Blog Archives

Day 21 - Softening

2/24/2020

“Don’t write about anything you haven’t processed first,” says Megan Macedo, our writing guru. Twenty-one days ago, when I began this blog challenge with Megan, I thought that picking "Processing" as a theme would be a natural to tie into my work as an Alexander Technique teacher. By choosing "Thought, Experience, Action" as the subtitle, I could neatly connect Experience with awareness, Thought with pausing (or inhibition) and Action with direction. Because of the prompts I was given to write on in the challenge, however, things got deeply personal very fast. Which was actually great. If I am working on processing, where else can I start but with my own life, my own experiences?

The days have flown as the writing flowed. Where I went is not where I thought I’d go, but I went there anyway. (That seems to be an apt metaphor for my life in general.) I have certainly experienced, sat with and acted on each of the situations I wrote about in this series. Some of them more than once, because habitual behavior dies hard. In last year’s series on the Power of Habit, I wrote an entire blog post on the idea of the spiral and how things come back around in our lives on different levels of intensity. I still believe that strongly, and now I can see how that spiral nature also applies to situations and memories I have previously processed.

A group photo from our recent vacation in India. I came home from the trip and started the blog challenge 2 days later.

Things definitely come around again. For example, I recently “met my grandmother” on a 2-week vacation. In a small group, it’s kind of hard to avoid someone you take an instant dislike to, especially when you’re on vacation and you don’t want to think about stuff like this and you don’t even know why this person bothers you so much. Yet, she bothered me. In her simply being herself, I had my buttons pushed. I wish I could tell you that I took all the time I needed to process the “why” of this on the trip, but I didn’t. I needed to come home to realize that each time my grandmother’s personality came out in her, I wanted to flee. Then, I learned something significant as she shared with us post-trip what was going on at home for her. Oh, my. I softened my heart and I was able to see it all – as well as have an incredible amount of empathy for both of us. I wish I had been able to do this as we traveled, but better late than never. It will change our meetings from here on out for the better.

When I meet a new Alexander student for the first time, I consciously work on softening my heart. I need to listen with full presence, to tune into what they are saying aloud and what their bodies are saying for them. It turned out that a large part of my work in this series was softening for myself, for my inner wounded child. Through my writing, I was able to soften and listen to what she had to say before sharing it with you. I think the series became better when I stopped worrying about my theme and just starting writing, letting the memories and emotions flow. My hope is that I’ll be able to take what I’ve learned back to my work, to my Alexander Technique students. To help them listen for their inner children and how they manifest in our bodies as well as our minds. Thank you for listening to both of us on this journey.

1 Comment

Day 20 - Pregnant Pauses

2/21/2020

1 Comment

When I was pregnant, sometimes the nine months seemed to drag on interminably. Would this ever end? Would I ever be able to go more than an hour without needing to pee again? What was my life going to be like when the baby finally got here?

Simultaneously, some days seemed to simply fly by in excitement. There was a nursery to decorate, there were baby showers to plan, there were cute clothes to buy. There were lots and lots of doctor’s visits, and copious amounts of food to cook for myself. The dichotomy between time sped up and time slowed down was dizzying, and when coupled with the massive changes inside my body and out it was quite the experience. It’s no wonder pregnant women are moody.

My last day of pregnancy. The room was ready and so was I!

My own experience with pregnancy was somewhat challenging due to my hypermobility. I wish I could tell you I had that blissful experience some women describe, but I didn’t. It was mostly painful. Everything dislocated all the time. My back was out more than it was in. I was glad when it was over and I could get my body back from the grip of pregnancy hormones. Yet, I found myself missing the time I’d set aside to dream, to think about my baby and who and what she’d be.

Pregnancy, like no other time in our lives, is the perfect time for processing. After all, what is the mother’s body doing for those 9 months other than processing? A baby comes from a brief, lovely experience, and then becomes no more than a thought for a few months. The action begins with the first kick inside and culminates with the tumultuous arrival of a new life in the world. And then everything changes again.

