Reawakening

After over a year in physical isolation, I am beginning to emerge. It is a strange transition, I am never quite sure when to wear my mask. As foreign as it still feels, I am reluctant to let it go too quickly. Different rules apply in different places. I went to meet several members of a board I’m involved with in a new location. On the door it gave clear directions, cutting through the confusion.  Vaccinated people do not need to wear masks. We happily took ours off and it was the first time in over a year that I saw their faces unmasked without a screen between us. Momentarily, I felt rather daring, then it quickly felt normal.

I've begun to meet weekly in person with a close friend as I record her story. It is quite a compelling one. She is a survivor of the Holocaust, 97 years old. We met each week by phone during Covid and I typed as she recounted. Pre-Covid, we used to go out to lunch each week, but now I pick up lunch and we meet at her home to work on our project.

Memorial Day weekend we met up with my brother-in-law to visit the graves of family members. While one other vaccinated person felt safe to be with unmasked, when we entered a restaurant, I felt flummoxed by masking etiquette. We wore our masks while we got our food, took them off to eat and then what? Do you put it back on when you finish eating?

 

I’ve ventured into grocery stores, still masked, first for a few items, then for a big shopping trip. Over the past year we’ve had groceries delivered and I keep getting messages from Target that my cart misses me, as if I am so starved for connection that I am anthropomorphizing my grocery cart. I’m still shopping for two week stretches out of habit and I have a new appreciation for those delivery people who sustained us over the past year. I celebrated my new-found freedom by getting my favorite foods at Trader Joes (which doesn't deliver) and noticed the slight weight gain that followed. There was a discipline around planning meals that I need to manage to maintain. The same goes for a daily workout. I anticipate schedules getting busier away from home when it becomes harder to fit that workout in. 

It is a reawakening and as I worked with the theme of brokenness and wholeness in the Artists' Lab, I found the echo of my experience in my artwork. As the ice of winter was thawing, my husband and I encountered an area where the ice had cracked and water flowed beneath it. It too felt as if it was reawakening. I had taken a picture of the ice fragments when my husband suggested I film it to capture the movement. I ended up combining a photo, a video and the painting above titled Reawakening, into a short piece that you will find at the bottom of this post.

 

I feel as if I needed this break and yes, I realize a pandemic is a bit of overkill quite literally to make that happen. Let me assure you, it would not be my chosen method of epiphany. But I know that I am a person who likes to be in the middle of things and unless the world stops along with me, I keep going, like a hungry person at an all you can eat buffet.

 

Now the world didn’t really stop. It just allowed me to structure my time from home. I attended writing workshops and a three week course on the Holocaust, lectures on art from London and book talks from as far away as Poland. I presented at conferences and gave genealogy talks on-line. Virtually, I was able to gather descendants from one of my ancestral towns from around the world. I consulted with genealogy clients locally as well as nationally and internationally. I met a new friend who had moved here, introduced through an old friend, and set up regular on-line visits and I connected with old friends who live elsewhere now that Zoom seemed to make reconnecting so much easier. My artists’ lab continued to meet on-line and actually allowed for more engagement with breakout rooms enabling more small group discussions. Nonprofit meetings continued on-line and I managed presentations of my genealogy group to both a local and national audience. In some ways my life got busier and broader in scope, while my physical sphere shrank. 

 

So which world do I prefer? I’m not sure. I think I’ve forgotten what it feels like to spend physical time with friends without the careful precautions the pandemic has required. Sometimes it just seems easier to Zoom. I can picture myself sharing a meal or a walk with friends, but I don’t think all of the nonprofit meetings have to be in person. I am hoping they conclude the same.

 

Now I realize this has been a harder time for my extroverted friends. They have a much more fundamental need for that physical connection. It has also been harder on friends who live alone. Still, living with someone isn’t always such a panacea. As much as I describe myself as an introvert, I live with someone who is even more so. We both got much more in touch with our need for space, even while valuing our connection. We realized that my prior busy schedule had given us both some breathing room. Now we needed to learn to co-exist in the same shared space, often by carving out our own physical turf. Fortunately we also have a studio that provided some additional room.  Our proximity leant itself to working out together at home or walking and our mutual fascination with the politics of our times led to a constant stream of CNN in our home.

 

So I don’t know what the ideal world would look like, but I hope to emerge thoughtfully and incorporate what I’ve learned through this pause. I will be maintaining some of the discipline that I drew on for diet and exercise while allowing friendships and outings to gradually re-enter my world. And I’ll be holding onto the expansion of my world that technology afforded while preserving windows of unscheduled time for the many interests that feed my soul.

