Nov 10, 2011
Every fall the Muumuu Mamas, nine middle-aged women, go to the beach for a weekend. The others have demanding jobs, with too many needy people, students, committees, travel. I am the only one who has retired, but I have Amanda. The beach weekend is our escape, and we look forward to it all year.
Planning begins in the spring, when someone sends an email: is it time to begin looking for a house? At least six weeks before the trip someone sends out a sign-up sheet for meals, and food porn fills our in-boxes..
Over the years we have gone from house to house, seeking perfection. Michelle, the most fastidious of us, sets the standard. The consensus: we want a house that is nicer than our own. (For some of us that would not be hard to find.) I am happy in shabby, and have a fondness for shacks, but I can wallow in luxury with the best of them.
For two years we rented a house that belonged to friends of Michelle, but she was active in gay rights in Florida, the friends grew more conservative, and that became uncomfortable. Then I found a beautiful house at the part of St Augustine Beach where driving is forbidden. When we arrived it had just been sprayed for bugs. Ceal couldn’t stand the smell, and earthworms were committing suicide in the swimming pool. The next year we rented the house next door, but the balcony had no shade.
This year we think we have finally found a permanent home. It’s on the ocean, two stories, with five bedrooms and five baths, two living rooms, a deck upstairs and patio downstairs, a swimming pool, and a long boardwalk over the dunes to the water. Its name: Peace of Paradise.
EARLY MORNING AT PEACE OF PARADISE
Peggy, who arranged the rental, goes over early Friday to open the house; the rest of us drive to the beach in twos and threes. When Iris and I arrive, we find Marcie, Michelle and Peggy already there.
Peggy challenges us to find the ugliest thing in the house. She gives us hints: it is downstairs, and has been put away. After a brief search, Iris comes back upstairs, waving her trophy. A flamingo tchotchke, neck curving down, its rump a burst of pink feathers, standing in front of lurid green leaves. It is one of a pair of bookends, and I long to steal them for the shelf in my office.
Apart from the bird, the decor is inoffensive, standard beach themes with not too many shell-encrusted items. The swinging gate from the beach to the boardwalk has a mosaic peace sign. Iris decides that the ceiling fan in the living room, huge blades shaped like palm fronds, is the only feature that is unacceptable. If she weren’t so short, it might cut off her head, and anyway, it is clunky-looking.
The Mamas give me a downstairs bedroom all to myself with a huge jacuzzi tub in my private bathroom and the pool right outside my door. They say it’s because I go to bed and get up so early, and they want me away from the main part of the house. But they spoil me, I think, because they are through with child-rearing and I have Amanda.
Many of us are cooks, all of us are gluttons, and the food is endless and varied. Among other treats this year we have the best cioppino I have ever eaten, black rice salad, warm red cabbage slaw, pasta with walnut pesto, a pear and apple cake, jelly tots. Plates of cheese, vegetables and hummus, and bowls of nuts are laid out on the counter, and there is always an open bottle of wine. I make black beans and rice for Friday dinner, Julie makes Caesar salad. I was planning cornbread, but all of us thought somebody else was bringing eggs and milk.
Saturday morning I finish writing about 7:30, and decide to jump in the freezing pool. A physical therapist once told me that ice is my friend, but I admit I was also showing off. I strip and step outside. Think a minute. Go back inside and fill the hot tub, sink until my breasts are bobbing, and turn on the jets. When I am hot to the core I pad out to the pool, walk to the edge and jump. If I hesitated I wouldn’t do it, and in mid-air I have a moment of exhilaration, thinking, “Can’t turn back now!” I tread water for about fifteen minutes, every aching joint and bone crying hallelujah. When I’m cold to the core I return to the tub.
I smell bacon upstairs, and I’m tempted. But once I go up and connect, it will be hard to tear myself away, and I am so happy to be alone, pampered, free. I contemplate a nap. I write a little more, and then a smoke alarm goes off, piercing even way down here. I’m ready.
