The Lotus and The Mud

Yesterday I was on a webinar for new parents at the university my daughter is preparing to go to in a few short months. I took pages of notes about what needs to happen, when, and how. “It’s going to suck telling her all this stuff,” I thought to myself. My daughter has always been fiercely independent (not unlike me), but now more than ever she’s determined to make her own way.

My role has been relegated to stagehand. I set the scene so the actor can act. Once I’ve done my bit, I retreat into the darkness and make myself scarce until I am needed again. My daughter, like most eighteen-year-old young women I know, is the star of her life right now. She’s busy living the life of a celebrity and has lost sight of the little people who helped her get where she is today.

Yesterday, when I was wallowing in nostalgia, wishing I had more than a fleeting to-do list to connect me with my daughter, I let myself feel the heaviness of my sadness. And as I settled into the darkness, the image of a lotus came into my mind. 

“That’s it,” I thought to myself, “she is the lotus blossom and I am the roots.” I am in the dark, her dark, right now. I am under the surface, rooted in the mud and she is above the water, basking in the light of the day.

I was comforted by this image. I remember when I was the center of the universe, when I couldn’t give my mother any credit for anything she did. To do so would be to deny my own glorious presence. I too rose above my mother. I left her in the murky waters below so I could unfurl my petals in the sun. Now it’s my turn to be the roots.

Like my daughter, I was always connected to my mother. Though I didn’t want to admit it, I needed her. I needed her to remind me of deadlines, to provide me with a trunk to pack for college, to feed me dinner every night. But during most hours of the day, I revelled in my independence, dismissing the hard work that helped get me where I was. 

The lotus, while it rises from the mud without stains, as if to deny the very earth from which it came, receives a steady flow of nourishment from the roots below. And how beautiful a sight the lotus flower is.

As I sat in the webinar yesterday thinking about packing up my daughter to send her 1200 miles away, I filled myself with worry about all the things that could go wrong — missing housing deadlines, not getting the right classes, getting a shitty roommate. My worry compounded as I anticipated my daughter’s resistance to accepting help from me. 

The lotus, often referred to as a living fossil, dates back 145 million years. The lotus is hardy and resilient; it is strongly rooted and survives in even the most destructive conditions. 

Being in the dark, under the water is thankless, and it’s also a little bit scary. Down under, you can’t see clearly what’s happening above the surface. It’s an act of trust and faith to believe that everything will be okay up there. 

At night, the lotus petals close up, settling down for the night. The splendid exhibit of beauty shutters itself into the darkness along with the roots below. It’s a lot of work to be so magnificent and the lotus needs time to get rest and nourishment. Down under, the roots are always connected, a slow steady flow of energy that supports the lotus flower to open up into the light each day. 

I know my daughter will be okay next year because even if she’s not okay, I’ll be here, soggy, muddy roots reminding her that she’s got support and love and back up. It’s hard right now; parenting is all work and no fun. But this isn’t the full story. 

Every morning when the lotus reemerges, opening herself up to the sun, she is basking in her glory, but she is also gathering energy to feed her roots. This is motherhood. I’ve survived this long under water because I’ve received a steady supply of sunlight for eighteen years. 

I’ve had it all wrong. Right now my daughter’s independence is the sunlight. This is what is actually feeding my roots. She’s where she is supposed to be because she’s taken the nourishment I’ve offered and she’s strong and vibrant, looking towards the sun. 

Next year when my she goes to college and takes care of her business and lives her life and hopefully finds great fulfillment and joy, she’ll be the long-distance lotus. And I’ll be here, rooted if she needs me. 

Terminated without Cause: The Brutal Transition to an Empty Nest

 

I’m in the process of losing a job I’ve held for the last eighteen years. I’ve been loyally committed for close to two decades. I’ve never been late or missed a day of work. I’ve given it my all every single day and I’ve done it without salary or benefits. After eighteen years of dedicated service, I’m being fired without cause.

My partner is an employment lawyer and over the years I’ve heard countless stories about unlawful termination, discrimination, retaliation, whistleblowing, and various other reasons why people are terminated from their jobs, often without cause. Though I have experienced many of these conditions in my current position, the reason for my dismissal is none of them. 

After eighteen years in my job, I am being let go simply because it’s time. After eighteen years of parenting, I am no longer needed. I realize this is a mildly hyperbolic interpretation of my situation — of course I am still needed as a parent, just not the way I have been.

