Category Archives: Family

Family, Politics

Domestic Courage

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Summer                                                         Most Heat Moon

Sexism rides through the institutions of our culture: through church and corporation, through the military and onto the athletic field, through higher education and elementary, too. Take medicine for a contemporary example. Since the days of NOW and conscious raising, many, many women have become doctors. According to a recent survey there are approximately 234,000 women physicians compared to 535,000 men. (kaiser fdtn.)

Those 234,000 women are disproportionately in the lower paying medical disciplines though not dominant in any of those either. Pediatrics is the sole exception with women making up 55% of all pediatricians in 2008.  But. They earned 66% what male pediatricians did. (Center for research into gender and the professions.) This link gives more detailed analysis.

Continued activism by feminists (male and female) in the workplace will be necessary for years, perhaps generations, to come.

Personal bravery, I called it domestic courage in a eulogy for Ione, a working woman who raised three daughters on her own, working evenings as a bookkeeper, is necessary though when the political gets personal.  When the issue is culturally determined sex roles, then the political comes home. It has to because there is no social nexus more culturally determined by gender than marriage and family.

Kate is an example of domestic courage and institutional courage. Here are three instances. In high school in Nevada, Iowa during the early 1960’s, Kate did outstanding academic work. This would not surprise anyone who knows her. In time long before advanced placement classes, the International Baccalaureate degree or any other now common place for accelerating advanced students, she asked to graduate in her junior year and then attend nearby Iowa State. Her request, though unusual, was granted. Until it came time to make it happen. Then the school went back on its word.

It’s difficult to imagine in our current educational reality, how much courage it must have taken for a young, beautiful girl to pass up cheer leading and the prom to push for an education that met her intellectual talents. That her attempt failed is neither surprising nor a reflection on the domestic courage it took for her to put herself forward. (I say domestic courage here because of the enmeshed nature of small towns with their elementary and secondary educational systems, an enmeshment I know only too well from my own experiences in Alexandria, Indiana.)

Becoming a physician, after first overcoming sexist objections to her becoming a nurse anesthetist, (a telling picture of her class at Mt. Sinai shows her with seven men), she applied to medical school over the objection of her then husband. The admissions personnel at the medical school told Kate that since she had a physician for a husband what was the point to her ambitions? They slapped a good deal of preliminary work on her, which she did, then accepted her reapplication.

The domestic courage in this instance involved persisting in her own ambitions, in spite of being a young mother and in a demanding marriage. She got through this by studying in the morning, early, before Jon and David got up.

Then, once in medicine, Kate continued her fight against sexist restrictions and organizational assumptions.  The clearest of these was her insistence that low income working women couldn’t afford to take time away during the day for a doctor’s appointment. The Coon Rapids Allina Clinic needed to offer appointments after traditional daytime hours.

When the resistance became obdurate, Kate volunteered to do it herself, which she did for several years until the Clinic decided to open an after hours clinic.

Now, as a grandmother, Kate feels (and I do, too.) a necessity to pass on this kind of consciousness to our grand-daughter Ruth. Sexism will not be eliminated by the time Ruth hits college or the work place. She needs an understanding of her own power and her right to her own path. We can help ensure she gets that.

 

 

 

 

Family, Feelings, Health, Politics

A Dull, Gray Day

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Summer                                                           New (Most Heat) Moon

It is what my Aunt Roberta would have called a dull, grey day. For my Aunt Roberta, Aunt Barbara and Aunt Marjorie most days were dull and grey. All three had a bipolar diagnosis. Aunt Barbara remained hospitalized for most of her life. Aunt Roberta was in and out of the state hospital as she got older and after her divorce from Uncle Ray. Aunt Marjorie starved herself to death after a career as a dietitian and a life long reputation as the family’s best cook by far.

(where the grocery store used to be in Aunt Roberta’s tiny community of Arlington, Indiana)

This is the set up for my vasectomy story which I’ve recounted briefly here before. It was 1973 and the feminist movement had begun to flow through academic institutions like the wave at a baseball game. When it hit United Theological Seminary, where I was a second year student, I was already committed to women’s liberation. (And, yes, I know I still carry my sexist upbringing with me and make my slips.)

