A memoir: the most important high school years

For a few years, fate threw us together in the same high school in the mid 1960s--the class of 1967 from Madison High School--and yet those years have left their indelible mark on our lives. We were the Madison Rams, our colors were orange and white, and we had merged into the high school, then 7-12, from four or more elementary schools. A few of us were catholic, two were Jewish, the rest of us were wasps--white, Anglo-Saxon, and and protestant. Although the Supreme Court had ruled segregation to be a violation of the 14th amendment in 1954, we were not yet an integrated high school. Most of us came to Madison High School still clinging to friends from those earlier schools. Some of us were ready to spread our wings and make new friends.

Last weekend about half of us met for our 47th class reunion. Most of us will turn 65 this year. As a memorial board cataloged, twenty of us have already died.

I came to Madison High School at the end of my freshman year and stayed until very near the end of my junior year. Coming from Louisville, Kentucky, where I had unhappily been since 7th grade, I was ready to make new friends and renew some old friendships from my elementary years.

For you see, I had gone to one of those elementary schools that merged into Madison High School for a few years before my family moved to Louisville, Kentucky. When I was in the third grade, we had moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Madison, Tennessee,  We lived on Berwich Trail with the mighty Cumberland River in our back yard, and I rode my bike to Neely's Bend Elementary School for the next three happiest years of my young life.

Last night at the reunion, many of the people that I remembered best had gone to both my elementary school and Madison High School. That may have been true for others, too, especially for those who had been together from first grade through twelfth grades. One man was going around and finding each of us from "the school on the bend"--Neely's Bend Elementary--and asking if we remembered each other. I certainly remember him.

When I was driving to the reunion at Old Hickory Country Club, I got to take a short walk down memory lane. Once I exited Interstate 65 North (which had not been there in the 60s), I passed by the old Madison High School on my left, which is now a middle school. I have always liked its welcoming u-shaped facade and am glad that the old building has not been torn down. Even before that, to my right I had recognized the name of the street that I had lived on when I was in high school--Marthona Road. I took a quick turn and looked for the old brick ranch house--the first house my family had ever bought, instead of rented--but could not recognize it. If memory served me, we paid $12,000 for that rather nice house! There were other street names--Graycroft, Vantrease, and Due West--that I recognized from the days that I was first learning  to drive.

1965-66--the school picture from my junior year in high school--On the back of the picture, it says Quill and Scroll (I was on the newspaper staff of The Ram Page, wrote poetry, and was to be the literary editor my senior year) and National Honor Society.

As I passed the familiar street names, my memory went back to an incident when I could have easily died. One of the things that we did back then was to drive past the house of our current crush, in hopes of seeing him or just to feel near him, I guess. Anyway a friend (Barbara Dunlap, I believe) and I had just driven past Tommy Cooper's (my latest crush) house and honked. Curious, he quickly came out of his house, jumped in his car--a Volkwagon Beetle, of course--and began to follow us. Not thinking, barely breathing, and not wanting him to know that it was me, I naturally sped up to get away from him. I was in my father's powerful, big Buick, and within minutes, we were at Gallatin Road, a major thoroughfare in Madison. Barbara screamed to me that the light was red and that I had to stop, but I told her that I couldn't and to hold on, because we were going through the red light. As we made it through, Barbara looked back to see that the cars on Gallatin Road had swerved to the shoulders to avoid hitting my car and that Tommy had stopped at the light. I just kept going--so afraid that the police were going to find and arrest me and put me under the jail! So afraid that my father was going to find out!

Tommy Cooper at Barbara's house. When I first met him, my sophomore year in high school, he was going steady with a girl named Cindy. Forbidden fruit, I chased him until I caught him in my junior and his senior year. I had dated another brown-eyed, handsome boy named Charlie Ligon through my sophomore year. 

When I walked into our 47th class reunion, a man came up to me saying, "You're Laura Drawdy, aren't you? And you married Tommy Cooper, didn't you?" Then he asked me if I had known what Tommy had recently died of. I had just heard in the last month that Tommy had died this past year. I had completely lost touch with him. The last time I saw Tommy was when he sold me my first Honda CRV after my Sabb had gotten totaled in Chattanooga. That must have been around 2000 or earlier. Tommy and I had been lovers through late high school, even after I moved to North Carolina to finish high school, and into college. We had married when I was about 20 and stayed married a few short years while I worked as a cashier at a small grocery store in Clarksville and finished college at Austin Peay. Perhaps I should have stayed married to him, but I had married him to escape my home life and because everyone else seemed to be getting married. We really had little in common. One day he told me that he never wanted to have any children. Though I wasn't so keen on having children myself and certainly not anytime soon, that was just the excuse I used to divorce him. Then I began my all-consuming teaching career. Later, after the divorce, Tommy and I were friends, even seeing each other occasionally, until I met John Mallernee.

At the reunion, I kept asking myself, "Who are all of these old people? Men with grey, thinning, or completely bald heads? Lots of women with grey hair, too. In my mind's eye, these people had frozen in time and should not have aged! They had name tags with their senior pictures (I had not been graduated from Madison so had no senior picture), but the pictures were really too small for most of us to see very well, without getting out our readers! We would look at the name on the tag and then at the person's face and sometimes we would see a slight resemblance! Other times the resemblance was quite obvious!

It seems to me that back then, we only took pictures at Christmas time!

Having not been to a class reunion since my tenth one, it was great fun to see people from high school again. It was fun to see who I remembered and who remembered me. Only good for about three hours of socializing, still being somewhat shy, and with the round dinner tables crowded together to accommodate all of us, I'm sorry to say that I could not get around to seeing everyone that I would have liked to see and to talk with. About 100 of us were able to attend, 50% of our original class. What surprised me was that some of the rather plain-looking people in high school were the most attractive now in our 60s. One lady from my elementary school who said that she had five great grandchildren did not look much older than 50, if that, and she had the loveliest face. And some of the people who were the most attractive in high school were not so attractive now. One studly looking guy in high school now looked like such an old man! Though many of those bald and grey-haired men that I alluded to in the previous paragraph were mighty handsome men, in contrast to their high school days.

It was good to sit at a table with some old friends from high school for a couple hours. But a lifetime had passed so quickly before our very eyes that we had little in common. Having not seen most of these people for nearly fifty years, I felt tenuous connections to them, connections as thin as gossamer. They didn't know me, nor did I know them. Wow to those who had not left Madison, who still lived in the area. How they must have felt connected to one another! But for most of the rest of us who had gone our individual ways, we were just reminiscing that night, as I am here.