It was kind of funny the other day as I sat in the kitchen, once again dejected after offering my eighteen-year-old a “healthy omelet” before school. “I’m okay,” she replied, in a way she might reply to one of those sweet old men volunteering at the airport, asking her if she needed any help to get to her gate.

As I sat on the couch feeling glum with rejection, my partner smiled and said, “you’ve been fired without cause,” and then she burst into laughter. I couldn’t help by laugh too. It was funny and true. My job as I knew it no longer exists, and the management is letting me go.

My daughter doesn’t need me to make her an omelet. She doesn’t want help choosing her prom dress or advice about which college to go to. Just five minutes ago she reprimanded me for doing her laundry. I can see that my time in this role has reached its endpoint. 

I keep doing my job the way I used to and management is telling me that I need to upgrade my conduct. I’m getting one performance review after another — “Try to refrain from over-offering food and beverages.” “Allow subject to invite conversation independently.” “Only do your own laundry.” Despite my earnest efforts, I have to admit that my performance isn’t improving and my tenure here is done.

This is really hard. Losing the job that I poured my heart and soul into for all these years is brutal. I find myself wandering around the house wondering what to do with all this energy. When I go to the grocery store I scan the aisles wondering what I should buy. 

I’ve never been fired before. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. It’s confusing and lonely and to be honest, it feels slightly unfair. If this had been a real job, a paid job with benefits, and I was dismissed without cause I might try to get justice, sue the ungrateful asshole who let me go after all my years of service. 

But this is not a real job. It’s motherhood. There is no case to be made, no charges to file, no defendant to sue. I’m lucky. I have lots of support in my partner and my friends. I can laugh about how ridiculous I sometimes feel trying to fit into my old shoes. 

A few weeks ago, when I was strategizing about how to change my daughter’s sheets while she was lying in her bed, she said, “Mom, can you give me some space?” Realizing that I was trying to do my old job again I snapped out of it, apologized and walked towards her bedroom door. “You know,” my daughter continued in her motherly voice, “it’s really common for mothers and daughters to grow distant for a few years and then get close again when the daughter is like twenty-five.”

I laughed, grateful that we can both find humor in this tough transition, but deep down I felt a glimmer of hope . Maybe in the not-too-distant future I’ll get my old job back!

Nasty Woman or Equal

Last week I was at dinner with my partner and two friends, all women in our fifties. The service at the restaurant was glacially slow. We’d been seated at high-top which was uncomfortable for a few of us and we couldn’t help but notice that there was a low-top that could have accommodated us just a few feet away. We asked if we could change tables, but when the host hesitated, we quickly retracted the request saying, “No, no. We’re fine here.”

One member of our party commented that drinks were delivered to the table next to us even though we’d ordered ours a half-hour before them. When a server brought over our appetizers, she said, in a very polite voice, “We haven’t received our drinks yet. We’d like our drinks before our appetizers.”

The woman apologized, turned on her heals and marched back to the kitchen. I immediately felt bad, guilty for our table’s assertiveness. The four of us made “funny”, self-degrading comments about ourselves to each other.

“We’re the table of cranky old women.”

“They’re probably going to spit our food because we’re such a bad table.”

Though our drinks had taken over 30 minutes to arrive and it was a logical request to ask for our meal items to come in the sequence that we’d ordered them, we all felt like assholes for being direct.

“Do you think a man would be feeling bad right now?” I asked. “Do you all think he’d feel ‘too aggressive’ for asking to have his drink delivered before his food?”

We all agreed that, no, a man wouldn’t give it a second thought if he’d asserted himself in that moment. Men are socialized to be direct. From a young age, they are given the power to ask for what they want. Women, on the other hand, are inherently more relational and are often raised to be deferential and accommodating.

As it often does when in my company, the conversation turned to menopause. “Did you ever notice how, when men get older, people often say, ‘he’s become such a sweet old man?’ and when women get old, they are referred to as ‘cranky old woman?’”

My friend Patty says that, in menopause, “our give a damn is broke.” As our estrogen lowers, so does our sense of accommodation and selflessness. After years of doing what we are supposed to, many women feel a shift and start to pay more attention to their own needs. For example, asking for drinks before appetizers.

Hormonally, testosterone drops in middle age for both women and men, but because testosterone is the primary hormone for men, the drop is more noticeable in them.

When women get older, they are often referred to as ‘crone’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘ugly old woman.’ Sometimes older women are referred to as ‘grannies’ or ‘washed up.’ Older men, on the other hand, might be referred to as ‘stately’ or ‘cavalier.’ I’ve heard many older men referred to as ‘silver foxes.’

