Thank Your Mother for your Sexual Freedom

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Yes, your mother (or grandmother) made it possible for you to have one less worry in your wild life.

Your mother made it possible for you to hook up with your lover without the fear of pregnancy.

Your mother made it possible for you to complete the joy of intimacy by making a physical connection to a human whose intellectual and spiritual bond with you was already in place. Or not. Your Choice.

(LS edit here: Not trying to be confusing. I mean: maybe you have an intellectual & spiritual bond. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you want to make a physical connection. Maybe you don’t. Your Choice.)

When she was your age, your mother lived with the frustration of not being able to express her sexuality with a partner without fear of pregnancy.

I vividly remember that our bathtub surround in the 50s always held a jar of Massengill douche and its related hose contraption. When I learned to read as a first grader, I reveled in reciting the label on the jar aloud, line by line, to my sister as we sat together in the tepid water, knees up to our chins while my mother shampooed our hair on Saturday nights.

When I reached puberty, my mother handed me three items: a box of sanitary napkins, a copy of “Growing Up and Liking It” and a panty girdle. A panty girdle?

Yes. A panty girdle. Apparently she felt this would ward off the attention of any males who might consider fondling my buttocks.

The girdle as a form of birth control. What a concept!

By providing this panty girdle and the “Growing Up and Liking It” booklet, my mother felt that she had done her job regarding the Facts of Life.

The booklet, brought to us by the Modess Corporation, a company that made sanitary napkins, had drawings of the female reproductive organs with the triangular shaped place called the “uterus”, connected on each side to an ovary by means of fallopian tubes. There was a drawing of an egg in motion, wiggling its way down the track of life with its little tail. Circles and arrows, Arlo Guthrie style.

The voice of authority in the booklet said that each month eggs were released from the ovaries and the result was blood, known as one’s “period”. However—and here comes the really scary part—if an egg was fertilized, you didn’t get your period, pregnancy was the result and a baby began to grow inside you! OMG!

The booklet neglected to explain how the egg got fertilized. I pored over those pages behind closed doors, secretly, constantly. There was no one with whom I could discuss this awkward topic and I could not for the life of me figure out the fertilizing part. Damned poor editing on the part of the Modess Corporation, I’d say.

The result was that Every Single Month from age twelve through eighteen and a half, I worried myself sick that my egg was going to get fertilized. I marked my period on freebie Hallmark pocket calendars with a star for each bloody day. During the week of having my period, I was relieved and buoyant. Unfortunately I was also in terrific discomfort since I was one of those unlucky ones who endured really brutal menstrual cramps that ached all the way down my inner thighs. Curl-up-in-fetal-position pain, with-your-eyes-shut pain. My mother never gave me anything to take for it. She’d say, in this “I told you so” kind of voice, “That’s the Facts of Life.”

During the week after my period, I’d be OK for a while; then those fears would begin to dog me again. Once, I meekly said to my mother, “My period is late this month.” It was late. I didn’t have precisely regular periods.

“What have you been doing that you’re worried about your period being late?”

“Nothing,” I said. Which was true.

When I had a blind date with a neighbor’s boyfriend’s friend, my mother suddenly came up to me, and said, “Your father wants to make sure that you know about ‘The Facts of Life’.”

Huh? Thinking, thinking. Facts of Life equals getting your period and enduring cramps. Check!

“Yeah. I know.”

Then I went to college. 1968. I had a new boyfriend and he conveyed the truth of the “Facts of Life”. Yikes. I sincerely had no idea. I was a late bloomer. I didn’t even understand what Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin Braddock had been up to.

What was it like to be dating and mating as a college student in the 60s and 70s?

Colleges had Rules. Crazy rules. During the early 60s, men could only visit women’s dormitories in their downstairs parlors. Later, when men were allowed to visit women’s rooms, the door had to be kept open. Both parties had to have one foot on the floor. Yes. It’s true.

Even at our state university, where rules were more flexible than women’s colleges, there were strict curfew hours in the late 60s. 10 p.m. on weekdays. Midnight on weekends. Sign-ins compulsory. Don’t even think about spending the night with a member of the opposite sex.

