For Strong Women

A strong woman is a woman who is straining
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing “Boris Godunov.”
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t
you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why aren’t you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.
A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.
A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

                  

I started working at a multi-national mutual fund company as a receptionist. The reception area had floor to ceiling windows that looked east over downtown. I wrote this letter sitting at my grandma’s kitchen table. The week before Anne had come to visit and stayed with me at my grandma’s house.

G’ma liked you quite a lot – her only negative comment was something about you not talking about your family very much. Not to bad a rating coming from G’ma.

I also introduced her to Betty. Betty was in her fifties – I had met her when I was with the Windsor Feminist Theatre. She had been one of the first female journalists in Canada and was now working as a constituency correspondent for the NDP. Unknown to me, she was dying of breast cancer, having decided to forgo treatment.

Betty likes you too. She’s got a woman in her office who she thinks is gay – she wears black turtle-necks and wide-shoulder jackets and shoes like yours. She also has hair kinda like yours. Betty knows it’s bad to try and identify by those means and I told her all about “gaydar”.

About a year and a half later during a very sad week, Steve’s mother would die suddenly of a stroke and Betty would succumb to the cancer that had grown inside her body.

This letter also mentions meeting a new friend named Lilly. Five years later I would attend the birth of her son who is now fourteen and recently friended me on facebook.

I’ve hit it off really well with a woman at work named Lilly. She is twenty-five, married to an artist and I just lent her The Handmaid’s Tale as she told me she’d been looking for it for awhile. I went to a housewarming party with her and her husband – it felt fun to be a stranger.

Living with my grandmother was one of the best experiences of my life. She died about seven years later at the age of one hundred and three. I hold dear my memories of getting to know her as an adult.

…when she laughs she looks so amazing – it makes me try to make her laugh more. Sometimes she’s so sweet it blows my mind. She told me something about mum that was neat. She said, ‘Marion was a very outspoken child and before we went visiting I would warn her not to take the floor.’ I found this interesting because I was such a shy and introverted child. It must have driven her crazy. When G’ma told me this something clicked with me – mum took a more individual form in my mind.

I never did get the courage to break up with Steve so he moved to Toronto about ten months later. It would be another four years before I would break up with him.

With love.

                  

The other enclosure is a graduation photo of me – in the robe, with the fake shelves-of-books backdrop and very high 1980s hair.

The WFT brought two community theatre goddesses to Windsor on an arts grant. One of them was a choreographer workshop woman named Leah. She was beautiful. I developed a crush on her.

Dear Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnne,

Well, I’m writing you a letter. And I want to say one thing over and over again… come back come back come back. I need you friend. Like, things are getting really neat o nifty keen around here and I would really like to share some of it with you…. it’s too much to put into words okay?  It’s like when everything starts clicking along… making sense… and coming together. You now, like life unfolding and you know it as it happens…but it’s still spontaneous…yeah, like that.

Bouncing around here, just trying to give you the highlights (it’s too hot for anything else). Here’s one: before Leah left, a closing show party, I spent some time with her that night. She gave me book titles, I gave her a poem. And when we parted company she gave me a kiss that would have made your knees weak, honey. <snip>

My bravado is an illusion. I still remember that kiss.

I have to go. Friends are jamming at a bar tonight and we have to go fill up some of the empty seats. I really hope you come visit soon… there are some really neat rituals in The Spiral Dance that I would like to do with you. And to answer a question in your letter: I think that if you visited again it may not have the same novelty of your first visit in over a year, but I think that it would still have the magic, and be just as fun. So show up.

And I miss you too.
Write to me soon.
With love.

                  

I’ve written before about how the lines between sanity and insanity are arbitrarily drawn in our society.

Is it insane to yell in the street that we have only one planet and we need to take care of it?

It would feel SO good to do that.

But I’m afraid I would be arrested or at least “taken away” by some sort of authority.

And I’d probably never get a job in this town again.

What will it take to motivate us/me to sacrifice the conformity that in turn upholds the system that is destroying our planet in the name of greed and profit?

What will it take?

