My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3, #2, July 11, 1997

TAKE A GOOD LOOK

Let's take a look at the crow's feet, just look,
Sitting on the prettiest eyes
Sixty 25th of Decembers, fifty-nine 4th of Julys
Not through the age or the failure, children,
Not through the hate or despise
Take a good look at the crow's feet
Sitting on the prettiest eyes.

Beautiful South

Have you noticed that on those rare occasions when an older woman makes news, the headline of the story will read something like this: "Grandmother of 8 Rescues Drowning Man" or "Grandmother Wins Nobel Prize"? Does it matter that the first woman was a competitive swimmer in her youth, or that the second spent 40 years slaving away in the laboratory? No. Each is cast as a "grandmother," because when she gave birth, she gained a child and lost her reality.

It may be that it's hard for us to see mothers and grandmothers as real people because we know them before we are truly conscious, when we are squalling and needy and dependent, and they are always there. We know that they exist for the purpose of wiping away our tears and administering cookies and the occasional swat on the bottom. They are there to ooh and ah over OUR accomplishments, (not to have accomplishments of their own), to comfort us through OUR teenage agonies of pimples and rejection, (not to have gone through such agonies themselves), to tell us, when we have done awful things, that they love us anyway (not, God forbid, to have done awful things of their own).

Mostly, when we look at old ladies, we do not SEE them. We see instead some image made up from sitcoms and movies and real life. The church lady. The nasty meddling old woman who puts Toto in her basket and goes bicycling off (reappearing as the wicked witch of the west). June Cleaver grown gray, but still wearing a dress and high heels while she vacuums. The plump, comfortable, cookie-baking apron-wearing applier of bandages. The story-telling LAP we climbed into so often.

And we write them off, dismiss them with casual contempt. They are negligible.

But old ladies are real people, and even June Cleaver may have had moments when she thought long and hard about running away from home (had she not been made up by male writers, anyway). I give you Shirley Jackson, housewife, mother of four, a woman of stunning plainness. You would never look twice at her if you did not know her, or read her work. The Shirley Jackson in Life among the Savages and Raising Demons is just a housewife, just a mother, vastly amused by the doings of her children, a woman struggling with and losing to the appliances in her household. This must be the woman her children and husband knew.

But did they know and understand Shirley Jackson? Did they read "The Lottery" and wonder how this housewife and mother knew weakness and evil so intimately? Did it bother them that she was able to imagine that strange girl who probably didn't (or did she?) murder her whole family in We Have Always Lived in the Castle?

It's not just Shirley Jackson. All older women have secret lives, lives that are secret not because we are unwilling to tell people about them, but because they are unwilling to hear. I knew my grandmother as a rigid, proper, picky woman, who wore old lady shoes and pinned her long braided hair around her head in an oldfashioned coronet. But she was also a woman who in the early 1900's drove across the country by herself , fearing nothing except a man who might jump on her running board and climb into her car (which was why she always had a can of red pepper and a hammer in the seat beside her). She and her sister worked their way to Europe and back, giving English lessons and piano lessons while aboard the ocean liners. When her husband died in the flu epidemic of 1918, she went to work and raised three children all by herself.

My other grandmother told me stories about being a little girl in the 1880's, traveling with her family on the flatboat down the Ohio River when they moved to Indiana. During VietNam, she could never work herself into the mindless patriotic militarism she saw in so many people around her, because, as she said, "Oh, honey, I've sent men off to five different wars."

My own mother was a woman who envied Amelia Earhart, and wistfully dreamed of being a fireman, who settled for listening to the police radio and following the firetrucks, watching the firemen. She settled for being a wife and a mother of four. But she took great pleasure in making sure her daughters had a chance to live out bigger dreams than she was able to.

There is a richness to women's lives, a depth of experience that is underappreciated in a society that thrives on Arnold Schwartzenegger and Steven Spielberg. We may not be zapping the bad guys with spectacular special effects, but we have done our share of warding off darkness nevertheless. Sometimes by being there, day after day, night after night, at the bedside of a child who is fighting to stay alive. Sometimes by fighting a legal system that gives drunk drivers a gentle slap on the wrist. Sometimes by making soup by the gallon and taking it to the homeless shelter. Sometimes by working tirelessly to raise money for a friend's kidney transplant. Sometimes by taking an unloved abandoned child into our homes and hearts. Often by teaching the world to play nicely and share the toys.

It's not big drama, but it is drama nonetheless--not King Lear perhaps, (who was so grandly, masculinely stupid), but Our Town, at least. But people don't see it. They expect us to be boring. At a cocktail party when someone asks us what we do, if we say, "I'm a homemaker," it's amusing (but hurtful) to see how fast they find a reason to walk away. They're like the sweet young thing who interviewed me for a story in the campus newspaper, about my internet activities, who said, "Well, we just found out you're interesting, but...but, well, you're a librarian!" Or for that matter, an old lady--the stereotypes are pretty much the same.

I can't tell you how much I enjoy smashing the stereotypes. Every time I go shopping for CDs, I blow the mind of some young record store clerk when I walk up to the counter with a nice mixture of melodic punk, metal, and three- chord-kickass rock and roll. The one I encountered this weekend looked aghast and said, "Are you sure you want Bad Religion?" And I said, "Well, yes, I kind of like their burn-the-whole-thing-down-and-start-all-over-again attitude, especially since it's well-written." He gulped and packed up my purchases and made it clear that I should by rights be buying Lawrence Welk because I'm an old lady.

I like to shake them up, not just because I want them to know that I am not ordinary, but because I want them to know that none of us is ordinary. We may have spent our lives trying to be kind and compassionate, but we have on occasion lived with rage (and had to swallow it and smile sweetly), and with anguish, and, yes, with lust, though that may be the hardest thing of all to imagine about us.

I love that song I began this column with, not least because Paul Heaton was only in his 30's when he wrote it, and he was able to look at old ladies and actually SEE us. He looked at the crow's feet and wrinkles, and understood and itemized the little moments of anger and passion that created them. It's an extraordinary act of imagination for someone so young.

I am unwilling to be invisible, as my mother and grandmothers were. As much as any man, I want the world to know I was here--in the words of Barry Andrews, "we are the hungry ghosts crying out remember me, remember me." Not all of us are lucky enough to have the words to tell you our stories. Because I do, I can MAKE you see me. I can be real.

But I want more than that. I want all of us to have the chance to be real. I want to make you take a good look at all of us, to see the crow's feet sitting on the prettiest eyes, and know them for what they are--not the toll of gravity, but the toll of life richly lived.

The next time I see one of those "Grandmother" headlines, I may get violently ill. But I think first I'll stop by the newspaper office. What do you bet that if my son has reproduced by that point, the headline will read "Grandmother Heaves on Reporter"?

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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