Navigating Mystery, Part 3

What my grandmother was like before the shock therapy, I don’t know and never

thought to ask.  I knew her as a passive presence, crocheting popcorn-stich

bedspreads and doilies, and watching daytime soap operas now that television

had arrived - Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns.  She went along with

whatever the family did. I was her favorite and would sometimes spend time with

her in her bedroom, playing her treasured music box shaped like a piano (which

now sits in a glass cabinet in my studio), and breathing in the pungent scent of

the cedar chest at the foot of her bed. But I never truly knew who she was.

My parents were second generation Americans.  All four of their parents had come over in the early 1900’s, escaping the pogroms and the hardships of Jews living in Russia. Even though World War II ended several years before I was born, the after-effects lingered, especially for Jews.  I remember hearing stories of the holocaust when I was a child, mostly because a cousin of my uncle’s escaped from a concentration camp, bearing an amazing story of survival and reunion.  Her name was Regina.  She and her family occasionally came to larger family gatherings in Baltimore from their home in New York.  I was puzzled at how her legs looked, thick and discolored.  My mother told me that Regina’s legs had gotten frostbitten during the war.  She and her husband had been sent to different concentration camps.  Regina was pregnant and managed to hide in a closet to give birth, and somehow she managed to smuggle the baby out to friends on the outside.  She herself escaped the camp by lying down in the winter fields, pretending to be dead.  That is how she got frostbite.  When the war ended, Regina reclaimed her son, but had no idea where her husband Sava was, or even if he was still alive.  When both she and Sava independently wrote letters to a mutual friend, they found each other again.  They and their baby made their way to the states where they eventually had a second son and a new life.

 

Every family has its sorrows, its losses, its challenges, mine included. Not everyone winds up as scared and risk averse as I have always been.  Most of the family’s traumas occurred before I was born.  Why was this my cross to bear?

 

Many years later, sometime in midlife, I was lying on a massage table getting a Cranial-Sacral adjustment, when the therapist encouraged me to tell a story about my family.  She suggested it might shed some light on the tension locked into my body.  The story about my grandmother’s shock therapy instantly arose in my mind, although it was a story told to me rather than one I remembered. After I finished relating it, she asked me this question: “Where were you when this was happening?”  My eyes flew wide open with sudden realization.  Of course!  I was very young, maybe two or three years old at the time.  I would have been on those bus rides, witnessing my grandmother freaking out over the horrible treatments, hearing my mother tell her to get a grip on herself.  I must have been scared.  I witnessed my grandmother’s terror and grief.  I looked up at my mother, the center of my life, at her wits’ end, forcing my grandmother into even more pain and suffering.

 

SoulCollage® card - The Writer

Navigating Mystery, Part 2

 

When my parents expected their first child, they were living with my father’s parents.  This was a good thing because when my mother went to the hospital in labor with my sister, my father was flat on his back in another hospital across town.  He had been in a streetcar accident and suffered a broken back.  It was a good thing that my mother had her father-in-law, a man she adored, to accompany her.  She no longer had a relationship with her own father.  My grandmother had divorced him after he refused to end a long-standing affair. The whole family disowned him.  Divorce was uncommon in those days, especially for Jews. I never met either of my grandfathers.

My sister Ellen was the first grandchild on both sides of the family.  My father recovered fully from the accident, and when my sister was a few years old, my parents moved into their own house, less than a mile away from his parents.  It was a modest row house in the Pimlico neighborhood of Baltimore, but it was all they needed.  My mother suffered a few difficult years then, losing several pregnancies to miscarriage, and then enduring an even greater tragedy with the death of a baby boy several days after birth.  My father was ready to give up trying to have more children.  He never could bear to see her suffer.  But my mother wanted another child. 

Each and every one of us begins in the depths, deep in the mother’s body, held in that small watery world.  When the mother moves, the baby rocks.  When the mother sleeps, the baby sinks down and rests in the darkness. Or wakes up at the sudden stillness, poking and jabbing an elbow, a knee, a foot. What the baby hears is muffled, distant – the familiar hushed lilt of the mother’s voice, other voices, the perpetual drum beat of the heart, the pumping and humming of the blood, and the muted noises of the outside world.  When the mother eats, the baby is nourished, everything pouring into her through the placenta and umbilical cord.  But what about what the mother feels?  Her fears and tension, her joys and excitement all travel through the cord with her shifting hormones. 

