Whatever faults my mother has, my whining exhaustion should not be her elegy by Devon Miller-Duggan

Last week’s assignment in my Intro Poetry Writing class was an elaborately phrased prompt for an elegy (I cannot recommend the prompts in Challenges for the Delusional from Jane St. Press highly enough. I only use a couple of them in the course of the semester because the real reason I have my students buy the book is so that they can take the marvelous thing away from the class with them…). I don’t normally write with my students, which is kind of dumb. Or it’s a reality-based function of the kind of energies involved in teaching. Or, or, or… But I decided that the elegy was timely, at the very least, given that last week my mother came home from the rehab following her back-to-back life-threatening infections (septic pneumonia and c-dif). I’ve been doing a LOT of processing, emotionally since she was ambulanced into the hospital with the pneumonia 6 weeks ago.

Short background: my mother was diagnosed with MS and epilepsy 3 months after the birth of my (developmentally disabled) sister when I was 15. She’s 80 now and in remarkable shape (she was still driving more or less safely until a year ago). I have no other siblings. Except for the year she ran off to California with a couple of grifters (I swear.) in an interesting attempt to “not be a burden” to me, there hasn’t really be a year in which I didn’t spend some time taking care of my mother, even though she has been largely independent for most of it. She’s lived with us full time for the past 11 years.

There aren’t a lot of 80-year old MS patients out there, and the ones there are are in much worse shape than my mother. Which does not mean she’s in terrific shape. She’s frail, has really lousy balance, truly terrifying toenails, no appetite, and a pretty bad attitude. Her speech is impaired, but mostly functional. Her brain’s been sliding away really noticeably for a year now. Hearing’s iffy and interestingly selective. But she’s on no meds and her heart’s strong.

Here’s the thing. I am the core and focus of my mother’s life. Always have been. According to her, every major decision she’s ever made has been made in the context of me. Every. She stayed with my (toxic to/with/around her) father for me. She divorced my father for me. She took up with her long-time incompetent alcoholic boyfriend for me. She stayed with him for me. She moved with him to Cape Cod for me. She had my (sister against all medical logic because she believed she’d have another me. She moved into my house because I wanted her to (nothing to do with the fact that the aforementioned boyfriend drained her finances to the point where she couldn’t keep her house on the Cape…). I am her greatest accomplishment. Otherwise, according to her, her life is a long list of disappointments. She never got her novel published. Or her diet book. She never wrote her second novel. She never got to take enough classes. She never got to travel enough (several trips to Europe and various National Parks notwithstanding). She never got to marry the Great Love of her life (wouldn’t leave his wife). She never got to have a Ph. D. and teach teachers.

She has never understood that I don’t particularly want to be the focus and core of her life. Not fully. She understands, on some important, but subconscious level, that I can’t be an actual grown-up without some sort of separateness from her. But she doesn’t like it. I’ve spent decades having a semi-comic conversation with her about the definitions of passive-aggression and guilt-mongering. Makes me feel better. Rolls off her like water off a charmingly twinkly duck’s back. I love her to pieces, but not quite the way she loves me.

And it’s been a largely highly functional relationship. She’s, of course, generous to a fault, and funny and smart and tolerant of my occasional bouts of bitchery and bluntness. We have a kind of system that has worked pretty well for a long time.

But the past 6 weeks have just about broken me. The hospital was a nightmare—I stayed the first 4 nights to keep her from getting up and falling on her face repeatedly (the nurses couldn’t get there fast enough, even with a bed alarm—she’s weirdly fast for a wobbly 80-year old—as it was she did rip out her lines once…). The rehab was worse. Good rehab, great care, still the most depressing place I’ve ever been. Now she’s home and I’m functioning as her caregiver until we get all the home-health stuff settled and in place. I’m also teaching and caring several morning a week for our 3-year old grandson (a more joyous human never walked the planet) and trying to spend enough time with my brand new granddaughter (oh, yeah, my daughter was in labor for a week in the midst of all this—but she won and got her VBAC and a gorgeous 9.6 lb. baby). I’m tired in ways I have never been before, and angry with my mother (like she timed this on purpose…) for still being alive, for believing that she needs to stay alive because her love is so magical that it somehow sustains me and all the air around me (that’s not actually a very exaggerated version of things she has said), and for needing me so very, very, very much.

So I’m having a little trouble with the elegy. I’d like it to be about the absolute animal joy of my mother bodysurfing with her granddaughters on a beach on Cape Cod Bay one perfect summer day when the normally mild waves were just energized enough to be perfect for it. I’d like it to be about how, even now, when she looks at trees, she’s trying to figure out whether they’d be good to climb (she was a great tomboy as a kid). I’d like it to be about the ferociousness and generosity of her love for her family. About her playing Rummy with my husband most days and the two of them squabbling like siblings. About how, at Yosemite and Bryce and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and Acadia and Zion, she thanked us over and over and kept saying “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life!”

But right now, all I can think about when I wake in the morning is how, no matter what else the day holds or needs, it will be another day of begging her to eat and cleaning up her messes and having her ask me repeatedly “What do I do next?” and telling me—achingly and repeatedly—how very much she loves me. Another day of one knife in the heart after another. Another day of realizing that my love has limits, that it can be worn down, wrung out, drained off, and then telling myself that caring for her body is, right now, enough of whatever ultimately indefinable thing love is. And kind of loathing myself for whining. Whatever faults my mother has, my whining exhaustion should not be her elegy.
Last week’s assignment in my Intro Poetry Writing class was an elaborately phrased prompt for an elegy (I cannot recommend the prompts in Challenges for the Delusional from Jane St. Press highly enough. I only use a couple of them in the course of the semester because the real reason I have my students buy the book is so that they can take the marvelous thing away from the class with them…). I don’t normally write with my students, which is kind of dumb. Or it’s a reality-based function of the kind of energies involved in teaching. Or, or, or… But I decided that the elegy was timely, at the very least, given that last week my mother came home from the rehab following her back-to-back life-threatening infections (septic pneumonia and c-dif). I’ve been doing a LOT of processing, emotionally since she was ambulanced into the hospital with the pneumonia 6 weeks ago.

