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lifefromthestep

Monthly Archives: February 2014

Sunshine on My Window Makes Me Happy

23 Sunday Feb 2014

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daughters, fathers, grief, spring

I forget it every winter.  I forget how the cold and dark and cloudy makes the world seem cruel and pointless.  Sunshine is such a little thing and such an everything. 

Last week my students read the story of Demeter and Persephone, that beautiful explanation of the seasons when the world goes dark and death stalks the land as a mother grieves for her daughter lost to the Underworld.  It makes sense to me. 

Winter too often brings death.  Of flowers.  Grass. Leaves from the trees. Loved ones.  Celebrity ones.  Strangers and other people’s loved ones. 

When the sun is not shining and the cold and dark prevail, it is so easy to forget that life goes on, that death is part of life.

And I cried typing that life goes on.  Every day still seems like a little betrayal.  Every day gets me further away from the last day.  yesterday I emptied into a bowl on my coffee table the last of my dad’s favorite mints that I had bought him for Christmas.  It was a warehouse-sized bag and soon it will be gone.  I’ll buy a new bag, but it will those mints my dad used to like rather than those mints I was going to give him because he was around just a few days ago, so few days ago that I still have consumable gifts that I meant to give him.

Sunshine switches the focus, however.  Sunshine pushes me to look not at the last time, but at the best time and to look forward to more best times with the people he loved, that we love. 

Grief goes on.  Life goes on.  The sun returns and I remember.

 
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The material

16 Sunday Feb 2014

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catholicism, daughters, death, fathers, grief

I am a Catholic, which can be hard to defend at times when the focus of the Church or people’s vision of the Church is on outdated (in my opinion) teachings and dogma–refusal to ordain women, continuing condemnation of birth control while arguing for the sanctity of life in the face of poverty, and teachings about homosexuality that put it at the heart of decaying marriage rather than whatever else is at the center.

However, one of the teachings of Catholicism that I love most is the insistence on the relationship between the material and the spiritual.  Christ’s body is bleeding and twisted on the cross.  We chew and swallow Christ’s body each week.  Because suffering is spiritual, but it is also always material.

This relationship between the two has been made viscerally clear in my experience of grief since the loss of my father.  Last weekend my mother and I went through my father’s clothes.  I had dreaded it and longed for it.  We cried, I buried my face in favorite shirts, wrapped my arms around fabric that no longer encircled my father, but was the closest I was going to get to the feeling of hugging him.

Monday I dropped off the clothes we chose to donate to Goodwill.  While I had dreaded going through the clothes and had been relieved to find it overall such a positive experience, I had not anticipated my feelings upon dropping off those clothes.  I wrote this sitting in my car just afterwards:

I just dropped off my father’s clothes at Goodwill.  I felt the words in my mouth to say–these were my father’s clothes–but I didn’t want to be grotesque, macabre.  I didn’t want to bring my grief into this cheerful person’s day.  So I loaded bags, accepted the receipt–12 bags–and got into my car.  And cried.  I wanted to take back every t-shirt, every sweater and bury my face in them, my hands, to pull my father back from wherever he went Dec. 18, back to me, his daughter, to us, his family.

Betrayal.

I can stuff my ears with music and my eyes with text, but grief will find you.  It keeps finding me.

The next day I wore a sweater that I had saved, a cardigan.  Throughout the day I would wrap it around me and feel my father’s presence.  The material and the spiritual.

I understand the altars to dead ancestors.  I understand the medieval collection of relics and the constant prayer for and to the dead. 

They are not gone, but they are gone.  They are not here, but they are here. 

The material is our touchstone to the spiritual, to our memories, so flawed and changeable.  The material is an unchanging witness.

This is my body.  Because there was once some body.

Do this in memory of me.  So we do.

Progress

14 Friday Feb 2014

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daughters, ex-wives, moms, parenting, stepchildren, stepmothers

Some moments in life make us stop and assess our progress towards maturity.  I would like to think I recently experienced one of those.

I began this blog relating tears and drama over homecoming photos.  Just keep that in mind. 

Our oldest daughter is in college.  She began at the local community college and is preparing to transfer to a four-year university next fall.  Part of that preparation is the sticker shock of four-year university tuition vs. community college tuition.  So scholarship applications are heavy on the winter to-do list.

She wrote one of her scholarship essays and sent me the draft.  Both her mom and I were part of the story as she explained how she came to choose her field of study, her mother through a childhood fear and I through advice on an elective in a discipline with which she fell in love. 

The essay was a rough draft and, as such, could have benefitted from some revision.  I read it through, sent my comments and mechanical corrections, and sent it back. 

Because I go to bed with the senior citizen crew and she works through the wee hours and sleeps all morning, our work schedules have a shallow overlap.  She continued to revise long after I was asleep, so sought her fellow night person, her mother. 

What resulted from that conversation was roughly the same essay, but the portion that told how she came to choose her field of study had altered.  The story with her mother had expanded, added some drama (not a bad thing in a scholarship essay). So childhood fear was heightened.  The choice to take the elective, however, was now completely due to this childhood fear.  My previous cameo, my role as advisor, encourager-in-chief, had disappeared.

I had literally been written out of the story.

