- New Year's Eve (January 2005)
- Let Hearts Be Light (December 2004)
- Cold Harvest (November 2004)
- I Read [Bleep] as a Child. Am I Bad? (October 2004)
- It Could Be Worse (September 2004)
- Surveyville (August 2004)
- Activist Heart: Anne Feeney (July 2004)
- Multi-Level Mothering (June 2004)
- Into the Mystic (May 2004)
- Popularity vs. Self-Assurance (April 2004)
- 'To Assume" -- The Eighth Deadly Sin (March 2004)
- Finding the Center of the Circle (February 2004),
- New Year's Revolutions (January 2004)
- Unconventional Family Holiday (December 2003),
- Motherhood As A Curse (November 2003),
- Holding On (August 2003)
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Ross. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Ross. Show all posts
Elizabeth Ross
SLEEPING SINGLE:
New Year's Eve
“I haven’t had a drink since New Year’s 2000,” my mother said as I offered her a strawberry daiquiri wine cooler. I knew it was a lie, and I couldn’t resist reminding her.“But you tried a Kahlua and Cream when we were at Friday’s, and…”
“I don’t count those. Little sips don’t count. The last I had was champagne.”
It could have gone on, and I could have protested her little escape from reality, but as I was standing there in the kitchen, pouring a few drops of the cooler into an old Windsor Canadian shot glass, I knew it was futile, possibly even cruel. I stared at the miniature Canadian Mounties officer on the glass, his red painted uniform chipping with age, and wondered for a split second how many shots of Southern Comfort and Yukon Jack I had measured in that old glass.
“You remember where that glass…”
“Yes, mother,” I said flatly, lifting the lip of the bottle away, and going to the cupboard to get a tumbler. As I stooped down to pull ice cubes from the freezer, I could see her from the corner of my eye, picking up the shot glass. She stared at it for a moment as well, lost in her own thoughts, before taking a sip, barely taking a drop from the half-filled glass. Her wincing was either an indication that I would end up rinsing the remainder down the drain, or her outward show that she was still opposed to drinking.There was a certain hypocrisy, and fear, attached to her attitudes about alcohol, since in one breath she could say that she would love to get extremely drunk, and in the next, preach the perils of alcoholism.
I poured the rest of the bottle into my own glass, added a straw, and took a sip. “You shouldn’t drink alcohol from a straw,” her words came out, barely above a whisper.
“I know. I’ll end up getting drunk quicker.” I stopped short, and didn’t pain her by mentioning the fact that I had “inherited” my father’s tolerance for alcohol. It would just turn into a tirade about my drinking habits, and denial of the fact that tolerance was acquired, not inherited.
By strictest rules, I knew I was probably an alcoholic, but then again, so was every old lady who took sacrificial wine at Sunday Mass. I drank on a specific schedule, which was a sign of alcoholism in the eyes of the experts. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t remember the last time I had gotten really drunk, or that I could skip the evenings out for weeks at a time. She didn’t know I had spent three months straight drinking only club soda, just to prove I could.
“You’re your father’s daughter,” she spat out, while staring at the red liquid in the Windsor shot glass.
“That’s a problem?” I asked, trying to put an innocent air in my voice, but probably failing miserably.
She glared at me for a moment, then stepped away from her drink, picking up a dishtowel, to dry invisible dishes, I supposed. Looking at her, I could see the years drop away, and her image with the towel over one shoulder, her hair pure brown without the help of a bottle, came to my mind. She always had a dishtowel over her shoulder when I was a child, back before my father bought her a dishwasher. Force of habit, or some obsessive-compulsive trait made it impossible for her to tolerate even well rinsed dishes sitting in the sink. They had to be washed immediately, and her towel was her weapon against disorder.
“You’re going out for New Year’s?
“Yes. James and I are going to the club.”
She winced as I mentioned our destination. I knew the phone number for the club before I knew our home number, because my mother always asked me to call my father there. Something about saying “no” to a little girl, when being asked to come home, he always complied.
“Do you want to come with us?” I asked, even though I knew she wouldn’t.
“No.”
“Are you sure? Some of your old friends will be there…”
“If they were true friends, I wouldn’t have to…” she stopped, and I assumed it was her Catholic upbringing that halted her tongue from disparaging the men and women she had known when I was a child.
“They have short memories. I guess you’ll blame that on the alcohol,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
She nodded without looking at me, and I knew she really wasn’t listening. It was rare when she passed up the opportunity to condemn others for drinking. “I don’t have anyone to go out with, so I’m not going out.”
It was my turn to cringe, as I knew all too well. Between my father’s anti-social attitudes after he went on the wagon, and the years spent nursing him during his illness, my mother had become isolated. She didn’t belong to any groups, like some of the neighbor women, no bowling, cards, or books. The closest she came to that was a support group from the hospice, but that was more depressing than anything.
I knew that isolation very well, since I had lived it only a few years earlier. My marriage served to drag me to the depths of depression, and between my ex-husband and myself, I had managed to end up closed off from the world. Even then, I was still trying to pull myself free from that cycle, and James, the man in my life, was a big part of that.
“New Year’s isn’t a beginning. It’s an end,” she went on. I wanted to protest, but the images of my grandfather’s suit cut to shreds came unbidden. He was my father’s stepfather, the only grandfather I had known from that side of my family. When I was young, he had died on New Year’s Eve, and the family had been at my grandmother’s house to support her. I nodded numbly to my mother’s words, unwilling to carry on the argument.I’d heard of “deafening silence”, but didn’t truthfully understand it until the first few years after my father’s death. It became an integral part of life in my childhood home; beginning on the day they brought my father home in an ambulance to die on the rented hospital bed in our living room. Silence was a curse in those short days, because there was nothing to drown out the mechanical noise of the machine that fed oxygen to my father. The hiss of air through tubing became fodder for nightmares for me.
Closing my eyes for a moment to clear my mind, I drank down the rest of my drink. My mother glared at me again, but said nothing about the alcohol. “I think I’ll go to bed.” I said it to break the silence, before I started believing that no noise could exist within the walls of our house. No reply.A couple years would pass before my mother would even begin to seriously think about picking up the pieces, and trying to find someone. There will never be a replacement for my father for her, and that is just as well. She and I are still caught in the web of deceit and abuse that was built in our home over the years. For her, the spider is a ghost, and for me, it has a new face.
We promise each other that we won’t repeat the cycle, but the standards are so difficult to reach. Where is the line between surrendering to an abuser, and compromise with a decent man? I don’t have the answer to that question, and that has left me wondering if I am caught, yet again, or if I’m just overreacting.
My mother was right, in saying that New Year’s is an ending, but not in the overly morbid context she stated it in the first place. I find myself looking at my life each year, as I take down one calendar, and replace it with another. There is a shedding of unnecessary things, and decisions to stop others. Dead wood is cut away, ending the existence of those things I do not need.
In that sense, it is the ending, and I pause in that moment, waiting for at least a little while before stepping forward into what is new.
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Copyright 2005 Elizabeth Ross
Elizabeth Ross is a 32-year-old mother of four, freelance writer and editor from Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Imperfect Parent, MomsVoice, and is slated to appear in Momentum, the magazine of the National Catholic Educational Association. She is the publisher of River Walk Journal, a bi-monthly online literary journal which is an expansion of her online editing group.
Let Hearts Be Light
In spite of the fact that the Christmas season is supposed to be happy, very often, people focus on the negative. Professionals have offered various terms for it, but rarely offer the most common sense remedy to the milder cases: humor.
This year I am bound and determined to keep the amusing memories of family holidays in my mind. I will tell them to my children in the hope that they remember the tales, and pass the humorous history on to their own children.
The first story is one that is pure legend to me, since it occurred the year I was born. It was the reason my father always gave when I would ask why we always had an artificial Christmas tree. I was born in the first hour of December 26th, and spent almost two weeks in the hospital.