Iris always brings her griddle and makes pancakes, but with no eggs or milk we graze – coffee, yoghurt, cheese, fruit, bread, sweet potatoes, bacon – there are plenty of choices.
After breakfast Marcie, Iris and I go to the store. While they are at Publix, I go to the Dollar Tree for a coming-home gift for Amanda, and find bags of rubber snakes, perfect for her Halloween Medusa costume. We head up A1A to the fish store, and while Marcie buys the fish for dinner, Iris and I go to the fancy thrift store down the street. I find a nice purse for Amanda’s birthday for $9.50. I plan to fill it with little gifts, individually wrapped. I am a little concerned about heavy metal rings on either side, which could make it a handy weapon, but I decide we have outgrown that concern.
If our weekend has a theme it is, “No one does anything she doesn’t want to do.” People walk on the beach, read, write, swim in the ocean or the pool. A 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle attracts several of us, but by Saturday night it's abandoned as too hard. Iris and Michelle have brought their extensive beading supplies, and they and Julie spend some time making necklaces.
There is always someone cooking, someone eating, someone tidying the kitchen. We turn on the music and dance. We talk and talk, and sit in comfortable silence. We take naps whenever we want.
At dinner and afterwards we are all together, talking about our lives, telling stories. This year Julie has a variation on Dictionary. One person reads the description on the back of a romance novel, and then all the others write first paragraphs for the book. The leader reads all the paragraphs, and we guess the real one.
Marcie’s daughter Naorah named us the Muumuu Mamas when she visited at 10am on our first beach weekend and found us all lounging in our muumuus drinking wine. We get together as often as we can, for dinner, canoeing, or celebrations. We’ve made Christmas cookies, and Christmas stockings for the HOME Van. When I had knee surgery, Joe spent the night with me at the hospital and the Muumuus took daytime shifts, so I was never alone. The nurses thought we were a church group.
One husband thinks we go to the beach to get away from our husbands. Marcie says, “No, it’s because we want to be together.” (One of us who shall be nameless says, “The other is just a fringe benefit.”)
The beach weekend is our gift to ourselves and to each other. It is a celebration of our friendship. I don't know how I would manage without the Muumuu Mamas.
DAWN
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NEXT WEEK: The Church Search: An Infidel in Church, Part I
Sep 16, 2011
I hadn’t planned to see The Help. Another noble white savior of black victims? No thanks. I’d read two books on the subject of black maids in the South and thought I’d spent enough time on the subject. David Denby’s review in The New Yorker changed my mind. Apparently the film put the black maids front and center, and the acting was terrific.
I heard a professor from the Association of Black Women Historians on NPR, who said that the maids need to tell their own story, and people should read the historical and fictional accounts of domestic workers by black authors. And then a black caller said that she loved the movie This caller said that as they exited the theater, the white audience was crying and the black audience was smiling.
I didn’t grow up in the south, nor with black servants. But I have my own story, about life with our Argentine cook, Elisa. Memory is fiction; fiction can be truth. Much of my memory comes from my parents’ conversations about Elisa, conversations infused with affection and condescension.
My sister Luli and I were born in Argentina, where my father was lawyer for an American communications company whose tentacles reached around the world, fomenting or preventing revolution as its bottom line required. My brothers spent their childhoods in Buenos Aires, but we returned home when I was a baby and Luli a toddler. And my parents, who had not lived in the States for many years, brought with them not one, not two, but THREE servants: Jackie, to nurse my brother who had polio, Theresa the maid, and Elisa the cook.
CHRISTMAS IN LONG ISLAND, 1948. ELISA (THE TALL ONE) AND THERESA, IDENTIFIED ONLY AS “SPANISH MAIDS”
Life in Long Island was dramatically different from life in Argentina. No more hobnobbing with diplomats and government officials in Belgrano, parties at the polo club, weekends in the country. Many of the neighbors had a weekly maid, but no one had live-in servants. Jackie went home to Argentina. After a couple of years Theresa moved to Queens and joined the other South American women who worked as housemaids. But Elisa stayed.
