Coming to Age

“I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How different from my now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn’t working. We had a new baby, I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old enough, I would keep her home from school, too, to have them all together.”

As I read these lines, I can’t help but to recognize the similarity in parenting methods that my own mom shares with the narrator. As the youngest of three daughters, I can remember my mom being so adamant about me attending school. I can nearly hear her now parading in the hallway saying, “You have perfect attendance, you can’t miss school”, although all I wanted to do at the time was miss one little day of school because I felt slightly ill. From a very early age I had an acute understanding that in some way I was an opportunity for my mom to “get it right”. I knew this, or felt this rather, because my mom was more relaxed about my sisters missing school than she was with me. I adored school as a child, and deep in my mind I knew that it was important that I did well because mom was counting on me to do well. I was, to some extent, the Susan of my family. 

The narrator attempts to make up for lost time by letting all of her children to stay home from school, and, despite these attempts, lost time remains lost time. The metaphor of the iron that Olsen sets the reader up with is representative of this painful surrender. The narrator who stands ironing is ironing as an attempt to settle the qualms that she’s collected over the years. All of the losses, missed opportunities, and quality time that fell through her hands because she was busy working to try and provide for her children. She is trying to flatten out these compounding imperfections that are permanent and unchangeable not just within Emily but within her own position as a mother.

Though the story is presumably about the seeming neglect of Emily. It can also be argued that the narrator is speaking of herself. That she was denied the care and attention that she deserved from herself and that this greatly impacted her self-esteem. It seems no coincidence at the time that the narrator is writing this, Emily is the same age that she was when she gave birth to Emily. It brings to question why there isn’t more support for first-time mothers, especially young mothers. The story also affirms that mothers are so much more pressured than fathers to be present in their child’s lives especially emotionally. The narrator carries such a heavy burden while trying her best to do what she feels is right. This is the hardest to accept.

This story nearly comes full circle while also leaving so many questions left to be answered. It begins with the narrator and her husband Franklin planning their death, deliberating whether to leave a note or not. It ends with the narrator professing that should she die, she’d want for Franklin to read the note that she left behind. From this we can tell that even though years have passed from the flashback that the narrator presents us with, her mind is still unchanged about leaving a note behind for others to read just as Franklin’s mind is unchanged about leaving the note alone, unwilling to write one, fine without reading one from his late wife. Without saying exactly what “it” is that is characteristic of their relationship, the narrator says that, “It went back through [their] whole life together”, “it” potentially meaning their differences in their attitude towards life.

Franklin comes off as more of the calm, cool, and collected kind of guy while the narrator seems to be taken off into the air with her thoughts, allowing them to consume her and influence her decisions, even going so far as to leave town on suspicions that Franklin is cheating with Dolly, his blast from the past. 

After all this time that they’ve been together the narrator seems to hold some distrust towards Franklin. She knows his likes and dislikes, his patterns and behaviors. She knows intricate details about him and yet there is much that she doesn’t know about him: his past. The narrator was likely a young teen when Franklin was at war, engaging in moments of fleeting desire and passion that eventually gave rise to the poem that he is most known for. The narrator even makes it a point to say that she only felt younger than Franklin when he spoke of the war. There is this immense curiosity that the narrator holds in association to Franklin that she doesn’t truly recognize until Dolly comes in (as a stranger to her) in an unexpected visit to sell her makeup. This curiosity turns to jealousy when she finds that Dolly was Franklin’s former lover. 

The final lines of this story go to affirm that the narrator would go against Franklin’s wishes to satisfy her own curiosities and that she knows deeply, that Franklin would respect any boundaries she set, even if it was a final farewell. Franklin’s rejection of the narrrator’s idea to leave a suicide note behind also affirms this notion that he has of I am mature enough to die and in my eyes, you are not. Even in their old age together, just twelve years apart in age, this rift in age is as much a problem for the narrator as it is for Franklin. It keeps them from seeing eye to eye. They lived through very different times, and as the narrator writes, their difference in outlook on life “went back through their whole life together”, and impacted their relationship as a result. 