Because my parents stayed with family in the city during that time, they didn’t end up returning home until after the new year. My father forgot his key, so he had to break into the house; the crack in the basement door in our kitchen is still visible through layers of paint. He went into the living room to check on the tree. Most of the needles and glass ornaments fell to the floor when he touched it, leaving a pile of shattered glass, and the necessity to buy new ornaments for our next Christmas. Live trees were considered too high maintenance for the next thirty years, and I introduced a tradition of acquiring them after my father’s death. Admittedly, watering the tree is a near religious affair for me.
Perhaps the family should have taken that as a warning, but it is doubtful they could have prevented the inevitable. She looked Santa straight in the eye and asked, “Why are you wearing Uncle John’s boots?” Before anything could be said to diffuse the situation, Santa stripped off his beard, unceremoniously removed my mother from his lap, and left the house, mumbling about his convictions to never dress as Old Saint Nick again.
If my mother hadn’t lost her belief in Santa by then, I have no doubt that year contributed greatly to that loss of innocence. My own revelation was not particularly momentous, but it was obvious. That year, although I don’t remember my age, I did respond to my newly acquired knowledge with some grace. I asked my mother for the biggest mixing bowl in the cupboard. She was not entirely certain what I was planning, but acquiesced. I proceeded to fill the bowl with ice, and placed it in the hall near the plate of cookies for Santa. Then I returned to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of my father’s beer from the refrigerator, putting it on ice in the hallway. My mother asked me why I was leaving beer for Santa, and my reply was to the point: “Dad doesn’t like milk very much.”
Holidays have many traditions, activities repeated for years, and even generations. Along with the myriad of situations that can cast a somber atmosphere on the season, there are those that can add a glow of happiness. Without getting into the rhetoric of the “reason for the season”, I think now that it is best to focus on the latter.
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Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
Cold Harvest
It’s always been a battle of sorts at the holidays, determining who does what, which family should be visited, which family should receive a tepid refusal. When I was young, it was easy, since my father’s family never pushed to have us over for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. So we’d typically pile in the car and head to the city to join my mother’s family for a not-so-well prepared turkey dinner, and a long evening of close company in a house that really wasn’t meant to accommodate the 12 or more people invited.
The numbers dwindled as the years went by, and by the time I was married with kids, there was a great deal of animosity built up by my now ex-husband about my family’s tradition. They tried to like him, but his personality didn’t lend itself to harmony with a fur-friendly household, something that was brought to a head when he started discussing recipes for cooking rabbit, obviously implying that he was considering the family pet for a main course.
I won’t lay blame for the rift in the family on my ex, since I knew very well that it started building before I was born. There was something about my mother leaving on her honeymoon, and returning to an empty bedroom in my grandparents’ house, apparently emptied of her childhood treasures by her mother and brother in her absence. I know the story well, and although I’ve never seen proof of it, I did see signs from both my grandmother and uncle that they were perfectly capable of the act.
Now, I am laying odds that I will be left with the Thanksgiving meal this year, as there is no real reason for my mother and uncle to make outward signs of familial solidarity. My grandmother is dead. She was the last thread to hold the family together, and even if there was some chance to sew some seams, I doubt that anyone concerned has the patience or ambition to bother. I may extend an invitation to my uncle and his family, but I doubt I will get anything more than a rapid refusal, begging pardon for their other obligations.
The situation doesn’t bother me greatly; as it leaves me with less work, and the possibility that I would not have to hire an extra table and chairs for the day. My mother in contrast will undoubtedly fall deeper into the funk that has been grasping at her since my grandmother took ill. Thanksgiving will be a harbinger of loneliness for her, further proving her hypothesis that she truly has nowhere to belong, no family.
I inherited my father’s pragmatism, making it very difficult for me to empathize with my mother’s current plight. In my mind, I don’t see my mother having any real use for my uncle, as he’s never been very brotherly to her over the years, so she may as well toss him aside as she would anything else that doesn’t work for her. I have said this to her, but my words are no comfort. Since my advice isn’t helping, I have begun harboring ill will towards my uncle on her behalf, a feeling that increases daily as I watch her fall deeper into depression over his apparent disregard for her feelings.
Typically, I had always looked forward to the air turning colder, the nights growing longer, and the local farm harvest season preceding the holidays. The time before Thanksgiving was enjoyable, as I looked at it for its own time, not a prelude to the dreaded weeks of preparation for Christmas. December had already been marred for me by family history, since it is the month of loss, holding the anniversaries of the deaths of my great-grandmother, and both grandfathers. November will also hold that onerous position for me now, if only vicariously so, since it holds the first significant day that will undoubtedly mark the dissolution of my mother’s family, Thanksgiving.
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Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
Elizabeth Ross is a 32-year-old mother of four, freelance writer and editor from Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Imperfect Parent, MomsVoice, and is slated to appear in Momentum, the magazine of the National Catholic Educational Association. She is the publisher of River Walk Journal, a bi-monthly online literary journal which is an expansion of her online editing group.
I Read [Bleep] as a Child. Am I Bad?
For many years, I have kept the idea of banning books and other media in the back of my mind, in the same file drawer with legends of alligators in the New York City sewer system, and the Loch Ness Monster. Our community had its little suburban legend about a radical Christian church that spent an entire weekend burning books and records, but I never saw real evidence of it, nor did I ever find anyone who witnessed it.In high school, there was a minor scuffle with the parents in the PTA over a health textbook we had that detailed stories of teens who were questioning their sexuality, but the school board brushed past them with assurances that the teachers using the textbook would remind the students daily that the stories were just examples, and not suggestions. It was a moot point anyway, since the provincial nature of the community at large did not lend itself to sexual experimentation, homosexual or heterosexual in nature, unless one wanted the reputation of street trash.
Now my attention was re-drawn to the nebulous subject of book banning and censorship thanks to an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette heralding the arrival of Banned Books Week. Beyond the obvious issues with the USA Patriot Act allowing the authorities to research the reading habits of US citizens, there was the mention of the American Booksellers Association’s Banned Book List and the American Library Association’s Challenged Book List.
At first glance, the ABA’s Banned Book List is depressing, and after a few moments contemplation, horrifying. The perennial favorite of the closed-minded, To Kill A Mockingbird stands at number one on this proverbial hit list. It was required reading for me at some point in my high school career, and re-emerged in some dorm mates’ freshman literature courses when I attended college. My roommate that year was left with another on the list as required reading, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, in keeping with the conservative nature of our college, a small Catholic institution. Fahrenheit 451 was also left for consumption in those venerated halls of learning, albeit in its cinematic form. Two of my favorites for the students I tutored at that time, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Brave New World found homes on this onerous list.
I probably should have neglected looking up the ALA’s Challenged Book List after the shock of the Banned List, but I gulped and grasped at a bit of courage as I clicked my way to the page. Laughter suffocated the tears, as I scrolled down, determined to take the list in from 100 down to one, but I couldn’t help but catch a few familiar titles and authors along the way. I must have a truly wretched fate in front of me, for as I scrolled back up through, the list was reading more like a journal of what I had read, instead of tomes I would have avoided. The Headless Cupid was the first to truly catch my eye, as I vaguely remember a worn line art dust sleeve protected with cellophane sitting on the shelf of our town’s library. I read it, but couldn’t tell anyone a thing about the book to save my life, so it must have left a truly horrible impression on my psyche.
There were the obligatory entries screaming in protest to such august authors as Howard Stern and Madonna, two whose works no one could pay me enough to read. Stephen King, R.L. Stine, and Alvin Schwartz got the nod for their works on the things that go bump in the night. I wonder if J.K. Rowling was objectionable for her content, or for the increasing lengths of her novels, previously credited with a rash of pre-pubescent migraines. Madeleine L’Engle wasn’t appreciated for her slight run into science fiction with A Wrinkle In Time, but at least only the first story was found inappropriate, leaving the rest of her series unscathed. Authors, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, William Golding, J.D. Salinger, and John Steinbeck, are still annoying those who find it necessary to decide what others should read. Vonnegut was only “slaughtered” once, in spite of the fact that the same spirit seems to pervade all his works, leaving one to wonder if it was merely the title that left him with the axe.
