taking a little guilt trip this summer . . .

10 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by Editor in Northern Ireland, World Book Day

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adolescence, attachment parenting, Awesome Women, Big, books, Books, children of cancer patients, Ireland, Janis Ian, Library, Life Lessons, Mother daughter relationship, Mother enough, mothering and guilt, movie Big, Mundanity, Northern Ireland, Poetry, Portland, Reading, reading, Summer Reading Flowchart, Summer Reading Infographic, Tom Hanks, wish come true, Words of Wisdom, World Book Day, Writing

After a fortune-telling machine grants his wish, 13 year-old Josh Baskin begins an adventure in the world of work and romance and in the adult body of Tom Hanks. We don’t need to watch the movie Big to predict the ending of the timeless tale behind it. We know that the boy who falls in love with the woman will eventually be pulled back to his thirteen year-old life, so we aren’t surprised by her response to his suggestion that she go back with him. “I’ve been there before. It’s hard enough the first time … you know what I mean?” she asks, and the almost immediate reality, “You don’t know what I mean …” We smile too, almost conspiratorially, as we watch him walk away from her, his body shrinking within the business suit that had fit just moments before, falling out of shoes that are too big. Be careful what you wish for …

As I have written before, my mother has a flair for transforming the most mundane task into something altogether fascinating. Just yesterday, as we talked on the phone, she was “doing a bit of ironing,” which transported me back to a typical childhood scene. She leaning over the ironing board, smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in my father’s shirts, pausing – for dramatic effect – to remind me to consider the lilies, to “mark her words” that there would be plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea. Implicit in her explicit admonishment not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away. Mostly, she struck an artful balance between shielding me from the world while empowering me to find the voice to explore its realities. But not all the time. Especially not when I was in the throes of the kind of teenage angst found in a Janis Ian ballad. In those moments, she must have longed for the hands of the clock to fly back to an easier time.

What goes around really does come around. Sometimes, when my teenage daughter announces, one hand on her hip, that she cannot wait to have her own apartment in a place where it rains all the time – notably not Ireland, the country of my birth, but somewhere infinitely more hip like Portland or Seattle – I find myself wanting to tell her that all of it, even the growing up part, is such a bad idea! It lasts but a moment, this longing to hold her as an infant in my arms once again, but it is a powerful moment that holds me in its grip just long enough to make me feel selfish and rather guilty.

Guilt and mothering. To satisfy my curiosity, I wondered where it would take me if I fed Google with those three words. Hardly surprising and almost instantaneously, our favorite search engine dutifully produced about 842,000 results on the topic. Somewhere in there, I’m sure of it, lies a discussion of the media maelstrom that swirled around the TIME magazine cover featuring a previously unknown Jamie Lynne Grumet breast-feeding her three year old son. How the ratings soared as all the experts weighed in on the subject of attachment parenting, extended breast-feeding, “baby-wearing,” and co-sleeping. The topic du jour for longer than a day, I remember everyone seemed to have something to say about it. For me, within all the noise was the matter of guilt, induced not by the cover photograph of a little boy at his mother’s breast, but by the question emblazoned in red next to it.

“Are you MOM ENOUGH?”

Naturally, I wanted to respond, “Why, yes. Yes, I am. Of course I am.” But perhaps the folks at TIME weren’t talking to me. Perhaps they were referring to some other woman whose credentials in mothering were inferior to Ms. Grumet’s or mine? No. They were speaking directly to me, and off I went to second-guess my expertise as a mother. But first, I had to grapple with the meaning of “enough” and “you” in the context of mothering, as opposed to grappling with these in the context of an Uncle Sam pointing at the whole country and saying he needed it.

Am I enough of a mother? What does TIME mean by “enough?” I know what I mean when I compare something “good” to that which I find “good enough.” (In the end, I think I’d prefer something a bit more sentimental as my epitaph than “here lies one who was mom enough.”) Perhaps I am taking it too far. Then again, probably not any farther than countless headlines and results of clinical studies have taken me over the course of my mothering, many of which have prompted me to question if any and every difficulty experienced by my child could be attributed to some tiny but critical error made by me. Struggling academically? Bottle-feeding might be the culprit. Low birth weight? Poor nutritional choices on the part of the mother during pregnancy. Talkative in class? A little immature? It must be something to do with her always being the youngest, at least six months younger than everyone else in the class. Whose fault was that, exactly? After all, Arizona’s Education Code stipulates that a child is considered “five years old” and eligible for kindergarten only if her date of birth falls not in December but before September 1 of the current school year. Clearly, this was poor family planning. Again, my fault. Recurrent ear infections? As a particularly cranky on-call pediatrician guilt-tripped me one Saturday morning when my child was screaming with a double ear infection: “Well, she is a day-care baby so what do you expect?” I remember retorting that I only taught part-time at the college. Unfazed, he reiterated to me, as though I were in fifth grade, “A day-care baby is a day-care baby.” I was just not “mom enough” for the good doctor. Nor was he “good enough” for me. I will not write here the retort I had silently reserved for him – my mother is reading this, after all.