Short background: my mother was diagnosed with MS and epilepsy 3 months after the birth of my (developmentally disabled) sister when I was 15. She’s 80 now and in remarkable shape (she was still driving more or less safely until a year ago). I have no other siblings. Except for the year she ran off to California with a couple of grifters (I swear.) in an interesting attempt to “not be a burden” to me, there hasn’t really be a year in which I didn’t spend some time taking care of my mother, even though she has been largely independent for most of it. She’s lived with us full time for the past 11 years.

There aren’t a lot of 80-year old MS patients out there, and the ones there are are in much worse shape than my mother. Which does not mean she’s in terrific shape. She’s frail, has really lousy balance, truly terrifying toenails, no appetite, and a pretty bad attitude. Her speech is impaired, but mostly functional. Her brain’s been sliding away really noticeably for a year now. Hearing’s iffy and interestingly selective. But she’s on no meds and her heart’s strong.

Here’s the thing. I am the core and focus of my mother’s life. Always have been. According to her, every major decision she’s ever made has been made in the context of me. Every. She stayed with my (toxic to/with/around her) father for me. She divorced my father for me. She took up with her long-time incompetent alcoholic boyfriend for me. She stayed with him for me. She moved with him to Cape Cod for me. She had my (sister against all medical logic because she believed she’d have another me. She moved into my house because I wanted her to (nothing to do with the fact that the aforementioned boyfriend drained her finances to the point where she couldn’t keep her house on the Cape…). I am her greatest accomplishment. Otherwise, according to her, her life is a long list of disappointments. She never got her novel published. Or her diet book. She never wrote her second novel. She never got to take enough classes. She never got to travel enough (several trips to Europe and various National Parks notwithstanding). She never got to marry the Great Love of her life (wouldn’t leave his wife). She never got to have a Ph. D. and teach teachers.

She has never understood that I don’t particularly want to be the focus and core of her life. Not fully. She understands, on some important, but subconscious level, that I can’t be an actual grown-up without some sort of separateness from her. But she doesn’t like it. I’ve spent decades having a semi-comic conversation with her about the definitions of passive-aggression and guilt-mongering. Makes me feel better. Rolls off her like water off a charmingly twinkly duck’s back. I love her to pieces, but not quite the way she loves me.

And it’s been a largely highly functional relationship. She’s, of course, generous to a fault, and funny and smart and tolerant of my occasional bouts of bitchery and bluntness. We have a kind of system that has worked pretty well for a long time.

But the past 6 weeks have just about broken me. The hospital was a nightmare—I stayed the first 4 nights to keep her from getting up and falling on her face repeatedly (the nurses couldn’t get there fast enough, even with a bed alarm—she’s weirdly fast for a wobbly 80-year old—as it was she did rip out her lines once…). The rehab was worse. Good rehab, great care, still the most depressing place I’ve ever been. Now she’s home and I’m functioning as her caregiver until we get all the home-health stuff settled and in place. I’m also teaching and caring several morning a week for our 3-year old grandson (a more joyous human never walked the planet) and trying to spend enough time with my brand new granddaughter (oh, yeah, my daughter was in labor for a week in the midst of all this—but she won and got her VBAC and a gorgeous 9.6 lb. baby). I’m tired in ways I have never been before, and angry with my mother (like she timed this on purpose…) for still being alive, for believing that she needs to stay alive because her love is so magical that it somehow sustains me and all the air around me (that’s not actually a very exaggerated version of things she has said), and for needing me so very, very, very much.

So I’m having a little trouble with the elegy. I’d like it to be about the absolute animal joy of my mother bodysurfing with her granddaughters on a beach on Cape Cod Bay one perfect summer day when the normally mild waves were just energized enough to be perfect for it. I’d like it to be about how, even now, when she looks at trees, she’s trying to figure out whether they’d be good to climb (she was a great tomboy as a kid). I’d like it to be about the ferociousness and generosity of her love for her family. About her playing Rummy with my husband most days and the two of them squabbling like siblings. About how, at Yosemite and Bryce and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and Acadia and Zion, she thanked us over and over and kept saying “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life!”

But right now, all I can think about when I wake in the morning is how, no matter what else the day holds or needs, it will be another day of begging her to eat and cleaning up her messes and having her ask me repeatedly “What do I do next?” and telling me—achingly and repeatedly—how very much she loves me. Another day of one knife in the heart after another. Another day of realizing that my love has limits, that it can be worn down, wrung out, drained off, and then telling myself that caring for her body is, right now, enough of whatever ultimately indefinable thing love is. And kind of loathing myself for whining. Whatever faults my mother has, my whining exhaustion should not be her elegy.

More Singin’ in the Brain by Devon Miller-Duggan–the soundtrack of life continues

I keep thinking about the music in my brain–and keep remembering songs (because they’ve pushed themselves to the front of my consciousness again) that I meant to list in my earlier post, Singin’ in the Brain; what good’s a list if it’s not comprehensive? So, herewith further thoughts:

I’ve had one or another of the songs from Les Miserables meandering through my head for a couple of weeks now. This has nothing in particular to do with the quality of the movie or of the show (I’m fond of it. I once heard the director of the professional theater program here at Pretty Good U dismiss it as manipulative minor-chord drivel. Apparently I don’t feel the need to agree with him about everything. Crow was miscast, everybody else was really good.) Les Miz isn’t the issue here, though. The soundtrack in my head is.