As men age, their oldness makes them desirable. The very sweetness that renders women weak in young age becomes something charming and adorable in older men. The gray hair that women are encouraged to dye so they stay looking young is considered sexy in men.

Women can’t win for losing. Though things are slowly changing, they aren’t changing fast enough. As girls, we are socialized to be relational, helpful, to minimize conflict by self-sacrificing and being friendly. Boys, by contrast, learn to take what’s theirs and to stand up for themselves. We can see this in the very over-used but incredibly significant statistic that, even though more women than men attend college, women only represent about 10 percent of the CEOs in this country. 

The greatest example of sexism (particularly in older women) is of course Hillary Clinton. Every single ‘male’ attribute Clinton demonstrated was framed as a negative, while in her brain-damaged opponent, these same attributes were revered and celebrated. 

During Clinton’s campaign, commentators said that she should “look more cheerful.” She was infamously referred to as “a nasty woman.” It’s not worth writing about how absurd and ultimately destructive it was that Trump, a quintessentially scowling nasty man prevailed in that election. Any sane human already understands this. 

What is worth mentioning is that fact that sexism and misogyny is what almost brought this country to ruin. Our collective US humanity could not get past the idea that a strong, unapologetic, female leader would be a better choice than an inexperienced, insecure idiot who happened to have a penis.

That’s devastating. And we have serious work to do. As change often does, this too will start with women. We have to reframe the way we think about and talk about sexism and aging. 

That moment at the restaurant when I felt guilty and ashamed (and afraid the server would spit in my food) was a moment of awareness that I need to attend to. That single incident brought a million little images into my consciousness — moments when I have ignored my own power in work, relationships, and social situations, times when I have instructed my daughter to overlook her own needs to alleviate conflict and maintain harmony. 

Consciousness is exhausting. It shines a light on what needs to be done. I remember the moment Hillary Clinton lost. My daughter had just turned twelve. We were coming off the heels of eight years with Barack Obama and I felt like anything was possible. I could see it. I could feel it. A woman as president. Finally. 

My daughter was at the center of my joy at this prospect. “Things will be different for her,” I thought to myself hundreds of times during the 2016 presidential election. But when Trump won, when we saw clearly how much our country hates women, especially older women, a part of me shut down. 

At that moment, it was too much work, too much hatred, and too much ignorance for me to face. But that feeling I had in the restaurant last week brought something back. It’s hanging on and telling me to stay the course, to speak up and keep fighting for young women like my daughter and older women like myself. 

When my daughter is fifty-four, sitting in a restaurant asking for what she wants, in a kind, direct way, I don’t want her to feel bad about it. I don’t want her to feel like she did something wrong. And I don’t want to feel that way either. Not anymore.

Old Masks: New Life

Last year, when the CDC told us that cloth masks no longer work, I gathered all the masks from around my house and put them into an old tote bag which I then chucked into my garage. All the masks meant something to me. At the start of the pandemic, I collected fabric from friends and family to sew masks. In all, I sewed over 500. I shared them with community groups and with my family members all over the country.

As I gathered the masks from the various baskets around my house, I saw an old shirt my friend had given me, a tablecloth a neighbor had donated, and scraps from a quilt I had made for my daughter. “I wonder how many people are in the same position,” I thought to myself, “throwing away all of these memory masks.”

I hate throwing things away. I always see an alternate purpose — ties from the grocery kale can be used to tie up the snap peas in the summer. Plastic takeout containers are perfect for reusing to deliver cookies to the neighbors. I’ve recently repurposed the metal cans that raisins come in as holiday candy tins by gluing magazine images around the sides.

A few days after I’d collected all the masks from my household, I posted a neighborhood notice asking if anyone else had cloth masks they were getting rid of. I shared, “I have a project, but I’m not sure what it is. If you have any cloth masks to donate, please DM me.”

Within days, I had hundreds of masks. It was delightful to drive around the neighborhood and pick up sacks of colorfully patterned masks. I could tell right away a little bit about who lived in each house. There were tiny kid masks, superhero masks, masks with cat-eye sunglasses patterns in purple and orange, serious sports masks, and masks configured in every style. There were double paneled masks, masks with an insert for a filter, masks with ear loops and whole head straps.

First, I washed all the masks. Then I had to remove all the elastic straps and wire nose pieces in the hundreds of masks I’d collected. Then, because the masks had been through the dryer, I had to iron them all. My hope was that spending time with the pieces of fabric would give me an idea about what to do with them. 

