A Magic Spell

Okay, I'm back to breathing...deeply and calmly...quietly and democratically--oops! strike that last one. I'm breathing in the zone...I am...I am...

Reminds me of an ancient spell I learned when I was a kid. These are magic words and if you say them, first slowly and then quickly, you will be awarded with your heart's desire. Ready?

Oh Wa Ta Goo Sy Am

Got it? Now repeat five times, saying it faster and faster each time.

Get it?????

As I recall, I learned that spell the summer I was twelve, at a sleepaway camp in upperstate New York (aren't all sleepaway camps in upperstate New York?). It was the same summer that all the girls in my tent were trying to find our inner Bridie Murphy by hyperventillating and then immediately holding our breath. We also snuck out of camp and bought baby ducklings which we then set afloat in the man-made lake that functioned as the camp swimming hole. The owners of the camp were not pleased, especially as those ducklings would keep shitting in the lake.

Don't you just wish that I'd flash back to that time and take you with me? The pine trees and the sumacs, the dragonflies and the bullfrogs. Flickering campfires. Faraway thunder.

Instead I give you duck poop in the lake. But that's what I remember. That's always the sort of thing I remember.

Hungry Hill: A Memoir, by Carole O’Malley Gaunt

Hungry Hill: A Memoir, by Carole O’Malley Gaunt. University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Carole O’Malley Gaunt is quite obviously Irish, and center stage of her memoir is her alcoholic father. How much more does one need to know to slot it into the genre of memoirs that detail the ills the Irish child suffers at the hands of his or her drunken parent? Think the McCourts, for one. It seems that her publisher and her publicist are aiming at that audience. Here’s the back flap copy they’ve written to entice readers:

“The author recounts her sad and turbulent story with remarkable clarity, humor, and insight, punctuating the narrative with occasional fictional scenes that allow the adult Carole to comment on her teenage experiences and to probe the impact of her mother’s death and her father’s alcoholism.”

Just makes you want to run right out and buy the book, doesn’t it. If you said, no, then you would be missing something, because the deathly prose in Hungry Hill is confined to the jacket copy. O’Malley Gaunt herself is a talented writer whose way with words and faculty for specific details makes this story of her teenage years come alive as only the best of memoirists have the wherewithal to achieve.

I am not Irish and my parents were merely social drinkers, but I grew up in roughly the same era as O’Malley Gaunt details here, and I can tell you: she’s got it down, right to the penny loafers and the headbands. Time and again, she transported me back to that time and that place. Here’s Carole on a double date:

“…Richie leans over, looks at Gordie, and lifts his eyebrows, a signal if I ever saw one. When Gordie puts thirty cents down for their cokes, Kathy pulls out her wallet from her straw bag while I reach into the pocket of my Bermuda shorts for the exact change. Because Gordie and Richie do not fork money up for our sodas, my neck relaxes a little….Out on the street, a blast of hot air hits us as if the July heat had been waiting for a Friday night meltdown. As we walk up the street, Richie and Gordie talk about cars—engines, headlights, and prices, but I can’t tell one car from another and have only just learned what a tailfin is….In the middle of Newbury Street, while talking about the pits in chrome fenders, Gordie reaches for my hand. It’s not as if he’s going to lift my hand with its short fingernails to his lips and kiss it, after all this is Springfield, not Paree. But still I don’t like it.”

I was on that double date, only mine was in Pittsburgh and we had just come from Gammon’ s and what made me uncomfortable was the boys hooting and hollering at a sign in the butcher’s window: Breasts, 79 cents. But the straw bag, the Bermuda shorts, the endless talk about cars and such that we all listened to with such feigned admiration—she’s nailed it.

But if you’re not looking for a trip down memory lane, there are those other reasons to read this book. It has something to do with the fact that her mother died early and her father was a handsome alcoholic and she was the only girl with six brothers. But at heart, Hungry Hill is really a coming of age story. The specifics of her life are less important than watching her make her way through the landmines that are always waiting for young girls growing up. This is not to minimize the impact that her father’s drinking had on her, but really, it is more important to her now, probably. There is about those fictional scenes with the adult Carole and the parental figure who wronged her a Twelve Step patina that rings false with the intense truthfulness of O’Malley Gaunt’s written memories of the time.

Hungry Hill is, despite the jacket copy, not a “sad and turbulent story.” Far from it. It is a counter to the bloated tales we're getting of the good old days of the Sixties and Seventies, stories of the movers and shakers, as it were, by the movers and shakers of today. This, on the other hand, is just a book about a girl in a time and a place; it’s a window into Growing Up Girl then—and I suspect—now as well. And it captures the era far better than all the retrospectives in the glossy weeklies have done.

