Hi Everyone,
Late last fall, on a trail I walk often, a sculpture appeared. Artist unknown. Its location is not far from a university campus, so my guess is that the unknown sculptor/s came from there. I thank them/her/him for it.
My friends told me they had discovered this strange creation and the next day I went searching for it. But it blends in so well with its surroundings that I couldn’t find it even though I walked past it several times. I had to ask one of my friends to lead me to it and she did. A neighbour we ran into along the trail that day said she’d heard it was inspired by Edvard Munch’s famous 1893 painting, “The Scream,” the one that so aptly depicts the ubiquitous condition of human anxiety. I know that painting well. A decade ago, I wove it into a short story I was writing. That story became part of my third book, The Left-Handed Dinner Party. In fact, I titled it “The Scream.” It’s about a woman who becomes the administrator for an assisted living centre. It’s a moody story.
I call March the moody month. It has one foot in winter and the other stretching towards the Spring Equinox so it doesn’t really know what it is. Is it spring or is it winter? You’ll notice that there is absolutely no snow in these photos, taken a few weeks ago. After a winter that barely felt like winter, I wondered if March would hit us with blizzards or sunshine. Here we are, two weeks into the moody month and spring seems to have won. Currently, it’s very mild and clear here in the Okanagan Valley. I’d been hoping for regular dumps of snow or any other form of precipitation. It’s odd to be hoping for snow in March, but with fire season just around the corner, many people in British Columbia and Western Canada are doing just that.
So yes, even with the blue sky and the sunshine, it’s Moody March and I am moody along with it. I have visited our local version of The Scream numerous times in past weeks. Sometimes I have the urge to sit down beside it, open my mouth really wide, and let it all out.
Do you know what the Spanish word for handcuffs is? I have studied Spanish for years. I don’t know why really. Perhaps some long unresolved desire to live somewhere else, somewhere with romance and music and hills and dashing dancers and exotic architecture and oodles of history. Of course, we have all those things right here in Canada too, but I digress.
In my books, I often try to find a way to weave in some Spanish words. In a recent lesson, I discovered that the Spanish word for handcuffs is “esposas.” That’s not a word I use often, so I had no need to learn it until my language-learning app threw it into a sentence last week. Curiously, the singular version of “esposa” is a very common Spanish word, one I learned early on in my studies: it means wife. The implied link between the two Spanish nouns is obvious: to be a wife is to limit a husband’s freedom. To me that’s backwards. There are reasons that so many younger women these days aren’t choosing marriage, are choosing not to have children. They recognize that the one whose life is handcuffed in a marriage is usually the woman’s.
“I know who I am.” Those are the words etched on a beautiful necklace my daughter gave me a few years ago. I loved it immediately. I felt so warm inside, reading that message on the small silver oval. I feel warm inside every time I wear it. In a male-dominated world that teaches girls and women not to like themselves very much, in a world that strives to convince girls and women they have less value than men, in a world that continues to contain, control, and silence females, these words are priceless.
I remember the decades when I didn’t know myself very well, when I was too wrapped up in trying to be what other people expected me to be, when I swallowed my thoughts and ideas because I knew they would not be welcomed coming from blonde little me. Then I went back to university as a mature adult, intending merely to finish the pesky arts degree I’d started years ago. That turned into an Honours degree and then a Masters and then a PhD. The whole experience was long, difficult, and exhilarating. Life changing. It taught me to see outside myself. That’s what an education should do. Education is not only for job training. Education is about learning how to be human. Education should teach people how to think for themselves, how to move beyond the perspectives of their own lives, how to be creative contributing global citizens, and ultimately how to know who they are.
In spite of the current worldwide chaos and my moments when I want to scream into a void, there’s an inner contentment that guides me now. At first I didn’t recognize the inner contentment feeling. It felt weird, like a glow in my belly. I rubbed my stomach and wondered what it was. I puzzled on it for a while, until I heard a quiet answer: it’s happy. And I was reminded of Camilla Gibb’s book, This is Happy, a memoir about finding oneself on a path towards that deep contented feeling. When I feel the glow in my belly slipping away from me, I reach for my “I Know Who I Am” necklace. Some weeks I wear it a lot.
In this month of International Women’s Day and in a world that is seeing the conditions of women’s lives heading in the wrong direction with the curtailing of women’s rights and access to reproductive health and choices in so many countries, no wonder younger women are shaking off the “esposas” and looking for alternative ways to live their lives. I’d do the same thing were I in their shoes again, but I’m not. Older women have issues to fight too. Ageism is rampant in our youth-obsessed world. We are too often written off as irrelevant. But that’s another topic, one I’m sure I’ll get to writing about soon. Meanwhile, here’s a peaceful pic I made in a spot that calms my urge to scream.
Thanks so much for reading Me Who Writes. If you enjoyed this issue, please feel free to share it with a friend or three. I’ll be back in this space in two weeks. Stay well.