Ah, but I digress. One of my wishes came true this weekend, when I discovered that my teenage daughter loves to read. Real books, too. None of these starting-at-the-back manga narratives that I still don’t “get,” not even the stuff of all those electronic games I railed against – for the Nintendo DS, then the Game Cube, the Wii, the Itouch, and the Ipad. It is almost painful to acknowledge that only a few years ago, the mere promise of a new game was almost enough to convince her to read from an actual book with actual pages for fifteen minutes. That and perhaps the tiniest of guilt trips . . .

Imagine my glee this afternoon as my daughter rattled off her opinion about Chinua Ahebe’s Things Fall Apart and recommended that I read it. Coolly, I pretended I had never heard of the novel, while visions of our very own mother-daughter book club danced in my head. Just yesterday, while strains of Ray la Montagne’s “Trouble” on filled the car, my brilliant girl noticed “Ray Montag” on the radio display which led her to begin a conversation about Ray Bradbury’s recent passing and Montag, the book-burning fireman, in Fahrenheit 451. A conversation. With me. About a novel. Be still my heart! Could this possibly be the same recalcitrant reader who, when confronted with her seventh grade summer reading assignment, counted out loud the 211 pages of My Brother Sam is Dead, painstakingly did the math, and then announced that a fortnight should take care of it, at the glacial pace of a chapter a day?

And then an epiphany. She is reading different books, but she has been reading all along. Reading her world, assessing the situations in which she finds herself, sometimes through no choice of her own. It matters not if it is manga or Shakespeare, the label on the back of a shampoo bottle, a text from a friend, a comic, a peace sign, a pink ribbon, a green light. Inhabiting the world of words and symbols, printed or digital, she has been reading, finding meaning. And when it means something, it really matters.

I have written before about how my daughter’s adolescence was unfairly interrupted by my cancer diagnosis. Some day, when she emerges from what I once heard Whoopi Goldberg brilliantly describe as “the teen tunnel,” I will ask her if reading books was the thing that helped her through it. In the meantime, I am curious. Which books should she read this summer? She has already worked her way through the infographic below. The result? Animal Farm. As it turns out, an unopened hardback edition has been waiting for her in my bookcase for almost as long as she has been alive.

So tell me, what’s on your reading list?

HAWMC Day 3: communing with the dead

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by Editor in grandmother, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Themes of childhood

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Bisphenol A, BPA, folk healer, grandmother, Health Writing Activist Monthly Challenge, Identity, Immigration, Influences, Janis Joplin, Memoir, Mother daughter relationship, Northern Ireland, poultices and plasters, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Susan G. Komen, the charm, Themes of childhood, WEGO Health Activist Writer's Month, Words of Wisdom

Day Three of my Health Activist Writers Monthly Challenge, and I’m thrilled to be taking part in it with my blogging buddies Marie Ennis O’Connor and Jan Hasak, two compelling writers who are truly inspired and inspiring in all they do.

Day 3: If you had a superpower, what would it be and how would you use it?

I remember the first time I heard about communing with the dead. I was about 9 years old, and some children at school were talking about how they had received messages from “the other side” via a ouija board. I was both fascinated and frightened by the prospect of them sitting around it in the dark, their fingertips on a glass, nervously waiting for ghosts to spell out the answers to their questions. Superstitious and gullible, I may well have believed that indeed it was the spirits moving the glass to numbers and letters on the ouija board. I certainly wasn’t going to attribute it to children like me who were bored with school and craving a little out-of-the-ordinary excitement. Still, I was not allowed to play with a ouija board, which of course made the very thought of it all the more attractive.

