In praise of rituals to mark victories, both real and imagined

Opinion

For the first time in many years, I returned to my birthplace for a get-together with women I had gone to school with. We had all turned into 75. We wanted rituals to mark this passage.

I had not been fond of school. I stood out as one who was heavier than most, wallpaper rather than wallflower, both visible because I was too large and invisible for the same reason. The outlier experience left me aching to discover a “good-enough” that could belong to some kind of crowd, even as I eschewed the “good-enough” culture and politic defining who had value as “in” and who did not and was thus, “out.”

These rules defining “good enough,” arbitrary and often tyrannical, disfiguring and dismissive, seem still to prevail as gatekeeping tactics defining worth and worthlessness.

All of us gathered had suffered under reductive insider-outsider schemas throughout the vagaries that come with growing up and growing old. All but one had lost life partners to illness and/or addiction; all had lost siblings and/or struggled through problematic familial bonds; many had children who endured life-changing accidents and/or mental illness; some had grandchildren with neurological and genetic challenges.

We sat round a table. Stories. Sorrow. Support. A game or two of Scrabble clambering to compete as we had in our youth. A walk along the shore road, arms round one another. A sentimental dive into ancient high school yearbooks with pictures of ourselves inspiring astonishment, mirth and chagrin. These rituals of remembrance and storytelling renewed our bond.

They included the gathering of wildflowers and a visit to parents’ gravesites. One friend had lost her mother only a few years before. I had lost mine when I was 41: 34 years stood between her death and my 75th year.

My mother was a remarkable woman. I have written of her many times and in many forms. She was artistic, wonderfully musical, introspective and even in the midst of her own troubles — dysmorphia, addiction, depression — she dreamed. Her dreaming spread as a canopy in our kitchen, late at night, the two of us smoking (I had followed her lead fervently by the time I was 15).

Swaddled in an ancient red and blue striped house coat, she meditated on the meaning of life, holding big ideas — an expansive canvas rich with insight and responsive to the needs of others. Brilliant in her own way though denied a post-secondary education, her maturation was valued only insofar it was the prelude to becoming wife and mother.

The husband she found did not find her ideas pleasing. He did not find her piano playing pleasing. He did not find being the father of four children born too close together pleasing. He rebelled. My mother and father suffered that rebellion together.

Though a creative who moved horizon lines, defeated by the times and circumstances that constrained her, that named her as not “good enough,” my mother sang for me in our kitchen. I say sang because her ideas were lyrical, her phrasing musical, her faith in my desire to listen, as moving as any symphony might be.

For these reasons, and so many more, I found wildflowers along the shore road and brought with me an essay I had published in a collection called Mother of Invention.

At the end of that essay, I decided I might release my mother, give her one of the nine lives I knew she could have lived had her life not been limited by the norms of her day. I created a world for her in a piano bar in Saginaw, Mich., where she sings nightly and her green eyes feathered with sinopia sparkle as she collects tips while the owner of the bar, appreciating the depth of her talent, sponsors voice lessons.

She has a picture of her four children tucked under her pillow, her wedding ring in a drawer. Though there is a dusty bus running daily that might take her home, my fictional mother never takes it.

I do not underestimate the complexity of this invented life I gave her. I wondered about the consequences for her children thus abandoned. But I remember feeling, even at six years of age, sitting on the edge of her double bed, that she had the right to a life that was less difficult, less severe. In carrying this writing to her gravesite, I wanted to tell her that I have been thinking of her, that I had known her teaching as a blessing, that her sorrows were ones I felt keenly and wanted to redress as best I could because her kitchen wisdom, her voice, singing still, encourages me to imagine not only her emancipation but my own.

At 75, rituals such as these mean the world.

arts@freepress.mb.ca