Two that greatly disturbed me were Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein, as that must be definitive proof that I am a horrible mother, allowing my children to read those works. I suppose I should retire A Light in the Attic from the bedtime reading list in our house. My one question is, since James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl is an unacceptable read, does that mean I should also remove the videotape from the shelf where I keep the kids’ movies? I guess I have to find a new “coming of age” book for my daughter, since the one I used doesn’t fit well anymore: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume.
Up until now, I had no great aspirations as a writer, given the fact that the majority of my energy has been devoted to editing these days. These two lists have given me a kind of inspirational lift, something that the individuals responsible for them probably did not wish for, or intend. I think just about everyone in the publishing industry, regardless of job description, has at least one or two back burner ideas that could become written word given the time and inclination. My own would undoubtedly ruffle the feathers of the ones who created these lists in the first place, and I think I owe it to my children to pursue those projects instead of allowing them to gather dust and cobwebs in the back of my mind. “We the people” is slowly becoming an arcane concept, buried under tons of pages of bureaucratic nonsense that chips away the very cornerstone of this country.
I believe now more than ever, it is the responsibility of writers to keep that spirit alive, by flying in the face of any who wish to curtail the freedoms this country was built to protect. We the writers need to place a spotlight on the great hypocrisy of spreading democracy and freedom around the world while stifling it at home. I have read many of the objectionable tomes I saw on those lists, and will undoubtedly read more of them on principle. I will share these books with my children as they grow older, and will tell them about the people who want to see certain books disappear from public view. Most importantly, I will teach my children to be open-minded, and protective of the rights of others to speak their minds, even when my children don’t agree. Those lists are about people trying to make everyone agree with their beliefs, forcibly, by silencing the most dangerous weapon of a free nation -- the written word.
The bookselling industry and libraries of America devote one week to awareness about book banning, but this is a year-round concern. Please visit the following sites, to see what you can do to stop censorship, and encourage legislation that fosters free speech and press.
American Library Association
American Booksellers Association
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Copyright 2004, Elizabeth Ross
Elizabeth Ross is a 32-year-old mother of four, freelance writer and editor from Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Imperfect Parent, MomsVoice, and is slated to appear in Momentum, the magazine of the National Catholic Educational Association. She is the publisher of River Walk Journal, a bi-monthly online literary journal which is an expansion of her online editing group.
It Could Be Worse
It’s morning again. At least I think so. Yes, the drapes are glowing from the morning sun. I think it’s Saturday, but maybe that was yesterday, or is tomorrow. No matter. It’s time to get up. I think I didn’t wear that outfit hanging over the chair yesterday. It looks clean. Did I put it out last night, or leave it there after dressing for bed? It’s cold, so as long as it keeps me warm, it will do.The radio isn’t on yet. I’m dressed, in the kitchen, but no radio. Better turn it on. They’re talking again about something. Just like yesterday. Get some cornflakes and milk. Where’s the coffee? The cup isn’t brewed. Press the button, and notice the pills on the countertop. They’re in the wrong compartment, the one with a “W” for Wednesday. It’s Saturday, right. Yes, I have to get ready to go to church this afternoon.
She should be here. Where is my daughter? Better call. Why was my sister at my daughter’s house, or why did I call my granddaughter by my sister’s name? The kids should have been there, not with their awful father. Little Ryan (or is it Allen) got on the phone today. What did he say? Probably nothing, even though they keep insisting he is learning to talk better.
The TV isn’t on either, and the radio is too loud. I couldn’t hear the TV even if it was on. Turn off the radio; turn on the TV. They’re at it again. Always so much sex and violence, I can’t remember when the soaps were actually clean. Doorbell’s ringing, and the lock’s coming undone. She’s here.
I remind her it’s Saturday, and I have to get ready for church, but she insists it’s Wednesday. Didn’t they say Wednesday on the radio? Could be Wednesday. There aren’t any soaps on TV on Saturday. I’ll just sit here and be quiet. Better to not let her know I don’t remember.
I don’t know completely what a typical day was for my grandmother in the months before she died. What I’ve shown here is just a theory. The level of frustration, confusion, and depression she must have been going through is beyond the realm of my personal experience and truthful understanding.
I learned at an early age to despise doctors and the like who would claim to know they understood what it was like to be in the situations their patients faced. Understanding comes from experience, not observation or learning. I prefer to think that I empathized with my grandmother; I would grasp at every little opportunity I had to have coherent interaction with her.
Beyond that, I know that what I did see of her situation made me terrified. I always knew her to be intelligent, and capable of caring for herself, and anyone else who came along. To see her mind slip away, with the gnawing sense at the back of my mind that the same could happen to me one day, was horrific, and depressing. But it has taught me a very important lesson. The cliché, “things could always be worse” is one of the most accurate adages I can remember.
I have no wish to belittle anyone whose depression is not only created by the environment they live in, but also has underlying chemical causes. I have no wish to belittle anyone at all. I do implore any who read this to sincerely take stock of their own lifestyle, and try to find the good within it.
There is always someone out there who is worse off, and if nothing else, that is one reason to shed some part of one’s own depression. My grandmother could not do that, as her mind slipped away, so now her memory is a reminder to me that I should take nothing for granted, and that I should not forget that even with my troubles I should cling to whatever makes me the slightest bit lighthearted.
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Copyright 2004, Elizabeth Ross
Elizabeth Ross is a 32-year-old mother of four, freelance writer and editor from Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Imperfect Parent, MomsVoice, and is slated to appear in Momentum, the magazine of the National Catholic Educational Association. She is the publisher of River Walk Journal, a bi-monthly online literary journal which is an expansion of her online editing group.
Surveyville
It is the 25th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ World Series victory this year, and that has made games at PNC Park an adventure. The prelude to the last game I attended was an autograph session with several of the players from the 1979 team. Unfortunately we arrived too late to manage getting any signatures, but we were just in time to wait in line for almost an hour.The queues were a little animated, since there were individuals asking if everyone had entered a contest for an H2 Hummer, and if we all were registered voters. It was marginally annoying that the salespeople with the contest entries were asking about every five minutes, but the more detestable individuals floating around the ballpark entry gates did not assault the lines.
I only heard them in passing as I made my way into the park, the pollsters asking about the ticket situation at the park. In 2006 the All-Star Game will be hosted by Pittsburgh, so now the Pirates’ organization is attempting to find out what restrictions they will be able to get away with imposing on Pittsburghers who wish to acquire tickets for that event. Our ballpark is relatively small for such an event, seating fewer than 40,000 fans, so this situation is inevitable. The pollsters were apparently asking how many tickets fans would be willing to purchase in the 2005 season to guarantee the ability to purchase tickets to the All Star Game. This survey’s existence in the first place is disheartening to me, since the implication is that there will have to be a certain degree of favoritism involved in the distribution of tickets in 2006, leaving season ticket holders from the 2005 season with the advantage. This will undoubtedly lead to some debate in our own household, since we would like to at least attend the Homerun Derby.
One survey was not enough for this day, and on the political end, beyond the voting registration drive, there was a survey with a petition going around about the recent garbage issue in Pittsburgh. On its face this undoubtedly would seem rather petty, especially to anyone outside of the viewing area of any of the Pittsburgh television stations. For the benefit of those who do not know, the city is in severe financial straits, bordering on bankruptcy. There have been cuts in the police force, talk of closing fire stations in the city, closures of public pools and recreation areas, and school closures. In the midst of all of this, there is now a garbage code enforcement team that is responsible for taking pictures of people’s garbage, searching for evidence of non-compliance with the recycling rules. I don’t claim to be green-unfriendly, but given the current situation, I think that there are more important issues than this. The loss of members of the police force has left the city with some minor jumps in violent crime; at least it appears that way since we are lucky if we make it through an entire week without at least two shootings or stabbings in the city. As annoying as the surveys can be, I can’t complain about one that addresses the quixotic priorities of the city’s officials.