Then overnight—not quite, but it seemed like it—everything changed. 1967 had been “The Summer of Love” in San Francisco. We became “gentle people with flowers in their hair”.*

The women’s movement began to gain momentum. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem continued to inspire us to stand up for our rights—including the right to sexual freedom.

Changes were happening on college campuses at warp speed. It was still illegal to prescribe birth control pills to unmarried women until 1972, but sympathetic doctors could be found.

In 1970, I was engaged to be married. I learned from other women that there were liberal doctors at our Student Infirmary who would prescribe the Pill under certain circumstances.

When the doctor closed the door on the treatment room, he asked the reason for my appointment.

I was nervous but truthful. I told him that I was engaged to be married, and my fiancé and I would like to have sex.

“To have sex” sounds a bit incongruous, but I don’t recall any euphemism that I might have used. Certainly not the slang of the time—“get it on”—and certainly not a clinical term like Sheldon Cooper’s “engage in coitus.”

The doctor looked at the engagement ring on my finger and reached for his prescription pad. Minutes later, I was heading down the hill with a 3 pack and I was officially “on the pill”.

Sexuality became a revolution. Co-ed dorms. Love-ins. John Lennon and Yoko in Amsterdam.

The result of those transformative years was your personal sexual freedom.

My advice? Be very careful how you use it. There’s a lot more to intimacy than sex.

———————–

*San Francisco, lyrics by Scott Mackenzie

“Thank Your Mother for your Sexual Freedom” is an excerpt from Linda Summersea’s manuscript of essays, Writing Like A Mad Woman.

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Live the Island Life: Live Green. 10 Tips Learned from Island Living.

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I confess that I am in the midst of a very long, ongoing love affair—with islands.

Many islands. I have yielded to their temptation in many seas—some repeatedly—and each island has shared its unique characteristics abundantly and unabashedly.

The most valued aspect of these island affairs is that they have taught me the principles of green living, as dictated by the isolation that is a normal, accepted part of the island lifestyle. While the isolation is part of the charm, it also has its own set of challenges.

The point is that living on any island requires one to live mindfully. Mindful of everything from water use to recycling to consolidating trips to the mainland to save money.

Right from the beginning, I found myself constantly saying, “When we return home, we need to continue to live as though we’re living on an island.”

And then we did.

Here are a few things we learned.

  1. Avoid paper products. Paper products take a high toll in trees and are bulky to ship to islands. We had never used paper products except for toilet paper, so this was easy. One amusing result was that when our oldest son went to Kindergarten in 1985, he returned home with cafeteria questions.

“What are those paper squares that the ladies put on the trays?” he asked.

“What do they look like?”

“They’re folded up,” he said. “They’re white.”

“Ohhh. Those are ‘paper napkins’. Schools don’t use cloth napkins,” I said.

I imagine the school staff thought we were raising little heathens who didn’t know how to use napkins.

  1. Conserve water. On the islands that we have visited, water is usually gathered from the passing rain showers and saved in a cistern. You didn’t let the water run while you brushed your teeth. You didn’t run the washing machine without a full load. Common sense.
  1. Don’t get hung up watching television. In the islands, mega-sized generators that fueled the entire island and went down several times a day often supplied electricity. Televisions were rare. One time walking the dusty road into town, I saw a crowd gathered around a tiny black and white set in front of a village store. The crowd was laughing hysterically. I approached to see Paul Rodriguez beaming in from Mexico City. We rarely watched television, and this non-habit was part of our life at home. While we had a television—a small Sony that we had purchased in 1974—we only watched it for occasional news or—ha!—“Saturday Night Live”.

Instead of watching television, we sat out on the porch. We read, or played Scrabble, or talked to each other. Sometimes we swung in the swing under the shade of the enormous twin beech in the front yard. The boys rode their tricycles up and down the length of the porch, and chased fireflies at dusk.

In later years, we would occasionally rent a movie from the convenience store. In those days, when you rented a movie it entailed carrying home a VCR unit. Yes, kids, you carried home a VCR and a VHS movie videotape as part of your evening rental, hooked it up and then carried back the whole kit and kaboodle the next morning.