Like Tarot cards and séances, the ouija board had something of a diabolical connotation. At the same time, paradoxically, the country at large embraced such other supernatural feats that included Tasseography better known to me then as “reading the tealeaves,” or interpreting some meaning in the pattern left by tea leaves in the bottom of a china cup that had been turned three times. My mother filled my head (and she does to this day) with such superstitions as counting magpies (“one for sorrow, two for joy”) and, in our long-distance chats, it is not uncommon for her to lead me into the mystic, recounting somewhat conspiratorially what she swears are prophetic dreams that have disturbed her sleep for years. My father, of course, thinks it’s a load of old nonsense. Still, it would be a bit disingenuous on my part if I were to distance myself from all of this or pretend not to take any stock in it. As my husband is quick to remind me, I am the same woman who had her astrological chart done last summer in California, in spite of his dismissal as “a quack” the nice man whose hourly rate was the same as that of a really good attorney.

Going back to Northern Ireland, there were parts – and still there are – where many people readily subscribed to a belief in the mystical, supernatural powers of the “folk healer,” an individual who had “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed us, and it came in all forms – plasters, poultices, brown bottles. My father tells the story of one in particular that came in a Cantrell and Cochrane lemonade bottle. My mother availed herself of it some time before I was born, having being told by her GP that there wasn’t really anything he could prescribe for her bout with jaundice. Never one to take no for an answer even if it came in the form of a dismissal from a man with formal medical training, my father went deep into the Derry countryside to visit the man with “the charm.” Although my father accompanied him into the fields, he was of no help at all in discerning which wild herbs held the curing powers. Following this excursion, the healer returned to his kitchen where he used a stone to beat the juices out of the herbs and then mixed it up with two bottles of Guinness stout. No payment. Just faith that it would work. And he sent my father on his way with instructions for my mother to take every last drop of “the cure.” When I ask, as I did by phone this morning, my parents take turns regaling me with stories such as this, tales of the folk healer as last resort, consulted only after it was determined that the medical doctor had been flummoxed. I am quite sure, as I write, that when news of my cancer diagnosis spread to extended family and friends back home, a charm may indeed have been considered, although not necessarily aloud. Odd it is to juxtapose this world with the one in which I find myself at this moment, a continent away with all the trappings of technology within my reach. So fascinated I am by how such folklore may have shaped me, I plan to read more about it in the aptly titled Folk Healing and Health Care Practices in Britain and Ireland: Stethoscopes, Wands and Crystals.

For now, it’s back to thoughts of the ouija board and the opportunity for just one more conversation with someone who is no longer with us. If I could harness such a superpower, there’s a handful of women I’d like to talk to:

My grandmother who died when I was just six years old. It was my first experience with death, and it crushed my little heart. When she was young and full of hope, she emigrated to America with my grandfather, and they settled in Connecticut. As my mother tells it, letters from home played a part in persuading the young couple to to pack up their family and return to Northern Ireland. So here they are in 1932, with their four little boys and their only daughter at the time, posing for the picture that would be placed in the family passport, stamped as they boarded the boat to go back, to forever abandon the possibilities and the promise of America. I don’t think my grandmother ever quite recovered from it. So I would like to tell her that although I didn’t have too much time with her, I still remember her and the details around her. The flowers on her apron and her good brown coat, the embroidered “As I lay me down to sleep” sampler that hung on the bedroom wall, ice cream sliders from McGurk’s shop, and Merry Maid caramels. Most of all, I woud like to introduce her to my American daughter.
Princess Diana whose every turn was noticed and noted by a nation that often seemed absolutely besotted with her. How could we be so smitten by a stranger? Not much older than my teenage friends and me, Lady Diana Spencer set the standard for fashion and a fairy tale wedding in 1981. Transformed by title and massive media attention, she could not possibly have imagined the extent of her influence nor that she would have so little time on earth to truly leverage it. I think she’d enjoy a casual conversation in a bustling London restaurant. The kind of conversation that ordinary people have all the time, completely unguarded and of no interest whatsoever to the paparazzi.
Susan G. Komen Her name will forever conjure up images of pink ribbons and hundreds of thousands of people literally racing “for the cure.” It is disquieting to acknowledge that she died in 1982, not knowing what caused her breast cancer, and that over thirty years later, we still don’t know. I’d like to talk to her about that and ask her what she would like to see done differently by the powerful and clearly political organization that bears her name.
Rachel Carson In Silent Spring, she warned us about pesticides and their link to cancer. This was some fifty years ago, when I was just an infant. Like Komen, she also died from breast cancer. I’d like to be able to reassure Rachel Carson that in 2012 America, our policies reflect what she told us – that the health of our world is deeply connected to the health of our bodies. But that wouldn’t be quite true; in fact, just days ago the FDA decided that Bisphenol A (BPA) will still be used to make containers for the food and beverages we consume in this country.
Janis Joplin Before my time, yet of my time, she will forever be the quintessential rock legend. Dead of a heroin overdose at just 27, she is remembered as much for the way her life ended as for her powerful rendition of George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which seriously makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. Against today’s backdrop of reality TV and the seemingly endless succession of people who, in spite of lacking any talent, have mastered the art of self-promotion. I’d like to ask Janis, who would be 70 this year, to share her thoughts on what happens when fame and insecurity collide in front of a global audience.