Check out a picture of this dog the year before when she was but a puppy in a blog post that I wrote about another incident in my Madison High School years. I think that I was trying to look "sexy" in this picture! I remember being so proud to have gotten that MHS class ring in my junior year!

One big thing for me in high school was the time that I had cheated in biology class. No, we didn't get caught, but I had felt bad all of these years--perhaps because it was wrong or perhaps because the teacher was so nice. Anyway, my friend and I had similar handwriting, and we were to memorize the names of  the major bones and the muscles in the body. She memorized one set, and I the other, then we exchanged papers. We both got a 100% on that test. When I asked my partner in crime if she remembered our cheating, she laughed and said that she did not remember the incident at all. So much for my decades-old guilt!

At the reunion, one of our classmates (the daughter of our chemistry teacher) was reading out fun trivia questions for us to answer such as "How many elementary schools fed into Madison High School?" and  "How many drive-in movie theaters were in Madsion in 1967?" when she shocked me by asking one personal question, "And who put those "for sale" signs in my yard?" I actually involuntarily raised my hand, but no one seemed to pay me any attention. But I was guilty as charged.

Let me tell you the story. It is one of my most vivid memories from my Madison High School years. I was in Mr. Jenkins chemistry class, and one day I got kicked out of class! Mr. Jenkins had once again lost control of his class and yelled at all of us to sit down and to get quiet. We misbehaved in his class because so few of us "got" chemistry. Except for some "eggheads" or "nerds" in the back row (you know who you are!), it was beyond most of our comprehension.

Anyway, as I said, Mr. Jenkins had lost his temper and yelled at the whole class to get quiet. In the meantime, Randy Fisher (who I'm sorry to say didn't make it to the reunion because I was going to fuss at him again!) was my lab table partner who sat next to me on those tall stools. Unknown to me, he was up to his old tricks and had just taken that big gold safety pin out of my plaid wool kilt and was taunting me with it. When I saw that he had it, I flipped my left hand over to him to indicate that he was to return the pin to me pronto. At about the same time, Mr. Jenkins just happened to look up from reading at his desk. He ranted at me, "Laura, get out of my class and go to the office immediately!" I heard a general gasp from the rest of the class as we were all rather stunted. I was a good student who had never been in trouble before.

I spent three days out of chemistry class, sitting in front of the office. When the principal Mr. DePriest came by, he asked me how yearbook sales were going. To which I responded that they were going well. I was ashamed for him to know that I was in trouble nor did he expect trouble from me. The vice-principle Mr. Bridgeman always took care of the trouble-prone students. He had told me that I had to go to Mr. Jenkins and ask him if I could return to class. Each morning during homeroom for three days, I went to Mr. Jenkins, apologized, and asked if I could return to his class. Each morning for three days, Mr. Jenkins ignored me. Besides all of my friends, my homeroom teacher Mrs. Eldridge seemed to be on my side.

Finally, Mr. Jenkins allowed me to return to chemistry class, but each day that I had been out of class and though I had tried to keep up, he had given me a zero--three zeroes that were to be averaged into my grade for the six-weeks! I had not told my parents about my getting kicked out of chemistry class. But when the report cards came out, there were those little blue Bs that I had gotten in all the six-weeks' grading periods before, and there, for the fifth six-weeks, was a big fat D, written in red!

Now I knew I had to explain that grade in chemistry to my parents, and I was plenty scared. When I did, they listened patiently to me and just said that Mr. Bridgeman had called them several weeks ago and explained the situation. They had been wondering when I was going to tell them! They figured that I had suffered enough already in silence and gave me no further consequence.

So my friends and I were out one night, looking for something fun to do, and we decided to "pay back" old (he must have at least been in his 40s!) Mr. Jenkins! I honestly do not remember who was in on the prank or whose brilliant idea it was, but we decided to do more than just roll his yard, we also "found" a dozen or so "for sale" signs to put in his yard. The next week at school was a nightmare of Mr. Bridgeman quizzing me and my friends about the deed. Knowing that I would get in even bigger trouble, all of my friends, some of who even confessed, remained loyal to me and kept me out of it. No matter how many times Mr. Bridgeman brought up my name, they would not incriminate me. I loved my friends for that.

That's how I learned the extremely valuable lesson that teachers are not always fair, and later in life, as a teacher myself, I would keep this message in mind. And I want Mr. Jenkins and his daughter (to whom we meant no disrespect) to know that as a teacher, I got more than plenty of pay back from my own students!

A grandmother by any name would be as sweet

As a grandmother now for four years, I go by the name Yaya, which my first granddaughter Tessa tagged me with. I was trying to get her to say Granna. (I wonder if she knew that Yaya means grandmother in Greek.) Actually what really happened is that, unknown to me and for some unknown reason, Tessa had begun to call her pacifier, which she truly loved, by the name of Yaya, and I thought that she was talking to me! It's funny how our nicknames come about, isn't it?

Though I liked "Yaya" immediately, I've discovered that the name that we call a grandparent doesn't really matter. What matters is the relationship between a grandparent and a grandchild. And of course, these relationships vary as much as there are stars in the sky. And we probably won't know what the relationship means to us until possibly long after it's over.

My own relationship with my three sets of grandparents I have mentioned in another blog post. Even though I only got to see my grandparents once a year, they were important in my life, and one set--one grandfather, in particular--made a world of difference in my life. Why? Because I knew that my Granddaddy Clark loved me. If I didn't feel important to anyone else at that time in my life, I knew that I was important to him.

My daughter Ellen basically did not know her grandparents. John's father died of cancer when I was pregnant with her, and his mother was not well and died soon after Ellen was born. My own parents lived in far-away South Carolina and were not well either. Both of them had died by the time Ellen was six. So inactive in her life were they that she does not remember them. I find that sad for her, for me, and for them. Having active grandparents, whom I could trust with her, would have been a blessing.

Here is Livvy Lara at my house back during the winter. In contrast to her sister's green or hazel eyes and her mother's grey blue eyes, hers turned a dark, dark chocolate brown like her father's. Also in contrast to Tessa's, her hair has been really slow to grow in, but we have noticed that it is really beginning to sprout now that spring has at last arrived! 

There are some definite things in my life that I believe to be God's plan, and one of these is my experience of being a grandmother. I never really gave being a grandmother much thought. Grandmother, like the word retirement, was just not a part of my vocabulary! But my daughter Ellen and my son-in-law Nekos up and decided to move to Nashville just a couple years after college and right after Ellen lost her newspaper job in Knoxville. I never expected their moving here, but of course, I was delighted since Ellen is my only child, and yes, she has been one of the orbits in my life.