This was also before I went through treatment at Hazelden’s outpatient program so drinking was still part of my life, as were the exaggerated mood changes that go with it. As a result, I wondered then about my own sanity, though after treatment it was clear the mood changes were chemically enhanced.

Being sexually active (this was still the 60’s culturally) and aware of the imbalance between women’s responsibility for contraception and men’s tendency to exploit it, I began to consider a vasectomy.

What made the decision sensible to me, even though 26, single and childless, was the history of bipolar illness in my mother’s family. I saw then and see in the same way now no need to pass those kind of genes along in the collective pool. Neither did I have then nor do I have now any need to reproduce my self, the selfish gene be damned. It was then that I committed myself to adoption if I ever wanted a family, though having a family felt unlikely at the time.

My decision was made without consulting any one else. It was my responsibility and I would see to it. A clinic on Rice Street in St. Paul found time on their schedule and I went in around 4 o’clock on a spring afternoon. The procedure is simple and was so in my case save for too little anesthetic as we began. Which a quick indrawn breath and a wince remedied.

Since that time 41 years ago, I have been functionally infertile. I’ve never regretted the decision though I did try to have it reversed in my mid-30’s. My second wife wanted a child of her own. The reversal failed and we reverted to the adoption plan which had been my preference since 1973.

(I put this in for our dogs.)

It’s not something I think about very often though it does come up. It surfaces usually when I recall the agony of my three aunts, how much I cared about them and how little the family’s love could do to quiet their inner life.

 

Anoka County, Family, Garden, Great Work, Memories, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Retirement, Sierra Club, The Move, Third Phase, Writing

A House With A History

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Summer                                                         Summer Moon

IMAG0531Why not write a history of this spot, this hectare? An ecological history. It can start with the glaciations, consider the flora and fauna since then, focusing in more tightly once the first nations began to arrive, then even more tightly as Minnesota began to emerge.

Another starting spot would be today, or from Kate and mine’s presence here. How we decided to be here, why. Go over decisions we made early on like hiring a landscape designer at the beginning. Recount our twenty years, the good decisions and the bad ones, the easy ones and the hard ones. The other historical and geological material could be worked in as backstory.

It would be good for people to view an average approach to the land, one which changed over time (though its roots were indeed in the back to the land movement) and which took advantage not of a particular approach, but of many. An approach that is dynamic, 06 27 10_beekeeperastronautchanging with new knowledge, the seasons, aging, new plants and new desire.

The flavor of “Return of the Secaucus 7” with some Scott and Helen Nearing, Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry thrown in, too. Ah, perhaps it could be a sort of third phase update of the movement years, an upper middle class idyll moving against the grain of upper middle class lifestyles.

Not sure whether to pursue this or not, but it could be interesting. Might even help sell the house. A house with a history.

A structure based on the Great Wheel might be interesting.

Family, Health

Jon

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Summer                                                             Summer Moon

Boy. Medicine. Trying to come to grips with Jon’s possible pulmonary hypertension. This is not a diagnosis you want. Even with advances, and they have been considerable, the fate of those with the disease have, to use Jon’s phrase, shortened horizons.

Just finished reading a 2006 article replete with medical shorthand, acronyms and formulas. I finally got it. This is a disease of the circulatory system of the lungs. Due to a variety of initial causes (and they are important in prognosis, but not diagnosis) the blood vessels in the lung become compromised, requiring increased pressure to push blood through them for its necessary oxygenation. The right ventricle of the heart pushes blood into the lung after it has been deoxygenated in its journey through the body. To produce the pressure required to pump the blood through the compromised lung circulatory system the right ventricle has to work harder (pump harder).

