Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Tarot Reading

Tarot Reading

You were The Magician;
you cast it differently,
but all my life you were

and The High Priestesses
you invoked never knew
as much as you.

Once I read for you
and drew The Moon.
I flinched, "a bad omen,"
but you said, "not for us,
we were named for that moon."

Names aside, most of all,
you were The Sun,
constant, light, and warmth.

When you died,
I bought new cards.
I smudged them with sage
and wrapped them in silken ferns,
blessing them for my journey--

for my journey still.

--Cynthia Sillitoe, April 2013

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Demystifying Grandma


Recently, someone remarked to me what a saint her father had become since his death. I told her that was nothing. My grandma started becoming a saint before she died. Not to everyone, but....there was definitely a myth started at some point and passed down through a few of us. For instance, I grew up believing that, at any sort of discord, my grandma would shatter into tiny pieces. Frequently, this was used to get a younger sibling (or niece) to take on someone else's chores. I also grew up believing she was perfect. Anyone doing anything less than perfect could be reprimanded by her example, though we could also count on never meeting her standard. When my mom realized I'd heard and believed all this, she swiftly debunked it.

"Grandma has many wonderful qualities," she would say, "but she is not perfect. She gets mad, she gets frustrated, she gets angry; she just doesn't do it out loud. And," my mom added, "Grandma isn't going to shatter if you don't dry the dishes right. Wait a minute, why are you drying dishes there? New rule: you only do chores that Grandma or Grandpa ask you to do. If it's one of my siblings, you tell them to do their own chores. And stop being so eager to please. Honestly!"

But I digress....

In later years, not only did I realize my mom was right (as she usually was), but I used to have a lot of fun teasing my grandma about her image in the family, which was a cross between Snow White and Joan of Arc.

One time, when she'd come to dinner with me and my mom, I really let her have it.

"Grandma," I said, "Do you know you've never once lost your temper?"

She rolled her eyes and replied, "I seem to remember a time or two."

"Grandma," I said, "do you know you've never once had an unkind thought about anyone?"

"Has your mom told you about how, once a couple of boys tossed her in a lake and she had to sit through the rest of the picnic in wet clothes, and then she got mono? I could have just shaken them."

At that point, my mom wondered aloud what had happened to those boys and my grandma started rattling off who they married, what careers they'd chosen, how many children they'd each had, and what those children were named. That was Grandma for you. If you met her once and mentioned you had to rush off to visit a relative in the hospital, three years later, when you met again, she would ask you how your relative was. She would remember their name, what they'd had, what hospital they'd been in, who their doctor was. All of it.

But anyway, back to the teasing:

"Grandma, do you know you never once wished you could sleep in rather than go to church?"

She considered this. "It wasn't so much that I wanted to sleep in, but I did wish it would start later in the day, especially when I had young children."

"Speaking of children, Grandma, did you know you had eight immaculate conceptions?"

She turned bright pink, but also laughed and then wiped her eyes. "What about the miscarriages?" she asked when she could speak again.

"Oh, those were lust," my mom said. "It's probably why you lost them, Mom."

"Well," I admitted, "I was told if you ever did participate in lustful acts, Grandpa probably persuaded you."

Turning even pinker, Grandma retorted, "I don't remember needing much persuasion."

At that point, while we were not literally rolling on the floor, laughing, we were all pretty close to it.

I once recounted this story to a relative. who asked, in a somewhat scandalized tone, "You talked to Grandma about sex?!" She then told me she only talked to Grandma about her children and her church job. I pointed out that since I had neither children nor a church job, Grandma and I needed another subject.

I love that I can still hear Grandma's laugh.



Sunday, April 21, 2013

Nearing Sleep

Nearing Sleep

I miss you,
I say,
as you stroke my hair.

You just laugh
and so do I
and then I miss you more.

--Cynthia Sillitoe, April 2013

Friday, April 19, 2013

Advice To A Former Me

A few months ago either on Facebook or CNN or a magazine I flipped through....somewhere I saw the question "what would you tell your fifteen year old self if you could?" My first reaction was to wince because fifteen going on sixteen is when I became chronically ill. And I thought of all the past selves I felt ill-equipped to advise, that's the toughest one.

My second reaction was, "Oh, wow. She so wouldn't want to hear from me." That fifteen year old Cynthia knew everything and didn't need any advice from anyone. That Cynthia liked this John Lennon quote: "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." And yet she still had her life all planned out. Every last detail.

I've thought a lot about this and I think I know what I'd tell her. First, I'd break it to her gently that absolutely nothing would happen according to her plan. Some things would happen, but out of the order she expected; some things she was sure of wouldn't happen at all, and some things she never expected to happen would happen. But that whole sequence of events? Uh, yeah, just let that go now.