                  

Dear Anne-sa-ka-ka-sa,

[We did that. She added letters to my name too.]

Here I sit in the park. Not a cloud between here and Omaha I would guess. I recognize that that lying in the grass over there is my life before your visit. Hardly worth picking up. Certainly a change of pace for Steve and I think all the heavy philosophy and intellectual blathering rubbed off on him a bit. It’s hard to pin-point but he seems more communicative and self-aware. Whatever it is (was) it’s made us closer, stronger, more in love.

<snip>

I feel really good about all the dykes in this world, and their beliefs and the fact that they, like me, are women. I am totally thrilled about you – yes Anne, about you. You seem so strong and self-perpetuating, so firm on your life path. It just makes me happy to have a friend like you… you came along and refracted me in such a way that I could really see me. “Hi,” I said. “that is me there chatting so intelligently isn’t it? Wow! Me sounding pretty well adjusted and non-conformed.” You challenge my being and it felt good to streeeetch.

<snip>

little letter drawing

You taught me new words! Homophobic and misogyny. I use them regularly in my thoughts. I want to learn these new avenues and walk along them slowly. In a way, an abstract way mind you. I wish I had never met Steve so that I could explore the lesbian culture in every way, on every level…

<snip>

As bad as it is to admit it, it makes me feel reassured that you think Steve’s alright. He liked (liked? is she dead?) likes you a lot too.

This letter is hard to read for so many reasons. The last bit freaked me out when I first went through the letters. Then I remembered how it was funny to say things about people being suddenly dead. I was 24. In the next five years my grandmother and both of Steve’s parents would die.

Typing the words from this letter here I feel again how hard I was trying to be sure about what I was unsure of. I also feel that longing for satisfying connection Anne fulfilled. With that longing temporarily sated I think Steve seemed “more communicative and self-aware.” I was really talking about myself though, wasn’t I?

With love.

                  

Ereshkigal Mesopotamian 4500 BC

My reading took me into Jungian Psychology and feminine archetypes. Sylvia Brinton Perera’s Descent to the Goddess (1981) still sits on my shelf all these years later. One of the thinnest books I own yet one that profoundly changed the way I related to myself, and to this world, as a woman.

In Descent Perera demonstrates a cyclic opportunity for psycho-spiritual growth she believes inherent in women. Perera writes that “daughters of the animus and the patriarchy…do not have an adequate sense of our own ground nor connection to our own embodied strength and needs adequate to provide us with a resilient feminine, balanced yin-yang, processual ego.”

Using the ancient myth of Innana’s descent to the underworld ruled by Ereshkigal: Queen of the Great Below, Perera opens a path to “shedding the identifications with and the defenses against the animus, introverting to initially humiliating, but ultimately safer, primal levels.” And, once there, the opportunity to “learn to survive in a different way.”

"Ereshkigal" TakaraJimasha Inc 2009 (used without permission)

Descent was written for Analysts so Perera addresses how to be with clients once they arrive in the underworld: “…working on the body-mind level where there is as yet no image in the other’s awareness and were instinct and sensory perception begin to coalesce…on this magic and matriarchal level the elements of ritual are potent and need to respected, even encouraged.”

When I started to practice magic under the new moon it was not love spells that I conjured. It was healing. I summoned myself to pass through the seven gates and meet with Ereshkigal.

                  

In 1989-91, I participated in a forum theatre project with Windsor Feminist Theatre that transformed me. As a group, the members of the company collaborated in a creative process of expressing where we were located in terms of oppression. Anne had taught me about misogyny and homophobia but it wasn’t until we produced our play that I woke up to  the experience of being silenced, stereotyped and marginalized. One of the worst things about oppression is how it can feel normal.

Our short play consisted of three stories captured and shaped from our collective process. One was of a woman who worked in a factory assembling products on a table that was too low and hurt her back. After the actor tried to get the factory foreman to do something about the table, members of the audience were invited overcome his dismissive, patronizing and bullying response to his employee’s problem. Some could, some couldn’t.

