Women's Words

Published in slightly edited form October 3, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     In discussions about last week’s Kavanaugh hearing, I kept listening for a truth I picked up during the proceedings.  I haven’t seen this truth described yet in print, so here goes.

           

     I think women’s words are harder to hear than men’s words in our culture.  In general, women’s words are easier to hear by women than by men, though both genders will usually give more weight to men’s words than women’s words.  Most of the books on my shelves were written by men, and I’ll quote a man before a woman simply for the greater weight of their authority.  (I don’t type that proudly.)

           

     The history of this tendency is long, stretching back at least to Biblical times.  It’s a direct result of patriarchy, of power held by the male gender over the female, which is directly related to who holds power over the land.  One of those books on my shelves is by a woman anthropologist who studied a matrilineal culture (i.e., one in which the women held and worked the land, while the men hunted, fished and joked around.)  Let me tell you, things were very different there.  Things were so different, in fact, that this woman anthropologist had a very difficult time re-entering our culture.  One of the things that was hardest was that people, especially her male colleagues and her husband, had a hard time hearing her words.

           

     When Dr. Ford began to speak, after having to sit through a 10 minute rant by Sen. Grassley about how we shouldn’t even have to be doing this (damned Democrats!) which was slightly moderated by Sen. Feinstein’s 5 minute speech saying yes, we should, I felt sudden fear.  “She’s not a fighter,” I said out loud, hearing the girlish pitch of her voice, seeing her hair fall over her face.  But the clarity of her words, both when read from prepared testimony and those that followed responding to questions – that clarity was her power.

           

     Dr. Ford said many things that morning that made total sense to me, but the words that struck home were “the laughter.”  She’d been asked what things about that night were the most unforgettable, and after listing the environmental elements – the sparsely furnished house, the narrow stairway, the room, the locked door, she said it was the laughter that she’ll never forget.  “They were having fun at my expense,” she explained.  I’d like to offer that the real violation is that they didn’t even see her at all, except as a prop for their emerging masculinity.  It wasn’t Christine on that bed:  it was nobody.  Just a girl.

           

     There’s a form of masculinity that enlarges by mocking the feminine.  I’ve heard it myself in snorts from my father when I felt unable to complete an assigned outside task or when making an appeal for something I loved.  I’ve heard it from professors when I advocated for the nurturing values of community.  I’ve heard it from lovers regarding home decorations, a recommended book to read or film to watch, a place to visit – and most importantly, about my ideas.  It’s what women mean by the word “discounted.”  It’s enough sometimes to make me vicious.

           

     But watching Dr. Ford put her words out there anyway, knowing they would be discounted for multiple reasons, gave me strength.  It’s just an old, prehistoric instinct standing in our way.  It’s not the words themselves.  Keep speaking, and clearly.

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Trudy Wischemann is a womanist writer living cautiously in Lindsay.  You can send her your words, brave or not, c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Note:  The day this piece was published, as the Kavanaugh hearings continued to roil, this poem appeared and asked to be written down.  I offer it here, just in case I'm not alone in my dismay.


Omnicultural Event


There is Mexican music swaying and pulsing
in the front yard across the street.  I lock
my mind against it, trying to think
American thoughts, circumventing
roadblocks placed in my way
by men of any culture:  romancing
Chicanos, patronizing pastors,
credentialed academics with "emeritus"
after their names.  "A-meritus"
is the stigma I'm trying to avoid
along with "housewife" and "layperson."
Claiming my undocumented female turf
is as terrifying as Christine's testimony,
Amy's questioning, Diane's standing
our ground, and as necessary
as those women crying and screeching
at Jeff Flake in the elevator.  Which voice
to use becomes the only question:


Barbara Jordan's, deep and deliberate,
     taking no bribes;
Chelsea Clinton's, clear and courageous,
     unfettered by her parents' past;
Dolores's, shouting Huelga and criticism
     at this Valley's big growers despite
     her impoverished background and small size  -


or my own:  workingclass, non-union,
non-denominational; unchurched; transfer student,
late-bloomer, childless, single;
Berkeley grad in a region where hatred
of intellectuals is exceeded only by its fear;
poet in a place whose beauty is daily
degraded by ignorance.