Or click on Pulsation of Life to see it full screen

My Many Mothers

 My mom has been gone for six years now and Mother's Day now seems like a holiday with no significance to me anymore. I have a folder with all of the Mother’s Day cards I gave my mom over the years that she saved and I retrieved after her death. She especially liked the ones that spoke to the genuine friendship between us. I would have chosen my mother as my mother if I had a choice. Who knows, perhaps in some universe I did. I hadn’t planned to write anything, but then I read Heather Cox Richardson’s column on the many mothers we have in a lifetime and began to reflect on some of mine. 

I have often considered what I learned from my mother’s example. One of the most important take-aways was evident. From our own relationship, I learned how to have rich cross-generational friendships with women. That is something that she and I did amazingly well. When I was in my 30s I began to take her on trips to Europe and our relationship matured into a friendship that lost some of the hierarchy imposed by a parent-child relationship. We became two people who enjoyed each other’s company and shared many interests. I began to have some understanding of her life and who she was.

As I get older, I often wonder about how she viewed aging. I would love to be able to have that conversation with her. I know she was happy with her life through all its stages, but I now have an appreciation of how hard-won some of that happiness can be. She made choices along the way to create her path and I am certain it was not always clear sailing. She had a visceral understanding of my wiring because she shared much of it, but the one thing she never understood was my certainty that raising children was not for me. Despite that, she was able to see me not as a clone of her needs and desires, but as someone unique, but also connected. She was able to give me room to be me, the best gift a parent can give a child. And she cheered me on as I confronted both challenges that we shared, and ones unique to me, as I carved out a life of my own making.

 

Because I chose not to have children, I had the luxury of control over my life and my time. I don’t take that for granted. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I began to understand something about the bond that is created by giving to another person, something most mothers realize much earlier even as they bemoan the loss of control over their life and time. I also learned that with the act of empathy and that very commitment of our precious time, we in turn create a rich connection.

When I met my current husband, his mother was in her mid-80s. She lived to 95 and we developed a special relationship in those intervening years. She was an intelligent woman, a reader and a lover of words. I am convinced much of what I appreciate in my husband came from her. She also had a difficult life without much control over her choices. We began to go over each week and do her grocery shopping, laundry and perhaps most importantly, bring things of interest into her life. I thought of our visits as an opportunity to make our time together meaningful and something to look forward to. 

Kitchen Competition 2002 by Susan Weinberg

We began to play Scrabble on each visit and I realized that she loved words more than strategy. If she read a word that would work well in Scrabble, she hung onto it until the next game. One day she put down a seven letter word and got scads of points. I commemorated it with a painting of us together, my first self-portrait and a portrait of us engaged in something we both loved. I hung it on the wall in my home when she came over for her birthday celebration and waited for her to recognize it. 

When I got into genealogy, I gathered information on those long-gone people who had once been significant in her world. She was intrigued with the trail of documents that captured her as a young girl. I interviewed her as my husband painted her.

I had a rather unique role. My husband was expected to show up. I did by choice and that made it a special commitment that she understood as coming not from expectation, but because I genuinely enjoyed her. Out of that giving grew a mutual love and appreciation of each other that felt familiar to me. I had learned it from my mother.

Another mother who has touched my life is my friend Dora. I met Dora in 2010 when she was in her late 80s. I was doing the website for the ancestral town in Poland that my grandfather had come from. Dora had grown up there and was fifteen years old when the Nazis invaded in 1939.  I began to ask her about the town and her story. I also began to forge an unexpected connection, both recognizing some of myself in her and finding a deep admiration for how she navigated her world. 

 

She is a very accomplished woman in life and intellect. After she survived the Holocaust she carved out a life in the United States, becoming fluent in yet one more language. She got a graduate degree in economics, became an accountant and a Holocaust educator. What I found most admirable was how she adapted to challenges within her life. When her vision deteriorated she shifted to books on tape listening to the Economist each week and studying the Talmud by telephone. 

 

Three months after I met her we began to plan a trip to Poland where I was invited to show my artwork. She joined me and shared photos from before the war and during the time of the ghetto. We did several shows in our own community pairing these materials. Over the past ten years we have gotten together most every week. I take her out to lunch and we go to events or work on projects. I’ve interviewed her and created artwork on her stories. Sometimes I assist her with talks to classes and we’ve used the artwork in some of them as a jumping off point for her experiences. During quarantine, we changed our get togethers to several hours on the phone each week recording her personal story. We celebrated her 97^th birthday on Zoom and now we’ve begun to get together again in person. We talk about books and life, politics and religion. It has become a friendship with a long history and a model for me in how to face life’s challenges while staying actively engaged in the world and living a life of purpose.

 

When you live well into your 90s, many of your friends are no longer around. Dora has mastered the art of establishing long-standing friendships with younger people. Someday if I am fortunate, I will be on the other side of that equation. So on this Mother’s Day, I am grateful for my mother who modeled that special friendship and all the mothers who have followed in my life.