She stayed for 18 years. I grew up in Long Island, Cambridge, and Ann Arbor with my sister, my mother, and Elisa. My father traveled a lot. When he was there he seemed distant and imposing. He looked like Eisenhower, and until I was five I thought he was The President.
I adored my mother, and trailed around after her like a puppy. But Elisa was a close second in my affection. She cuddled and fed me, welcomed me in the kitchen, let me visit in her room in the afternoon, took me with her to Catholic church. My mother was small and thin; my father said with pride, “I always told Marcy I would divorce her if she became fat.” Elisa was tall, stout and solid, with big strong arms.
When I was little I called her Lili, but graduated to Elisa. My parents called her Elisa, and she called them Senora and Senor. She refused to learn English, though I’m certain that she understood every word of it. She was proud, and I think she didn’t want to feel stupid, the way you do when you are learning a language. My parents offered her classes, but she considered herself, as an Argentinian, superior to the other new immigrants.
She was an exceptional cook. I remember her chicken fricasee, her deep dish apple pie. I watched her roll out the ravioli dough and put down spoonfuls of filling made with beef and pork, cover it with a second sheet and press it into squares with a rolling wheel. She stuffed the homemade canneloni with calves brains, prosciutto, and spinach. When I had my first apartment, I asked her how to make meat loaf, and she gave me a stalk of celery, an onion, a green pepper and a few pinches of sage.
My sister and mother were often at odds, and Luli spent a lot of time in the kitchen with Elisa. She herself became a professional cook, but even Luli can’t duplicate the rich, sweet crust on the deep dish apple pie, or the fricasee gravy.
Elisa cooked delicious meals, served them to us at the table, and ate alone in the kitchen. But when my parents went out, we’d have a special treat: frozen pot pies or TV dinners with Elisa. For dessert, we made banana splits.
ELISA JOINED US AT THE TABLE FOR LULI’S WEDDING CAKE.
When I was eighteen, Elisa went back to Argentina. I remember her in a grey suit, with a purple orchid on the lapel, when we took her to the airport to fly to Buenos Aires. She was eligible for Social Security, but there was some rule against non-citizens collecting if they lived abroad. I don’t know how he did it, but Dad spent years in bureaucratic wrangling to get it paid to her. The income made her relatively rich, and she lived comfortably with her niece’s family.
ELISA GOES HOME
When I was twenty, my mother’s breast cancer spread to her bones. Elisa agreed to come back to help. They were living in a three-bedroom apartment in Silver Springs, Maryland. I visited them there, and found a very unhappy trio.
Elisa cooked in the little kitchen, and tended my mother in the bedroom. My father told me with amusement that she strenuously objected to wearing her old uniforms but, “Of course I insisted.” Elisa had left her life in Argentina, where she was an honored matriarch, to help my parents, who had always claimed she was part of our family. She returned as a friend, and they insisted she was a servant. She left after a few months.
I was furious. A child accepts whatever she sees; a teenager sees no one but herself. Now I was old enough to begin trying to imagine Elisa’s life.
She was in her early forties when she came to the States in 1948. In 1957 she went back to Argentina for a year while our family lived in Bolivia. Except for that year, she had no contact with her family except letters.
She had a day off every week, but only occasionally took the train to Queens to visit with friends. Her friends never came to the house. I think she had no lovers. Sometimes she went to church.
In every house we lived in, she had her bedroom, and sometimes a bathroom of her own. She spent her days in the kitchen, and afternoons in her bedroom, listening to the Spanish-language radio and reading “La Prensa.” She watched television with us in the living room; Perry Como was her favorite. My parents bought her a television so she could watch in her room, but she never used it. Occasionally she went to the movies with Luli and me.
She opened presents under the tree with us on Christmas mornings in her maid’s uniform, then made Christmas dinner for a big group of friends and family. After my father carved the turkey, she fixed herself a plate, and ate dinner in the kitchen. She attended family weddings in her Sunday best.