Once I entered back into the world as a new mother, there was no time for processing anything for next several years. Life became a whirlwind of activity with a new focus and a new priority, leaving little time to think about anything other than what was on tomorrow’s schedule.

Looking back, I wish I had then the skills I learned later about pausing, slowing down, being in the moment. I wish I had spent more time present each day, instead of hurrying on to the next thing. I do remember that precious sweet baby smell and slowing down to inhale it. I remember the pleasure of nursing and holding a sleeping child in my arms.

Remembering that time in my life again now, over 30 years later, is interesting. Much of the day to day that seemed so important has faded with time. Emotions I processed about young motherhood in my forties surface differently in my 60s. The wisdom gained in life makes all that seemed like a crisis then so much more manageable now. I think I finally understand the knowing smiles the older women in my life gave me back then when they told me to stop worrying. If only I’d known how.

1 Comment

Day 19 - An Artist's Manifesto

2/20/2020

6 Comments

We were the Arts Department Nerds. Most of us considered ourselves completely un-cool unless we were on stage. We were the singers of songs, the players of melodies, the builders of sets. We knew all the secret passageways in the auditorium. We spent hours in practice rooms. We were equally at home memorizing every note of the new Steven Schwartz musical as we were analyzing the authentic cadence in the middle of Beethoven’s bridge. Led by inspired teachers, we were learning the theory behind the magic. It was thrilling, like being given the key to a treasure chest. We began to understand that in those moments of well-processed performance, we were something bigger than ourselves.

We considered ourselves klutzes. We didn’t like to sweat. While the jocks were outside running laps and bouncing balls to the cheerleader’s chants, we were more likely to be found lying down on the stage as our drama teacher encouraged us to imagine ourselves “floating on a velvet cloud.” Outside of school, we sometimes gathered to play touch football or kickball, but those games usually disintegrated into a laughing puppy pile without a clear winner or loser.

Competition, of course, reared its head during auditions for solos or parts in plays. Cast lists would be posted, tears would be shed – but then – it was back to the community of the whole, for the integrity of a performance would rely on all of us, working together. It was never about one person being better than everyone else, just someone being better for a part.

Top Row - Scenes from our production of Godspell at the Nanuet Mall, Diane Robinson musical director
Bottom Row - L - Godspell. Center - The Ascot Race from My Fair Lady. Right - Doug Austin, drama director, inspiring a cast.

Due to our unique proximity to the New York theater scene of the 70s, we not only could sing every word of “A Chorus Line” to the original cast album, we saw the original cast on Broadway. Twice. We were exposed to the beginnings of color-blind casting, to shows that openly explored alternative sexuality and we soaked it all up like sponges. We lived for the big finale where everyone holds hands and sings. If you shared our values, you were welcome to be with us. Our group was multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious (or not). Sexuality was fluid. We coupled and un-coupled and no one cared as long the whole remained. Sometimes we fought hard to remain in our little bubble, outside the cultural norms of our community.

The jocks and the prom queens may have run the rest of the school, but we ran the Arts wing. We knew we were not always understood, but by the magic that music and theater bring, we were not only tolerated, we were appreciated by audiences of our peers and the community at large.

Even today, we find ourselves by and large a liberal-minded group. All these years later at school reunions, we still don’t fit in. If anything, our peers who stayed in our town have become increasingly ideologically conservative, creating more of a divide in our shared experiences. No matter. We do many things for a living now and are scattered all over the world, but we are the dreamers of dreams, the singers of songs, the players of melodies. We unabashedly and proudly believe in the ability of the arts to heal the world.

6 Comments

Day 18 - Daily Connections

2/19/2020

2 Comments

Every day when I would get off the school bus, my mother would be waiting for me in the kitchen with a cup of tea and some cookies. We’d sit down together, drink our tea, and talk about our day. This small, twenty-minute pause and re-entry into my home gave me time to process my day aloud, get mentally ready to do my homework, and connect with my mother before she went on to cook dinner.

