Emerging Through Silk and Ceilings

What I’ve learned about birth I’ve learned from opening to the genetic encoding of our species… by that I mean, Kitty Cooper and I were allowed to explore, from ages six to eight, as some lucky kids are, in the safety, but not overly supervised safety, of our own homes, and to “create” our own birth scenarios complete with dolls, blankets and leotards.

Kitty and I gave birth to anything and everything that would fit through our leotards: oranges, dolls, pillows… we may not have understood all the mechanics of it, but we got the sound-effects down real good… moaning and grunting and making other such appropriate accompaniment for our squatting, or supine with legs held high, or on all-fours approach to birth enactment. 

The collective memory of our species is embedded in our DNA. There is a biological imperative which informs our actions when we step out of the way and let it move through us. This I believe with all my heart.

One night, when my kids were six and ten years of age, I heard a munching in the kitchen. We were the designated family that Spring Break week for the class science project. 

Bombyx mori moths, a.k.a. “silk worms” can go through fists full of mulberry leaves in an evening. And they’re real loud chewers! My girls and I got good at sighting their preferred (and only?) food on walks in our neighborhood and even when driving elsewhere in the city. We took the care and feeding of these silkworms very seriously. It had to be fruitless mulberry leaves and they had to be fresh. What if they/we ran out in the middle of the night? Not so easy to maraud a neighbor’s tree at midnight as it was for my beloved to fetch me pickles and ice cream from the all night drug store when I was pregnant… though I never did crave the traditional… I was way into celery of all things! Gotta have crunch!

 Anyway, I was watching the silkworms devour leaf after leaf and growing before my eyes from slender pinky finger dimension white eating machines to fat as my thumb girth in short order. 

Their emergence from their cocoons a few weeks later was heralded by a turning brown at one end of the white gauze-like enclosure. The caterpillars-turned-moths secrete an acid which burns a hole in one end of the womb/tomb of their metamorphosis. How ever did silk-road countries discover that they could stop the burning and harvest the gossamer filaments? The way they do it necessitates the snuffing of the already short lives of the bombyx mori moths.  They’re boiled alive, then the filaments are carefully un-spun to be used by humans in the finest rainments. Only a few moths are allowed to live in order to reproduce. Upon emergence, the female moths’ job is to get fertilized and to lay her eggs. 

As a nursery school teacher, I learned the folk wisdom passed on to me by my predecessors that strips of blue construction paper, three by twelve inches or so, made the best target for their egg-laying apparatus. And they lined up their matte-grey colored eggs like dot candy on those long white papers which we used to purchase at the penny candy store. 

You keep all the egg lined strips in a coffee can at the back of the fridge until the mulberries are in full leaf (about March in Los Angeles). Then the poor moths flop around the box which has been their entire universe from hatching to laying (or fertilizing – let’s not forget it still takes two to tango – even when flight has been bred out of you) until the “lucky” ones – males and females - die. Then you take the whole mess of spent moths and degraded greens to the compost minus the delicate silk sephulcurs which you ooh and aah over for at least a week marveling with the children at the miracle of life and the many and varied forms it takes.

From the silk worms I learn: Birth is messy and it requires death: Death of the maiden who becomes mother; death of a boy to become a man (though this seems optional in our current culture); death of spermatozoa (Off with his head!) and ovum (She’s blasted apart!)– each of which lose their individuality - merging to become the blastocyst.

Emergence is ‘smack dab in the middle’ of the crossroads. Hecate, goddess of same is there to guide and guard young mothers in their transition from Maiden to Mother. Invoking her is prudent.

I long to be as straight-forwardly useful to my genetic lineage as those moths were. Keep going… make something of yourself – even if it’s only a copy of yourself… a flightless moth that gives beauty to a world which is as starved for beauty as a bolemic beggar at a groaning board.

Moreover, I long to recover my ability to fly and to teach my offspring how to accomplish that defiance of gravity as well. Here we morph into the familiar diatribe against the status quo for women. I loved Hillary Clinton’s unity speech on conceding defeat to Barak Obama in 2008. She said, “We may not have broken the glass ceiling, but we put 18 million cracks in it!” 

Women have been held down and back and every which way a body could be held and still live (though some of our sisters didn’t live) until one of us bursts up and out and soars a bit ‘til she’s shot down again. But her striving has opened the prisons and possibilities for many of us; giving us permission to fly as high as ever our wings can take us.

Out on a limb of a Fruitless Mulberry Tree, here, but I hope Los Angeles soon has a woman mayor! May she SOAR!

The Perfect Date

Isn't it Romantic?