Then there was a very small contingent of citizens asking the public about the current issue of most relevance to ballgame attendees: scalpers. Recently we have been hit with a run of rather nasty characters trying to buy and sell tickets to games, some of which have been accused of harassing fans, and others of selling counterfeit tickets. It is like running a gauntlet to reach the park, since these scalpers populate the Roberto Clemente Bridge, and accost just about every person crossing to reach the ballpark. There is a kind of sigh of relief as the fans reach the shadow of the ballpark, since these ticket-sellers cannot get too close to the park without getting arrested. This tiny survey was extremely limited, and held very close to the entry gates, in the safe zone beyond the scalpers’ territory. Those brave souls had to stay out of earshot of any of the people they were asking about, and hope that none of the fans went and told the ticket-sellers on the bridge what they were doing.
Finally, although it wasn’t a survey, there was also a small group of people at the stadium that seems to find a purpose at every venue in the city. These people were handing out cheaply printed black and white photos of the team members, proclaiming these the “labor-friendly” baseball cards. “No sweatshops were used to print these!” was their cry. If it had been the circus, they would have been handing out flyers about animal cruelty. I wonder what their cause will be in football and hockey season.
Freedom is a wonderful thing, and I encourage everyone around me to embrace it. The result of that can end up being annoying, especially when one is rushing through throngs of people to make it to the entry gates of a ballpark, and reach one’s seat before the singing of the National Anthem. But in the greater scheme of things, having to sprint up a couple flights of stairs because I’ve been detained a little by others trying to make their voices heard is fine with me.
Maybe I’ll try my hand sometime, and try to get the area outside the ballpark named “Surveyville”.
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Copyright 2004, Elizabeth Ross
Elizabeth Ross is a 32-year-old mother of four, freelance writer and editor from Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Imperfect Parent, MomsVoice, and is slated to appear in Momentum, the magazine of the National Catholic Educational Association. She is the publisher of River Walk Journal, a bi-monthly online literary journal which is an expansion of her online editing group.
Activist Heart: Anne Feeney
Being American these days while conversing with the world via this wonderful electronic web can be a somewhat depressing concept. It is becoming more common for individuals of other nations to look at us with disdain for the actions of our government overseas, and even in our own backyard. I continually fall back on the statement that the people do not always agree with what our government does, but that often falls on deaf ears, since our media doesn’t give the spotlight to those in dissent as it did during the Vietnam conflict. I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to interview one of those individuals that the media doesn’t cover often, Anne Feeney, an activist and singer/songwriter from Pennsylvania.
I asked Anne about the nature of today’s activists versus those of the Vietnam Era. Feeney stated:
“I would say that today's activists are more savvy and more dedicated, and quite possibly more numerous. The overwhelming majority of protesters in the 60's were pretty naive -- and I was certainly one of them – believing that if we could just stop the war and enforce Civil Rights laws that we would have a just society. There was a smaller utopian group who wanted to remake society in a non-capitalist model, and, just as the right-wingers suggested, we were 'infiltrated' by a few outspoken Marxists, but most of us were too young to spend a lot of time on theory, and operated on a very visceral sense of peace and justice. The huge difference between then and now was the way we were treated.”
She continues, “At the risk of seeming cynical, in retrospect I think it may have been because we were a key demographic group with a relatively huge disposable income. Today's activists seem to be much more analytical ... they ‘have’ connected the dots ... corporate globalization, developing world suffering, World Bank 'restructuring' and homeland security all benefit the same small group. The reason I think today's activists seem to be less visible is because major media is not going to create a 'summer of love' and make media darlings out of a group that essentially buys ‘nothing’.”
Known for her anthem, Have You Been To Jail For Justice, Feeney is the personification of the artist in action. She sings of the plight of the working man, woman, and peace-loving Americans, standing firmly on her convictions, including risking arrest for her beliefs.
“The first time I was arrested was at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach in 1972. I was with a group of Zippies (the successors-in-interest to the Yippies) outside the convention center. We were verbally harassing delegates as they entered. Miami/Dade police told us we had 15 minutes to disperse or we would all be arrested. They immediately encircled us and arrested us all. Up until that moment, I believed the police would not give a 15-minute warning and not honor that. We were rounded up into paddy wagons and taken to the Dade County lockup. I was released later that evening on my own recognizance and panhandled the bail for the 11 other Pittsburgh folks who had traveled there with me. All the Miami charges were eventually dismissed. We were just locked up so that the delegates could come and go without seeing us.
The next time I was arrested was in 1994 at the Staley strike in Decatur, IL. In the meantime I had received a lot of training in non-violent resistance and civil disobedience, and had been to hundreds of demonstrations. I had been support for other groups doing CD. Since I usually had my PA and guitar at these kinds of actions I was never a likely candidate for arrest... I had too many other responsibilities. That day in Decatur I was just so fed up that I handed my guitar to some Teamsters and just went and laid down in an intersection. That struggle was very frustrating, and ended badly.”
In spite of these negative experiences with authority figures during her years of participation in protests, Feeney still looks forward with hope for a peaceful future.
“I was shocked the first time I witnessed lies and violence from the police. But the more I read about our past the more I understand that it's actually a fixture of US History. Over a lifetime of activism I've seen the scenario re-enacted so many times that I now take it as a given that effective expression of our constitutional rights will be met by brute force and martial law. The "Miami model" promulgated during the FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas] in November of 2003 took this military response to new levels of repression. The scenes from Abu Grhaib are logical extensions of the dehumanizing of 'the enemy’ that has been going on since September 11, 2001. Thanks to this digital age ordinary people cannot escape witnessing this brutality, and they don't have to look hard to find evidence of the resistance. The two superpowers in the world today are the US, and world opinion.
The US is adding notches to its belt temporarily, but the world's opinion of us is plummeting. People are increasingly sickened by this violence and searching for a better way. I'm convinced that these vicious displays of violence against non-violent resistance are what make empires collapse.”
Besides being an activist, Feeney is also a mother who considers it her responsibility to hand down her own values to her children.
“I have always believed that civil disobedience and other acts of non-violent resistance are powerful and important tactics, and taught that to my children.” Her daughter, Amy, who recently traveled and performed with Feeney, has definitely learned this message. “My daughter and her friend Llewellyn Gannon came to DC from Portland to sing with me at the March for Women's Lives. We enjoy singing together, but seldom perform together in front of audiences. That was definitely a mother/daughter type occasion, and I was thrilled to be able to provide an opportunity like that for Amy and Llewellyn.”
Anne Feeney exemplifies the ideal of womanhood, clearly stating her views and purpose in all she does. In her words
“I'm a feminist environmentalist anti-racist peacenik socialist anarchist advocate for working people. I've always worked hard for the full panoply of women's rights... I think controlling our fertility is the bottom line, but access to health care, freedom from violence, respect, pay equity, equal opportunity... there's no issue I avoid.”
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For more information go to annefeeney.com
Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
Elizabeth Ross is a 32-year-old mother of four, freelance writer and editor from Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Imperfect Parent, MomsVoice, and is slated to appear in Momentum, the magazine of the National Catholic Educational Association. She is the publisher of River Walk Journal, a bi-monthly online literary journal which is an expansion of her online editing group.
