my secret, sacred name

The temple matron leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Sophie.” My temple name. The name my husband would use to call me through the veil to the highest level of the celestial kingdom. Only he and I would know my name (though I would never know his). This was secret and sacred and it was mine. I treasured it.
 

I had always been fascinated about names acquired after you were born, not just the name you were saddled with by your parents. The Catholic kids got confirmation names and I was jealous. I didn’t know when I was growing up that I would eventually be getting my own special name. 

 

It seemed magical...like my temple garments, full of weighty covenants and hushed promises in ceremonies heavily borrowed from the Freemasons; I had to pledge to keep the name and covenants secret. Under penalty of death actually, though that was communicated without words but by the sign of drawing one’s finger across one’s neck. Clear as a bell, that one.

 

I was as serious as a nun and twice as obedient. My family converted to Mormonism when I was eight, followed with baptism by immersion at the age of nine. Religion fit me like a glove. I was ripe for dedication and structure. Of my family of seven, I was the most fervent. The line between letter of the law and spirit of the law never waffled with me--it was letter of the law first; spirit of the law second.

If being Puerto Rican/Irish did not make me peculiar enough in my seriously white Long Island public school, Mormonism tipped the scales. I couldn’t drink alcohol/coffee/tea, smoke, do drugs or have premarital sex. I remember one boy I was dating asked me (upon learning about my invisible chastity belt) Well, how far can you go? I insensitively, almost gleefully, announced that we were there. Kissing. That’s how far I could go. His disappointment was palpable.

After a fairly successful stint in high school (I squeaked into the top 10% of my class--which percentage was, by the way, the same amount that I gave to the church every time I earned money. Gross earnings, not net. God, I was insufferable.) I was accepted at several Ivy League schools but my parents sent me to Brigham Young University because 1) it was cheaper--I was a smart kid but not full-scholarship-smart and church members got a tuition discount and 2) it was a more controlled, safer environment.

Whenever I hear the word “safer” as it applies to how women are protected, I hear “Hymen Protection.” BYU was safer, I suppose. And godknows I was fine with being in the Mormon Mecca. I met Dave after my first month in Provo. I was 17. He was 21, fresh off his Mormon mission. We dated for less than four months before my father urged me to marry him. Oh, the humanity. And of course, marry him I did right after my freshman year. I was 10 months out of high school and convinced that this was my righteous path. Which led to the whole temple ceremony and my secret, sacred name.

Many years later, after my divorce from religion, god, heterosexuality and husband (in that order), I was talking with my younger sister who had also gone through the temple ceremony. We wickedly and giddily exchanged our temple names like we were breaking the rules (and we were; they just weren’t our rules any longer) and then, she said, you know, the temple name you got was given to every woman who got married that day. No shit? The same name? So, what, is there a whiteboard in the Holy of Holies with the Name o' the Day scrawled on it? Seriously, my sacred, special, secret name was shared with scores of others? Well, isn't that the proverbial cherry.

2 Mini 1000, Day 2–My Children

The vacuum in the wake of my grown two children departing from our home is sharp and bottomless. They live (by birth order, respectively) about 2,000 and 5,000 miles away from us. Adages like "great love risks a greater sense of loss" bubble up to the surface, useless and true. Mostly the love is clear and mutual but there is no pure sense of completely resolved love. The part that sharpens the black hole edges is the unresolved conflicts and the memory of conflicts resolved but still sore. I am tangled up in my love for them. My anxiety for their often precarious lives. Our desperation to reunite, all three of us, is real but there are mounting difficulties with those reunions. New health issues and old financial constraints.