On the first night we performed for only women but on the second night we invited men to join the audience. A man was there that was known to us, at least a couple of us had been his lover. He became aggressive during the group discussion and challenged the value of feminism. He interrupted others and made sexist statements. At the same time he remained seemingly polite and respectful, operating within the confines of social acceptability. No one tried to stop him or speak to his behaviour.

Afterwords, at the press club, we gathered around beer to debrief and identified that we had been silenced. The irony was devastating. Also revelatory to me was discovering how my participation in being oppressed lives in my body. A series of conditioned responses that culminate in a subtle fear and paralysis – and not just individually, but collectively, too.

More than containing a message from the past, these letters I wrote to Anne twenty years ago are revealing something I did not expect:  a lens of emphasis. During the time I wrote the letters, I made some life commitments and pledges to both myself and to something sometimes called “the creator” –  for me, the cosmic creative energy that simultaneously exists internally and externally.

I stepped into my life as an adult seeking fairness for people and our ecosystems. I was developing a profound and sacred connection to our universe and its mysteries. I also practiced rejecting conformity and control, questioning consumerism, authority and abhorring television. Most of the important choices I’ve made reflect how these values rooted deeply into me.

Although I never miss a moon (it’s new today) these letters are drawing to my attention that I’ve lost some of my connection to magic and the timeless dance of universe. Occasionally, this blog has provided a place to unpack some mathemagics and philosophy of life – both strongly woven to my faith — and for that I am thankful. I would like to write more along that theme.

With love.

                  

I got busy and figured out what I was supposed to do to be normal. I found The Hite Report on my parent’s bookshelf and schooled myself in what women wanted from men, and then set out to get it. I took the reins of my emerging sexuality and guided it down the heterosexual road. I was attracted to skinny, effeminate men. At 21 I met one I liked a lot and we moved in together. For the purpose of this blog I call him Steve.

A year has passed since the last letter. A busy year of reading Audre Lorde, Anne Cameron, Starhawk, Ntozake Shange and Toni Morrison. I also co-wrote a play, called Witches. I started to dream of female lovers.

I had suppressed my memories of being bullied and it wasn’t until 1994 that I started to make the connection. This letter documents the beginning of that process.

Dear Anne,

Friend of memories…when again will you be near?

I read Zami, a new spelling of my name last week. It is a beautiful book. Steve saw it in the bathroom and read a bit. He came to bed and asked me if I was having those feelings again. (“those feelings” = a recent admission to him that I’m attracted to women sometimes). I lied to him. I said, “no”.

He said it would be a blow to his masculinity. How the hell can I talk to him about it? I do not hold that against him but he may be holding it against me. Our sex life is dieing. Is it because I’m a lesbian? The thought that this is the answer shakes me down something fierce.

I have read things that sting me. Talk to deep parts of me. The trees in me. I hear things in me I cannot say out loud because nobody around here speaks them. I only read them in books. The fact that my body is sacred, that creating is sacred. The fact that I’m not a hole, but whole. The fact that my dreams are a valid part of me.

…I get scared, I want to run. To British Columbia? They have a lot of feminists and witches out there…but mum and dad are there. BC is limitations and confrontations. If mum doesn’t like Steve what would she think of a woman?

…I am feeling so much better now that I’ve written this. A temporary purge. Nothing is solved – it lacks a proper ending, I guess because it can’t be summed up.

All my love.

                  

I am jealous of your network…as a hetero I could never hang out in bars and bookstores until I found a worthy partner, well I might, but I’d probably be seventy fucking years old by the time it happened. As a womyn I feel massive curiosity and I want to grab you and squeeze you until everything comes out and I can understand it. On the other hand, I’m terrified that in fact female+female relationships are superior and I don’t want to know that because I love Steve.

Six years later I left Steve. When I became single my first lover was an old friend, a guy, who identified as queer. He introduced me to a woman who became my first female lover. Since then I know I’ve met a few lovers in bars, but have yet to meet one in a bookstore.

Hmmmmmm….

                  

This room is really hot!! I took off my sweater and no one even noticed that I’m sitting here in my bra! They have been too busy talking about their definitions of what a “have” and a “have not” are… The lady beside me has a plain watch with a leather strap but she has a Kleenex under it. Like this:

…Hey! guess what I’m doing my seminar on next week? Existentialism in Hemingway. I hope to god the discussion that is spawned reaches above the already astoundingly high level of intellectual insight going on right now. Heh.