When I became a mother myself, I thought often about what I missed most about my own mother. This little tea ritual was on the top of the list. I looked at my beautiful infant daughter and promised us both that we’d do the same thing.

Fast forward a few years and this was not so easy. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, I was not. I’d pick my daughter up from after-school care, we’d drive home and there was no time to sit down for a leisurely cup of tea at 5 pm. We could do it in the summers, when I wasn’t working and it was afternoon snack time. It became clear that for the rest of the year we were going to have to find something else.

It turned out that I didn’t have to “find” anything, our daily together time was right in front of me. In the car. My daughter attended the school where I taught, so each day we would carpool together in and back. When she was in lower school, I had the advantage of working with her teachers. In the faculty room each day I would get treated to anecdotes about what my daughter had said or done, so I had an “advance briefing.” I’d find a way to bring up what I knew about her day through questions that got her to tell me the story on the way home, and I had the delightful experience of hearing about her day from both an adult and a child’s perspective. It quickly became my favorite part of our day together.

A favorite annual Mother/Daughter activity that usually involved tea - decorating Gingerbread Houses with Maria Springer.

As my daughter moved into middle and upper school, our car talks were a lifeline. There was something about not having to look at each other – no eye contact – that allowed honest feelings to flow in the car in a way we couldn’t manage anywhere else. Because we’d spent years creating a safe space in which to share with each other, there was seldom any awkwardness about it – we just started talking.

When my daughter started driving herself to school her senior year, I was very sad. I knew it was all part of growing up, and that soon she’d be off at college, but I wasn’t as ready to let go of our car-time as I thought I’d be. I remembered sobbing the first time 4-year-old Anne got out of the car by herself at day care and told me not to walk her in. I felt the strong resonance of that memory in my heart. I’d raised a magnificent, independent person. She was ready to go. It was I who was not ready for her to leave. Time to do the mother’s work of letting go, yet again.

Now, through the wonders of technology, we text almost every day. And, come to think of it, it’s usually around 4 pm.

2 Comments

Day 17 - Life as a Conflict Avoider

2/17/2020

0 Comments

“Here comes the teacher’s pet! Always has the right answer! Look at her with those glasses. Hey, how’s it feel to have the whole class hate you?”

It felt awful, frankly. My fourth-grade homeroom was the worst ever, and the year I learned a lot about how to physically avoid a conflict. Mental conflict avoidance, well, that came easily. Remember, I never saw my parents have an argument, so arguments scared me. A lot. This year in school, however, was my first experience with physical, in your face, verbal abuse. I hated it. My inexperienced teacher did nothing to stop it, and I felt powerless. We were in a different, bigger school now from my little safe primary school. A lot of families were moving up to suburbs like Suffern from New York City in those days to escape the increasing violence. My new classmates were tough, street smart kids and they bonded over making mincemeat out of me. I found myself taking roundabout routes to the classroom so they wouldn’t be waiting for me in a hallway where teachers were out of earshot. I spent a lot of time planning escape routes, and where to play on the playground with my old friends to avoid the bullies. I would replay scenes over and over in my mind, making the scenario worse and worse.

Many years later I realized that that year of torture set me up for the rest of my life. It was far less risky to avoid a fight, to let someone else win, to simply leave if someone didn’t like me, or to apologize. If I couldn’t express my opinion calmly, or better, with a laugh to disarm people, then I didn’t do it at all. Only with my really good friends who I trusted implicitly did I feel I could argue. A lot of what I had to say came out sideways, which girlfriends generally understood.

In college, I discovered that I loved having guys as friends. There was something really refreshing about their directness. They said exactly what they thought. I admired their ease with anger. Wow, this was simple compared to talking with other women! There was a time when the bulk of my friends were men, and I avoided the complications of women friends.