We dropped off our youngest with our grandchild just this morning. The first day of absence is the keenest. Tomorrow I will remember the delight of an orderly house. Of removing the Play-Doh and rice from the area rugs. Of getting all the treacherous trike and step stool obstacles out of the walkways. Of walking through rooms not littered with clothing. Or small shoes and stuffed animals. Of things put away where they belong. But today I miss the tiny spoon a two-year old used to spoon yogurt into and around their mouth. There is a void where the chatter of a burgeoning vocabulary and new words being strung together filled this space...just a few hours earlier. I miss the way my youngest engaged that little person with compassion and patience. I miss the way my youngest and I navigate the difference in our expectations of each other. Perhaps I am not the ever-ready grandparent they had hoped for. Perhaps I'm not the grandparent I was hoping for. Perhaps I am just the best grandparent I can be.

These two humans that I pushed out into the world continue to surprise and delight and challenge me. I like them each so very much. They think and converse and laugh and weep with me. They care deeply. They know how to be stubborn and they know how to apologize. They teach me to be better. To be quiet and listen. To let go of my expectations and accept their changing lives. I wonder if we lived in the same village, would we love each other so fiercely?

I began my journey into parenthood at the ripe age of 19. I had been married for a year and was plagued by the paranoia of the religiously brainwashed, "if I wait too long to have children, would god make me barren?" Whatever the premature impetus, I never regretted having children. I had always wanted them, even if I jumped in too young. I was taught by my 1950's-era parents that the successful parent has obedient, well-behaved, compliant children. That my job was to ensure that I won the battle of wills and kept them safe and churned out productive, independent human beings. How differently I would approach that job today!

I watch my youngest with their child; doing the emotional work of not crushing a child's will is amazing, while maintaining their safety and teaching them a sense of communal cooperation. I took this toddler to a toy store, for heaven's sake, and they not only enjoyed looking at the toys, they were cooperative about putting up 90% of the toys they pulled off the shelves. They did not fuss when we left the store and I never had to threaten or get angry at them. There are just better ways. If they fussed about crossing the street (they wanted to push the stroller themselves), that was the only time I calmly picked them up and said it wasn't safe for them to push the stroller in the street. Both the Saint and I had them help with all kinds of activities: sweeping, laundry, cooking and vacuuming. They are enthusiastic about helping. Throwing things out, putting toys away, folding laundry and decorating cakes. It takes longer, is a bit messier but so much more fun.

The one memory from their visit that is etched forever in my mind is the night that we (my two grown children and I) stayed up until 2am. Just the three of us, talking and laughing. It felt as if no one wanted to break the magic of the moment. They are the...I've used up the superlatives...delight/joy/wonder/pride of my life. I am so goddamned lucky.

So my kids survived my mistakes, like I survived my parents' mistakes. If nothing else, it is the thread that binds all generations: our screw-ups. Today, one of the hardest part of parenting for me is the same as it ever was: how to be supportive but not swoop in and fix problems that they need to solve by themselves.

 

Postscript: So it's not 1,000 words and I didn't complete this challenge. I probably shouldn't have scheduled this at the same time as a daily drawing challenge! However, this essay is valuable so I'm posting anyway. I think I am overwhelmed with the idea of "telling our* story" because it feels like too much. This is predictable but still, I have to deal with it. I hope to get back to telling it because it's a great fucking story.

 *The Saint's and mine.

Winter 2022 Mini 1000, Day 1–My Mother

My earliest memories were of my tireless mother, "D," always in motion. Cooking, laundering, tidying and scrubbing. I joked with my sisters that, like a vacuum cleaner, I thought cleaning tools were mom's bodily attachments. Even when she was swimming upstream against Fisher-Price, discarded Keds and Barbie Doll clothes, mom would eventually emerge from the chaos, everything neatly folded in its immaculate place. 

Every weekday, she was down in the basement at 5am to do some laundry, then, back in the kitchen laying out the assembly-line of lunches for 4 or 5 kids while making or monitoring breakfast. She showered and ushered all of us out to our various bus stops and was off to work herself. At the end of her day, she'd pick up groceries, have dinner on the table by 6 for my father and all of us kids. She'd wash the dishes, pots and pans and prepare for the next day's domestic assault. Saturdays were cleaning days and Sundays we spent an inordinate amount of time at church, for which she usually brought a hamper of food for lunch. We were bathed, fed, clothed in clean and pressed clothes and always knew that home meant our own clean beds, warmth, meals and safety. There were eventually five of us kids with dental and doctor appointments, school rehearsals and performances. She was in charge of all of it.

