Gender

September 16, 2013

The Eight-eyed Steam Girl is a Woman Now: My life as Myth

I was born an Eight-eyed Steam Girl. The fire of natural gas and oil shot through me from below; ancient waters poured down from above. The mixing was wild and chaotic. Fluid emotions and flaming passion combined to propel me down the tracks, rocking back and forth with my own rhythm. I could see where I was going even though I had no map in hand. A different sort of sight was required for my trip through life. And I had lots of sight—eight eyes. Not just the two typical face eyes but eyes of my heart, hands, feet and one right in the middle of my forehead.

Other folks thought all that sight and steam was too much in one little girl. My “extra” eyeballs were lassoed and tucked out of sight. The “unsightly” steam was controlled by a careful wrapping of my entire body with a beautiful skein of yarn, stopping up all of the “unsightly” eruptions of steam.

Luckily, I was a smart girl. I learned how to navigate with two eyes and my rational, logical mind, all propelled by the limited amount of steam that escaped around my full body wrapping.

Until now.

It’s time for a change. My rhythm has long been strong and powerful, but limping. Not connected to the heart of myself. Trying hard to adapt to the demanding gallop of the culture around me. I wanted to find the real me once again.

I released my eyeballs from their hiding spot and laid the beautiful yarn unwrapped from around my body in a knitting basket. Part of me danced with delight. But my two, overused eyeballs and my brain, so long in charge, screamed and shouted in fear. “Don’t go. You are throwing away the best ways to navigate through life. You’ll never be able to keep everything straight, get anything done, be efficient again.”

Nonsense. But sometimes, too many sometimes, I still believe this fearful voice. Chaos is harder to navigate than tried and true to-do lists. What would happen in my life, I wondered, if too many things fell through the cracks?

For over fifty years I’d kept my inner lid tightly closed so I could adjust to the world. It was time now to quit pretending I was someone else.

In my wrapped up days, I’d over accommodated, tried to be the woman others needed me to be, nice and supportive-like. It was EXHAUSTING. I’d been trying to fuel my life with limited sight and truncated energy.

Now is the time. I was born an Eight-eyed Steam Girl, and now I’m older. Coming home to myself. Learning new songs and dances.

Wild, wise and a little crazy, I’ll find my own way to dance with steam, see every which way and sing with all parts of myself.

In the middle of writing Big Topics at Midnight, I played with telling my life story as a myth. Instantly, I had the image of an Eight-eyed Steam Girl in her Little Red Boat. I told her story from birth until high school. As I struggled to find a way to step into a more intuitive, Spirit-guided way of shepherding my book for this second year, I returned to the myth to see how my story would look right now, as I moved toward my 60^th birthday.

For a more extensive peek into my personal myth, see Big Topics at Midnight, pages 306-308.

August 29, 2013

“What is my emotional inheritance?”

That question jumped off the page in Colette Winlock’s book Undoing Crazy.* Earlier in the novel, when “Mama” spoke about her childhood in Love, Texas in the 1930s, I was thrown back into my memories growing up in West Texas in the 1950s and 1960s.

What was the emotional inheritance passed down to me from generations of my white-skinned family living in North Carolina, Tennessee then Texas?

I can still hear Mom’s voice telling me that emotions aren’t trustworthy. “Don’t let emotions detract you from the work to be done.” “Emotions have no place in the Church.” “Responsibility is more important than how you feel.”

I was taught to think critically. To be curious. To study. And yet, we were discouraged from thinking, or noticing, the Big Topics like racism, sexism or classism.

My grandfather O.R. Tipps, an attorney, was direct in a letter he wrote to his daughter, my mother, in 1945—“Social reformers all try to make people equal. They can’t do it, and by trying, they impede the best ones and don’t help the weak ones. However, they usually get worked up into a lather in trying to get some law, or some tradition, or some precedent changed to make each and every person exactly equal.”

What laws, traditions or precedents did he mean? Redlining? Segregation? Black codes? Jim Crow? Lynching?

How much was my family’s emotional inheritance stunted in the clash between our valuing of intellectual analysis of every topic except the big public ones?

Part of us had to go to sleep to live in the face of such a stark contradiction. We were trained not to notice anything that didn’t fit into the official, white-skinned, USA self-image of rock-solid values of democracy and justice for all.

