When one works with the public, one meets some interesting people, who have many interesting interpretations of one’s life and lived experiences (never mind that they haven’t lived them). I’ve been told I am cold and logical (probably partially true); I’ve been told (while smiling) to smile, because then everything will be great (it’s never worked, folks). Today, however, I’m going to focus on the guy who told me that he’d analyze my handwriting—and then, after being flummoxed that I wrote in pencil (I’m severely dyslexic, what do you want?), said that I am stubborn, determined, and strongly influenced by a woman, or women—my mother, my grandmother. And you know something? It’s a crackpot idea, everything he did—and anyone can probably see I’m stubborn, and a plotter—but it’s true: my mother, and my grandmothers, are always there.
My maternal grandmother, a soft and gentle woman whose yearly rages are the stuff of legend and whose novels were (almost) always about the nicest people imaginable,1 got me to say my first word (everything was a duck), and told my mother, when I was just a tiny little thing, that something wasn’t connecting quite right, and my parents should be on the lookout for dyslexia, or some similar learning disability. (She was, of course, right.) In a day when women did not often get educations, she was considerably more educated than my grandfather, who claimed, to her three Master’s, only one, in library science. (She had that too, of course.) My memories of my grandmother are strange, and fraught, and I am often frustrated when I am told I look like her, and I wonder if perhaps those who think I do merely think all fair-skinned, dark-haired white women look the same—but I owe a great deal—perhaps even my hard-won literacy—to my grandmother.
My paternal grandmother was not a soft woman. Though she be but little she is fierce, Shakespeare wrote, and it could easily have been written about her. At her tallest she barely hit five feet, though I remember a time when she seemed tall and I quite, quite small. I think I was two years old then, and she was teaching me to ice skate. My brothers told me, recently, that they think she mellowed out, by the time they came around. I’m not sure if this is accurate, or if, perhaps, she merely passed on her rage—her “Peso ancestral,” with its cup of women’s bitterness and rage—to me, and not to them. I learned old grudges and newer vendettas from her; the sound of an English accent will always make me flinch, thanks to her tales of cannibal English and their unrelenting desire for Irish babies.2 My grandmother was eternally complex, a creature of iron and of bedrock, the foundation of a dynasty, much as her mother, whom she loved and hated, had once been. She aged well, and, my father and my uncles have told me, in the end she died well, too—a model of how to live, and how to die, my introduction into my own culture and ethnicity. I laugh like her, I am told, though my brothers—who may well remember a more mellow woman than I, since I cannot imagine her mellow at all—have asked, more than once, if Grandma actually laughed. She was not, you see, your average grandmother.
My mother is very little like either of my grandmothers, though, like my paternal grandmother, she never stops moving. I’ve grown up on her tales of the bloody ’60s and ’70s; I, apparently unlike other white folks, was trained to be as wary of the cops as of a mad dog, or a bear. She, a champion speller, never gave up when presented with a severely dyslexic child, and without her determination, I have no doubt I’d never have made it through a double major (with a perfect 4.0 back in the day when that was as high as it went), and then through two Master’s programs, without her.
She is a musician—in the highest echelons of Chicago’s freelance elite—and I grew up backstage, which meant both that I, despite being so cold and so logical and so used to the inside of a lab,3 can move freely among artists and musicians and actors and writers. It also means that I had a full repertoire of profanity by the time I was, oh, maybe five, and now can swear pretty respectably in three languages4 and, in one of them, multiple dialects. When one is lucky enough to have a mother who encompasses that word, in all its nouns and verbage, a few words on Mother’s Day are paltry, indeed, yet here they are, all the same.
I have been lucky, in my life, to have learned from strong, imperfect women, whose strength and fire and—sometimes—outright rage has forged a path for me. One raised me, on tales as well as determination; one gave her the insight to watch for a disability of which she’d never heard. One taught me rage deeper than, most likely, anyone really needs to know, and gave me bedrock on which to set a foundation. I am not quite sure what it says, about me or about the women who have formed me, that from the moment I read the Argentinean modernist Alfonsina Storni‘s poem “Peso Ancestral,” I thought of those women who came before me, strong women, determined women, who had no choice but to drink of that bitter cup of centuries, and who blazed through it anyway, from determination, from spite, from love. I would not be here, or be who I am, without them.
1 I do not write about nice people.
2 Probably this was a bastardization of Jonathan Swift, who was actually Irish and writing satire, and Jack and the Beanstalk, but trust me, you hear it enough times, you’ll never hear an English accent without flinching again, ever.
3 This is true: when she couldn’t take me along and couldn’t find a babysitter, I got dropped at my father’s lab, where his fellow lab rats gave me my very own set of test tubes and pipettes, showed me the doctor’s hidden chocolate stashes, and let me play to my heart’s content.
4 I hope to add German, some day.
Essentially a Nerd 