My beloved and I went out on a super date last Tuesday. It was discount day for seniors at Ross Dress for Less. We looked at shoes. Not finding Crocs or anything else useful in the shoe department, we wandered on. I left him in one section while I went searching for black jeans to replace my holey ones. I’ve been wearing the same jeans to camp for more than 13 years. They look overly well-used - even for camp.

Both Camp Ronald McDonald and The painted Turtle camp, where we both volunteer, (he - much more often than I), have extensive selections of dress-up clothes for use by campers, their families and counselors who wish to transform themselves for the dance, stage night, a camp-fire skit, or just because. There are dresses and suits and velvet jackets, hats of every kind, sashes and trousers and shoes, oh, my!

One of my beloved’s uses for dress-up is as a prize. 

“Hey Cabin Ten! If you can beat me in this word game, I’ll come to breakfast tomorrow all dressed up.”

You’ve got to know... the kids always win. Funny how that works.

For this story, you must know also that my husband has some hygiene issues. He keeps a bottle of hand-gel at the ready on his belt-loop. He prefers to use the toilet at home to any public restroom. He disdains second hand shops and isn’t even keen on using the familiar and plentiful dress-up clothes array at either camp - simply because other people have used them!

When we met at the cash register, I showed him mine and he showed me his find: a lovely short-sleeved, green and black, striped, ankle-length dress! Quite the find!

We were pleased with our purchases and high-tailed it to Sharkey’s for a little dinner.

Quite the date for us!

And... Guess what he wore to breakfast at camp this morning!? 

And what a lovely frock it is!

Knuckles

Sixty Minutes News Program ran a story Sunday night about R. A. Dickey, perfecter of the knuckle ball and winner of the Cy Young Award for outstanding pitcher of 2013. 

I was fascinated by two facts which emerged during Lesley Stahl’s interview of Mr. Dickey: 1) He was abused as a child of eight and kept all that history inside for twenty four years, and 2) It was in healing from those events from his childhood that he found a way to believe in himself again. 

He was a good pitcher, but he had some missteps. His career had begun to flounder. During one game, he gave up six home runs in 2.3 innings. He slipped into a depression and began acting out with an affair while his wife was pregnant. He came very close to taking his own life - once intentionally with carbon monoxide poisoning in his car, and once unintentionally - during a stupid “I’ll show the world” attempt to swim across the Missouri River. His muscles gave up. His head went under. He thought about all the people he’d hurt and disappointed. Maybe he thought about the events of his childhood and the shame which prevented him from speaking about it. He gave up. 

When he surrendered, his feet hit bottom - the literal bottom of the river, which gave him enough adrenalin to swim up to the surface. He was rescued by a friend and team mate. Once out of the water, he wanted very much to live. He sought therapy and after about a year and a half, finally told the therapist of his ordeals at the hands of a female baby sitter and, later during his eighth year, with a male stranger who raped him.

Orel Hershiser was the one who counseled Dickey to take up the knuckle ball to offer some surprise pitches and to redeem his career. There was no one to teach him how to do it, so he taught himself how to send this non-spinning, unpredictable ball over the plate. Surprise should be his middle name. No one can hit his knuckle balls.

It is unusual for a baseball player to re-start his career at the ripe age of thirty seven, but that’s just what R. A. Dickey did. He maintains that the knuckle ball is a metaphor for his life: It has ups and downs. Maybe some secrets too. You just can’t tell if it will do what you intend it to do. While he’s pitching, he has to surrender. There’s some amount of magic to the process, or at least suspension of disbelief.

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In the 1980’s a dear friend who knows something of my history with early childhood sexual abuse clipped a newspaper article for me about how kids, who are abused early in life, seem to endure sexual exploitation later in life as well - as if the earlier abuses might implant a magnet to attract similar events later. My belief is that the body is always going toward health. When there’s unresolved trauma, we do attract whatever raw materials may be useful for our healing - even if it looks cr-a-a-a-a-zy from the outside, there’s a wisdom to it. Recapitulations are common among trauma survivors.

Trauma theory suggests that when a boundary is breached - whether it’s through abuse, car accident, fall or surgery - without repair, that gap in our energetic boundary leaves us vulnerable to subsequent repetitions of similar impacts. Perhaps, it’s because we don’t see it coming because we can’t bear to look in that direction whence the trouble arose, or perhaps it’s because we’re attending ceaselessly (hyper-vigilance) to that direction and tune out the other 359 degrees of perception, so we get clobbered. Either way, we’re screwed until we heal the breach in our boundary. Mercifully, we’re hard-wired to heal.

My friend’s kindness in giving me the article touched me deeply. I felt heard and understood. Abuse, incest, and rape generally are not topics for polite conversation. Children who grow up in alcoholic homes learn early the importance of secrecy. Mr. Dickey’s mother was alcoholic. So was my dad. 