Day 2: Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge #HAWMC

02 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by Editor in Memoir, Northern Ireland, Themes of childhood

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Anna Quindlen, Army of Women, Arts & Entertainment, Awesome Women, Books, breast cancer diagnosis, Edna O'Brien, Friendship, Health Writing Activist Monthly Challenge, Influences, Inspiration, Library, Memoir, Mother daughter relationship, NBCC, Northern Ireland, Reading, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, WEGO Health Activist Writer's Month, Writing

Day Two: Quotation Inspiration

We want things to be easy for our children, and we know from sad experience that the world can be unkind to girls who do not please, who speak out, who go their own way. But we know from experience, too, that the role of the good girl can be a hollow one, with nothing at the center except other people’s expectations where your character might have been.

She doesn’t know it, but Anna Quindlen has been one of my best friends since I began my life in America. Helping me navigate my way through a new country, a new culture, was the Op-Ed column she regularly penned for The New York Times, aptly entitled, “Public and Private.” In 1990, before marriage and motherhood became milestones in my own life, I learned lessons about both from a woman I most likely will never meet and. As I turned 30, Anna Quindlen turned 40. The mere decade between us belied the often motherly wisdom I found in her writing, which was at once intensely personal and sharply political. So it is as my mother’s daughter and the mother of a daughter, that I am drawn once again to her words about women in the world.

As a child, I was an avid reader, much preferring to stay indoors with my nose stuck in a book than playing with all the other children on the big field outside our house on the Dublin Road. Our house was full of books, but still I borrowed as many as was allowed from the mobile North Eastern Education and Library Board van that parked around the corner every couple of weeks. Also, once a week, an impressive variety of comics was delivered to our house by a lanky newspaper boy. First came The Twinkle, “the picture paper especially for little girls,” when indeed I was a very little girl. Next, more comics named after more girls,most notably The Bunty (although I have yet to meet a real-life girl named Bunty), The Judy, and The Mandy. By the time I was a teenager, there was The Jackie – a little less childish and more ‘with-it.’ In my mind, it was a bona fide woman’s magazine, complete with fashion and make-up tips, and the much anticipated pin-up of pop singers of the day. There are many women, of a certain age, who will remember with fondness a very special issue – circa 1975 – featuring a very young “heartthrob,” David Cassidy.

Between all the girls in the comics and those created by prolific children’s author, Enid Blyton, I was never lonely. My best friends were her ‘famous five,’ and her girls who attended the very posh boarding schools, St. Clare’s and Malory Towers. Written in the late 1940′s, I know Enid Blyton has been lambasted today as politically incorrect and sexist, reinforcing class and gender stereotypes, but her books were real page-turners, providing hours and hours of delight and pure escapism for a working class girl in Antrim, Northern Ireland. I just cannot bring my enlightened and evolved self to criticize Enid Blyton. That would be sacrilege!

Add to this print-rich environment three black and white TV channels from which to choose – Ulster Television, BBC1, and BBC – and there you have my recreational options as a child (which later expanded to include Channel 4, its color commercials and edgy content pushing the envelope).

By the time I got to Antrim Grammar School, I had expanded my horizons a bit with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (which led me to her sister, Emily’s, Wuthering Heights), and Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. But, for a period, it seemed I was only reading the novels, plays, and poetry of white men, most of whom were dead. Chaucer, Hardy, Shakespeare, Dickens. Where were all the women? Surely they had something to say too? So it was altogether thrilling when in college I was reintroduced to the writing of women, Irish women in particular, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, and my favorite, Edna O’Brien, whose work helped reform censorship laws in Ireland, following the banning and burning of her book, The Country Girls, in 1960. She spoke out, went her own way to craft exquisite literature, and the world was often unkind to her, but Edna O’Brien blazed a trail through it, changing it for so many. She changed it for me.