Elisa’s story echoes that of southern black maids in so many ways. She was a wonderful cook and caregiver. She was called one of the family, and reminded of her second-class role at every turn. She demonstrated exceptional loyalty. She knew every family secret, and we never knew hers.
I failed when I was twenty, and I fail now, to understand what it was like for her. I could create a fictional character out of these sparse facts, but I have no confidence it would contain Elisa. My character would enjoy her work and be proud of her skill, but she would be lonely, angry, resentful. If that was Elisa, she hid it remarkably well for the eighteen years I knew her.
LIZ, ELISA, LULI
My stepdaughter, majoring in African American studies at Oberlin, denied that Elisa could have loved me. But Elisa was cut off from her family, had no children of her own, never married. She was not like the black maids who “lived out.” She had no children whom she must neglect to take care of us, no home other than the one we shared. Not just because she was so important in my life, but for her sake, I hope she did love me and my sister.
My mother died when I was 24; Elisa died two years later. She would have been in her 70’s. After long neglect, I was just getting ready to send her a picture of me and my son. Her death left me with grief and guilt.
So what did I think of the movie? The two black maids, Minnie and Abilene, were full, breathing women, with a chorus behind them of sympathetic victims. Their white employers, Hilly and Celia, were respectively bully and bullied, with a chorus behind them of paper doll Barbies. Abilene’s crude revenge was perilous and implausible, and diminished her. The movie was like a full painting and a pencil sketch glued together. If you’re looking for insight as well as entertainment, I’d recommend the books listed by the African American history professors, or one of those below.
New Yorker review
ABWH Open Statement
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (book)
Telling Memories Among Southern Women (book)
Aug 26, 2011
IRIS
School started Monday, and Iris came over last weekend to help Amanda organize her room. Iris is a champion organizer. She even has labels in the refrigerator.
Amanda’s room was my despair, though she is a top-notch tidier, and if I don’t ask her she does it on her own every few days, quickly whisking everything to its place. But there were too many things, and not enough places. Broken toys, single earrings, dead balloons, pieces of plastic and cardboard with no known provenance, and everything she had brought home from kindergarten through second grade. All of it in higgledy piggledy piles: on the dresser, on the bookcase, in the corners. Piles on the desk so the flip top couldn’t be opened, piles on the night stand imperiling the nightly glass of water.
But even though I hate the mess, I am torn. When I was a child the rule was: no food in your room, and keep the door closed. So part of me says it’s Amanda’s room, not mine. Another part says it’s my job to teach her how to keep control over the mountains of things that invade our space. And a third part wants her to be what I am not. I am a lifelong slob with organizing tendencies. I live surrounded by clutter, but I love to spend a morning tidying, and I long for bare, beautiful rooms.
MY CLUTTER
My internal conflict about Amanda’s autonomy is part of the challenge of being her mother. Her favorite phrases are “I can do it,” “I don’t need help,” “Leave me alone.” I’m never sure whether I should guide, instruct, require, or leave it up to her. Lazy (let her do whatever and however she wants) is as bad as authoritarian (you’ll do it my way, right now). It’s finding the crooked path between that is hard for me.
I encourage independence as much as I can. When we do the laundry together I help her sort and put away, but she loads and runs the machines while I watch. She makes Sunday morning pancakes all by herself while I set the kitchen table and keep an eye out for danger. She climbs the ladder and cleans the muck from the gutters under Joe’s supervision. It’s a treat to see her gain competence and confidence.
At the same time, I often do know what’s best. She has plenty yet to learn, and sometimes she has to let me teach it. So I decided she would begin the school year with a desk she can work at, books and supplies she can find, and a closet where her clothes don’t disappear. But I knew we would tussle if I tried to help, and I proposed that we ask Iris.
Iris has known Amanda since before she was born – she was at the baby shower for Amanda’s mother, and gave a women's welcome party when Amanda first came to live with us. She was happy to help. Her own grown daughter, temporarily living with her, won’t let Iris touch her room.
