You Really Can’t Go Home Again

Tags

aging, Autobiography, life in the foothills

I’m in one of those head scratching modes. I’m thinking that perhaps I’m the “duh” one, not the others.

The others?

Oh, all those folks I expected more of and got so much less from.

Truth be told, they probably think the same of me.

But I conclude that it was really all my fault from the beginning. And they were generous in their open-armed acceptance. And I was a fraud.

Once upon a time I lived in a place called Flint. It was a factory town, where most everyone got their paycheck one way or another because of cars. We lived in a subdivision called “Mayfair” and my childhood was, as others no doubt saw it, “idyllic”.

People love that term.They mean, you grew up thinking you were fairly normal and you had enough to eat, and TV to watch, and a yard to play in, and got new clothes for the new school year, and a decent load of presents at Christmas. You got to swim in lakes in the summer, and skate on ice ponds in the winter. You ate blueberry pie from wild blueberries picked by your aunts and uncles and cousins. That sort of idyllic.

For no good reason that I ever figured out, kids like to join cliques. Being a “only” child, I was always looking for friends. My best friend as a small child was one of the kids across the street. She was a year older, but when you are young enough, that was okay. Still she was different than me. She came from a big family, me the “only”. She slept in until 9 or 10 in the morning, while I knocked on her door at 8, having waited an excruciating hour at that, to be told by her mom, that she hadn’t gotten up yet.

I sat some more.

Then when I got to older pre-teens I was with another group. I was, for a while, second to the leader, a dark haired girl name Patty something or other, who told us about the $400 dollar couch her parents had, which seemed to make her rich.

You were either on Patty’s good side or bad, and when on the bad, nobody else would play with you, meaning you couldn’t play jump rope with the gang. I tried hard to be on the good side of Patty. It was painful to fail. I was, as you can tell, not principled. I shunned who she shunned and did my best to lick her shoes.

Then there was the middle school years. I tried hard to be in the “in” group. The one that played sports, and were cheerleaders, and that sort of stuff. I was successful for a bit, but the funny thing was, that I was always hanging on by my fingertips, and I knew that.  If we were going to meet at someone’s house to go out for pizza say, I had to be there early, because they would not wait for me. I was one they “put up with” until they didn’t.

Either they didn’t or I grew tired of trying to be “in” and being left “out” too much.

So I drifted to another group whose main attribute seemed to be a general dislike for almost everything that had to do with “that” school and “those” people. We hung out with some guys from another school. We were starting to drive now, and that broadened our horizons.

I felt accepted by them. But still, I probably never felt completely at ease. I was always having to “try”. We had fun for a few years, mostly going to dances, and walking to strip malls and drinking cokes and eating fries. We hung out every evening after school until it was time to go home.

Then we graduated, and I went off to college, and they went off to marriages and babies, and finally I left Flint, only visiting now and then to see family.

And I didn’t contact them, and they didn’t contact me, because I suppose we all knew it was never a proper fit. I was the one who got good grades in spite of trying to look very much that I didn’t care. I was the one who apparently had dreams they did not.

Not that they didn’t have dreams of course, they had them I’m sure, but they were very different from mine, and there was nothing to keep up “friends” after graduation.

I saw Flint as a place to escape from, they saw it as home. I saw education as the means to a life where I did important things, met important people, talked about important things. I met mayors and congressmen, and brilliant jurists  and traveled on “business”, and they did what they did.

I no doubt felt superior, based on my assumption that everybody should want what I wanted, which is surely stupid on my part. But as the years went by, we had less and less in common surely.

Now we are all on the cusp of being real senior citizens, and we’ve reconnected and had those chats about the “old days”. And it was fine for a while. I tried to interact with those from the old groups whom I abandoned in my middle school years, and that was kinda sad.

Some were polite, some were friendly, until we realized that we believed radically different things. Several cut me out of their Facebook life. Others just ignored me. Even though I would dutifully “like” their constant “if you love your daughter share this”, and fishing trips and other stuff, they never returned the favor. My links to my writing was left with stony silence. My birthday was left unremarked about.

What the hell did I do to you?

Some were  “friends” and we maintained the facade a bit longer. A few (those who share my general uber liberal beliefs) still share and “like” a lot, and chat on the side sometimes. But mostly even those who were my “best friends” for a good four years of the high school years, have silently slipped away, no longer interested.

Perhaps my beliefs offend them too. Who knows? As I said, they were open to me, while I always was trying to fit into that square hole with them. So I account it as no one’s fault, just water seeking it’s own level.