I’d really love it to be meaningful. I’d love to be able to use it as a sort of constant diviner of my spiritual/emotional/situational state, but I have concluded, sadly, that it is an imperfect guide, at best. Some of it is so clearly a product of What’s Going On. Otherwise we’d have to search really hard to find meaning in the fact that I spent several insomniac nights in December waking up every hour with the theme song to Doc McStuffins stuck in my head. Just as in October, when I was haunted day and night by the theme song to Thomas the Tank Engine, Doc McStuffins was a clear function of my grandson’s video-obsession-du-jour. The song from Daniel Tiger’s World is currently worming its way into my brain. Glrrrphhh.

Other songs have somewhat more idiosyncratic connections. There is something about the rhythm of playing Spider Solitaire that, for years now, pulls up “Ease on Down the Road” from The Wiz and I hum it helplessly when I play, which I have, by times, done way too much of.

But much of the music running through my head is pretty easily predictable–at least in terms of what makes sense as part of my internal music library–melodies from Bach or Handel or Purcell, hymns I’m fond of (or loathe), and a longish list of charmingly random pop and folk songs from the 60s and 70s. But mostly I suspect that there is some correlation between the rhythm of whatever I’m doing, if it involves movement, and whatever bit of music crops up–at least initially. Sometimes there’s a conversational key. Mostly not. I sing to myself in all kinds of emotional and situational weather–pretty normal human behavior. I have, now and again, used my mother’s assertion about my singing indicating happiness to convince myself to be less grumped: I’m singing, so I must not be as pissy as I thought. It works sometimes. Not bad.

Of course, I wouldn’t need the soundtrack-as-gauge if I were better at reading my own internal weather. That’s where my husband’s especially useful. Apparently my face is an open, neon-printed book to him. Meanwhile, I expect that I’ll have bits and pieces of Les Miserables making frequent appearances for a while longer. It’s never “I Dreamed a Dream,” thank heaven. It’s mostly “Do You Hear the People Sing.” I’ve always been a sucker for an anthem (especially of the non-national sort). Sometimes “Bring Him Home” tries to hold me for a while, but I tend to actively suppress that one, unless I need a good cry. Once the French pop-opera resettles back in the attic, I expect I’ll go back to random selections from the Brandenberg concerti and The Beach Boys. And Stan Rodgers. Why it’s almost never any of the small list of songs I have persuaded my ADD-ridden brain to retain (“A Maid that’s Deep in Love,” The Marvelous Toy,” “Twisted,” “Maddy Groves,” “Hard Times,”Punky’s Dilemma,” “Come My Way, My Truth, My Life,” “Jerusalem,”that’s pretty much the whole pathetic list) I will never understand.

Oh, yes, and for some reason one of the most frequent visitors along with the Daniel Boone song I mentioned before is the theme song (by George M. Cohan) from Harrigan & Son, which was a sitcom about a father and son team of lawyers that ran before The Flintstones (tv scheduling used to be even weirder…) in 1961. The elder Harrigan made jokes in Latin. That is probably my other most frequent soundtrack. Which is maybe a little weird. I was 7. Of course, I did end up married to a man who loves a good Latin joke. I suppose there might be some sort of line there…

Main Street by Devon Miller-Duggan

Main St.

I never expected to spend my life in Newark, DE. It’s a college town and it used to also be an auto-plant town, which made for some interesting contrasts, but it has never been, per se, an interesting town in any sense beyond which pretty much every town is or can be interesting. It’s vaguely pretty, vaguely lively, and vaguely convenient. No mountains, no really good museums, no snow. We have pretty nifty theater and excellent music. It’s altogether mostly pleasantly liveable. And I have been living here for the overwhelming majority of my 58 years, starting when I was 1 and my parents were still both undergraduates. I planned to get out. I transferred to a nifty New England school in hopes of facilitating that, but I’d already condemned myself by falling hard for a prof who got tenure the year we got married. Sigh.

It’s been a good life. A very good life, so it’s not like I’ve been crippled by Newark. Not at all, except that a couple of my actual career possibilities were things that I could only ever have done in a seriously big city. Small sigh. But no self-pity. Okay, maybe I get a little mopey once or twice a year.

There are a actually a couple of businesses on Main St. that have been here since I was toddling. One is Bing’s Bakery, which was always terrific (they carefully hired European bakers back in the 50s and 60s) and still is terrific under very carefully respectful-of-tradition new ownership. They even made my daughter’s wedding cakes–and they were wonderful. Come to think about it, that’s the only one. The non-corporate Newark Cinema has been here a very long time, but I remember when that was the Post Office where my burly father would get seasonal work slogging Christmas packages. The sub shop where he cut his finger in the meat slicer is long gone, though. Even the Stone Balloon–which at one point in the 70s and 80s held some sort of national record for the amount of beer it pumped–has morphed beyond being able to claim survival–into a rather good, if goofily expensive, restaurant/wine bar. And there are businesses that have only recently disappeared and others that have been here a good long time.

But the Main Street of my childhood is gone, and the Main Street that I enjoyed so much as a college student and young mother is also very much gone. And it was better. We certainly have a much broader selection of eateries now–some (the best ones, I’m delighted to say, even locally owned, mostly), but the grotesquely high rents have made it pretty difficult for folks to sustain new businesses without big-time corporate backing. I’ve heard, on pretty impeccable authority, that the local landlord who owns most of the buildings has blithely acknowledged that he’d rather take the tax breaks on long-term empty buildings than lower his rents. Bully for him. So much for civic-mindedness.

