A Tribute to Those Who Nurture

Longing for the child she abandoned at 14, Annette Bening’s character in the movie “Mother and Child” lives a grouchy life. The scene opens to her reluctantly caring for her ailing mother and her own dour spirit. The grief of releasing her baby when she herself was still a child turns into the wall we all know a little bit about, any of us who have ever longed for something we lost or something that never was.

Checking on my sleeping daughters I flash back to the days as toddlers when they came to me and the long nights of pain and sadness they endured when they had been moved around from group home to my home. Safety brought with it the remembering of trauma endured and our first year was marked by both great joy and deep sorrow. Once, after a solid two weeks of interrupted sleep, I was stunningly awake as I had never been to this god of nurturing and loving two helpless human beings.

“As the world goes by, all I know is I want to be wide awake/Seekers of status quo, I say let them go, I want to be wide awake/fear for all of its fury can’t hold a flame to any soul that cries, I want to be wide awake, awake.” (Christine Kane, Wide Awake)

Awake. Like jumping into an icy pond. So at times I have fallen asleep. Nurturing while sleepwalking changes my creativity and my parenting, I see that now. My mind wanders to my mother’s obsession with feeding the seven of us. It was/is her creativity – her deep joy channeled into the thing she had to do. And anyone who nurtures others 24-7 knows the drain of energy that comes with outer focused nurturing. And yet, it is our creativity, our soul’s joy channeled into caring that feeds the life force. I bake bread weekly; make soups, have learned Indian, Chinese and Thai cooking. I make cookies and scones; tend a garden in the summer. How many artists: painters, potters, songwriters, writers and sculptors works are channeled into people who were fed well in childhood? Am I my mother’s novel?

Elizabeth Layton raised five kids, battled depression for 35 years and became a published painter in her 70’s. Her depression went away.

Watching the movie Secretariat the other night with my daughters who are now 12 and 13, one comments and the other agrees that it is “wrong for that mom to abandon her children for the sake of that horse.” I breathe in deeply that sentiment, knowing I might be my mother’s great works and they might be mine.

Re-Construction

I count myself in the middle to the tail end of the baby boomers. We are re-constructionists. I and many of my friends bought houses in which we replaced original windows and doors, heating units and installed central air conditioning units. Some of us eventually re-did the house altogether, opening up kitchens to living areas and replacing countertops and cabinets. Some of us replaced these items because there were more energy efficient iterations of them on the market. Some of us tore down walls to collaborate and communicate more effectively.
We look for houses with good bones, we value what is there, but we are eager to make it better to fit the needs of our families. I saw an article about house design not too long ago that tracked the opening up of the kitchen to other living spaces side by side with the burgeoning women’s movement of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. While there had been a small spurt of new construction with a more closed kitchen recently, most of us are not going back there.
Good bones. We’re not about throwing everything out. In a way, we are bridge builders, working to connect the dots between our parents’ generation and the offspring we have. My daughters roll their eyes, but occasionally they are humming to a Joni Mitchell tune. They asked to have a couple of Earth, Wind and Fire songs put on their iPods. My peeps are zumba-ing to Lady Gaga and Usher.
Good values. Community, connection, collaboration. These are probably the re-building blocks of my generation. Call it what you will: decentralized management styles, emotional intelligence, new value propositions, I call it “women in the workplace.” Women couldn’t help but bring their authentic selves to the table. This “let’s make sure everyone is connected” mentality permeates the new work environment. We couldn’t help it.
Technology has helped the employed mom and dad juggle work and family. As a tool, it has increased our ability to connect with one another. A snow day turns into a conference call/on-line meeting day. With Microsoft Communicator on my desk top, the geographic size of my responsibility shrinks to my desktop, less time traveling means more time on task.
My grandparents’ generation forged new territory, continued settling the west, built around the outer loops made possible by interstate highway legislation passed during the Eisenhower administration. My generation, and those who come after us, will re-build, holding on to values and physical spaces but seeing them just a little bit differently. Perhaps because of the increasing scarcity of land or the valuing of that land and the earth’s resources, we are not as willing to keep stretching and making a new outer ring. The future belongs to those who are bridge builders, who can challenge all of us to see the good in what was, and stand on the shoulders of those ideas and take them another collaborative step closer to a more perfect community.