My family was politically moderate, Christian and thoughtful. I never heard my parents make a racist statement or treat individuals disrespectfully based on the color of their skin.

Yet, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called my family to task: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice…Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

My family’s silence spoke volumes, and perpetuated injustice.

The cost of our sleep was profound.

Believing so deeply in law-and-order yet averting our eyes to injustice (or feeling bad, but doing nothing) stunted our emotional inheritance. It is impossible to be profoundly asleep in one area of our lives and be vibrantly alive in the rest of life.

For me personally, I still struggle to notice, then pay attention, to my own emotions. But the cost to my nation is far more serious. How else can we explain our deep sleep to the reality of inequity, injustice and environmental destruction all around us?

I want to leave a different emotional legacy to generations yet to come.

* Colette Winlock. Undoing Crazy (Oakland: Oaktown Press, 2013), 293.

August 27, 2013

Transgender

For most of my life “transgender” wasn’t part of my vocabulary. I never knew there were any options other than male and female, congruency in body and spirit.

This week Chelsea Manning brought transgender to the front-page news. It is clear from the reactions that many others also assumed that gender identity was cut and dry—the genitalia you were born with determined whether you were male or female.

It’s not that simple. Being asleep to this reality, however, doesn’t make the reality “strange” or “wrong.”

Transgender is a relatively new term (though not a new experience). Trans Basics gives three definitions: “someone who doesn’t fit within society’s standards of how a woman or a man is supposed to look or act,” someone who was assigned a gender at birth “but later realizes that label doesn’t accurately reflect who they feel they are inside,” or someone who feels like “they’re in between those two options; both male and female; or outside the two-gender system, entirely, neither male nor female, outside of the strict division of male and female.”

Even believing that all babies are physically born either male or female is untrue; it is estimated that 1 in 2000 babies have ambiguous genitalia. The societal stigma of parents not being able to answer the critical question, “Is it a boy or a girl?” is so powerful that typically the doctor will decide the baby’s gender and perform “corrective” surgery. As the child (most often “reassigned” a female) grows up, she/he may, or may not, agree with the doctor’s choice.

Dr. Milton Diamond, professor of neurology and intersex, said, “Nature loves variety. Unfortunately, society hates it.”

Yet even if genitalia are not ambiguous, they don’t always align with an individual’s inner experience of being male, female or gender non-conforming. Those who experience a disconnect between their physical gender and their inner-knowing gender have a challenging choice before them.

Live a lie about an important aspect of life.

Or live what is true, and face opposition, stigma and daily challenges. Simple things become complicated. Public bathrooms. Forms with binary gender boxes. Personal pronouns. Name change. Greater possibility of ridicule and violence.

Chelsea Manning. She.

As a nation, we can react from our (often) non-existent personal experience and societal-affirmed assumptions about being trans and speak from ignorance, fear or prejudice. Or we can stop. Listen. Seek out information. Read about the experience of people who know what it is like to live outside our culture’s rigid belief that people are born either male or female. Allow the boundaries of “normal” to expand to include all of nature’s variety.

I believe that a society thrives when we can each bring forth the truth about ourselves. Chelsea Manning just spoke clearly, publicly. It won’t make her life any easier (despite what too many newspapers speculate), yet it will make her future more honest.

June 29, 2013

Getting Naked: Memoir #1

I’m not fond of taking my clothes off in public. St. Francis did it when he renounced his father’s lifestyle and business and ran off into the wilderness. But I’m no saint.

And yet I felt led to write one of the most revealing of books—a memoir. Not just one memoir, like a normal person should write. But multiple, parallel memoirs: personal, family/ancestral, “my people” (white skin, wealthy, Christian, woman, American, and Texan) and even the moon has her say. Most of these push the definition of memoir, yet all come from my experience and find their “voice” through me. All of these “memoirs” speak with an eye to supporting change from the personal to the global levels.

It was a writing task, to be sure. I’ve always written, but writing a book required lots of learning and relearning the craft of words as well as putting myself at the mercy of great editors. Nevertheless, learning how to write a book was the easy part.

Diving back into the nooks and crannies of my life and the world around me was the demanding part. I looked at things I thought were true about myself and the world around me. I was humbled to see how often I was POSITIVE, yet wrong.

Standing in the light, wide awake and seeing things for the first time, was demanding. Sometimes I hid under my mother’s blue afghan. Often I doubted I was up to the task of learning and change. In the end, however, I surrendered, naked as a baby.