This is Tessa last week, dyeing her first Easter eggs. 

So once Nekos and Ellen started their family, I got to be there. I mean really be there from the beginning. When Tessa was about three weeks old and I could hear extreme fatigue in Ellen's voice on the telephone, I said, "Do you need me to come and take her for the night?" To which she replied, "Oh, would you, Mama?" And thus began a weekly overnight visit from Tessa. Sometimes in those first two years, I even got to keep her for several days while Ellen and Nekos went on trips/vacations.

Being the artist that she is, she loved dying the eggs and putting stickers on them! With each visit, art is almost always something that Tessa and I do together.

Then less than three years later, along came Livvy Lara. I said that I would not keep them together! I wanted to appreciate each granddaughter of her own. But now almost 18 months later, what I've been working out is keeping Tessa and Livvy together about every other week and keeping them separately on the other week. That works out well for all of us. I like to see the two sisters interact/play together, but I still get to cherish them one at a time! Ellen and Nekos get a date night every other week, and they get to have one-on-one time with one daughter on the other week. So this arrangement of having one grandchild visit, then two grandchildren together visit, every other week, has been a God-sent for all of us.

Here the girls are at my house this past week.

Tessa is so loving and protective of Livvy.  And Livvy so loves her big sister, following her around and emulating her. (It looks as if my camera focused on big Bisquet in this second picture or else the girls are just really riding that horse!

All of this is not to say that the visiting with me is perfect. I mean it's real. There have been a couple of rough times indeed when I have called and asked Ellen and Nekos to come pick Tessa up (but that's out of over 200 visits!), and there were times when I didn't call them and just endured. (Tessa can be as stubborn as her grandmother when it comes to getting her own way!) And always there is my house getting pretty much wrecked, those stinky diapers to change, loud screams of pleasure and of pain (Tessa is very sensitive to any real or perceived hurts.), and my confusion about how to discipline granddaughters (Most times, I just don't have the energy to discipline anymore. Discipline takes energy--it did as a parent and it did as a teacher!) Then there is my fatigue level.

A sweet though blurry moment, Tessa reading to Livvy.

There that's a better picture.


Of course, I talk more about Tessa because she is four and has been in our lives longer, and I think that I know her better, whereas Livvy is only almost 18 months old. She's just beginning to really talk, instead of grunt. The second child doesn't feel the need to speak words as much as the first because her needs are even more promptly met by her parents and her sister, who tries to speak for her. Having had only one child, it's been interesting for me to note the differences between the first and second child. For one thing, their personalities and temperaments have been quite different.  

This is my baby Ellen with her baby Livvy!

Next month, I look forward to keeping Livvy all by herself for four nights while Ellen, Nekos, and Tessa take a trip to the Outerbanks, North Carolina, with friends. I can already see Ellen running up my walk with happy tears in her eyes when she returns to get Livvy because that's what she used to do with Tessa after being away from her on a trip for several days. Being the mother that she is, Ellen loves her breaks away from her children, but her heart aches for Tessa and Livvy when they are not with her, just as mine does after about a week's absence from them. Who knew?

I know that there too soon will come a time when the girls are in school and busy with their own activities, and they won't have time to come visit me for a full day and night. Then my house will stay in perfect order and the quietude will be a constant, and then I will really miss them. 

A memoir--my mother, myself

In the drama I Never Sang for My Father, Robert Anderson tells us that “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some resolution which it may never find.”

I am just beginning to work on excavating my rather complicated relationship with my mother. Actually, some of my last memories of her are so harsh that I have not allowed myself to think much about her since she died 25 years ago this May. But she is my mother, and whether I want to admit it or not, she is still majorly affecting me--or so a soul reader told me many years ago.

This is my mother and father in the late 1970s in Camden, South Carolina, after my dad retired from DuPont.

What is that statement/belief about how we become more like our mothers all of the time. Some of us are even afraid of turning into our mothers. There's an old book entitled My Mother, Myself on my bookshelf, but I have yet to read it.

Once I have completely "figured out" a relationship to the best of my knowledge, then I do breathe easier and feel lighter and am happier. So here goes it with my mother.

Here is my mother Mary Laura Marguerite Clark Drawdy in her early 20s.

My mother was known for her beauty, but the first twelve or so years of my life, I only knew her as my mother, and I adored her. I trusted her and what she did and said. When I was young, she would play a lot with me--she would draw paper dolls and their clothes--and I would color and cut them out. I loved that about her. Later, I would always take her side when she and my father fought with each other. I have already begun to piece her story together as best I can in another blog. When I turned 16, some things happened that made me feel as if my mother had abandoned me; I blogged about the most significant of these events in an earlier entry. Still though, I sometimes hear my mother's voice in my head.

She was indeed a beautiful young woman! Always a fairly petite woman at 5'5", she was not much interested in cooking nor eating and was forever thin.

Generally, once I was on my own here in Tennessee, my parents always lived away from me. So through my 20s and 30s, I visited them at least twice a year--for several days at Christmas and again in the summer. I would always drive far distances to Kansas or Illinois or South Carolina to see them. Though the visits were not always pleasant and sometimes downright disturbing for me, I had thought that they were the norm and that they were expected of me. One of the last times that I visited while my mother was still fairly healthy, she said to me, "I asked your dad, what do you want when you visit?" When such remarks were made, I didn't know how to answer her. Now I believe that I was still desperately searching for some signs of her love for and acceptance of me.

Granted the last 5-10 years of her life, my mother was quite sick with what is now called COPD, and there were no medicines, like today, to give her much help. She was on oxygen the last few years. All of her life until she developed this terrible disease, my mother had smoked--like many people of her generation. When I was a child and got separated from her in a store, I would just wait for her familiar cough and then know where to find her.

Here is my mother in the early 1980s when she had quit coloring her hair in her late 50s. She and my father had retired in SC.  Still a beautiful woman, this was a favorite photo of hers, and she had several copies made.

One of those harsh memories that I have of my mother was after Christmas in 1987. In my late 30s, I had told my parents that I wanted to start making my own Christmases at home with my young family, but my father had coaxed me into visiting my mother in South Carolina once again. Although things were certainly tense and not going well at my home, I left my wayward husband and young child behind and flew to be with my parents.

