Driving in the Dark

Several years ago, the Matron found herself doing a lot of late night driving. She was teaching a night class way out in the 'burbs. The class ended at 9:45 pm, just in time for her to make the forty minute drive to downtown Minneapolis to retrieve then 8 or 9 year old Scarlett from her stint at The Guthrie. Little did the Matron know that this was just the first of many late night runs she would be making to pick up her stage-minded daughter.

But the gift in the driving?

The Matron discovered The Story, American Public Media's late night devotion to the drama of real, non-celebrity lives. Each night during that drive to The Guthrie, the Matron was transformed. Hurtling through the darkness, in the midst of headlights and blinking city skies, a stranger shared his or her story -- heartache, surprise, tragedy, success, joy and pain. It was a strangely intimate experience, hearing these people pour out their hearts, yet also completely solitary. Just her, the van, the voice, the black outside her windows.

Yesterday, the Matron listened again as she drove home, late (no theater this time because Stagedoor Manor is just three days away and that's another blog post).

Her night class had been long and demanding, and had included the most cherubic, chunkiest, adorable five month old baby in the history of babies -- and she (the baby) wasn't even the Matron's!

You see, one of her students is a new mom, struggling with this little dumpling who needs to nurse every twenty-five seconds. The new mom's night class --the one the Matron teaches -- is three and a half hours long, three nights a week. The new father? Tearing out his hair and texting his wife throughout his own three and a half hours of torment, three nights a week.

Student: "This is so hard! She never sleeps! I'm trying to work and go to school, take care of my in-laws and I can't even go to the bathroom. My poor husband can't do anything to calm her. I don't know if I can finish this class -- I'm really sorry."

Let's just add that this student is an unusual person, someone who has endured hardships most of us cannot imagine (and is not quick to share these, but sometimes the teachers get a view) and has left her entire family half a world away so she could live in safety. This brave woman, felled by a five month old. This, the Matron could not stand.

Matron: "You can bring the baby to class if you need to."

Student (shocked): "Really?"

Matron: "Really."

She didn't. Until the next to the last day of class when her husband's psyche needed some rest and the baby needed her Mama. So last night, the Matron got to hold, cuddle and play with the beautiful K -- while her Mama worked on her papers. It was fun to realize one can lecture while holding a baby.

The entire class went "AAAH" and "OOooo" more than once.

Then, on the way home, tuning into The Story, she was treated to this: The Longest Shortest Time.

Her landing in the past was swift and bittersweet, remembering her firstborn and his demands --and how she struggled to meet them, railing against all she lost: freedom to move, an intellectual life, quiet evenings with her husband, a good book in a cafe. As a new mother, the Matron felt she had been given a life sentence of constant demand, need and feed.

Now of course, she realizes she had been given a life.

She finished the drive home, thinking of that baby and her own firstborn, far away in Chicago (summer camp -- debate institute) and a good foot taller than his mother. He's planning for college with an eagerness that doesn't escape anyone in the house.

And the sky drifted clouds and darkness as the voices of those new mothers traveled with her, women in a different place on the same journey, a journey that seems forever and an instant.

The fire fly lives we lead. Bright, rapid -- short.

Oh, That Matronly Eye

Today, the Matron was sitting in a community meeting, innocently minding her own business . . . well, not really. She was at a neighborhood meeting, after all, which means she was attending to the entire NEIGHBORHOOD'S business and somehow got a gold star for her control freak ways.

But that's another blog post.

At said meeting, a particular disturbing sight caught her delicate eye. Across the room sat a man -- sort of pudgy, late forties she guessed, dressed in a casual button down short-sleeve shirt and khaki shorts. Nothing too alarming, right? But this casual button down short-sleeve shirt was unbuttoned halfway down its owner's chest. The shirt fell open, to the breast bone. The owner of the offending attire was wearing a crisp white t-shirt underneath the unbuttoned, button-down short-sleeve shirt which was almost worse than a bare hairy chest. Worse because the gaping neckline (well, nipple line) screamed "trying to be HOT even though I'm nearly 50" and the white t-shirt underneath said "I am SO not hot and I'm nearly 50."

The mid-calf white athletic socks and green Crocs completed that sentence.

This garb unduly bothered the Matron. Instead of neighborhood concerns--whose trash was piling up, what to do for National Night Out, why a stop sign wasn't approved, etc. -- she fretted about her exposure to such a frightful outfit. Damage, being done! What if the image is permanently imprinted in her brain?!

Poor Matron!

