It could turn on a dime

By all accounts, my grandmother’s father was an asshole. Mind you, it would have been the early 20th Century. Chicago. We come from poorer, scattered folks whose women were more surprisingly bawdy than feminine, and the men — well, at least Mr. Gamble — were more of the sour brew than sipping wine.

Our grandfather, my great-grandfather, likely embodied more immorality than my matriarchal lineage documented with whispers in tight spaces where they already felt small.

“He was a bad egg,” Aunt Kate whispered to me, eyes darted away, as we sorted through craft items in her magical craft room — the one that had mom’s 70’s beehive, salon chair hair-dryer. The hair dryer I found her Cosmopolitan magazine under that had Burt Reynolds naked in a Centerfold. The big, pink sit-down hair dryer that drowned out every sound when under the egg-dome cap blustering hot air over curlers and bobby pins.

That hair dryer. It’s one of the magical things about my mom and my childhood. Sitting. Reading. Drowning out the world with a magazine while getting beautiful for the world.

I have no children of my own. Our ancestral line is not a raging river, but a trickling stream behind a magical cabin with an outhouse and a view.

Instead of children, I have ideas. They require long stretches to be birthed, and because they are ideas and not people, I’m not sure if they hold much value or how to hold them at all.

Who cares about my ideas but me?

Do I care?

Just exactly what‘s a mid-lifer with no children supposed to do with those girl-to-woman poems, half-finished lyrics, a fashion doll collection, selfie pics and voice memos?

I stockpile digital files in the cloud and on forgotten hard-drives, try to keep a pen and paper (no lines!) handy, and make a daily search for power cords to keep the the lush variety of hungry tech gadgets and cameras alive 24/7.

Even those have too much maintenance these days.

Despite serious attempts at gadgetry handiness to capture those “mobile moments” when ideas fall out of the ether and into a pattern of thought, I’m always late finding a gadget to do the job at least 40% of the time ideas first spark. I blame Siri and dead smartphone batteries. I blame the self-defeating belief that I’m already behind. And, definitely Siri. She gets me lost when I need her the most. And, I ask her questions. A lot of questions.

I ask Siri more questions than any living human for something I need.

And, she’s not much help.

It’s work. It’s work to write it down, edit and archive photos, text a memo, make art or record a thought and make it into something worth sharing … eventually …. Because if it’s not shared, does it have value?

• Do I matter to anyone’s story?
• Am I okay with being my own audience of one for my own ideas?
• Is that enough?

If there’s anything I’ve learned the last year it’s this:

“It’s not just my show. It’s your show too!”

Donna Summer ignited a crowd at a concert with those words. It’s also a good mantra for any woman in mid-life with dark nights of the ego. How you share your show may be different, but a great way is to document it.

So, maybe …

Maybe it might not just be me who’s interested in my or our families’ documented life.

Will a future soul want to trace the interior life of the women in her blood line? Maybe she’ll want to, like me, find out what Archetypes she’s living out down the generational line and why.

Do I have any kind of familia duty in documenting our stories — our beliefs — about living in this time and place if I don’t have any actual kids?

I have lots of ideas but few clippings.

Most of my ideas are kept in fragmented puzzle pieces, like those single earrings stuffed back into weird containers and kept for years just in case the former match reappears.

I just can’t throw it away yet, I think often about earrings and ideas.

Now, NO idea that’s puzzling me has a FULL SET of pieces, except for the easy-grabbers — like those travel size puzzles from Wal-Mart you do on vacation and leave behind in the hotel room.

Ideas, like complicated puzzles, take time and important table space to lay them out on. A table that you know will be highjacked for weeks. See, that’s one of the decisions in taking on a puzzle. How much space is it going to take on your already full table?

I’m not sure any one idea is worth completing, or WHICH idea holds the most promise of an enduring passion to see to the end. Something is always missing, like the original top of the puzzle box where the picture appears of what it should look like when you’re done.

Oh, all right, we think. Let’s start another never-to-be-fully-finished puzzle project.

You know how to do it.

• Look for the edge and corner pieces.
• Build the frame first but delight in matching pieces together as you work on the first priority.
• Continue into the night and start putting mail, coupons, door flyers and a missing tech gadget part you picked up off the floor on top of it. You’ll eventually get to the puzzle again when the muse strikes or you need to have a family dinner. Right?

And, like this damn puzzle metaphor (women love puzzles), I’m likely missing important pieces to complete the picture frame. A really important corner piece, perhaps.

Sometimes I don’t even notice when the idea fairies are lighting me up with an idea. Which is why I jumped into the documentary impulse when my mid-life crisis started.

I’m searching for my purpose.

I might have many purposes. Just like ideas.

And, this may be one.

• What compassion or lesson can I and my last remaining link to Mr. Gamble learn from Mr. Gamble the Gambler?

She Asked

I know my Aunt Kate couldn’t wait to escape Mr. Gamble. Her mother wanted to escape too.

Aunt Kate didn’t particularly like their mother. Kate’s mother was busy escaping with a younger boy and doing what most women in midlife do — retreat to the outhouse for a smoke and a drink of her own, surrendered in her journey‘s travails and wondering how she was gonna make it.