A few years ago, I would have been devastated that our daughter went with this advice.  I would have taken this as a sign that I was not loved, would never achieve parity, and that life was perpetually unfair.

Now I take this as confirmation that I will never achieve parity and that life is unfair.  But I’m ok with both of those.  I don’t want to be equal.  I want to be me and our relationship to be ours.  And I feel sorry for her mother that she felt the need to write me out of the story, whatever the reason.  And I empathize with our daughter, who has been torn between her need to please and affirm two adult women throughout her entire childhood and now young adulthood. 

I cannot take away the ways in which I responded to my circumstances and the pain I caused her each time I responded by pulling her my direction.  I have changed the way I respond now.  Now she is pulled one way, and I can’t control that.

But I can chuckle about it with you for me and ask you to empathize for her.  And her. 

And hope you agree this is progress.

Crises of Faith

09 Sunday Feb 2014

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elizabeth gilbert, faith, hilary mantel, history, signature of all things, wolf hall

I am reading a novel that’s part of a Wall Street Journal book club led by Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.  Gilbert cites this novel as a model for his new historical fiction work, The Signature of All Things.  In Wolf Hall, Mantel tells the Tudor story from a more unusual angle–that of Thomas Cromwell.  Usually cast as villain, Mantel’s Cromwell is like all of our modern heroes–neither good nor evil, but sympathetically human.  He loves and mourns his wife, is loyal to his first master even as he falls (Wolsey), and is efficient no matter what the task, even breaking the will of old men (Fisher).  

In Mantel’s hands, Cromwell becomes sympathetic and Thomas More, usually cast as martyr hero, as one-dimensionally dogmatic, misogynistic, and focused on his ego.  

How interesting, I thought this morning as I read various characters debate the likelihood of More taking the oath to Henry’s succession plan after the birth of Elizabeth, that we can be brought to love and dislike the same historical figure through placing him or her in different lights.  

I realize this is a novel.  History itself should be drier, less emotive, but when it is, it is not compelling.  The trend in history is to move toward a more novelistic approach, to engage our emotions, to bring historical figures to life using some license with the historical sources.

Here is where the musing really begins and intersects with more recent figures.  

My grandfather was a wonderful man at the core.  He loved his family and was extremely loyal to those he loved.  He was also bigoted until presented with just the right argument or experience.  He seemed to enjoy, at times, provoking family members with his bigotry and for much of my childhood was a slightly frightening figure who swore, blustered, and later even fought with my mother, who I thought would never cross him.  And yet, when he passed away and we told stories about him, the blustering and bigotry took on a nostalgic glow, awash in the light of the love and loyalty, its hard edges eroded with each retelling.

My own father has recently passed and I find myself doing the same–celebrating all of the positives, softening the hard spots, and pushing away the year of outright crossness with everyone at the drop of a hat.  How might someone who did not worship him, as I do, retell his story?  Someone who met him in that year of crossness?  

Is that what history comes down to?  Whether or not the person telling the story loves the subject or not?  Or what the teller needs to make of the subject?  If I need George Washington to be a saintly patriot, I interpret him as a saintly patriot and minimize all contrary evidence?  One can’t ignore it because information will out in this age, but minimize it, neutralize, cleanse (in the PR business).  

On the other side, what happens when what we leave behind for interpretation are mere documents, fragments of our relationship to official entities?  When those who remember the timbre of our voices and the snap in our eyes are no longer there to witness to our essence?  

This leads me to the realization that now I am suffering not only a crisis of religious faith, but one of professional faith.  Nothing is certain.  Everything is slippery, subject to the whim of nothing.  Of chance.  Or an order I strain to see, but whose outlines I cannot even faintly discern.  

Happy Sunday morning.

Give Me the Old Gray-Haired Jack Ryan Any Day

03 Monday Feb 2014

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harrison ford, jack ryan, movies, sex appeal

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I’ve been wanting to see the new Jack Ryan movie (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) since it came out a week or so ago.  I am a die-hard Harrison Ford fan.  My friends give me a hard time because he’s still on my “list.”  If you don’t know what the “list” is, you’re too young or too senior to truly appreciate most of what I’m going to say.  (Or you can Google and see how it’s related to an infamous Friends episode).  Back to the point.  The gray-haired Harrison has always been, to me, superiorly sexy.  I don’t care for the Hans Solo Harrison.  Too cocky and boyishly slim. 

I probably first fell for Harrison in his role as Tom Clancy’s character, Jack Ryan.  Steely, confident, but not showy, Harrison entered a crisis situation, did some stunts, laid down some one-liners, and saved the world.  I’m sure he had energy to carry his wife off to bed after briefing the President on his latest adventure. 

So the new Jack Ryan is supposed to be a prequel–the story behind his recruitment to the CIA.  I’m down with that, but chronologically there’s a problem.  He’s recruited post 911.  The original Jack Ryan stories are Cold War stories.  Ok, young kids won’t gel with the Cold War, so I can forgive that logical gap. 

What I couldn’t forgive is a Jack Ryan who, while good-looking, is just not Harrison Ford.  There’s no fire.  No sexual tension.  No sexy. 

It’s not just because I’m now middle-aged.  I’ll keep saying that.  It’s not about me. 

It’s all about the sex appeal of a nice-looking gray-haired gentleman. 

Thank goodness for Netflix.

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