Then, I married my first husband and things got very, very confusing. In fact, all we did was argue. I quickly learned that if I went for his bait, I couldn’t win. My response became not to fight. To let him be “right.” To stuff my feelings. To be angry sideways. Again. I knew this pattern intimately and I fell right into it. We had seven years of trying to work it out before we began therapy and, finally the scales started to fall off my eyes.

When I started studying the Alexander Technique, it all began to make sense to me as I processed through that lens. I finally faced up to how being a conflict avoider kept me from being present. Always worrying about what might happen next, stuffing my feelings to keep the peace and running out of the way to avoid potential conflict does not allow a person to live in the “now.” Life is worth the risk of being present, of learning to deal with the situation I am in, in sitting with and processing difficult emotions. When I stay with myself instead of running away, I am a complete and authentic person.

If you've been enjoying my blog series and you have had your curiosity peaked about the Alexander Technique, why not come in for a lesson with me and find out more about it? I'd enjoy the process of discovering awareness, ease and grounded presence with you, as well as helping you with any activities in your life that are causing you physical discomfort. Give me a call at 678-720-8717, or drop me an email here.

0 Comments

Day 16 - Working for Women

2/17/2020

0 Comments

I grew up in a household of strong women, and my mother encouraged me to do anything I wanted to – not to limit my career by gender. She was fairly disappointed when I decided to become a teacher. She would have liked me to think bigger than a traditional woman’s job – but teaching was all I wanted to do.

On the way, however, I had some pretty interesting workplace experiences. My first job was at Pine Knoll Nurseries in Suffern, NY. I worked for the female accountant as a bookkeeper, adding rows of figures after school. Eventually I got scooped up out of there by the crazy, strong, wonderful Japanese florist named Mieko, who opened her own flower shop and took me with her. Mieko was amazing. Looking back, she was a bit like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. She scared her new customers (and me, initially) half to death, until she’d grilled you enough to decide she wanted your business. And then a better florist and boss you’d never seen. Her work was legendary in our area. I gratefully worked for her through my senior year of high school and for many summers thereafter.

In college, I worked for Paige’s Music – a huge Indianapolis-based music distribution company – in their music education department. There were a lot of men at Paige’s, particularly in the band department, but I reported to a woman. I came close to eschewing teaching and staying there to travel and give music education workshops at conferences, but my dream called.

I taught elementary music at St Paul’s School in Baltimore, where I stayed for the next 25 years. I worked under 3 female principals, and 3 male headmasters – but except for salary negotiations, 90% of my dealings were with the principals. After about 10 years there I made a conscious decision that I liked working with and for women. I heard my friends complaining in the business world about how hard it was to work for men, to get time off for family leave. I never had those issues. I was chronically underpaid, but it was worth it for the support I received.

Around the same time I switched all my doctors to females. I supported women-owned businesses whenever possible. I set about raising a strong daughter, making a point of giving her female-centric books to read full of strong heroines. Three female colleagues and I started a music teacher training program together.

Looking back, this was also the time period of my lowest sense of self-worth. I questioned myself constantly and needed to be “right” to feel safe and strong in my own life. Surrounding myself with other strong, confident women gave me role models and allowed me to not have to defend myself in a world of men. I was busy enough doing that at home, where every decision I made was usually deemed “wrong.” When that marriage ended, I finally understood the words of my therapist, who said “You can be right, or you can be in a relationship.”

Various moments from the end of my school teaching career, and the start of my Kodály teacher training programs.

Now, I work for myself. I direct a summer program for Kodály music teachers, and my university contact is a woman. I run my own business teaching Alexander Technique and piano lessons, out of a healing arts center owned by a woman. I am proud to have this legacy and to have supported and had the support of women for all these years. I no longer feel like I am running away from the world of men, but instead I can face it head on as a strong, experienced woman, confident in my own self-esteem.