I am not one who is fond of bemoaning an idyllic past. The past was at least as imperfect as the present, if not more in many respects. But I miss Newark Farm & Home with its creaky wooden floors, slightly quirky selection of non-essential items, and really knowledgeable guys. We hung on to one small True Value until recently, but Home Depot finally killed that off, too. I confess to loving HD–so many interesting things–but I miss not having to walk half a mile to find a screw I need, and I miss talking books with the neat kid behind the register. And I sorely miss Sharrah’s Fabrics. I spent many, many blissed-out hours poring over pattern books and patting fabrics there. And I always found what I needed. The fabric selection at JoAnn’s pretty consistently sucks unless you’re making a prom dress or a Halloween costume, and it’s a 20 minute drive in consistently thick traffic. I miss The Malt Shoppe, which was decorated with the owner’s collection of vintage aprons and made wicked good sandwiches, and the greasy spoon where I used to feel so cool having coffee with my professors. Pretty much everyone misses The State Theater, even in its latter incarnation as a heat-less wreck. They showed wonderfully weird and erudite double features and it was fun to curl up in the blanket you brought with you. Main St. looked cooler with a movie marquee. Now in that spot we just have the architecturally dead Galleria, with its perpetually dicey collection of Retail Space. Whoopee. Like every other town in the country, we used to have actual bookstores. Now we have B&N in a dazzlingly ugly/bland building which for reasons that completely escape me actually won some sort of architectural award (I’m betting that it was or the use of some specific material–our really ugly high-rise dorms won one back in the 70s when they were built–it was for their effective use of concrete…). It’s a black cube. Black. It looks like the Borg ship, but less interesting. And Barnes & Noble is a bookstore only in the loosest sense. Actually, they kind of are the Borg, so maybe the building is appropriate after all…

I do, in fact understand the brute economics that made it hard for the smaller-profit-margin businesses I miss to survive. I just don’t think that those brute economics should be the only driver. At some point, it behooves a town to facillitate intangibles like “character” and “variety.” I had a really nicely formulated and fairly passionate rant here about real estate developers. I vaguely remember promising Miriam when she asked me if I wanted to guest-blog for her now and again that I’d avoid politics, though. So insert your own.

So the restaurants are better, but the street as a whole has much less character and is less funky and less functional. I may be shifting into stubborn-old-cuss mode, but I cannot for the life of me understand why there can’t be some sort of middle ground.

Season’s Musings by Devon Miller-Duggan

Season’s Musings

I love Christmas, even though I have a fairly bad and long established habit of overloading the season with to-do lists to the point where I’m too exhausted to act human. I love it for a long list of theological reasons centering around the whole business of incarnation. I love it because it’s the winter holiday, and I love winter. I love it because it involves lots of sparkly things like lights and glitter–and all the sparkle really is a valid expression of the theology. I love it because it smells good. And I love it because it was the one season of the year when my parents more or less stopped trying to stomp each others’ souls into the ground and acted more or less like we were an actual family.

But most of all I love it because of the giving. I get high on the giving. I love the process of choosing presents for people ranging from the neighbors to the family. I take it very, very seriously and think of it as a very real and present expression of both my knowledge of the recipient and my wish for his or her joy.

I grew up with people for whom Christmas was an important expression of their understanding of their lives and their places in the world, and who approached it with the same ferocious standards they applied to the practice of, in this instance, law and dentistry. Christmas not only had to be celebrated, it had to be done RIGHT. If my grandfather (my mother’s father) couldn’t find exactly the decoration he wanted, he commissioned a local artist to make it–so his front porch featured a truly gorgeous life-sized Santa cut-out. He had a huge beautiful pine tree in the center of his circular driveway precisely so that he could cover it in perfectly spaced lights which were turned on exactly at dusk on Thanksgiving evening every year–by custom in that small southern town, always the first lights of the season. He began to wake up early with excitement, making plans for the year’s gifts, in early October. My grandfather’s present always made me feel exactly what he wanted me to feel–like a treasured part of his treasured family.

My father approached the holiday with the same aesthetic ferocity that he approached dentistry. To say that he was a perfectionist barely covers it. We decorated the tree so that it was a shimmering masterpiece of perfect spacing and quivering ornaments–and every one of them quivered because if any branch blocked the perfect hang of an ornament, the branch got trimmed. Every strand of tinsel shimmered because we not only placed them one strand at a time, we did so with scissors in our pockets so that any strand that didn’t hang freely could be trimmed to do so. He wrapped packages the same way.

Both of them LOVED piles of presents under the tree. Piles and piles. Of perfectly chosen, beautifully excessive presents. And for a long, long time, I repeated that excess. To some extent, I still do. My grandfather’s present always made me feel exactly what he wanted me to feel–like a treasured part of his treasured family. While my father was alive, the choosing and buying/making of gifts for him was a frantic yearly attempt to please him, to make him like me, to express my love for him in terms that he could actually accept. When he liked things, my soul lit up. When he didn’t, my soul died.

I know he felt, toward the end of his life, that I wantedwantedwanted stuff from him and regarded him as a bottomless pit of guilt-induced bounty, and to some extent, he was right. I wanted whatever I could get from him that I could construe as love or liking, and since both of those were generally ephemeral, I always wanted more. But what I really wanted was for him to not cancel dinner plans because his friend Dave had called to invite him to a Flyers game. I wanted him to not look at me with thinly veiled disgust. I wanted him to love my second daughter as well as he loved the first one, even though she was a different child. I wanted him to stop being angry with me because I remembered too much and wouldn’t just “get over” the scars he had left. I wanted more of our relationship to have the joy in it that wrapping presents together and making dazzling Christmas trees together had had before he decided that I could do those things up to his standard and handed them off to me.