I cannot fathom the thought of living in that town still, and having always lived there. I’ve lived in four parts of the country, five really, and I don’t find that a lot frankly, from the friends I have now. We are all people who have traveled from location to location following jobs or dreams. It makes us different from people who haven’t I guess. Or at least it seems so.

I don’t bemoan any of it really. My life is too special to me here and now to lament that I don’t have friendships that are real with people I haven’t seen in 40 years. I just find it curious. And then I don’t. For if we had nothing much in common then, then it can only be worse now.

Mostly, I find that people who stayed in Flint became people I don’t like much. Not all, some seem to have escaped the provincialism and the tribal indrawn mentality. But most are hatin’ kind of people. I don’t know enough about their lives to judge. They say that each generation has it better than the last. My gut tells me that this was not true for most of them.

I guess its good mirror. My desire to learn served me well, bringing me out of a stultifying world and into a cosmopolitan environment where I met people from all over the world, enjoyed other cultures, and lost any sense of “them or us” in my thinking.

I’m a boomer, through and through, an Idealist. I scratch my head and wonder, “how can you think like that????” But dirty factory towns apparently do that to people. Flint became a mean place, in some ways worse that Detroit, because it was always “at least we aren’t Detroit”, and the fall was all the harder I suspect.

Or maybe this is all just me trying to defend me. Funny thing is, I don’t care. Aging does that. No more time for people who aren’t  on the same page. As the meme says, “not my monkeys, not my circus”.

May your life bring you peace–mine has to a degree I would never have thought imaginable. I imagine that pisses some of you off. And that tickles me frankly.

 

“It seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South–so much in balance, in agreement–and yet… the whole world lies between.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

He Would Turn Me In a New Direction

Tags

Autobiography, mentors

Mentoring.

We hear it a lot today. The need to help young boys and girls who perhaps have challenging lives, to strive for the heights. We are asked to inspire, direct, counsel, set an example.

Mentors are wonderful in their willingness to offer of their time and talent.

Yet, if we delve a bit deeper, we realize that many of the people who affected our lives most deeply and most clearly, had no particular intend to do so, and the interaction may well have been brief.

So it was with me.

I grew up in a factory town called Flint. A grimy hard nut of a town where at one time Buick and Chevrolet ruled. The UAW was also powerful, so much so that the local county prosecutor had a standing order to UAW members that their complaints would be personally attended to. (Of course how their complaints were actually processed was quite another thing.)

My parents worked in “the shop”, (as we called it) my dad as a journeyman mechanic, my mother sat the line at AC Spark Plug. My uncle worked there too. All my neighbors, or at least most it seemed, also built cars or parts that went in them. We had a good life, wages and benefits were good, we lived well for working class folks, we had vacations at Houghton Lake where our family had three cabins all told.

Nobody’s parents in our neighborhood (at least as far as I knew) were college educated. My dad had not finished high school. But they all were good citizens who paid their taxes, read the news, argued about politics, mowed lawns, went fishing and deer hunting, and dreamed–always dreamed that their kids would go to college and not have to work in the shops. Not that it was so bad there, but it was a soul suffering routine, it was work for a paycheck. It paid the bills. It was not the life my parents wanted for me.

Nobody in my family (aunts, uncles, cousins) have ever gone to college. I was thought to be the first.

I had early on been selected to jump ahead in math, and I did okay until Algebra II where I began to struggle. Fearful, since this was the first “mental” obstacle” I’d come up against, I quickly ended my math endeavors and science too for good measure. I settled into “office” classes, learning typing and shorthand and bookkeeping, along with the general fare.

Our school was a county one, peopled mostly with kids like me, working class kids. Our education was good so we thought, but it was basic. There were no sports beyond the ordinary, no serious experiences with anthropology, archaeology, or philosophy.Things like that were not going to help us kids who were, most thought, destined for mid-level white-collar fare. We would be perhaps teachers or police officers, office managers, bookkeepers. A very few of us might become lawyers or doctors. Beyond that, well, we had no clue since astrophysicist was not in the vocabulary nor a topic one heard in the hallways of Hamady. Gasp, I’d never even heard the term paleontology before college, which turned into one my most favorite “hobbies”.

So I opted, because I thought I was a math failure and therefore not “serious” college material, for a junior college education in office management. Since I had taken so many classes in high school, I slid into second year classes in my first, leaving me “free” electives in my second year. I chose as one of them, introduction to political science.