I am certain my grandmother Evelyn (Kate’s sister) carried the bulk of the emotional weight of Mr. Gamble’s inhumanity and bad-fatherness. She was Kate’s younger sister. They had a brother. The baby of the family. He died young of Diabetes. Every year, we’d see him playing cards at the Thanskgiving table with fewer and fewer finger parts. Uncle Bobby was a gentle, loving man. He wasn’t his father, Mr. Gamble, but he most certainly gambled with self-care because of his father.

I’m not sure if Diabetes is what took my grandmother, but if disease is a tributary of shame or heartbreak, it’s what swept under her at 54 in a raised hospital bed in my mother’s living room. The living room with the 70’s green shag carpet. Her bed was in the place that the pink, chair hair dryer sat before they moved her in.

I loved her.

Grandma Evelyn made my childhood magical. Costumed Halloween parties and a dollhouse bigger than a shed. The house was insulated with carpet inside. Painted on the exterior of the house were mural-sized Disney characters grandmother commissioned a young artist from the community college to paint.

I love artists.

A picture of the dollhouse ran in the small-town paper. I was seated on the grass as the artist stood in the doorway next to Snow White.

We have clippings.

Stories are Puzzle Pieces

Women like puzzles and stories are fragments of our puzzled ancestry. Not many on this side of the family had the documentary impulse. But, we have newspaper clippings for a few publicly shared moments.

As far as the inner life of the family matriarchs, there’s little to go on about how my own bloodline of women thought, felt, survived, triumphed, thrived, ached, hurt or loved in their lifetime.

• What was their Heroine’s Journey?
• How did they learn to be enough?
• How did they learn to ask for what they needed without apology?

I know of one story. And, that’s from Aunt Kate.

Ask and you shall …

When she asked for what she needed that Friday morning, she had to be ready to risk it all. She had to be a woman, who at 18, would be willing to gamble big with small aches of her own courageousness. She probably thought restlessly about how she would ask her father, Mr. Gamble the Gambler, for money. After all, the family and everyone in it walked on eggshells around him. Women know this sound. Our family knows this sound. We are all skilled in the art of feminine egg-shell walking.

So, Kate must’ve braced for any answer. And, any answer would have profound consequences. Now, I don’t know if she expected to receive the answer unconditionally, but likely she was willing to barter or trade something in exchange. She would have known the cadence of his receptivity and pre-planned days, perhaps weeks, on when to ask. When the timing was right, you know?

She probably asked her mother, who told her to ask her father. She had to do it. She HAD to ask, as this need of hers … it meant something.

So she asked her father, Mr. Gamble the Gambler …

for a dime.

“I’ll give you 2 cents of what I think about that, but not a penny more,” he likely guffawed. “What the hell do you need a dime for?”

Yes. Kate. What do you need a dime for?

Kate told me the answer over her laminate table among glue bottles, ribbon and plastic beads and pins. She was a crafter. We were crafting crafts on the kitchen table like always.

“It was my High School Graduation,” Kate said between a glue dot.

She was a young woman about to graduate, an accomplishment even more so then, and she needed … breathe, Kate … 10 cents to pay for the cap and gown so she could attend the graduation ceremony.

Back then, being a graduating high school senior should have been cause for any family to celebrate. Unlike today, there are no pictures.

There aren’t any clippings either of Kate’s senior year in high school. No senior photo sessions the Fall before to capture Kate the Future Survivor, Kate the Facilitator of Card Games with Nuns, or Kate the Mother of Three SETS of Twins — two sets that made it (the boys, not the girls), or Kate the Amazing Craftswoman with a 1,000 Hand-Beaded egg ornaments for the Christmas Tree’s ornament theme that year. (We have the newspaper clippings.)

Not only was Mr. Gamble the Gambler not participating in his eldest daughter’s senior graduation, he didn’t give two shits about her either, and he certainly wasn’t going to drop a dime.

She had asked. At least she asked for what she needed. She asked the scariest person to her on the planet for something she really, really wanted.

And he said “No.”

A pastor wrote, “People lose their love for the truth by degrees” in relation to the story about Lot’s wife. That Biblical story is a lesson in slipping away from the truth and becoming cold, careless and disobedient, as Mrs. Lot was. It’s a warning that the loss of spiritual power takes place almost imperceptibly.

Aunt Kate turned away from her father that day outside the house with the outhouse like Lot’s wife walking away from fire and brimstone. Unlike Lot’s wife, she never looked back.

Just like that.

She lived with friends, married, had babies, and still took care of her asshole father when he aged.

She had asked her father for what she needed, even when the answer left her feeling forever in search of that important corner piece to complete her picture. But, his was no longer her puzzle to solve. The truth was, she just didn’t fit with the other pieces. And, she was tired of walking on eggshells.

Aunt Kate knew the value of a dime and the temporariness of time. And she filled her life with service to the neediest of needy until she passed away in her 90s. She filled her life with love, garage-sale treasures, and hand-beaded, hollowed-out, egg shell ornaments that were as painstakingly delicate, fragile and as beautiful as her inner light.

A sense of self worth.

It could all turn around on a dime.

Interested in more around self worth and resistance? Take a gamble and watch …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn3zkreYUho