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I talked some in my very first blog post about the importance of words and names to me. Words can hold undue power - what they say, where they say it, how they're put together. One of my ideas of heaven is hearing the most beautiful combination of words. I love the aesthetic of words and carefully turned phrases.
I thought for quite some time about whether to change my name or not last year, when I first faced divorce. I talked to different people about their choice, the ramifications in their children's lives, and the reason for their choices. These ranged from the ease of keeping their married name to the need to cut that marital tie. I thought about the few friends' and family I have who kept their maiden name even into marriage, and how doable it is to have a last name different from my children. I remembered a sophomore music class with a revered St. Johns' tutor, an aged, gay man who wore thick, black rimmed glasses with one lens clouded to hide his eye, and him telling me during one class, "Alexa Van Dalsem. Such a musical name." I remembered how much I loved my maiden name, the tie to my dad whose middle name is Alexander, my name's exotic sound and reference to one-sixteenth of my family origin - a small town the Netherlands called Dalsem. I talked to my mom, and she remembered me saying that I told her I was going to change my name, "so I wouldn't hurt Michael's feelings." I have no memory of this. I do remember changing my name for him, as an act of submission.
In returning to my maiden name, I have felt more finally the end of my marriage, the regaining of my identity, a healing because for so long I haven't felt like me, like this is my life, and a strength standing on a name that meant so much to me in my family roots. I don't have a family home to return to, but my name change has felt like a homecoming. I have felt acutely in this change the life experience of "Always we begin again."
At the same time, the change has been tough, a representation of a family tie that I have lost, no longer being a daughter/sister-in-law in the Behmer family and losing a relationship I treasured and enjoyed. I have a strong memory from our first year of marriage of standing outside a large Baptist church in Huntsville with Michael, his brother and two of his sisters. It felt so good being part of a large family, having all these loving and protecting (while also lovingly crazy) siblings. I cringed recently when Asher was talking about last names while we drove in the car. From the back seat, I heard him list our last names, his being Behmer, Harper's Behmer, mine Behmer, Dad's Behmer. I slowly told him I had changed my name to Van Dalsem, explaining with the barrage of "why" as simply as I could that some people change their names when they get married or are no longer married. Thankfully, though I imagined him seeing his nuclear family crushed with this symbolic change, he did not seem phased by the information.
I am still adjusting to introducing myself and signing my name as Alexa Van Dalsem. I have started changing all the names on my accounts but put off changing my gmail display name until the summer is over and work with a youth organization conference is done for the season.
(Apparently the image gods are smiling upon me because in doing an image search on Google, I found the above image from a mushroom growing company in the Netherlands. Is that what all this is? The art of growing?)
If you'll indulge me once more . . . so, I also just might have a rant about the state of feminism these days. Again, to set the scene, at one time I could have also been a poster woman for a feminist liberal (though not quite raging, a little loud sometimes) I'm all about women's rights, equal representation (in life, movies, books, faith, TV), women in the workplace, equality of pay, the view of women, "herstory," etc. Sometimes my feminist side still jumps out of me. A few weeks ago, sitting at the serving bar at LeftHand Brewery, the bar tender (poor guy) asked Michael what he wanted to drink and "what can I get for your lovely lady?" To which I quickly replied with a nice smile, "I am my own lovely lady," with a thank you very much thought bubble. Carrie Bradshaw would be so proud. In a Bible study I lead, one of the women bought me a "Women of the Bible" book because I wouldn't pipe down about the lack of references to women in the study book we were reading.
I was quite happy today while flipping through a series of pictures on the Time Magazine website showing all the lovely women in British and European politics. Apparently, Spain is getting quite a bit of flack because the number of women in the Spanish Cabinet now out numbers the number of men. And the new Spanish Minister of Defense is a woman. And she's seven months pregnant. Oh, yeah. How do you like them apples?
Yet (and here we go), one of the pictures' captions read, "Sarah Brown, the wife of the Prime Minister, like her predecessor Cherie Blair, has found that women in the public eye are still judged more on what they look like than on their brains and abilities." Of course they are. Nice.