Years later, when my daughter was less than a year old, I worked part-time as an adjunct English professor at a local college. There, I took advantage of the academic freedom afforded me, and I milked every opportunity to introduce my students to writers who were actually alive and female. I wasn’t required to teach Shakespeare, but when I felt like it, I would take my students through some of his sonnets, like his clever Sonnet 138 instead of rehashing Hamlet’s soliloquy. Again. Just going my own way … and I brought good company with me.

It’s been 28 years since I took my tentative first steps into a classroom at the old Hopefield High School, in a predominantly Protestant housing estate, where Loyalist sentiment regularly ran amok, outside Belfast, Northern Ireland. Armed only with Great Expectations and lesson plans and feeling very much like the young woman in Kingsley Amis Take a Girl Like You, I can still hear the click-clack of my high heeled shoes echoing in the hallways. I was only 21, and I was scared to death. What if the pupils didn’t like me? What if they picked me up and put me in the wastepaper basket (like they had done to a petite biology teacher)? What if the English Department Head came in and observed the one lesson that hadn’t been planned? What if I sat in the wrong chair in the staff-room (the one reserved for a knitter, the High Priestess of the faculty)? What if they made me teach a novel I hadn’t read? I needn’t have worried – expectations were low. My pupils were working class protestants in a Belfast that often appeared to neither need nor want them, and I was a teacher who was committed less to building a better Belfast for them than I was to getting myself out of there, out of the country and off to America. I was fortunate, my family untouched by The Troubles that plagued our little country, other than what we read in the paper or what we imagined the few times our windows shook because of an explosion in a nearby town. As a child in this time, I knew without being explicitly instructed, the meaning of ’whatever you say, say nothing.’ I imagine many of us felt we had no choice other than going about our daily lives, and in the process hardening ourselves, on the surface, against the senseless bombings and killings of people who looked and were just like us. And so I left. Traveling abroad with a local orchestra each summer had exposed me to places where people did not experience the kind of disappointment we felt almost daily back home. It helped expand my vision of myself, the very possibility of myself in a much bigger world. So I left Northern Ireland. Mentally, at first. The first in my family to ‘go on to school,’ I soon extricated myself from an engagement to a nice boy and what would have been a slippery slope to a domesticated life within what I perceived to be a small-minded hardened country in urgent and desperate need of humane leaders with expansive minds and hearts. Leaders who would see the human being behind the Catholic or the Protestant, the British or the Irish. Ironically, it wasn’t until I left Northern Ireland, that I found the voice to speak about it. I appreciate today what Edna O’Brien told a Telegraph reporter about having been away from her “motherland” for over 50 years:

Certain things are rock-hard within us – the feeling for a person or a country. That is not the same as wanting to live with that person or in that country.

Because today’s post is about health, I should write about why this quotation is so relevant to me now. Now that I have been diagnosed with breast cancer, and I know a little more about its vocabulary, its politics, its culture, and funded, even the level of commitment it requires in the form of endless appointments that quickly fill a calendar for a year, I am ready to speak out. I will be 49 in a couple of weeks, so I don’t care as much about what people think of me any more. I am ready to tell my story, in my own way, about a disease that has just burst in and disrupted our lives. I don’t know that I can sit back, be a good girl, and accept as truth that we are racing for a cure. That I’ll “battle” and “get back in the swing of things” soon.

I am a most unwilling conscript to this battle. We are doing anything but racing. We are moving at a glacial pace, and too often I feel as if I’m holding my breath, not unlike the way I did as a child, wondering if the bomb scare was just that. A scare. A hoax. Except in my new reality, the suspicious devices come in the form of tumors and test results. All this waiting and worrying, all this time spent coordinating more time to spend in waiting rooms, is just too time consuming, energy consuming. One out of eight women will develop breast cancer some time during her life – this means one new diagnosis every 2 minutes. Every 13 minutes, a woman will die of breast cancer, according to the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). In 1973, it was 1 in 11. We have made such tiny steps. Unacceptable.

So, while I am an unwilling soldier in this cancer “battle,” I have nonetheless enlisted in an army, The Army of Women, because I believe this army needs my help to change the trajectory of the lives of so many of us. With science, real science, in its arsenal, this army has the potential to bring an end, forever, this disease. And to change the conversation about it. About my cancer. About the destiny of my daughter.

GET INVOLVED

Thank you for taking the first step in helping us move beyond a cure. Your decision to partner with the scientists who are seeking to unlock the key to preventing breast cancer will help us end this disease once and for all.We need YOU! Take advantage of this life-changing opportunity to directly participate in breast cancer research. Women of all ages, ethnicities and risks — whether you have had breast cancer or not — are needed now!