Again, my mother was in the small town hospital, where she would recover enough to go back home and to be miserable. Pretty much my mother was miserable the last years of her life and not at all pleasant to be around. My father had even made a recording of her in one of her "fits"--bitching him out for his behavior or lacks thereof. He had played the tape for me until I begged him to turn it off. I did not want to hear my mother like that, but I understand why my father needed to share with someone. Dad said that he thought that the reason my mother acted so mean sometimes was because with her COPD, oxygen was not getting to her brain. Still protecting my mother, I tore up that tape after my father died as soon as I got the chance.   

Anyway, back to this particular visit in December 1987: After my rather long trip, my dad picked me up at the nearest airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, and drove me to the hospital in Camden, South Carolina. Because the small hospital was out of space, my mother had been put in a private room in the maternity ward. As I waited outside her room, I heard one of her oldest friends in there with her. My father walked in and proudly announced that he had a surprise for her. When I entered the room with a big smile and went over to give her a hug, she said in the nastiest voice, "Oh, it's you." I was embarrassed and mortified that she would speak to me in that way and in front of her friend Ginny, who was such a loving mother to her own daughter.

After the visit, I allowed a few tears to fall as I waited for my father beside the window that looked in on all of the newborn babies. I felt then such a strong desire to have another baby--to become a mother again. Little did I know, not until a few weeks later, that I was already pregnant with a baby whom I would lose about six weeks later on Valentine's Day.

A few days and a few hospital visits later, my father took me back to the airport in Charlotte. Despite my mother's mood, he and I had had a fairly amiable visit, and as we talked there in the airport, for the first time I felt a real connection to and compassion for my father. Unfortunately, that was the last time that I saw him. He died suddenly and unexpectedly that next summer of a massive heart attack at the age of 64. I was 39 years old.

Some other rather harse memories of my mother have to do with my buying a house and my having a baby. Late in life (at 35), I had finally gotten a home of my own. Before purchasing that house, I had lived in various apartments and in a glorified apartments called  condominiums. I had dreamed of a house of my own for years, and one of my favorite pastimes on a Sunday was to drive around and look at houses. Actually, that's how my then husband John and I found our home here in Kingston Springs. By the time we moved into our house, I was nearly 35, and I was so proud of our new home. Back then, I was a crazy perfectionist and kept things spotless. Of course, I just couldn't wait for my parents to visit us and see our new home. When my mother finally came to visit, she sat on the couch in my living room, looked up, and remarked that she had never liked cathedral ceilings. Later she informed me that there was soap scum under the soap dish in the bathtub (The “soap scum” was actually cement!)  and dust on top of my refrigerator (which I was sure that my tall dad had told her).

Also late in life at age 33, I had had my one and only child--a daughter that I named Ellen Clark (after my Granddaddy Clark). Like most parents, John and I loved that little baby s-o-o much. She was definitely the light in our eyes, and of course, we delighted in taking her to visit my parents. My mother had already been a grandmother for 16 years by then. Their only other grandchild, a granddaughter named Shelley and her mother had lived with my parents for several years when she was a toddler. I really didn't think that my mother gave much attention to my daughter Ellen, but I rationalized that she was older and didn't feel well. On one of our visits to SC, my mother declared, "You and John just love Ellen too much." Again I didn't know how to reply to such a remark.

This is my first visit to my parents after Ellen was born. Ellen is about six months old here, and I am 33.  My mother was 59. She died just 6 years later in her mid 60s.

  
After thinking and thinking about my mother and me this morning as I wrote this blog post and in comparing this last picture of her with the first one in the late 1970s, I notice that my mom really doesn't look well as early as 1983. That COPD must have been brewing several years before it got a complete hold of her in the mid 1980s. She may have even felt sicker than she let on. By then I was certainly too enmeshed in my own personal drama, too busy with being a new mother, and teaching in a new school to have much time and energy for her.

Though she never talked about it, I think of her dark-hued childhood, of the hurt and shame she must have felt when her parents divorced in the late 1930s. Though she never mentioned it, her father was an alcoholic, who died when she was 35, and her own mother was geographically and emotionally distant and solemn. Again how sad and shameful when her only sibling and teenaged brother Joe went to jail for robbing a gas station in the early 1940s. Later in her early 30s, how incredibly tragic that she became completely estranged from him for the rest of their lives. How melancholy that my mother never did find the love and acceptance that she was looking for in my father's large family. No wonder my mother depended on her good looks and on my father to make her happy. And of course, both of them eventually failed her.

My mother never worked outside the house once she married my father in her early 20s. For nearly five decades through her 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and into her 60s, she was a wife, a mother, and a housewife (married to her house?) Like many in her generation, she was a stay-at-home mother; she was an active mother through her 20s, 30s and mid 40s, while my sister and I were still at home.

Because my father's career moved us around, she could not have held onto a job outside the home for very long anyway. She kept a really clean, uncluttered house, but I do not recall her having a passion for any hobbies or outside interests. Though she put good dinners on the table for us, she eventually became a disinterested cook.

After I left home, at times she turned to drinking, and at times she was severely depressed. Being a life-long housewife had not fulfilled her. When her marriage became unbearably unhappy in her late 40s and she would call me to complain about my father, I encouraged her to leave him, but she did not have the confidence to do so. A few months after he died, she was happy for the first time in a long time, enjoying the birds singing in the mornings and the taste of a Reese's cup. She must have felt free of him and his bi-polar disorder at long last. Unfortunately, my mother died of the COPD in the spring of 1989, a short 10 months after my father’s death. In contrast to what some may think, it was definitely not her grieving for him that took her life. It was her weakend heart from her disease and from her anger at what life dealt her.

I weep now cooling tears of understanding and forgiveness. Mom, I am sorry that I have neglected you for these last 25 years, since your death. I have come to believe that your seeming not to love me was all about you. It was never about me. It's too damn bad that we children take on our parents' shit so much. We always blame ourselves for our parents lack of attention and affection; we think that we have done something to cause our parents not to love us, to deserve their neglect. We project their stuff onto ourselves. But the fact is that my poor mother did not love herself, so how in hell could she love me?

British poet Philip Larkin expresses it so well in his short poem called "This Be The Verse."

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

"Since feeling is first . . . "

In my personal favorite of his poems, e e cummings tells us

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

landscape by e e cummings

All of my life I have paid too much attention to the syntax of things. I have wanted to figure my life out--as if it were a puzzle to be put together.

I have analyzed too much. Analysis is some comfort, but it is cold comfort. I wanted Life to have some order, to make some sense, to have a pattern to it.

