Singing in the Laundry

In the convent, everyone had at least one obedience. Both postulants and novices had the obedience of working in the laundry on Monday and Tuesday each week.

            The college adjacent to the convent was for young women. Each week they put in the laundry their towels, washcloths, sheets, and pillowcases—all initialed. The nuns did this also. In addition they laundered some articles of their own clothing—also initialed.

            My initials, printed on ribbon tags, were DR3. Mom ordered these before I entered and then sewed them on my clothing. I didn’t help for two reasons. First, I simply couldn’t sew—either as a girl scout or later as a convent scholastic. And second, Mom wanted to do this for me. She was, I think torn by my entering. On one hand she thought I was entering to escape my father’s drinking, and on the other, she felt proud to be a Catholic mother with a nun for a daughter.

            Postulants came to the convent with their clothes tagged. But six months later, when they received the habit, they had to sew these tags on their new clothes: forehead bands, coifs, habits, scapulars, veils, undergarments, and hose. The forehead band was a double-thick triangle of white materials with strings attached to the sides for tying the band around one's head. 

             In the laundry, some of us pressed and folded sheets, some ironed habits, some folded towels, and some ironed these forehead bands. In a basement room in the convent, some nuns worked the coif machines that made the creases in the wimples. 

Picture of me as a scholastic wearing a forehead band and a wimple, or coif.

            I’d graduated from the adjacent college a month before entering, so I knew all the students, except the incoming freshmen. Thus, I became a “sorter.” That is, I sorted the college laundry into boxes labeled with dorm names. Except for the winter months, another postulant and myself sorted into large boxes set on benches outside the laundry beneath the shade of an ancient oak tree.

            As I sorted, I sang old Cole Porter songs, Disney ditties, Broadway tunes. This was, I tell you, a No-No. We were to do this laundry obedience without talking, much less singing. In fact, during most of each day, we practiced silence except when a superior gave us “salutation." That would come at lunchtime in the main dining room.

            Why did I sing? Was I just being contrary? Disobedient? Independent? Uncooperative?

            No.

            I was infatuated with the novice who ironed the forehead bands by the open window behind my sorting boxes. I thought that a postulant who sang would enchant her. I’d never thought that anything else within me would attract someone and so I was grasping at straws. Singing was, in my mind, a likely straw.

            I’d known this novice in college. She’d graduated the year before I did. I’d always both idolized and idealized her. I felt no sexual attraction, but I was drawn like a moth to her charisma. I wanted others to know that she thought I was special. If she did, then surely—surely—they would too.

            And so I sorted and sang. I'd look up often to see if she was noticing me. Watching me. Sometimes she'd smile and I'd beam back. In those moments, I found life totally satisfying.

            I was so immature and so needy.                       

            Six months after I entered, she made first vows and left the novitiate. She was now a scholastic. The next day, the Mother Superior sent her out on mission to teach. Loneliness settled over me and I grieved. It was then that I began to realize what being a nun might mean—growing up.

Rambling in the Cemetery

During the next two or three weeks, I hope to post stories about my life in the convent. If you are new to this blog and find this topic interesting, you may want to go to the archives and read one or more of the following postings:

The Postulancy—background on the first six months of convent life:

Life as a Postulant

Divine Office in the Choir Chapel

Seeds of Doubt Amidst Great Joy

Amusing Convent Stories:

The Convent Tree

The Lavatory Plot

One Swift Kick

Entering and Leaving the Convent:

Entering the Convent

Why I Left the Convent

Where and What Is Home?

Nearly forty-five years ago—in 1966—I left the convent. I have many good memories of my eight-and-a-half years there. I also have not-so-good memories. Thus it is with all of life. For today—let’s seek out the humor of my life as a postulant.

            As I remember, our families could visit us only once during the summer. They came to the main convent building and someone fetched us from the novitiate. We then spent two or three hours visiting while sitting on benches amidst the pine trees.

Dad, Mom, and myself, as a postulant, in a summer visit of 1958.

The professed nuns also had visitors each Sunday. None of us—postulants, novices, scholastics, or professed—ate with our families, but I found sustenance in the conversation about life at home and what was happening in the world beyond the convent. 

            Often the nuns would meander to the cemetery with their visitors to view the large sculpture there and to pass beneath the arching branches of the deciduous trees lining the driveway. As they walked, these visitors casually smoked.

            After supper each Sunday, four of us from the novitiate would surreptitiously amble down that driveway. Our mission? Salvaging the butts.

            Three of us—two novices and one postulant—had smoked before entering. They sorely missed their “ciggies.” So every Sunday at dusk, we’d retrace the steps of those cemetery visitors, plucking from the driveway every smoke-worthy butt we could find. Afterward, we’d huddle behind the trees. The three of them would pull their veils around their faces. They’d turn their backs on the convent. Light up. Inhale. And whisper, “Ah!”

            I—the nonsmoking asthmatic—stood alert. The lookout.

            You’re wondering where we got the matches for lighting up? From the convent kitchen. All of us had the occasional obedience of working in the kitchen and serving meals to the nuns, which meant getting bowls of food from—you named it—the kitchen! Pilfering matches became an art form.