There's a commercial on TV featuring Kelly Ripa of Regis and Kelly selling appliances. She does her TV show and then rushes home to do all the mothering duties - cooking, cleaning, finding things, entertaining, raising her children, and dropping exhausted. It's amazing, all the things a woman can do. It's amazing all the things we can do to run ourselves ragged. I read a regular column recently in our newspaper by a woman who is self-titled, "Brazen Careerist." She recounted a time when she had just had one of her children, was working full-time and working on a publishing deadline. She finally got help with everything when - get this - her husband found her in the kitchen stabbing herself with a knife. Uh, yeah. And she goes on about how amazing it is to be a woman and working like she always has.
Let me just put out there that the feminist movement has been amazing for women. I wouldn't trade what I now can do in the world, in my community, in the workplace, on the web, anywhere, for the world. But, I also think my generation and generations to come struggle with putting this new world into play, balancing the many parts of being a woman - in the workplace, in the home, in the community, in the world, in the bedroom, in the marketplace - along with the constant focus on our appearance. I've been struck recently with how dangerous it can be for a young woman to be pretty and attractive. Being a woman can't mean doing everything but in the same ways they've always been done. None of us should ever get to the point where we're stabbing ourselves with a knife for the sake of being a "modern woman."
Ahh, a lightbulb. Perhaps I can be more green by doing less housework - use less water, less energy, fewer chemicals - and save some of the valuable time a modern woman needs.
(Note: How great is that picture after my last blog rant?!)
Okay, so to set this up you have to have an idea of how crunchy I am. At times in my life, I could have been a poster child for a granola girl. In college, I had cute, wire rimmed glasses, wore my hair long, almost to my waist and didn't get out of t-shirts, jeans, flannel shirts and my Birkenstocks (with wool socks in the winter. Oh, yeah. Major cuteness factor). One of my favorite outfits was oversized overalls and a big, wool cardigan sweater. (Like I said, cute). I've been a vegetarian (more by taste than morality, I have to admit) for about 15 years. I've lived by "If it's yellow let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down," since the seven year drought in California during my childhood. When I moved to New York City, I didn't own a car, used public transportation, loved it, and hate (really, truly hate) the necessity of having to own a car. Back in 1992 when Al Gore published his first book, "Earth in the Balance," I was a big fan of his environmental policy. I used to think I could save the world, one recyclable item at a time. My garage is often half full of cardboard and hard to recycle items that I eventually take to Ecocycle and recycle, with Asher joining in because I want to teach him at a young age. Michael once bought me a "Give a hoot. Don't pollute." Woodsy Owl t-shirt because of the crap I gave him about littering, even small gum wrappers. Besides microwaves, I also heart recycling. Big time. My dream home is off the grid, made of sustainable materials, using solar power, collecting rainwater, reusing non-potable water, directing heat from the dryer into the house during the winter, low flow showers and toilets, etc. I would get rid of all the grass in my yard and plant only xeriscape plants if I had the chance. I've taken Asher to Arbor Day twice because I love trees. So you get the idea. There's a part of me that's a raging environmental liberal.
Why, then, am I just a little perturbed by all the green activity these days? It's so exciting - the development of "green collar" jobs in hubs like Seattle and in and around Boulder; Wal-mart offering organic and transitional products (our mega Mall-Wart here has a long aisle of green products from clothing to cleaning supplies and uses natural light, although they also run about 100 fans in the fan aisle all day long); big companies like Palmolive selling environmentally-friendly dish soap; car companies selling hybrids; presidential candidates promising renewable energy research and raising the MPG limits on vehicles; Conoco-Phillips opening a 400-acre office complex in Colorado to study renewable energy; more people recycling, buying local, thinking about their impact on the earth; news story after news story and business after business getting in on the movement; democrats and republicans, conservatives and liberals coming together to sit on couches and be in advertisements about how we can do this, we can reverse some of the damage. It's incredible! It's amazing! And it's about damn time.
Earth Day - both the US and UN's observances - were established in 1969 and first celebrated in 1970. That's 38 years ago. And not the first time people wanted to love on mother Earth. I remember driving through Palo Alto, CA with my mom, and her pointing out a gas station where she sat in line (in line, people) to get gas following the 1973 oil crisis. That was 25 years ago. We had another energy crisis in 1979. 19 years ago. Al Gore came out with his first book in 1992. 16 years ago. As much as I love all that is being done and the movement and the energy and everyone being on board and the big love ship of worldly green, I can't get over how long it's taken, all the reminders we've been given, all the time we could have spent doing what we are no doing and more. And some day, I hope to get an explanation as to why we can put a man on the moon, we study how a spider spins a web in space, and we can make a phone call from remote part so the planet, but the vast majority of our cars are still run on gasoline. This is an over 100 year old system! The Model T was introduced in 1908.
