Archive for the ‘daughtering’ category

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Danced Out

May 16, 2012

20120517-123023.jpg

Exhaustion strikes, but in a good way.  This exhaustion comes from dancing with a nearly 90-year old woman (my mom)–I call it dancing, and I say it’s with her.  This is not accurate: -it was dancing a couple of feet behind with arms outstretched to catch her in case of a fall.

My mother grew up in a time and family in which people didn’t really touch.  Everything about them was northern; and the times were harsh.  As a result, touch is somewhat distracting to her, an imposition rather than support.  (It’s a bit of a tussle to take her arm even when crossing a busy street.)

And yet, there was dancing.  With.  Her.  Of a sort.  (One two three four, one two three four–she counts time aloud with quiet absorption as she moves.  I hate to say that I think the song was a waltz.)

A magnificent sort.

Music–it enlivens/energizes/lightens the body and soul.

(One two three four, one two three four, one two threeeeeeee.)

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I am linking this post to Imperfect Prose, run by Emily Wieranga.  The dancing came about, in part, because I just got a speaker for my computer so that my visiting quite- deaf mother could actually hear some of the music on my iTunes.   She liked it a lot.

Categories: daughtering, elephants, Uncategorized
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Sunday Poem (Mother, Daughter, in Father-Son Realm)

February 21, 2010

Script (Poem for Sundays)

A poem for Sundays–perhaps more of a story than poem.  Thanks as always for reading.

Script

Pictures hung in the Sunday School downstairs:
men mostly, whose long-haired, but not hippified, heads
were highlit with gold, clouds, doves,
and, hovering above, goatee-shaped
wisps of flame.

In the actual nave hung
only a spare metal cross,
lit by shafts of dust-mote-
dropping day.

Whenever the minister made an important point, he cupped
his hands together,
the fingers separate but clenched, the pinkies nearly throbbing
with tautness.  He used the gesture
to symbolize a knot.  But also growth.
Tense knotty growth.  How hard
it all was, how simple.

I watched the terse bend of knuckle closely, the extended
half-wound fists.  But, as the sermon droned, I turned to
other hands:  my own inside short white gloves, the worn seam
tracing their perimeter,
like a railroad track en route to itself;
my mother’s, bare, cool, soft.
I picked up her fingers,
one by one, as if to find beneath them,
a way of passing time.

Then, just as my father’s shaved crust of chin
nodded over the crisp edge of Sunday shirt collar,
she quietly rotated
the bulletin on top of a hymnal and
modeled my name in script.
She used one of the short pencils stored in the pews
for new parishioners.  I, taking off one glove
to firmly grip the wood,
copied her letters slowly,
feeling each curve
as a blessing, a secret blessing,
for we were interlopers in that
realm of fathers/sons/ghosts,
the ones who snuck beneath the shafts of light,
then basked in them,
we women.

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

Categories: children's illustration, daughtering, poetry
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Long Distance 911 Call

September 25, 2009

A long distance 911 call morning.  The plight of the adult child whose parents live  elsewhere.  How to interpret the steady phrases of EMTs who are several hours away, and who, five minutes earlier, couldn’t talk to you because (as you heard in the midst of tense rustling), they were “kind of busy here.”

Fly immediately?  Or, stay within cell range?

Don’t cry.

Medication can be complicated for the elderly and/or infirm.  I don’t want to put the blame on doctors (or do I?), but prescription instructions and verbal explanations are frequently cursory, sometimes actually wrong.    People think that medications are calibrated, and I’m sure doctors do try to calibrate them.  But there is a one-size-fits-all aspect even to fairly careful dosages of extremely powerful drugs.

The uninitiated (that is, those unused to the effects of overly high dosages)  think of medications as little thermostats, capable of adjusting the body’s specific internal climate in the manner of a really good air-conditioning unit;  unfortunately, many medications seem more like a battery-powered fan simply stoking this or that bodily function until its juice runs out.

(Which reminds me that I left my iron on this morning.  Can’t turn back now.)

Blood sugar meds seem especially tricky.  The most common one (at least the one my Dad takes) doesn’t adjust sugar but simply lowers it, bang, bang, bang, like a hammer hitting a peg.

The effects can be very dramatic.  We’re not talking about a nail shooting through a wall here, but a person sliding to the floor, unable to talk or move.

Seeing the slide, and then the recovery (even just hearing about them long distance), fills one with amazement for the body’s many delicate balances; its incredibly speedy resilience.

A few packets of sugar later, the body that had become an alarmingly dead weight is once again a smiling, laughing, person, reciting the name of the President and the day of the week. Only those standing to the side, or at the end of the phone line, now have trouble speaking.

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