Mind you, the man was profoundly generous, both to me and to a long list of other people and causes. The year he bought us a car, he pretty much saved our bacon. But I think he was angry about that, too, so the cost was high all around.

It has taken me well into advanced middle age to understand that the kind of giving I grew up with was, in its own way, a form of obsessive consumption. That it leaves big footprints on the spirits of the receivers, binds them to us, and is, in many, many ways much more about making ourselves seem important than about giving delight.

That being said, much of the joy in it is real and valid and strong. And maybe I’ve reached a point of some sanity with it. There is as much pleasure these days in gifts I buy from Episcopal & Development or the Heifer Project or The International Justice Mission (yep, those were shameless plugs…) as from amazon or etsy. And the ones I make always will be the ones with the most joy in them, for both me and the recipients, I believe. There is something sacred in things that are made with hands and clear intentions–just a little bit of sacredness, but an important one, I believe. And I do still believe that there is a great deal to be said for the effort of real thoughtfulness. I learned wonderful lessons from both my father and grandfather–about both the bliss and the importance of doing things beautifully, about generosity, about rejoicing in small things, and the possibilities for healing or solace in seasons of celebration. These lessons were, no question, the greatest gifts they both gave me. And, even with the scars and costs my father’s gifts most often carried, I am very aware in this season and at this point in my life of how important those gifts have been to me. In the end, I do believe he wished that, wished that those things he taught would be real gifts of real love. And they were and are.

For those who read Miriamswell who celebrate Christmas, may it be merry and bright. For those who are celebrating (or have, depending on when Mir posts this) Hanukkah, may it be a joyous reminder of the sacredness of both light and persistence. For all the other celebrations of midwinter–I wish you joy and peace. Once it’s the 22nd of December, may we all rejoice in not having to hear anything else about the End of the World. And for all of us, may 2013 be full of grace. Thanks for reading my mutterings.
***
PS. FROM MIRIAM SAGAN–I love this essay and am glad to share it with you readers. As a Jew, I’ve always been puzzled by Christmas. It wasn’t just that it was a mainstream and Christian holiday that wasn’t for me, I didn’t know how people experienced it. This essay has enlightened me. By seeming coincidence I have in my file, ready to post, the photos below, “Holiday in the Hood”–one across the street, one on the mantle. Happy last night of Hannukah to all–and peace in our hearts and in the New Year.

Singin’in the Brain by Devon Miller-Duggan

Singin’in the Brain

My mother says that she could always tell when I was happy when I was little because I sang. I do remember being enthralled by songs on the radio very early on. For what seems like ages (though it couldn’t have been, thinking back carefully) I wanted desperately for my name to be Tammy because of the hit song from the 1957 movie “Tammy and the Bachelor.” I’d have been 3. I thought that song was the prettiest thing I’d ever heard. I thought that name was much prettier than mine.

Anyway, for ages I tried to convince myself that whatever song I caught myself humming was significant—a kind of waking dream language that I could somehow parse for clues to my psyche’s well-being. I’ve given up on that. Here’s what convinced me that there’s no message in the songs in my head: the theme song
from the TV series “Daniel Boone” (1964-70). I don’t think it has anything in particular to do with my having a huge crush on Boone’s Indian friend with the English Accent, Mingo (played by Broadway actor Ed Ames for the 1st 4 years of the show’s run). I don’t have any idea why the theme song has stuck in my head
so firmly. Heaven knows there are all sorts of things I wish would stick in my head that don’t. But I got up this morning humming to myself “Daniel Boone was a man, yes a biiiiig man…and he fought for America to make all Americans freeeeeeee…what a boon, what a doer, what a dream-comin’-truer was heeeeeee…”
Really? I remember that? Good grief. And I can’t remember the words to my favorite hymns? Not fair.

I have, of course, all sorts of pop songs from the 60s and 70s stuck in my head, not to mention all sorts of ad jingles (“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!”) and theme songs from shows I didn’t even very much like (The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, I Love Lucy—okay, I was a weird kid). But the words to “Be Thou My Vision” or “Come My Way, My Truth, My Life,” not so much. Cole Porter or Stan Rogers songs? Goodness no. Memory’s a funny thing. And irritating.

I find myself humming Christmas songs in August sometimes, and slightly off-color pop songs while I’m in church arranging flowers. Protest songs while I’m in line at the DMV (well, that one might actually make sense…). Bits of Handel or Purcell in the grocery store. It all probably does “mean” something, but what it means is probably that my brain is more of a dustball rolling down the hill, collecting odd bits it runs over but never stopping long enough to intentionally collect anything than a carefully curated collection of worthwhile objects and documents.

I fear I can probably only partially blame it on the ADD.

And now I have “There she was, just-a walkin’ down the street, singin’ Do-Wah, Diddy, Diddy-dum, Diddy-doo…” stuck. I guess it’s an improvement over the Daniel Boone song…

It’s probably a good thing that I believe none of this means anything.

Devon Miller-Duggan on Gone With The Wind

My mother’s book group is reading (re-reading, I trust) Gone With the Wind. My mother’s book group is a bunch of brainy older Episcopal churchwomen and the group is called Novel Theology. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is more their usual speed. I’ve been trying to talk them into The Sparrow and Good Omens and Lamb for years, to no avail. Mind you, I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society –it’s not that I disdain their taste. So, I assume, they have decided that there are theological lessons to be discussed in Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic.