Amanda would have resisted me at every turn, but she worked happily with Iris.
They spent four hours organizing – sorting, boxing, even discarding. Amanda scrubbed all the surfaces before they put everything away.
Like anyone cleaning out a room, Amanda lingered over things – old toys, old letters, old photos. I would have been in my juggernaut mode: don’t dawdle, we have a job to do. Iris let her talk about the memories that caught her. Amanda wouldn’t give away anything, but by the time they were through, the biggest bin was full of dolls, stuffed animals, and toddler toys.
I did a few little things as follow-up – moved winter clothes to a storage box on the top shelf of her closet, threw out the trash bag, moved the shoe rack into a corner. I’m going to buy one more big bookcase to take care of the tidy piles still left to put away, and a label-maker. Amanda resisted this until I told her it was Iris’ suggestion. Then she agreed I could buy them, but I wasn’t to touch her stuff. She and Iris would finish the job
Even with some work left to do, the room looks wonderful. I can breathe in it again. I am so grateful to Iris for doing this, and even more grateful for her role in Amanda’s life. I’ll always be Amanda’s grandma, but now I’m her mother too, dispenser of rules, routines and requirements. She needs women who can delight in her without trying to fix her. Iris is one of these women, and Amanda loves her.
Aug 19, 2011
My father once said he really liked being important and hanging out with important people. I replied, “I don’t. The only thing I hate worse than kissing ass is having my ass kissed.” (My father brought out the worst in me.)
Emily Dickinson said it much better:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – Too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!-
How public – like a Frog -
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog.
click
I can’t stand show offs. Raconteurs annoy me. Some men in my family indulge in monologues – I once clocked my father at 32 minutes without a break. In law and academia people tend to hold forth. When you combine these into a law professor, watch out! I worked 23 years at a law school; I was surrounded by bloviators.
I have always felt my opinion is not called for on every subject. Better to hold your tongue and be thought a fool than speak your mind and confirm it. If you use your ears more than your mouth, you learn a lot. My mother taught, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” But underneath this quiet, discreet exterior is the little girl saying, ‘Look at me, look at me.’ Deeper down is my yearning for everyone to like me, and my astonishment when someone doesn’t. And surrounding it all is a completely distorted self-image.
For instance, I consider myself tactful and well-behaved. My friends are astonished when I reveal that. Apparently what I am is extremely blunt. It’s true I sometimes say what no one else will, but I never get credit for all the times I hold my tongue.
When I worked at the law school, I often gave speeches at conferences or to community groups. I enjoyed giving the speeches, a nice mix of information and advocacy. I was usually preaching to the choir, and I liked the audiences’ responsiveness, the admiring cluster of people coming up afterwards to agree with me. After the talk, though, when I was alone, I quickly descended into self-loathing. What a know-it-all. Who gives a shit what I think.
When I discussed this with my sister Luli, she sent me a cartoon captioned, “Lizzy receives the Nobel Prize for peace, literature, and general wonderfulness.” It was a picture of me with a brown paper bag over my head, muttering, “Pond scum, I’m pond scum.” As you can see, she has a sharp wit, a skilled pencil, and an exaggerated view of the marvelousness of me.
click click
So why would I decide to write a blog, to throw my opinions out into the world for anyone to read? Clearly, Ms Lookatme is in charge. But more than that, with the complexities of raising Amanda, the writer I had struggled to create after retirement was expiring. She needed time and attention. Like Tinkerbell, she needed to hear me say, “I believe in you.”
It’s been well over a year since Amanda came to live with us, but I’m not yet ready to pick up my novel. This blog helps me keep the writing going as I adjust to motherhood. And I’m finding unexpected advantages in writing it.
Like many writers, I struggle for self-discipline. If you’re a teacher, you have to show up every day, ready or not. If you’re a baker, you have to provide the daily bread. A mother’s work stands in front of her, insistent, a dozen times a day. But the world is not waiting for my writing. No eager audience is clamoring to hear from me. I’m the only one who cares whether I do it or not.