Wow, I sat mesmerized in that class. I was soaking up the stuff faster than a cat with a milk fetish.

Our instructor had had each of us fill out a card at the start indicating what our junior college program was. A few days later, he confronted me in the hall.  In a gruff but entirely friendly manner, he said,

“Ms McCameron, what the hell are you doing in my class?”

I gulped, stammering that I had some electives to use up, and gee wiz I sure loved learning about politics and gosh, if only I’d known, I might have applied to go to a four-year school, but now it was too late. . . .

“See me during office hours when you get a chance and we’ll talk.” he said, and off he went, and off I went, wondering what the hell that was and would be about.

Well, I went to his office, and I found out that damn, I could transfer to another school, and a lot of my credits might well apply, and my last semester could be chock full of stuff that would surely transfer. And he told me, that I had all the “right stuff” from whatever he had gleaned from my answers on quizzes and participating in class.

So, I did. I applied to a couple of places, but I truly only wanted to go to one, Michigan State University!

And they were happy to have me, and I transferred as a full junior.

And that was the beginning.

I got my bachelors in political science. By then the education bug has firmly lodged in my head, and since having such a degree was pretty worthless, I applied to law school, and lo and behold, they wanted me too.

I lot has happened since then. I grew bored with law, nearly became a nun, returned to school again this time in hot pursuit of a degree in theology or biblical studies, fell in love, yada yada.

But that teacher, oh that teacher, I am convinced changed my life. I was too unsophisticated to even know that you could transfer college credits. I would have likely ended up working in some insurance company office as the office manager, married some insurance salesman (no offense), had kids, and stayed within 50 miles of Flint.

Now, all that might be fine, it might grand for others. It would have not been for me. I had dreams that were bigger than Flint, bigger in the end, than Michigan.   And I’m pretty sure that instructor had a very lot to do with starting it all off.

And I wish I knew where he was, so I could thank him. Our lives crossed but for a moment in time, but he had no idea how big a difference he made in my life. Thanks Mr. M. It’s turned out better than I could ever have believed.

Don’t Run! It’s Me!

Tags

Autobiography, Blog, life in the foothills, truth

Every so often I feel the need to change things up a bit. I don’t do this to my other blogs by and large, but this one seems to change with time.

Mostly my interests are so diverse that occasionally I discover that I’ve struck a new course in a meandering sort of way, and now find myself quite unlike where I expected to be.

I am as they say,  a woman for all seasons, a renaissance gal, an eclectic, a head in the stars sort of lady.  I’m a foul-mouthed sailor on occasion if that can any more be said to exist apart from the general population’s proclivities toward sewer mouth. I’m a sexual tease, a damned old lady, eccentric in my heart (although my husband says a true eccentric must be rich and I’m not sleeping in a bed of hundred-dollar bills, though I do account myself quite wealthy by some standard I set for myself anyway), and an intellectual maven in my own mind at least. I’m so housewifey it makes me sick at times with another recipe always tempting and another craft to be mastered. I watch too much television, don’t read enough books, think too much of things I cannot know, believe in stuff that would stun a logical person, question almost everything, argue because it’s Tuesday, (or any other day of the week), and love fiercely, passionately, compassionately, empathetically, and with a child-like innocence.

I love any animal with fur, and dislike most anything without it.

I have a good grasp on what I don’t know.

I have a passion to know, and when I realized long ago that I could not possibly keep up with all the books I wanted to read, I felt like I should have a funeral. There was once a time when the average person could do so, albeit she would require a certain wealth to obtain the books.

I took forever to find women roll models but I have them, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Saint Catherine of Siena,  and Hypatia of Alexandria, the latter being my most noteworthy mentor. She was at one time the librarian at the great library of Alexandria, and yes I mourn the loss of that institution still, along with Freddy Mercury from Queen. Go figure.

I think of libraries as sacred places.

As I enter the small city of Las Cruces many mornings and come over the last hill down into the town, the hillside to my left reminds me of the houses perched down the sides of the cliffs of the Aegean although there is no sea below. It’s the white/pink colors that remind me. I revere Athens and Plato and Socrates unlike hardly any other beings from the past, along with a string of Romans such as Livy and Cicero. Let us not forget Aristophanes, Ovid and Virgil either.

These people and places are my center.

I like old coke, potato chips and chocolate ice cream. I secretly play a few games of bingo every day. You wanna talk eclectic?

