Spring Renewal

I've always enjoyed having a birthday in May, for the flowers and birds, and the ebullience of another season of abundance, with the coming promise of hot weather. I feel so much better with heat, long days, more outdoor activity...I've never successfully cultivated a love of being cold and confined even though I've come to appreciate what my winter brings too. Plus I have this sense of order from my birthdate...the fifth day of the fifth month, which is the 125th day of the year, 5x5x5...and when I was five it was 5-5-55. Don't tell Facebook. I need a sense of order. I like reassurance that all will be well somehow.

The recurrent theme of deprivation juxtaposed with abundance has shaped my life, a condition of growing up in the fifties to parents who survived Depression-era poverty, into the rich Delaware landscape where elite people owned all the good lands but the farms were just beginning to turn into suburbs. We moved when I was six from a downtown duplex into a big lot in a place called Cooper Farms...we could still locate the original farmhouse we thought, and our place had fruit trees, lots of space, neighbors who didn't have fences. And we could freely roam. I wandered all over the woods learning plants, finding bones, going to the Bookmobile and walking to school. Everybody knew everybody else. We were so safe in our world we took it for granted.

Of course not really, and our family had dark secrets we thought were normal. It wasn't that bad. I thought I had a happy childhood until some time in my twenties. I spent a decade in silent reaction to my father's actions, though I never really blamed my Mom. I did hide from her for a long time, or maybe I didn't, and she was just extra good at letting me be. I struggled for decades to find some normal, to find that elusive "one true love" of the Disney fantasies. It was having a child at age 39 that really changed me the most. I only did it because my Mom said she would back me up if I needed anything. Which ordinarily you might assume, but I had to hear it said, while drunk enough to actually ask for that.

My change was not without effort, of course. After reading "Your Child's Self Esteem" I was in therapy once a month for a couple of decades and followed it up with co-counselling, and other work. I read so many books, wrote so many journals. Journalling was my main healing modality and I do it daily. I started in my teens on my mother's urging...she meant travel logs as I ran off to Mexico in a wild adventure, but she probably knew I was a writer. I had a teacher in High School who could maybe tell it was what I needed. She was the first authority figure that really convinced me I was smart and good at something. I tested very well...I am smart and good at things. But self esteem is a wily snake that has many ways of biting you and self destruction was hard-wired from an early age. And let's not talk about Catholicism today, even though, as usual when I write, it's Sunday. The day we try not to work. The day we pretend to take a real day off. I needed outside affirmation that I had something special to bank on. Deprivation, even perceived, makes you fundamentally insecure.

So, raising a child while I worked my ass off was not ideal, but I did pretty well at modeling work. I shared my inner work some...introduced my teenager to NVC, took him to my therapist once, though he clammed up of course. I didn't date. Never even tried. Never had a babysitter. His dad and I broke up when he was two, after I read that book and figured out that my "high self esteem" was a bald-faced adaptive lie. I was so damaged. My child didn't save me, but my will to make a good, non-traumatic life for him did save me. I build a house for us...so he could have a room with a door, and got it (kind of) done when he was about fifteen or so. I made safety for myself even before I could articulate that was what I needed. It's odd to even admit that we need that. Not as odd now as it was only a few years ago, as now we all feel in jeopardy, except maybe the very rich. May 4th with the return of Kent State reminded me how we thought campus was safe, until we got teargassed, and then shot down for protesting, or merely being near a protest. By kids our age. You don't get back your sense of safety after experiences like that. Still you have to try to have one. Living in fear is debilitating. I've refused to do that.

Not that I mastered it, but this house is pretty solid and I can hermit here with fair assurance that I can keep my demons and nightmares at bay. I have space for all my projects and what turned out to be archives, not merely junk I hung onto. Mom admitted on her last visit that she worried I'd become a hoarder, but after I got over my defensive shock I can explain. Most of it is art supplies (and my archives) and I can indeed get rid of useless things and have begun to thin. At some point I will have to get out of my shop to rent it, so I can work less, so that's one of my goals. I turned 68. I'm not going to be able to screenprint that much longer. But I'm not mentally ill in that particular way and I'm not going to be a hoarder. I like things, that's all, and like to use them up before I throw them "away." Earth day got through to me in my twenties too.

I enjoy the regrounding and reassessing that comes with every birthday. I take a look at things. I'm so happy that last night my son indulged me in about an hour of texting. It was mostly some uncommon sharing about his life, which was so welcome, but we touched on parenting things too and he gave me the Mother's Day gold I had been needing for years. Just a bit of affirmation of my hard work and dedication. I didn't need a lot. I just remembered how damn hard it was for me to process my own childhood and family relationships and since all I have is him, I do have a strong need for his occasional compliment or acknowledgement. He delivered. I hate to ask for it.

