Looking Again at Venus

"It's Pahbo' s hair! " I lamented to my sister.  Pahbo was our grandfather--the first of what turned out to be three Robert Leslie Pettigrews in our family ; a man who had spent much of his life growing sisal plants in Haiti.  "Pahbo" was the Haitian word for "bad", and he said it to my sister so much when she was a toddler she assumed it was his name and it stuck. He was Pahbo to his three Pennsylvania born grandchildren throughout our childhoods.  I have inherited his thick head of hair.  It is one of the few visible connections I still  have to a man I adored, and one of the few things I like about my body. 

"I don't want to look sick! " I told a friend later.  I had spent more than enough time fighting the perception that using a wheelchair meant I was sick.  Now I would have to fight it all over again.

Some years ago when I began this blog,

 I wrote about my favorite goddess.  I wanted a statue of Venus of Willendorf, I said, because she was the only deity who was obese and I needed her reminder that my clearly overweight body  was sacred.  So I bought myself a small figurine of her which sits on one of my bookshelves.  The other day I sat staring blankly for several minutes in front of that shelf.  At some point I noticed she wears what looks like a hat on her bald head.   " Maybe she's been through chemotherapy, " I thought.   "And maybe bodies that have been through chemo are sacred too."

The Necklace That I Wear Now.

In her later years, my mother wore a simple necklace, a gold-plated fleur-de-lis through which she tied a black shoe string, every day. Etched on its surface in the tiniest of print is the name Mary King Hilsman Pettigrew, my mother's mother.  When Mom died, I inherited the necklace.  Me, the one person in the family who doesn't like to wear jewelry other than watches. I don't know why I don't like to wear jewelry. For some reason, I have had a lifelong aversion to the feel of  cool chains or pendants on my neck and on my wrists. So my mother's necklace has stayed largely hidden away since her death.

White Protestant that I am, I have also never really understood the attraction of religious medals or icons , or the invocation of one's ancestors.

Two days ago, looking for something else, I found the fleur-de-lis necklace--at the end of several months of never ending chaos and long-festering anger, frustration, and powerlessness because the quality of life where I live has been severely compromised.  This week, after they announced that my apartment needed to be treated for the fifth time for bedbugs , the stress of those months erupted into a full-blown depression , and when I found the necklace, something led me to put it on. I've been wearing it ever since , although I will put it away for safekeeping while they spray tomorrow. Otherwise the careless people who pack up my stuff and and have now done two heat treatments and sprayed my room with god-knows-what chemicals twice may well damage or lose it.

I'm still not sure what I think about religious medals, and neither my mother nor my grandmother were hugely religious.  They were certainly not saints. All I know is that I feel some almost desperate need for the strength, love,  and presence of two strong women who adored me.

Love on the Walls

 

A friend of mine was ordained yesterday.  Last Sunday was the twenty-eighth anniversary of my own ordination.  Pictured above is the letter my mother wrote me two months before the momentous occasion.  It's the kind of letter a daughter dreams of getting from her mother-- full of love and pride. "Number two daughter-- Number three child -- NUMBER ONE PRIESTESS!" it says.  I smile--and cry--every time I read it.


Beside Mom's letter is a quote from Shakespeare which my sister hand painted and gave to me one Christmas. . . 

     Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight
     and hurt not.  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine
     ears; and sometime voices that, if I then had waked after long sleep, will make
     me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would green and show
     riches ready to drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.
                                                             [Caliban, The Tempest]

Leslie's reassurance in a world that often seemed--and seems--perilous to me.

Just above my ordination letter is a framed poster of a woman who looks Indian.  She is holding the sun. Its light creates a prism of color around her.  "Healing Woman" reads the caption.  My friend Margaret gave me the poster for my fiftieth birthday.  Hard to believe that was almost ten years ago.

Looking up from the poster, I see a picture of a fleur-de-lis, the symbol of the home and land in Haiti where my mother spent her childhood.  I painted that picture for her the summer I turned thirteen, during the two weeks I spent with my grandmother.  I can still see my grandmother looking over my shoulder as I painstakingly printed the Haitian words she taught me for "I love you":  "Je Vous Aime".  There is three generations of women's love for each other in that painting.

To my left as I face my mother's letter are two of her paintings of the New Mexico landscape.  "It's the only place I really want to go," I had told her when she expressed a longing for me to travel, so she and my father surprised me with a trip there in 1994.  I remember them pulling me in my wheelchair through barely accessible dirt and rocks to view ancient drawings etched in stone, or to gaze at the beauty of rock formations standing against the wide open clear blue sky.  I remember our joy at sharing that experience together.  I see again what an incredibly gifted artist my mother was.  I feel how much my parents loved me.

Behind me is a picture of late twenty something me sitting on a bench outside the common area of the seminary I went to.  My six million dollar friend Steve Austin took that picture.  Steve, if you happen to read this, you should know I've gotten more compliments on that picture than I have on anything else in my apartment.

To the right is a black and white photograph of an aged man, his body stooped to an almost ninety degree angle, standing on sun-dappled grass framed on either side by trees.  My sister took that picture; of my grandfather walking on the farm he loved.

Somewhere on that wall is a painting of a delicate lavender wild flower sandwiched between two boulders.  The artist was a friend of my mother's.  Mom bought the painting from him, and gave it to me because "It reminds me of you," she said.

There is my mother's water color rendering of a sisal plant, the plant my grandfather grew while they were in Haiti, and a picture of what looks like some deity hovering over an island in the ocean.  "The Goddess watching over you," said Mom as I opened her birthday present.

Last but not least, there is the silver-framed picture of the five of us--my sister, me, my  brother, my mother, and my father, taken on Mom's ninetieth birthday--the last time we were all together.