And then I'd tell her, "Cynthia, you're going to have an amazing and rich life, full of pain and joy, love and loss, and while you won't enjoy every moment, you will look back on your journey--past, present, and future--and be proud to claim it as yours."

And I'd say one last thing: "You know this little computer company called Apple?  Buy stock  in it. You'll  thank me later."

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Just Watching The Cycle Go Round and Round

Disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with laundry or bicycles or even unicycles, but with cycles of abuse, including sexual abuse and rape, so feel free to jump ship now.

I just finished reading Broken by Shy Keenan. It's a heartbreaking, gut-twisting, awful memoir about a girl's horrific abuse, physical and sexual, as a child. I've read a lot of books about child abuse. (Why, you ask? Because I have a gene in me that says "seek out darkness, try to understand it, try to stop it." I got mine from my mom. She got her "seek out darkness" gene from her dad, a cop. I can't explain it. It's not that I enjoy someone else's suffering. Just that I feel the need to bear witness to suffering and say to the person, I can't change this, but I hear you. I believe you.") Through decades of reading and listening to the stories of survivors, I have come to understand, as much as I can, the horrible damage one incident, let alone decades of it, can do to someone's soul.

I believe in evil. I believe sexual abuse is evil. I believe sexual abuse of children is eviler--that it is one thing for an adult to cope with a sexual attack, but for a kid, who is powerless and still coming to understand the world and their place in it, it's just devastating. And evilest...well, that's when someone, be it a priest or just some whacko with a god complex, sexually abuses a child and tells them it's God's will. Nothing like destroying their connection to the divine right along with everything else.

What I took away from this book, though, was a new understanding of the role of abuse in crime. I'd been aware of it. In fact, I overheard a conversation between my mom and one of her cop friends. They were arguing over--if somehow child abuse stopped to exist--just how much the prison population would drop. They were pretty sure that the majority of prisoners, regardless of what they were arrested for, had been abused as kids. Now, that doesn't give them a free pass on breaking laws, but...

What this book made me thing was: "What do we expect?" Kid grows up constantly sexually abused, is ignored by her mother, who is too busy shoplifting, lives in a home with no moral code, no security. Kid gets older, starts acting out. Everyone is so surprised. Kid says she's being abused, no one believes her, so it goes on and on. She gets angrier and acts out more, she winds up in reform school, where she is abused by staff, and, gosh darn it, if she doesn't get angrier. And yeah, when she gets out, she starts a life of crime. Not only is she angry, she still has no moral code. All her life what she has seen is that when someone wants something they take it. So that's what she does. But then when she wants to press charges against her abuser, she has no credibility because she is now a convicted felon with a long rap sheet, not to mention medical records stating that she's mentally disturbed. (Well, if you'd been raped daily for your whole life, and had an STD before you hit puberty, and thought it was all your fault, you'd be pretty disturbed yourself.) Unfortunately, all that gives her zero credibility, which doesn't end the abuse, only makes her angrier, and allows a pedophile to continue to prey on children.

Of course, if someone had believed her the first, or second, or seventh time, she told, and then had gotten her out of that situation and moved her somewhere safe--because way too often kids in foster care or state care wind up vulnerable to more abusers--maybe she never would have wound up in prison.

I have seen this in someone I love. Someone who was abused, and then struggled with anger and defiance, and lashing out, only to then be lectured and disciplined, which made him angrier and less trusting, which led to more discipline. What he needed was to be heard. He'd wound up in situations he didn't choose and his pain had led to anger and yes, it can be challenging to find ways to constructively direct anger, but what will not work is punishing him for anger. And it's so much easier for us to judge than it is to empathize.

I didn't really follow the Steubenville rape case. I knew it was happening and I knew a community was divided over it, and that's about all I knew. I don't know much about either the boys or the girl, so I can't tell you if these kids just had an appalling lack of judgement, empathy, decency, resulting from a break down in their childhood or families or whatever....or if they were sociopaths. The difference being sociopaths can't learn empathy. They just can't. So maybe the parents in question were sadly lacking in the conversations they had with their sons. Or, for all I know, maybe they did everything right and....their sons were sociopaths.

Anyway, where I came into the news story was when people online started posting snarky, stupid comments--and let's face it, we've all posted snarky, stupid comments, myself included--about how these young men might feel once they got to the big house and were raped themselves. I can't tell you how many times I almost puked on my computer screen. Seriously? Have we gotten to that point? I'm not saying they shouldn't have been prosecuted and done their time. I'm just saying that maybe no one deserves to be raped. Also, that maybe taking even violent offenders and exposing them to more violence, well, just maybe that makes things worse. Maybe it will just make them angry and more violent. As the Mahatma would say, "An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind."

I'm not trying to sound like I've got the moral high ground. I mean, you should have heard me cheering for joy when Bin Laden died. And, even at the time, I wondered if I should have felt that joy at the death of another human being. I suspected I should be more evolved. But I couldn't, not for Osama Bin Laden, and I didn't even lose anyone close to me in his many attacks against the U.S. and other countries.