Multi-Level Mothering
I watched my own mother do this for almost as long as I can remember, and I believe it must happen to just about every woman at some point or another in her life. Of course I was in a sort of denial about my personal aging, especially since there are still many around me who keep claiming I am still young. Apparently it is only obvious to those select few, since now I’m expected to mother in multiple directions, just as my own mother has.It is a transition, when the mothering moves from just towards the next generation to the previous ones as well. Thankfully, my mother is not completely incapacitated or anything, and what is expected of me is relatively minimal at the moment. But the fact remains that I find myself giving motherly counsel to my own mother. Sometimes it is not-so-friendly reminders about silly little things, like paying bills on time, when I happen to catch a bill-collector’s phone call. Other times it is the little reality check I give her about the impending hazard of her brother putting their mother in a nursing home. My role of daughter is slowly shifting to a more maternal role.
In my better moments, I try to write this off to just my mother still having trouble adjusting to my father’s death, but as the time passes by, I realize that this is probably wishful thinking on my part. The fact is that my mother is not as young as she used to be, and the fact that she is the primary caregiver of my grandmother is slowly aging her before her time. The family joke is that my grandmother will outlive us all, basically by wearing the rest of us out in the process of caring for her. Cynical in the best light, and probably a little downright nasty to think such a thing, but I’ve learned that there is no use in building guilt over it. I would just add to the veracity of the statement, making myself ill from self-loathing.
So here I am, barely in my thirties, knowing I’ll soon have to call that mid-thirties, and biding time until I have to really start taking care of my mother in the same way she takes care of hers. My mother is a Baby Boomer, and now I’m starting to truly see the impact that her generation is going to have on all of us. This is not to say that we should be angry or anything; it is just a statement of reality, that many of my friends will be in the same situation as I will, and a great deal of our time and money will be devoted to the care and upkeep of our parents. Forget the debates about whether or not Social Security will be there by the time our generation retires, it won’t. No bitterness involved in that comment, since I’ve been a long advocate of personal savings over dependence on state funding.
It’s a transitional point, between still being my mother’s child, and needing to care for her more than I already do. I look at my children, and hope I don’t end up causing any of them to do this, remaining completely capable to the last of my days. It wouldn’t surprise me if my mother had similar thoughts when she was my age, looking at her own grandmother’s failing health.
So it’s my turn to start caring for multiple generations at once, as that is what I was taught to do from the beginning. I know as a part of my role, I will be making myself well-versed in the world of AARP, MediCare, a myriad of prescription drugs, paid in-home caregivers, and personal-care homes. My bookshelves will have tomes on geriatrics sitting next to the pediatric volumes.
In the end, it’s all a cycle, full of experiences and changes.
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Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
Elizabeth Ross is a 32-year-old mother of four, freelance writer and editor from Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Imperfect Parent, MomsVoice, and is slated to appear in Momentum, the magazine of the National Catholic Educational Association. She is the publisher of River Walk Journal, a bi-monthly online literary journal which is an expansion of her online editing group.
Into the Mystic
It was a typical Saturday night, 1986, in the autumn. I hated carrying the boxes of 45’s, but I loved being out. The bar was one of the early memories I had of childhood, something that most children today wouldn’t be claiming in adulthood.It’s not that my parents weren’t good. My dad was a member of the local American Legion Post for years, and had a regular “gig” to DJ oldies dances on Saturday nights. I’d learned how to work the equipment, wire it up, and cue music, using the mixer like a seasoned veteran. He and my mother played those records into the wee hours of the morning, and they had started letting me come with them to help while they took breaks.
Dad and I would set up the equipment on the pool table that was covered with plywood for the evening. He’d drop the cords to the ground, and I would plug them in, since I was small enough to crawl under the table easily. My mother would go through the records, making sure they didn’t forget any that had been requested during the last dance, and she would talk to the guests about what music was available for the night. Before long, we were doing sound checks, and then dad would cue up the first song of the night. Some guests would always leaf through the piles of records in the tomato crates, and mother would make sure they didn’t get them out of order. When the requests would come in, I would cue up the records on whichever turntable wasn’t running.
Before long my parents would start circulating in the crowd, and I would keep up with the pile of records, masterfully fading from one selection to the next. I was just 14 years old then, but I knew all about the Doo Wop era music: The Platters, The Flamingos, The Drifters. Of course I had my own favorites, many were current to the time, but mostly they came from a time shortly before my own birth. Van Morrison was one that I particularly liked, even though my father kept insisting that his music wasn’t real, since it came after the Beatles. My mother didn’t really understand why I liked the music, but occasionally would show slight support for my preferences, since she didn’t immediately insist that I turn off the “noise”.
Mother liked the Motown sound, Diana Ross and the Supremes in particular. Dad tolerated it at times, and actually bought a few records of it, supposedly for my mother, but I think he also realized that he had to have those songs for the dances. People regularly requested them. I was one of the few people who even knew that my mother had different tastes in music from my dad. She typically acted like she absolutely loved all the music he played at the dances, so the guests there never knew what she really listened to in her headphones. For as long as I can remember she always had a radio or tape deck with her. In the seventies they had those little earphones that looked like hearing aids, and it progressed to the Walkman in the eighties.
When my dad was at work or asleep in bed, my mother would make cassette tapes of “her music”, so that she could play them through headphones. She made friends with oldies DJ’s on the radio, won prizes from them regularly in contests, and often went to visit them when they would go out in public for remote broadcasts. Mother was typically a quiet and meek sort of person, but when dealing with these radio personalities, she seemed to glow, and I saw a glimpse of the outgoing person she could have easily become. Through those friendships, and a few my dad had made over the years, I ended up being dragged all over the Pittsburgh area to meet various DJ’s, musicians, and managers.
After a couple hours at the dance, my mother would announce that she was leaving. I knew that she hoped I would go with her, but this was always the one evening I could get away with staying up late, and she knew I really couldn’t go, because dad would need help tearing everything down again. Dad would look at me, and ask if I wanted to leave. He knew I would stay, actually hoped I would, but we had this little ritual, just to show my mother that the idea wasn’t being ignored.
After she’d leave, Dad would leave me to keep the records going again, so that he could talk with his friends. I never complained about it, since I liked running the equipment anyway. Still, I’d sit behind the pool table, playing records I didn’t really like very much. I had my own Walkman, and I’d listen to “Into the Mystic”, just loud enough to hear it over the other music, so that I could fade to the next tune.
Before long, one of the guests would come up and say I was just like my mother, listening to other music, while playing the records for the dance.
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Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
Popularity vs. Self-Assurance
I didn’t seriously ponder the concept of trying to find a place in my community until my youngest child was born. The statement had already been made to me several times that I should “at least try to fit in for the sake of my kids”. It wasn’t actually the birth of my son that made me pause; so much as it was his father.This man holds a solid place in the community, more so because of his family’s long-standing existence in the area than anything else. They boast having buried relatives in the town cemetery since Revolutionary War times, whereas my own relations from that era were planted in either Scotland or Germany. Our community is strongly based by the families who have called it home for generations, and in spite of various objections to the contrary, this definitely sets an atmosphere of intolerance for supposed outsiders.
My father moved our own family here about a year before I was born, and that left me as a first generation child in the town, just second or third in the U.S., depending on which side one counted generations. I can try to blame the relative ostracism I have endured over the years purely on this, but that would be unfair. I know that my family has always held an attitude that doesn’t quite meld with those of the long-standing members of the community. We are who we are, and do not cater to anachronistic caste-style sensibilities.
So I know my outsider status started even before I was born. Of course my own life choices didn’t help in the situation. An unmarried, albeit committed, mother in what my grandmother would call a “lace curtain” neighborhood doesn’t sit very well. I’ve often seen other single mothers fit into the social strata better, even if they have rather promiscuous dating habits. I’m not rewarded for my fidelity, as it doesn’t fit the social norm. Thankfully the man I am with encourages this arrangement, and we are both pleased with the concept of being able to separate from each other most evenings, spending our nights under our own respective roofs.