Due to the lung’s normally highly efficient circulatory system, the right ventricle has evolved a thinner wall than the left ventricle which pushes oxygenated blood through the body which requires greater pressure. As a result, when a diseased lung forces the thinner walled right ventricle to push harder, it eventually widens under the pressure, which makes its pumping less efficient, which makes it work even harder, which increases the dilation until the left ventricle becomes involved as the widened right impinges on it. This process defines the phrase vicious cycle. Then, at some point, the heart itself cannot produce enough pressure to effectively circulate the blood and heart failure ensues.

Treatment regimens are complex, only a few aimed at the actual problem, the circulatory system of the lungs, and all of those drastic. The advanced therapies (I don’t understand this use of the term.) are all symptomatic, that is, they reduce the load on the right ventricle by dilating blood vessels and improving circulation within the lungs, for example, but they don’t go to the problem itself and therefore ultimately prove inadequate.

So much about survival depends on etiology and we don’t know that in Jon’s case. Yet. Nor do we know to a medical certainty that he has the disease. An echocardiogram on July 1st will provide more information though catheterization of the right ventricle to determine it’s health is the final diagnostic step.

We’ll proceed as a family, figuring out what we can do for each other.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Feelings, Memories

A Hole

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Beltane                                                              Summer Moon

Sometimes these moments reach out, grab a part of you unexpectedly. Evoke a feeling long forgotten. In unusual places. Kate and I went to see How to Train Your Dragon 2, better than the first installment and worth seeing for any proud Scandinavian. It’s a touching story, dramatic and funny by turns with a quality of animation that shows how far we’ve come since Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker. If you have a kid in your life, see it. If you have a kid left in your heart, see it.

Here’s what got me. Spoiler alert. Hiccup, the lead character, a boy just grown into young manhood (since his youth in the first picture) meets a mystery figure who loves and helps dragons, just like he does. The surprise is that she’s his mother, thought dead. There was a scene where this animated mother reached out and hugged her 20 year old boy for the first time since he was in the cradle.

A sudden wave of longing swept over me. For a second it was my mother, met again, reaching her hand out, a hug, the smell of her hair. The feeling rose from somewhere long forgotten. To be hugged by my mother. I miss it. Still. At 67 and her having been dead for IMAG016150 years this October. It reminded me of the hole I’ve lived around, never filled since her death and of the simple joys not possible for all those years.

It’s not regret nor nostalgia nor something I even wish for, just a hole, the hole that death leaves. And yet in its own way it was affirming. I loved my mother and I know she loved me. I know, if we found ourselves together, even over this long span of years, that she would hug me and caress my cheek. Kiss me. Tell me she was proud of me. That was her way. And, thankfully, I’m sure she would be proud of me.

 

Colorado, Family, The Move

Move Proud

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Beltane                                                                               Summer Moon

At our business meeting we look at cash flow, reserves, upcoming expenditures. We check our calendars and discuss mutual work like the garden, the orchard and now the move. We set some time aside next Friday for combing through items to send on to the SortTossPack consignment store. These meetings, first recommended by Ruth, a financial counselor, have become a key part of our marriage, about mutuality and forward thinking.

Kate’s clearing through the upstairs like a horde of locusts, sweeping everything before her. My movement through books and DVD’s has gone at a slower pace, but at a pace that will still see me done sometime this summer. Done, that is, with packing that which will be sold or donated. I will make, too, a good deal of progress on books and files that will be moved. Of course, some of the books will remain on the shelves because they are in current use.

We’re proud of ourselves because we’ve taken the move from idea to living reality in a matter of six weeks or so. A lot has gotten done already. And even more remains to be done. This house will be in the spring market for 2015, probably around March.

Dogs, Family, Garden, Latin, The Move, Translating Metamorphoses

Spray, Translate, Box

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Beltane                                                          Summer Moon

Sprayed the orchard again. I’m going to have this down by the end of the season with two a weeks in the orchard and once a week in the veggie garden. The rain and the International Ag Labs program (+ plus Bill Schmidt’s super juice that I applied last fall) have combined to give much of our garden big boosts. The collard greens, egg plants, cucumbers, beans, sugar snap peas, chard, beets, garlic and carrots have all exceeded their usual growth by this time of year. The tomatoes and peppers have been slowed down by the cooler weather and we’ve lost one of each. The onions don’t look bad, but they don’t look great either.