I am a good person, at times an awful one. I am selfish, and then extravagant in my giving. I love beautiful jewels and hate the diamond mines and the toll of human life they take. I hate that we are so rich and yet so poor in spirit and common decency that we are willing to allow cruel poverty to consume all too many in exchange for retaining a few hundred extra dollars a year in taxes.

I hate stupid. I hate ignorance, and I hate most of all people who are content to be both because it’s easier to believe the lie that brings comfort to their otherwise miserable lives. I hate people who cannot face themselves or their shortcomings. I hate people who blame others instead of themselves.

I love truth.

I love it because it is all that we have in the end. Without it, we live lives of delusion and cling to what cannot endure. Truth is enduring though it may well change as we learn more. Truth in reality never changes, but our understanding of it does. But seek it we must, for all solid ground is ultimately based upon it.

You can believe the earth is 6,000 years old and God will somehow never let earth fail, but it won’t stop the truth. Believe what you may, true will have its way. Better to accept truth and perhaps then the light can shine on how we have misidentified God. Is it not better to know God for what God is rather than as we desire God to be?

The logic seems irrefutable to me.

So here we concentrate on truth.

We always have, but it bears stating it out, and naming it as our goal.

We welcome discussion, we welcome dispute, but we will never sacrifice truth for what feels good here.

I expose my underbelly with no small reluctance, but still I do it because truth is the only thing that in the end will help another to cope with their own demons and despair. You are not alone, we are all in this together.

So nothing is changed much, except that we have prettied our self up in a new dress  and new name. And hopefully we will use truth as our walking stick, always aware in whatever we say and do, that we cannot hide it, deny it, or pretend it is not. It walks beside us, is firmly gripped by us, and seeks the firm ground as we walk forward into this and every day.

 

 

 

The Dirty Little Secret

Tags

Autobiography, family

I’ve spoken once or twice about my failed relationship with my parents. Both of them. The trifecta of dysfunctional. It is probably not possible for two dysfunctional people to raise a third who is not also dysfunctional.

That would be me. But I take great comfort in the fact that I became aware that I was dysfunctional quite early on, and took a lot of steps to fix me. I did a good job. In fact, I have to say that that I’ve been “evaluated” and found to be quite sane, and quite functional. (Nowadays when you are considered for entry into the convent you get a psych evaluation, and you also get a copy–so I know of what I speak).

I’ve talked a bit about my mother and father, and how odd it seems to me it is that two people who BOTH functioned on the basis of conditional love would marry. But they did. I’ve explained something about what that is about, and I don’t intend to delve into that all again. It was what it was. They were who they were. Both were emotionally wounded themselves and given that, they presented as fairly normal as most people go.

I certainly am not suggesting that my life was any living hell. It was not. I was not physically abused. I received corporal punishment as was common among all the kids I knew, but no more so than most. My parents were emotionally abusive though I’m quite sure they would never have suspected that what they did was damaging or wrong. People who are emotionally abusive raise kids with all sorts of issues about self-esteem. It impacts what they seek, how they seek it, and how they evaluate their own success in life. It all leads to a bad end  of, I think, revolving abuse, if you aren’t lucky enough as I was to identify it, and fix it.

This all comes up because yesterday was Mother’s Day, and as you might expect, Facebook was just chock full of pictures of everyone’s mom and lots of laudatory things to say. I don’t quarrel with any of that, and in fact, I bless everyone who was lucky enough to have a good relationship with their mother and/or father as the case may be. Father’s day of course is coming up next.

I recognize that a whole lot of people say they “love” their mother, and they “honor” her in many ways, but if you probe a bit, you find that the relationship they had with Mother was anything but loving and supportive. In fact, books galore are written about the difficulties in parent-child relationships.

Which means really that people think that it’s wrong to admit that their relationship with parents simply sucked. It’s the same way mostly with “do you believe in God?” A whole lot of folks will say “yes” because they don’t want to face what they think will be the reaction if they say “no”. People react automatically to “don’t you love you mother?”  They say “yes” because the opposite is unthinkable.

And a ton of folks, bite the bullet as required every year, every month, or whatever, making the journey to mom’s or picking up the phone. But as they do it, their stomach tightens and they try to get prepared for what is to come. When the encounter is over, they feel mostly relief. They go home and lick their new wounds, or bandage up the old one’s that have been torn back open. Tell me if you don’t know people like that?

Yet, it’s somehow better to “put up with” mom’s snide remarks, badgering about the grandchildren she doesn’t yet have, you’re failure to live up to her expectations, and so on and so on. It’s better to put up with it than to remove yourself from a toxic situation that is causing you pain and trouble. Somehow you “owe” it because after all they “had you”.