Because then she remembered that earlier that day, she ran into a friend -- a woman in her fifties -- who spent actual money (the kind that goes into a bank and can pay the mortgage) to have tiny teeny little braids woven into the side of her otherwise long straight hair--just like her teenage daughter. That's right: matching mother/daughter braids, with feathers in them.

This sent the poor fraught Matronly psyche hurtling back through time when her friends wore smocks -- one cannot rightfully call these creations dresses -- that matched their small daughters'. Grown women in apple green dresses with full skirts and pink etching on sleeves and scooped necks: just like their four -year olds!

Worse, somehow it was acceptable to be seen like this in public.

What about the man and woman she saw recently, walking side by side down an otherwise unobtrusive city street. The man wore a t-shirt with a big thumb pointing toward his female companion: "She's the Boss."

Hers? "Dealing in Dollars and Sex."

This nearly did the Matron in. Until she remembered the toddler with the mohawk. It was pink and stood about a foot off the little boy's head. The Matron's own far more perfect children didn't even have sufficient follicles to launch such head-gear at two, let alone the gumption to pull off pink.

At least the toddler wasn't wearing Crocs. If memory served, he had a runny nose, though, probably a result of the terrible tension caused by wearing one's hair straight up in spikes before you're old enough to say the word spike.

The images were bright, painful and unrelenting. Yours truly could simply not focus on whether or not the elm tree on the corner of 3rd street and Bates had succumbed to or conquered Dutch Elm Disease because she was awash in a psychological nightmare of polyester, large lace collars on grown women and butt cracks fighting jeans for air space. Things took a turn for the worse: the entire decade of the eighties descended. Growing Pains! Full House!

Gasping, she searched the room for relief. Not a Vogue in sight. The only magazine visible was a weathered copy of Redbook.

Of course, she survived to tell the tale. Otherwise she wouldn't be safely sitting here -- in the spare, well-balanced and carefully coordinated comfort of her office -- typing this late night blog post.

Wearing skinny jeans, a tank top without words or a four-year old matching side-kick and a smug little smile -- that disappeared when her husband walked in and said "why is your shirt on inside out?"

Of course, that was what she wore to the meeting.

She of Delicate Nature and Fierce Feminism

Now, it appears that SlutWalks are all the rage.

The Matron knows that some of her readers may not be up to speed with this latest feminist trend (mass demonstrations involving scanty dress). Go ahead and google "SlutWalk." She knows that there are dishes waiting, a work memo to write, and children who need baths or sedatives. Set your troubles aside, friends, and familiarize yourselves with the SlutWalk.

Now, these demonstrations are a reclamation of sorts. Women are attempting to 'take back' or 'reclaim' the word 'slut,' just as some feminists have done for the 'c' word and African Americans for the N-word. There is no end to debate about people without a history of traditional power reclaiming language once used to oppress and demean them.

The Matron cannot address the use of the 'n' word. She is of the school that, as a white person, this is a word she will never utter. As for the 'c' word, yours truly was raised in a household where the body was to be hidden as much as possible and any bodily functions? Denied. If there was a part that couldn't been seen through a Communion Viel, well, God didn't make that body part. Satan did. So there goes her ability to reclaim the 'c' word. Thanks, Mom.

But this new venture -- not only reclaiming language -- but embodying language and acting it out, holds new philosophical questions that the 'n' and 'c' words don't. You can't change the color of your skin or your female anatomy, but you can change your clothing. But that's precisely the point for the feminists involved in the SlutWalks. This is a choice. As one protester put it, she should be able to skip the underwear while wearing a skirt or sport a thong in public and not get raped.

Naturally, the Matron would agree with her on all points, wishing she herself were young and svelte enough to pull off a public thong, even.

Now, the Matron has enough semiotics bubbling about in her to understand that a word (any word, but let's say the 'n' word or the 'c' word or the other word in question) signifies a meaning. The precise meaning is in the hands of the person receiving the word. A feminist hears 'slut' and she emancipation rings through her ears; a sexist hears the word and a vision of moral collapse comes to mind.

Keeping the comparison going (makes you want to take that sedative yourself instead of giving it to the five year old, hmmm?), she wonders what would happen if thousands of people turned out to embody -- to create street theater about -- the 'n' and 'c' words. Just how would that scene play out? What would dressing, acting and parading about as embodying those words mean? Is it possible?

It's one thing to reclaim language but quite another to purposefully create one's self in an image that already exists in our culture -- a negative, even dangerous image. Yes, the negativity and danger are the very things that our feminists sisters are challenging -- laughing at, even.

"You can't get me!"

Ah, but they can.