I haven’t thought about the book for years and years and years. I read it, as I suspect most of us did, in junior high, and found it pretty yummy stuff. Rhett was hothothot even without the picture of Clark Gable in my head, and there was enough drama for an episode of Game of Thrones. I’ve seen the movie a bunch of times (and the last time I remember thinking that it was NOT great, actually). But like a great many cultural icons, GWTW just sort of sits there on a back bookshelf in my mind and doesn’t get dusted off very often, if ever.

My esteemed Mater, though, will be reading it again this. She was 6 when the movie came out, so she was a little young to be caught up in “Scarlet” fever, though I do have her Madame Alexander Scarlet doll from some time in the early 40s (by which time, I think she’d already become a doll-averse tom-boy). I keep hoping it’ll be worth something on e-Bay…

But I was thinking about the book yesterday afternoon because of my mother’s surprising announcement (I might have to go to the meeting on GWTW, just to see what they do with it—they’re sweeties, they’ll let me…). What was it about that book? God knows it’s turgid. For its time, it was fairly sexy (though feminists have certainly had a field day with the semi-sort-of marital rape scene—we’ll pass over in silence the thrill that scene gave me in the 7th grade. In these days of all sorts of women blithering about 50 Shades of Gray, I can’t imagine that anyone cares about the scene much any more.). And it was a “big” book both in length and in subject. Maybe it was among the first popular appearancse on the public scene of a Southern take on “The Whoa-ah.” There was certainly interest in the era—Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson (as great a pairing as Astaire and Rogers to my mind) danced up the stairs in “The Little Colonel” in 1935 and the book came out in 1936.

But, in the end, I think it’s the character Scarlet herself that makes the book interesting. She’s awfully attractive, but my goodness, she’s a horrid, anti-heroic, unregenerate bitch even as she’s a survivor. If she’s emblematic of the pre-War south, or meant to be, then it’s pretty hard to argue for rejoicing in any survival of the culture that shaped her. Which is probably not what Mitchell was planning on. The book romanticizes the rise of the KKK and speaks of field slaves in ways that made me cringe in the 7th grade and makes me want to barf now, so it’s not exactly progressive.

But there’s the dark, swarthy, dangerous, sexual Rhett. The scalawag. And it’s very clear to anyone at all that both Mitchell and Scarlet prefer the heck out of him to the Beau Ideal, Ashley Wilkes. And critics these days like to say that Rhett stands in for the African slaves Mitchell could nevernevernever have Scarlet be attracted to—that their love/hate story is actually a story of interracial love. Not sure I buy this. Not sure I don’t.

But I can’t wait to see what Novel Theology makes of it.

Devon Miller Duggan on the Vise Generation

I could start by listing all the things that aren’t wrong. It’s a blessedly long list. But starting there would seem a little like asking for the universe to decide I need another thing or two to keep track of. And it would probably, in the end, have exactly the effect Oprah said it would, and make me at least feel lousy about whining, if not actually better about my life.

And, in truth, I feel pretty good about my life. Maybe even very good. But, cripes, I am tired.

Apparently, I am a member of The Vise Generation. I just thought I was a tail-end-Boomer. And you know how The Boomers are the Have It All, Want It All, Last Manifestation of the post-war American Dream? Yeah, sort of. Vise Generation is feeling a lot more accurate these days. I became aware of it when The Mother of the Wonder Toddler mentioned to me that she’d heard a piece on NPR about it and it had made her freshly aware of how much her father and I are doing for her family. The conversation was by way of saying how grateful they are. It was one of those moments when you just feel really decent about how your kids turn out—precious in so many ways.

So here’s the vise situation: My husband and I make sure that our teaching schedules don’t mesh so that we can take care of our grandson (2.5 years and sweetfunnywonderful) while his mother works 7-12. So we get up at 5:30 a couple of days a week, take him to pre-school at 9:15 and pick him up at 11:15, bring him home with us to wait for his Mama to come get him at 12:30.

I suppose his parents could probably manage to pay for day care. Sort of. Almost. These are people with middle class incomes and medical insurance and one set of student loans. But paying for childcare would pretty much wipe out my daughter’s salary, I suspect. And we wouldn’t trade the time with the kidlet for anything, though another hour of sleep would be pretty welcome. It’d be fine if I were constitutionally capable of going to sleep before midnight, but it’s pretty clear that if I haven’t started doing that after 2 years of this, I’m not going to. And I have tried.

But the grand-kid care isn’t the issue. The mother-care is. Now, let’s be clear. Moving my mother in with us 8 years ago was one of the top 5 decisions I’ll ever have made. No question. And for most of the 8 years, she has been remarkably independent, esp. given that she has had MS for a million years—driving competently, running her own social and medical life to a large extent, taking care of most of her own stuff. And we have a terrific relationship. She is smart, unfailingly generous, wildly loving, frequently funny. And she and her great-grandson have a rhapsodically beautiful relationship that is worth pretty much anything to have gotten to watch and be around.

But things have been steadily slipping, particularly over the past couple of years. And any “normal” cognitive slippage is happening to a brain that is already considerably scarred by decades of MS. So it’s hard, more and more often, for her to dredge up words. And she surrendered her car keys several weeks ago. Something weird is up with her feet that is causing huge amounts of pain in the skin on the bottom (MS just plain mucks about with stuff randomly), so between that, her MS-crappy balance, and several decades of living with a spine that S-curves sideways, walking has gone from bad to worse. Oh, yeah, the perpetual semi-dehydration (don’t get me started…), perpetual sleep issues (you don’t want to be adding sleeping drugs to this brain’s mix…), and a minor obsession with her size-4-ness don’t help.

But all of that is cope-with-able. So far, anyway.