I wanted to make something symbolic, something to memorialize “the end” of our mask-wearing days. I contemplated making a quilt, but that idea became overwhelming as I started unstitching the masks and realizing that there was no uniform size to the various rectangles I’d collected. I thought about a big flag, but that posed a similar problem to the quilt.

Then it came to me. I’d make a mask version of prayer flags. Once I had the idea, a vision came together. Many of the masks had hand-sewn straps that could serve as the strings that attached the separate squares.

I sorted the squares by size and shape and carefully selected 15–20 masks per strand, which I then laid in twenty piles across my dining room table. Then I spent hours matching random strings to piles and pinning the masks to the strings. 

Once satisfied with all the sets of flags, I went down to the basement and did the final stitching of all the strings and squares on my sewing machine to complete the twenty sets of prayer flags. I felt a swell of happiness to be repurposing these masks that symbolized one of the hardest two years of my life.

Over the course of creating these flags, my vision of what to do with them clarified. I wanted these flags to make other people as happy as they made me. I decided I would hang them on the chain-link fence at the public playground on a busy street a few blocks away from my house. 

I recruited my partner, my daughter, and her friend to walk over to the park after dark and string them up along the fence. It took about an hour to do, all of us working side by side, negotiating the placement of each string of flags. Once they were all hung, we stood back, satisfied.

I went to bed excited, waiting for morning when dog walkers, kids going to school, and adults making their way to work would see the flags and smile. I imagined them feeling the swell of relief I felt, knowing that these masks were now on a fence as a piece of art instead of on their face.

But the next morning my daughter’s friend called me frantically as she was driving to school. “Laura,” she said, “someone is cutting your flags down!”

I raced over to the park where a parks department employee was cutting the flags off with heavy shears. “These are mine,” I said to the woman. “I hung these last night. They’re mine.”

She was kind, but firm, “you can’t hang these here,” she told me, “it’s against park policy.”

The flags were wet from dew and the parks department employee had destroyed a few strands by cutting them off. For the next hour I painstakingly untied the knots that held the flags to the chain-link fence. Demoralized, I took all of flags home and strategized about what to do with them. A few weeks later, around Halloween, I tried to hang them along a wall near my house, but the bamboo poles I had were too short. It didn’t work. 

I’ve contemplated stringing the prayer flags between trees in the park or across benches along the lake, but I haven’t done it yet. All the flags are sitting in a box in my garage. I pass by them every time I need to get extra toilet paper or a hammer. 

Last week, the WHO declared that COVID-19 crisis is officially over. I wonder if the moment has passed, if the prayer flag masks won’t mean anything to anyone anymore, if the post-COVID celebratory moment is gone. Maybe. For now, the masks will stay in my garage. I don’t want to throw them away. Even though I wasn’t able to share my vision, the prayer flags still represent a beautiful moment of liberation and joy for me. 

Closet Clepto or Thrifty Old Woman?

A few months ago, while shopping at the Goodwill Bins, I found a pair of diamond-studded boots. If you’ve never shopped at the Goodwill Bins, let me explain why this is significant. At the Goodwill Bins, everything is $1.59/lb. Clothes, shoes, toys, tools, linens, art supplies, and housewares and all dumped into gigantic bins that people sort through to find treasures. Shoes are rarely together, so finding a matching pair is challenging, if not impossible.

On this particular day, a sparkly diamond-studded boot caught my eye on my way in, but there was only one, so I walked on by. Then a while later, 75 yards across the warehouse in another bin, I saw its match. I grabbed the boot and, like a game of Memory, used my best guess to find the boot I’d seen on my way in. And, miracle of miracles, I found it! I was victorious and excited; it was as if I’d won the lottery.

When I was eight, my family was living in the era of 1976 free-spirit parenting. My sisters and I, along with all the neighbor kids on the block, went from house to house without supervision. We were all welcome everywhere.

We didn’t need to knock on anyone’s door to enter. We just went into whomever’s house and used the bathroom, got a snack or watched TV. Sometimes a parent would be there to check in, but often not.

Our neighbors, three houses to the south, had the nicest, biggest house on the block, with a fully remodeled kitchen and a big back deck. They also had a housekeeper who kept up on the shopping. Unlike our kitchen, theirs was always fully stocked.

