Little Old Lady … in Waiting

Tag: love

  • Reading Room 3

    Sally Rooney is a favourite writer, maybe more than a little old lady in waiting should admit. Her characters are brilliant, ruined twenty somethings who overthink their way into clinical depressions trying to outrun their Irish childhood trauma. Rooney’s writing is fresh and smart and made from the modern gestalt. The Observer in their review of her latest novel, suggests there is no better author at work today.

    Beautiful World, Where Are You is essentially a correspondence between Alice, a novelist, nestled in the Irish countryside, freshly arrived from a psych ward, and her best friend Alice, an underpaid intellectual living in Dublin. They write about their relationships, and their work, and the state of the world they live in, “standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.” The book earns a high rating from me for the sex scenes alone (I’m imagining you making note of the title now). I’d rate the story even higher, I believe, if Rooney was my contemporary, perfectly capturing the age my children are living in now in which “the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.” Her characters are “untouched by vulgarity and ugliness” and looking for moments of “something concealed …the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world.” 8/10

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    I picked this book up at a favourite design shop uptown last winter. I liked the title and her chapter headings had quotes from writers I admire like C.S. Lewis, Anne Lamott, Carl Jung and Pema Chodren. I believe the author is local, a Maritimer, which makes my less than glowing review a bit more uncomfortable. While I appreciated the author’s true to life anecdotes and the general premise of her book, that bad things lead to growth and a more evolved self, I hated her God-squad vernacular and her overly familiar tone. I liked the road she is taking, I just didn’t love her running commentary as she journals about her boundaries and her conversations with her God. I applaud her vulnerability, I abhor her candor. 2/10

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    I’ve read enough Kate Quinn to understand that she is a no fail formula story writer. She creates strong period pieces, in this case 1950’s Washington in the heart of the McCarthy trials, when the rights of women were predicated on their status as wives and mothers, where reputations were guarded, and romances were discreet, and every woman held a secret in her wasted heart.

    The Briar Club is the story of a supper club in a women’s boarding house that brings together and bonds a motley crew of women ranging from widows and war brides, to single moms, and civil servants, a mobster’s moll, an immigrant artist, and an injured baseball star, to name a few. Quinn captures unique, compelling narratives, drawn and crosshatched by a master story teller who showcases our social history, as seen through the eyes of women, our stories, lesser known and more delectable for their subtleties. 7/10

    Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy is a unique story, intellectually challenging and structurally unorthodox, it is essentially the documented therapy sessions between a brillaint twenty year old mathmatician and her psychiatrist in 1972 when she voluntarily commits herself to a psych hospital as she processes the death of her brother, Bobby. With a history of paranoid schizophrenia and suicidal ideation, this is not her first visit to Stella Maris hospital, but her first conversations with a new therapist who engages her in a game of cat and mouse that makes a voyeur of the reader and keeps our attention despite the challenging sections that review the magic inherent in advanced math. The rewards are exponential as we meet her chimeras, the highly constructed hallucinations only she can see, and follow the “My Dinner With Andre” conversation that swings back and forth in the space between philosophy and quantum mechanics with cameos from Wittgenstein and Topos Theory that transport you to the edge of another universe. Stella Maris is a master work of intricate ideas and an absorbing examination of the “billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies at their knitting.” Warning – this is no beach book. Have wine at the ready for the deep thoughts aftershock . 8/10

    Doyle is a delight to read on any occasion but Life Without Children, a collection of Corona stories, is truly superb. His eye for the everyday detail distills something true and generalizable for every reader who anxiously sang the Happy Birthday song while washing their hands like surgeons, and danced the supermarket side step, or binged their way through the Netflix scandi-noir series, and social distanced themselves out of work and relationships.

    Doyle’s brilliant story collection looks at the masks we wore, discarded, like “underwear on the footpath“, and examines lives under lockdown, “that ripped away the padding“, with “no schedule, or job, no commute, nothing to save us.” His characters explore their smartphone addiction, and earworms, and engage in real conversations, “the tricky ones that stray from the usual.”