These are the pictures which surround me every night and greet me every morning. The love which emanates from them cradles me as I sleep and supports me as I move through my day.  And it is that love which my ordination calls me to share with the world.

The Genie is Out of the Bottle

"Bodies of Work ", said the reminder that popped up on my cell phone.  I'd put the event on my calendar weeks before the election--  a night of "disability culture ",  artistic expression by and about people with disabilities.   At the time, it seemed like a good excuse to get out of my apartment.  Now, it was as necessary as oxygen.

 

There were readings from original works-- plays and essays, humorous and reflective.  Good enough, but not particularly memorable.

Some guy walked onto the stage carrying a potted plant.  He threw it on the floor, picked it up, and threw it again, shattering the pot and spilling its contents.   He pulled a roll of masking tape from a plastic bag, fit the pieces of the pot back together like some sort of jigsaw puzzle, and re-potted the plant.  His representation of life with a mental illness.

 

  Definitely memorable.

 

But it's the dancers who made the biggest impression on me.  Three women.  I recognized the first.  She use to live in my building.  Tall and thin, with jet black hair, coffee colored skin, and thick red painted lips.  I thought  of a Frida Kahlo self-portrait.  Her body leaned on a sparkling silver cane.  Carefully she turned toward us, shifted her weight, balanced, and lifted the cane in the air, thrusting it with defiant pride.  Bearing a look which dared anyone to question her, she turned again, cane still held high, and marched around the room.  The second woman followed.  What she did escapes me.  The third, however.  .  .

 

She came in five minutes after the others.  Left crutch, right foot ; right crutch, left foot.  I knew that walk.  The same walk I began learning when I was three years old.  I knew the curve of her back too.  I' d seen it in a picture of me in my twenties standing looking at my mother.  This woman' s skin was dark black though .  Her hot pink shorts stretched tightly around her stomach and thighs.  She wore a flowered bikini top.  I envied her self-assurance.  I would never have been caught dead in that outfit.  Not in my twenties, and certainly not now.  Crutch / foot;  crutch / foot,  she turned, until her back was directly in front of us.  Planting her crutches firmly in front of her body, she leaned all her weight on them.  .  . and wiggled her hot pink butt in our faces. The genie is out,  I thought .  The genie is out of the bottle.  You can refuse to enforce legislation.  You can dilute it 'til it's meaningless.  You can even make fun of the way we move and speak.  But as long as our pride lives deep within our bodies, as long as our pride stirs and moves our bodies, the genie is out of the bottle. No matter how hard you try, no matter what you do, the genie is out of the bottle.   And you can never put it back.

Calling on the Ancestors

My mother was in her early 40's during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Having three children ages four, five, and almost seven , she piled stacks of National Geographic's onto our basement floor so that if we needed to survive there for any length of time, she would at least be able to educate us. Decades later, she told me that during that time she also tried to teach us to recognize trees by the shapes of their shadows, so that if we were ever imprisoned and unable to look out of a window, the shadow of a tree could help us preserve our sanity. When I was a teenager and some idiot legislators try to dilute the impact of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, she found me in the bathroom crying."Martian Luther King didn't cry", she said.  "He got to work fighting."

My maternal grandmother was born and raised in Georgia. She did not leave the state until she was in her early 20' s, the year the Navy sent my grandfather to live in Haiti. My grandparents also had three children. My mother was two, my aunt was one, and my uncle, if he was even born yet, was an infant. Left largely to her own devices, my grandmother, who did not complete college, ordered the curriculum with which she educated each of her children so that they successfully passed tests and met state requirements every year until the curriculum ended and they left Haiti in order to enter High School.

My great-grandmother Minnie was a widow.  She was a single parent long before anyone ever acknowledged there were such people. She had three daughters. When her husband died, she renamed her youngest daughter Albert, after him. Once when she saw a bill collector coming down the road to her house, she brushed her hair, smoothed her apron, put a smile on her face, and went to the door to meet him with dignity and grace.

My father's stepmother, Mildred, the woman I knew as Grandma, watched the father she cherished die when he stepped in front of an oncoming car to save the life of his profoundly intellectually disabled wife, my grandmother's mother.  Seventeen-year-old year old Mildred instantly became responsible for raising her two younger siblings, both of whom she eventually put through college. Mildred grew to become a woman who insisted that her grandchildren move through life with class, manners, and decorum. I don't think I fully appreciated that until recently.

Helen Gilchrist, whom we called Jingle, was a close family friend. I don't remember a word she ever said to me.  But I remember her black dresses and pillbox hats; her angular face, her firmly set jaw, the worn wood on the top of her cane, and the white-knuckled death grip with which her hand held it-- a grip I know only too well. I remember the occasional streaks of gray on her artificial leg. Like wrinkles in flesh, they told me she had lived, and endured much. And I remember that she drove a car.  In the early sixties. When people with disabilities didn't do such things. To my four or five year old self, she was an image of strength. Of the strong woman I could become.

Helen Keller was the child I got sick of.  Who people constantly talked about--The  pathetic, inspirational, "handicapped"  child whom Annie Sullivan turned into a human being. The child who "overcame" her disability like I was supposed to overcome mine.  Today I know that she became so much more:  An advocate for people with disabilities.  A suffragette. A radical socialist, and a founding member of the ACLU. I didn't like her then, but I'm claiming her now.

These are the women who have nurtured me. They made me who I am. They survived dark and difficult times.  And because they did, at least one child was able to survive and thrive.  By blood or by circumstance, they are my ancestors. And I am calling on them now--To hold and inspire me; to breathe through and empower me.  So that at least one child alive today can survive and thrive into tomorrow .