"Sing," says the still-small whisper
from my great Interior.  "It's
your only hope."


TMW 10-3-18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gingerbread Woman

Published in the "HomePages" column Jan. 5, 2011 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette in slightly edited form


      She’s been hanging in my kitchen window for just a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to take her down.  But I know the time will come, so I soak her up every time I stand at the sink to wash dishes or pare potatoes.  She’s a gingerbread woman, a blown-glass Christmas ornament I found at a 99 cent store last year and brought home to hang in the center of a spare, spruce and holy berry fake wreath I bought there the year before.  And she means something, though I’ve been taking my time discovering what.

           

     She’s iridescent gold with pink crabapple cheeks and an infectious smile, a red ribbon bow at her white collar on the gold dress edged in sugary white, with a green apron tied around her wide middle and a pair of cranberry red boots that might have come from the army but for their scrumptious color.  Between her chubby hands is a string of gingerbread men cookies, an offering that appears to have pleased her as much in the making of them as they hopefully will please the recipients.  Her hair is as white as mine and looks like it’s still up in rollers.  I love this woman.

           

     I think she’s my alter ego, the woman I might have liked to have been if things had been different.  I think in some ways she’s a keeper of the hope, if not the promise, that things might yet still be that way.  She’s the Christmas maker, and I think she stands for the bravery of women everywhere who dedicate themselves to the arts of Home making at this time of year.

           

     I am slow to arrive at the task of Christmas making, and even slower to finish it, reluctant to let go once I have my hands on that plow.  But the Twelve Days of Christmas start on Christmas Day, not end:  they end on January 5^th, the day this issue will hit the stands, something I learned from my dear friend Wendy in Oregon.  In that lovely song, people are still giving gifts through the January New Year doldrums, so I feel quite justified in leaving my red and green decorations in place for yet another week or so.

           

     “It’s not going to be a good New Year,” my beautiful friend Nancy told me in the parking lot of R-N Market as I strode toward her to clock in New Year’s Day.  “Why?” I asked, stopping to listen.  “That woman who was killed yesterday morning, Friday, she was my daughter’s mother-in-law,” she answered, trying not to cry.  “She was always so full of life. . . .”  She told me what she knew about the circumstances of the accident, then we hugged and she left with her trunk full of groceries.

           

     Later, manning register #1 as the afternoon turned to evening on that first day of 2011, I got another glimpse of the impact of this tragedy.  One of the woman’s sons came in with friends and identified himself that way to me, even though I am a total stranger to him.  “She used to come in here all the time,” he mentioned, and I wondered how I would ever be able to identify her in my mind.  He left with two friends and three 30-can packs of Bud, and I called after him to drink carefully.  “I won’t be touching this,” he said softly.

           

     “What was her name?” the other checkers asked, and all I could remember was that it was Hispanic and her last name started with an “h”.  At the market, sometimes we know people by face and personality a long time before we learn their names unless they normally pay by check.  Those who pay cash often remain nameless even if the connection between us borders on intimate.

           

     Inglatina Huerta is the name of the woman who was killed early last Friday on her way to work at 6 a.m. in the dark.  Nancy said she’d gotten the frost off her windshield on the outside, but that the car was fogging up on the inside or something that made it hard to see.  Nancy said she was killed instantly when the car or truck plowed into her head-on, driven by one of Vahn Blue’s sons, Layton.  Despite the fact that the greatest degree of pain is felt through the families of the victim in these situations, I know that the Blue family must also be suffering.  I extend my sympathy in both directions, knowing neither family well enough to say it in person.

           

     After work, I went home and started cleaning up the kitchen, trying to make some peace in the middle of the chaos in my heart and mind.  I found myself staring at the gingerbread woman, still smiling, still offering her cookies and hope.  Still trying to make Christmas last even though the ball has dropped in Times Square and bare, dying fir trees are already lying on their sides in the alleys around town.  What is the hope that drives us, particularly us women, to add the work of making Christmas to our already full lives?  What hope is it that we anticipate breathlessly on Christmas Eve, anticipating that the next morning we will find ourselves transformed?

