Raised to Read

Although my mother wasn't much of a reader, she honored my lifelong passion for the printed word, and took great pride in the early manifestations of my bookishness.  Books were never denied me, and whether obtained from the library or local department store, they were the things I most coveted throughout my childhood (along with fashion outfits for my Barbie doll).  I give my parents a lot of credit for indulging my book addiction, since an obsession for reading was probably rather foreign to them. My son would likely have a different story to tell about me, and the way books figured in his life.  I suspect he would relate to Eudora Welty's description of her mother, which I happened across yesterday while re-reading One Writer's Beginnings...

I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else.  In my mind's eye, The Origin of Species is lying on the shelf in the pantry under a light dusting of flour - my mother was bread maker, she'd pick it up, sit by the kitchen window and find her place, with one eye on the oven.  I remember her picking up The Man in Lower Ten while my hair got dry enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make me like my idol Mary Pickford.  A generation later, when my brother Walter was in the Navy and his two little girls often spent the day at our house, I remember Mother reading the new issue of Time magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of "Little Red Riding Hood" with the children.  She'd just look up at the right time, long enough to answer - in character-"The better to eat you with my dear," and go back to her place in the war news.

Reading is infectious, but there are lots of ways to raise a reader - just because you aren't necessarily one yourself doesn't mean your children won't be.  I'm thankful my parents and grandparents recognized and nourished my love of stories, for it is one relationship that has stood the test of time.

All this by way of introduction to my essay, Raising a Reader, which appears in this week's issue of BiblioBuffet.  Go read it - and the rest of this fine e-zine, which focuses on the living the literary life. It's one of my favorite bookish reads each week. 

And ~ keep reading.

cross posted at Bookstack

Sunday Scribblings-Telephone

She was on the phone when it happened.  I was playing on the floor in the living room, so I could see her standing in the archway between the dining room and kitchen, the dark corner where the telephone sat on its narrow wooden table.  I wasn't listening to her conversation, being wholly absorbed in lining up a series of Matchbox cars on the ramp of my Fisher Price service station.  I can still hear the skittery sound their tiny wheels made on the hard plastic ramp, like dry leaves blowing across the pavement on a fall day.  The pleasant tone of her voice droned in my ear, probably an ordinary conversation with one of my aunts, whom she talked with daily. From the corner of my eye the hem of her pale blue house dress was visible, its wide circle skirt hanging in gentle folds just above her ankles.

It was the skirt that first caught my attention, for it puddled across the hardwood floor when she fell creating a pale lake on the dark wood.  I turned my head just in time to see my mother's body crumple to the floor, a dull thud the only sound she made.  The heavy black telephone receiver fell from her hand as she went down, taking the rest of the telephone clattering to the ground behind it.

Within seconds my grandmother came tearing through the kitchen door - I"m sure she was screaming, because she screamed at everything anyway, and the sight of her only daughter lying unconscious on the floor would certainly have set off paroxysms of alarm.  But I didn't hear her - I was frozen, transfixed by the sight of my mother so still and motionless on the floor, one arm awkwardly folded beneath her back, the other outstretched, reaching toward me.  The next sound I remember was the relentless cry of ambulance sirens, racing toward our house.  Huddled behind the brown sofa, I stared wide-eyed as paramedics burst through the front door, quickly buckled my mother's still form onto the stretcher, and rushed her into the ambulance.  As they sped down the road, sirens screaming away into the distance, I became aware of the telephone, ominously droning one long penetrating tone into the empty room.

In medicine we talk about sequela, a pathological condition resulting from an injury, disease, or attack.  Not surprisingly, there were a number of sequela resulting from my mother's allergic reaction to penicillin, back on that spring day in 1959.   For her, it spawned a life long fear of taking medicine - even though she had been taking penicillin all her life,  that one dose nearly killed her.   For me, a frightened three year old who watched her mother collapse instantly in front of her eyes, and then be rushed to the hospital where she would remain for nearly two weeks, it triggered an obssessive need to be close to her every moment, so great was my fear that something would happen to her.