    Doyle’s book beautifully frames the silent, deadly days of our very recent past when Covid hemmed us in, he shows us our fragility, our interdependence and our essentialness, and will make you laugh until you cry. 8/10

    Pema Chodren is a Buddhist nun and meditation teacher who I have read for many years, including her meditation series which I highly recommend. Taking the Leap is a series of teachings designed to help you stay open to the many vexations of human life and build a space or pause within highly charged situations before reacting with our smaller selves, and further contributing to the deepening and seemingly entrenched polarization that governs so much discourse in today’s world that labels the ‘other’ as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. What she offers is a Buddhist prescription with the potential to reduce suffering.

    It starts with staying open and present and awake to whatever is going on no matter how uncomfortable or seemingly intolerable, no easy task when we are, most of us, pleasure seeking, or putting our heads in the sand.

    Pema is big on the pause and embracing impermanence and the underlying uneasiness that is an integral part of the human condition. Her book is a guide that coaches us to stay with the “tightening” when it comes, to break the habital chains and reactions that rule us unconsciously. Taking the Leap offers a formal teaching, a map to a more peaceful approach to living, but it is no easy journey. There is an undertow, a dopamine hangover that will distract and discourage your efforts…still its worth a read even if all you get is that there is a spiritual toolbox waiting for you when you’re ready to open it. 8/10

    Alexander McCall Smith, a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University, turned highly successful detective story writer, is a very popular and commercially successful storyteller. He understands that great detective fiction has more to do with setting and the personal charisma of the detective than any murder or plot device. Career mystery readers are rarely surprised by the denoument of the books they devour. We read mysteries because we love to be in the company of the detective, or immersed in the world that the writer places their heroes and the villains they sort out. The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is McCall Smith’s first run at a winning detective series and it does not disappoint. Mma (Precious) Ramotswe is a keen and unusual gumshoe, “the only lady detective in Botswana,” with an unerring understanding of human nature and a love for her native Africa. “A good woman in a good country, one might say.”

    McCalls stories document unrecorded lives, the narratives of ordinary people who see beauty in simple things and find happiness with very little material wealth. Detective Ramotswe deals in absentee husbands, African gangsters, and witchdoctors, and a disinterested police presence, outsmarting her fellow characters, armed with nothing more than a detective manual and a small inheritance from her father. She is a unique sleuth with a Columbo like innocence, an interesting backstory, and a determination to succeed that will have you routing for her. Best ecapist read this summer. 7/10

    This book came to me via an interview I did for the blog that will be dropping later this month. It’s a life changer… the kind of book you buy in bulk and try to force on everyone you love. Published posthumously, it is a compilation of wisdom teachings presented by Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest and psychoanalyst, who describes a paradise on earth, waiting inside each of us, just beyond the reach of our conceptualized world and the limitations of language, out beyond the boundaries of our egos and all our charitable good works (a more refined ego construct).

    Awareness shows a way to wake up from the modern day miasma, an all consuming mass illusion that keeps us trapped in a hamster wheel of self absorption and unhappiness, derived from a short term self soothing dopamine cycle that breeds a disquiet we’ve acclimated to through a lifetime of conditioning.

    De Mello asks us to kill our expectations, to remain open, and to detach from our desires.

    Awareness leaves readers with a series of excellent prompts but the real work comes after the close of the book. De Mello’s message is a little like “trying to capture the feel of the ocean in a bucket of water.” Its a beginning. It starts in awareness. You cannot strive for the world he describes or, he cautions, it will elude you. It begins with a willingness to sit in the present and observe the majesty that is the reality hidden beneath the ego and its self serving thought stream, it glimmers only in the present, turning to dust in a mind that travels to the past or the future.

    He coaches the reader to watch everything within you and around you as if it were happening to someone else. He counsels that real happiness resides in you and no where else, in no thing, in no other person.

    De Mello’s book is a call to awaken from a world in which we are dying of spirtual thirst surrounded by a sea of fresh water, living in a world filled with joy and happiness and love, but brainwashed, hynotized and sirened to sleep, trained not to see what is all around us.