I think my Mom loved having an orderly house but she never expressed any joy in it. She was a very good home cook but I don't think she enjoyed that either. She loved her children without a doubt, but I would argue it didn't seem like she enjoyed raising us. Everything was an endless chore. Fucking endless. She grieves now that she never stopped to play with us (she rarely did) and I remember her stopping to read a novel once in my life. Valley of the Dolls–so rare that I remember the title. My father worked hard too but nowhere as relentlessly as my mother.

Being a mama's-girl, I tried to please her. Once when I was about 10 years old, I announced that I would clean up after dinner. I washed all the dishes, pots and pans; swept the floor and wiped down the counters and stove. It was so hard and I was so proud. Her only feedback was to pass her fingertips along the formica and say, "the countertops are greasy."

So when I stumbled into adulthood, I knew very little of what my future would hold but I was sure as shit not going to spend my life cleaning house. A wasted life. A feminist affront. I would play with my children. I would be creative, even if it meant household chaos. And I was true to my word. Even with a partner who carried none of my fierce anti-housework baggage and didn't mind cleaning, with two kids and school and work, housework felt like a monster I would never tame. There was no point in fighting it. Besides, I was a narcoleptic and sleepiness piggy-backed onto my sense of defeat. It was utterly impossible.

Recently a lovely friend wrote an article about us in Outsmart (our local gay magazine). It was sweet but made me realize how much I'd rather write my own story than have someone else do it. So, for at least part of this Mini 1000, I'd like to do that. And I am starting with my mother.

I start with my mother with some trepidation. First of all, she is still alive, I don't want to hurt her feelings and I love her dearly. She did so many things well. Raised by alcoholic parents, she was often left to tend to her four younger brothers and fend for herself. Compared to hers, our childhood was completely carefree. She was a part of a different generation. Born shortly after the Great Depression, she married because it was what she was taught to do. Her pendulum swing from her own mother's irresponsibility was to make her life a model of selfless martyrdom. She was, and still is, one of the most duty-driven people I know.

I start with my mother because I empathized with her (though empathy was not a well-developed emotion in D's House of Silent Suffering. Being sick in our home had better involve febrile convulsions, compound fractures or bleeding from an orifice if you wanted any show of sympathy). My father was volatile, demanding and loud. I saw her as a victim because I had a particularly black & white world view--even for a child, I was powerfully drawn to the Good/Evil dichotomy. I needed her affection and got very little of it but she was never cruel to me. And she was funny. When she could release her iron grip on Making House Immaculate, she was quite funny. I needed that like other people need god.

I start with my mother because her domestic perfectionism transferred like osmosis into my creative and academic cells. Doing something extremely well was a way to honor her. I was a smart kid. An over-achiever. I was chubby. I was a religious fanatic. (I had all the components you'd need for a walloping eating disorder except one: I can't throw up. Seriously. My digestive tract is a violently one-way street...but that's a discussion for another essay.)

Finally, I start with my mother because my father frightened me, enraged me and made me feel small in ways that my mother did not. So I needed her. As I have grown I have learned that I am more like my father than I'd have ever thought possible and I loved her because she was not.

As we've grown older, my mother and I, I am continually amazed at how this stoic, duty-driven woman is so full of self-doubt. She skipped her childhood and adolescence and I'm sure learned to measure her worth by how she was perceived as a wife, mother and House Cleaner Extraordinaire. Now that my father has passed and she is well into the great-grandmother phase of her life, it is unsettling to constantly see her devalue herself. At the same time, she is finally able to express some feelings of affection for me and heaps praise on me for my accomplishments. Often, unfortunately, with a nod to her lack of them.