           

     “It’s just love,” she said, echoing something a man once told me about why he got up at 5 every morning to squeeze fresh orange juice for his two boys.  Just love.  And I imagine it was just love that got Inglatina Huerta up in the wee hours to drive to work on New Year’s Eve day, as she probably has been doing much of her life.  And it is just love that is causing the pain in those families and friends who now have to learn to live without her.

           

     “Grief is the price we pay for love,” Diana Lampen, a Quaker, wrote in 1996, and every time I remember that tremendous paradox, I am comforted.  It is the price we pay for being loved as well as the cost of loving others, because at some point in time all of our lights will go out and the loving we’ve offered and received will pass into memory, become passive rather than active vocabulary.

           

     And some of it may be passed on in strange, invisible ways.  In recipes for cookies and cranberry sauce, tamales and posole.  In wooden toys crafted in Dad’s shop, in doll’s dresses sown late at night on Mom’s Singer.  In saved letters and notes from boxes that arrived in the mail saying “Nothing special – just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you.”

           

     Just love.  That’s what the gingerbread woman is all about.  I’m glad she told me.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial gingerbread woman who is grateful to be told people’s stories.  You can send her your thoughts on grief and/or gingerbread c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

In the Kitchen

Published in slightly edited form Nov. 22, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “A woman’s place is in the home,” was an old saying trying to die as I was growing up.  Where we lived, few women worked outside the home, for someone other than husband and family.  Few women brought in a paycheck.  Instead, they served on school and church committees or watched each other’s kids during the day.  But come the end of the afternoon, where most women could be found was in the kitchen.

           

     Serving neither husband nor family, I still find myself most at home in the kitchen.  It’s a kind of command post, the central hub where the food half of home is directed.  The rest of the house serves as “shelter,” but unless the kitchen is functioning well, I might as well be sheltered elsewhere.  The whole sense of home dissolves when the kitchen is a wreck.

           

     At Thanksgiving, when we focus on what comes out of the kitchen and winds up on the dining table, I find myself most distressed.  I’m not a pro in the kitchen, or much of an eater, either.  I prefer my food plain, not glamorized.  I prefer to remember its source at Thanksgiving:  the land and God.

           

     That being said, a woman’s place is still central to most of our Thanksgiving celebrations, whether that be deciding whose table will bear the kitchen’s products, who will be invited to share our kitchens’ bounty, where the money will come from to buy the groceries, and when the whole production will start.  After the feast, when the men and kids retire to the television set to nap off the heavy work of eating, the real hangover of Thanksgiving sets in:  cleaning up the kitchen, putting away the food, distributing leftovers on take-out plates for the visitors, cutting the pies for round two.

           

     In truth, my actual memories of those kind of Thanksgivings are good.  My mother shined, even when the pie crust didn’t turn out perfectly or the turkey browned too soon.  With family around her and other women sometimes joining her in the kitchen, her role as the family’s center was clear, and her ability to perform it well was evident.   I think Thanksgiving seems painful to me simply because I have chosen a different role.

           

     For those of you women who now perform a double role, bringing home some or all of the bacon and then having to cook it, I offer my profound admiration.  It’s what needs to be done, and you do it.  The world is still home as long as our kitchens are functioning.  For those of you who have been joined by men in the kitchen, I am thankful:  equality of the sexes actually begins in that small room, not the one with the bed in it.

           

     For those of you – of us – who still suffer inequality of the sexes in the workplace, I offer my sympathy.  The current flurry of news about politicians and other celebrities addicted to that inequality is only a reflection of everyday reality for many of us.  I think women who still punch the time clock, regardless, deserve our admiration.  But remember whoever is in your kitchen this holiday season, and give her (and/or him) thanks.

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Trudy Wischemann is a picky eater who writes.  You can send her your holiday food encouragements c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.