Oh, and one more sequela from this event - I despise telephones. 

for more telephone tales, go here

On Level Ground

Lots of ups and downs lately, a veritable roller coaster ride through life.  Things have evened out a bit on one front, thank goodness- my daughter in law came through her surgery with flying colors and a very positive report from her physician, so my worries on that front have eased up a bit.  (Thanks to everyone for their concern and good thoughts - the vibrations apparently reached all the way to the South Pacific!) When I came home today, my husband was on the phone with our friendly mortgage company, trying to work out the details of that re-finance on our property in Florida, and I felt the roller coaster car speeding toward the top of the next precipice, preparing for another belly wrenching plunge.  But I held on to the safety bar, pressed my feet firmly to the floor, and gutted it out.   My darling husband managed to come up with a few choice "questions" for the banker that actually sent them scampering into their corner with a pledge to "check with their supervisor" and "get back to us tomorrow."  He's really good at that kind of thing :)

And that's only one of the reasons I've stayed married to this guy for the past 32 years (today). 

On May 8, 1976, I was nothing but a baby - 20 years old, and I had never even spent the night away from home- really!  What in the world was I doing getting married?  I'm sure nearly every one of the 150 people in that church were shaking their heads in dismay. 

I was the first of my 13 Michigan cousins to get married - but I'm the only one still  married (to their original spouse, that is!)

So there.

Not that it's always been a picnic.  Of course not.  We've certainly been apart far more than I would have dreamed back on May 8, 1976, when I could barely stand to let him out of my sight for 20 minutes.  He's worked away from home a lot - on long term assignments everywhere from Dayton, Ohio, to Chengde, China.  And he's worked long hours even when he was home.  Sometimes I felt as if I were raising our son alone - and that's a big reason why we didn't have more than one child.  But the reason he worked so hard was to give me the ability to stay home and be a full time mother, something we both felt was really important.  And I'm more grateful than I can say, for those years were a true and lasting gift.

But the distance between us has never been in more than miles.  For at the end of the day, we can count on each other - he knows it, and I know it.  We cover each other's back in those hard "life" things, but we also give each other space to pursue our individual dreams.  We share the same values - the importance of family, of caring for other people, of giving your best effort to everything you do.  And we share the same dreams -traveling the world, making beautiful music, trying to make the world a better place, and sharing life with our children and their children.

I'm certainly not complacent about marriage, even one of 32 years.  My parents marriage ended after 42 years, so I know we're nowhere near home free in the longevity department.  As we move into this middle aged stage of life, with more physical challenges presenting themselves everyday, more world problems intruding on and affecting our hopes and dreams, our patience and thoughtfulness is called upon in new ways.  Because of Jim's neuropathy, he has a hard time taking walks, one of the things we used to love doing.  I admit it, I occasionally get annoyed about that.  Or about the fact that his medications make him sleepy, so he tends to nod off the minute he sits down. 

But he still jumps up when I call his name, ready to do whatever needs to be done.  He still sends me little notes during the day (text messages now) with encouraging words when he knows I need them.  He still thanks me for making dinner, tells me I look great (when I know I don't), and never complains if he can't find a pair of socks that match (as long as he can find the tv remote, it's all good!)  Next Saturday, he'll get up at the crack of dawn and drive me to Sandusky, Ohio to play for my friend's elementary school choir in a competition at Cedar Point - he does it every year.

On May 8, 1976, I might have been only 20 years old, but I knew what I was doing.

He's a good guy. 

And he keeps me grounded on this roller coaster ride of life.

Happy Anniversary, Jamey.

 

Stormy Skies

For most of my life I've been an expert worrier - if there wasn't a good reason to worry, I could make one up.  And there have been several periods in my life when stressful situations were outside the norm - the year my parents split up, the year my grandmother died and my husband lost his job (all in the same week), the year my son moved away from home.  During those times, I found it difficult to eat or sleep, found myself obsessing over the situation to the extent that I was unable to concentrate on anything else, found myself lying around staring mindlessly at the television for hours on end. It's been a long while since I've had a really substantial worry, and I guess I've grown a little complacent.  I believed I had learned how to handle life's smaller vicissitudes with a bit more aplomb, and that's probably true.  But I have several very substantial worries right now. 

Just last week I was musing about my son, comparing his life to a multi-colored kite soaring in the breeze.  That kite has encountered some stormy weather, and is being tossed about quite roughly, so we're all feeling the effects here on the ground.  For not only have he and his wife run into some significant roadblocks in their quest to start a family, my daughter in law is suddenly facing unexpected surgery this week. 