  1. Visit your library for reading materials. I loved one island’s aged library whose wide stone sills had been built during the sugar mill days. At home, instead of buying books impulsively, we went to the library. I did have a small but growing library of my own beloved titles, and we did buy Children’s Books. I wanted our sons to know the joy of having special, favorite books. Going to the bookstore was a very dear activity. When they moved from home, our sons took with them several large boxes of their childhood books, which they retain today in their 30s.
  1. Buy local. In the islands, you can’t get there from here. You have to be satisfied with what’s available from a limited selection. Once when I asked for a Hershey bar at an island mini-mart, the response was “melt too much”. (The heat also makes the language terse. 5a. Mean what you say and don’t chatter needlessly.)

At home, we didn’t just drive into town for every little item that we needed. No impulse driving. We kept a list for the items to be purchased and the errands to be run. In later years, when we lived in a rather remote location by some standards—an hour’s drive from the grocery store—our habit served us well.

  1. Grow a garden and cook it yourself. In the islands, local produce is king. Due to the high cost of ocean freight, in the islands you pay high prices for prepared foods that mainlanders take for granted. At home, I planted and maintained a garden from Day 1. Organic. In the early years we lived close enough to the ocean that we used seaweed to mulch and enhance our soil. I canned and froze everything. At home, we cooked from scratch. Everything. Even the bread—and this was before bread machines. As a result, our children enjoyed nourishing food and were never fussy eaters.

There were some times when it proved comical.

Our children always chose a favorite meal for their birthday dinner. One year when our youngest was five, we had a birthday party and four little boys joined us that evening. Zack’s selection was a Cantonese meal: Ho Yu Gai Poo. The children refused to eat it. No problem. We had lots of leftovers. I suppose I could have told them that these were “chicken nuggets” and served the sauce on the side, but I’m glad that this didn’t enter my mind.

When our sons grew up, their taste buds were “spoiled”. Since they had never experienced fast food, they didn’t crave it. Of course, they did try it when they went away to school, and certainly ate it for a period of time. Now in their 30s, our sons favor a plant-based diet with occasional free-range meats—never pork. (Pigs are smart creatures.) They have been at times vegan and pescatarian. It makes a mother proud.

  1. Make things and fix things. In the islands, you don’t buy new clothing every season, as the fashion magazines would lead you to believe is necessary. If you need a chicken coop, you build it. Recycled lumber is very common.

I had always sewn my own clothes, except for blue jeans and imported Indian tops and winter jackets.

I had always been repulsed by the pinks and blues assigned at birth so automatically. I made velour overalls for our babies, soft and warm, and in bright or earthy colors like purple and russet. I hand-sewed a stack of quilts, made a goosedown coverlet from a Colorado kit company, and knit a cedar closet full of woolen sweaters. We built our own house, barn and chicken coop. For heavens sake, we drilled our own well!

Sometimes when I think back, I have to remind myself that this all really did take place. I’m sure that some of you can identify with this. There is nothing quite like the energy of youth. Youthful energy becomes mid-life habit and mid-life habit begets senior citizen tradition. It’s all good.

  1. Find delight in nature. In the islands, we enjoyed tropical trails and white sand coves on shore, and coral canyons full of schools of bar jacks and butterfly fish in the sea. At home, we looked forward to morel mushroom season in the woods when we walked sycamore-lined creek beds and old apple orchards. I followed the tracks of a mountain lion and her cubs with my snowshoes, reveled in the sound of the coyotes in the hills, and absolutely loved to watch the beaver heading home at dawn as he swam across the front of our property. Admittedly, we had to wire fence our trees to ward him off. One morning, I found an otter lazing about on our dock eating fresh water clams.
  1. Dream about the rest of this amazing solar system. One island home that we rented had a flat concrete rooftop where lounge chairs called to you at night so that you could view Mercury on the horizon in December and watch for the occasional shooting star—a special treat to point at quickly and track across the sky.

At home, I drove the truck up to a high field during the Perseids in July and lay in the truck bed with my sons while the cascades of meteors flew by.

  1. Share with your friends and neighbors. In the islands, little is wasted. We saw people carrying home other persons’ discards. At home, if we didn’t need something, we sold it cheaply or gave it away to someone who did. The boys sorted through their toys for donations, and participated in food drives.

