Weddings
I recently attended a wedding and was struck by the now-familiar blend of emotions: joy, hope, idealism, belief, fear, anger, cynicism, pity, and probably a few others that pass through too quickly to name.
Sitting there in the pew, in the (non-air-conditioned, and it was 92 degrees) Catholic church, anticipation and dread occupied equal space in my heart. I was glad for my friend, who is very much in love with her now-husband. She'd found someone capable of loving her in the way that she loves: no holds barred, passionately, openly, and this after a disastrous and wounding earlier relationship with a swinish ... well, anyway. There in the church I thought about how happy she's been, how right this relationship seems, how much she feels that she's met her soulmate.
But she thought that the swinish one was her soulmate, too.
And there's the rub. Or one of them. I've been married for nearly thirty years, and I still don't know whether I believe in soulmates. I want to. On the other hand, if people can be soulmates, then I'm missing out on something. I love my husband and we are very close, but soulmates? I don't know. I think he thinks we are, but--. "Soulmate" seems so, well, cosmic. Mystical. It must be something special enough to happen to a person, if at all, only once. And yet people do fall in love more than once, sure each time that this is The One.
This leads me to one of the other uncomfortable truths about marriage. The priest or pastor still intones the "till death do us part" promise, and the bride and groom either believe that they will be together forever, despite the odds, or cynically say "I do" having their own doubts, not because of a lack of love or commitment, but because they know how many people out there are divorced. That promise was a bit easier to make when people didn't live much beyond the age of 48. Now that our lifespan is 30 years longer, though, it's no wonder that rational people have their doubts. It's a lot to expect. The Catholic church, at least in the U.S., certainly recognizes the impracticality of this expectation. They may give lip service to "until death," but it seems to me that annulments (and how is this different from divorce?) are plentiful these days, even after the marriage has produced half a dozen or more children.
I want to believe that my friend's marriage will last forever. I'm an idealist at heart, and a romantic, and an optimist. I have hope. But at the same time that I feel all these things, there is fear, fear that maybe it isn't going to last, that my friend's heart will be broken. I try to look on the bright side, to say that after all, my husband and I have made it to thirty years and will likely be together until one of us dies, but then a great wave of pity fills me. They have no idea what they're in for. My friend is twenty years younger than I am and has yet to travel the parts of the road that I've seen. Some of it's just life itself, the inevitable disappointments, the death of loved ones, the unexpected events that can throw your life into turmoil. But some of it is the work of staying together--and it is work, joyous at times, dogged at times. There is the disillusionment--inevitable. Discovering the shadow in the other. Becoming irritated at little habits that no longer seem endearing. There are peaks and valleys, and my hope for my friend is that she and her husband will slog across those valleys and make it to the peaks, over and over again, because they will be called upon to do so, over and over again.
I also felt the by-now familiar charge of anger that suffuses me at most weddings. The priest, in this case, was really not your average patriarchal, traditional kind of guy. He even mentioned equality--the equal partnership of the two being married. And yet--and yet--there was the old familiar Christ/church, man/wife analogy that gave away the truth of the matter. Here we are at the end of the millenium and still, still the ancient patriarchy rules in these matters, civic and religious. The priest also spoke of the woman as helpmate to the man. Well, hell's bells! Why can't the man be a helpmate to the woman? Why not a mutuality here? Why is one the primary agent and the other one just a help? It's time to get rid of all that. No wonder I know feminists who are not so sure that any marriage can be anything but unequal. I don't agree with them, but I can certainly see why they feel that way.
But in the end, I'm as much as a sap as anyone when it comes to weddings. There may be one in our family in the not-too-distant future, and I'm sure I'll weep and idealize, as I always do. At my friend's wedding, the poems the bride and groom chose made my throat ache and I struggled not to weep. The compassion I felt for these two as they will be in the future, the joy I knew was in the heart of my friend: those things I took away, and tried to leave my worries to the cosmos.
Mother, Daughter
(to read some poems about my mother, click here.)
This month I will turn 48. My birthday has always been a bittersweet time, not, as I suspect is the case for many of us, simply because I'm growing older and more and more aware of my mortality, but because I was born in late August, a time of year I dislike. Yes, it's true that the harvest is beginning to come in--the farmer's markets are packed with fresh sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, and all kinds of goodies--but the trees darken with dust, the cicadas' song fills the air constantly, telling of the end of summer, the grass is drier, the freshness of growing things is gone. Late August has always seemed like a jolt away from possibility and toward the narrowing of choices. The path no longer forks so often; the by-ways come fewer; the horizon is too close or too far. The glory of autumn is some time off, but the glory of summer is fading, fading.Then, eight years ago, just as I was about to turn 40--the age that our society has set in concrete as a symbol of youth's end--my daughter, my first-born, was about to leave for college, and my mother suddenly died.