Got back on that equus. The next few verses after those that threw me were also tricky, but with the commentary I got through them. That felt very good.

Kate came up with an excellent idea, pack two boxes a day. If we each do it, that’s 28 boxes a week. And, in just two decades at that rate we’ll be ready to go. No, much earlier than that. By next spring, lord willin and the creek don’t rise.

Today I boxed up DVDs and surprised myself by finding several that I want to take along. More, though, thank god, that I could let go.

Mission crew commander Buckman-Ellis tells me that it’s looking bad for Kep coming to join him in Korea. The housing situation there is dormitory style until the dorms fill up, then you can go off base and, presumably, have a dog. That is, however, if the dorms fill up.

Fine with us. Kep has fit in with the locals.

Family

Vision

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Beltane                                                          Emergence Moon

When Kate was in high school, she was ready to graduate a year ahead of time. She had gotten agreement that she would take classes at nearby Iowa State. Then the school backed out of the agreement.

When she applied to medical school, she was told that her husband was already a doctor. Why did she want to be a doctor, too? She went anyway, studying in the early morning hours, so she could continue to be a wife and mother.

When she was the lead physician among pediatricians at the Allina Coon Rapids Clinic, she saw the need for evening hours, for pediatricians and family practice doctors working closely together. She saw the speed-ups underway with scheduling crowding appointment times and doctor visits measured by demeanor rather than medical results. She got angst and a bad back for her efforts.

She is a woman of vision, able to see, as the old testament prophets did, ahead. She was born just a few years before she could have been heard more clearly, yet she now has the satisfaction of looking back and being affirmed that her seeing was clear. I’m proud to be the husband of a woman who can see the horizon. And beyond.

Family, Feelings, Politics

Allowed?

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Beltane                                                                Emergence Moon

Kate and I drove on a blue highway, Minnesota Highway #10, from near our home here in Andover to Detroit Lakes, then, after the wedding turned around and drove back. Along the way, when I mentioned my driving “to get there a little faster,” Kate surprised me by saying, “Well, I’ve only recently been allowed to drive when we’re together.”

Allowed? This stubborn Norwegian woman, whose eyes have seen far ahead all of her life, further than life could take her, most of the time, felt the need to be allowed? That set me back and I knew it was true. As she’d pointed out a couple of years ago, I always drove. Never any question about it. And, as with most deep seated discriminatory impulses, her driving had never crossed my mind.

She drove to Denver a couple of years ago and reported that her back felt much better than when she rode. I said, “Well, you should drive then.” Guess that’s when she was allowed. This is not an easy thing for me to admit, since I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to eliminate discrimination, especially sexism and racism, in the institutions in which I’ve worked and the communities in which I’ve lived. But there it was, staring back at me from the driver’s seat.

I’ve gotten use to the passenger’s seat over the last year and a half or so. It was a transition and one I’m glad I’ve made. I can see more, enjoy the trips more. Shows you what you miss when you drive with blinders on.

 

Family, Garden, Great Work

Earth Bound

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Beltane                                                               Emergence Moon

That Kate and Charlie gardening team have begun another year of plant wrangling. Kate planted the herb spiral, cut a space so we can more easily harvest raspberries in the fall and mended the flower bed wounded by Rigel. Meanwhile tomatoes, peppers, chard, collard greens and ground cherries found themselves spots for the growing season.1000Kate and Charlie in Eden

There is nothing more literally grounding than planting.  We move the soil aside, add some nutrients and water. All the time we have to consider the type of plant, what it needs, how the soil is (though that process here is largely over) and what its requirements for sun are. Most vegetables need full sun and we had the big ash in the midst of our garden cut down last year to open up more areas of full sun.  A seed (its package) or a plant (its plastic container) leaves a temporary home for a place it can flourish, reach its optimum.

Caring for a garden together is so much like raising a family, caring for dogs. Nurture. It helps us stay in touch with our home and as a by product we get nutritious food. A pretty good deal.