Women who have Guided me

I just finished reading a book by Sue Monk Kidd: “The Book of Longings: A Novel”. It tells the story of Jesus in a way that feels faithful to the Biblical gospels with one significant exception: the main character, Ana, is the wife of Jesus, and it’s through her eyes that the story of his final three years of life on Earth is told.

After reading this engaging story, I read an interview with the author and one of the questions posed caught my attention: “How do you think you have been shaped by the older women in your life?”

In the second half of my life, women have been my natural companions and workmates. I have found in women the character, energy, and dedication to ideals, from which I knew I wanted to learn and, if possible, to exemplify in myself. This phenomenon continues to this day, but now with women who are all younger than me.

This question about older women shaping my character and values, at first made me regret that I didn’t have a grandmother in my life. But, unlike some of my friends, I was blessed with a mother who loved me. And from that beginning, there followed several older women who allowed me to feel valued. In turn, feeling valued by others inspired me to treat myself with more appreciation.

There was my Latin teacher in Grade 11 who stayed after regular school hours to help me plod through the homework I hadn’t been able to do successfully on my own. This helped me in at least two ways: I felt valued as a person even though I was not a good student; and I still notice the Latin roots of many of the words I use with delight every day.

There was my aunt Katie whose quiet, unassuming presence created the welcome of a second home in the country growing up; later, Katie drove 80 miles down to Montreal every week to make it possible for our mother to keep living at home after she was no longer able to shop and do laundry on her own.

There was Buffy, who along with her husband, Eric, came into my life from war-torn Europe, when I was in my early teens. Eric introduced me to the world of literature and philosophy and to his concern for the direction our society was taking after the sacrifices made in WW II. Some of that concern rubbed off, along with his disappointment and discouragement with a world that I had yet to experience much of myself. Eric influenced me profoundly but when I became interested in Eastern mysticism, he told me I’d lost my way and our relationship became less intimate after that. After Eric died and Buffy was dealing with cancer, she invited me to join her for her own final visit to Montreal where all of us had lived for years. During that visit, she became the voice of confirmation for choices I had made—which Eric had not been able to do. She was impressed with a piece I had written about my engagement with Eastern mysticism and she shared it with several of her old Montreal friends.

In the early 1990s, Pat, a woman just a few years older than me, joined Friends in Time, which Foster and I had started to provide a vehicle for helping others with neurological diseases, and she was soon leading the rest of us with her passion and her intimate knowledge of how to do that effectively. She allowed our small non-profit to set sail and head into the future on the prevailing winds of that time in the life of our world.

There were and still are women who entered my life as friends, teachers, and exemplars who inspired me to live with the challenges that life delivers to all of us. But there was one woman whom I can’t begin to remember apart from the single moment in time when she looked at me with disapproval.

This moment would probably have been lost to memory, if I hadn’t started reading the books of George Gurdjieff while I was working as a deckhand on a barge that transported oar trucks and shift busses across three-mile-wide Lake Babine in the 1970’s.

During those 20-minute crossings, I had lots of time to read and I read everything I could find by Gurdjieff. One of his assertions hit home for me: he claimed that the human mind has fallen so deeply away from sanity and balance that only one possibility for recovery remains. He called it a “pang of conscience”. This provided the context I needed in order to remember the moment that occurred one day at lunchtime in Grade 3.

When that memory returned to me, I cringed. But then another realization also came back. That moment had caused a “pang of conscience”. And that in turn had seeded in me, no matter how unconsciously at the time, a desire to behave differently in future.

It was lunchtime in our Grade 3 homeroom and, along with our sack lunches from home, the school made available half-pint cartons of milk. I remember that I had bought two cartons, one white and one chocolate. I must have already punctured the tops of both cartons and inserted straws into the holes. That was when the teacher announced to the class that one or our classmates had just arrived late and all the milk cartons had already been distributed. Then her simple question followed: “Could someone with an extra milk carton share one of them with her?”

That was the moment that descended like a hawk and plucked me from what could have been a moment of grace. Before my body could be joined by my heart, before a better impulse could point out that sharing with the girl who had none would be worth infinitely more than having two cartons to myself, before any of those wiser responses had a chance to guide my hand, my mouth had swooped down and taken a loud slurp from my second carton.

That’s the kind of self-absorbed gesture I must have repeated many times since. But that day the teacher must have looked straight at me with a look of disapproval. Why else was I squirming when that memory finally came back to me?

I am grateful that such moments don’t have to lead to lifelong feelings of guilt. They can become a milestone on the road of life that we leave behind a wiser and kinder person.

One comment to “Women who have Guided me”
  1. Nice piece, Mike.We grow and kearn with the heip of other people. It seems that is role that many women take on. Some are mentors and some are reassuring presences in our lives.

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