Kids: Love Them, But Sometimes Leave Them

There's a conversation going on over at Her Bad Mother that--how can I put this politely--bothers me. It bothers me so much that I can't keep out of it, and since I can't go on forever commenting on her site, I thought I'd bring it over here and see what you all think.

HBM begins the conversation like this:

Here's something that I feel strongly about: the right of parents to take their children pretty much anywhere in the public sphere that they see fit. I also feel strongly that this is a right that carries with it considerable responsibility - as do most rights - but there it is: I believe that if a parent needs or wants to take their children to the theater, to nice hotels, to restaurants that don't use vinyl tablecloths or distribute crayons with their menus, that's their right. Any perceived right by other members of the public to move about in public without exposure to children is just that: perceived. There can be no such right in a liberal human society, because children are members of such societies.

You can read the entire post plus all the comments, mine included, here. The gist of it is that HBM had several unpleasant and/or unhappy experiences when she was with her daughter recently. One was on an airplane when another traveler refused to respond to the toddler and shot her some nasty looks. The other was at breakfast in a fancy restaurant when the hostess evinced some panic, albeit unspoken, at the sight of the small child toddling in. These events, and the feelings they evoked in HBM, led to her post.

Okay? Okay. First of all--my disclaimers: I have spent much time in all sorts of restaurants with all sorts of small children of all ages. These kids were all related to me; I loved them and I loved the fact that they were with me in said restaurant.

However, I feel equally strongly to HBM that parents do NOT have the right to take their children anywhere in the public sphere that they wish. That does not mean I don't like children. It does not mean I don't agree that they profit, as does ultimately our society, by being included in a wide range of activities. What it means is that I don't think they are appropriately included in any and every activity.

Case in point: This past weekend, I was involved in an organization honoring a group of womenat a country club luncheon . One member of the organization wanted to bring her 3 year old. Her mother was coming and this member like the idea of three generations being present. We said no. "That's a terrific idea in a couple of years, when she's five and can sit through an hour of speeches. But right now, she's too young. It would not be fair to the several hundred women who paid quite a bit of money to attend an adult luncheon."

The idea that babies and small children have full and equal access to the public sphere because they are human is--I dunno--based on some social philosophy that doesn't resonate with me. The idea that full grown citizens have no right to enjoy child-free arenas is--I dunno--nuts. What have we come to when the desires of one group, the parents, supersedes that of all others. It's smacks of the Mommy Gestapo.

Okay, that's extremely harsh, but really, Moms: get a grip. The world at large does not begin and end with your child, even if yours does. We can all love children (or not) without wanting to have them around 24/7.

Perhaps this debate and others like it that roil the feminist movement occur when groups of women get polarized around their individual philosophies about children. It's a spectrum of beliefs we have, from the woman who is totally and completely invested in her maternity and her children to the woman who has made the decision not to have children. Getting stuck into one end of a debate, whichever it is, helps neither individuals nor society, and those in the middle get lost in the totalizing shrieks of each end. Not only is reason abandoned in the need to be right, quite frankly, it's not very sisterly.

NaBloPoMo - Day One - The Alphabet

I know you've been staring at that badge on the right ever since I put it up there last week. The marker that I too, along with some 3,000 other bloggers, have vowed to post once a day for the month of November. NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month. Or is it, November Blog Posting Month? I dunno; you'll have to ask Fussy, whose brainchild this is. Whatever, I've committed myself to dribbling on this page daily. And to make it more challenging, I've decided to play a little game with myself. I'm going to follow the alphabet (which I keep typing as alphabetH, as if some superior person named Beth). That is, each day's post will be brought to you by another letter of the alphabet.

When I was a kid, we played a game called, "A My Name is Alice...." Sometimes it was jumping a rope, sometimes bouncing a ball--but the object was to make your way through the alphabet singing the following ditty:

"A my name is Alice
And my husband's name is Albert.
We come from Atlanta,
Where we sell Apples."

It got really hard when you got to X: X my name is Xena and my husband's name is Xerxes....except as young as we were, I don't think our vocabulary ran to Xena's and Xerxes'. More likely we collapsed in a giggling heap at some made-up quasi-syllabic name, like Xerpituitous.

Now I know that you're wondering how this is going to work, considering that there are 30 days in November and 26 letters in the alphabet. My studied solution: there will be four Wild Card days. They will come somewhere along the way, at my discretion and my disposal.

So--what's in it for you? Other than the sheer pleasure, nay, joy of knowing you will have a fresh ByJane to read every single day. I've been thinking about some sort of contest, but I'm not sure what it would be.

Hey! The contest is: you come up with the contest. I give the prizes. This can be a really interactive event, with extremely cooooooool, desirable prizes (not your usual shit). The competition begins now! On your marks.......GO!

