During the two decades of my childhood, the glass ceiling was cracking and being shattered, and mothers suffering economic distress found it easier to become working parents. It took a while for the daycare and educational industry to fill the void, and many of us missed out on learning not only the domestic arts, but on what it takes to be a family. Our model was a latchkey, an empty house, a frozen dinner, and arguing with siblings over who got to pick the next TV show.
My folks tried to make good choices, but their childhoods had been so different from ours, they didn't understand the challenges and couldn't foresee the results. Some of their parental decrees were slingstones at the Goliath of the junk food and television marketing industries; for years at a time, we wouldn't own a TV after the old one broke down, and one infamous weekend we switched over completely to a "health food" diet. In those days this meant granola for breakfast, carob chips in our cookies, and no soda pop in the house. I was forced to spend my allowance on bags of candy at the drug store, half of which would be consumed on the walk home. Our parents meant well, but they had no idea what they were up against.
I was born at the tail end of the Baby Boom; on some charts I'm even a member of the Baby Bust. Schools closed behind me, and Home Economics classes were phased out of the curriculum as I passed through. One year in middle school I struggled (and failed) to sew a shirt and had to be shown how to dry dishes by hand. It was with great surprise I discovered (four years later when I had to make my own choir performance dress) that my mother knew how to sew.
Many sacrifices were made so that young women my age would have the opportunities our mothers and grandmothers did not. A generation of us did gain the whole business world but we lost our domestic souls, and when I started to seek what had been lost to me, there was no one to teach me about family life except the paper mothers.
I became an avid reader the Christmas my mother gave me Little House on the Prairie, when I was eight years old. This series about a pioneer family who worked hard and always stayed together was my first family training manual. Later, my mother passed on three books from her own childhood: Little Women, Pollyanna, and The Secret Garden. It was a good thing we didn't have TV that year, as it turns out, or I might never have opened the covers of these derelict and almost forgotten treasures. These falling-apart books by long-dead female authors (Louisa May Alcott, Eleanor H. Porter, and Frances H. Burnett, respectively) opened further this world of family love, even when the heroines are orphans. From the faded ink on their age-stained pages I learned that loss and loneliness aren't triumphant over the desire to love and be loved; that a good attitude and sheer determination to forge ahead regardless of the emotion du jour is the rocket fuel I need to get off the ground and keep moving forward.
The exercise of will over emotion: this was my first burn.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Rocket dream
When I was 12 or 13 (in the early 70's), I dreamed that I was sitting on the back of a launching rocket, and I rode it until I neared the point of no return. I had to decide if I would continue riding that rocket into the unknown, or return to earth. I chose to return to earth.
I suppose I felt unready to venture into the unknown. I don't know if that was the right or wrong choice to make in my dream, but rockets have been a metaphor and marker of change in my life since then. We who grew up in the 60's and 70's knew that rockets were risky conveyances that traveled (if successful) to terra incognita, but could also end up marking the end of human lives in fire or ice or a fountain of smoke trails.
On November 12, 1981, I met my future husband at 4 a.m. in the dormitory lounge, waiting with a few other rocket junkies to watch the second flight of the space shuttle Columbia. I was really there only because my roommate's father was in aerospace tech and had worked on this mission, and she wanted company as she watched. My future husband was there because he, like so many other young men of his age, had wanted to be an astronaut, and was a fan of all things NASA. She had Columbia posters on her wall...he had NASA posters of the planets on his. Every evening we geeky types gathered around the lounge TV to watch original Star Trek episodes before dinner, and play "name that episode by the first three seconds of the opening scene." Though not a true geek myself, I was surrounded on all sides by "space, the final frontier," and what's in it, and how to get there.
A few years after we were married, the shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, encouraging even more the fear of the unknown that was in me. With other newspaper employees gathered in horror around the TV, I watched the cascading plumes of smoke arc and fall, and that white fountain is etched forever into my memory. My fondness for the earth and the gravity that keeps me bound to it increased. It would (and did) take an awful lot of thrust to get me to leave the familiar behind.