            Each summer Sunday we rescued thirty or so butts. Afterward, I’d dole them out equally to my three friends. The following Sunday, we’d fill our pockets again. And so the summer passed. The three of them hoarded what they could of their bounty for the lean months that followed.           

            The Benedictine convent I entered celebrated it’s centennial in 1963. I have no idea if, during those one-hundred years, other nuns reclaimed cigarette butts and smoked them. But for me, one of my favorite memories is seeing those three fellow novitiate sojourners blow smoke rings.

Ménière’s Part 7: My Life Given Back

This week I’ve posted two stories about living with Ménière’s Disease. Thank you for reading them and also for reading any of the other four Ménière’s postings from this past July. In your comments many of you said you’d never heard of Ménière’s and that you couldn’t quite conceive of how I could live with it. 

            Today I’d like to assure you that all is well. The acute rotational vertigo episodes were almost a daily part of 2006 and early 2007. After that, they happened only sporadically. I experienced the last episode in August 2009.

            What or who brought about this change? A Minneapolis surgeon.

            After the episode of May 2006, I saw three Twin Cities specialists who knew of no way to truly stop the episodes.

            Then in late December of that year I took a chance and drove two miles to the grocery store. Curves was just around the corner. On a serendipitous whim—or perhaps the grace-filled promptings of the Holy Oneness of All Creation—I decided to go in and just see if I knew anyone there.

Hannah (the 1997 Geo Prism) and I by the two-story house 
in which I lived in 2006.

            I entered the spacious room in which a number of women were exercising on the circle of machines. One, who was clearly finished with her workout and ready to leave, approached as if she knew me. I had no idea who she was because my mind had lost considerable memory in the preceding months.

            This stranger told me she’d missed me at Curves and asked if all was well.

            I barely spoke the word Ménière’s when she reached out, touched my man, and confided, “The man who mows our lawn has Ménière’s and he had those horrible episodes.”

            “Had?”

            “Yes. They’re over with now. He had a marvelous operation.”

            Hope oozed over me like honey.

            This woman, whom I later discovered I’d known for ten years, put me in touch with the young lawnmower. He’d had to give up driving trucks because of the acute episodes and the headaches. And yet now he could get upon a lawnmower and not fall off. He had headaches only when the barometer dropped precipitously. He had a life again.

            The rest is history. I immediately made an appointment with the surgeon who’d helped him so greatly. A friend drove me to the Minneapolis office and accompanied me into the exam room. This fourth specialist asked a multitude of questions and told me I’d been a candidate for his operation for many months.

            He operated on Thursday, February 15, 2007. In a future posting I’ll share the story of this operation, which was so successful, but basically he drained away extra fluid from the sac behind the left mastoid.

            The surgeon—who gave me back my life—told me recuperation would take at least eighteen months. I needed to recover both from the surgery and from the stress of ten months of acute rotational vertigo episodes.

            He was correct in his prognosis.

            During the recovery, I continued to experience daily headaches. The acute episodes occurred occasionally. Because of them, I couldn’t drive for the next six months.

            Let’s flash forward to today—September 24, 2011. I have no acute episodes. The doctor has found a prescription for the headaches. When I take a pill at the first niggle of one, it goes away within forty-five minutes.

             I have days of wooziness and no driving whenever the barometer shifts sharply. But those days aren’t frequent. And I’m only woozy or slurry or imbalanced. That’s easy for me to live with. The acute episodes put everything into perspective.

            So I drive. I visit. I read. I garden. I watch television. I sleep. I sit here at the computer. I type. I scroll. I live without fear or pain. I have experienced the dawn after the dark night.

            Two mantras got me through those years. I said one many times during 2006. It is a quote from Julian of Norwich—an English mystic of the Middle Ages: “And all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be exceedingly well.”

            The other mantra is one from a favorite poet of mine—Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She ends her poem “Bare Tree” with the following lines:

                        “Blow through me, Life, pared down at last to bone,

                        So fragile and so fearless have I grown!”           

Lindbergh quotation from The Unicorn and Other Poems: 1935-1955.

(Pantheon Books edition, 1993)

Ménière’s Part 6: Daily Life

I kept prepared for acute rotational vertigo episodes. When I went upstairs, I feared getting stranded, so I carried with me a large bowl for vomit and a pee pot—a gallon ice-cream plastic bucket—because the only toilet was on the first floor.

            I never knew the nanosecond when an episode would throw me to the floor, so I slept mostly on the living room couch for those sixteen months. I brought the five kitty litters up from the basement and put them on the back porch. Steps could be the death of me. Literally.

            During that time, I never knew when or if I would be standing upright or pitching forward to the floor. I often crawled from room to room for much of the day, pulling myself upright to crawl into bed or to stand at the kitchen counter—holding tightly to the edge.

            Because of the uncertainly, I mostly stayed in the house. But sometimes friends would take me out for a restaurant meal or for a visit at one of their homes.

A meal in my home before Ménière’s took over.