Edna and Bobby Jefferson

A simple 70’s love affair that lasted 10 years

Q. How did you and Bobby Jefferson meet?

1. We met while I was out with  a friend and then Bobby came and he was just so handsome, I had to acknowledge him, and he acknowledged me. 

Q. Tell me about your first date?

1. Bobby asked me he said “You wanna go eat? I like chicken wings with hot sauce.” I said “Well I like chicken wings with ketchup” and we went to a place and had wings with fries… 

Q. How was your Honeymoon phase with Bobby, your first 6 months together?

A.” It was fun, we went to a couple movies and I had an apartment, and we looked at a lot of movies at my apartment. We both could co0ok. He could cook go0d because he had a lot of sisters, and they taught him. We would cook together and watch together, we had fun…”

Q. How was your 5th year with Bobby?

1. “It was good because by that time I had knew all of bis family. He had six sisters and three brothers. I knew them all. They used to have a lot of family functions, so I was always included, so it was very very nice.”

Q. So How were the disagreements between you two?

1. “They were average, but we never really had too many of them. We didn’t have too many disagreements we were all about having fun” 

Q. How was your final year with him?

1. “ I think that I had begin to kind of outgrow him a little bit. I was about working a whole lot during that time , and he still was into having fun. Which made it a little lopsided, but it was still good. Even though at one point we did go our separate ways, we always remained friends .

Q. Do you think he was your Soulmate?

1. “ I believe he was very close to it because we never had too many disagreements at all. Like I said we talked. Some of the conversations were serious and we were able to come to terms with different things. Like what was good for the both of us. We tried to really meet each other physically, emotionally and mentally.”

Q. Did Bobby make you happy?

1. “Yes very much so”

For my final project, I interviewed my grandmother and aunt. I wanted to learn more about what aging is like in a culture that has historically been more focused around multigenerational family relationships, as opposed to the Western structure of a nuclear family, in which a home consists of parents and their children. My dad participated in the interview to help translate a little for my grandmother and I–she is most comfortable speaking in Tamil and I don’t speak any–and to answer some of the questions about how his mom raised him and my aunt and how the way he supports her is changing. 

When I asked how they care for each other, my aunt’s first response was that they have the same mother/daughter relationship they’ve always had. She said that she considers my grandmother a “friend, philosopher, and guide” to her, that she provides my aunt with a source of strength, and that she offers guidance when my aunt has to make hard decisions. My aunt also said that she doesn’t yet feel my grandmother needs taking care of. I believed all of this was true, and I thought there was more to their relationship than my grandmother being caretaker and my aunt being taken care of. I also figured that when I asked about “care,” without specifying the different forms care can come in (physical, emotional, financial, and medical as just a few), they assumed I meant physical care–which my grandmother largely does not yet need. 

My dad added to this that, in his words, “our parents have always been our parents,” and at the same time, there has always been a deep respect for the opinions and wishes of everyone in the family, regardless of generation. He noted that even though he and my aunt were kids, their parents always asked them before making a big decision, and they always took their ideas into consideration. 

This statement drew the conversation towards forms of care that are more emotional and advice-oriented. I think context in regards to our family structure is important for understanding the way we emotionally support one another: My dad moved away from India to Illinois when he was in his early 20s, to go to grad school. My aunt stayed in India, married, and had two kids. For some time, my aunt and uncle and cousins lived on their own. When my cousins were eleven and five, my uncle passed away suddenly. My grandparents, without hesitation, moved into my aunt’s house. They offered her emotional support in a time during which she felt she was drowning, helped her make practical decisions about how to move forward as a single, working, parent, and took on roles as primary caretakers for my cousins. For years, my grandparents, my aunt, and my cousins all lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Delhi together. Over the last few years, the family has dispersed. My oldest cousin left to live at school when he was a teenager, and has lived in Bangalore for years now. His wife and daughter live there too. Several years ago my dad bought a flat in Bangalore and my grandparents moved into it–it’s down the hall from my cousin’s and his family’s flat. My dad and I stay there when we visit, and though my cousin and his family are close-by, since my grandfather passed away two years ago, my grandmother has largely been alone in that flat. My aunt and my other cousin stayed in Delhi until last May, when my cousin got married and also moved out of the house. That left my grandmother living by herself for the first time in her entire life, something that was deeply challenging for her in the brief time she stayed alone in Delhi. My aunt has since moved into my grandmother’s flat in Bangalore. I think this context tells the story of care effectively on its own: the family has lived multi-generationally for a long time, and no one is ever left alone for too long. 

