When arriving into this world and growing up, we usually accept the world around us. As people like to say: “It is what it is.” For an example of this: as I went backwards into the past, I realized for the first time that I was raised in a matriarchal system. I never thought of the past like that. I thought: I had a grandmother who had a strong personality, she had three children, all women, and the various female members of this female matriarchy all lived within a few miles of each other and talked on the telephone every day. But when I sat down to write about these things, I could see the past with all its richness. I saw it as something quite remarkable and–the best part of this was–the fact that my soul was filled with love for them. The truth was that for the most part I had taken them all for granted.
They were all funny and all of them loved jokes and silly stories. No woman in this clan ever put me aside and was standoff-ish. One of my mother’s first cousins, Audrey, had my beloved cousin Maxine in the year 1950; we were four or five months apart in age. So having Maxine in my life–I have baby pictures of the two of us still toddlers–put the seal on the matriarchy. I had my personal sidekick and she did too.
My favorite matriarchy story? When I began to menstruate I was 11 years old. On waking up and finding blood on my pajamas–I normally would have been full of joy–I was feeling upset. This was the day that my sister was going to have her tonsils removed and my mother was staying in the hospital overnight. So my father drove me to the Morrowfield as planned; I was going to spend the day with my grandmother. I walked down the long, dark hallway feeling very sad indeed. My mother had thoroughly prepared me for this event so I had not been frightened. But I wanted my mother.
So into my grandmother’s little apartment I went and said: “Gram, I’m having my period.” She said she knew that already. At that time her knowing what was happening made her even more powerful than I had thought. But obviously–my father, probably–called my grandmother on the phone and alerted her. I told my grandmother that I had a terrible pain in my lower back.
“Listen, love,” she said. “Lay down on the floor, on your back. That should help.”
Now here’s the really magical part of this. I did what I was told; I lay on the floor on my back and my head was near my grandmother’s telephone table. She sat down there and called everyone in the female clan and said: “My Leslie fell off the roof today.” I never heard that expression before but I could tell what it meant. I stayed there at my grandmother’s feet and closed my eyes and listened to my grandmother’s voice. The pain in my back slowly drained away.
What better story could illuminate the reality of living like this. It was total mind/body connection. If my beloved grandmother said my back pain would go away if I lay on the floor, then I believed her. Combined with this was the very intense feeling of inclusion and of course I loved it. I loved all of it.
Then of course I had to call Maxine and tell her. We had been talking about growing up for years. The beautiful part was that Maxine was not jealous. She was overjoyed for both of us, traveling the road to womanhood together. So my father came back from work, and I pleaded that he drive me over to Alderson Street so Maxine could see the elastic band that held the pad. My lovely father understood so he complied. When we got there Maxine and I raced upstairs to her bedroom so she could actually see this new symbol of womanhood.
The day ended with my mother staying overnight in the hospital, as planned; the house felt empty with her not there. But one of my aunts, my aunt Esther, came over in her secondhand car, took me to the bathroom, and checked to see if everything was in order.
lgmwriting 