To synthesize, if you will--to have a logical, coherent rhyme or reason to why things had happened in their certain ways.

To evaluate, classify, and assign things, and even people, to their categorical shelf.

I wanted to reach some new and higher level of Truth. To put together the pieces of myself into a unified whole.

I wanted my life--all Life--to have symmetry, beauty, balance, and harmony.

I did not want Life to play me for a fool.

Analyzing the games we all played, I worshipped at the altar of Intellect and Wisdom.

If the best gesture of my Brain could just work better. If I were only smart enough, then I could know. Know what?

The 1950s and my childhood had taught me that things were white and black, that there was a wrong and a right way (a certain way) to do something, to do anything.

Logic taught me that one thing led to another. Cause and effect.

Most times, I have let my Mind squeeze my Heart out. I didn’t allow my Heart to speak very loudly. I didn’t trust her; she had betrayed me too many times in my chidlhood.

Was I an illusionist? Was it Life’s illusions that mystified me?

I fell hard for the rationalist delusion. After all, I had a mathematical, scientific mind.

I leaned toward Classicism; I desired to be a Classicist. Didn’t they have all of the answers, rules, and reasons for everything?  The voice of my human rule-based education led me down that path, down the logical path.

Did you notice the repetition of the word down in the last sentence? Did you pay attention to its syntax? That’s just it, isn’t it? I went down a path, rather than up a path.

Ironically, one of the first classicist Horace coined the phrase “carpe diem.” Isn't it more reasonable, logical to work and plan for tomorrow? To be ready for any and every eventuality? An impossibility.

 Both Emilys have taught me to live mindfully and to "dwell in possibilities."

Of all that I tried to teach my students, by the end of my career, it was the concept of “mindfulness” that stood out the most for me, (and I hope that some of them got that message as well!) It was there and emphasized in the literature of Thoreau and Emerson, Wordsworth and Shelley, and Whitman and Dickinson, and Wilder’s famous play Our Town.

I have become an intuitionist--I now trust my Heart more and more, thus my Mind less and less. But it’s a long, long journey from the head to the heart.

Life is not black and white, but made up of a multitude of hues and textures and intensities and feelings.

All I know for sure is that I didn’t get to laugh enough in this lifetime. So unpracticed in laughing am I that now my laughter sounds hollow, even to me.

And I have no one’s arms to lean back in and laugh. But it is not too late to laugh nor to lean back. Will you catch and hold me? Will you be tender with me?

At long last, I have found no answers.

All I know to be True is that Life is definitely not a paragraph--it cannot to organized; it is not coherent. It has no topic sentence nor supporting detail sentences.

Perhaps it is not even a distinct division from Death.

And you Mister Death--the great mystery--are no parenthesis--you are not unnecessary. You are the only necessary thing in this life.

(As parentheses often indicate, Death is not just something that is explanatory, qualifying, amplifying, or digressing.)

Death is an interruption of continuity, though perhaps only an interval. And it is the one thing that gives meaning and sustenance and laughter to Life.

seascape by cummings

Grandmother--the most unimportant, important role I've ever played

Grandmother is a word, like the word retirement, that I have learned to love. Neither word nor state had I given much thought to, until they happened in my own life. Though not at first, but now, they are the sweetest words and states for me!

The word grand, after all, can mean magnificent, impressive, dignified, imposing. It can mean that which inspires reverence or awe, but I fear that as a grandmother I am sometimes too meek!

Four years go this month, I became a first time grandmother. Already I wrote a blog post about my early experience of grandmothering, which turned out to be somewhat humorous, and everyone loves humor. This post will be a bit more serious.

Being a grandmother, like so many important roles in our lives, is not something that we train for, go to school for, or are educated for. We just have to "wing it." And at this point in my life, I'm not so sure that I know how to "properly" play that role.

Now in my rather limited experience with my own grandparents, I adored my Granddaddy Clark (my mother's father) and his second wife Etta. Unfortunately, Granddaddy died when I was nine. My two other sets of grandparents (My mother's parents were divorced and remarried to other people, which gave me three sets of grandparents.) were not as significant in my life as the Clark set.

The Mundricks (my mother's mother and her second husband Wassil) lived in the large city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and we usually traveled north to see them once a year. Though Wassil was a jolly enough person, my Grandmother Mundrick was somewhat taciturn. She would sometimes take me into New York City though to shop and to see the Rockettes! Wassil would occasionally take me and my sister Lynda to movie matinee double features. Once we saw a horror movie that so scared me, I woke up in a cold sweat that night and had nightmares for years to come and still well remember the movie--entitled The Shrinking Man.

Living in the small country town of Bowman, South Carolina, the Drawdys (my father's parents) had nine children and dozens of grandchildren, and we usually saw them only once a year, too. My father's father, Papa, was rather quiet. With so many grandchildren, I certainly didn't feel particularly special.  It seemed to me that Mama Drawdy seemed to favor an older male cousin of mine, as she appeared to favor her five sons. But I loved to visit their old farm as a child and run "my heedless ways" among the animals and fruit trees and sleep in the high old beds covered with heavy piles of quilts and blankets. After frolicking on the farm all day,water would be heated up on the kitchen wood stove for me to bathe in an old metal tub. Afraid of the outhouse at night, I hated to have "to go" in the middle of the night, and of course, would wake my mother up to go with me. As I recall, my small family of four slept in two double beds in the large middle bedroom of the large old farmhouse.

It was the Clarks that I got to stay with in the summer for a week in Columbia, South Carolina, and who made me feel particularly loved. I have already written a post about them entitled "Someone to love me."

So with Granddaddy Clark in mind, I thought to myself, all I have to do to be a good grandmother is to just love my granddaughter. And trust me, I do! But what does love look like, feel like? I went about being completely indulgent of her. When she was here, I was "on call" for little Tessa. It was Tessa-time the whole time that she visited me. I played with her, fixed her favorite foods, bought her lots of things, etc. Need I say it, I "spoiled" her. I had often been told that I could do just that, and then give her back to her parents for disciplining!

But that's not working out so well for me. A big difference between my being a grandparent and my own grandparents is that as opposed to once a year, I am fortunate that my granddaughter gets to visit me once a week for 24 hours or more at a time. And oh the difference that is! For her first two years, my being so compliant with Tessa was all right. But here we are four years, over 200 visits, and a new granddaughter later, and I'm thinking maybe I've been too indulgent with her. Now that she is nearly 4, going on 14, I feel as if I need to discipline her more, and it feels uncomfortable to me, yet necessary.