In 1949, six and a half years after my sister was born, I entered the world. I wonder what of my mother’s losses came through the placenta to me.

 

In the year before I was born, my father’s father and his older brother and only sibling both died.  My parents took my grandmother in; her grief was relentless and seemingly insurmountable.  My mother said that her mother-in-law wept incessantly, day and night, for months, and then for years.  My mother understood, as she was grieving as well, but when the never-ending crying did not abate or even lessen, she couldn’t live with it any longer.  She took my grandmother to doctors for help.  The only help they had to prescribe was shock therapy.  And so, my mother would take her weeping mother-in-law on the city bus across town to get treatment, as this was in the days before my parents owned a car.  Each time my grandmother would beg my mother not to make her go back.  My mother claimed that my grandmother would be very quiet and docile on the bus ride home, but that the tears would soon start up again.  My mother told her, “When you can get a grip on yourself, we’ll stop. But for now, this is what the doctors say we have to do.”  At some point, the weeping ended or at least calmed sufficiently for the treatments to end.  The medical world likely deemed it a success. Mission accomplished.  I will never know what my grandmother lost or the terrible pain that she suffered.  In other words, what damage was done in the name of healing her?  It was as much if not more horror than it was healing.

My mom, me, my sister Ellen

Navigating Mystery, Part I

After attending Deena Metzger's Writers' Intensive a few months ago, I had the thought that I'd like to blog some of the writing from the week, but I needed to sit with it for a while.  I wasn't sure whether I would want to write more or at least revise what I'd written.  Looking at it from this bit of distance, I have decided that it's complete as it is.  Not liking long blog posts, I plan to put it out in segments.  So, here's the first :

“What if we reframed ‘living with uncertainty’ to ‘navigating mystery’?”  

-- Martin Shaw   

 

The first time I went to Greece, the car rental agent and the desk clerk at the hotel in Athens both advised us not to go to Elefsis.  “It’s just a dirty, industrial city,” they warned.  Of course, we went.  The Persephone story had been with me my entire life, ever since I danced the part of the north wind blowing over the meadow where Hades pulled Persephone into the underworld.  I was five years old.  The story wove in and out of my life after that. Eleusis, the old name for Elefsis, was where the mysteries celebrating Demeter and Persephone were held for over 2,000 years.  How could I not go?

 

The historical site did not disappoint.  When I arrived at the Plutonion, the cave said to be the place where the goddess descends and emerges from the underworld, I found a bouquet of flowers someone had left on the ledge at the opening.  I was not alone in loving and honoring this ancient being and Her story!  Tears filled my eyes.

 

The second time I visited Eleusis, my mother was dying.  The trip had been arranged long before. I hesitated to leave the states, but my mother encouraged me to go.  Red poppies covered the Spring hillside, and we were practically the only visitors to the ruins on that weekday morning.  This time, I sat by the maiden’s well, where Demeter wept for her lost daughter, and I wept for my dying mother. 

 

Sitting on the rim of a well, a liminal place, at a liminal time, considering the deep relationship between mother and daughter.  I never fully understood why the Persephone story took me the way that it did, but certainly the mother-daughter bond was part of it.  I was a Spring child, too. 

  
The Plutonion, Eleusis

A New Poem: Mabel's Mermaid

My friend Gail and I were sitting in my living room recently, talking and sharing poems, as we do, and looking at the mural hanging from the mantle that my nine-year-old granddaughter gave me two years ago, and I realized it deserved a poem.  Here is a small section of the piece:

And here is the poem:

Mabel’s Mermaid

 

Once there was a girl child

who lived (sometimes) in

an enchanted, watery world

of visions and dreams and art.

One day, the girl learned that

her grandmother was very ill,

and so she brought to her

a smiling mermaid

with purple hair and tail,

swimming in an azure blue ocean

with yellow and coral-colored fish.