    Awareness is by far the most important, insightful and funny rendering of the truth of the universe that I have found in a decade of searching. I cannot recommend this book highly enough not only for how powerfully it could impact our lives individually but also what it might mean for an awakening world. 15/10

  • Little Old Lady to Little Old Lady Wisdom

    Sister Rhona Gulliver

    Author’s Note: The following profile is the first in a series of interviews based on a standardized set of questions designed to illicit insights and wisdom from Little Old Ladies in waiting. For me the exercise might be likened to what London black-cab apprentices refer to as ‘The Knowledge’; a mapping or learning the grid…the Grand Dame essentials, all the best bits and bobs to be discovered on the road to little old ladydom. The guiding spirit behind the profiles is best captured in a line by Rilke; “I want to be with those who know secret things, or else alone.”  I hope to interview women with considered and varied life experience, interesting and unusual career paths, a sprinkling of accolades, and maybe a smidgen more than their just share of “je ne sais quoi.”  

    The very first person that came to mind, satisfying all qualifiers, was Sister Rhona Gulliver.  I consider Rhona one of the most learned and wise women of my acquaintance.  She has a sharp intellect, a rich interior world, and a well-established and dearly appreciated wit.  She is a writer and an artist, with the singing voice of a sweet young girl, and the conversational acumen of a late-night radio host.  She has a genuine love of people, asking questions that open up all those who enter her realm, and paying us the ultimate compliment of her complete attention.  She may be the most skilled listener I have ever met with an unparalleled capacity for friendship. 

    Tell me your life story in seven sentences or less?

    What I have done… I attended 7 universities including Dalhousie, McMaster, Ottawa, as well as Dublin City University searching for a career and life values.

    Where have I been… I’ve been engaged three times to be married, looking for romance and companionship. I entered the Congregation de Notre Dame in Montreal in 1970 to become a religious sister and after three years they told me to go home. I had come to know and love the foundress, Marguerite Bourgeoys, of Notre Dame. Ten years later I entered the Sisters of Charity in Saint John and it felt more in keeping with the career I had chosen, leading to a deeper spirituality and giving of my gifts to others.  I worked many years in the community as a nurse, social worker, family councillor, and teaching at Queens University specializing in forensic psychiatry. My desire through life was to encourage others to learn and experience the best they could and give back to others.

    What is the best thing about getting older?

    The best thing is that you have less responsibility, and you can speak your mind without worrying too much about whether someone is getting upset… you also take things with a grain of salt.

    What is the worst thing about getting older?

    Always worrying that something else will go wrong with your health… some little thing that hurts. Your health starts to deteriorate and there is nothing you can do about it… you’re at the back of the line.

    If you could retain or retrieve one quality from your youth, what would it be?

    Dancing… I love to dance. I took lessons until I was 14 or 15 and then it wasn’t cool anymore. I’d like to dance again.

    Do you have a favourite quote?

    Yes, it’s a quote my great grandmother told me.

    “When you educate a man, you educate a man. When you educate a woman, you educate a generation.”

    Do you have a favourite word?

    “Kretzimah” (Unfamiliar with this word, I requested a definition)

    I made it up. It means you’re soft or enjoyable, a gentle person… it describes everything delightful.

    Describe your perfect day.

    One that I would be free of all responsibilities – the telephone, visitors… with time to paint and write poetry, to read and have some spiritual time for rejoining my connection with God… maybe pieces of chocolate here and there.

    If you could have tea with anyone, real or fictional, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you talk about?

    Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I find him very fascinating. He broke the rules of etiquette and of government. He did what he liked to do. We would have a swinging good time. We could talk about everything: great books, philosophy, theology, politics. There aren’t that many you can talk to about such things.

    Do you believe in life after death? What does it look like?

    Yes, I believe in life after death. Most of life is getting ready for death. Life isn’t always pleasant but after this life all will be revealed, and the feeling of love will be so powerful you won’t have time to think of anything other than the love of God. Sometimes in this life after traumatic things have happened, I have contemplated suicide, but in the end, I thought I might be cheating myself of a higher form of love. I don’t mean to say that suicide is sinful, I mean that the more you can accept and survive the hard times, the greater your capacity for love… for other people, for yourself, and for God.