The community’s view of my eccentricity is increased because my profession is something that is altogether intangible to them. It is beyond my neighbors’ comprehension that someone would devote hours upon hours to labors that do not reap immediate financial returns. I know that I am taking a convoluted route to my goals, even by standards within the literary world, so I cannot expect understanding from those outside of it.
Acceptance from most of the people around me has never been an important goal for me, and I must thank my parents for teaching me that self-assurance is much more valuable than popularity. The more pious level of this was the disdain my family has always shown for vanity.
For now, my older children are considered outsiders in the neighborhood, not because of me, but because of the small amount of time that they spend here. There is nothing that I can do about that, and they are
learning that it is best to make due with what one has.
My youngest son is still rather young, and his interaction in the neighborhood is very limited. That will change soon enough, and perhaps he will be able to take advantage of an oddity I have started to notice. Where the adults in the neighborhood aren’t very accepting of the people who live in my home, the children have a certain fascination with us. It reminds me of the way the kids in the neighborhood when I was growing up used to look at my own father. He was simultaneously frightening and fascinating to the kids, with his shocking white hair, and his habits of either sitting on the porch watching everything or tending his huge tomato gardens in the backyard.
Now the kids look with curiosity at me, sitting on the porch with books and notebooks, busily reading and writing. Perhaps they are wondering what an adult is doing studying all the time. In the end, I think that parents, mothers especially, often consider compromising in life, presumably because they feel that this is the best thing that they can do for their kids. Perhaps this could be true in the short-term, but I think that standing firmly on one’s principles says volumes more to our children than those little concessions.
To me, mothering is not a popularity contest, but an endless multiple-choice test. My decisions are usually my best guess of what the right thing to do is, and I don’t take the community cliques into consideration. This world changes far too fast to justify trying to teach my children how to fit in a particular social group. A group may just dissolve by the time my children become adults and could really use those lessons. The best lesson I can teach them is to believe in themselves, in spite of everything else in the world. That will take them as far as they wish to go.
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Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
'To Assume" -- The Eighth Deadly Sin
When I left my ex-husband, I had assumed that he was being honest to me. This was a silly assumption in retrospect, as part of the reason I had left him was his infidelity. From that first day to the present, he has made me regret that assumption time and again. The most important deception in all of this was his statement that he would never try to take our children away from me. It was under a month before that statement was broken.For about three years we battled back and forth over custody, and all I kept feeling was a general loss of control over the situation, and over my role as a parent. He and I had not agreed on parenting styles; he is very laissez-faire, and I am much more strict. I also am not the warmest person on the planet, and definitely do not tend to be warm with strangers. During the repeated in-home interviews by officers of the court, I was consistently characterized as “distant”. These individuals did not seem to understand when I stated that their presence in my home did not put me at ease. I made another deadly assumption when I thought that they would use a little common sense, and figure that I was a bit cold not because of the kids, but because of them.
During all of this I had a weekly ritual the first day or two when the kids would come back to my house, re-training them to act like well-behaved little citizens as opposed to the overactive destructive little creatures they mysteriously turned into each time they spent time with their father. I know there are plenty of experts out there who would write this off to “transition issues”, but I also knew that my ex-husband was never very concerned about keeping the kids from running wild through the house when we were married.
There was no reason to think he would start.
In the end, after a great deal of “he-said/she-said” turmoil, it was decided that my ex-husband should have the kids primarily, and I should only have visitation. Initially the blow of this decision was like a freight train, leaving me crushed on the ground. My mother and my grandmother didn’t help at all in this, and at one point they began to act as though I was a bad mother.
I almost believed them, until I took a very long and hard look at my youngest son, something that no one involved in making reports to the court in the custody battle had bothered doing. This child lacked the mean-spiritedness that had settled on his half-siblings. At two-years-old, he seemed to have a better command of speaking than my four-year-old, albeit with a more limited vocabulary. The words from his little mouth were much easier for me, and others to comprehend. I started to see in him what I had wished for my other children, and all I wanted to do was scream at those lawyers and social workers that they had not seen the difference that good and loving parents could make for a child.
My older children were constantly caught in the middle between my ex-husband and I, even before the divorce. The damage that this has done is clearly evident from the differences that anyone can see between them and their youngest sibling. I know now that I started to separate myself emotionally from the children from my marriage shortly after the custody battle began. The only explanation I can find for this was that I fell into some sort of defense mechanism, protecting myself from further abuse by my ex-husband through distancing myself from everything to do with him.
At first I felt guilty for this, but as time went on I noticed something. I was no longer as stressed out as I had been. It was liberating in a sense, to not bear the burden of responsibility, not only for my own actions as a parent, but also for my ex-husband’s behavior. I still try to instill values and an abiding respect for authority in my older children, but now I am not looking at it as an uphill battle that must be won.
There may never be a legitimate answer given to me about why the people who were involved in the mediations between my ex-husband and I so obviously disapproved of me as a parent, but I know now that I do not need their validation either. They didn’t see my coldness for what it was: a choice that allowed me to let cooler heads prevail. I had already learned that if I allowed too much emotion in my interaction with my children, it often degenerated to anger and frustration. I’ve taken the path of logic over emotion in parenting, especially in respect to my older children.
Their father is attempting to start life over, and remarry. I know that sooner or later he may begin to cast his second-wife as a quasi-replacement for me. That is something that I cannot control. What I can do is remain, as I am, a constant and stabilizing force that my children can rely on. The one thing I cannot do is engage in what I consider the eighth deadly sin — assuming.
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Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
Finding the Center of the Circle
For quite some time now, I have been attaching a little piece of Eastern Philosophy to each of my emails in my signature file. The quote is a touchstone of sorts for me, because it is something that I have continually found very difficult to achieve. I have had my particularly enlightened moments when its spirit has descended upon me with a grace that undoubtedly showed through to any who saw me. But those moments were unfortunately fleeting.The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.
(Lao-Tzu, “Tao-te-Ching”)
I found those words while meandering through the pages of Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and the words immediately struck a chord somewhere deep inside of me. Perhaps it was the fact that the quote pointed out that a female could be considered a Master, or perhaps it was that it did not suggest that the world was something to be controlled, but merely observed. Regardless of why it had such an effect on me, the goal that it placed in my spirit has followed me since.
As a single mother, the feeling that I can’t control many of the occurrences in my life is probably a little more profound than in mothers who are married. There is a grounding force for those women, beyond just their children, and that stability, even in the less than perfect marriage, is more than what I can boast having. I think sometimes that instead of the stability of a husband, I actually have a ball of chaos, a maelstrom in a bottle sitting in the form of the father of my youngest child, the only man who I can even come close to saying could be a stable part of my life.
Like many lessons that people can easily take for granted, I have repeatedly forgotten that it is not my place in this world to determine what that man should be. I can choose how much weight I give to his existence in my own world, but that is all. Until very recently, I had continually looked on him not as he is, but as I hoped he would be. That illusion is the exact opposite of that quote I had adopted, and I refused to see my own folly. I have been trying now to keep my vision of him clear, and to carefully determine how much I can allow him to tip the scales in my life before they are thrown completely off balance.
In these observations, I have seen myself working very diligently to fit myself into an outline that he has predetermined for me. I do not resent him for this, as it is the nature of humanity, the inevitable determination of a person’s role in another’s life that occurs within the first hours or days of a relationship. My own expectations of him were inaccurate at best, as I saw him through the hyperopic view of emotion, refusing to see what was right in front of me; preferring the far-off fantasies of the future.
Now I am slowly moving away from trying to change myself only to please him, analyzing each of the shortcomings he perceives and determining whether or not I agree with his assessment.
On the other end of the spectrum, I have my mother who doesn’t comment very much about what she thinks of me, mostly because my being a writer is somewhat foreign to her. I do know that she has some very strong opinions about my role as the mother of her grandchildren. My father and I had been the center of her world as I was growing up, and even up until his death a few years ago. Now she is having difficulty getting back into the world of people, since she spent most of her life caring for family. Also she had never truthfully tried to build up her own self-esteem, and she is paying dearly for that now.