The loss was almost unbearable. My mother and I had not been close for very much of our lives. Because my father had been such a dominant figure, for many years my mother seemed to me almost a non-entity. I blush with shame to write this now, but it was true then: she had little or no say in matters affecting the family, affecting us children, our discipline, our relationship with our parents, and I saw her as someone who didn't count. My father's word was final, and he was cruel too often; my mother bit her lip, suffered for us inwardly, but could not stand up to him on our behalf. It was partly a matter of the times and the social milieu, and partly a matter of personality and the nature of my parents' relationship.
After my father died, however, my mother and I began to talk about things--things that mattered. We talked about my father and his domineering ways, his insistence on total submission, and I began to understand my mother, what she had felt all those years, how much pain she had endured. During my father's illness, my mother had begun to come into her own. She took over the family business and she began to make her own decisions. After his death, ten years before her own, she lived in the way that she wanted to.
We were close for too brief a time. Eight years ago this month she suffered a myocardial infarction that, within 72 hours, claimed her life.
My grief was intense, passionate, infused with self-pity. And while I endured this, there was my daughter's departure looming large. She wasn't going far--the University of Michigan is only a little over an hour from our house--but it represented a break, the boundary between childhood and adulthood.
We had survived the usual mother-daughter dramas during her junior year of high school, the fighting, the tears, the mutual woundings. Her senior year had gone fairly smoothly. But as the prospect of her step into adulthood neared, she became moody, snappish at times, unpredictable. Her way has always been to turn fear and anxiety into anger, so it wasn't as if I had no clue to her behavior. But I too was feeling deeply the impending break, and all I could do was mutter to myself the words that have seen me through so many mother-child disturbances: "You have to be the adult here, Kris." And then my mother died, and I had too little energy to try to put some of my daughter's fears to rest, to be reassuring, to get caught up in the excitement of getting ready for college that was the opposite side of the coin of fear.
I still regret that. I know, too, that after my mother died, my daughter felt grief, grief that she found it difficult to express. Not once did I see her cry at the funeral home or during the funeral until the graveside ceremony, the committal of the body to earth. Then she broke down, but I was in the row ahead of her and could not even put my arms around her. Or would I have been too selfish in my own grief to do so? I don't know. I hope not.
She had a different kind of relationship with my mother than I had with my mother's mother. My grandmother was almost an alien life form to me. I loved her in an abstract way, more in theory than anything. She lived on the surface; she was always busy, busy, busy; she lived in the world of the concrete almost totally, save for her religious beliefs, which were, on the whole, pretty literal in terms of biblical tale and promises. I knew that she and my mother had had a rocky relationship, that grandma hadn't approved of my mother's choice in husbands, that they had fought and that my mother had moved out of the house during high school, ostensibly to live closer to the high school she attended but also, I believe, because of the tension between her and her mother.
My daughter loved my mother, and if they weren't extremely close, they nonetheless were often on the same wavelength. My daughter was rather difficult as a toddler and pre-schooler, and my mother was often the only one of all the family who was unruffled. She seemed to have an understanding of H that was intuitive, and she firmly based her interpretations and subsequent actions, where H was concerned, on that intuitive understanding. My daughter loved her in turn and felt the "river beneath the river" that flowed between the two of them at crucial times.
My mother never experienced the death of her mother: she died before my grandmother did. I had no stories to draw on, stories my mother would have told me about how she felt when her mother died. When a child dies before a parent, a link gets broken. All my life, she'd been able to tell me about her own fears and joys in being a mother, the struggles of her marriage, how she'd dealt with various crises. But now I had no stories. Absurdly, I wanted my mother to mother me through her own death.
One thing I could not do, and that was to ask my daughter for comfort. As a teacher of freshman writing courses, I had read essays by women students who had written that they'd tried to help their mothers when their grandmothers had died. I did not ask this of my daughter, did not expect in any way that it was my due. For one thing, I was the grownup. But more importantly, I knew that she was grieving, too, that this death was too close to the smaller "death" of her leaving for college, and most of all, that my mother's death stood as proof that I, too, would die someday.
To this day she can't talk about my mother's death or funeral. The specter of my own death hovers too near when the subject comes up. She and I are very close, and I marvel that we can have this relationship. I had hoped for such a relationship, and I am grateful for it every single day. Whether a good relationship, a neutral one, or a bad one, the mother-daughter tie is unique.
So, my birthday is coming up, reminder of my own mortality, reminder of my mother's death, reminder of that awful summer when I felt I was losing, had lost, both mother and daughter. In reality, my mother lives on as long as I am alive, as long as my daughter is alive; and I never lost my daughter. The separation was a necessary event, as it is for all of us, one that only feels like loss at the time. I think it will not be far into the future before my daughter makes me a grandmother, and if she has a daughter, I hope that, as she and I went a step beyond what my mother and I could achieve, she will go that one step with her daughter, and I will go that one step with her daughter.
An evolution. Not an end.
(click here for poems about my mother)