You can easily see from this picture and the next one how adorable and hard-to-resist Tessa is!

Let me give you a few examples of my concern. Last week on her visit, she told me that my house was her house, not mine! And the way she tears through it as if she owns it, one would think that that were true. I have been in the bad habit of not making her pick things up after she has played with them. So when she leaves after a couple days at my house, well, you can imagine the clutter!

Later that evening as she was brushing her teeth before bed, I noticed that she was not brushing her top molars and reminded her to do so. She told me that this is how her daddy had taught her to brush her teeth and that it was the right way. She often tells me that she is right and that I am wrong about such things!

The next day Tessa argued with me about the order of the days of the week; she told me that Monday came after Saturday. Then she proceeded to sing a little ditty about the days of the week, and sure enough, she had memorized it wrong, "Saturday, Monday, Sunday." But she once again insisted that I am wrong and that she was right.

Probably one mistake that I am making is taking all of this too personally. Nevertheless, I feel as if I have been a "push-over" as a grandmother, and I want my granddaughter(s) to respect me. So the fact remains that I'm gonna have to be a bit tougher as a grandmother. Even if it is not my usual MO, even if change can be challenging, even if it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and even if it comes as a shock to Tessa's little system, I must earn her 4-year-old respect! After all, I want to be one of those awe-inspiring grandmothers! Please wish me luck!

Here are my daughter Ellen and I and her two daughters, my granddaughters Livvy Lara and Tessa Jean about four months ago.

      

A memoir--the Louisville years

The junior high and high school years are as foundational as those first years of our life in forming who we become. (In April, I am going to a Madison High School class reunion, and it's been 47 years since I graduated from high school in 1967! When did I get so old--and yet how do I still, at times, feel only 15?) 

My father and his career with the DuPont Company moved us around about every two years as I was growing up. The longest that we stayed anywhere--three years--was recorded in my last memoir piece entitled "the very best of my childhood years."

After my elementary school years ended, we moved to Old Hickory, Tennessee, for a few months and then on to Louisville, Kentucky, where I lived from mid-seventh grade through mid-ninth grade.

It is not good for most teens to move around in their high school years. Adolescence can be a confusing enough time without adding unnecessary uprooting. Perhaps if there is a strong family unit intact, then maybe a teen could take moving around in stride, but my family's dysfunctions began to surface more with each new move.

All total, I attended four high schools. Into the middle of my seventh grade year, my family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in Northern Kentucky. Even though I consider Kentucky to be a southern state, because of its proximity to Indiana and its large size, Louisville definitely had characteristics of a northern city.

This is me in seventh grade in Old Hickory, TN at DuPont Junior High School. After Christmas that year, we moved to Louisville. Once again, I had been given a permanent wave to curl my unacceptable straight hair. Apparently, though this is 1961, I was still wearing those late 50s' petty coats under my skirts on special occasions! That little dog is Jose. 

It was in Louisville that I also started high school, that I immediately began to feel less than intelligent and particularly unattractive, that I started my period (but don't tell anyone!), that I learned about the supposed importance of expensive clothes and large houses, that I came to love the Beatles and other rock and roll music, and that I began to learn to keep the family secrets.

 As usual with a move, when we first arrived in Louisville, we lived in a motel, while my dad searched for a house for us to rent. Once he had decided which part of the city that he wanted to live in, my dad took me and my older sister to enroll us into the local school.

In this large city, it was Waggener Junior and High School. Of course, the school didn't have our transcripts from our Madison schools yet, so the guidance counselor asked my father what kind of students we were, to which he humbly responded that we were just "regular kids." He did not realize, nor did we until later, that he was sentencing us to imprisonment in classes that we didn't fit in.

Thus at age 12, I began an academic journey for me that would make me feel "less than" or "not good enough." What my father had no way of knowing was that in contrast to our Tennessee schools, Waggener had an intense tracking system for its students--from R1, R2, R3, to S1, S2, S3, and up to A1, A2, A3. Nine different rankings from R3 all the way up to A1!

Each class from English to math could be a different track. Even though I had made mostly As and a few Bs throughout my elementary years, because of what my father had said about our being "regular" kids, I was put into all R classes.

R stood for regular, S stood for superior, and A stood for advanced. So there I was in all seventh grade R classes, knowing nothing about tracking. Apparently, the school was so large that when my previous school records did come in, no one was made the wiser about my grades. So I found the work rather easy in my classes and began to try to make some new friends.

One really embarrassing memory from those first days of school at Waggener was that the music teacher had me stand up and sing a solo a capella on my first day in her class. Since I had been told all of my short life that the Drawdys could not sing, I lied and told her that I didn't know any songs. But she kept calling out titles until finally she came up with "Oh where have you been Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" to which I shook my head and stood up and sang the song to the best of my young ability. The look on her face and the faces of the other student confirmed what I had been told.

One of my first friends was a girl named Louisa, whose parents managed/owned a local drive-in movie theater. When I would spend the night with her, we would watch Jerry Lewis movies from the front seat of her parents' old car and get free popcorn and candy. We were also often left alone at her house with her older brother for short periods of time, which I didn't tell my parents. From my friendship with Louisa, I would learn a few things about the forbidden subject and about how to ride on top of an old wooden sawhorse.

A strange mix between tom-boy and otherwise at age 13, if I had been encouraged, I probably could have gotten into some sport, but neither my father nor the society at that time, encouraged girls' sports. 

Still loving small animals (remember the hamster story in my last memoir post ), I had adopted a guinea pig from a fellow student before we left Madison/Old Hickory. After we arrived in Louisville, she got very fat and would cry for food when she would hear the refrigerator door opening.

One day as I was saying good morning to my guinea pig in her cage at the bottom of my closet, I got to watch her give birth to three baby guinea pigs! One that looked just like her--brown and white spotted and twins that were solid white. I then felt really bad about her being so hungry, and my parents swore that the boy who gave her to me must have known that she was pregnant! I only knew that I was glad that I had three new guinea pigs to love, but my parents said that I had to give them away.

An across-the-street neighbor named Brooke became my best friend. She was different from Louisa. At first, we were not in any classes together (she was in all S and A classes), but we just connected. We both liked to play outside in a nearby woods, and we rode bikes together around the neighborhood and to Woodworth's dime store to get 25-cent hot fudge ice cream Sundaes in the afternoons. (My allowance was 50 cents a week, but occasionally, I got to babysat for a few families in my neighborhood for 25 cents an hour!)