            That was always tricky because I might pitch forward at any time. My head would splatter the soup or mash the entrée. However, that happened only once. The friend with whom I was having supper got me out of the restaurant, into the car, and home to my couch. She hesitated to leave me alone, but I assured her there was nothing she could do for me. No one could stop the episodes. No one could make the swirling world in which I lived go away.

            That was one of the difficulties of the disease. When friends saw me living through an episode, they felt helpless. I didn’t want that to happen so for those sixteen months I saw few people. I became, for all intents and purposes, a recluse.

            I did talk on the phone, but often the episodes affected my speech so badly that I alarmed callers. Each day a friend and I made contact. She could immediately tell when I was having trouble because my voice was so hesitant. The brain fog, which I mentioned on Tuesday, obscured my thoughts. Because of that, I couldn’t track ideas or sentences. I’d stutter. Stammer. Stumble for words.

            Sometimes I felt the need to sit at the computer and research. I always regretted my decision, however, because always I’d suddenly pitch forward. Only a total act of will permitted me to jerk myself to the left, so as not to shatter the monitor. I’d continue downward, often grazing the corner of the desk. I’d thud to the floor. There I’d vomit and keen until the episode subsided.

            Of course, if the episode lasted several hours, I’d ultimately crawl from the office to the living-room couch. Lying down and fixing my gaze on the top right-hand corner of the ceiling always helped.

            Some people, I later learned, call acute rotational vertigo episodes attacks. That is understandable. I remember feeling as if an evil spirit had shoved me out of bed during that nighttime episode in May 2006. Suddenly I saw clearly why our ancestors thought demons possessed those who suffered seizures.

            Episode or demonic attack, the result is the same: panic.

Postscript: In your comments on Tuesday's posting, many of you have expressed concern about my life today. Did all this get better? If not, how do I handle it? Saturday’s posting will reassure you that all is well. Future postings in the next few months will detail the operation that gave my life back to me.

Ménière’s Part 5: Living with Terror

Prologue:

Way back in July, I posted four stories about Ménière’s Disease. I’ve lived with this disease for several years now and it can be terrifying if someone has the progressive, intractable kind as I do.

            This week I hope to post three more stories. However, I’m not at all sure you’ve be able to understand these three new postings without the background from the first four. Here are the links for them. The top link is the first of four:

Night Terror

One Fixed Point

Adrift

Ménière’s Disease

For you to read these will take some time and so you may choose not to do so. I do hope that you will read the three postings this week so as to gain an understanding of the side-effects of this disease. You might already know someone who has Ménière’s, or you  might meet someone in the future who lives with it. If so, these postings will help you understand the parameters of Ménière’s.

Today's New Posting:

In four earlier posts, I described the acute rotational vertigo episode I experienced on May 11, 2006.  Afterward, these episodes occurred daily or every two or three days. Sometimes I had two or three a day. Always I had what I came to call brain fog. I couldn’t process my thoughts, remember words or conversations, problem solve, or make a list in my mind.

            My brain wasn’t functioning as it always had. I worried that I might have the beginnings of dementia or Alzheimer’s. I’d always valued my ability to think. Now thinking clearly or sequentially was difficult for me.

            The acute episodes controlled my life. No driving. No walking outside without someone’s arm to lean on. No working in my rock gardens for fear of falling and hitting my head. No taking a shower or a bath for fear of having an episode and either simply banging my head against the tub or drowning.

            No reading of books, cereal boxes, mail, newspapers, cooking directions because parallel lines brought on acute episodes. No watching television because movement on the screen brought on rotating. No working at the computer for more than five minutes at a time because scrolling brought on an episode.            

            So what did I do? 
            A friend at the library brought me books on tape and CDs. I listened to those several times a week, meditated a lot, and felt the world rotate around me often. Because of this, I spent most of my time lying on the couch, trying to live within the present moment. With great frequency severe headaches kept me lying flat on that couch. In intensity these were like migraines, but without the accompanying sensitivity to light.

I later discovered that a precipitously falling or rising barometer brought on these headaches. The longest one lasted twenty-six hours. The longest acute rotational vertigo episode lasted twenty-three hours. Having the room rotate around me for that long brought on nausea and the fear that the episode would never end.

                             A picture of myself twenty years ago in an arboretum.

            An optimist, a never-say-die person, one who likes a challenge, one who forges ahead and doesn’t always look at the signs, I made so many mistakes. Almost daily I would feel that all was well. Surely today, I’d think, I can work in the garden or walk across to the garage or go up the steps to the second floor. Wanting some control in my life, I’d do these things almost daring the Universe to stop me. And I’d discover, often tragically, that Ménière’s was ever present.

            I’d bang my head against a large stone in the rock garden; I’d crawl back across the side yard to the back door. Stranded upstairs, I’d lie on the bed for hours because I couldn’t bring myself to go down the steps with the world whirling around and within me.

            During all this time, I dreaded going to sleep, fearful that I’d wake again in the midst of an acute episode and that this time the rotating wouldn’t stop. And so I began to suffer all the effects of sleep-deprivation. Truly, Ménière’s hijacked my life.