Okay. Phew. Deep breathes. Underlying all this is also a deep faith in the American people to step up and to create products and ways of life that have never before imagined or were imagined and can be reignited. Like the ad says, "we can solve it." This just might be one of the greatest wonders of the world that capitalism can create.
There are lots of things in life that we don't expect to do, and if we did, we might not start some things. On the top of my list of things not to do is getting divorced. I was committed through the spectrum of good and bad in my marital relationship to working things out and being married until death. I wanted so much for my kids to have their mom and dad together. And, interestingly, I discovered last night while thinking about my divorce that I wanted to be different from 50% of the population - I wanted to have a happy and healthy marriage, even with the work and pain. As in many things in my life, it drives me crazy to (just) do what the majority of people are doing. But through the conspiring of events and emotions and choices, I am on a new path, on which I can crumple or dance.
Pondering divorce, because my mind will ponder everything, even those things I didn't plan on doing, I have realized several things. One is extreme thankfulness for my microwave. This wonderful cooking tool is absolutely vital to my kids' and my survival. Without it, I might well never get anything cooked. I am even more thankful (though the microwave is way up there) for my rights as a women. I was watching a movie that took place in the 1930s last night and have recently obsessed over Masterpiece Theater's Jane Austen movies, and the women had an extremely slim chance of supporting themselves without becoming old maids dependent on male relatives, prostitutes or destitute.
Another realization is how awkward and strange it is to announce a divorce. It's a bit like telling someone about a death, though with embarrassment and confused emotions mixed in. I did not blog for almost a month because I had many friends and family members to inform of the change in my life, and some of the informing I put off due feeling embarrassed about the failure and about letting my friends down (of course, my dependable friends and family reacted with great love). People don't quite know what to say (heck, I don't) - whether congratulations or sympathy are in order. It's a mix - sadness and relief.
On the other side of reactions, in the last two days, I have met three women through work who have been divorced. Two of them gave me a big hug and congratulated me. One of them wears a snake ring next to her left ring finger because "a wedding ring used to be there." I realized as with all monumental events in our lives - an unplanned pregnancy, a death, an addiction, an illness - that my marriage and divorce experience opens up new views and emotions. My experience offers a way to connect to other people who have been or may go through similar events and a new way to love and to help bear my friends' and family's burdens.
This last Sunday, I snapped, and poor Asher got the brunt of me reaching my end point. Asher and Harper were playing on the couch sometime after nap. I had forgotten to put my glass of water away, and before I could intervene, Asher was drinking from it and then Harper. Harper soon hit herself in the mouth with it and dumped water on the couch. Without hesitating, I appropriated the glass and took it to the kitchen, taking deep breaths and hoping for a minute to cool down because the whole events with my glass had me a bit frustrated (mostly because I forgot to put it away).
My calming was quickly interrupted by a loud thump and crying from Harper. Returning to the living room, I found Asher back on the couch, laughing, and Harper on her stomach on the floor, crying. I picked up Harper to soothe her and then found myself yelling at Asher, "It's not funny! It's not funny!" As soon as Asher's face crumpled, and he started to cry, I knew I had so poorly handled my stress and fatigue. You'd think that I would have a better idea of where I was on the stress scale based on the three cold sores that were healing on my lip and the sore state of my back.
I apologized profusely to Asher and was especially conscious about my words and level of activity for the rest of the day, reserving energy for the basics (like actually being kind to my dear children). Rolling along and I wake up Tuesday with two more cold sores (that's five in about a week, and I haven't had a cold sore for about five months) and a neck on the verge of kinking. With a slightly wrong move Friday morning, my neck was officially kinked.
I imagine my heart and soul banging on the door to my mind, "Hey! Let us in! Hello! You're stressed! Can you not even hear us?! Let's have a minute here because . . . this is all so monumental!" But I had regressed, regressed to pretending I was fine, that I could be "happily divorced," that I had energy to finish all the work and volunteer projects I had undertaken, that I was okay not taking time to release the grieving energy at work over the local teacher killed in a car accident, that I had any energy left after a week of being home (which I really did love) without relief from Michael, who was out of town and out of touch for four days, or daycare, which was closed due to Alisa being on vacation.
I went to a yoga class this morning, and it met all my expectations of being absolutely perfect and lovely and a place to let my mind, heart and soul relax and reconnect. I love the aesthetics of yogic language - child's pose, warrior pose, exulted hero pose (yes!), tree pose, sun salutation - and feeling how my body can bend and not bend and balance in tree pose, solid, connected.
Talking on the phone with Megan this past Tuesday, Megan said to me, "This is monumental. It's not often I get to use that word, and I'm going to use it." I'm sitting with this word - thinking about the monumentalness of Easter weekend and the current tide of my life.
There are many pieces to Easter weekend, and I'll begin with the end of the weekend, with church because it's a little easier. For a few weeks before Easter, I had known that our church was going to close. The dear church that could has finally had to give up the ghost due to finances. A small church plant that began five years ago and has been through hiccups and fissures and a false closing has loyally lived out and preached the gospel and supported a congregation of people who could be open about their wounds, brokenness, deaths and life disasters along with celebrations, joys, births and happiness.
Our church held its last service on Easter Sunday with our pastor barely able to stand due to injuring his back two days before and with many tears from congregants and our pastor's family. My tears were dry until I saw Ardis, the pastor's wife and my close friend, and her daughter, Hannah, crying while lining up for the last communion. This is the church we moved to Colorado to work with, the church in which both my children were baptized and I imagined them growing up in, the church that has held me up spiritually, emotionally and even financially over the last year and a half. I have, for the first time through this church's health and demise, a sense, a feeling of a church family.
As in the aftermath of a death, there is confusion and rearranging - the church's property dispersed, the congregants dispersed and searching for a new church home, some realized, some unrealized dreams and ideas about the future in the midst of rearranging, my close friends wondering what their future will hold as our pastor looks for a new position, possibly in another state.
Saturday was a day of preparing for Easter and running errands with Michael and the kids. A trip to Boulder to return some shoes landed us in the middle of a mad house of an Easter egg hunt at Grand Rabbit's toy store.
Stepping back to Friday, Good Friday, Michael and I went to court for the final hearing on our legal separation. We learned during the proceedings that we would not be able to make any changes to our marital status for six months, and decided in a five minute conference together, to change the proceeding from legal separation to dissolution of marriage (in Colorado, the paperwork is identical). Less than thirty minutes after entering the courtroom, I was no longer married and my maiden name was reinstated. I cried. Michael cried. We hugged. We walked down Pearl Street mall and had coffee. I had such a strange desire to still express my love for the man I was married to for over 10 years even as our relationship as husband and wife had ended.
And I felt a profound sense of relief. What had been lying in hospice for so long, at one point making a valiant attempt to walk around, had taken it's last gasp. I felt the relief of losing someone with a terminal illness and the great relief of honestly naming something - our marriage was no more. And I felt the relief of having an answer to the nagging question of whether or not we would stay married.
I can't quite piece out the meaning behind the coincidence of events and holidays - Good Friday (death), Easter (rebirth), a closing of a church, the end of my marriage. But it all somehow makes sense, underlies St. Benedict's "Always we begin again." And sometimes on a monumental level.
Note: Tree pictures is "Red Autumn, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 2007" by Phil Douglis.
One of the many things that makes my workplace interesting (besides the exciting goings on of the diverse youth who, you know, might one day say they want to blow up the school or have to file a report with the police about the gangs terrorizing their home) is the spiritual diversity. I have two co-workers who are primarily Buddhist, and they have given me quite an education on their beliefs. Through our discussions, I have discovered, if I believed in reincarnation, that I was most likely of Asian decent in my previous life and that "my soul agreed to all this" before I was born. Of most interest to me recently has been one of my co-workers claims that she believes this life is hell. I was a bit shocked and surprised - how can this life be hell? Certainly there are many hard things but there are also so many beautiful and joyful things.
Two days later, I pulled up to my daycare providers' house, and parked outside her house was a large delivery truck with "Big Ready Beer" and two beer cans of local brew pictured on the side. The truck stayed there, in her residential cul-de-sac, for about a week. The funny thing is our daycare provider is Mormon, and she was pretty tickled by the truck outside her house. She joked about opening a daddy daycare - caring for dad's and offering them beer. How, I wondered, chuckling time I drove up at the humor of the situation, can that be hell?
I talked some in my very first blog post about the importance of words and names to me. Words can hold undue power - what they say, where they say it, how they're put together. One of my ideas of heaven is hearing the most beautiful combination of words. I love the aesthetic of words and carefully turned phrases.