I remember discovering academic bliss when I finally ventured into interdisciplinary studies. Until then I was a big picture thinker trapped in a snapshot. Everything began to make sense when I started filling in the context around the authors we studied. Philosophy. Politics. Art.

I also remember how much I enjoyed sarcasm. I write, “[my partner] says I can be very sarcastic sometimes, it makes him mad when I’m sarcastic…I think I inherited it from my mother, who else?”

In this letter I tell Anne about my parents safely arriving at their new home on the west coast. That I’m excited I already have my plane ticket for a visit. Does that mean I did the right thing moving here myself last year? Will the challenges of this transition be worth it?

All these years later I can answer the question about the watch. Summer course in a hot humid city. The leather strap must have made her arm sweat.

All these years later I’m applying to grad school. An MA in interdisciplinary studies. Check!

All these years later and I’m making a mental note to stop censoring my sarcasm. An excellent attribute to compensate for the slow fade of youth methinks! Heh. Indeed.

                  

A week after this letter was written we put all our stuff and ourselves into our new-to-us lemon-yellow (never buy a yellow car) Duster and crossed from Windsor, Ontario into the United States in order to avoid going “over” the great lakes.

We re-entered Canada via Lake-of-the-Woods and despite the best effort of the border guards and their dogs, no drugs were found. After we repacked everything we decided to look for somewhere to stop for the night. Following campground signs, we were driving slowly down a back road when the bottom of the car sorta collapsed. In the gathering dusk we looked underneath and saw that most of the engine was resting on the road. We learned later an old weld had failed.

Two weeks later, after some lovely camping at a place aptly called “Journey’s End,” we returned, sans car, to Windsor. I went back to school and my partner went back to house painting. Two years later, in 1989, my parents moved to Vancouver Island and nineteen years later, in 2008 I finally did too.

Dad as a young man

Which brings me back to dad. He was duly sacrificed to the work gods so I didn’t see him much growing up. Then, immediately after retiring, he moved across the country with mum while I stayed in Ontario. For the next nineteen years my relationship with my parents consisted of long phone calls with mum and visits every ten months or so. Occasionally I talked with dad too, but dads are not phoners.

Since moving to Vancouver Island I’ve been getting to know him, in some ways for the first time. What I didn’t realize when I was young is that this man is my number one champion. We have always got along easily… cut from the same cloth, as they say…

But it’s more than that.

My mother did most of the parenting when I was young and her strong personality and role as lead worrier and communicator kinda eclipsed my father from my perspective. When I read the letter I wrote back in 1987 it confirmed for me what I am discovering now, in 2010. Dad actually loves me unconditionally. And, although I never knew it, he’s always had my back!

It’s impossible to re-live the past but if I could I would know a lot less fear.

                  

I wish I didn’t understand so much – I realize now why (or at least partially why) so much of this world is fucked. When a person works five days a week – 8 hours a day, they want to have fun the remaining time. The tension/stress/anxiety of working is as much as people can handle. This is why nobody cares – they fucking well don’t feel like it! Help! I hate this lifestyle. This mindless complacent world – I will not choose much from this summer to become a part of me – or my reality that I am forming. Bleck! Yick!

We were both in second year university. Earlier in the summer she had stayed for a week with me at my parents. She didn’t come out to me for another three years, and I didn’t come out for almost a decade.

I am beginning to become quite detached from the opposite sex…I hope it is a stage – but what I really need is someone to renew my faith. It’s nice to have J around again – we get along quite well. He is still a special person. But I will lie and say I’ve got VD before I’d sleep with him again. I feel strange these days…

…I miss you Anne, so far you have been the best part of my summer. D and K really like you – K said, “I’ve never heard anyone laugh like that before.”

When Anne and I reconnected in 2008 her laugh had the power to evaporate time. I play it back so I will remember it always, but it fades anyway.

Take care Anne, win awards! with love…