My husband, however, found an outlet for his inner astronaut: High power rocketry. I was in my childbearing years and had less interest in trekking to the desert for rocket launches than I did in maintaining my sanity by keeping to a regular schedule, but we took a few trips and I wish now that we had taken more. They are among our family's treasured memories. Rockets went up, they came down, they cato'd (catostrophic failure), but no one was hurt, no one left the earth, and a good time was usually had by all.
Rockets are less of a presence and more of a metaphor in my life these days. There are unbuilt rocket kits in the basement, and the shuttle launches come and go with little fanfare now. But the metaphor still stands; as a dedicated subscriber to entropy, I find my life degrades into chaos without a good "burn" now and then to put me back on course. My family dreads these burns, sudden interests and passions that interfere with their comfort or deprive them of my presence (both physical and emotional) and seem generally wacky and without reason or purpose to them. They rarely last more than a year or two and burn themselves out when the fuel of interest is exhausted, leaving me humbled, shaky, and inclined again to inertia, until the gravity of some planetary (or human) body bends my trajectory off course, and it's time for another burn.
This blog is a place to record some of those "burns" and what they've taught me, how they've changed me, and where (I think) they're taking me.
I suppose I felt unready to venture into the unknown. I don't know if that was the right or wrong choice to make in my dream, but rockets have been a metaphor and marker of change in my life since then. We who grew up in the 60's and 70's knew that rockets were risky conveyances that traveled (if successful) to terra incognita, but could also end up marking the end of human lives in fire or ice or a fountain of smoke trails.
On November 12, 1981, I met my future husband at 4 a.m. in the dormitory lounge, waiting with a few other rocket junkies to watch the second flight of the space shuttle Columbia. I was really there only because my roommate's father was in aerospace tech and had worked on this mission, and she wanted company as she watched. My future husband was there because he, like so many other young men of his age, had wanted to be an astronaut, and was a fan of all things NASA. She had Columbia posters on her wall...he had NASA posters of the planets on his. Every evening we geeky types gathered around the lounge TV to watch original Star Trek episodes before dinner, and play "name that episode by the first three seconds of the opening scene." Though not a true geek myself, I was surrounded on all sides by "space, the final frontier," and what's in it, and how to get there.
A few years after we were married, the shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, encouraging even more the fear of the unknown that was in me. With other newspaper employees gathered in horror around the TV, I watched the cascading plumes of smoke arc and fall, and that white fountain is etched forever into my memory. My fondness for the earth and the gravity that keeps me bound to it increased. It would (and did) take an awful lot of thrust to get me to leave the familiar behind.
My husband, however, found an outlet for his inner astronaut: High power rocketry. I was in my childbearing years and had less interest in trekking to the desert for rocket launches than I did in maintaining my sanity by keeping to a regular schedule, but we took a few trips and I wish now that we had taken more. They are among our family's treasured memories. Rockets went up, they came down, they cato'd (catostrophic failure), but no one was hurt, no one left the earth, and a good time was usually had by all.
Rockets are less of a presence and more of a metaphor in my life these days. There are unbuilt rocket kits in the basement, and the shuttle launches come and go with little fanfare now. But the metaphor still stands; as a dedicated subscriber to entropy, I find my life degrades into chaos without a good "burn" now and then to put me back on course. My family dreads these burns, sudden interests and passions that interfere with their comfort or deprive them of my presence (both physical and emotional) and seem generally wacky and without reason or purpose to them. They rarely last more than a year or two and burn themselves out when the fuel of interest is exhausted, leaving me humbled, shaky, and inclined again to inertia, until the gravity of some planetary (or human) body bends my trajectory off course, and it's time for another burn.
This blog is a place to record some of those "burns" and what they've taught me, how they've changed me, and where (I think) they're taking me.
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