Well, the dirty secret is that there are a lot of adult children out there who have cut the cord, saying enough is enough. I’m going to get healthy and stay that way. Mothers aren’t always “there for you”, they aren’t always “on your side”. They don’t always have “your best interests at heart”. Sometimes they have their own, and no doubt they are not even aware.

I recall many years ago a discussion with a group of nuns I was spending a weekend with. They were talking about the necessity to vision God in not just male terms. God needs to be what God is, non-gendered. The reason is that there are people out their who have been abused by men, and calling God “father” is jarring to them and makes it difficult for them to feel safe in God’s love.  I realized the importance of that idea, and it carries over to such holidays as Mother’s and Father’s day.

For those of us what have found it necessary to move on from these relationships, such days are reminders of what others have that we don’t. Or more correctly what many of those others profess to have because they are afraid to utter the words, “I don’t want a relationship with you any more.”

Someone posted this on Facebook and I went and read it, and was surprised at how viscerally some of these things hit me. It’s entitled, 13 Things No Estranged Child Needs to Hear on Mother’s Day.

No one should feel ashamed or more importantly feel called upon to explain or defend their decision. We are all born of someone. We do not “owe” them anything for that. We exist. We have a right to try to make our lives as happy and complete as we desire. Nobody should be forced to endure misery because “they’re your parents”.  I am sad that I did not have the relationship I envisioned.  I hold no anger that I did not. I have let all that go long long ago.

I have found the mentors I needed and they were happy to be there when I needed them. I don’t consider my story unusual or myself particularly brave or special.  I suspect there are a lot more out there who don’t desire to be open about their own journey of estrangement. They have every right to talk or not about it as they see fit. I’m just willing to let others know that if they are like me, they are not alone. Not by a long shot.

It’s about truth.

Maybe we need, a day of honoring all those people who have helped us become those things we admire in ourselves. A “You’re a Good Person Day”.

Perhaps it would mean more than  words spoken in hollow obedience to society’s “norms” that I fear is all too often the case.

 

 

 

I Really Never Knew Her

Tags

Autobiography

She was born. She had a mother and a father. She had two brothers. It was a messy family. The mother, victim of mental disease at a time when there was little to do but lock them away, was locked away. The father, a man of the railroad sent the children off to foster care.

In later years he took up with a widow and they lived in sin, and her kids became his family.He saw his daughter and sons from time to time, but they had effectively been replaced. She never spoke of that in anger. It just was. After all, he was under the influence of a woman. What could one expect.

She clerked at a department store. She met men. She probably craved love. She was probably close to being one of “those girls”. She got safely married to another wounded soul.

He lived under the thumb of a controlling mother who covered her manipulations under the guise of martyrdom. He was a soft sort, easily controlled unlike his sister who was rebellious.

He met the almost bad girl, and married her. They practiced conditional love, the only kind they knew. They had a kid, a girl. They went through the motions of being parents. They tried their best. They had no idea how it was supposed to be.

She never had another child–the first one had been that hard a delivery. She did all the things the books said. She kept it clean and dressed. She fed it baby foods. She baked. She cleaned her house. She modeled housewifery. Being a wife and mother were the standards she had aspired to, it was how one was adjudged as “normal.”

She was liked by most everyone. She was a great party attendee. She was lively, funny, animated. She danced up a storm. She never started to smoke until she went to work in the shop. She never drank much until after she divorced and remarried. Then she learned to drink a lot.

She wrapped presents nicely enough to compete with her sister-in-law and mother-in-law at Christmas. They were most polite to each other on the surface, but seething beneath were all kinds of resentments, jealousies, and God only would know what else.

She met a man at her workplace and fell in love. She gave up her teenaged daughter but then moved two miles away so she could “visit often.”

She never read a book, barely touched the newspapers except to check the ads for sales. She liked soap operas and jigsaw puzzles. She was a Republican until she was told that she wasn’t supposed to be, so she became a Democrat. She could not have explained why.

She was great at small talk but never had a serious conversation that anybody every heard about any subject. She was short on empathy because she never met anyone who was empathetic I guess.

She once said to her daughter that she was “smart about books and stupid about men”. She often registered her disgust that her daughter inherited her buck teeth but the father’s chunky physique. She was always frustrated when she took her young daughter clothes shopping. She would tug at the skirt, sigh loudly,  and tell the sales girl to “get the next size up, she’s nearly up to my size already.”

