To Be or Not to Be—A Woman

(Edited repost from June 2011 . . . )

My last post ended with me being kicked out of scouts. I was told I’d never be one. Today’s is about being a real woman.

            This happened in my first year of the Scholasticate. Those three years were meant to give me a chance to see if I really wanted to be a nun. They also gave the professed nuns a chance to see if they really wanted me among them. In other words, was the life for me and was I for the life.

            In the ceremony that began the Scholasticate, I’d taken five vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, conversion of morals, and stability. I meant those first vows. In three years, I hoped to take final ones.

            I’d spent the past school year in a terrifying classroom of fifty-five seventh-graders. One student had thrown a knife at me when I had my back turned and was writing on the chalkboard. The blade barely missed my hand.

            The students themselves weren’t any safer. When the girls passed out class work, the boys jabbed their behinds with compasses. The girls yipped and yelped as they reeled down each aisle, trying to avoid the compass points.

            In early June, I’d come home to the convent, exhausted. I panicked when the Scholastic Mistress told my convent class of eighteen that we had to “turn” our habits that summer. I could face knives, but not thread and needle.

            At recreation, I asked two friends if they’d turn my habit while I did their obediences. One tablewaited in the summer refectory; the other worked in the scullery. They also polished the halls of the four-story building. All that sounded like a walk in the park to me next to the ordeal of turning a habit.

            To turn a habit was to make the back become the front by changing the sleeve openings, the yoke, and the hem. The back of our daily habit had become shiny and threadbare in spots from our having sat on it for two years. The long, narrow scapular of black serge we wore over the habit—back and front—would cover the shine. Turning would keep the habit whole, not holey. Turning was beyond my capabilities.

            My two friends thought they got the best of the deal. They actually liked to sew. Both of them had probably been great girl scouts. When the Scholastic Mistress heard my plan, she nixed it. I’d turn my own habit.

            “I don’t like sewing,” I explained.

            “It’s your habit, Sister Innocence. It’s your duty to take care of it.”

            “I’m not good at sewing.”           

            “You’ll get good.”

            “Believe me, I can’t sew no matter how much I try.”

            “If you don’t learn how to sew, you’ll never be a real woman,” she said.

            “I don’t want to be a real woman if that means sewing,” I countered.

            She held up her right hand for silence. This brought me up close and personal to her veins, wrinkles, and liver spots for I was actually kneeling as we talked. That was our body’s attitude when we asked a permission of the Novice Mistress, Scholastic Mistress, or Mother Superior. Also when we made culpa for faults—like not lifting our habit when we climbed the steps. That dragged the hem on the stair edge and frayed it—a fault against the vow of poverty.

            I closed my mouth. I’d taken the vow of obedience. I’d lived it out on mission at a school where the kids toilet-papered the clothesline when I was doing the laundry and threatened to rape me if I didn’t let up on them in class. Surely turning a habit couldn’t be worse than that.

            Let me be the first to tell you. It was. That summer I had to do it all by hand because the personality of a sewing machine continued to evade me. I had so many needle pricks in my fingers and left so many drops of blood on that black serge that my friends felt sorry for me and surreptitiously helped whenever the Scholastic Mistress wasn’t looking. We were downright sneaky.

            Years have passed and I’m fairly certain that letting others define us is hazardous for our emotional growth and contentment. The Scholastic Mistress defined a woman as a female who could sew. Upon leaving the convent, I discovered that many people—both women and men—defined a woman as “married.” Or, even better, “married with children.” I didn’t then, I don’t now, fit those definitions.

            The truth is I’m not particularly concerned about “being a woman.” Being either male or female is of little interest to me. What is important is becoming an authentic human being. I’m gently greeting—day by day—the Oneness that lies deep down in the center of myself. I choose to let this Oneness define me.

            What I know for certain is that I never become a scout . . . or a seamstress.

            Surely Dante considered sewing one of hell’s worse torments.

Photo of needle from Wikipedia

           

Failing the Girl Scouts

(Edited repost from June 2011 . . . )

I got kicked out of Scouts. The leader didn’t like my attitude. I didn’t particularly care for hers.