Oh, and by the way -- A is, today, for Alphabet...of course.

A Cup Half Full? A Life Half Empty....

Let me introduce you to Love Monkey, or Sturdy Girl as she's now calling herself (for reasons best, I guess, kept to herself.) She is my new BBF, best blog friend. More than that, I want to be her when I grow up. Sturdy Girl is the reason the internet in general and blogging in particular are so fucking fantastic. How else would I know her, if not for our blogs? She knits, she bakes bread, she cans, she writes like a demon and, man, can she say exactly the right thing that I so needed to hear but didn't know it.

She also is one of several people this summer who made me see that, hey, I'm not such a happy-eyed child after all. I used to think, quite proudly I must confess, that I am the eternal optimist. I always think life is going to go my way. I never question whether I'll get the job, the promotion, the whatever. My mother brought me up with a mantra--if you want something, you'll work hard for it and you'll get it. I believed her. And for a long time it was true. Or so I thought. In fact, one of the major bones of contention between D and me is his predilection for seeing failure looming while I allow myself to envision nothing but utter success.

I'm now beginning to question myself, however. Am I really such a perky Pollyanna? Then why the following:

• Sturdy Girl wrote in yesterday's post that she is now

  "very productive in my knitting of late. I am making great strides in the toddler pullover (cardigan) and the socks and working on two scarfs, one classic and one lacy. I am starting to "get the hang of" the yarn shops and I have decided just to pick yarn I like (to make small things like scarves) and in this way learn the way different yarn knits up. I think this in itself is an education in knitting. Besides, I can now understand why knitters have a stash. We love the feeling of security it gives us - all these yarns we have to look forward to knitting."

Whereas I say: I cannot stick with one knitting project long enough to complete it. I bounce from scarf to sweater to purse to fill in the blank. I have Knitting ADD (along with the other kind) and I am riddled with guilt over the projects I have on needles from FUCKING YEARS AGO....THAT NO LONGER EVEN FIT ME!!! And my stash, my stash, my stash! like my bra cup, it overfloweth.

• Item #2: when reminiscing with my BFF1 a couple of weeks ago, I was struck that our memories of our early years in school were so different. She remembered the teacher she loved, the playground (okay, I'm making this up because I can't remember all the good stuff that she remembered), while I remembered every slight or failure or bad day I had in Elementary School. I remember that I used to come home from school crying every day over some tragedy or other. I remember my mother telling me that I had to get a "shell" and not let people hurt my feelings so much. I remember the teachers who didn't like me, the kids who made fun of me, and the signal traumas that are with me still today.
• Item #3: There is the stuff I know for sure, and the stories I tell myself about the stuff I know for sure. Those stories inevitably posit me as the victim. I became aware of this as I have worked at various times this summer to pull myself back from the brink of whatever. I will stop the story and pull out of it just the stuff I know for sure. When I do that, I see that inevitably I've chose the road not only less travelled, but the one that leads off the cliff.
  

What is this about? Is it a Jewish thing? Some say that part of our DNA is a perennial feeling of never fitting in, of seeing the world splintered in pieces, in need of healing. Or was I a depressed child, even back then in the first grade--and I've been more or less dysthymic all my life?

I don't know the answer, and I'm not sure it's really relevant. What does seem important to my present and future sense of well-being is that I CUT THIS SHIT OUT RIGHT NOW.

Oh, now that's a positive way to begin, Jane....

Still Wandering...

...and not sure when I'll be back. I could go home tomorrow. Or I could take a sidetrip to the coast. Molly's up for whatever, and me--I think all these hours alone in the car are....probably good for me. Maybe.

I had great intentions to blog along the way, but tonight is the first time I've actually achieved an internet connection. Perhaps the drinks and wine at dinner on the nights I was in Seattle had something to do with it. Here we are last night:

Liz and I haven't seen each other in--oh, decades and decades and decades. Our last memory of being together was a week we spent at Lake Candadhota with two other friends, Ellen and Karen. It was the summer before our senior year in high school. Liz and I made our own bathing suits. Hers was a red and black plaid with white piping, a two piece. Mine was blue-green silky print, fully lined, in the most daring of styles, a "hiphugger". I was always the girl with the shortest skirts, even in those days. I left after that weekend and started my freshman year at Pitt; my mother, who was in a hurry for me to get going, shoehorned me into college at year early. I never had a senior year. I never saw Liz and Ellen and Karen again. Do I sound bitter? Well, regretful, no doubt.

Despite the decades and decades and decades intervening, Liz and I picked up as if it had only been days. We marveled at that, and I, ever one for deconstructing every happenstance and emotion even unto death, tried to figure out what it was about us that created such an unbreakable connection. We met in First Grade; our mothers fixed us up, in the days before Playdates were so common. And we just stuck, I guess. Liz is the reason why I'm such a good Catholic: whenever we had Saturday night sleepovers, we had to go to Mass the next morning. She taught me to genuflect, to cross myself, and to bob my head at "Jesus" when I sang Christmas carols.