In our house, sugar was forbidden. My mom did not allow anything sugary beyond raisins and these weird carob tubes we called “space food sticks.” I had and still have a major sweet tooth, so I was in constant craving. Once, I climbed up on the counter in our pantry to get what I thought was chocolate, only to discover that it was baking chocolate.

I was on a constant quest for sweets. Any money I got I spent at Harper Foods, the tiny grocery on the corner of our block. Even though I don’t really like marshmallows, I always got the Charleston Chew because it was the biggest and felt like the greatest value for my money.

I regularly let myself into the kitchen of the neighbors with the nicest house. Unlike the dregs at my own house, they had a pantry full of goodies, including seemingly infinite packages of Trident gum. At the time, I didn’t realize that Trident was sugarless. I just knew it was sweet and forbidden in my house.

A few times I helped myself to a package or two of Trident from the neighbor’s pantry. I assumed that they wouldn’t notice since they seemed to have some kind of grocery fairy restocking everything all the time. But then one afternoon, the mom of the house asked to talk to me. She led me out to the back deck for a private conversation, where she invited us both to sit on a step.

“Laura,” she asked kindly, “have you been taking gum from the pantry?”

I have no idea how she knew, but she clearly did. I had no choice but to answer honestly. Well, almost honestly. “Yes,” I said, “I took a pack once.”

“Well,” she replied, still kindly, “that’s okay and you can always have whatever you want, but please don’t sneak it, just ask. Okay?”

Filled with shame and confusion about how she knew about my petty thievery, I walked back to my own house and ate a carrot. Humiliation is indeed the best teacher, and I learned my lesson that day. I have never snuck gum or anything else from someone else’s home. But I do still sneak.

A few days ago, I went to help a friend set up for an event at a community center. When we got there, I noticed a big open case of Diet Pepsi on the counter in the kitchen. Diet pop (as we call it in Chicago) is one of my guilty pleasures. I know it’s terrible for me, but I love it. I rarely buy it, so when I go somewhere that it’s offered, I always indulge.

This community center had lots of different uses — as a theater, a youth center, a church. The Diet Pepsi could have belonged to any of those groups, but I didn’t consider them. I didn’t think of it as stealing. As my friend and the other helpers were setting up in the main area, I snuck into the kitchen, grabbed a can of Diet Pepsi, and hid it in my purse under my water bottle.

Later, back at home, I cracked the warm can open and drank it. “It’s so weird,” I thought to myself, “that I do this kind of thing when I could have just asked if I could have a can or bought some at the store on my way home.”

It’s the ‘getting away with’ feeling that I love. I’m not a deviant creature by nature. In most situations, I’m kind of an annoying rule follower, even when I think the rule is dumb — like waiting for the walk signal when there are no cars for miles around.

But there’s a thrill in getting away with something that I have always loved. A free appetizer because the cook at the restaurant over prepared? Yes! Even if it’s eggplant, which I hate. The Alaska Airlines flight attendant delivers me a frequent flyer chocolate bar by mistake? Why, thank you very much. The rush of excitement of getting something for free or getting something that you normally wouldn’t is like no other.

I’m at the age now where I don’t need to take the free shampoo and conditioner from the hotel, but I do. I can afford to shop at regular stores and avoid the Goodwill Bins altogether. But I don’t want to. Why would I when I might find diamond slipper boots for $1.59/pound?

I don’t think that anyone at the community center missed the Diet Pepsi I pilfered. That’s part of the thrill. No harm, no foul, and I got a free drink! And drinking that free warm can of Diet Pepsi was ten times more satisfying that buying a cold can at the store.

As I get older, I am more aware and accepting of my quirks. Those strange habits I’ve always had live on. Even though I can afford to buy any food or beverage I want, I seem to be more inclined than I used to be to take the free granola bar from the promotional basket at the grocery store.

We used to go to Sarasota, Florida, with my Nana and Papa every year. We always went to a fish restaurant right on the beach. On every table was a black plastic basket filled with cellophane-wrapped saltines and breadsticks. My sisters and I loved those crackers and Nana used to always tell us to control ourselves before dinner. But every time we ate there, as my Papa paid the bill, Nana would unabashedly take the entire basket of crackers and shake the remaining crackers into her purse.

I remember being so embarrassed when Nana did that, but I know that if I were at that restaurant today, I would do the exact same thing. I’m at the age now that she was then. When Nana poured the entire basket of crackers into her purse, she wasn’t ashamed, she was taking a snack for her grandkids for later. That makes total sense to me now. I am kind of a closet clepto. But I’m also a thrifty old woman.