            No. That’s not the whole truth. As a ten-year-old, I worshipped her. Dreamed of being as stylish and poised as she was. Wanted her beauty and glamour to rub off on me. She wore a charm bracelet of multitudinous silver trinkets given her by former boyfriends. She herself was a charm.           

            I, on the other hand, had two left feet and a habit of opening my mouth and sticking both in at the same time.

            She kicked me out after two sewing projects—an apron and a handkerchief.

            My Mom and I purchased bright red material and green thread for the apron. My favorite colors. Mom showed me how to use her treadle sewing machine. But remember those left feet? I peddled backward so the green-stitched hem ambled hither and yon.

            I thought it pretty nifty when I brandished it for the scout mistress. She curled her lip, cautiously picked it up between her thumb and index finger, and scrutinized it contemptuously. I felt for that apron. After that, I wore it every time Mom let me help cook. Which wasn’t often because I’d once set fire to the kitchen. Accidently of course.

            The second project involved crocheting around a white handkerchief. I assiduously worked for a week. It felt like drudgery. When our troop met again, all the other scouts had already crocheted around all four sides. I’d managed only one. They went on to new projects—and merit badges.

            “I like having just one side crocheted. It looks different,” I said when the scout mistress examined my work.

            “It looks unfinished,” she said dryly. “Keep crocheting.”

            I did. For one week. Two. Then a third. A whole month passed with me pulling out the thread and starting over again. The handkerchief got downright grimy. Years later, when I read A Tale of Two Cities, I knew I could have been one of those women knitting by the guillotine. Only I’d be crocheting the history of hanky torture.

            At the next meeting, I said I didn’t want to work on it any more.

            “You’ll work until it’s finished,” she ordered.

            “I can’t.”

            “You will,” she reiterated, baring her teeth.

            I saw myself trying to blow my nose on that crocheted hem.  It’d scratch.

            “I’m finished,” I announced. “I want to do something else.”

            “There’s nothing else for you until you finish this mangy handkerchief.”

            Of course part of the problem was that I wanted her to like me and I didn’t feel she did. I wasn’t pretty enough or witty enough or interesting enough for her. And I could feel my dream of being just like her collapsing.           

            “No,” I said, swallowing hard.

            “That’s it. I’ve had enough. You’re no longer in this scout troop.”

            The words stunned me.

            “But . . . ,”

            “But nothing. Go home, you’ll never be a scout.”

            That marked the end of my scouting career. When the other girls went to troop meetings after school, I caught the early bus home, vowing that one day I'd conquer crocheting. But at the time all I knew was that I was barely ten and a failure.

Photos from Wikipedia

Nickels and Cones

(Edited repost from May 2011 . . . )

Until I was three, Mom, Dad, and I lived in a duplex overlooking Allen Grade School, which stood below street level. A blacktopped playground surrounded it. On three sides, a sloping, grassy embankment separated this playground from the bordering streets.

            The duplex in which we lived faced the back of the brick school building. My dad’s parents lived two blocks north of it. Often, Mom and I visited Grandma while Grandpa was away being a fireman.

            Mom and I would race down the slope shouting, “Here we come! Ready or not!” She’d take my hand and we’d skip across the playground, hike up the alley with its overhanging oak trees, cross at the corner, and climb the steps to Grandma’s.

            At the end of our visit, Grandma would hand me a nickel. Mom and I would amble to the corner drugstore and spend my nickel on an ice-cream cone. Then we’d mosey on home, me licking, Mom whistling.

            On the day of this story, which took place right before my third birthday, Mom was ironing.

            “Mommy, could we visit Grandma today?” I asked.

            “Not today, Dodo. I’m too busy.”

            I kept asking. She kept ironing. Ultimately she simply set the iron aside and gave me my marching orders: “I want you to go outside, Anna Dolores,” she said—she always got formal when frayed. “Go outside and play house with Jimmy.”

            Once in the yard, I told my four-year-old playmate about the ice-cream cone.

            “You’d get a nickel too, Jimmy. Want to go?”

            “How’d we get there?”