I’m pleased to say that we now live on an island in Puget Sound where these values are firmly in place. People here take the ferry to the mainland. Thankfully, there is no bridge.

Certainly we haven’t spurned technology. It brings the world to us. We even have an island Facebook group where our residents share what they no longer need, report ISO (in search of) items and report stuff we need to know. Example:

“Heads up! Two Nubian goats seen headed south on Island Road at 5:10 this afternoon. Do you know who they belong to?”

I am very pleased that we are living the island life in reality now, but then, we have always lived the island life.

Live the Island Life Anywhere on the Planet. Live Green.

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Judge Not

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Judge Not

There was a man on the train platform. It doesn’t matter what race he was, or what age he was, or the color of his eyes.

He approached me with calm determination and a vacant look. Me, in my traveler black with the silver suitcase and an American Express card in the zippered security pocket on my thigh.

He told me a brief story of homelessness. He spoke so softly that I didn’t hear all the words with the rumble of the trains. I could only assess the body language and the wardrobe.

Then he asked me for a dollar.

Was his story true? Or was this his daily gig?

Did he did he put on raggedy clothes with bent shoulders and a forlorn look that morning as part of a performance that works for him in place of a more traditional job?

Did he proceed to the commuter parking lot at a different train station each day, rotating his way through the many train stations that surround his city?

Did he start with the morning commuters, and then, take a break at MacDonald’s before hitting up the mid-day suburban housewives on their way to a fancy lunch in town?

Did he use donations to buy a sandwich and a cold one to wash it down at a local bar? Did he meet his dealer in an alley for a hit? Was he a con man?

Or was he a down-on-his-luck drifter looking for work? A PTSD veteran? A man who fell through a crack in the system?

Maybe if I lived in that city and saw men with their palms open on a daily basis, I might be more cynical. Maybe, like most people, I would look the other way and let it be someone else’s business.

But I don’t live in the city, and I don’t see this every day.

I opened my zippered Baggallini purse and pulled a bill from its contents.

I gave the man the bill. He said a simple “Thank you” and turned away, then stopped with his back to me to view his take and place it in his pocket.

So. Was I a victim of fraudulent panhandling? Or a contributor to someone’s critical needs for the day?

You know what? It doesn’t matter. If I was swindled by a con man, it doesn’t matter.

In the brief seconds between “Do you have a dollar?” and “Thank you”, I decided not to judge.

With a twist of fate, any one of us could be that man on the train platform.

Christianity says to “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

The Torah of Judaism says 36 times to help “the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger.”

In Buddhism, the more one gives, without seeking something in return, the more one gains. The suttas record various motives for exercising generosity. The Anguttara Nikaya enumerates the following eight motives: [1]

  1. Asajja danam deti: one gives with annoyance, or as a way of offending the recipient, or with the idea of insulting him.
  2. Bhaya danam deti: fear also can motivate a person to make an offering.
  3. Adasi me ti danam deti: one gives in return for a favor done to oneself in the past.
  4. Dassati me ti danam deti one also may give with the hope of getting a similar favor for oneself in the future.
  5. Sadhu danan ti danam deti: one gives because giving is considered good.
  6. Aham pacami, ime ne pacanti, na arahami pacanto apacantanam adatun ti danam deti: “I cook, they do not cook. It is not proper for me who cooks not to give to those who do not cook.” Some give urged by such altruistic motives.
  7. Imam me danam dadato kalyano kittisaddo abbhuggacchati ti danam deti: some give alms to gain a good reputation.
  8. Cittalankara-cittaparikkarattham danam deti: still others give alms to adorn and beautify the mind.

As long as our affluent society chooses not to have the compassion to find the resources to provide jobs and homes for those who need them, it’s up to us to individually decide what role we play in the great inequity.

Another train approached, the doors slid open and the masses flowed forward leaving the man on the platform alone.

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[1] Accesstoinsight.org

“Judge Not” is an essay from Linda Summersea’s Essays: Writing Like a Mad Woman.
“Judge Not” has also been published on elephantjournal.com. Check it out!

On Euthanasia, A Good Day to Die

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Friday was a brilliant day at the water’s edge on Puget Sound. Sparkling water, blue skies with cotton candy clouds.

