love and relationships

Who Can I Offend Today?


It seems my ranting about mammas who rant got me unfriended on Facebook. Between my pruning and my offensive nature, I will soon be left with just family and that is the realm of the truly uncool.

I think I must have slipped in a whole truth or two about family recently because my sister-in-law unfriended me too. Not the lousy one. The other one.

And in other social networking news, I have greatly annoyed an old high school chum who has grown up to be someone who would have made a great next door neighbor for my parents. Passionately to the right on nearly any topic you’d care to name. My feed must be an eyesore to this friend.

I rated a mention over at Ye Ole Widda Board the other day in the old timers quarters. A friend, thank goodness, who confessed to still peeking at my blog in her five year update. The goddess must have been smiling because no one noticed me and I wasn’t ridiculed or barbecued in absentia – though you can be perfectly present and roasted for the titillation of others while the multitude stands by as silent as collaborators. A recent perusal of the main forum there revealed another posse had run someone out-of-town. And good riddance to non-conforming grief too.

Mostly this week I have been memoir writing. A project that is sure to offend in-laws but possibly my own family too. In earlier drafts/attempts I tried to keep my point of view as non-committal as possible on the subject of those I didn’t care for or when I was recounting events where I was simply left to sink or swim, but in its current incarnation, my memoir is not holding back that much. I am not trying to be mean, but honest observation is sometimes painful.

So four chapters and probably closing to the point of having caught 20,000 words.

Yesterday was the chapter on Will’s final hours. It was ouchie to say the least possible. Another two chapters of widowhood, which won’t sting as much because I was mourning myself more than him rather early on in the process and then on to the rediscovery of joy, love and regrouping. Nicer though not always easy times.

Which brings me to something. While catching up with my bloggy friend as she shared what’s been going on in the last year, I noted that there were several other four and five year updates. So I read them too. It shouldn’t have surprised me but a senior widow or two managed to slip a snarky line in here and there because if there is one thing on the Ye Olde Widda Board that just don’t fly – it’s remarried widowed folk who grieve out loud. Maybe it’s jealousy. There are one or two I might comfortably accuse of that, but I think it is more that they just don’t want to know that there isn’t a magic pill that makes it all go away. They give lip service to the idea that grief is lifelong really, but they don’t really want to believe it. The remarrieds are proof that there is no “all better now”. Who wants that knowledge?

Today is a PD day at Dee’s school, so we are out and about having some of that quality time together I read about on the mommy blogs. Library, shopping for a new skating helmet and lunch with Rob.

TGIF, people!

The Widow of Saint-Pierre


Rob and I haven’t had time for movie watching lately, but he grabbed a couple of dvd’s from the book mobile on Wednesday after returning books. Normally book mobile duty is mine. I take Dee, return whatever, retrieve anything we’ve ordered via the county library’s online catalog and check out the dvd shelf for new or interesting offerings. I think the story has been told, by Rob on his blog or by me here, that he wasn’t allowed to go to the video store by himself anymore after returning one time with spectacularly poor choices. Well, The Widow of Saint-Pierre doesn’t quite merit such a prohibition, but it does beg the question of what was he thinking?

Based, supposedly, on the true tale which took place on the east coast islands new Newfoundland that are still a part of France today, it endeavors to tell the story of Madame La and her husband Jean. The year is 1849 and Jean is a captain of the French forces stationed on the island to keep the peace. A senseless murder of a local by two drunken fishermen has taken place and Jean is charged with warehousing them until a guiotine can be shipped to the island for the execution of the man who wielded the knife, Neel Auguste. His accomplice is killed by a mob as they are being transported to the army compound. The island people regard the remaining murderer as a barbarian for whom redemption is not possible.

It’s never made entirely clear why Jean is stationed at Saint-Pierre. He is clearly a cut and a half above his men and even the men who make up the local ruling class including the Governor and his councilmen. There are hints that his being there is a punishment and that perhaps it has something to do with his wife. Madame La is clearly ahead of her time. She believes that not only can Neel be rehabilitated but that the local population can be re-educated towards him and the idea of executions as a way to maintain law and order.

The movie begins at the end with Madame La in widow weeds, but it’s misleading because in that time the guillotine itself was also know as “the widow” and the island of Saint-Pierre is rife with widowed women due to the hazards the local occupation of fishing poses to the male population.

Madame La is drawn to Neel for reasons that don’t always seem altruistic but she and Jean are very much in love and quite lusty.

“Maybe this is porn,” Rob suggested as the film wore on.

“French period piece, sub-titled porn?” I asked.

I puzzled over it quite a bit the next day. I wasn’t sure what the message was supposed to be. Essentially in trying to save Neel, Madame La sacrifices both him and her husband without realizing until too late what she has done when it becomes clear that her husband has been shielding her from the displeasure of the Governor and his men who appeal to France to remove and court-martial Jean.

Jean loved his wife so much that he could not ask her to be anything other than who she was – even though her actions put them both in danger and cost him his life. Madame La, though she loves her husband, does not really take notice of the depth of Jean’s love for her nor does she return it in kind really. She takes Jean’s devotion and protection for granted.

I can’t say that I liked the film, but I didn’t dislike it. It gave me one of my new favorite lines however.