Being a good mother does not have to mean surrendering oneself to the task of care giving for decades. If a mother doesn’t build a life for herself outside of the family, she is not only short-changing herself, but also her children. I came dangerously close to isolating myself the way my mother had, and I know now that the reason was because I had learned to from her.
The gentleman in my life and my mother have prompted me to do a great deal of meditation, and I have unearthed many unsavory aspects of myself so far. The selfish nature of this must remain as the driving force, as I know I should never do anything to cause change in myself purely for the satisfaction of anyone else. I think this portion of self-enlightenment is often glossed over by authors of spiritual texts, as they are trying to balance the need for self-improvement with the need to please some unseen force, whether it is God, Buddha, or some other universal power that is the source of all existence.
Many mental health professionals have said over the years that we must love ourselves before we can love anyone else, and I think this is also true of faith. Without faith in oneself, there cannot be a healthy faith in anything or anyone else. Understanding this concept would definitely aid theologians in showing people ways to embrace faith without feeling guilt for a healthy amount of self-centeredness. As children we were taught that being selfish was wrong, mostly for the purpose of encouraging us to share with friends and siblings. If we learned this lesson well then, as adults we have to relearn how to be selfish enough to avoid unhealthy relationships.
This is a very simplistic way of stating a problem with interpersonal relationships today, but I have found for myself that moving beyond negative relationships is much easier for me by viewing the process this way. I learned the lesson to be unselfish very well, and the first concept that I’ve kept in the front of my mind when dealing with anyone is that I am not responsible for making anyone happy except myself. On the other side of this, no one else is responsible for making me happy, and I must find my own balance with this life.
It is odd that I have found such spiritual means to achieving what I need to in this world, as I have for quite some time now considered myself a confirmed agnostic. When asked, I usually reply that I am not arrogant enough to give a name to a supreme being that created the universe, so therefore I do not follow any specific faith. I know this does not sit well with my mother, as she raised me to be Catholic, but I am not here to please her. One day she may reconcile herself with what I have come to believe in — that no one faith is right or wrong, and that as long as the basic premise behind a religion is to live life well, without intentionally harming others, no person should condemn another for following it. I believe there is something out there, but I also believe that I am not meant to understand whatever it is completely.
This belief in a higher being carries over to my beliefs about people as well, and I firmly believe that I am not meant to completely know any other person, no one is meant to know me entirely either. Milan Kundera poignantly illustrated this in a novel I had first read many years ago, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera’s story was of love and loss, sudden death looming in the distance for a couple, which occurred when they finally knew everything about each other. With nothing more to learn, there was no point to life for them, and I believe that is true for all of us, as we spend our entire lives in search of knowledge in one way or another.
Somewhere lost in the hodgepodge of ideas and theories I have seen over the years, there is the key to reaching what Lao Tzu was speaking of in that verse, and I have placed my faith in the hope of finding it one day. I know it will be a hard and confusing road, but anything wondrous has its obstacles to overcome before reaching it. For now I will be content with trying to see those closest to me without the haze of illusions surrounding them, and trying to see myself through their eyes as part of my personal self-evaluations. It is a small circle for me to sit in the center of for the moment, but I see it as a pebble dropping in a pond, the circles expanding into my future.
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Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
New Years Revolutions
About four years ago, my daughter asked me, “Why do people make ‘revolutions’?” It is funny that I remember the question, but still cannot remember what I said to calm my daughter’s curiosity. At that time in my life, I would have been lucky to come up with a satisfactory answer to that question for myself, so perhaps it is a good thing that I don’t remember now.
But the memory has sparked something in me now that has been a long time coming. I know I have spent a great deal of time in my life lately in the futile exercise of explaining my choices and myself to others. At best this causes one to engage in rather severe introspection, and at worst it becomes a diatribe of self-doubt and recrimination. For myself it has definitely left me with quite a bit of fodder for the “revolution” list.
Now that I have the “what to do” list for this little tradition, I am still left with finding that elusive answer for why. I remember the adults during my childhood telling me that these little promises are purely for self-improvement, and should be taken very seriously. It was a difficult message for me to believe, mostly because I knew that the adults who said this were going to joke about abandoning their own by Valentine’s Day. This memory definitely is giving me pause this year, wondering how I should teach my own children about this tradition.
There is no room for halfway with children, and I truly understand that now. We cannot sit down and tell them one thing, and do something else. It is a very simple concept, one that many could take for granted as common sense, but as we consistently see writings telling of the demise of this long-standing institution, perhaps it is not out of place to remind ourselves of what common sense should have taught us.
Calling on the wisdom of Eastern philosophy, I think that instead of some great accomplishment, I will choose something small. Regardless, I also know that I will keep whatever it is to myself, and not tell my children. This is a personal decision, following through with it is a personal journey, and I will encourage my children to do the same, not to hide any failure, but to show them that deciding to improve oneself should not be monitored and judged by others.
Regardless, I know that what I will undoubtedly end up doing in the coming year will confuse my children quite a bit. Without saying exactly what I am going to try to do, I will say that I know it is time for me to stop. A very simplistic statement, and the lack of stating anything specific is not just because of my own desire to keep what I will do to myself. I have spent the past several years constantly running from one issue or another, and just plain running to keep up with life around me.
This problem of keeping pace is universal to mothers everywhere, as there is always something else on the horizon to deal with. Whether it is keeping up with the hurried schedules of our families, or keeping up with the current trends in society, we are always trying to find that greener grass in the hopes of having a respite, only noticing that the next lawn is more vibrant. I am going to stop, and just let the rest of the world keep going, at least for a little while. There is no good to be had for anyone around me if I allow myself to succumb to the illusion of finding an end to this perpetual race to success and happiness.
We’ve learned the lesson well from everything around us that there is always a better way to live; better things to have; better relationships to belong in; and better drugs to cure our ills. For all the chatter, there is still no miracle cream, tonic, or pill that will magically make any of us into what we have allowed others to create as our “perfect selves”.
I know I am no beauty, at least from the standards of what the fashion world throws out into magazines. There is no way that I will ever truly fit in with the people in my community, and I will always be viewed as somewhat eccentric by them. I am moody, sometimes petty, and generally not affectionate, which I know now can all be traced back to my own childhood. There isn’t much to be done about changing the mold on myself now, and the only changes I will ever entertain will be ones that will make me feel better about myself, not please someone around me.
This sounds selfish, but there is a primary truth to this kind of motivation. I know a woman who spends hours each day getting ready to face the world. I can not remember a time when I did not see her with perfect hair, makeup and clothing. She constantly talks about her husband enjoying the fact that she always looks perfect no matter what, and she is one of the most well versed individuals I know on the merits of Zoloft, Prozac, and Valium. Her price for perfection is a chemical cocktail just to get her through each day.
I am still left with answering why we make “revolutions”, but I think that for now, saying that it is for self-improvement alone is enough. The lesson I want to teach my children is that it may seem that the neighbors have the better life, but appearances may be deceiving. Everything in life has a price, and some things are not worth the cost. Happiness can only be found within oneself, not be given by someone else, or by acquiring things. There is no benefit to trying to impress others at the expense of one’s own happiness, and if others don’t see goodness in them, they don’t need those people. Life will give them whatever they put into it, not more, not less, and love is the best thing that they can share with anyone, it is priceless.
Finally, “revolutions” are an opportunity to find ways to increase personal happiness.
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Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ross
Unconventional Family Holiday
All of my childhood memories of the holidays included waking on Christmas morning at the crack of dawn, and running to my parents’ bedroom to wake them so I could go downstairs with them to see what Santa had left for me. This was always a double-header affair for me, since I was born the day after Christmas.My own children won’t have those sorts of memories, at least not of having both mom and dad in the living room with them on Christmas morning. For a long time I carried a great deal of guilt about them not having a traditional family. But I finally realized that having real love is more important, not only to me, but also to them.
