So I have a weird collection of stuff percolating about in my head today. Well, maybe not that weird. Mostly things like heritage and culture and identity. Crap that comes up, I guess, when you’re going to be a parent.
I hope I haven’t already written about this. If you’re bored, skip it. I’m just too damn tired today to scan my blog and make sure I’m not repeating myself.
Something I’ve struggled with as an adult is the fact that I have no cultural identity. I’m a typical American WASP—and an American mutt. I’m, from what I can tell from the various family trees, German, Welsh, and British. My husband is German, Irish, and Hungarian, so our children will be an even worse mush of European genetics.
I grew up (as I said the other day) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We were poor when I was a kid, so my mom and I lived in what would now be called “the barrio.” Brown children, both Native American and Mexican, surrounded me and as I say in this poem I wrote about this subject, I stood out like a tumor, with my pale eyes and sun bleached hair and chronically sunburned nose. All the kids around me were bilingual, and I just felt so left out, dull, boring.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve developed a kind of nostalgia for other cultures. The movie Moonstruck makes me wish I were Italian (yeah, I know, it’s totally a stereotype, and Cher isn’t even Italian). Attending my friend’s baby naming ceremony or another friend’s Bat Mitzvah makes me long to be Jewish. All that history!
A friend of mine from high school is just now exploring her Jewish roots after spending time as both an agnostic and a devout Christian. She suggested I pick something from my heritage and embrace it, but for god’s sake—I’m a WASP! What’s to embrace? Colonialism? Giving Native Americans small pox infested blankets? Killing the Pagans?
I flirted with being a Pagan for a while, and while a lot of the concept of worshiping the Earth appeals to me, the people who practice Paganism, at least the ones I’ve met, are a bunch of annoying flakes. If I hear another suggestion to dance around a fire “skyclad” to welcome a new season, I’ll puke. It’s just being naked in public, people!
My mother was raised as a Methodist, and with the exception of a brief tour of duty in an evangelical Christian church while I was in middle school, my mother brought me up Methodist as well. I know that going to church is not for me any longer, but I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what I did get out of all those days of Sunday School and listening to sermons.
As a kid, I loved Sunday School. I liked my teachers, and I enjoyed the “youth activities” we did, such as having a slumber party/starve-in to raise money for hungry people around the world (we locked ourselves in the church and didn’t eat and played games until we all passed out from hunger—we took pledges from people based on how long we could hold out). I feel like I did learn some things in church about compassion and caring and viewing the world as larger than just me, my family, my town.
Oh, and the singing. I loved being in choir, I loved singing hymns, I loved that silly thing Methodists (and some others, I’m told) sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow…” Getting a solo in the church choir was a dream come true, something I strived for, learned to be proud of.
My spiritual center now lies in the rooms of recovery, where we all are free to believe what and how we want. If only we sang! Well, maybe not. Singing alcoholics…hmmm, not so much.
But my children won’t get out of meetings what I do, even if they attend with me on a regular basis and hang out with other recovering adults. They won’t get that sense of the larger world that I got through my Sunday School escapades. And they certainly won’t get to sing.
There are options, in the area I live, for a church-like experience for those of us uncomfortable with Christianity. There are the Unitarians, who as far as I can tell have a fast and loose general belief in God, and are very politically active. There are a lot of Quakers in my town, and the same can be said for them, but they don’t, as far as I know, ever sing.
While I’d love my children to get the positive aspects of this stuff, there were negative aspects too. Like my Sunday School teacher who asked us if we’d heard about a woman being raped at the local library. When we said we had (we were all in 8th grade, and it was BIG news in our area), she proceeded to tell us, solemnly, that the reason it happened was because the woman was wearing a see-through shirt.
There was also the mandate that all the children had to go and say hello to Paul, the quadriplegic, every week before services started. While I didn’t mind, surely he must have hated to have to chat politely each week with a parade of small children. It feels like pandering, now, in retrospect.
The only other thing from my childhood that provided a sense of both community and the world at large was folk music. My mom was a hippie, and a folk singer, and some of my fondest childhood memories are from watching her perform and from all the various concerts we attended, like Buffy Saint-Marie; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Pete Seeger. I got so much out of those! Besides the fact that these performers were political activists, they always did something special for children, and there was more of that singing in public! I just loved it as a kid.
While I’m sure I can scrounge up some concerts to attend, I’ll have to do it without my darling husband. My mother and I took him to one Peter, Paul and Mary concert and he wandered through the crowds alternately asking, “Who here voted for Bush [Bush 1, that is]?” or “Who’s got the acid?” His parents voted for Nixon, so he doesn’t have a lot of, er, respect for the whole folk music thing. So unless they did up Woody Guthrie, he won’t be joining me at any concerts.
I’m in a quandary about all this stuff. I’d love to hear what you’ve done. Let me know, will ya?
