root cuttings

I had a profound shock tonight.

My grandmothers are troublesome figures in my life. One of them is a sociopathic ex-prostitute of aristocratic extraction who I've never met, but whose features I see echoed in my own--survivor of a brutal military occupation, bitter immigrant wife of a never-present serviceman, badly-treated as a sufferer of bipolar disorder the doctors didn't know how to properly care for. I have never met her, since my infancy, and her only contact with my immediate family is the every-few-years call when she tries to get my mother in on an insurance scam or bilk her out of money. In my difficulties with my own mother, I often hear hers speaking through her. She has become something of a legend--fascinating, terrifying, the source of a goodly amount of the beauty and madness in my own veins, a woman who took up with sea-captains and movie stars and never managed to look after her own children.

And then there's my father's mother, who I grew up knowing, and removed contact with voluntarily. She is a Democrat only by virtue of her Judaism, it always seemed to me--old-fashioned, entitled, classist, racist. She speaks to people of color like children, sends back food three times, told my father in his youth that he might be permitted to date a non-Jewish girl, but never a black one. She travels on cruises and then complains when foreign countries won't speak English and serve food bland enough for her liking. Her treatment of my mother--the brown Catholic working-class woman my father brought home after his first near-arranged marriage failed--has been, by all accounts, years upon years of nastiness, dismissiveness, and passive-aggressive cruelty. I was always surprised when reminded that she had had a career before she stopped to mother full-time--as, of all things, a doctor, which is impressive for the day and age in question. She has softened some, with the years--accepted that her grandchildren are not white, accepted that her daughter-in-law is here to stay, accepted her own frailty--but some years ago, when I was finally old enough to see her behavior as anything but normal-and-acceptable, I disengaged. I removed myself from her sphere.

My father outed me to the extended family the other day, starting with her. By all accounts, she wasn't even surprised. She was kind, compassionate even--and then the shock.
My grandmother, in all of her socially-conservative, old-fashioned everything, was not just any doctor--she was a doctor in women's health and, moreover, the doctor the queers went to.
She had a lesbian patient who she treated--and this was rare in that place and time--with understanding and without laying judgment, and word got out. By the time she retired, her clientele was half lesbian women.

My grandmother.

I was going to write about my connections to the women in my family; I was going to write, in grand cliched fashion, about my mother. I need to let this settle, though. I need to shift the lenses and rearrange my conception of the people my blood comes from.

I think maybe this is the point--not just in our relationships to women, or to family members, but in all of our interactions--not just to avoid forgetting, but to assume there are layers we don't know about. We don't know--especially when it comes to our elders--everywhere someone has been, everything someone has been. Sometimes they surprise us with their venom and cruelty; sometimes they shock us further with the currents of decency, or courage, or sure-sightedness, that we never thought them capable of. When we are situating ourselves--finding context, taking root, a vital project for those of us attempting to move the world--we cannot let this just sit.

We cannot ignore where we come from, and a large part of that is the people around us. And we cannot--cannot--forget where they come from.
Feminism is, as a project, about building connections and communities if it is about anything. When healthy as a movement, one of the most momentous things it does is remind us to listen to each other, to connect us in common struggles and common experiences. It connects women especially to each other by emphasizing that those connections between us matter, and that they are avenues by which we can strengthen each other and, by the slow and steady work of building communities of mutual support, change the way all of humanity moves and breathes and lives. Part of my context has been, until now, a disconnect from the women two generations back of me, because they're hard. They're problematic, they're embarrassing, they hurt. But while self-preservation matters--especially when you're talking about a con woman and a lifelong manipulator--the most problematic thing is my disconnect.

If we can learn from anyone, it's the ones that are hard. It's the ones we'd never go near if we didn't have to--like the woman who looks at my brown skin and cringes, but who I have to know because she is my father's mother--like the woman who would rob me blind and then hex me for good measure, but who I still hope to someday meet, because she is my mother's mother--who present the most opportunity to challenge that reflex to judge, to sneer, to say no, not for me. If they weren't my grandmothers, it would be too easy to cross the street when I see them coming, to duck away and surround myself only with the people who treat me well and make sense to me. It would be too easy to let them be caricatures who never put themselves on the line to care for people they didn't have to, who never made great sacrifices in an unknown land to give opportunities to the same children they heaped abuse on.

We have to look after ourselves, of course. But we have to look after each other, too. If that woman can look at me and still see granddaughter, how can I look at her and see nothing but bigot? In examining these connections, it becomes clear that it's too easy an impulse to deny these people their complicatedness. And isn't that what we're supposed to be working against, in the fight for social justice and equality? The impulse to make simple cardboard cutouts of people and not engage with their wholeness, their difficulty, their own voices, no matter how hard those voices are to hear? It is imperative that we try to forgive the fact that not only does the world put us in places that hurt, but that sometimes those doing the hurting are the ones who are supposed to love us. To remember that even those who stand in our way have stories, and those stories come back around and become part of our history, too.

It's hard to keep in mind that we're all family here. It's hard to look out at the seething mass of humanity and see them all as unavoidable, as hitched and bound to us, as people who, in the end, we cannot just cross the street to avoid. We can turn around and around and around, but the fact of the matter is, people are complicated, and their histories tie to ours, the good parts and the awful, and they aren't just going away. I can hardly think of a better reminder than the ones we're supposed to call family by default, even the ones who don't treat us like family ought to. We don't have to welcome them in just yet, but we have to engage. We have to let them be messy and real. This is radical love. This is the love that acknowledges that we are connected whether we like it or not. It's not about redemption, or deserving, or who's good and bad; it's not about good deeds, or courage in adversity, excusing cruelty and bigotry. It's just about letting it be more complicated than that, and insisting on caring.

Let people surprise you. Take another look.