One of the things I've tried really hard to lose is coercion. Control patterns built from irrational need are debilitating to others and I've gone over my past many times to pin down my guilt and root out what drove me to do the mean or stupid things I've done. One upside of Catholicism is that I really do want to be a good person. Not to go to heaven, of course, but maybe to be a saint here on earth. Just to not cause more damage. Just to make the world a better place for others, after so many years of thinking only of myself, or feeling that my own needs were so great that others should fill them for me. Or that I was justified in placing myself over others for survival reasons. To really feel equality.

Growing up with four siblings, I always wanted things to be fairly distributed, and being a member of so many membership organizations that have this as a value makes me take it seriously. I grew up with plenty of racism, too, which of course persists, and as a woman I've worked my whole life to just embrace internally what I know is logically right. Equal means all of us. It isn't granted. We have to demand it, work for it, give for it. We the privileged have to release what we've gained. When I do well, I have to share.

Thus my security is tenuous...I haven't accumulated much in the way of financial resources, and I won't depend on someone else to keep me safe. No strong husband scenario for me. An equal partner has never seemed something I could handle, at least not with anyone I have ever known. Maybe I just don't have the patience for the negotiations. Relationships use up a lot of time, and as a creative person I have a flair for the dramatic so even though I have learned what drama is, that doesn't mean I can always avoid creating it. So at some point, or many points, I've just opted out. I'm solitary and I like it. Plus I have a lot of work to do.

That solitary hermit life

wasn't great to model, as interdependence is healthier and acknowledging the contributions of others should be a constant habit. I've had to train myself to say thank you instead of operating on the assumption that everyone will do their assigned part quickly and with professionalism. People need to be thanked and know their contribution wasn't taken for granted. It's a goal to be grateful.

Group process, the formal pursuit of the common good, is an excellent way to spend energy and time and I'm dedicated to us in the craft world to not get too lazy and go for the more efficient majority rule. Whenever we have a tightly split vote at the Board level I feel that we have not worked hard enough. There should be a decision all of us can support. I don't mind long meetings if we find consensus, but not many people agree with me on that. I don't usually insist any more. I wish I would speak up more, but I get the feeling I've been dismissed in some ways...put in some categories I don't accept. I hope to work my way out of them rather than give up. Efficiency has its place but poorly-made decisions come back again and dig holes in our shimmery fabric of mutual well-being.

It's like the Jell-O Art Show this year...we went off into the winners/losers paradigm and threw it out. Everyone got participation awards, everyone won the golden roses from the Golden Commode of competition for one highly valuable prize...no one got to be at the top. I thought our political quotient was perfectly attuned to the zeitgeist and left us all richer. You had to be there. The video, which we saw this week, only shows that we meant to make the points...but I guess they got across. I'm too critical as I watch my wardrobe fail and dropped lines. Being too critical is something to work on, isn't it?


Mom says I was always hard on myself. Maybe the quest for sainthood, instilled at such an early age, has made me cynical and devoted to abstract justice which is not attainable, but I'll probably die trying for increased self-awareness and incremental improvements in the lives of my friends and neighbors. Hopefully not too soon. Someone told me yesterday they were aiming for 93...that's the age I've always aimed for too. My Mom will be 93 next winter. She still has it all...she's doing super well. It's probably obvious how much I am like her, though to me I'm also so much like my dad, and really unlike either of them.

My son said he is trying to be like me, but better...you have to laugh at things like that. I agree, of course, that he should be better...and I'm sure he will be, with the benefit of seeing my efforts and some of my mistakes. I'm mostly relieved to know he isn't really mad at me for some of them. I might tell him more about my mistakes as we grow older...I have a lot of cautionary tales that I've kept to myself. He's an experiential learner, and I respect that. It's my challenge to watch as he learns, and not judge and not advise. I get to marvel at his solutions and his explorations, and I hope he will brag to me about his accomplishments as I do to my Mom every week in our phone calls. She tells me about her limits and some of her mundane challenges, not so much her fears...I tell her what I'm proud of, and what I'm working toward. I put my fears in my journal. I like to think she doesn't have to worry about me now. She doesn't want me to worry about her either. She has taken care of herself, after taking care of so many people over the course of her life. That's what I want to do, take care of myself and not worry people. And I want to truly learn to care for others, while not expecting them to care for me...except on my birthday, when I do want them to care for me. They did!

I'm lucky. Plus I got Mother's Day out of the way a week early, so I can focus on Founder's Day, which is a whole other level of caring. Maybe I'll have time to write about Lotte this week. Her vision has been such a gift to me, to our community, to my friends and family. I hope to convey my appreciation for that, if that is even possible. Carrying her legacy forward is something I'm proud of. I told Mom all about it. Next Saturday, come and see what we've done, say hello to her daughters, and spread the love as thickly as possible. It looks to be another spectacular Saturday. See you at the Market, where I live and breathe in the beauty of our mutual creation. Bring flowers. Smile more than you ever thought possible, for it is glorious spring!