It never ceases to amaze me how life can turn itself on a dime, how things can be going just swimmingly, and suddenly you're caught in a riptide being sucked under before you have a moment to catch your bearings.  I find myself slipping into that familiar mode of obsession/distraction, riffling the problems over and over in my mind like strings of worry beads between my fingertips (maybe I should get some of those).  I had saltines for dinner,  spent two hours last night watching the Entertainment channel (ick), and fell asleep in the chair.  I wander around the house, picking up clutter and setting it down somewhere else, desultorily play a song or two on the piano, just pounding the notes mechanically beneath my fingers. I feel as if I haven't learned a thing about how to handle stress, for I've simply reverted to patterns established years ago.

Most of my difficulty arises from the loss of control that is inherent in any situation like this -from not being able to fix things, from not knowing what will happen next.  I feel completely incapable of handling life, so I wander, dither, worry.  As the saying goes, "Worry is like a rocking chair - it gives you something to do, but gets you nowhere."

There is much written these days about the power of positive thinking, of envisioning the future you want to have.   I would like to buy into that philosophy, but maybe I'm just too old.  I keep slipping back into my familiar mentality - bad things will happen, and there's nothing you can do to change them.  Because lately I haven't seen too much evidence of good things happening to anybody, positive attitude or not.  Amidst the continuing stories of economic and social doom and disaster clouding even the bluest sky, there hasn't been much evidence that anyone's vision for a brighter tomorrow are coming true.

But right now, the concerns of the wider world are of little consequence to me.  It's just my small corner of the world I'm worried about - my family, it's present and it's future. 

And the skies are a bit too blustery for my liking.

Kite Flying

Right before my son’s senior year in high school, my friend Pat gave me a framed reprint of the poem titled “Children Are Like Kites.” You’ve probably seen it - the gist of is that you spend years prepping children to “get off the ground.” You run with them, patch them up when they’re torn, pick them up off the ground countless times. You let the string out a bit at a time, until finally they’re airborne. Then, “the kite becomes more distant, and you know it won’t be long before that beautiful creature will snap the lifeline that binds you together and it will soar as it was meant to soar - free, and alone."

By the time you get to this part of the poem, you’re choking back tears. Even now, over a dozen years later, I get teary-eyed reading those last few words.

But then there’s the final sentence:

Only then do you know you’ve done your job.

I believe that’s true. It’s in the letting go that a parent really comes to know what they’re made of. And if you’ve done your job well, when you read that very last line, you’ll dry your tears, stand up a little bit straighter, take a deep breath, and carry on.

My husband and I are only children, and when it comes to feeling responsible for their parents' happiness, I think the burden on an only child is rather great. My parent’s and my husband’s parents were as different as night and day in their child-rearing styles, but the outcome on each side was exactly the same. Both of us always felt the need to be perfect and do whatever it took to make our parents happy, even if that meant subsuming what we desired for our own lives.

So when we married, we had an agreement. If/when we had children, we would not stand in their way, would not make them feel as if our lives depended on their constant presence, not make them feel guilty or worried about what we’d do without them.

In short, we’d let them break the kite string and soar.

We’ve tried really hard to do that, and I think we’ve succeeded pretty well. Our only son left home at age eighteen to go to college in Florida, traveled more than halfway around the world on several occasions, then met and married a young woman from a completely different culture. He’s lived in Florida for the past twelve years and is planning a move to Texas to embark upon another era in his life’s journey.

Sometimes I laugh at just how well we’ve succeeded in allowing him to soar. I’m sure his trajectory boggles the minds of our parents, as well as other more conservative folks in our families, who probably always wonder why in the world we let him do those things.

Make no mistake; there’s nothing easy about this process. There’s no magic pill you can take to stop missing your children, to keep your heart from aching when you’re apart on birthdays or holidays, to prevent you from wondering what they’re doing or how their day is going, if they’re in a bad mood or on top of the world. I’ve always been deeply involved in my own mother’s life (probably more than is good for me), and I know that I will become more involved from now on as she draws nearer to the end of it. It hurts to think I might never have that kind of relationship with my only child, that I may well need to depend on “the kindness of strangers” to shepherd me through my later years. 

But, as writer Phyllis Theroux says: “My children have taught me more than I have taught them, given me more joy than I have given them, and their not being present or even much aware of me now does not alter this."

Watching those beautiful, strong, colorful kites waving proudly in the breeze is worth everything and is one of life’s greatest experiences.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.