A contagious atmosphere of summer celebration was in the air as toddlers splashed at the edge of the icy water and a handful of sailboats marked the horizon.

A busload of school kids was picnicking with parent chaperones while their teachers took a break from counting down to the last day of school. Lovers nuzzled on park benches, new mothers in yoga pants and hoodies pushed strollers while a slight breeze off the ocean lifted and swirled their hair.

My dog Lily and I walked along the shore enjoying the sun at our backs.

A 30ish couple with their baby girl and a black Border Collie was stretched out on a patch of lush green grass just ahead of us, watching our approach.

The young woman called out to me. Let’s call her “Emmalene”. It was something like that. The events that followed made me forget her name.

Emmalene explained that today was the last day of her dog’s life. He was going to be euthanized tomorrow, and would I allow Lily to play with him? She said that she was trying to give Blackie a Very Best Last Day.

Whew.

We all looked at Blackie and Lily. The Border Collie and the Golden Retriever were straining at their leashes, tails wagging wildly and trying to get near enough for sniffing. How could I refuse? Why would I even want to refuse? This was a serendipitous meeting. I had just helped a friend navigate through the euthanasia of her cat three weeks earlier.

The dogs greeted each other happily and stood very much at ease in each other’s presence. Honestly I’d never before seen anything quite like this extremely pacific exchange between my dog and another. I knelt in the grass and began to massage Blackie as we spoke, starting behind his ears, then neck, shoulders, and back, reverse and repeat. I could feel lumps all over his body, but he was relaxed at my touch.

Emmalene told me that Blackie had been having bad days when he vomits all his food and can’t get around. He also had good days like today where he was energetic, but the bad days were increasing.

“What did the vet say?” I asked.

“He’s old. 15 years. Most Border Collies live to be 12 or 13. He’s covered with lumps and some days he can barely function. Today he’s happy and alert, but the vet said it’s all about quality of life at this point so we had to decide… but we keep second-guessing ourselves. It’s so hard to say good-bye yet we don’t want him to suffer.”

As I massaged Blackie and spoke gently to him about his beautiful day, I shared that my friend’s cat was actually her second cat to develop pancreatic cancer. Her first cat developed it two years ago, and she approved all possible treatments. Chemo. Painkillers. The max. The poor cat suffered through it all until nothing more could be done. Sadly, her second cat was diagnosed with the very same type of extremely aggressive cancer.

This time, my friend decided—and the veterinary oncologist agreed—that quality of life needed to be foremost. Sometimes humans do everything to keep their pets alive when it’s not to the benefit of the pet’s life. My friend made the difficult decision to euthanize since there was no chance that treatment would do anything other than delay the end for a few weeks. Just because science has the ability to prolong life doesn’t necessarily make it right.

I’m certainly not an expert but I am a dog owner so I did my best to engage Emmalene and her husband in a conversation of assurance. I understand how difficult it is to say good-bye to a beloved pet that is such a dear member of the family.

I said, “You can always remember that you’ve given Blackie his very best life. 15 wonderful years. From what I understand, dogs don’t know Yesterday or Tomorrow. They only know Today. And now, Today, you’re giving him a Best Possible Beautiful Last Day.

Look at how happy he is! The two dogs are snuggling and he’s lying in the grass and enjoying the warmth of the sun.”

Emmalene said that some people with dogs had actually rejected her request that day, and it made her feel very badly about the situation. One woman even went so far as to tell her that her dog looked healthy!

Lily and I continued on with our walk and when we returned on our way to depart, I stopped and knelt at Blackie’s side one more time, ruffling his coat and massaging him again. It was hard to leave…

Finally, as they looked on, I held his face and spoke softly. “Good-bye, Sweetie. You’ve had a wonderful life. Today, I want you to enjoy this wonderful day. And tomorrow, I want you to have a smooth passage…”

Then Emmalene thanked me for what I had shared and told me that our visit had been meaningful to them.

Lily and I proceeded to the parking lot. Lily jumped into the back seat and settled down with her head between her paws, tired, eyes closed. I shut the door and resolutely took my position behind the wheel. I cried quietly for dear Blackie for a few minutes, then drove away through an old growth forest that spoke to me of the worth of a life well lived that pulses within us all.

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