That process continues every day.

In her exploration of the fairy tale “Vasalisa the Wise” from Women who Run with the Wolves (page 108), Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about these demands of living an conscious life:

“… watching and comprehending of the negative forces and imbalances both inward and outward. Secondly, it causes striving in the gathering up of will in order to do something about what one sees, be it for good, or balance, or to allow something to die.

“… we clearly see all sides of ourselves and others, both the disfigured and the divine and all conditions in between.

“Yet, with this light the miracles of deep beauty in the world and in humans come to consciousness. With this penetrating light one can see past the bad action to the good heart, one can espy the sweet spirit crushed beneath hatred, one can understand much instead of being perplexed only.”

In the end, getting naked through a memoir was the only structure I found powerful enough to dive deeply into race, class and gender in order to support the great turning that is so needed in our world today.

I’d love to hear your bare stories too. Too much is at stake for us to continue to hide beneath layers and layers of silence.

First in a series of five blogs about memoir.

June 16, 2013

Thank you Dad

I always wanted to please my Dad. But he wasn’t much of a little kid person, and I was full of life and questions and energy. I also wanted to please. It wouldn’t have taken much from Dad to shut me down–a short shout and I would quickly learn what behaviors to avoid around him. I did my “be careful what I say and do around Dad so he won’t get upset with me” dance until I was in my mid 20.

Mom and Dad had come up to see Howard and I just after I’d sent out a family letter saying that we were considering joining the Peace Corps or returning to graduate school. Mom went to battle trying to convince us that the Peace Corp would be a stupid thing to do. Dad listened most of the evening, then said the words that sparked our new relationship. Nine years later, after Mom died, Dad’s and my relationship deepened even more.

Thank you Dad. In your eighty years of living and in your three weeks of dying, you gave me profound gifts.

Ed Mathys, age 57, 1979*

On that night in Boise as you shared your dreams and ideas, I glimpsed a pattern. Men in our family have loved strong women, and then tried to tame them again and again.

In Boise, I realized I’m done trying to be in charge.

Sue can march into wars if she’d like. Not me.

Why did I think life was a contest? That I’d shine brighter if you faded and became quiet like me? If I step back in time I see you were a normal three-year-old, growing up. Not a threat, just full of life.

If I could do it again … Actually, I did. Twenty-two years after I squelched you, I supported your desire to do something wild.

It’s never too late. When you heard my heart, the healing began.

Excerpted from Big Topics at Midnight, page 73, 74.

May 11, 2013

A Legacy of Art

Mothers Day this year falls on the day my mother, Sue Mathys, gave birth to me fifty-nine years ago. Though Mom died when she was a year older than I am now, her presence surrounds me.

Her wooden and fiber ostriches reside in the living room. Huge cloth books lean against boxes of Big Topics at Midnight. “Houston is Green” in fabric and embroidery hangs above my couch, reminding me that Portland is also green. Her genealogy work enabled me to dive deeply into my ancestors in my writing.

I am my mother’s daughter.

I grew up not only with art hanging on the walls but also silk-screened Christmas cards drying on the dining room floor, sketches on bits of paper around the house and half-finished stitcheries folded up beside Mom’s living room chair. Now my collages, line drawings and the art of friends surround me in my writing studio. Friends like Khara Scott-Bey, whose art fills my book, and friends like Brenda Wills.

Last week in Newport, Oregon as I read an excerpt from the chapter “Forgiveness by Grace,”* Brenda listened and sketched. Her painting included the ocean at my back, the cathedral of the pines from my reading and me in the room.

How fitting that the artist was Brenda. She is an old friend from my early twenties, and she is one of the few people in my life today who knew my mother. Both of our mothers were artists.

Brenda and I honor our mothers and grandmothers and their art, in whatever form it flowed, on this day honoring all mothers.

*Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself page 274

April 30, 2013

A Wild Ride

I looked at the photograph, put my pen to paper and wrote without stopping for ten minutes. The photograph is long gone, but the words remained tucked in an old journal:

What a contrast! A woman, dressed to the hilt in a long dress and pantaloons, hair done up in the latest fashion, shoes pointed for fashion over comfort, with her groomed little doggie in tow, sitting delicately on a wild horse.