Rape, isn't about clothing. Rape is about power, humiliation, violence and control. Male, female, straight or gay, we are each potential victims of sexual abuse. Nuns get raped. So do small boys.

So . . . perhaps she's still swamped in her preadolescent psyche where the body wasn't to be stripped and teased and presented. But, still. Embodying the very stereotype where the culture historically places its eyes on rape only keeps those eyes directed on the slut, the whore, the vamp. The Matron thinks that feminism shouldn't hone in with laser sharp focus precisely where our eyes have gone before, but in the dark areas of our psyches, homes and streets where the real problem -- and victims -- live.

Written in a record 15 minutes but she thinks the reasoning reflects years of wisdom. Maybe.

The Same Old Story

When the Matron was but a Wee Miss, say seven or eight, she remembers her mother sighing over Wee Miss's uneaten dinner (which would be from McDonald's or a box, but that's another story).

Mother: "When I was little, my parents always told me that children were starving in China and I should eat my dinner. What good did my food do for starving children in China? But you should eat your dinner. Someone is starving somewhere."

So Wee Miss understood that somehow, another child's starvation was related to her own untouched french fries.

Throughout her childhood, she remembers seeing pictures of hollow-eyed children in magazines and on television, toddlers with huge-heads, vacant faces, and stick limbs. They were always sitting in dirt.

Wee Miss contemplated these images and contrasted them to her own existence. You see, Wee Miss wanted Frances McGuire's life. Frances McGuire lived in a palatial estate (in Wee Miss's estimation). Frances McGuire had her own room and it was ENTIRELY IN PINK. And she had, dream of all dreams, a canopy bed. Her mother baked brownies in a spotless kitchen where all the plates had pretty, matching colors and designs. The bathroom towels were visibly fluffy and Frances McGuire herself wore crisp pretty dresses to school -- it seemed like a new one appeared every week -- and her hair was braided or curled or otherwise styled into something that spoke to Wee Miss about a mama behind a brush, a big house and happiness.

Wee Miss's own home and maternal experience paled in comparison. Her own clothes came from garage sales and there was never any money, let alone time, for good smells wafting out of the oven. The kitchen was shiny or spotless or even a kitchen, but a nook off of the single room serving as both eating and living space.

These circumstances -- her own misfortune and yearning in comparison to Frances and her own vast good fortune compared to the starving children in countries far away -- confused Wee Miss. Was she the luckiest little girl alive or the girl who lived a life far away from privilege?

Funny how some things never change.

As of late, the Matron has been yearning for what she doesn't have: financial security, extra money in the bank, a boundless income. She'd love to say with assurance to her children -- yes! Be smart enough and you can go to Harvard or Yale or any college of your dreams and abilities! She's love to say, yes! Let's tour Scotland and Italy and China and Thailand before it's too late.

Yes.

But today, while driving to the moderate-income job she's lucky to have, the Matron hit the tail end of a National Public Radio piece on Rupert Murdoch, his riches, fame and current fall. This is a story she's been hearing all week -- his thousands of employees, millions of dollars, infinity of influence and prestige. She supposes she can google and find out how many houses he owns.

Then, she heard the story that isn't this week's news, but the eternal story, the story that simply recycles itself generation after generation after generation: children are dying of starvation and disease. This isn't the story Americans are fed at their own dinner tables, whether those tables are full of fast food or organic greens. Exciting news is the unanticipated suffering of the Rupert Murdochs of the world. Endless news is the enduring, age-old suffering of people who have no choice.

And so . . . the Matron continues to wonder. How does this all relate to her own wealth, ambitions, shortcomings and excesses. How is it possible to have so much and always want more?

Intention

Today, the Matron attended an evening meeting which she was under NO particular obligation to attend and which mainly served to fuel a certain smugness that comes from being a good citizen.

Said smugness and self-satisfaction quickly dissipated when she returned to her van to find a ticket for $111!!! That's a whole lotta change, folks! Aghast (when was the last time you were aghast?), she scanned the ticket for cause: expired tabs on the license plates.

What?

Now the Matron and dear husband are diligent about these matter. Still, she scooted down to those plates only to see that someone had scraped off her 2012 tabs! Victim! So much for good citizenship.

Instead of wallowing, the Matron vowed to NOT let this unpleasant incident --and the required follow-up with traffic court or whatever government entity could prove that she'd paid her dues -- bring her down. No! She would continue on as the good citizen.

Even better! She would be spiritual, buoyant, ethereal, even.

In that spirit, she ran some errands before work. Because Minnesota is currently in the midst of a heat wave, those errands were basically a lesson in sweat (with a heat index of about 118 not that she's keep track). Soaked in sweat, yours truly was not unhappy to see the sky darken. A thunderstorm in the making!