            “Walk.” Jimmy seemed hesitant, but my bravado won him over.

            We silently left the yard—I’d figured out how to open the gate latch. We crossed the street and plunked ourselves down on the embankment. Giggling, we rolled down its grassy slope. At the bottom, I took off running. Jimmy lagged behind.

            “Come on,” I shouted, trying to galvanize him.

            Jimmy shouted back, “I’m an old slowpoke!” We grinned delightedly at one another and waved our arms like dive-bombers.

            The alley at the tail end of the playground stood in deep shade. Ominous. Half way up, Jimmy started to cry.

            “Don’t cry, Jimmy,” I said. “It’s okay. We’re almost there.”

            He just kept sobbing. Wailing. “Mommy says I’m a crybaby!”

            “You’re not, Jimmy,” I assured him. “Come on. Remember what I said. Grandma’s got nickels.”

            I continued marching up the steep alley, singing—shrilly—“Whistle While You Work.” I’d learned this song when Mom and I went to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. We sang it as I used my little red-handled broom to sweep corners in our apartment.

            I could hear Jimmy sniveling. Wiping his nose on his sleeve, he sniffled a couple of times then shouted, “I’m going to get chocolate!”            

            “Me too,” I shouted back. We scampered the rest of the way up the alley in our Buster Browns. Mounting Grandma’s porch steps, we banged the door. “We’re here!” we bellowed.

            Grandma shooed us into the kitchen, fixed lemonade and peanut butter sandwiches, and told us to settle our bottoms on the kitchen chairs and stay put. Then she left.

            A few minutes later, I heard the screen door slam and Mom say, "Where are they?" I didn't hear Grandma's reply, but the two of them didn't come into the kitchen right away. 

            When they did, Mom wasn’t smiling or whistling. She had the serious look she wore when I’d been naughty. She took my hand and Jimmy's too and marched us back to the duplex. The only thing she said was "Never do that again, Dolores. Never. Promise me." I promised but kept my fingers crossed behind my back. You just never knew when you might need a nickel.

            What was said between the two of them? Mom never said, but more than once in the years that followed, Grandma told me, “Your mother’s shanty Irish. We can’t expect much of her.” She thought her son could have done better than this “no-account Catholic hussy.”

            Grandma tried hard to get me to agree, but I didn’t even know what “shanty Irish” meant—much less “hussy.” I only knew that Mom made me laugh when we danced together. She let me dry the dishes. She stood on her head against the wall—to get the blood rushing to her brain she said. I idolized her.                       

            Oh sure, I got a swat on the seat of my panties when she took Jimmy and me back to the duplex. But in the days that followed, I bet she told the story to anyone who’d listen. This Irish lassie wasn’t going to let my dad’s mom make a wimp of me.

            Mom anchored me. This was the woman who told me at every turning point of my life, “Dolores, you can do anything you set your mind to.”

           The next day, Mom walked Jimmy and me to the corner drugstore and bought us both ice-cream cones.  "You don't run away, Dolores," she said. "You ask for what you need."

          During the years since, I've often forgotten that. Such forgetting always leads to heartache.

Photos from Wikipedia

Posting the Pieces

(Edited repost from May 2011 . . . )

These memoir memories resemble jigsaw pieces. In the past three years, I’ve emptied the puzzle of my life on a figurative card table. Now you’ve gathered with me around that table. We pick up a piece, examine it, and place it somewhere in the landscape of my life. Lower left corner. Upper right. A border piece. Smack dab in the middle.

            Together, we view that picture as it emerges.

            The individual pieces may seem haphazard. How do convent, Meniere’s, work, growing-up, and cat stories relate? I wonder.

            One thing I’ve often wondered about is rather I would have stayed in the convent if cats had lived there with us. Picture a long-haired calico cat like Maggie with whom I now live. Watch her weave her way down the choir-chapel aisle as we chant Compline. The nuns gathered there try to suppress their laughter. It erupts into loud guffaws and we mangle the Latin. Maggie ignores us. She's ambling now for her fleece pillow in the sanctuary. Now that's contentment.