0 Comments

Day 15 - Paths to Independence

2/14/2020

0 Comments

“I got a letter from Marie.”
“Oh, how is she doing?”
“Well, she and The Doctor are headed off on some cruise again.”

Growing up, my great-aunt Marie was a shadowy, mysterious glamour figure in my life. All I knew was that my grandmother and great-aunts envied both her beauty and her money. She was the eldest of my grandfather’s 9 siblings, and the only one to have moved away from our little corner of New York state – all the way to exotic northern California! Occasionally a present for me would arrive, accompanied by a scented note in Aunt Marie’s spidery handwriting. When I’d ask about it, my mother said presents came because my grandfather was Marie’s favorite baby brother.

What no one spoke about was that Marie and Pops (eldest daughter and youngest son) were the only two siblings who had broken out of their lower middle-class upbringing. They’d taken very different, gender-based paths to success. My grandfather worked hard to slowly rise up the corporate ladder. Marie “married up.” As a young woman, she worked in our new hospital and caught the eye of one of the founding doctors. I learned later that it was quite the scandal at the time, the rich older doctor leaving his wife to marry the beautiful girl from the other side of the tracks. Such a scandal, in fact, that when The Doctor was offered a job in Oakland, he took it and away they went. This left the rest of the family to imagine Marie in her furs, living a life of luxury with a wealthy man 20 years her senior.

The other seven siblings married, had families and worked as bus drivers, small-scale farmers, merchants - the kinds of jobs that keep a community running. They lived lives with little room for luxury. My grandfather, on the other hand, retired as a bank Vice President. There were nice cars, golf vacations and, an eventual college education for me. In the rest of the family there was struggling to make ends meet, genetic obesity, diabetes, and even epilepsy. Despite the differences in their lives, the siblings relied on my grandfather for advice, and he was their executor as he gradually outlived them all.

The Rosenbrock siblings at a family reunion in 1972. From L to R - Top Row: Grace, Herman, Lilian. Bottom Row: Barbara, Ken. Missing: Marie. Deceased: Emmet, Fred, Alice and unnamed twins who died in infancy.

At family gatherings, no one talked about anything that wasn’t status quo, other than in whispers away from the children. So what was life like for Marie, living so far away, so removed from her close-knit family?

As a young woman, I found out. I was accepted to a graduate program at Holy Names College in Oakland, California. I went to meet the famous Aunt Marie. At this point, she was in her 90s, childless, and The Doctor was long ago deceased. I had no idea what I would find. Expecting a mansion, I was shocked when the taxi pulled up in a shabby neighborhood of small 1920s one-story bungalows. Was I in the right place?

I was indeed, and Marie was delightful. She made us tea and regaled me with stories of her many travels with The Doctor. They’d done very well for their day, but the picture of flaunted wealth my grandmother had painted was clearly not true. They’d lived in this little house since it was built. Sadly, drugs were changing Marie’s neighborhood for the worse. She was fearful, but she had good neighbors who remained to take care of her. I visited her several times during the year I lived there, and it was always the same – the frail, birdlike woman who had married for love and moved away to create a new life, happily sharing stories and tea with her great-niece from afar.

Marie's house, and a visit with my parents about 5 years before my move to Oakland.

When Marie passed away a few years later, she left me some money – enough for the down payment on my first house. I never expected that, but I was incredibly grateful for the gift that arrived at exactly the right time. In retrospect, I am more grateful for the opportunity to have met someone who courageously stepped outside the family box, who missed them but never looked back while following her own path. Our instantaneous connection remains and continues to lovingly inspire my own journey.

0 Comments

Day 14 - From Loss to Resilience

2/13/2020

0 Comments

A good friend left me a comment on my blog post the other day. She said, “Your writing is all about loss and resilience.” I was delighted to feel so “seen.” Not only was that a lovely compliment, it is the heart of my life’s work.