That said, while I shed no tears for the bullets that ended his life, I never once said "Hey, maybe you should rape him first. That'll teach him." Even Bin Laden didn't deserve rape.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

April 6th

April 6th is a date of significance to Mormons and to me. To Mormons, it's the date Joseph Smith began the church. It's also, at least to many Mormons, the true birth date of Christ. (No, I don't know or even care why.)

It will come as no surprise to people who know me that I have a love-hate relationship with the Mormon church. Actually, it's more complicated than that. On any given day, I feel annoyance, bemusement, anger, pain, or disinterest. Sometimes I ignore anything to do with Mormonism. Other days, I have to rant. And then I hear back from Mormons I know. Admittedly, they speak mostly in silence: You're making too much of this. It was never intended that way. It doesn't matter. Why are you still talking about it? It isn't nice to talk about it. Sometimes I even hear It didn't happen. You're making this up.

Oh, how I wish I were.

I have a fantasy of somehow producing an x-ray of my psyche. I could then display and point to each wound, scarred and ugly as if from the lash of a whip. I could say not only "That one is Mormonism," but with some I could be awfully specific. "That one there," I would say, "is when, at the age of three, I first realized my parents could be excommunicated from the church." In fact, I have a special cluster of psychic scars just dealing with excommunication. During the recent transition to a new pope, one of the CNN experts said that, once they entered the conclave, the cardinals could not communicate with the outside world, "under the threat of excommunication." I looked at my dad and said, "Under The Threat of Excommunication would be a good title for a book about my childhood."

Not that I myself ever faced that threat personally because I never got baptized. That's another story. All I will say now is that it was not an accident. You're supposed to get baptized at eight and I spent a year, from when I was seven and a half to when I was eight and a half, with a perpetual stomachache. If any of my relatives baptize me after I die (yes, they can do that) I hereby promise to wreak as much havoc on them from the other side as I can. It doesn't matter that even in Mormonism, there is a caveat that the soul being baptized can decline. I will still get even with you. (Can you tell I have a cluster of scars all from being pressured about baptism?)

Between the two of them, my parents wrote and spoke about plenty of subjects the Mormon church didn't really want discussed, let alone criticized, and it usually drew the attention of church officials to them. It wasn't just my parents. For instance, the reason I felt it so young was that a Mormon feminist named Sonia Johnson fought against the church and its stance towards the Equal Rights Amendment. (They disliked that about as much as, decades later, they would dislike California's prop 8.) My mom began a series of articles about Sonia. By the time I was three, Sonia had been excommunicated, and I somehow knew, if they could excommunicate her, they could excommunicate my parents.

(An interesting factoid about Mormon excommunication. They call the meeting where they decide your fate a "court." This does not mean the person in question gets to have representation and plead their case. In fact, Sonia was not even allowed to attend her court. My dad tells me that as far as he knows there isn't even a set procedure. Basically, they can do whatever they want.)

As I got older, I became familiar with the patterns of what my parents and their friends referred to as "purges." Sometimes the church reacted to individual misdeeds, but most of the time it was a purge. They'd put out an edict, remind people that certain subjects shouldn't be spoken of, certain publications were frowned upon, certain gatherings (particularly the annual Sunstone symposium, which was and still is a big draw for historians and intellectuals) were forbidden. When people didn't fall into line, they intensified the pressure. First, your bishop would warn you, then a stake president would get involved. If you couldn't get back in his good graces, it could go further up the chain. Purges lasted a few months to a year and always ended the same way. The church made examples of people, excommunicating a few, disciplining others, and, at that point, everyone else did fall into line, at least for a while.

One day in late March, when I was in junior high, the church was in the midst of another round of purging, and my parents were on their list of targets, I came home to find, among the mail, an envelope from the church addressed to my mom. It was not the first envelope like that I'd seen, addressed to one or both of my parents, especially over the last few months. For some reason, though, I thought this was it. This was the letter telling her they were holding a court against her. Not that she would care about losing church privileges. She'd long since stopped attending, but, because she was well-known, it would become very public.

The way my mom remembered this day was that she pulled into the driveway and I raced out. Pale and trembling, I held the envelope out to her. She opened it, found it was something innocuous like a reminder to pay tithing, which she hadn't paid in over a decade, but they still seemed to think she would, and told me, "Cynthia, it's nothing, sweetheart." I think I burst into tears.

And in that moment, she decided it was enough. She would no longer let the church wield that kind of power over us. She spoke to her devoutly Mormon parents in person, sent letters to her siblings, and then wrote to the church and asked to be removed from their rolls. (My dad later did the same.)

With the eye for symbolism she always had, she timed it so the date on her letter to the church was April 6th.

Or, as I like to call it, Liberation Day.