            I want to alert you that the color of these memoir memories will sometimes be dark; other times, light. I hope many stories will tickle your funny bone. For myself, some are poignant; others just strange. If you stick with me in this venture, you’ll get to read the whole shebang.           

            I hope you’ll gather often with me at this card table. I hope also that you’ll jog my memory by adding comments and asking questions about something I’ve mentioned that bemuses or intrigues you.

            It’s apparent to me that my life choices frequently seem mistaken. But one wonder of growing older is being able to look back on a longer life. We get a chance to discover that what may once have felt like a bad choice turned out to be good. It’s all in definition and meaning.

            Living in this new locale and facing almost three years of illness have forced me—willy-nilly—to explore the arc of my life. Here’s the pot of gold: I’ve come home to myself. That is to say, I’ve embraced my whole life. I am who I am. Take it or leave it. I’ve taken it with a lightness of heart that surprises even me.

            Walt Whitman wrote, “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” That Whitman knew metaphor.

Photos from Wikipedia

Meeting the Poltergeist

(Edited repost from May 2011 . . . )

“Dee, write a memoir,” a Minnesota friend suggests.

            “Why? My life’s so ordinary.”

            “My life’s ordinary,” she counters. “Yours is interesting.” Stunning moment.

            I toss around the idea and even set to writing. But rather quickly I stop. Too much work. And somehow, my life seems boring in the telling.

            Then another friend suggests a blog. Ah. A post whenever a story from the past moseys to the street corner of my mind and announces, “Tell ‘em about me! I’m a humdinger.”

            So that’s what this blog’s going to be—the story of my life as moments present themselves to me. We’ll move together from growing up to convent to cats to social justice to edging into the 21^st century. Back and forth. No trying to be sequential. Just meandering.

            Let’s begin.

            I used to live in an 1870 house with a 1907 dilapidated garage at the side of the yard. No matter what the Minnesota weather, I’d be carrying groceries from way back in that yard to the kitchen.

            Recently I moved to a 2002 house in Missouri with an attached garage. Think of it. A garage attached to the house. Twenty-first century for sure. I’m not even going to talk about the marvel of a dishwasher. That’s for another time.

            My brother and his family gather on the driveway to greet me. We explore the house. Then he hands me the garage-door opener: Lock this way; open this way. Simple enough I think. I immediately name the opener “Sesame.”

            The family leaves around midnight. Within minutes my cousin and a friend show up. We settle on the bedroom carpet—the furniture won’t come for three more days—and talk about my drive down that day.

            Around 2 a.m., I lead them to the kitchen and open the connecting door. Flamboyantly flourishing my right hand I proclaim, “And here’s my attached garage!” I invite their oohs and aahs at the wonder of it. They struggle to find something to say about an attached garage; I lean against the wall, expectant.

            Just then the garage door opens. What the heck happened? I examine the door but what do I know about the personality of an attached garage and its opener? I lean back against the wall while the three of us consider possibilities. The door comes down. But before it can grab hold of the floor, it heads back up again. Then it changes its mind and starts back down.

            I’m still just leaning against the wall watching this strange phenomenon. What if this keeps happening? How will neighbors sleep with this racket? And what about me? Anyone could get into the house. I’ve left a place of safety for this. Suddenly the 21st century doesn’t seem so tempting.

            Up.

            Down.

            Up.

            Down.

            I’ve collapsed against the wall in bewilderment. My cousin and friend seem equally perplexed.

            I call my brother. He answers groggily. Always helpful, he comes over. By this time the door has done its hokey-pokey several more times.

            He questions me, then asks for the opener.

            Where had I put it? Oh, yes, in my pocket.

            All of you who have attached garages know what was happening. The opener doesn’t just accept finger taps. A hip bump will do.

            My cousin, our friend, and I giggle. My brother just shakes his head. After he leaves, I feel foolish for a moment and then excited. Perhaps this is an omen. Maybe the 21^st century is going to be filled with laughter. Adventure. Creativity. I did sort of figure I’d unwittingly been fairly creative with that opener.

            One can only hope. 

Photo from Wikipedia