When I was nearing the end of therapy in my forties I literally used to say, “Loss is my issue.” At that point I’d dealt with the death of my mother at 26, the death of my grandmother 8 years later, almost losing my baby daughter to SIDS, the breakup of my first marriage, and finally, the death of my beloved grandfather. Of my little family of onlies, the only elder I had left was my father, and we had never been as close as I would have liked. I understood loss intimately.

In those days I never thought about myself as resilient. I knew I had to be strong to take care of my daughter as a single mom, and to keep my job for our income. I just put one foot in front of the other for as long as it took to come out on the other side of each wave of loss that hit me. I cried a lot and tried to be patient with myself to not rush the process of healing.

I’ve written extensively about all the forces that caused me to undertake my Alexander Technique training. Perhaps the most important thing I learned there was to value my own self-worth and to discover that yes, I am a very resilient person. Inside of me there is a well of strength and purpose that sees me through a crisis. All of my experiences with processing loss have made me sensitive and open to being gentle with similar loss in others.

One of the joys of Alexander Teaching for me is putting my life skills to work in helping others. I see that my strength is in helping people gain resilience for themselves. I help people to sit with loss and fear (it’s constant companion) and learn to trust themselves again. Got a new knee? Let me help you learn to trust how to use it and walk again without old habitual patterns of protecting. Let’s find a way to release fear from your mind and get you back to ease and comfort in your body.

It’s an honor to witness growth and change in people, and to be trusted with the stories of their life experiences. The work I do is an intimate expression of caring, being-with, honoring the individual and what has brought them here, and great joy in discovering a new way of being. If you’d like to explore this path with me, please contact me and we can set up a lesson for you.

0 Comments

Day 13 - Growing Up Free-Range

2/12/2020

2 Comments

I was part of a generation of Free Range Kids. I grew up at a time when children went anywhere and everywhere in the neighborhood by themselves. At first we walked, but then bicycles gave us a wider range and even more freedom to explore our own neighborhoods and beyond.

“Go outside and play” was perhaps the number one parental command. So, we did. Children who didn’t do this were talked about behind their backs, worried about by other parents. The cultural norm at that time was to get as much fresh air as possible while giving our stay-at-home moms some space and time away from children.

My mother had a large brass bell hanging on our back porch. When she rang it hard, I could hear it throughout my acceptable play range in the neighborhood. The bell’s signal was clear – “Robbin, come home NOW.” I never disobeyed, for to do so would have limited my freedom. In summers I’d go home for lunch or dinner and then be right back out there.

My neighborhood of tract houses meandered up a long hill, with two main roads in a V shape which came together at the bottom of the hill and connected by side streets of increasing width as you traveled up the hillside. I lived about a third of the way up the hill on the left side of the V. We had a side street in front of our house, and that’s where we spent a lot of time playing larger organized games like dodgeball, kickball, or softball. There was a large field at the bottom that had been cleared and dumped with fill dirt when our homes were constructed. It was the place to play if you wanted to do something outside of any parental eyes. I generally left it to the older kids smoking and drinking down there. I preferred traveling up the to the top of the hill and going to Foxwood pond. I spent many hours there watching the turtles, ducks and fish. It was full of abandoned turtles of all kinds, exotic greens from Asia, painted turtles, and even snappers. The pond was surrounded by a pretty wood where we liked to play. My friends and I jumped on skunk cabbage just to smell the acrid smells. We picked wildflowers and chased each other through the woods. We’d get home eventually. No one worried. In the winter our dads would drive us up there to ice skate when the flag was up to show it was safe.

My neighbor David Haas put together this video with footage shot by his father at Foxwood Pond. I would have been 5 during the summer scenes in 1964, and on any given day that could have been me feeding the ducks. Skip to 0:39 for the beginning of the pond scenes.