    Tell me three things that bring you joy.

    Chocolate. People. The Arts – painting, singing, music.

    Name a guilty pleasure.

    I like flirting with men. My brothers always told me if I kept my mouth closed, I could find a better boyfriend.

    What would you like your eulogy to say?

    I came… I was… I went.

  • On Mothers, Mothering, and the Mother Choice

    “Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” – Elizabeth Stone

    “You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars” – E.E. Cummings

    Author’s Note:

    The decision to become a mother and the experience of being a mother is highly individual and personal.  My thoughts on the matter are based solely on my own experience of being mothered, becoming a mother myself, and a recent discussion with my adult children about the pros and cons of choosing to become a mother (parent).  The following essay is an opinion piece, not intended to critique or explore anyone’s choice or experience but my own.  It is part love letter, and part cautionary tale, as written by a little old lady…in waiting, the mother of two twenty somethings who recently asked, incredulously, “If you got to do it all over again, would you still choose to become a mother?”

    This post is dedicated to everyone who has ever asked themselves if motherhood was for them and, however they answer, a celebration of the right to choose and define that role on their own terms.  There are many ways to mother, and we need not be corseted by traditional paradigms.  As every mother knows, there is a bottomless well of love inside to bestow on all those whom we choose to call our own.

    A few months back I was walking into a glass fronted store when I caught my reflection in the entrance.  It was my mother’s face that stared back at me, and not my own.  It shocked me at first, and then a feeling of such unexpected happiness and peace came over me, as though she was there with me for a moment, and covertly always close by, watching over me, even when she “walks invisible”. My mother passed away suddenly almost ten years ago now, a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the age of 82.  She was old, I guess, but I didn’t know it.  She had survived breast cancer and open-heart surgery and she was very much alive and present in my life, my companion most days, and my first and closest friend always. There are days when I miss her so badly, I surrender to the emotion, I crumple, and after a time I rise and try to remember everything she taught me about life, including how to be a mom.

    My mother, like so many women of her generation, stayed at home with us when we were growing up, and her constant companionship and attention informed our understanding of our worth.  Surely, we must be important if we could command so much of her time.  In those early years our family did not have much in the way of material wealth, but I was blissfully unaware. I felt like a princess because that’s what I saw in my mother’s eyes when she looked at me.   She didn’t work outside our home, so our humble abode was spotless. There was always a home cooked meal for dinner, and most days a cookie as big as your head when I got home from school.  And so beget a lifelong addiction to sweets … but that’s another post.  It’s always the mother’s fault.

    My mother took her work seriously.  She saw her role as the keeper of the home and the keeper of our hearts.  She never cared if we earned good grades, or made AAA sports teams, but she was hard core when it came to the inner workings of our moral compass.  She was always our True North and is largely responsible for what I have come to refer to as a strong Catholic sense of guilt.  We were just as rotten as other kids, of course, but Mom made sure we learned how to feel bad about it afterwards.  She was a master class in empathy and a maker of men who will, 9 times out of 10…perhaps with a little prompting, attempt to do the right thing…if convenient, especially with the promise of a sugary treat for good behavior. And I guess if we’re talking world peace and the survival of the planet and, you know,…the human race, there can surely be no more important work, no higher goal than making sure the next generation feels a bit bad about not being good.

    My own daughter, aged 24, has a slightly different take on the whole mothering concept.   She recently returned home from her first peer group baby shower with a serious case of “ick”.   Although she was happy for her friend, near bursting with an almost fully baked baby, she was a little disgusted by the idea of body sharing with what she currently considers a kind of parasite, and as a qualified nurse she is more than a little horrified by the idea of the coming out party.  It doesn’t take Psych 101 to understand in my small, Catholic guilted heart, that as her mother, I must be to blame.  Did I overshare when I recounted her own birth story, that in the absence of an epidural, if I could have gotten off the birthing gurney and thrown myself out the window, I would have.  Too much?  I mean it was still one of the best days of my life…right?  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that pregnancy, labour and delivery are the easy parts. 