What’s making me nuts is that the sides of her character that have, shall we say, been hard for me to negotiate all these many years are, as is normally the case in these sorts of situations, just plain exacerbated. Do we have a little trouble with boundaries between ourself and our daughter? Yeah. Are we a bit prone to passive-aggression of a Southern Lady-belle sort. Unh-huh. Do we have a great deal of trouble acknowledging that we might have done whatever it is that has the household in an uproar? Oh, hell, yes. Is EVERYTHING the fault of some man (mostly her astonishingly welcoming and long-suffering son-in-law…)? Yeah (and, oh, do I have fun negotiating that recurring mess…).

Do I spend a lot of time reminding myself how much I love this remarkable woman? Yep. Do I spend a lot of time reminding myself that I need to make whatever her remaining time is as wonderful/stable/loving/comfortable as I possibly can without doing so on the backs of the rest of the family? Yep. Is it awful that there are days when she can’t tell me who the president is or what the year is. Yeah—but most of all because it’s breaking her heart to watch herself go down into that fog. And we have more good days than bad at the moment. I think we will at least until great-grandbaby #2 arrives in March. After that, I have no idea. No bloody idea. No bloody freaking idea.

Therein lies the problem. Therein lies the Vise in which we are squeezed.

And we have two wonderful daughters who love their grandmother almost as fiercely as she loves them, and who are here, and willing to help. We have decent, if not lush, resources and a wonderful community. We have (approximate) sanity and (reasonable) knowledge of what needs to happen. We’re on the good end of the scale.

And some days my heart hurts so much I’d like to take it out and throw it away. Preferably over the side of a cliff with crashing waves at the bottom. Some days I spend the whole day vaguely dizzy from anger and grief. Some days it feels like my mother is eating me away from the inside out.

Other days it’s okay. It’s just life. And there is always the radiance of the grandson to balance everything out. Always. But I am afraid of the time when the okay days are consistently outnumbered by the hard ones. And I think it’s coming soon.

Essay by Devon Miller-Duggan

Word Love

I have noticed, since I’ve begun writing my other blog, that I have a new favorite word: complicated. Or complex. They come up a lot.

I was trying to write a note to a young friend who’s caught in the shredding darkness of grief about how complicated grief and even more complicated healing are. This was by way of affirming some things she had said about the also-young great love of her life who had recently died, and about how she was trying to begin to understand what the process was going to ask of her over the next few years. Short answer: a lot. Long answer: a lot of muddled, complicated, bumpy, non-linear work.

Often in my other blog, issues around weight, the distinction between the fake Obesity Crisis and what may be the real obesity crisis, and what both of those things have to do with ethics, psychology, religion, medicine, culture and God knows what else, lead to my sort of throwing my hands in the air and declaring that it’s (whatever “it” is) is complicated. It’s not a cop out, at least not all the time. I’ve sort of come to understand why so much of philosophical writing is more circular than linear—or maybe more fractal than linear—sometimes you need to pull yourself back from a branching conversation in order to stay in the neighborhood of your original subject. And, very often, declaring something complicated is an attempt to keep the blog post under a zillion pages. But often enough, it’s a way of saying that I’ve thought my way into a corner and can’t write my way out of it. And most often, it’s my way of building a bulwark against a culture that desperately wants to make everything simple and binary.

I get it. I’m a binary kind of girl—at least that’s often my default first response. But more than simplicity, I ultimately treasure the complex and the paradoxical. There’s a visceral pleasure in playing with/around/through problems and narratives and circumstances, even when the issues themselves are painful or difficult. And it’s a better pleasure—for me, at least—and a less dangerous pleasure—for me, certainly—than the pleasure of simplicity often is. Simplicity, for me, often leads to contempt and anger and dismissal and discourtesy and short-sightedness.

The problem is that complexity, for me, often leads to hesitance, over-thinking, and near-paralysis. And sometimes things are just plain wrong, or gorgeously and uncomplicatedly right. And some people are just jerks, even if the reasons for their jerkitude are more or less complicated, the jerkitude is, itself, fairly straightforward. And often, it’s important to recognize the clear, uncomplicated stuff for what it is—both the bad and, probably just as importantly, the good.

But I do love the complex. T. S. Eliot, whose work I adore down to my cells, was probably something of an anti-semite—something I find uncomplicatedly unacceptable. Mother Teresa, inarguably someone who lived in a sacred space, was not a particularly nice woman and knew it, and was tormented by it, even as she walked around spreading the light of her God everywhere she went. Most saints, in fact, were not particularly easy folks to live with. Greatness and venality/idiocy/cruelty/pick-the-failing are not mutually exclusive, even when they seem like they should be oxymoronic. They’re just extreme examples of what most of us are, and most of us are just ambulatory examples of the complexity of being in a world where everything is in a constant, complicated tension between birth and death, light and dark, being and nothingness, peace and violence.

So, unlike some of the other words I have fixated on in the past (gossamer made its fluttery way into a great many of my early early poems, lucid inserted itself into every corner of my justly unpublished novel, gather and flesh fight their way into many of my poems even when I watch out for them…) I think this one’s actually got work to do.

Goopy, but it wanted to get written: Devon Miller-Duggan Muses on Friendship

Goopy, but it wanted to get written:

I recently spent a week at The Glen Workshops—a nice conference on religion and the arts that’s full of some of the nicest people I’ve ever been in a group with. I’d made an unusually large (for me) bunch of friends when I went 3 years ago and I was a little nervous about meandering back in and being welcomed after a couple of years of not going. Wasted worry. People were gloriously, heart-healingly welcoming. And I made new friends. Like I said, the place is unsually dense with folks who are smart, art-driven, and truly nice, so it’s very, very fertile ground. I didn’t stay on the campus of St. John’s College in
Santa Fe where the Workshops take place, though. I stayed down the mountain in the city with one of my oldest and most deeply beloved friends. 40 years we have now.