I took all of this for granted, and only took the time to process how lucky and safe I felt then when I had my own child and lived inside the city of Baltimore. There, we heard gunshots while sitting in our backyards at night. Our cars were rifled through for change. My neighbor was in her backyard with the children. Going back into her house, she discovered a man wandering around her living room! Our children never walked by themselves, and if they thought they did that was because there was a mom phone chain going on from house to house until they reached their destination. I felt badly that my daughter would never know the same freedoms I had.

Somehow, during my lifetime the cultural norms about safety have swung to the far opposite side of the pendulum. I know that a lot of bad things happened to kids, even back then, but they were the exception rather than the rule. What I mourn now is the overarching lack of trust in the fundamental goodness of all people. Children count on this to feel safe.

2 Comments

Day 12 - Love, Faith and Hope

2/11/2020

1 Comment

I despised the fake paper cross stitch pictures in my mother’s kitchen. There were three of them that she hung on the kitchen table wall in a triangle pattern – Faith, Hope and Love, with Love on the top. Every time I sat down to eat, I had to look at them because my chair faced that wall. The words burned themselves into my brain, even though there was no author citation on the “cross stitch.” I still recall exactly what they said.

There was never much of what today we call “Word Art” in my house growing up. Mostly what hung on the walls were paintings by my paternal grandmother, who preferred to paint in oils and was a bit of a folk artist, although she’d taken some classes over the years. Her best paintings were seascapes, as she lived in Maine and went often to the coast to sit and paint when the weather was good. She would freely admit that she couldn’t paint people in correct proportions, although there’s a couple of charming watercolors of me that she tried hard on when I was little.

When I was a young teen, my mother decided to redecorate the living area of the house. Out went all the cool fifties Modern furniture, like the pink boomerang shaped couch and the crescent moon lamps. In came Early American in avocado and orange. To go with the new look, my mother asked my Nana Irene to paint some new paintings for her in the Colonial style. She delivered a couple of really badly copied portraits of people in formal outfits, and a lovely still life of some oranges I enjoy having in my home today. And then my mother hit the kitchen as well. She hung colonial flowered wallpaper to replace the fifties farm scenes I’d loved as a child, and somewhere she found the awful paper cross stitch quotes in exactly the right colors to match.

This morning I finally took the time to look the quotes up. The Love quote I knew was one of my favorites from First Corinthians – “Faith, Hope, Love abide, but the greatest of these is love.” The Faith quote, I learned, was from Edna St Vincent Millay – “Faith can break the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.” Yawn. How hokey was that to a teenager? The third one, Hope, came from Alexander Pope. In the version on the wall, it had absolutely no punctuation and read “Hope springs eternal in the human breast Man never is but always to be blest.” This drove me crazy on a number of levels. Just look at all the ways you can punctuate that thing. Have fun. I also hated the idea that according to this we were NEVER blest. Say what? I live in a nice house, I have great parents, I go to an excellent school, I’m smart, I have a cute boyfriend, and you’re telling me I’m not blessed? That if I’m really lucky, I might be blessed sometime in the future?

I put up with the other two quotes, but I begged my mother for years to take that Hope quote down. We had many an existential argument over it. She liked it. I offered to actually cross stitch her a different quote about hope. Offer refused.

That quote was still hanging there years later when my father sold the house. Dad asked me if I wanted those pictures. I just laughed. I didn’t need the yellowing paper and plastic frames – all I have to do to see them is close my eyes. I’m thankful for all the love I received and the faith I learned in that little house. And I still don’t agree with Alexander Pope. I’m blessed every day I’m alive.

My grandfather's birthday. Even cynical teenagers like birthday cake.

1 Comment

<<Previous

Robbin Marcus

An occasional post from me, about stuff that interests me.

2024 blog selections: Resistance

2023 blog series:
Slow Forward

2020 blog series:
1) Processing - Experience, Thought, Action
2) Diving for Light - Shedding light on a dark time

Robbin Marcus

2019 blog series: Exploring the Power of Habit

Archives

2019 blog series:
Exploring the Power of Habit