Holidays are still melancholy for me, because I am not able to give my children the traditional Christmases my parents gave me. These past couple years my mother and I have both been in about the same situation of not having spouses to share with, since my father died in 2000.
Now I’m just hoping that I can piece together something similar to the holidays I knew in my childhood with the father of my youngest child. The past year has been a very difficult one for us, and one that probably should have caused us to end up much like my ex-husband and I did, fighting over every little detail when we separated and divorced.
I know most of the problems of the past year are my fault, mostly because I kept refusing to speak up when I felt that the relationship was not going well. Learning very ugly things about yourself is very difficult, and talking about them with someone you love is even worse.
I realized that abuse is an addiction, for those who abuse and those who are their prey. In the psychologist-speak they often say “once a perpetrator, always a perpetrator”, but that is only half the equation. Victims stay victims as well, and often bury themselves in new destructive relationships even after they’ve taken the initiative to walk away from them in the past.
When I had been married, I lost myself. I allowed the man I married to teach me that I was worthless, and then allowed myself to strike back at him, further proving his lesson. This is something I can never blame him for. But I can hope that he saw the abusive nature I saw in him, and that he does something for himself to stop it. What I have to work on now is straightening out what has become of the relationship I have with the man I hope to spend the rest of my life with.
I started feeling that the man I am with now really didn’t respect me. It could have turned into the downward spiral my marriage had become, but thankfully I decided to do something before it went too far. Breaking a few rules, I made it clear to this man that I was looking for someone else to be with, even found a possible candidate. I remember my grandmother saying that nothing makes a man realize what he’s got like seeing that he has a good chance of losing it. She was absolutely right. Now we are trying to not take each other for granted.
Another difficulty in all of this is that I decided long ago that I would not marry again. I had a taste of the state involving itself in my private life through my divorce, and I have no desire to leave myself open to that ever again. To me, sleeping single doesn’t necessarily mean being alone. However, it does mean that whatever long-standing relationship I may have with a man would not include vows and marriage certificates. It helps that I have ended up with a “confirmed bachelor”; the most I can ever expect to see in this relationship is cohabitation, which is fine with me.
Christmas is supposed to be a time of new beginnings and hope, and I know this holiday will be the first in many years that I will actually try to embrace those concepts. I hope that I will be able to convince the man I love that this year is the right time for both of us to renew our faith in each other, and take the chance we are being given to create something meaningful between us.
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Copyright 2003 Elizabeth Ross
Motherhood As A Curse
I remember an old college professor of mine saying that, “It is a tumultuous world out there, amongst the purveyors of the written word. Beware of the pitfalls, and hopefully you will not fall into a niche that will leave you destined for mediocrity from sheer lack of material or enthusiasm.”This seemed such an arrogant and cynical comment to a late teenager trying to glean just a speck of brilliance from a literary guru in a tiny world. Now I have no choice but to agree with the old man, and hope that I have the wherewithal to pull myself out of the very thing he warned me about.
I am a mother who writes, or an author who happens to be a mother. Lately I have been wishing that more editors I have been dealing with would agree with the latter as opposed to the former. This is a purely professional preference, not intended to discount the importance of being a mother.
As a freelance writer, whose main occupation outside of writing is being a mother, it is very difficult for me to sell what I have to say to editors because of some anachronistic belief that many of them seem to have about what motherhood is really about.
The first assumption I think many of them make is that I can only be literate on subjects directly dealing with motherhood. Of course, it would be in bad form on my part to try to engage them in a fruitful debate about political or philosophical theories, to prove that I am not unfamiliar with the higher theorists of our time.
This inaccurate view of what mothers are capable of is obviously not limited to just the gatekeepers of the publishing world. It was most disconcerting to me to find that a young man at a public pool who saw me with my youngest son, and then saw me reading a book by Nietzsche, found it necessary to comment that the book seemed a bit too cerebral for a mother. I bit my tongue, and just smiled, even though I had distinct suspicions that he had never read what I had in my hand.
There is no doubt that this attitude is a direct descendent of the image of the full-time mother created by our own mothers, and the first mother of sitcoms, Donna Reed. The end result is a societal complacency that assumes that the life before children disappears, and life is centered only around children for mothers who don’t work outside of their homes.
Now I am expected to write just about my life as a mother, and quirky little advice pieces for mothers who have lives outside of motherhood.
The terrible niche of mediocrity is staring me in the face like a dragon from a fairy tale, poised to burn my brain to a crisp. My only choice is to sharpen my nails and claw my way free of this nonsensical vision the publishing industry and society has of what I am.
I only wonder how many other women writers out there aren’t choosing to fight this manufactured curse, and what great writings our world may never have because of it.
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Copyright 2003 Elizabeth Ross
Holding On
Time has a funny way of changing your perspective on life. I remember clearly when I was a child and heard my grandfather talk of the old days, and promised myself that I would never allow myself to grow so old that I would have to grasp at my past like he did.Now I find myself looking back fondly on my younger years, when I would spend uncounted hours talking with friends. An evening could fly by in a flash; spent sharing cheap wine, short stories read by candlelight, and somewhat heated discussion on philosophy. I was a free spirit then, and there was no need for clocks or watches.
Four children and about a decade later, time is my master. And I am left with strictly watching the clock. Instead of ignoring the clock on my computer while I write, I end up checking it practically every minute. There is always something on the horizon to keep track of; from dinner in the oven to the time to leave for Girl Scout meetings or ball practice.
Regret is a difficult feeling to shake. Oddly enough, most of the people I once spent so much time, sharing my innermost thoughts with, really don't see or understand what unsettles me today. They immediately assume that I feel trapped because of the children. They are right, in a very superficial way. I can't just pick up and leave on a whim. Even deeper is the daily reminder of my own mistakes.
I have four beautiful children with two different men, and I am single. Either I was a magnet for disastrous relationships, or a very crafty creature. One very old friend was perceptive enough to compare me to a black widow spider. Granted the men didn't end up dead, no matter how much I may have wanted them to, but my mentality was about the same. Now my problem is that I just can't seem to detach myself from a man who drags me down.
There must be some obscure genetic disorder in many women that causes them to try to cling to relationships that have just about as many chances for staying afloat as the Titanic. If there is, I must have gotten a double dose of it. I know in my mind what is good for me, but I can't seem to convince the rest of me. The temptation to consult an addiction counselor has been increasing daily, since I can't seem to shake the feeling that I absolutely need someone who does nothing for my feeling of self-worth.
If it isn't addiction, it must be a bizarre combination of masochism and martyrdom. I keep allowing the father of my youngest child pull me into a downward spiral of self-doubt and recrimination. All of this seems to be worth everything to me, simply because my deepest wish is that my children somehow end up with a traditional home life. For all of our hot air and high ideals saying that non-traditional families are quite acceptable, I still can't buy it. And I'm still willing to sell out my self-respect to have the typical family arrangement.
My old friends are still left wondering and I'm left speechless when they ask for explanations. It is far too difficult to admit to people, who had known me as a strongly-independent person, that all I really want now is to be able to lean on one person, and know deep down inside that I can always rely on him. Even more difficult is admitting that I never seem to be able to tell that man exactly what I want.
Perhaps it is not really a loss of my own strength, but a change in definition. So much strength is needed to hold onto something that is falling apart. I keep trying to hold onto a relationship with a man I care about and think could be a good father and husband. It is amazing to see what I am capable of, just for the sake of my children.
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Copyright 2003 Elizabeth Ross
Elizabeth Ross is a 31-year-old mother of four, freelance writer, and editor from Pennsylvania. Her previous experience had been mostly in technical copy editing and technical writing for small foreign software companies seeking to break into English speaking markets. Recently she has been published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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