Photograph Courtesy of PD Photo.org.

I am leading a quiet life

on 83 A Queen’s Street everyday

I blow my kids’ noses and polish floors

and copper pots

and cook potatoes and sausage . . .

Autobiography (reply to Ferlinghetti)(1963) by Sonjia Äkesson. Poem included in A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now edited by Aliki Barnstone & Willis Barnstone

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I have been fortunate in life to have met many heroic people: men, women, and children.  The focus here is on women though.  Women just like you and me. Women we brush shoulders with on the subway and pass on the street. Women to whom we are related. Women with whom we work, play, go to school, engage in civil discourse, attend church, synagogue, mosque or temple. Women we see in grocery stores, on food lines, and in board rooms. Ordinary women, not societal or celebrity icons, though they may also be heroines, generally in those parts of their lives that have nothing to do with their profession, priviledge, or public image. The women I’m thinking of are those women who quietly handle their responsibilities, often with great love, despite daunting odds, and for little or no material reward and often no recognition.

The women I’m thinking of are like my grandmother and my mom.  My grandmother was married when she was twelve years old. (My grandfather was seventeen.  It was a different time and different place.) She came to this country with her husband early in the last century. She had to leave two children and her birth family behind in Lebanon to honor the dreams of her often violent husband. She bore eighteen children, ten of whom survived until World War II took one of her six sons who served in the U.S. military. She had four daughters. Despite all the children, she took on the additional task of raising my beautiful sister. At one point in her life, my grandfather became so violent that she ran to the nuns at a local convent for protection and stayed there until she could get a divorce.  She never went to church again, though she said her rosary and hung pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Last Supper in her home. She never went to church again because in her own mind she’d committed a mortal sin in getting a divorce and was unworthy.  My grandfather (whom I never did meet) abandoned the family, but she continued to handle her family and household responsibilities.  She died at sixty-three with one dress to her name, several serviceable cotton house-dresses, nine compassionate and upstanding children, and nine healthy grandchildren.

As for my mom, she battled cancer for most of her adult life.  She was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was thirty-six, an unwed mother and pregnant with me. Subsequently over the years she had thyroid cancer, uterine cancer, another breast cancer, and finally – the killer – colon cancer.  She lived her life under seige: from cancer, poverty, discrimination, and workplace inequities. Throughout it all, the only time she took off from work was for surgeries. She worked through radiation treatments and chemo therapy until she retired at sixty-five. She lived to be seventy-six. In her day, there were no support groups, no helpful books and websites with information on coping and healing, no wealth of blogs sharing experience, insights, and resources. In her day, doctors tended to be rigidly dogmatic. There was little in the way of discussion, debate, and collaborative decision making. Life was tough, but Mom was tougher.

When I think of all the unsung heroines I’ve known, I also think of the many women on welfare whom I taught in classes: Greater Avenues for Independent Living, Job Search, and Career Development. I remember one young woman who was excited beyond belief to be in our Career Development Class, a four-week, three-unit class my agency delivered in concert with a local community college.  She was there early every day with her scrubbed and shining face and enough enthusiasm to carry the whole class herself.  Then suddenly, she disappeared.  I couldn’t reach her by phone.  It was three days before graduation.  It just didn’t make sense.  Her case manager tried to track her down.  No luck.  On graduation day she turned up bandaged and burned.  Her live-in boyfriend, threatened by her new found confidence and knowledge, beat her and poured a large pot of boiling water on her.  But she wouldn’t miss graduation, no matter what.  She got out from under the relationship, was succesful in finding a good job, and moved on with her life. Others I remember included a woman who was a third-generation prostitute.  She ate up everything we had to offer determined to get a good job and show her three daughters that there were other safer and better ways to earn a living.

Unsung heroines can and do turn up often in my life, unexpectedly and suddenly. Yesterday one such appeared, which is what precipitated this post.  My neighbor, Joann, came to my door to ask me to write an article for her publication, The California Woman. Now, both my daughter-in-law and I have read the magazine and like it. What a delightful surprise to learn that my sweet, quiet neighbor was implementing this worthy project so modestly out of her little apartment.  Such are the joys of life. Ten years ago, after raising three lovely daughters, Joann decided to provide “everyday women” with a forum to share their stories by way of encouraging and mentoring other women.  What a great idea!  If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, you can often find the publication in groceries and at hospitals and other such places.  Joann also has a website where you can read her story in her own words (and she is a heroine).  She has written a book as well: Women as Mentors, Mentor: A Wise and Faithful Counselor, an excerpt of which (Beauty Is In the Eye of the Beholder: Image Disorder) is here.

While the poem, Autobiography, with which I started this post is about the poet herself, I think it is also an homage to unsung heroines, “everyday women.”  Poet Sonjia Äkesson concludes the poem – a response to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti – with a stanza that begins

I am leading a quiet life

reading homages to existence

by someone who did not suffer enough . . . “

Sometimes suffering serves a good cause. Often, it is the crucible in which we develop compassion. But, just as often, our suffering causes us to become cruel and callous.  I think the ideal goal is to mitigate suffering. The only way we can do that is for us to do no harm, and for unsung heroines – those quiet ones – to make some noise and tell their stores, and for those of us who can speak and write to do so for those who can’t.

This post is dedicated to my mother and grandmother, both unsung heroines and “everyday women”. Al Hub ‘As-salam.

May all sentient beings find peace.