A mixture of child and adult, Brooke and I both still liked to play with our dolls--albeit mostly with our Barbie and Ken dolls. And we loved to play cards--canasta--for hours on end in the summer time. I did not tell her about what I had learned from Louisa nor about what was going on at my house.

I think that this is a school picture from either 8th or 9th grade at Waggener. Sometimes I let my hair grow out and flipped it up by spending sleepless nights in large brush rollers. Oh my, what we do for beauty's sake! 

Before seventh grade ended for me, slowly but surely, some of the teachers began to recognize that I needed to be moved up into the S and A classes. So by the time I entered eighth grade, I was in a various of classes from R1 up to A1. For example, I may have been in an A1 English class, in a S1 history class, in an A2 math class, in a S2 science class, in an R1 music class, etc. Crazy but true! So I was beginning to meet different people--almost as if I had transferred to a different school.

It was about this time that I noticed that the other students (in the S and A classes) wore clothes that were different from mine. Instead of clothing from Penny's or Sear's or the Ship 'n Shore brand, they wore Villager and Ladybug dresses and skirts and Bass Weejuns and blouses with Peter Pan collars--what I now know as pre-preppie and Ivy League clothing. I began to yearn with all my soul for these demure blouses, cunningly tucked shirtdresses, A-line skirts, and blazers. I myself, at ages 13 and 14, passionately desired a complete wardrobe of floral cotton.

Suddenly, with a terrible pang that was the real beginning of adolescence, I wanted to be one of the glamorous school crowd. Some desperate instinct whispered to me that the right outfit just might take me a magical step closer. I also knew that those well-dressed people didn't live in our moderate neighborhood of Lansdown Estates, but that they lived in Indian Hills--a place with rolling hills on top of which sat huge mansions.

Madras and madras cumberbunds were also part of the Ivy League clothing style, but certainly not those shoes! The in-crowd at school would be wearing weejuns with this outfit! Back then, we wore hose and girdles to attach the hose to (whether we needed girdles or not)! 

On the day that I started my period, I had no idea what was happening. Neither my mother nor my sister had told me a thing. I felt afraid and ashamed for some reason, but I told my mother that I was bleeding. She gave me a sanitary belt, some kotex, and a book entitled It's Time You Knew. Though I pored through the book, it was pretty technical and not much help. I did not exactly understand what it was talking about--especially the part about "sex." So on I went, stumbling my way through life in my rather innocent and naive way. It's hard to believe in this day and time, but "sex," and anything to do with sex, was taboo in our society and especially in my family. We used to actually spell the word "s-e-x" on the rare occasions when it was mentioned!

On TV my family and I were still watching "Wagon Train" and "Gunsmoke," rooting for the white men in white hats, and the new doctor shows "Dr. Ben Casey" and "Dr. Kildare." I still loved "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver." Then the Beatles made their debut in America! Though my parents hated it, I loved their music and loved to dance to it. "Oh, yea, I'll tell you something/I think you'll understand. When I say that something/I wanna hold your hand! I wanna hold your hand!"

So I saved my money and bought the first Beatles' album. Every chance that I got, I would play that album on my parents' stereo record player, which was in a big wooden cabinet in the living room. Of course, I could only play it as loudly as I wanted to when my parents were not at home. Later, I also liked the Monkees, the Kingston Trio, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, the Mamas and the Papas, Motown, etc., but it was the Beatles, who really began my musical evolution into adolescence.

Check out the back of that car to the right! I don't remember if it was ours or not, but I do remember this big old elm tree in our front yard in Louisville, because I used to climb it! The outfit certainly wasn't Ivy league, but those are definitely Weejuns on my feet. On the back of this picture, my mother had written to my grandmother (her mother) , "Laura with her new outfit. See, she's not so plump any more." When was I ever "plump"? 

Besides the Beatles, another strong memory from that time period in my life was the news of the assassination of our president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It felt as if when our country lost its "innocence," I began to lose mine. I was sitting in eighth grade study hall on Friday, November 22, 1963, when the intercom suddenly broke into our quietude and announced to the teachers to turn on the classroom television sets. President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. What an incredibly tragic, scary, and confusing time in all of our lives!

Meanwhile back on the home front, things were heating up or cooling down, depending on how one looked at it. We did not do things together as a family, and there was no fun nor laughter nor lightness in my family life. My parents were wrapped up in their own lives, of which I didn't feel a part. They were fighting even more, which made me really nervous and afraid. Periods of screaming, followed by periods of tense silence. Always pretending, pretending that everything was all right in my family. My parents had parties with their friends, mostly bridge parties, with lots of drinking and smoking. I remember late at night that my father would pull out this album with "dirty" jokes on it to play for the other couples. It was called "Knockers Up," it was a female middle-aged comedian's voice, and its vulgarness offended  me. In this particular house, my bedroom was next to the living room, and unfortunately, it shared a wall with the stereo record player.

Now here's a really weird thing: I do not remember much about my older sister Lynda during these years. Did she just hide away in her room? She had already proved to be somewhat strange and distant when we lived in Madison. By the time we moved to Louisville, she was in the eleventh grade. I do remember that we both had English essays chosen for the literary magazine the next year; I was in eighth grade English, and she was in senior English. I have a slight memory of my mom taking us to an "outlet" store to buy a few of those Ivy league-type clothes, which mom thought were outrageously priced.

My clearest memory of Lynda is one that I wrote about in an earlier post--When I was in middle school, my eyebrows had begun to grow across the bridge of my nose. One night at the dinner table, my mother asked my sister if she would show me how to pluck them properly. To which Lynda responded that it didn’t matter if I plucked my eyebrows or not, that I “was so ugly that plucking would not help me.”

And then from another post--When Lynda went off to college at the University of Kentucky, Mom, Dad, and I drove her to her dorm on campus. I was 14 years old at the time, just starting high school that same month. We were all so proud of Lynda's going off to college! When I went up to hug her good-bye, she roughly pushed me away. Stunned and deeply hurt, I walked back to the car in a shock of confusion. Though there was usually little to no affection between us, there had been nothing between us that led to such complete rejection. But now I realize, that’s just it, there had been “nothing between us.”

And after that incident, I wrote about this one on a third post about Lynda--One spring afternoon when I came home from my freshman year in high school, no one was home, and a neighbor informed me that my parents had gone to get my sister Lynda from college. No one would tell me what had happened. It was all a secret. Hush, hush. Don’t tell. It took me months/years to piece together that Lynda had tried to commit suicide (had swallowed pills and had to have her stomach pumped) because she had not made it into a certain sorority. Later she admitted that she had taken the pills for attention, knowing that her stomach would be pumped. We also discovered that she had told people at her college that she was adopted and that her real father was a famous psychiatrist! My parents were stunned.