She and her new husband moved to his home state of Tennessee, and they saw each other rarely after that, and conversed on the phone on “holidays”.

She introduced her daughter now grown, as “my daughter, the lawyer.” She could not have told you much about what a lawyer did of course. She incessantly wanted to know when that daughter would marry. Nothing else much mattered.

When the daughter announced she was going to enter a Catholic convent, she was livid with anger. She never explained why. The daughter, by then had learned to avoid conversations with “Mother” who was always judgmental, always accusatory. Much like the Father, the daughter was presumed in the wrong in every dispute. She hung up on the daughter in disgust once or twice, the condition not met for love.

When the daughter called to announce that she was not entering the convent but instead was moving to Connecticut to be with a man she had fallen for, she was ecstatic. The conversation was short. She hung up and then called back telling the daughter to “call when you get your new number”. The daughter promised to call when she arrived.

She never asked the daughter anything about this new man. Not a single thing. It was enough that the daughter was reaching the goal at last. For now it was apparent to the daughter that the Mother defined her own success in parenting on the daughter’s seeking marriage as the standard of female attainment.

The daughter called when she got to Connecticut. The relationship with the man was over almost before it began. When the phone rang and the answering service cut in, and she heard the woman’s voice, she froze and could not answer. She could not go through another round of explaining and then the judgment, the disappointment, the question of how had she failed again. She let it go. And she let it go again, and again, until the woman stopped calling.

The daughter did find the right man, and learned all about unconditional love. She moved to Iowa. Once she got a call that the woman was sick but was recovering. She was told that the woman expressed happiness at her marriage. She thanked the “step-brother” who conveyed the news.

Yesterday, for no reason,  the daughter googled the woman, wondering if she was still living in Tennessee. She would be in her mid 80’s.  She found instead an obituary. The woman had died in 2008. Her husband in 2010. The obituary said she had been survived by a husband and three step sons. There was no mention of the daughter.

The daughter sits quietly and reflects. She does not judge her actions right or wrong, only what she needed to do. She does not judge the actions of the others in omitting her from notification as right or wrong, only what they needed to do. She never judged the woman who did the best she could.

Lives quietly move on. We do not choose who will be our parents, who will be our children. DNA does not insure a bond. There are no winners. We just pick up and continue, hoping we have learned something from it all, though God knows what that can or should be. Plenty would tell me that a parent is a parent no matter what. I guess. But then you aren’t me are you? We can only acknowledge each other’s pain, each other’s sorrow, each other’s needs and limitations, and we can only believe how we would handle things because it would be right for us.

And another chapter ends in this thing we call life.

 

My Confession

Tags

Autobiography, Catholic Church, Episcopal Church, Inspirational, life in the meadow, spiritual journey

 “To every day

        turn, turn, turn

There is a season

         turn, turn, turn

And a time to every purpose under heaven.”

A number of images, a number of verses, both in scripture and in song come to mind.

This is a difficult, perhaps one of the most difficult, posts I’ve ever written, but one that was destined to be written, and I’ve known that for some time.

This summer has been a hard one, but not in any way that should bring cries of “not fair” or “my sympathies” or anything so dramatic. It’s just been hard. Weather and bad lanes, cars breaking down in more ways than one, finances stretched more than one would like, all this and then some. Not nearly as awful as people who are truly suffering from financial ruin, or awful illness, or just plain lousy never-ending bad luck. Just the kind that makes a person say, “I’m glad that week, month, season, or year is OVER!”

What it has meant to me is that I’ve been hermited in the meadow for long stretches. And that played havoc with my church attendance. At first there was great sadness, anger, and furious shaking of fists at “fate.” Then there was reflection and a digging away at the surface “reasons” for these emotions, and yes, picking off of old not-yet-healed scabs.

Painful, but increasingly necessary as I uncovered things I had not dreamt of. Things I had buried deep, and thought were dead and gone. But as we all know, that seldom happens.

I realized that my church had become very important to me, mostly for the social aspects. I had found a home of like-minded individuals, like-minded theologically but also politically. I could speak my piece and find nodding heads.

What heady stuff is that? Heady indeed I can tell you. From clergy on down, I found such a collection of genuinely nice, intelligent, educated, spirit-driven, mission-motivated people as could ever be found in one place.

For those of  you who don’t know the story, I shant go into it in-depth, but in general the story goes:

I was a life-long Catholic wannabe. I finally figured out I could become one, and did so at age 43. I nearly entered the convent. I didn’t, and met and fell in love with a gorgeously warm and loving man. I married him.

