of them my age, I feel like my generation is marching. I feel loyal to them. I also increasingly understand that going to a foreign place to fight in a war is by itself heroic, and made the more so by the uniquely terrible conditions of Vietnam. I know that buried in the nightly news reports of that time, were stories of courage and kindness. I know that most veterans who served in Vietnam didn’t choose to be there, but they were there and did their best, even when the country was doing so little to support them. I guess I am grateful that they were sticking up for me and every other American even though I didn’t like it at the time.
There is something so true about the adage that time heals all wounds. I hope time has healed the wound Vietnam vets must have felt coming home, healed the wound of lack of gratitude and recognition, healed the wound of hatred.
They deserve that. They’re heroes and I’m glad I finally figured that out.
___________________
Photo by Michael Browning on Unsplash
Fun with Special Ed
Out behind your everyday, run of the mill public school, there is a very dense forest. In the forest, there are paths that crisscross and at the intersections the signs point up and down and backward. Many people get lost in the forest. They leave behind their cell phones and their manila folders in the fallen leaves, wet scraps of IEP’s hang from the trees. If you look closely you can see the blurred outline of an IEP goal, maybe one that says that Little Johnny will sit in his seat and listen attentively 80% of the time.
At the entrance to the forest where a tiny footpath starts that is mostly grown over with weeds and dead branches, there is a small sign. It’s not at eye level so it’s easy to miss. And it’s black on black so it’s hard to discern. But what the letters say is SPECIAL EDUCATION.
This week there was a fairly nasty article about a special education student essentially being caged in a school in the Fresno (CA) School District. The Fresno Bee reported that “a 7-year old Fresno Unified School District special education student was allegedly locked in a makeshift cage by her Viking Elementary first-grade teacher last school year, according to two claims filed against the teacher and school administrators in mid-October.” The cage, a makeshift collection of child gates and filing cabinets, apparently served as the penalty box for the little girl whenever her behavior was deemed inappropriate for the classroom setting.
Apparently stumped by how to respond to a child with special educational needs, the teacher resorted to imprisonment, a common enough reflex. Act out? Separate and stigmatize – all in the name of order and doing what’s best for the most. I hear echoes of the American prison system in the room where I’m sitting, but that’s probably just me. I’m sure the teacher’s response to the child’s acting out (however defined) was completely appropriate and was only done in the best interests of all of the students in her class. Nifty, though, that the little girl got to stay in class, even though it was behind bars. And super nifty that her classmates could see firsthand what could happen if they themselves ever became a special education student. Talk about deterrence. Powerful.
Of course, none of this is an abstraction for me. I know about special education. At one time, I had three kids in special education, each with quirky learning disabilities that made it nearly impossible for them to get through school without assistance. The essence of a learning disability is that a child is of average intelligence but has one or more ‘in-child’ barriers to learning. In our little band of outliers, we had dyslexia, dysgraphia, auditory processing issues, and, my favorite, an overall inability to absorb new knowledge. I gave the testers credit for this last ‘diagnosis.’ It was ingenious, if nothing else, encompassing everything but describing nothing.
We debated about whether to seek a special education designation for these three children. On the one hand, we desperately wanted to avoid the stigma that is automatic with a special education label. We can kid ourselves, pretend that all the teachers and other students will be kind and understanding but they won’t usually. The stigmatizing will be subtle but it will be there. The aggravating thing is, though, that stigma also prevails for the child who is persistently behind, doesn’t get it, can’t understand the material or do the work. It’s a stigma buffet. You pick.
In our case, we decided that our kids wouldn’t get through school without special instruction and accommodation. The latter ended up being the more important. Accommodation meant more time for tests, being able to test orally rather than in written format, and having other assists to complete work. Happily, each of these children had something else that made them shine in the eyes of their classmates. One was an athlete, one was an actor, and one was gutsy and beautiful, a powerful combo.
They made it through. They are all gainfully employed, each using their own brand of unique talent. One of them even works with special education students, helping the most severely disabled get through the school day. Karma in Technicolor. They were all lucky. None of them spent time in a cage, none of them was purposely stigmatized and shamed. Their teachers taught them as the whole persons they were. I remembered to be grateful for that when I saw this article in the Fresno Bee.
A long, long time ago, when son #2 was a toddler newly arrived from Nicaragua with a catalog of delays and disabilities, I would drive him to St. Francis Children’s Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he would get special therapies and play with other children. The sign on the front of their building said something like this: All children can learn if we learn how to teach them.
I think the teacher in Fresno needs to come visit. See how it’s done. Learn.
It’s What Happens Next
The alarming thing about wanting people to step up is that sometimes they do just that.
When that happens, everything that was set in place to accommodate their resistance to stepping up gets jumbled. All of the adjustments, in-fill, sacrifice, work-arounds, the vast repertoire of excuses and overlooks end up scattered on the floor like too many shoes in a too small closet.
Say a young dad who has been a hit or miss father to his child suddenly decides to get serious and be consistent. And say his parents who have been filling in the cracks, who were re-activated after playing too many seasons, both with probable concussions from hard hits suffered in the past, say they stepped up to fill a void left by the young dad’s flimsiness, his inability to consistently attend to his child. And say his parents spent years being place-holders, providing for their grandchild the upbringing they thought they had provided for their son so that, at some distant point, that son would show up and become the father they had expected him to be.
And then he shows up. And he makes noises like he’s not just visiting but that he means to stay. He cooks meals. He does homework. He makes a space for his child in his life that looks permanent, but it doesn’t have all of her toys, her stuffed animals, her winter clothes, all of those things are with his parents who hold on to those things thinking they shouldn’t trust something that is so new, so strange.
“It’s what we wanted,” the young dad’s father says to the young dad’s mother. “We wanted him to step up and that’s what he’s doing.”
“I know. You’re right,” she answered. “It’s what we wanted.”
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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