Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day coming up shortly,  where soldiers march and remember the "glory" of their service, applauded by one and all. Flag waving, cheering, teary. Medals glistening on uniforms, smart salutes, Last Post, maybe pipers in kilts blasting praise to the skies. New monuments erected, lists of the fallen and betrayed And cannons or guns fired in glory. Honouring the Dead, the Unknowns, selling red poppies to support recruitment of more such heroes. Another November 11th. Another glorification of the non-stop "wars" of men, (how many centuries now?) Another misuse of that plural noun "freedoms." 

I wrote this 5 years ago and read it somewhere, the men were pissed, the women cheered and applauded but controlled themselves when they saw the men's faces. "We will Remember Them" is a common refrain on November 11th. We even have the moment of silence across the country at 11.00 a.m. in all our multiple time zones. But I remember the women. 

1939 St. John's Newfoundland

I wiIl remember

Where are the monuments, the medals,

The honours and commemorations

For the women and girls who carried on,

Who birthed year after year after year after year

While husbands and lovers marched

And killed and drank and fell down

In wars for the wealthy back room boys.

Women who despaired and cried in the poverty of their existence

Who had no choice, no say, no name. But his.

Who died and were replaced. By women like them

Who birthed year after year after year after year

And worked their fingers to the bone day and night.

Who were oft times beaten. And raped.

And in their turn, watched their daughters sacrificed.

And now, they are glorified without name,

Sanctified only as a matriarchal monolith,

Sacrificial lambs, their misery forgotten,

Mere nameless footnotes.

Their struggles negated.

Their stories erased forever.

MM 10/28/2017

The Mating Game

You can tell us apart. Us 70+ (or even 60+) women. On one side we are distinguished by our grey hair, our absence of makeup, our short unpolished nails, our sensible shoes, our jeans and sweatshirts.

On the other side (not me but I have some friends who are) are the well burnished flirty specimens, the no-fooling-anyone reddish auburn blondish permed hair, blue eye makeup, orange matte makeup, painted eyebrows, prickly mascara, whoa - there's a whole lot of effort involved. I am in awe of it and please don't think for a second I mock it.

These women fall apart when there's a single man or two in the room. The whole tenor of social interaction changes as if a switch has been pulled. Now that, I have a hard time with. I am embarrassed for them. I feel men are ripped off too. They see these women simpering and posing and oh-my-ing and they think, I'm sure, that these are representative of women as a whole. And unfortunately these are the women who appeal as mates. All intelligent conversation ceases and at that stage, I for one make excuses and leave.

I love the freedom this age gives me. I love that I can chat to men of any age as if they are as human and intelligent and sentient as I am and we can have coffee or a meal without any batting of eyes or hidden agendas. I resigned from the mating game a long, long time ago. I have never felt more me in my life. Not performing to any expectation of others. Authentic. Real to myself.

I was looking at an acquaintance on FB the other day who has been on the hunt, so to speak, for as long as I've known her. She must have gone through 5 or 6 potential partners after being widowed twice and finally found The One and they have a diamond and she has a sparkly red dress and new blonde hair and long ruby nails and a look of such triumph as she gazes upwards into his eyes and I am glad for her that all that high maintenance was worth it for however long she has left as she is a wee bit older than I.

What now? I silently ask her. Will it be happily ever after? Was it worth it?

PS Image is from the Drew Carey Show.

She says

She says to me once we finished dinner together in a restaurant:

"I've never eaten at a restaurant with a friend in my whole life. I like this. There's no pressure."

She insists on paying.

As she gets into my car, she says, "I know you're supposed to tip. I didn't know what to tip. Was $50 OK for her? The bill was $36.00."

She says: "I've nowhere to hide my pills. My mother steals every pill from everyone. Even her own mother's and my father's. And I need my liver pills. What do I tell the doctor?" (the truth)

She says: "You're like a therapist. I never knew how to talk to people without yelling or blaming until I met you."

She says:" I'll miss my kids' first haircuts." And starts to cry. I let her.

Her mother calls.

I hear the mother yelling about pills. She doesn't care how her daughter procures them. Get her pills now. She doesn't want me to hear. She's embarrassed.

Then she says: "I hate going home. She'll attack me for pills once I walk through the door. She'll go on and on about how she gave birth to me in pain and I owe her. I never want to speak to my daughter that way. Never."

And she doesn't cry this time but holds herself a little more stiffly in the car.

And I think: We are so privileged. We have absolutely no idea what hell others face on an hourly basis.

I love this wee woman as if she were my own.

Thank You, Delia.

This post is inspired by Marcia's post.

Back then, it was one of those new-fangled estates in the suburbs of the Irish city where I was born. 13 houses in a cul-de-sac. We moved there when I was six from a small east Cork town where all my relatives lived. My father had a city job by then and was fed up with the daily train commute.

There was an exotic family living directly across the road from us. Louis (pronounced lou-ee) and Delia had only a single child, named Geoffrey. Rich, red thick carpets ran all through their house and it had an art studio custom built on the back, full of light overlooking a terrace with cement planters and rose gardens back and front. They even had outdoor furniture made of cast iron. And a record player with a huge collection of music and floor to ceiling bookshelves everywhere. A sparkling Morris Minor was parked on their driveway. Louis was a bank manager and Delia was an artist.

When we moved in, they were already installed for a few months. My brother and I, aged 3 and 6, were not allowed on to the road so were locked up behind our gate where we peered out through the iron railings dressed in matching blue coats. I know this because years later I saw a painting of the two of us thus imprisoned, in her studio.

Geoffrey was a sickly child, I never knew what he “had” but his neck was covered in ugly scar tissue where glands had been removed and eczema plagued his hands. He wasn't allowed to play sports or do anything 'strenuous' like play hurling on the road with the rest of us.

Delia and Louis befriended my brother and I as we grew older and we were invited along on Sunday afternoon drives and treated to afternoon tea in hotels. Louis taught us to sing “Oh Give me a Home” in harmony on these rides. I can never hear the song without thinking of his deep bass voice, Delia's soprano, my budding contralto and Geoffrey's and my brother's interchangeable soprano-tenors. There were other songs of course but I can't remember them.

Delia gave me much, much more than those Sunday excursions. She invited me over to hear “Peter and the Wolf” on their turntable - my first introduction to classical music - which led to her sharing all of the Beethoven Symphonies with me. She allowed me to borrow books (“one at a time, dear”) and each occasion (Holy Communion, Confirmation, thirteenth birthday) in my life was marked with a special gift – one time it was a leather bound edition of Jane Austen's Emma, another time it was a hand-painted box.

She showed me a bigger world outside of our little estate and small town sensibilities. She showed me women could gain a certain prestige by devoting themselves to passion and creativity in an era where this was judged as “fierce odd” by her contemporaries and Louis pitied because of her independence for she had the unmitigated gall to exhibit her works regularly at the Municipal Art Gallery and also taught art. She even drove herself to her night classes, practically unheard of in her time.

It was extraordinarily difficult to be a Delia in the long ago and she never knew how much she inspired me and how much I cherish her memory.

Well, duh, we could have told them that. Free of charge.

UCLA Study On Friendship Among Women

An alternative to fight or flight.

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women.

It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside down. Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is release as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect.

This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health.

It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer.

In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.

Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight.

And that's not all. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). The following paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very true and something all women should be aware of and NOT put our female friends on the back burners.

Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them right to the back burner. That's really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women. It's a very healing experience.

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. Behaviorial Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight"