Courage Network

by Nancy Werking Poling

author of OUT OF THE PUMPKIN SHELL

During Women’s History Month we like to recall women who have made significant contributions. Last week’s trip to Maryland to visit my 98-year-old mother-in-law got me to thinking about women whose very survival merits remembrance.

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My relationship with Virginia got off to an inauspicious start. For Jim the weekend was a chance to introduce his girlfriend. For me a chance to be with him and escape the college campus. For Virginia, a working mother, an imposition.

Saturday was cleaning day in the Poling household. I picked up a dust cloth, expecting her to say, “No, you’re company.” But she didn’t. And when I offered to help in meal preparation that evening, she gave me the task of mashing potatoes, which Jim’s bratty nine-year-old sister loudly mocked at the dinner table for being sticky.

As friendly as I tried to be, I don’t recall Virginia matching my efforts. My most vivid memory of that weekend was her getting upset over Jim and me teaching his siblings a card game. In fact, upset was an oft-used word among family members, as in “Don’t upset Mother.”

She opposed our marriage. At the time I assumed it was me she objected to. Later I came to understand that yes, twenty was too young to make that huge commitment.

On subsequent visits, both before and after Jim and I married, his father would draw him aside to relate how The Change was upsetting Virginia (symptoms that lasted at least fifteen years). Naturally Jim sympathized with him and passed on to me the conviction that dealing with his mother was a challenge.

For one thing, a small incident could ignite an emotional outburst. And she was a scrapper. She would not be told what to do. To her, even a hint came across as a command. Her feistiness was mainly directed toward Jim’s father.

She wasn’t a nurturer. I don’t remember her cuddling her grandchildren. I doubt that she took pleasure in being a grandmother. Yet she expressed affection in ways congruent with who she was. A quilter, she once made long patchworks skirts for her daughter and the three daughters-in law. She made a puffy bed cover in pink and red for our daughter, a wool comforter for our son.

Once Jim and I discovered a clue about the possible cause of her obstreperous personality. A few questions about her father evoked a shrill, “I don’t want to talk about him.” She never said much more, except that he’d been domineering.

Not until I myself had matured and become a little wiser did I begin to sympathize with Virginia. An intelligent woman, she graduated from college in the thirties, during the Great Depression, with a major in French. The only job available was as a secretary at a church’s national headquarters west of Chicago. For her it was a time of independence and close friendships. She was in daily contact with people who were traveling abroad. When she was almost thirty she met and married Jim’s father, a seminary student. Within a short time she found herself the mother of three boys. A daughter came along later. Virginia’s adult life was marked by hard work and stringent expectations about what the pastor’s wife should be like. Her husband’s salary could barely support a family, and the small parsonage was overcrowded.

Jim’s father died in 2002, leaving the family stuck with a cantankerous old lady. An old lady who’s blind and can only hear if someone yells in her ear.

An old lady myself now, I’ve become more understanding of Virginia’s nature. I see her as a survivor. Maybe a genetic disorder made her subject to emotional outbursts, and her father didn’t know how to deal with her. It was, after all, an age of Spare the rod and spoil the child. Or maybe he was an abusive father and she survived by fighting back. Or maybe something terrible happened when she was young, a traumatic event she’s repressed in an effort at self-preservation.

What were her dreams? Did anyone ever ask? Last Saturday, in her room at the nursing home, she asked Jim where I was. He told her I was introducing myself to area bookstores, familiarizing managers with my novel. “I always wanted to write,” she said. She went on to tell him she’d long had ideas for stories. Sunday she asked me for a full account. I leaned close to her ear and described Saturday’s venture.

How is it that age has finally offered us the wisdom to accept each other? After nearly fifty years she seems to recognize that I am no threat. I have come to admire her strong will. She said on Sunday she’s going to make it to one hundred, which wouldn’t surprise me.

These thoughts lead me to extend my musings to a wider circle of women, women labeled as screwed up, bitches, whores, bad mothers. Some live in self-protective shells; some lash out from an intense fury; some try to dominate. We don’t know their stories. We do know that by the time she is eighteen, one in four girls has been sexually abused. Too many grow up in violent households. Too many are denied the opportunity to pursue their dreams. Yes, trauma and neglect can have a lifelong impact.

Can I, in my new wisdom, find ways to accept and support women whose lives are marked by anxiety, fury, a fear of being controlled? Women who are hard to like?

When we said goodbye Sunday, my eyes watered over the possibility that though Virginia is determined to make it to a hundred, she may die before we again make the long trip to see her. If that is so, I can’t picture her dropping off into a peaceful hereafter. No, she’ll exit this earthly life fighting.