The horse is bucking for all she’s worth trying to tear down some of the women’s pretenses. To make her hair-do fall, shoes drop off, lace tear.

But the amazing thing is that the woman is not only allowing it, she’s enjoying it!

What freedom—to take the best from both worlds. To be willing to let loose and risk letting go of the image you’ve work so hard to develop.

That freedom is beyond me now.

The dog seems concerned that his mistress is off on a wild escapade. Does he fear she’s lost her mind? Does he fear that she will desert him? There often seem to be people nipping at our heels when we want to break loose.

Am I like the little dog? Am I pulling others back from experiencing all sides of life?

Or am I like the horse, playfully bucking the system? Maybe sometimes the bucking is not so playful…

Or like the woman willing to play dress-up but also eager to let loose, even if that’s only on the inside of me now?

The ride of their lives.

What is the ride of my life?¹

Over the years, timed writings have opened amazing doors of creativity for me. Things have emerged that I’d never considered before or from perspectives that shed new light on some aspect of my life. Sometimes I write from a written prompt, such as “When the horse started bucking.” Sometimes from a photograph. When I’ve been stuck with my writing or just want to play, putting pen to paper and writing for 3 or 10 minutes without stopping has been one of the most fascinating tools I’ve used to reach intuitive knowing that is hidden somewhere deep within.

Pick up your pen and give it a whirl.

¹ From my book Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself page 105-106.

Illustration by Khara Scott-Bey from Big Topics at Midnight

April 7, 2013

I am Not That Girl Anymore, Except that I Am

She loves me, she loves me not. Or, in this case, I love me, I love me not and I love you, I love you not.

Pulling petals off a flower in an attempt to answer such big questions may have been fine for me as a child, but once I became an adult I needed something more nuanced. I wanted to learn the fine art of seeing clearly with double vision—peering inside my own skin while simultaneously stepping outside of my experience and looking around.

Compassion was needed. Penetrating vision was required. Looking back. Looking inside. Looking around.

I couldn’t avoid the past, my culture’s or mine, no matter how far I tried to run form it. When I stopped, I discovered that it was not only possible to own where I’d been personally and where we’d been as culture and then go somewhere new—it was also essential.

This exploration of seeing near and seeing far away at the same time is the subject of my second YouTube posted on my website. What has been your experience with “double vision”?

March 26, 2013

I Couldn’t Do It

I couldn’t follow their advice.

Yet the question kept coming, “Who is the target audience for your book and for your book events and workshops?” I was told it would be primarily middle-aged women like me. Probably white like me too.

Something inside me yelled, “NO.” That narrowness of audience would perpetuate the very problem I was working so hard to address.

If story is to have the power to change the world, it needs to be shared across the lines that have divided us—gender, skin color, class, religion and age, to name a few. How else are we going to know about a diversity of experiences in the reality of our world today if we don’t share our story, and listen to others’ stories, as broadly as possible?

It might be true that women would be more comfortable reading my book or engaging in conversations about it. Rather than an intellectual and at-a-distance analysis, I dove into creativity, play, other voices and deeply personal sharing. I had no interest in throwing out intellect and logic—that is found in my work also—but I was passionate about the need for us all to use a wide variety of tools and ways of knowing. Our off-balance world was built on the foundation of white patriarchy, and it needs diversity if we are to survive, much less thrive.

My intended audience for Big Topics at Midnight is human beings on the planet today. Likewise, I want to read and listen and dance with a wide diversity of other people’s stories. We each hold a piece of the truth that is needed for the great turning.

Today I came back to what I always knew—this book was written for people. My lack of a narrow target audience may not help me to sell Big Topics at Midnight, but it is true to my heart and mind, and that is the only rulebook I want to follow.

March 18, 2013

Dancing Grandmother

Years before I was born into the Mathys family, my grandmother Ann Cahoon Mathys danced and taught dancing. She got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physical education. During her brief tenure at Kansas State University she convinced the Kansas State Legislature to allow women in physical education classes to wear bloomers. She fought for the right for women to vote. She also gave birth to my father, Ed Mathys.

Tucked into a memory box was her Dance Record Book, filled with page after page of dance instructions. On my website, I included a copy of a few pages from this book and a modern rendition of one of the dances she outlined — Little Man in a Fix. Step back in time and visit a small slice of her dance world here.

She is teaching me to dance now, across the generations.