He, had been married before and divorced. Holy Mother Church frowns upon that. Much much later, I realized that. No one ever turned me away as a mortal sinner (which they would claim I am), but I felt the rejection. Ironic wouldn’t you say?

I contrived to be a “spiritual” person without a  church until someone pointed me in the direction of the Episcopal Church. I went, I saw, I adopted “Catholic lite.” I was happy, as I said.

Until, as I also said, I had to work through my sorrow at not being there. My “works” were my new identity, I was someone who was “in the know” a “go to” person somewhat. People knew who I was. I basked in my own sense of importance. Was I important? Not so very, but I felt it, and that was what mattered.

Digging down through the layers, I uncovered a still deep-searing pain at my Catholic loss. The Episcopal church liturgically met my needs precisely because it was “most” Catholic.

I looked back over the two years and saw that I had tried to be “tsk tsk” about Catholic short-comings and failings. I had always freely criticized Her when an active participant and I had continued, though most thought it was out of anger and hurt, though mostly it was not. But of course such criticism falls on deaf ears when you are a “former” Catholic.

The germ of longing seemed to grow, even as I fought it. I truly did fight it. I have no desire to be a thorn among the roses. I don’t relish being in the minority. I don’t desire to feel like a back-bencher. But that is what I would be, will be. I’ve written a bit about this on another blog called rather appropriately I think, Walking in the Shadows.

I found myself, even almost against my will, digging out the old Missal, the old Christian Prayer book with the Daily Office. A quick stop at the USCCB, located me as to week and Mass readings. I have been praying a rosary every day for weeks now. It is all too familiar, and, frankly it became deeply comforting to me.

Last Sunday, I returned to the Mass. It was as it always was. Comfort food for the soul I guess. Mine at least.

I am not sure where I will land. Whether I enter into a specific parish or not remains to be seen, but I sense I may not, being more content to be a traveler, seeking the better homilist this week, the more awe-inspiring interior the next. I truly don’t know.

The Contrarian remains confused at all this, a great sounding board, but not offering advice. He is puzzled why I would leave a user-friendly place to wander alone in the wilderness so to speak. I cannot answer, except to say that I am so thoroughly Catholic that I must. As odd as it may seem to one not a “cradle” Catholic, I am defined by it, and I suspect I always will be.

Nothing much has changed. I still rail at its inadequacies, its horrific failings, its out-of-touch dogmas. But I can do so as a “Catholic” now and not a Protestant.

I owe so much to the Episcopal church. To all the fine people there, I owe such a debt of gratitude. They are, en mass the finest group I have ever known. I can say quite literally that I never met anyone there I disliked.

They taught me that Protestants are often more right in dogma than Catholics on a few things.

They taught me that one can disagree without being disagreeable and that serious and important differences don’t have interfere in a coming together at the table.

They taught me the inherent goodness of all faiths. Where I had believed it on the surface before, I now KNOW it to be true.

They taught me that the truest message of Christ is service to others, and not personal salvation. In fact, the first leads to the second without effort.

They taught me that I will work for and support women’s ordination in the Roman church with unswerving dedication, for I was blessed with such role models in the Episcopal church. (That’s generally true online as well, as I know a few women priests here.)

I know that many, perhaps most will not understand. I don’t expect that. What I have come to see is that each of us is a unique spiritual gift and we all are nourished in different ways. What is of deepest importance to me, is of no consequence to you perhaps. That, I am convinced, is the way things are meant to be. Our relationship to God is uniquely our own.

A weight lifts from me. I look forward to the adventure. Parker, God bless him, bit his tongue, when I said I was finally going to write this. I smiled and said, “I know what you want to say. Perhaps I should keep silent, for in six months, I may change my mind again? Is that about it.”

He smiled. “uhuh, just about.”

And I may, but I doubt it. They say that about Catholics you know. That once you are one, you are always one. It’s just a matter of whether you are home or away. I think that might be true. It is for me I think.

I can only follow as best I can. So far? I don’t know. Perhaps this was the journey I was intended to make, returning to Catholicism with a more mature sense of what it and I am. Time will tell.

Honor Thy Mother (Part II)

Tags

Autobiography, Mother, mother-daughter relationships, parenting, psychology

The threads of the end are easy to see in retrospect. Although I had tried to renegotiate our roles in my 30’s, which worked for a while, things returned to their normal position over time.

I was the “this is my daughter, she’s a lawyer” object to impress friends. I was also the one who was “not married” and would “never produce a grandchild.” Such are endured by many a young woman, and I place no especial emphasis on them as harbingers of some future face off.