    The truth is that I felt very much the same about becoming a mom when I was in my 20’s. I’m still not sure what happened to make me change my mind: falling in love, the biological imperative, socialization, FOMO.  I don’t know how it happened… well, I mean, I know how it happened …I’m just not sure exactly when or how the idea first came for me. I only know that when it came it was a complete knowing, not some indifferent or half-hearted decision.

    “Would I do it again,” they asked me, would I choose to become a mother knowing all that I know now about the sacrifices, the highs and lows, the weight of the responsibility and the constancy of the relationship?  Of course, I told them what every mother must, that knowing and loving them as I do, I could never choose differently.  But a little later that same evening I gave their question a more rigorous and honest consideration.  I thought about what I had willingly given up or done without to accommodate the mother role.

    I spent 12 years at home with my kids in their formative years.  I had never mentally prepared myself for that kind of mothering, I had my mom set up to be the 9 to 5 Nanny, but after her heart attack, it became clear that I had just landed a full-time position well above my aptitude test.  Let’s just say I wasn’t a natural. I had never really learned to play, I had the patience of a gnat, I hated crafting, and organized sport remains a mystery to me to this day.  I had only the vaguest understanding of toddler milestones.  Looking back on those challenging years I will admit it wasn’t all idyllic or Instagramable.  Being a mother is, without a doubt, the hardest job I’ve ever had.  It’s a learn-as-you- go deal with no gentle onboarding.  The hours are unacceptable, the pay is shite, and the performance reviews can be eviscerating.

    The pragmatics of mothering, the meal prep and lunch bags, the homework, the chauffeuring and learning to tolerate the child centred activities: the birthday parties, the bowling alleys, the soccer fields and hockey arenas… all of that can be managed.  For me, by far the hardest part of being a mother is that you’re “only ever as happy as your unhappiest child.”  The scraped knees and fevers, the broken hearts, the car accidents, and the plethora of little wounds that befall our children are far more agonizing than anything we could experience ourselves. The mother bond is like a Chinese finger trap and cuts deep when tested.

    Despite all the hard graft of mothering, the blessings…the gifts far outweigh the grievances.  I am not the person I was before I became a mother.  My children changed me.  Mother love is the fiercest, most intense, highest frequency, unconditional love that we can experience.  No one… no one will ever love you like your mother does.  Motherhood is a transformative experience.  It taught me humility and patience, it showed me how little we can control and how much we have to be grateful for every day we get to spend together.  Even as adults my kids continue to help me grow with their contemporary take on what constitutes a life well lived and their insights on how we should best spend our time. To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that cohabitating with twenty somethings is easy.  It is not.  But the Zoomer zeitgeist does keep things interesting.

    In short, being a mother, in my experience, is both the best of times and the worst of times.  Would I choose to become a mother again, with the perspective of time, and the convenient memory of a woman well past the heavy-lifting years of mothering – an emphatic, “yes.” Adding up all the mom hours I have logged over a lifetime, do I sometimes wonder what I might have accomplished had I spent that time in pursuit of projects more in keeping with my natural inclinations  – again “Yes.”  Do I crave a more serene environment with less shoes at the door, fewer dishes in the sink, with more time to read and walk and wonder, without consideration of anyone’s needs but my own?   “Perhaps.” Do I sometimes fantasize about an alternate life where I am a lady of leisure and letters, in Rembrandt-lit rooms filled with books, reclining in a Chaise-lounge overlooking the sea… CBC radio my only company?  Of course, I have…Moms are human beings too you know.  Did I live up to the bar my own mother set?  Did I do my job well?  Am I the True North that will help guide my children in making decisions that align with their values and beliefs when it is my time to “walk invisible?”   I hope so. All I know for sure is that I would rather be a merely adequate or average mother to my two darling descendants than an excellent anything else.

    If you’re still searching for the perfect gift for Mother’s Day, take some advice from a little old lady in waiting – make dinner, wash the dishes, clean the house, do the laundry, and if you still live at home, maybe take yourself out for the day.  Give your Mom some time to herself, time to remember the woman she was before you owned her entire heart, in the days before your chapters of her story, when she belonged only to herself.