One of my goals in this project was to explore what elder-care looks like in a culture whose collectivism I admire deeply, and in some ways still find myself resistant to. I think multigenerational communities are beyond valuable, and much more radical than any set of beliefs that values one age group over another. Throughout this course I thought a lot about how I’m going to cope with my parents’ aging and their needs for care. It is a sad truth, but a truth, that I don’t have the relationships with my parents that my cousins do with their mom or the relationship that my grandparents have with my dad and aunt and cousins. I can’t imagine living with them in a way that is healthy or enjoyable for any of us, and I am also thoroughly opposed to relocating either of them to an assisted living facility. I’m still working through imagining the option for elder care that is in line with my values, and then finding out if that option actually exists. This project allowed me to explore an option that, though not quite right for me, put me a few steps closer.

Here is the link to my final presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-6ux_qhvlEBIVtF6oUZz3Ko9UMcjz4D-zdlL1Gzuy3E/edit?usp=sharing

I so enjoyed Patricia’s visit to our class. I took a class with her last semester, a creative nonfiction class, and was so consistently compelled by the way she speaks and teaches. One of the first things I wrote in my notes from the visit is how the way she speaks is so patient, so thoughtful. I’m taking her class “Dreams, Visions, Rituals” next semester, and am looking forward to how some of the themes we discussed in her work are explored in that class. 

One of the first things that struck me in our conversation was the way in which the main character of the story spends so much time avoiding being like her mother, just to follow in her footsteps. I see this happen often, in real life and in stories–I know some of the seniors mentioned seeing this pattern in their own relationships with their mothers–and I see it partially in my relationship with my own mother. There are many ways in which I still resist the path my mother has taken in her life, and that resistance is in line with my values, and there are many ways in which my mother and I are the same, points of connection that I can only have with her. It has taken me a long time to be okay with sharing those parts of myself with my mother, and sometimes I still balk at it, so reading narratives like these in which people, women in particular, come to terms with what they share with their mothers are really helpful in providing a guide for what that process can look like. 

Another part of the conversation that I really appreciated was the conversation around “stagnancy” in the mother/daughter relationship, and the necessity of body- & healing-work to unblock stagnancy. I had chronic headaches for almost nine years and they only started to get better when I started seeing bodyworkers. A couple of them told me the same thing right away–my headaches were caused by stagnant energy. They then guided me through what needed to happen to unblock that stagnancy, to move my energy and my blood so it didn’t cause me harm. I think there is a similar quality to my relationship with my mother–I hold anger, fear, and sadness around my relationship with her and that hadn’t changed much until the last year. All those feelings have been stuck in the same parts of my body for years, and I think I can apply the same healing principles to those feelings that I did to my headaches. If I help those feelings move, and help my body release them, they don’t keep causing me pain. I am so consistently surprised by the way that talking to Patricia always helps me dig up and deal with something I didn’t even mean to look for, something I didn’t realize needed dealing with.

Violet Phillips

Coming to Age

Dr. Saxton

05/04/2020

My project is called Reading as an Elder. I interviewed my grandmother, great-aunts and grandmother’s friends. I was interested in seeing what they liked to read and how their reading habits have changed since the shelter-in-place laws, perhaps assuming they all had started reading more, like I have.

One thing most of them mentioned was how much the accessibility of books and audiobooks have improved in recent years. They also mentioned how endings to stories have been more negative and less clear-cut than they used to be. When asked, “Do you have any observations about how writing has changed? Or not?” my great-aunt responded, “some fiction now does not have a clear ending, less happy endings.”

