Watching my youngest granddaughter is like time traveling. As the youngest, shortest and smallest in by any measure, a dysfunctional, family, I had to make a fair amount of noise to be heard. It was screeching into a void, though, and I have been lucky to live long enough to outlast the expectation, but not the hope, that my voice counts. This begins early, I see, as I watch a not quite 3 year old work out the ways in which she may make her voice count.
Sidebar: Because I am still thinking about Joan Rivers, and arguing with people about her right to be the kind of comic she wanted to be, I wonder what kind of a little girl she was? I have also wondered if she had not been petite, and cute and visually compelling how well her early career would have gone. She paved the way for Roseanne, but could Roseanne have happened without her? Could the first huge female talent been a tall woman? A heavy woman? As much as I loathe the way women are viewed in the world [poorly, in every culture it seems] I must bow to the forces which shaped me.
I was pretty enough as a young woman, but tall, loud, aggressive, outspoken, bad tempered and insecure.
I am still those things, but now without the looks to excuse me.
The only thing that has been added has been less of a hair trigger, less willingness to do battle over bullshit, more peace with myself and about 40 lbs.
There has never been a time when what I said wasn't reacted to outside of the family.
Inside the family, reaction was binary. Nuclear meltdown or punishing silence. My mother had a trick of looking at you and turning her eyes into little points without changing her facial expression at all. She added to this the effect of retreating inside her self, putting as much distance between herself and the object before her without leaving the room.
Because it took so much to get a response at home, I took most of my life trying to figure out how to modulate that in the outside world. I never learned for example, not to call a teacher an asshole, or yell "Fuck Off" at someone…… hours of standing in the hall or waiting in the principal's office did not wake me up
For someone who scored well on puzzle solving tests, I displayed the problem solving ability of an inbred, confused, dyslexic lab rat.
These days, I have set myself the task of remembering how much I desire peace.
Peace in my self, peace in my home, peace in my life, peace in my relationships and of course, World Peace.
This means not reacting from the place of being threatened. It means that when someone frightens me or makes me angry [pretty much the same thing] or impatient or bored that I have to take the time to peel a layer back; then another, and so on until the place is revealed where that other is more like me than unlike me.
Somewhere underneath all the undesirable, itchy labyrinth of human encounters, there is common ground.
This is the common ground that Mr. Rogers called holy ground, and if we are to have peace, if we are to get along, it is the only ground we have.
Sidebar: Because I am still thinking about Joan Rivers, and arguing with people about her right to be the kind of comic she wanted to be, I wonder what kind of a little girl she was? I have also wondered if she had not been petite, and cute and visually compelling how well her early career would have gone. She paved the way for Roseanne, but could Roseanne have happened without her? Could the first huge female talent been a tall woman? A heavy woman? As much as I loathe the way women are viewed in the world [poorly, in every culture it seems] I must bow to the forces which shaped me.
I was pretty enough as a young woman, but tall, loud, aggressive, outspoken, bad tempered and insecure.
I am still those things, but now without the looks to excuse me.
The only thing that has been added has been less of a hair trigger, less willingness to do battle over bullshit, more peace with myself and about 40 lbs.
There has never been a time when what I said wasn't reacted to outside of the family.
Inside the family, reaction was binary. Nuclear meltdown or punishing silence. My mother had a trick of looking at you and turning her eyes into little points without changing her facial expression at all. She added to this the effect of retreating inside her self, putting as much distance between herself and the object before her without leaving the room.
Because it took so much to get a response at home, I took most of my life trying to figure out how to modulate that in the outside world. I never learned for example, not to call a teacher an asshole, or yell "Fuck Off" at someone…… hours of standing in the hall or waiting in the principal's office did not wake me up
For someone who scored well on puzzle solving tests, I displayed the problem solving ability of an inbred, confused, dyslexic lab rat.
These days, I have set myself the task of remembering how much I desire peace.
Peace in my self, peace in my home, peace in my life, peace in my relationships and of course, World Peace.
This means not reacting from the place of being threatened. It means that when someone frightens me or makes me angry [pretty much the same thing] or impatient or bored that I have to take the time to peel a layer back; then another, and so on until the place is revealed where that other is more like me than unlike me.
Somewhere underneath all the undesirable, itchy labyrinth of human encounters, there is common ground.
This is the common ground that Mr. Rogers called holy ground, and if we are to have peace, if we are to get along, it is the only ground we have.
<3
ReplyDeleteTalk to you soon, I hope.
Jumping Mouse
Who are you?
DeleteLove the idea of common ground as holy ground- that place in all of us that is ours and others- and we all can meet some where
ReplyDelete