Still ethereal and all things peace, the sudden downpour --as in flash flood levels of rain -- out of the blue didn't bother her. No matter that she was in her work clothes, standing outside of a library with her van and UMBRELLA (conveniently in the trunk) two blocks away. No! No matter. She would simply get wet and dry off before the job began.

So she darted and slipped through the torrent. Thoroughly soaked, and somewhat less sanguine, she couldn't find the right button to unlock the car.

Click, click, click.

Matron: " < Insert profanity of your choice >"

The car finally open, she wrestled with the trunk. Rain continued. Now her underwear was soaked and her shoes probably ruined. The damn trunk finally opened. She grabbed the umbrella (why, she wonders in retrospect when she could have just jumped in the car) but the umbrella handle looped into the trunk and got stuck!

Profanity of your choice, uttered the Matron.

After some pouring, she yanked the umbrella out -- now the wind was whipping at about 50 miles an hour, adding an interesting aesthetic twist to the torrential rain -- only to find that the trunk was now broken and would not shut.

Rain poured in that, too. Which also meant she couldn't drive.

Giving up, she decided to dash into a nearby coffee shop to dry off and have some tea instead of sitting in the car while waiting for the rain to stop.

Dash.

And . . . her purse handle broke, sending the purse and its contents all across the street. In the rain and wind, while her open, broken trunk looked at her longingly and the clock said ten minutes before she was due at work and now her internal organs were wet, never mind the underwear.

Ethereal, indeed.

The Nest, Emptying

Way back when, the organizers of the Matron's 20th High School Reunion decided to bestow what yours truly felt was a rather dubious honor: the youngest grandparents in the room!

Now, when the Matron attended said reunion, she was 37 years old with a four year old, a two year old and a dim idea of a third, someday. She remembers accompanying her polite clap with a grimace when the 'youngest' grandparents (at 38 with five year old twin grandchildren) accepted their award.

She wasn't sure for whom (note the appropriate use of preposition) she was grimacing, herself or the grandparents.

The grimace today?

Certainly, for her very own self!

Many, many of her friends from high school are solidly into or entering the grandparent phase. She grew up in a smallish town, where many of her former peers remained to raise their own families. Working at a college, many of her colleagues had their children young and then launched careers. Now, the Matron wishes she could say she launched her career and THEN had the babies, but she sort of dilly-dallied with the former and then found herself stuck in the midst of the latter and then launched that career.

A late bloomer, all around.

Today, the Matron realized that she will be 58 years old when her baby leaves the nest. That's old enough for great-grandchildren and the Smithsonian, folks.

Merrick: "How soon will you die after I grow up, Mama?"

Matron: "Many, many years."

Merrick: "Let's count!"

He wants the house.

Merrick's mcenary interests aside, today, the Matron is reflective about her stance as an 'older' parent of an 8 year old. Yes, yes, she can hear those keyboards clicking from other friends, readers and women who had babies well into their forties (actually, commonplace before the availability of birth control). But as one child, He Who Cannot Be Named (HWCBN), is away for an entire month at a prestigious (she had to throw that in) debate institute as the recipient of a national scholarship (if you can't brag on your blog what is the meaning of life?) and the middle child, dear Diva, is headed off to Stagedoor Manor for three weeks in August, the Matron and her husband are now more frequently alone with Merrick.

Merrick will be 13 when Scarlett leaves the house. He's stuck with his parents for five years.

So the Matron has a new understanding of that empty nest. The house doesn't suddenly shed itself of children. They dip their toes into the world, week by week, year by year, until they're ready to go. Sending them off into the world is a long process of love and good-bye, a process that started at birth, she supposes.

She's lucky to have this knowledge. Everything about Merrick is just a little sweeter, a little slower. Dipping his toes into independence currently means a week of day camp and helping Dad build a campfire. God-Buddha-Allah-Oprah-Universe only knows that both Merrick's parents will need more and more help with things like building campfires, hauling garbage and doing yard work as knees and backs succumb to decades of use. Such is the reality for the older parent.

Today, the nearly 13 year old daughter is preparing for her upcoming role as teenager by sleeping for 14 hours and the oldest is far away in another state.

But Merrick is nestled on the couch with two dogs by his side, a fever (poor guy!), tootsie pops, red tea, a Garfield book, and an abiding interest in guns. Sure, the other two are testing those waters, but the little guy? Firmly by her side--and he doesn't care how old she is.

As long as he gets the house someday.

The Slow Blog Summer

Indeed.

More on Monday!