Another thing my grandmother mentioned is how few books about girls there were when she was growing up, and therefore, how much books such as Candy Woodland and Little Women meant to her.

I believe elderly women’s opinions are usually ignored in favor of millennial women. In fact, no book recommendations by elderly women came up when I googled it. This may be because we live in a culture where people feel the need to read books that are posted on social media. All in all, I hope my project shows how underrepresented elderlyl women’s taste in literature is and what could happen if we pay more attention to their opinions.

In this reading, I was particularly struck by Janna’s cognitive dissonance around caring for Mrs. Fowler. She consistently describes feeling both put off by Mrs. Fowler and being fascinated with her. I think this is a consistent conflict in how we talk about people who are aging–we claim to admire them for their wisdom, but also feel disgust around their physical states. 

This disgust is attached to smell in particular; Janna describes over and over again her aversion to the smells of Mrs. Fowler’s apartment. She notes the way the smell sticks to her: “I could feel the smelly air of Mrs. Fowler’s place on my skin and hair,” and then details the process of washing that smell off, in the luxury of her bathroom(21). There’s some clear guilt around the juxtaposition of her perfectly-designed, well-kempt bathroom and Mrs. Fowler’s dingy, dirty, damp flat: “I came out of the bath and stood in the doorway wrapped in my bath sheet and looked at the bathroom and thought about Mrs. Fowler. She has never had hot water. Has lived in that filthy hole, with cold water, since before the First World War”(22). Even in Janna’s attempts to wash herself clean of Mrs. Fowler’s aftereffects, she finds herself stuck thinking about her new companion. This train of thought continues, as Janna grapples with her simultaneous desires to leave Mrs. Fowler and to continue to care for her. She thinks, “I wish I had not responded to her, and I was wondering all evening how to escape. In the morning I woke up and it was as if I was facing some terrible fate. Because I knew I was going to look after Mrs. Fowler. To an extent, anyway”(22). After having come to this conclusion, Janna’s attitude towards the smell of Mrs. Fowler’s flat changes, too. She once again articulates her disgust at the smell, but then notes “a sharp sweet smell which [she] didn’t know”(23). I would argue that her initial revulsion is less so an honest reflection of how Janna feels about Mrs. Fowler, but an ingrained societal response to older people. Janna is supposed to be disgusted, so she is, but as she allows herself to actually see Mrs. Fowler in her entirety, beyond being an “infirm” older body(20) (as opposed to Janna’s own “solid firm” body(22)), some feeling of adoration creeps in. Like that “sharp sweet smell,” Janna struggles to name the adoration, but its presence is clear(23).  We first see Janna’s shame around her affection for Mrs. Fowler in her thought process while at a dinner with Joyce, after having first met Mrs. Fowler: “I was full of revulsion. The sour, dirty smell was in my clothes and hair…We had a good dinner at Alfredo’s and talked. I said nothing about Mrs. Fowler, of course, yet I was thinking of her all the time”(13). Janna knows that her world is structured so as to maintain the invisibility of older women, and so “of course” she would not make Mrs. Fowler, or her interest in Mrs. Fowler, visible to Joyce. I imagine there’s fear here–that if Janna is visibly attached to someone invisible, that she will also become invisible, or conversely, that if Mrs. Fowler is brought to visibility through her connection to Janna, Janna will be associated with the disgust that motivates us to hide older people. When she prompts Joyce to include older women in their Female Images issue of Lilith, Joyce’s reaction confirms Janna’s assumption that to bring Mrs. Fowler and other older women into visibility would bring judgment: “I said this to Joyce, and I watched a series of reactions in her: first, surprise. Then shock, small movements of head and eyes said she was alerting herself to danger. Then she, as it were, switched herself off, became vague, and her eyes turned away from me”(18-19). Joyce’s reaction shows that to bring older people into visibility is so taboo that it’s visceral–Joyce does not immediately jump to logic or to rationale to defend her point, but expresses a physical fear first. Janna, then, is suspended in between this visceral fear and avoidance of aging, reinforced by her interactions with people her age and younger, and her own visceral fascination with Mrs. Fowler, reinforced further by each of their interactions.