I remember two incidents where my sister accused me of stealing from her--once when I was in middle school, she tattled to mom and dad that I had stolen an ink pen from her. Still later after Lynda got pregnant and got married in college at age 20, I, at 16, still thinking that we could be "sisters" went to visit her for a few days. As I was leaving to catch the bus home, her husband had me open up my suitcase, saying that I was stealing the record albums in my suitcase (that my sister had actually loaned me). I was shocked and embarrassed and hurt. Later, I realized that Lynda had told him that I was a thief.

Even though my sister had left home by this time, her behavior was still affecting all of us adversely and would continue to do so for the next three or more decades.

The not-so-mixed messages that the young and impressionable me were receiving were that I "ugly," "plump," not well-dressed, not part of the in-crowd, couldn't sing, wasn't smart.  "S-e-x" was bad, something to be made dirty jokes about, something that got you shamefully pregnant. Also hush, hush, don't tell anyone about my sister Lynda nor about my father, even if my heart was breaking.  And there was no Granddaddy Clark's love to counter these negative messages. All I knew for sure was that my family was nothing like the "Father Knows Best" family, and that I so wanted them to be just like that fantasy TV family.

That old green-eyed monster

Shakespeare called  it “the green-eyed monster.”

The Bible names it as one of the seven deadly sins. Though many Catholics may mean something else by “deadly sins.” I believe that they are “sins,” that if we don’t overcome, will kill the very essence of who we are, of who we are meant to be. (By the way, the six other “sins” are sloth, anger, avarice, gluttony, pride, and lust.)

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than happiness.

Happiness is the true antidote to envy. Being grateful for exactly where and who you are is my definition of happiness. Knowing that your hard times will make you stronger and even more thankful for the good times might also help.

There are entire books written on the subject of envy. And of course, the internet is filled with advice about overcoming or coping with jealously. One article that I found particularly helpful was one also entitled "The Green-Eyed Monster." Joseph Epstein distinguishes between the words jealousy and envy, but I'm using them synonymously in my post.

Envy implies discontent, resentment, and bitterness. Epstein tells us that "malice . . . cold-blooded but secret hostility, impotent desire, hidden rancor, and spite all cluster around the center of envy." Certainly not feelings that you want to encourage to grow within you. Instead you will want to sow the seeds of contentment, gentleness, generosity, and love into your life.

According to Wikipedia from an article entitled Envy, “like greed and lust, envy is characterized by an insatiable desire . . . Envy can be directly related to the Ten Commandments, specifically, ‘Neither shall you desire... anything that belongs to your neighbor.’ Dante defined this as ‘a desire to deprive other men of theirs.’ In Dante's Purgatory, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. Aquinas described envy as ‘sorrow for another's good.’”

Jealousy seems to say that everyone else has it easier than I do and that they are so obviously happier than I am. But this is a false and dangerous belief. We tend to compare our lives, which is always a mixed bag of good and bad, with what we falsely perceive as the “perfect life” of another.

When we do this, we minimize our own talents, gifts, and graces and maximize the other person’s.  Ironically, we often do the opposite with our problems and struggles: we maximize our own and minimize the other person’s

Others seem more clever, more attractive, more popular, more relaxed, more athletic, more talented, more wealthy, more loved, more powerful, or more whatever than we are and therefore (or so it seems) they lead a charmed life. The other person, or so we surmise, faces no real problems in his/her life. Or if we do know that they face problems, we think, “well, their problems are not as bad as mine.”

But no one (let me repeat that) no one leads that proverbial "charmed life." Everyone’s life is a full measure of graces and blessings, as well as struggles and challenges.

One of my worst cases of jealousy nearly ruined the last decade of my teaching. By that time, I had given up being English Department Chair to another teacher in my department. That same year, we got a new English teacher who was young and witty. The chair took a real liking to her, and from that point on, it seemed that he favored her in every way. I would often say, even to him, that he treated me like some old aunt that he didn’t like very much. If not for my envy of her, I think that she and I could have been friends. Even if he did favor her, so what? I needed to be happy where I was--no longer burdened with the weight of being department chair--and free just to teach my classes.

The main thing about jealousy is that if we are envious of another, that means that we are not being accepting and loving toward ourselves, that we are dissatisfied with ourselves. Loving ourselves is the most important thing for us to do to get rid of envy. If we love ourselves fully, then we will not allow ourselves to live in the despair of jealousy. We will realize that envy is a self-poisoning of the heart and mind and that it is a spirit-killing and joy-killing enemy.

Trapped by our false ways of perceiving other’s lives, we denigrate our own lives and thus devalue ourselves. Since it is always easier to imagine the “fantasy” life of another, we remain stubbornly unsatisfied with our own. The tendency to compare ultimately leads to despair because our own real life can never compare with the perceived (but false) perfection of the other person’s life. And so, we are led into a spiritual dead end.

There is a rather pithy saying for this: Compare and despair.

Jealousy is referred to as “the green-eyed monster” because it is a monster that destroys us and our happiness. The cure for the “sickness” of jealousy is to love yourself enough--to know that you are who and where you are supposed to be--not to allow that green-eyed monster to eat you up, to eat up your happiness.

"Little is good about envy, except shaking it off, which, as any of us who have felt it deeply know, is not so easily done," writes Epstein. Being loving to yourself is the way to shake jealousy off. Loving yourself feels like being ever so tender and gentle with yourself--nonjudgmental toward yourself. It means no negative messages about yourself, absolutely no put-downs toward yourself in your head or in your heart. Only loving messages about yourself to yourself--as if you are talking to someone that you love very much and don't want to offend or hurt in any way.

Loving yourself means being kind, patient, protective, and generous toward yourself. Can you do it? Can you love yourself enough to shake off any minor pricks of envy or, at least, to shake off, what Epstein calls, "its deep, soul-destroying, lacerating stabs"? Loving yourself is easily said, not so easily done. It takes lots of practice.

Self-love is not selfish love. It's something that you truly have to accomplish before you can honestly love another. I think that it is now time for you to begin your practice of self-love day by day and to allow envy to fall by the wayside. If you feel jealousy creeping up again, then you will know that you are not being as loving toward yourself as you need to be. Love yourself deeply until envy fades away again. Practice self-love always.