When I was working on novels, I could always find an excuse not to write. A novel takes at least a year just for the first draft. What does it matter if I skip a few days? I can always justify it with the idea that the whole thing is simmering inside. But if I’m writing mini-essays, I can’t pretend I have weeks for them. They’re not worth weeks. And they’re a manageable size. I can dump all my thoughts on the page in a morning or two, and then tidy them up.
Habit is taking over; each day I write makes it easier the next. I remember reading an essay years ago in which a writer said that every day you don’t write, you’re not a writer. This strikes me as both neurotic and male. Every woman writer knows that family will interfere. So I’m pleased to be writing almost every day.
And of course there is the practice – whatever you write, you are practicing your skills – the right word, rhythm, fluency of thought, editing. The passive voice, present participles, cliches all raise red flags. Oops, there’s one now.
I didn’t anticipate how much I would learn about myself. In my diary, my counselor and comfort in the darkest times, I usually simply ramble until I understand what’s troubling me. In these mini-essays I choose a subject and find out what I think about it.
I’ve written and edited seven of these, and have a dozen topics waiting. I wanted to have a store of them, to avoid the paralysis that might come if I faced a deadline and an empty page. (I’ve never been a journalist.) I also wanted an assignment to keep me occupied during our extended stay in South Africa. Six weeks is too long to be a tourist, too short to make a life.
The private me is still uncomfortable with the whole idea. Silence creates a peculiar power, a promise of deep water beneath the surface. Maybe the voice of the duckweed is a shrill quack, and underneath is just muck. But even Emily Dickinson wrote her letter to the world. Do you suppose she would have pulled her poems out of the drawer and put them on the Internet?
Frog in duckweed. Copyright 2000 Narciso Jaramillo, used by permission. click
Aug 17, 2011
Foster mom:squirrel monkey and night monkey
I have been many kinds of mother – a single mother, raising my son from scratch, a single foster mother for a daughter and a son, a step-mother. Now I am 64, and with my husband I am raising my eight-year old granddaughter, Amanda. Click here
I was a lawyer for 28 years, always focused on poverty. I still am. It’s not just a job; it’s a chronic condition. I retired to write, and wrote three novels. I helped start the HOME Van and nine years later we’re still going strong, carrying food and friendship to the people who live in the woods. Click here
When grandparents raise grandchildren there is usually a sad story behind it, but I’m not going to tell it. That one belongs to my daughter and granddaughter. Instead I’ll write about my friends and family, past and present. I’ll write about an old woman raising a young child, a feminist struggling with traditional women’s roles, a writer who is suddenly a mother again. It all sounds terribly serious, but everything has its lighter side. I'll try to keep my professorial self under control.
When my son was growing up, I felt inadequate as a mother, and overwhelmed doing it alone. In the1968 edition Dr. Spock included single mothers and “working” mothers in his chapter on special problems. I was both. I used to read that passage to my family law students to show them how dramatically times had changed. Yet people still speak of “working mothers,” a ridiculous phrase that implies mothering is not work.
Is motherhood work? Vandmoderen by Kai Nielsen
Now, for the first time, I have a partner, and I can do the job thoroughly. I take Amanda to soccer and gymnastics and therapy. I meet with her teacher, volunteer at the school, keep her at home when she’s sick. I see that she tidies her room and brushes her teeth.
I don’t feel inadequate. But like any mother I come to the end of a busy day and can't understand what I did with my time. Like any writer I struggle for discipline and focus, idle time to let my thoughts wander, work time to put the writing front and center. Like any stay-at-home wife I negotiate jobs with my husband, and wonder if he understands what I do all day.
When Amanda came to live with us I put my fourth novel aside. I’m not ready to pick it up yet; it’s simmering on the back of the stove. Instead, now that she is settled and happy, no longer bouncing off and knocking down walls, I will write these mini-essays, send them out in my blog, and hope you will read and respond.