For him, healing and spilling the beans about his early years was spurred by the need to get his career back on track. He’s convinced that the knuckle ball would not have been mastered without the progress he was making in the therapeutic container he found for himself. 

My forays into healing were not nearly so dramatic, but rather a gradual building of safety through my marriage, mothering and career. I realized that I HAD to be healthy and sane because I was the hub of several wheels. If I was off center, the cart would fall over. How fortunate I am to have the support to continue the process of healing all these years.

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The last tie-in that’s on my mind this week has to do with the immediacy of tweets, face book updates and smart-phone inter-connectivity and how damaging some news can be to vulnerable populations.

When R.A. Dickey was abused in 1977, there were no instagrams sent by his conquerors/perpetrators. My childhood abuse was acted out in complete privacy in the “safety” of my own home. When I was gang-raped at eighteen, the event was not broadcast on instant media. The shame I felt was severe enough that I didn’t speak of that event for a full decade. I don’t think I could have survived the humiliation had the perpetrators taken photos and put them on billboards around the city. 

Saturday’s L.A. Times’ LATEXTRA Section shows Audrie Pott who committed suicide after photos of her, taken and posted by one of the three boys alleged to have sexually assaulted her, were viewed by her peers. The fifteen year old girl posted on her Face Book account that, “The whole school knows. My life is like ruined now.” A week after that, she killed herself.

Cyberbullying makes very public the humiliation that is barely survivable when it is private. Cyberbullying is becoming epidemic. 

Thank you, R.A. Dickey for your part in bringing to the public conversation the devastation that early assaults wreak on children. Thank you, Audrie Pott for your sacrifice to clarify that assault compounded by public humiliation is too much for any human to survive. Both date rape and cyberbullying must be stopped. Maybe a knuckle sandwiches should be on the menu for would-be sexual predators.

With Listening Eyes

Everyone and every creature has a story. I don’t know Paul’s, but since my friend Mbali introduced me to him a year or so ago, I chat with him whenever we chance to meet when we are out walking our separate ways - he with his two small dogs, and I from errands on the boulevard.

Parts of his story I have pieced together include: 1) Paul is not tied to a 9-5 job; 2) he’s from Jamaica (well, listening ears tell me that); and 3) he has nursed more than a few critters back to health - one being a three-legged Chihuahua several months back.

Today, on my return from the Farmer’s Market, I am walking through the park as usual, and here is Paul and his two off-leash Chihuahuas. “La La” and “Charlie” are sniffing under a picnic bench and Paul draws my attention to a squirrel which just doesn’t look right. You know how you can tell when a creature is “off” in some way; in pain or off balance? This little guy is sitting at the base of a tall sycamore, has a swollen left front paw and there is a crease - not a bloody wound, but a crease on its same side rear haunch.

The story my eyes hear is that this rodent has recently met with a larger predator - perhaps a coyote or cat, or maybe of the four-wheeled variety. From my market bag, I pull out some unsalted peanuts in the shell. The squirrels in this park are very docile and tame. Normally, they approach people boldly to ask for food. They are seemingly  unafraid of humans. “Rodent X”, at first, appears to be fearless as Paul approaches with peanuts in hand. Unfortunately, La La and Charlie smell competition and slide adeptly along their jealous streak - chasing Rodent X up the nearest tree.

Our eyes discern that the squirrel’s Fight/Flight responses are still intact. Up he scuttles, slowly and in a slightly lop-sided manner, but UP nonetheless. He is out of harm’s way. Paul gently scolds his pups. Compassion oozes out of him. His grey blue eyes cloud over and his coffee colored brow furrows with concern for the hurt one. My listening eyes see that, among other things, we have freckles in common.

As I must get home in time for an appointment, I don’t hang around long enough to see whether or not Paul has success giving away the nuts to the hurt one, but out of the corner of my eye, I observe three other very fat squirrels closing in on Paul, his dogs and the peanuts as I cross the grass to the nearby park exit. Hmmm... who is predator and who is prey in this scenario? My listening eyes tell me Paul has been on the receiving side of hurt before, and that therein may lie the source of his great compassion.

A few steps beyond the picnic bench, I see a clump of squirrel fur that would fit precisely in that crease on little Rodent X’s back leg. 

As it does with a puzzle, my mind chews on the clues. What can have happened here? What’s the story? What’s Paul’s story?

When next I write to Mbali, who has moved back to South Africa, I’ll ask her about Paul. Last time he and I met, he asked me to say his “hello” to her. The next time I see Paul, I’ll ask him about the squirrel and also about the three-legged dog. I want to know “The Rest of the Story” - to quote another Paul... Paul Harvey of decades long radio fame.