The passage I’d like to close read for this response is on page 21 in They May Not Mean Do. It reads: “‘You’re a saint,’ Daphne said. It was not a compliment. ‘One of those insane, self-destructive saints,’ Natalie added. The kind who wander around in masochistic determination until they contract an incurable disease or are roasted on a fire or skinned alive, they all agreed”(21). In this passage, Joy’s friends are addressing her caretaking of Aaron–as opposed to hiring a caretaker, or to putting Aaron in an assisted living facility. 

While it’s clear that this position of martyrdom is not enjoyable, Joy continues to cling to it through Aaron’s demise and death. She’s consistently reminded by the people around her and even by herself that this caretaking labor is as harmful to her (if not more so) than it is helpful to Aaron, and yet she refuses to change her behavior and ask for help from anyone other than her daughter, Molly. I think this attachment to martyrdom is deeply connected to Joy’s position as matriarch. In one instance, she vocalizes how tasking it is to be this martyr-matriarch: “‘I can’t take the disorder of cooking a Thanksgiving dinner, the crazy mess, the hot steam in the kitchen, the millions of dishes. It’s too much for me, Molly. But I don’t want to give up my place as the matriarch, I suppose. What foolishness. But it’s true’”(50). Just as in the conversation with her friends, Joy juggles a simultaneous knowledge that her position as martyr-matriarch is unconstructive, that she’s clinging to a role that is no longer useful for her or her family, and a desire to maintain that role nonetheless. As the oldest woman in their family, it’s always been her role in this group of people to caretake–it’s her identity, and to stop caretaking would mean cultivating a new identity. Doing so is challenging at any age, but I imagine even more so in the later years of one’s life, when that identity has had decades of reinforcement. 

Even after Aaron’s death, Joy continues this self-flagellating martyr-like behavior. In organizing Aaron’s funeral, she flips quickly: “‘Oh, I don’t care anyway. He’s gone. What does it matter?’ As soon as she said it, Joy knew it did matter, that it was all that mattered, there was nothing else. The funeral was Aaron’s funeral, the last thing she could do for him. She had to do it properly. Not just properly, but perfectly”(137). I think this continued attachment to her being the “perfect,” wholly capable caretaker for Aaron comes from a desire for control in a situation in which she actually has very little. Dying is an unpredictable, uncontrollable process, as is aging. There’s no satisfying, well-mapped blueprint for caring for someone who’s dying, nor is there a foolproof plan for grieving. 

Even less so is there a blueprint for being responsible for both someone else’s unreliable body as well as your own. In the moments before Joy’s friends note her martyr behavior, she almost falls: “The doctor said these dizzy spells were nothing to worry about as long as she didn’t fall. But what if she did fall? What was to stop her from falling? She could very easily have fallen just now…”(21). There seems to be a direct correlation between Joy’s lack of control over herself and her need to control Aaron’s wellbeing. Rather than deal further with the possibility that she might fall, or what she would do if she did fall, Joy pivots back to Aaron’s health. It doesn’t seem that she does so intentionally, but she puts her own health on the backburner to manage Aaron’s. When she returns home from this conversation with her friends, her first thoughts are “how gray Aaron looked, his hair, his beard, his face, and his hooded sweatshirt”(21). I think most people do this–when we lose control in one area of our lives we seek to supplement it by controlling something (or someone) else. This book is an interesting exploration into how that pattern applies specifically to aging. 

I’d like to look at two passages for this response: one in the beginning of the piece and one at the very end. 