The rich and powerful of the town gather on Sundays for brunch and entertainment at the Governor’s home every Sunday. Jean and his wife do not regularly attend but on one occasion Madame La overhears the men in the smoking room discussing Neel and she enters to challenge them. Naturally she offends them and Jean comes to her rescue, verbally boxing one man and forcing him to admit he was wrong and apologize to Madame La for all those gathered – men, women and children – to hear. After Jean and his wife leave, the Governor’s wife remarks to the other women – loudly enough for the men to hear as well,

“Le Capitaine doesn’t even have to fuck us to make cuckolds of our husbands.”

Classic.

This Kinda Pissed Me Off


I am not reading blogs as I used to (sorry, but I scan/read through my blog reader because I am crunched right now) which means I don’t comment much either (though I am really trying to pop over and leave a note for those of you who are friends – ‘cuz I do care to know about you and yours and stuff). Sometimes I read things still that work me up enough to actually write a comment that says more than just “hi, I was here and thinking of you”.

Mommy blogs bore me. I don’t read them. I have my own mom moments and mom stories, and I prefer to get my advice from known sources. But I read Jessica because she is smart, irreverent and herself, which isn’t always a given. Bloggers have personas that don’t often match their real life self. You would have to know me for a while to hear the same kind of honesty from me that you read on my blog. Discretion is actually one of my real time virtues.

The subject has come up before on this blog and it irked me then too. It’s the idea that DNA trumps with a sub-theme of “I could never love another as I love my spouse”.

Okay.

So I am adopted and until I had Dee, there was literally no one else in the world with whom I had a blood relationship. And I have to be honest, I didn’t love her at first sight. I was perplexed and a bit unsure because I was told I would love her with the intensity of a million suns from moment one and frankly, I didn’t feel that. She was a stranger who I thought I knew because of all the time she’d spent growing inside me. She was a little person from the start who I had to learn – just like I have had to learn everyone else in my life. As a result, I am not an advocate of the Disney Princess School of Motherhood.

I should have known this going in. I had witnessed plenty of instances of mothers and fathers whose regard for their biological children ranged from disinterest to pure duty with all sorts of cringe-worthy twists and turns in between. Biology ensures almost nothing in terms of attachment. Case in point would be Nephew1 who regularly threatens his mother (my youngest sis) with:

“If you do not come and visit me the next time I am at Grandma’s, I will divorce you when I am 18 and you will never see or hear from me again.”

This is the only thing that will rouse my sister from the reality show disaster of her life to spend an hour or so with her son. The third of four children to whom she has given birth. The other three she gave up for adoption without a second thought. The one she kept so she could go back on state aid because she was tired of couch surfing and living out of paper grocery sacks with her toothless boyfriend -who isn’t the father by the way. He wouldn’t oblige. She seduced the teenage friend of another guy – who also declined to impregnate her. Award winning mother material my sister is not and that’s my point. There are more people in the world like her that disprove the “I would lay down my life for my (bio) child” than not.

I would have taken umbrage even before I remarried (yeah, I’ll get to that) and became a step-parent. If there is any disparity in my feelings for my older girls and Dee, it’s because we are still getting to know each other. It’s harder when they are older and living on their own. We just don’t get opportunities to interact like Rob and Dee do, but I wouldn’t be able to choose among them in one of those hypothetical “you have to toss one from the boat scenarios” which are stupid anyway.

Blending fails when adults in the scenario make decisions that will ensure it does. Adults set the tone, make the rules and provide the examples, and if you go into a second marriage with children with whom your past track record as a real adult is in question, you are going to have your work cut out for you.

My Uncle Donnie married a widow who was 8 years older than he was and who had seven children – some of them already grown and married when they wed back in 1968. They all call him “Pops”. He is their children’s grandfather. They aren’t as blended into my mother’s family as they could have been because at the time, my mom’s siblings weren’t as close as they could have been – are now. This was the result of adult decisions. My grandmother didn’t like Auntie Bern very much. Different personalities. But as far as Auntie Bern’s family went Uncle Donnie was welcomed and became “husband” and “dad”. Auntie Bern passed away quite a while ago and nothing has changed.

Perhaps it’s what you are taught growing up? Dad’s family is the direct result of a second marriage after widowhood. His father’s older step-brothers had issues with their father, but they never let it keep them from integrating with their new siblings (who were the same ages as their own children really). Sometimes a certain amount of “suck it up, buttercup” is necessary to make blending work and this, I think, is what separates the true adults from the wanna-be’s and posers.

So, the nonsense about not being able to love another as much as your spouse? Crap. People fall in love after having long, short and in-between marriages to people they truly loved all the time. Often what I hear from them is that they are even happier in the second relationship. Because they didn’t love the first spouse or it wasn’t a “soul mates” thing? No, it’s because they know how to create a loving relationship. They make the extra effort because they have lost someone and know the searing pain of regrets and what-if’s and opportunities lost.

Love is something you choose to do whether there are biological ties or not. It is not magic or genetically hardwired. Believing in love as some kind of compulsion based on forces beyond our control is what allows us to not care about people who are homeless or without health care or are being imprisoned by fanatical religious extremists in parts of the world that don’t interest us because we don’t have family or first spouses there. It’s the kind of thinking that allows us to dehumanize others and dismiss them and their welfare and that kind of reasoning has never led humanity to any happy place that I know of.

I choose to believe that I am capable of  more than that.