I don’t think of myself as someone who makes friends easily—a holdover from a slightly isolated only childhood (we moved a lot and I was a little weird and a lot shy). I do a pretty good job these days of acting like I’m an extrovert when I’m in groups—mostly because I’d rather make that high-energy effort than go
back to watching from the side and feeling weird and socially dysfunctional.

Anyway, I started thinking about friendship. I’ve had an interesting year, friendship-wise, a weirdly good year, partially because I’ve maybe been more focused on it than usual, for a variety of reasons (one friend out of work and
stressed, another grieving the loss of a child, others who’ve wandered back into my life because of Facebook, the happy surprise of the Glen, and my I’m-always-smarter-when-I’m-talking-to-her Santa Fe friend whose wisdom I particularly needed this year and who runs this nice blog and lets me write
these meandering think-bits). It’s probably good to periodically run through your friendships and make sure you’re paying proper/nurturing/conscious attention to them. Because I, at least, can be careless, and have been.

Smarter and more profound folk than I have written reams on the subject of the value (salvific, succor-giving, steadying) of friendships of various sorts and degrees. I can’t add anything to those reams and don’t mean to try.

Maybe I’m just writing this to let the Universe know that I know how fortunate, how blessed, and how flat-out wealthy in friends I am, and that I’m deeply grateful, even if writing this makes me feel a little bit like an Oprah episode…

Twin 6′ Hearts
Jim Dine 
Born in Cincinnati in 1935

On Reading by Devon Miller-Duggan

On Reading

There’s a moderately interesting discussion up on the New York Times site about the nature and future of The Novel. I both love and don’t-much-care-about this sort of discussion. I love it because it’s a conversation by folks who have things to say about something in which I’m interested. I don’t much care because I think it’s silly to worry about The Death of The Novel or The Death of Poetry or The Death of Culture. Even Snooki and Twitter can’t kill art, and I have a great faith in the abilities of art and artists to adapt and grow and morph and keep on doing what they’ve always done. I also have a sort of Pollyanna faith in history—I think humans bumpily, slowly messily, sometimes brutally do generally manage to improve/progress even as we cycle around on ourselves. I forget just at the moment which great philosopher(s) described history as an upward-moving spiral, but that’s always resonated with me. So I find myself disinclined to pay much attention to prognostications and declarations of The Death of this or that. Except, of course, for potential nuclear disasters, climate-change disasters, and other things of that magnitude. Those can cut the nice spiral off pretty effectively, at which point the Death of the Novel won’t much matter anyway.

In some ways, the most interesting thing about the NYT discussion about the novel is that everybody who wrote (Jane Smiley, Matt de la Peña, Robin Sloan, Thomas Glave, James Gunn, William Deresiewicz) was right. They all offered reasons for the survival of the novel. Nice, smart reasons (Smiley: Empathy. de la Peña: sadness and challenge. Sloan: longevity. Glave: novels change readers. Gunn: Genre’s, especially Sci-fi’s, ability to address issues. Deresiewicz: flexibility and sturdiness.) that the novel is vital and will continue to be vital.

I figure that it was a nifty thing that there was a YA novelist and a pro-Sci-Fi writer in the lot at all—the NYT has made some progress in expanding its understanding of What’s Worthy.

The whole thing, of course, got me thinking about why I read and what I read. I’ve always read for reading’s ability to take me out of where I am and into places I would rather be. Or just get me out of wherever I was. It was a great day for me when I discovered that my parents actually believed I couldn’t hear them because I was reading so intently. It might have been true some of the time—I wouldn’t know, would I?—but it was a mighty convenient fiction when I was 12 and not in the mood to wash the car/weed/do dishes. Of course, I always ended up doing that stuff anyway, but I did get to postpone it a bit. Any control will do when you’re 12.

I used to read very widely—fiction of many sorts and degrees, non-fiction, poetry, magazines. Especially in high school and college, of course. But I have always really been, at heart, a genre floozy. A little swash, a lot of buckle, and I’m there. I adore the endless variation-on-a-form of fantasy, romance, mystery, sci-fi just like I adore the endless variation-on-a-form of wedding gowns and Old Master portraits. Westerns and spy novels, too. Pretty much any genre other than horror and whatever it is that Tom Clancy is (testo-tech?). And poetry. I still read some serious fiction and a little non-fiction, but I have not a lot of patience for some of the bottomless grimness of current literary fiction (Boyle, McCarthy) and its general under-editing (Franzen). It may be a flaw—an indicator of some essential triviality in my nature—but I do have a need to be able to connect to/cathect with some characters in a book (which may explain my troubles with Dostoyevsky). Almost happily, I’ve hit the blissful stage of almost not caring about whether my credentials as An Intellectual will stand up to much scrutiny. Almost.

And poetry. I do read that. Probably not as much as I ought to, but consistently and in not inconsiderable quantity. And on some possibly questionable level, I think poetry is even less likely to die than the novel, and for good reasons, but mostly because I think it has a deeper relationship to whatever it is that makes us human. This is me, folks, skirting a huge debate…

Which covers what I read. But the why is maybe the most interesting part of the question, I think. Because I suspect that, for all the lovely other reasons (information-gathering, spiritual questing, fantasy-wandering, understanding, empathy, sex, fun, study, whatever) that we read, the one that I understood when I was 12 is still the core: we read to get away from the world in order to be able to be in the world, to inhabit limited and (in some sense, even if only formal) ordered worlds in order to be able to live in and pay attention to the larger and un-orderable world. I really don’t think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that.