“I never had time to paint that fence back then, neither. But it didn’t matter none, cause Gracie had it all covered up with her flowers. She used to sit right here on this swing at night, when a little breeze be blowing, and say she could tell all the different flowers apart, just by they smell. The wind pick up a scent, and Gracie say, ‘Smell that jasmine, Pearl?’ Then a breeze come up from another direction, and she turn her head like somebody calling her and say, ‘Now that’s my honeysuckle,now’”(139-140). 

“The storm is moved on. That fresh air feel good on my skin through the cotton nightshirt. Smell good, too, rising up outa the wet earth, and I can see the water sparkling in the leaves of the collards and kale, twinkling in the vines on the bean poles. The moon is riding high up over Thompson’s field, spilling moonlight all over the yard, and setting all them blossoms on the fence to shining pure white. There ain’t a leaf twitching and there ain’t a sound. I ain’t moving either. I’m just gonna stay right here on this back porch. And hold still. And listen close. Cause I know Gracie somewhere in this garden. And she waiting for me”(151-152). 

I think these passages, and the several other passages about the garden in this piece, outline the way we cling to certain physical objects or spaces that attach us to someone we’re grieving, even if it’s not something we would normally be interested in or attached to for ourselves. I also think there’s something particularly potent about the source of attachment being a garden–a place where life is cultivated. Where the main character is dancing around her grief about her partner’s death and her grief about her own impending death, fixating on the garden makes it possible to stay connected to new life, to lush life, and to life that supports other life (growing food, in particular, as directly supporting health and vitality in human bodies). 

The garden in this story, though, has started to become a space that doesn’t solely inhabit beautiful, lively things. The first introduction we get to the garden is through the “old weather-beaten fence [she] ought to painted this summer,” the fence that, in the past, “Grace had it all covered up with her flowers”(139). The comparison between the past and present aesthetic states of the fence is deeply revealing of the main character, Jinx, right away–she’s clearly struggling to maintain the house and garden in the same way that she and Grace did, and the lack of flowers is part of the deep grief she feels for Grace. She later states, “Gracie’s poor bedraggled garden is just struggling along on its last legs–kinda like me”(141). The garden holds many different kinds of grief. 

The garden then becomes a place where “sassy little scoundrels” steal peaches from her trees, it’s no longer a sanctuary of sorts for Jinx and Grace(143). This incident quickly leads to a deeper realization–as has been true throughout the story, grief about the garden is really indicative of a deeper grief about Grace and about herself. She comes to the realization that “it wasn’t even them two kids [she] was so mad at. [She] was mad at time. For playing tricks on [her] the way it done. So [she] don’t even remember that Grace Simmons has been dead now for the past thirteen years”(143). Here, the garden gives us insight into the way that anger and grief work together. 

In the final passage, whatever desire for action, for repair, that Jinx had is gone. There’s a contentedness in stillness, in stagnation. And while the garden is still a locale for grief and for death, there’s no resentment in it. It’s almost pleasant, calming.

by Elizabeth

Munro throws us into the middle of our narrator’s flashback to the time when she overreacted to seeing her husband and his ex get along. While this short story might seem a little tedious or ridiculous, Munro portrays human emotion and rational well. By giving us little to no context about the characters or their setting we are entirely dependent on the main character’s observations and feelings about the things around her.

“The thing was, he would do what I asked. I wouldn’t, in his place. I would rip it open, no matter what promises had been made. He’d obey. What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel, at  his being willing to do that. It went back through our whole life together” (254).

The narrator reminisces over a moment in her life when she was rash, which is the complete opposite of her and Franklin now. Munro introduces us to our character’s while they are in the middle of planning out their death, and clearly we can see a complete devotion and trust between the narrator and her partner Franklin. The flashback shared with us by the narrator however depicts a time when that wasn’t so, at least on her behalf. Though the narrator at times seems to make childish assumptions and takes rash actions, but the reason for this narrative is to demonstrate human behavior and how fleeting, complex, and irrational it can be.

Our narrator has expectations of everyone around her but none for herself, and she prepares for the worst at her own cost. I thought that was inconsiderate of her and even selfish, but again I think Munro’s point in all of this is to give us a glimpse into how irrational one can behave at unexpected events.