We didn't go to Mass this weekend, but we spent hours talking and laughing and catching each other completely up to date on our four marriages and her three children, where we've been and where we still want to go. It was, in a word, amazing.

On Being A Mother - Why I'm Not

I never set out not to be a mother. I always assumed I would have kids, along with the obligatory husband, 2 car garage and white picket fence. That’s what people did, wasn’t it.

When H & I were in college, before we were married, we planned on having six children. I don’t know why six. I do know that one of them was to be called Megan; the other five were name- and genderless, I suppose. I recall sitting at dinner in the dorm cafeteria one night and he/we were playing house with our imaginary six kids. Suddenly, I don’t know how, he had all six of them in league against me. About what? I don’t know. I just remember the searing feeling of injustice, of being odd man out, without a recourse. It’s interesting to me now that I can only recall that emotion, the strength and taste of it, but no other details of that night. When I say ‘interesting’, I mean ‘telling.’ It’s telling isn’t it that all I can remember is the feeling and not the facts.

When H and I got married, the time for kids never seemed right. First he was in drama school and then a lowly rep actor. I supported us with a variety of secretarial jobs, menial labor of the female sort. We lived in furnished digs, bedsitters where we shared a bathroom with sometimes fifteen others, none of whom ever washed the tub, some of whom refused to even pull the plug after they’d bathed. I couldn’t imagine bringing a baby into that; it was so antithetical to my understanding of motherhood as to be beyond belief.

When we finally got a real flat with real furniture, albeit 2^nd hand, there was a real mother with two real kids who lived downstairs. She was my role model for what not to be. Her life was an endless cycle of lugging huge garbage bags crammed full of dirty towels and peed-on sheets, kids clothes stained with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and her husband’s work clothes to the Laundromat down the street, bringing them home still damp, hanging them out to dry in whatever-weather-London-was-offering and then starting all over again the next day. It was her oldest son, the six year old, who nightly wet the bed. The three year old was potty-trained, but exhibiting what I now recognize as symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (that’s the one that often leads to sociopaths). His mother, who had become my friend, was his captive slave, running after him endlessly to right the death and destruction that went in his wake. “There’s a good boy, Peter,” she whined endlessly, uselessly, feebly.

In the six years that I was married to H., I don’t believe the subject of children ever really came up between us. Friends started having kids and I would say, when they get Pampers in England, I’ll get pregnant. Maybe they already had them. Maybe it was just an excuse because I knew that this was not a marriage in which to create a family.

When H and I finally split up and I moved back to America, I brought with me my prescription for birth control pills. I was a single woman now, and this was---hey, hey, hey! The Seventies! And The Eighties! But somewhere along the way, I stopped taking the pills. I was in a Long Term Relationship that I Thought Was Going to End in Marriage. Maybe I thought getting pregnant would make that day happen sooner. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could. I couldn’t, it didn’t, and when D and I got together, I just didn’t bother with birth control. Que sera sera, was my mantra.

What would be was zip, nada, not even a smidgeon of a pregnancy scare. In the back of my mind, I always kept an eye out for telltale signs: the swollen breasts, the darkening line down the belly. Nope. Not for me. And so it went until it was past the point of no return. Until it was, as they say in Yiddish, fahfallen, which is what they say to a bald man who is hoping for hair.

And now here I am, lo these many years later, a woman with no children. A non-mother. I’m ambivalent about that fact, and maybe I always will be. I don’t know what I’ve missed; I only know what other people say when they wax eloquent about their children. I started this as a post with the subhead, Why I'm Not & How I Feel About It. But I don’t really know. I would have to stutter and explain and maybe wave my hands a lot. And that seems to me to deserve a post of its own. So consider this Part I and Part II will be, even as my progeny were not, forthcoming.

The Internet Is A Dangerous Place...

...for me. I can get lost in it.

When I was about five, we lived in a rural area in Western Pennsylvania, and there was no kindergarten. So my mother took me every day to Walking School. This was her invention, just the two of us, going for a walk and talking about whatever we happened across. Walking School came about because one day I had said to her, "Mommy, you're so mean to me. There's so much to learn in the world and there's no way for me to learn it."

When I surface after a session on the 'net, I thinking about Walking School. There is still so much to learn in the world, and now there is a way for me to learn it. I just want to inhale it all.

But no one is paying me to surf, so it's all gratuitious fun. Isn't that kinda like porn? And thus, the internet is a dangerous place to someone like me whose curiousity is endless.