Ready or Not, mostly Not

My mother died on Sunday, March 12, at 3:40 a.m. I haven't really felt like writing about it until now. It has taken some time to digest my thoughts and feelings. Mother had entered the nursing home on Wednesday, March 8, and I arrived Thursday, having only planned for a long weekend visit. As it turned out, I drove into my home town that Thursday afternoon, went straight to the nursing home and didn't leave for more than a short time until she died. What occurred there was an intensely personal experience I will never forget.

When I arrived, Mom knew me, knew I was there, and from the moment I kissed her hello, I felt she was in the very last stages of her life. My sister from Michigan arrived the next day, as she had also planned a visit, and of course my sister Ronda, my mother's rock and best friend, was there all the while. I can never repay Ronda for the loving care she provided for my mother in the last months of her life. She also provided a model that enabled me to be with my mom in a way that I can be sure she knew, in those last hours of her life, that I loved her.

Driving home after the days that followed, I distinctly remember having the thought that with my mom gone, I now represent the oldest generation in the family, the group that's "in charge." I married very young, had my daughter at 20, and spent the years following her birth working my butt off to keep body and soul together and trying my best to be a good mother. I didn't attend college until I was 41, and have only recently started a real career. Having all that other stuff to do earlier, sometimes I feel I've just barely begun to figure out who I am and how I'm supposed to "turn out."

Good grief. I don't feel half wise or experienced enough to be in charge of much of anything, but time doesn't wait for us to be ready, it just moves forward and the chips fall.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

artiste ersatz

If I could paint, I would make this picture:
the figure of a woman, slightly bent over,
having recovered (found? discovered?) something,
an unrecognizable piece.. of what? a lump, (clump?).
the sky is gray, only a hint of light.
she's holding this whatever carefully, in both hands, close to her
and looks as if she's breathing shallow, tentative breaths,
(or holding her breath).
her face is still, her eyes slightly focused, or blank, Sphinx-like;
and out of this thing she is holding, there is a barely recognizable....
shoot? sprout? tendril? root?
of the palest
green
possible.

Reading Reading Lolita

Recently, I finished the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. In this book Azar Nafisi, a literature professor, tells the story of her life in Iran during the Islamic revolution of the late 70's. She uses her experience teaching the works of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, Austen, Bellow and others to help explain her reactions to the changes occurring in the country. The book makes clear that in the modern era a religious ideology supported by reactionary people can gain mass and insidiously erode the civil rights of a troubled, though relatively progressive monarchy, to the point where it becomes an unrecognizable shadow of itself. In fits and starts, sometimes in bold leaps, at other times in barely recognizable increments, the disgruntled people of Iran allowed a revolution to occur which failed them, as it stripped the country of its former secular identity.

No matter what one thinks of the Western literary canon as a standard for great literature, or one's feelings about the U.S. meddling in the affairs of a vulnerable state in order to further its own end, this book is an important record of the way freedoms can be diminished and then obliterated when religious ideology is allowed to insert itself into government.

Scary, and a little too much foreshadowing for my comfort.

Being There- virtually

I have been reading blogs on another site, and they are very different from mine in that the bloggers' topics tend to be more personal; problems are presented, advice traded, this sort of thing. Though the postings are read by hundreds (number of views are tracked and presented on the blog), there is a core group who actually initiated friendships by reading and responding to each others blogs, and this group seems to have created a nice little community of people who care about and support one another and have a good time in each other's company on a mostly virtual level. These people live all over the country, all over the world, actually. From what I have read there, they are a thoughtful, interesting, diverse and broad-minded group of people. This is probably the point at which I should say that I only read the posts and responses; I don't post there or respond to their postings. I'm a lurker, not an active participant, not because they have excluded me, but because I haven't taken the initiative to join the conversation.

It's interesting that though many of us think of maintaining friendships through face-to-face contact, these bloggers seem quite content to befriend each in the "virtual" realm. Although I've seen a few of them make reference to talking on the phone, and some have even met in person, it seems they mostly communicate by writing and responding to each other through their blogs. At first glance, it might seem a bit unnatural, especially to those of us who haven't lived our entire lives with the internet as an ever-present medium. But I can assure you, being a high school teacher, young people don't find the idea of doing a great deal of their communicating through new technologies strange or unnatural at all. What may seem less authentic, and perhaps inferior, to some of us because it is "virtual," is in fact complete reality to hoards of teenagers. And I think it's important to remember that for a very long time, before the telephone and convenient travel that's a given to nearly everyone now, people maintained longstanding friendships through snail mail and very infrequent face-to-face contact.

Remember pen pals? Round robin letters?

Another thing I've noticed among this blogging bunch is that there is a certain ambivalence about it all. From time to time they discuss whether blogging is or is not beneficial, whether the amount of time they spend blogging is inordinate, whether it's healthy, addictive, has improved their quality of life, that sort of thing. Responses to these posts vary from those who enthusiastically state that their blogging is an important and valuable part of their lives, to those who seem less convinced, to those who say they have simply got to "cut down" because the time they spend blogging keeps them from participating in the real world, pursuing other interests and hobbies, and has an isolating effect, although they all seem to have interesting jobs, rich intellectual lives, and friends outside of their blog buddies.

So, what do you think? Are friendships formed and maintained through blogging simply a new way of meeting people and being together? Then there's me, who only participates by reading their posts and responses- the virtual version of a wallflower :)