My mother, and the coming war against men

Marge Wold, with creatures

My mother died a few weeks ago, and, since then, stories of my life with her have come bubbling up. She, like me, wanted to do everything, to create everything. She was fiercely ambitious and trained me to be the same, with the good and bad attendant: all the achievements and all the dissatisfactions.  A few weeks before she died, she wheeled herself to her neighbor's, told him she wanted to talk, and announced: "I'm 95 and I haven't accomplished anything." This from a woman who wrote ten or so books, speechified throughout the world, was the goto troubleshooter for Lutheran churches, who founded day nurseries across the country for newly single working mothers, who raised five children, and who, when the family bought a silent 8mm camera, immediately wrote a wordless story and had me and my dog at the time act it out in the sprawling parsonage in Grand Forks ND. 

But one of my oldest and most favorite stories is of the time she sat me down, when I was about ten years old, and told me that, one day - and I suppose I assumed that that day was fast approaching - women would have to take up arms against men, this to right the many wrongs of the many millennia of the many oppressions. I knew that most wars are won by attrition, and that there are more women than men, so I resigned myself to being on the losing side, and would even now be willing to surrender if asked nicely, if we could once again find those Viking soldiers buried with their sword and shield so long mis-gender-identified, but no such battle has come, no such victory, and we see that, even today, women find themselves living in a world of shit. 

My Mother

I went to the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary yesterday to experience the laudation of my mother, who served back in the 80s as the chairman of the board of directors, the first and only woman to hold the position as evidenced by the photo panel to the left. It was an overflowing of love for her, mostly by women, mostly - of course - Lutheran women of faith. My mother was an ardent and sometimes radical Feminist, radicalized by crashing into the walls of the prison into which women had been placed (and to a fortunately less extent still are) by the American Culture and the Church, which lagged even further behind the culture and was a majorly patriarchal institution. My favorite story was that she was told she couldn't teach the Bible, as that was reserved for men, although she could be a missionary and teach the Bible to third-worlders, a statement that masterfully wraps together the worst of sexism and racism into one big lump. But, coming from inside that world, she fought for equal representation for women, for the ordination of women, and, even more shockingly for the time, the same for women of all sexual orientations.

I had to tell a story or two, and one was the story about the time she told me that women "might have to take up arms against men" which made a strong impression on my tween brain, especially as I was a member of the male species at the time. We used to have theological discussions late into the night, where she would point out the particular Hebrew word for the divine with a feminine ending, and the fact that maybe one of Paul's letters was written by a female disciple, and ask me whether the resurrected Christ first showed himself to a man or a woman. But she was very practical in the real world, starting day nurseries in all the churches she served, a place for working women to leave their children, at a time when people spoke out against the idea of a working woman, using the same arguments we hear today against the latest movements towards equality: that it would destroy the family, destroy traditions, destroy the nation. Traditions, we should always remember, are just things that happened in the past, and just having happened in the past carries no weight.

Unfortunately, at 92, half-blind and crippled with Parkinson's, she couldn't make it, so her most atheist son was sent as a representative, a sheep or wolf among the group of older, smart, attractive and somewhat maternal-to-me women.  I did sing the hymns heartily and even took communion for the first time in decades, as I believe in religion-as-performance & religion as one of the biggest collaborative artworks ever. Yes, it is the opiate of the people, but it stands there along with all other entertainment, no worse, with TV and video games and the perils of the Interweb.