She swam alongside a sandy beach

laden with shells and other

treasures from the sea.

Every day, the ailing old woman

lay in her chair by the window,

her eyes drawn to the mermaid,

blue eyes shining back at her,

lavender hair streaming out

through the dancing waves.

She would return the mermaid’s smile,

her heart easing just a little bit.

After the grandmother recovered

and no longer spent all day languishing,

she kept the mermaid in her purview,

never tiring of the smiling face

that lifted her spirits, the precious gift

of her precious girl.

 

 

A New Poem: The World of Our Making

A few weeks ago I attended Deena Metzger's Writers' Intensive.  Once again, a profound week with a wonderful group of writers.  The intensive does not focus on writing poetry, but rather on stories.  Still, one poem came in response to the poem I received at the beginning of intensive, something to contemplate and consider.  I may blog some of the personal story I wrote about later, but in any case, here is the poem.

This summer,

water use in our dry

northern California

will be restricted.

My little pomegranate tree,

only two years old,

just burst out with three deep red flowers.

Last year the tiny fruit fell off, too heavy

for spindly young branches to bear.

I don’t want the baby tree to die

from lack of water, so I will

catch shower-heating water in a bucket

and save the liquid from steaming artichokes

to dribble onto the dry soil.

 

The rains do not come, cannot come.

No rain to evoke sadness

or a flow of memories, but sadness

and the ghosts of memories arrive.

What comes from the sky is dust,

what water arrives is in our eyes.

Looking up for omens and comets,

we struggle to see, to hear something,

to wait for a message, to change.

And still, I love the earth.

The earth Is not the world.

The world of drought and fire,

floods and reckless storms

is of our making.

Our tears are salty and insufficient.

The blown dust and ash clog our eyes.

Yet despite all the horror, all the brokenness,

the redwoods and pines draw up

and display their good green life.

The earth still and always reminds us

to keep on, to love anyway,

to sit down with our ancestors’ ghosts,

to keep telling the stories.

The earth has everything, bears everything –

us, the trees, the life-giving waters,

the myriad other beings.

With all that we have done to her,

can we do any less?

A Spring Poem : April Rain

 I realized that it would be good to post this before we'e so far into spring that it's not so relevant.  

April rain

after a dry winter.

Some night visitor ate both

baby cucumber plants,

but the tomatoes are fine,

the fresh garden verdant

in the soaked soil.

A tiny bit of mist

floats down onto my cheeks,

invisible to the eye,

as the sun struggles

to break through.

 

This is the sky

that reigns over

the tiny plot of land,

this urban refuge

in a world of turmoil.

It is a hugeness, this sky,

changing, changing,

full of billowing clouds

at this moment –

this moment of breath

and herbaceous scents,

of a light breeze rustling

the tender new branches

of the Japanese maple

and the reaching shoots

of clematis vine.

 

These are the tall trees,

redwood and pine,

who lift their bodies

high above the houses,

whose unseen roots

intertwine beneath

the earth.

 

This is my heart,

heavy with fear and sorrow,

burdened with uncertainty

and resistant to accepting

the fact.

 

There is a show of sunlight now,

between drops of mist,

between the rain that was

and the rain to come.

Between.  As we all are.

Between life and death, of course,

but also between breaths,

between times of connections,

between moments.

 

Each between is

an opening,

each between a space

in the clouds,

each between a possibility

of letting go, a possibility

of ending, a possibility

of love.

 

A New Poem: Defeating the Demons

Descending stairs

in pre-dawn darkness,

I enter the cave of memory

and confront

the demons named

         Routine,

         Boredom,

         Dullness, and

         Fear.

I muster up the energy

or the interest

or the will

to say –

         Hello, yes,

         here we are again.

Yet again.

 

The weak winter sun rises

and burnishes the side

of the castle’s tower

across the valley.

A beacon flashes

from parapet

or window,

beaming directly

across the expanse

to me.

Is this a sign, an omen?

Then, just as quickly,

the sun and

the beacon both

disappear, and behind

the castle a rainbow

arcs across the sky.

The demons are,

for the moment,

defeated.