But the beginnings of the end started when I converted to the Catholic church. Since my parents were never ones to “talk” about the past, I had no idea whether I had ever been baptised. I assumed not, but it was made clear that I needed to know.

I called Mother to confirm that such was not the case. In a strange prescient moment, she responded, “well just don’t end up being a nun or something.” I laughed, assured her that nothing was further from my mind and soon joined the ranks of the newly baptised at the age of 43. It was several months later when I felt the call of the convent.

In a conversation some months after that when I was beginning that process, I mentioned that, ironically, in fact I had decided to join a religious community. Her reaction was short, sullen and non-communicative. In later years I asked her why she was so unpleasant about that choice, and her only response was the “way I had announced it.” I still have no clue what that was about.

What followed were another couple of instances of intense criticism, unwarranted and in the end, simply glossed over by her as if they had not occurred. Such was her way. She would blow up over some perceived insult, only to find in a day or two that she was wrong, and yet she never could make the call and say she was sorry for her outburst of anger, so misdirected. She even at one point claimed that I could not at my age enter a religious community, per some unknown “friend.” I learned as always, it was simply best to not respond.

Things started to unravel rather quickly after I decided that I in fact was not called to such service. I had met and fallen in love with a man from Connecticut. I called to tell her that I would be moving to that state and that I had cancelled plans to join the Dominicans. Her response was bizarre to say the least.

She was purely ecstatic. She was thrilled beyond words. She did not ask his occupation, his previous marital history, whether he had kids, his age, ethnicity, or anything whatsoever. It didn’t matter. I was finally “attached” to a man. I had of course been “attached” to several men over the years, but somehow this one mattered, since it saved me from the church, which apparently was important.

I was appalled frankly at her lack of concern about any particulars. I told her I would call when I arrived in Connecticut, and I did so. But the more I thought, the more this all seemed so exceedingly crazy that it required more thought.

What was this relationship? Clearly there was no interest in my happiness, or even safety. There was only one issue: was I living a life that met with her approval–which validated her own perhaps? It was never explained and I was unable to see any mothering or indeed any relationship whatsoever to preserve.

Since, as those of you who have read through the pertinent sections of the autobiography already know, the relationship was over before I arrived in Connecticut, I was loathe to explain this event. I could not bear, given my fragile state of mind, what might ensue should I admit that the hoped for marriage would not be occurring. Somehow it would all be my fault of course, and since I felt no responsibility for the demise of said relationship, I was not ready to withstand the torrent of blame that would come.

So I lied, or more to the point, didn’t bring it up during those couple of conversations that were initiated in the early months of my life on the east coast.

But as I said, as I pondered this thing called a mother-daughter relationship, I saw nothing to preserve, and out of sheer avoidance, the next time she called, I didn’t pick up. The next time, I avoided it as well. She was never good at even the easiest of technological innovations, so she never left messages on the answering service. I became simply “never there” when she called.

It  became easier, and easier, and more difficult to contemplate actually explaining my “unavailability” for so many months. I decided to make it permanent. I of course later met the Contrarian and moved to Iowa. She is aware that I am now married, is thrilled, and understands that I wish no contact.

That is how it stands. As a Christian, I periodically think about it, and often decide I’m not honoring motherhood as I should. That somehow, I should stick it out, and make allowances. Yet, I cannot bring myself to open up that can of worms again. I cannot bring myself to willingly offer myself up to that “motherly criticism” offered so easily, and always without request.

I don’t feel sorry for myself. One is dealt the cards one is dealt. I wish things were other, and I wish I had the relationship I sometimes see between other mothers and daughters that I know. But I don’t dwell on my misfortune. I am not the least unaware that another woman could have handled it where I could not. The blame is partly mine.

My cousin offers the example of one who faced similar nonsense from his mother, but firmly dealt with it, without shutting the door. Grandchildren may have had something to do with that decision, and I would probably have not made the drastic decision I did had there been children involved.

Still, I return to the decision, as I said, from time to time, and I only ask for God’s forgiveness, for I feel sure that I’ve not done the right thing. But I also feel I did the only thing for myself. I feel at peace with my decision. I simply refused to be part of a toxic relationship.

It is a fine line between honoring parents and honoring self.  I hope others are not called to make such a choice as I, yet,  I have now a measure of self-respect, pride, and strength that I had not before. That soothes me in the those moments of doubt. I have been, to that degree authentic to my self.