French Friends

Navigating the Maze December 26 2009


When I turn a corner in the maze of life

And see a change approaching,

My first response is “I don’t think so!”

What if this and what if that?

What if it hurts? What if I don’t like it?

What if I change my mind?

I worry about saying “yes.”

What will I get into that will turn out wrong?

Will I find myself with no way out?

What will I regret?



But then I look the other way, comparing

Notes on saying “No,” rather than affirming “Yes.”

With “no,” I make no progress;.

I stay planted where I am, and stagnate – heavy, stuck.



It’s “Yes” that points the way to lightness, opens doors to joy,

And lets us smile as Love and Grace propel us gently on our way.

At each turn, if we pay attention, we can keep on saying “yes”--

Following our heart’s desire each moment,

As it shows the next place to turn, and then the next

Along the labyrinth’s path.



The help is there; it’s ours – but only if we will say “yes.”



Reflection

When I was in my teens, I thought I was choosing what I would be – for the rest of my life – when I would “grow up.” I believed that I would only have one chance, one choice. If I picked wrong, that was it – no u turns, no changes – no forgiveness. What a heavy burden that belief creates! Making a decision under those conditions seems virtually impossible.

In fact, belief creates reality. I did make decisions and learned fairly quickly that they weren’t infallible. Believing they should be or had to be made once and for all led to depression. My first choice had been to become a veterinarian. That desire was quickly shot down by well-meaning adults: “You can’t do that! You’re only a girl! They’ll never take you.” Naively, I believed them.

I then decided to enter the convent. The powerful women I had known, the ones that didn’t have to get permission for everything from a man, were nuns. I definitely wanted to be a powerful woman. I had been about seven when, as I watched my mother struggle under the heavy burden of trying to care for five young children – doing many loads of laundry in a wringer washer each week – I had sworn to myself, “I WILL NOT live my life as a housewife!” Going into the convent was the only practical alternative that seemed to exist.

I entered the Sisters of Mercy in September 1956, after graduating from high school in June. The first year, I loved the novelty of praying, meditating, living with other young women my age, attending college classes. The second year, the so-called “Canonical Year,” was designated as a time devoted solely to manual labor and prayer. I had never done manual labor very well. I hated it. My arms and hands were unusually weak (and still are), and I struggled to make anything come out correctly. And I also hated the restriction of not being able to look around and absorb learning about everything.

I became miserable, although I thought I was hiding it. I also became ill – my allergies escalated dramatically, and I spent a lot of time in the infirmary with horrible outbreaks of eczema accompanied by abdominal pain, feeling desperately ill, though with no plausible explanation. I was accused of being hysterical, neurotic, even “schizophrenic.” The one food that was yummy that the sisters made were homemade rolls and breads, and that’s what I was mostly eating. Of course, I now know that the increased emotional stress and increased consumption of bread were combining to exacerbate my gluten sensitivity symptoms.

I should have known, but didn’t, that ultimately the choice wasn’t up to me whether I stayed or not. I did not want to leave. I knew I didn’t want to get married (I had never had or wanted any boyfriends) and the only other option for potential life states that I knew of that was open to women was to be an “old maid” – a reject. Better to tough it out in the convent. I was told on the eve of taking first vows, that I would not be allowed to do so, and must leave that day, without saying anything to anyone. By that afternoon, my parents arrived to take me back home, – an abject failure, my hair hacked close to my skull as it needed to be under the veil I would no longer wear.

The convent had been a good solution to the fact that I did not want to stay at home with my family a moment longer than I had to. I didn’t want to go back home now, either. I was desolate, grieving the loss of my chosen life. I was deeply ashamed of my failure.

I found a job as a residential camp counselor for the summer, and was out of the house within a week. I’d never been to camp, other than a YWCA Day Camp for one season when I was 10, and which I had hated. But I told no one what had happened to me, and figured out as best I could, by observing and imitating others, how to be a camp counselor. One condition they required me to fulfill was to take lessons during the summer so that I could be certified as able to swim 100 feet. During each two week session that entire summer, I took swimming lessons with the “pollywogs” – the cutesie name the camp assigned the first graders. At the end of every two week session, the “pollywogs” all received certificates of completion; but each time I took the swimming test, they had to fish me out with a life preserver, one of those round white doughnut-shaped buoys on a rope, used along with a hook on a long handle. Embarrassing! I’ve taken swimming lessons and classes at least a half a dozen more times since then, and have never been able to swim – probably a result of my twisted back and weak arms.

I don’t remember anything else about that long, difficult summer. At least, I was able to start college as soon as the camp had ended. The sisters were kind to me in reinstating the four year scholarship I had given up to enter the convent, and I was able to live in the dorm by being a “house mother” (now called “resident assistant”) in one of the dormitories. To cover other expenses, I obtained a part-time job as an organist and choir director at my parents’ parish church, St. Martha’s. Among my college classmates were the newly professed nuns from my convent class, wearing their habits and black veils. Following directions, I never said a word to any of them. I felt a keen sense of disgrace. It was obvious that, at age 19, I’d already flubbed my chance to decide what I would be when I grew up!

I was able to finish my college credits and graduate in two years, in 1961. I was trained as a high school French teacher, but knew that I definitely didn’t want to be a teacher. I’d received a Fulbright scholarship to study in France, and left by ship from the Chelsea Piers in New York that September, at age 21, to study French literature at the University of Toulouse in southwestern France.

Ellen, then 28, had just completed her medical training in Lausanne, Switzerland, and returned to New York for her first year of internship at King’s County Hospital. I was about to embark on what became three years in France, the first two on Fulbright scholarships and the third as a teaching assistant and doctoral candidate in Applied Linguistics at the University of Nancy, in eastern France.

It was in France that I learned the benefits of accepting and saying “yes” to each moment’s opportunities – that if I did that, I would always be guided and provided for. As my first year was ending, I wrote to Indiana University to reactivate the university fellowship they had promised they would hold for me if I accepted the first Fulbright. Indiana wrote back, saying they had not held the fellowship, and that same day I received an offer from the Fulbright Commission offering me a second year scholarship in a different city, Nancy– something that was rarely offered. I was willing to stay longer in France, and my “Plan A” had just been withdrawn, so I wrote to the Fulbright Commission accepting the second year scholarship. Three days after I’d sent my acceptance to the Fulbright Commission, I received a second letter from Indiana, telling me that the first letter had been sent in error and that I did indeed still have access to the University Fellowship. I thought it over, and decided that I had been meant to stay longer in France. I negotiated with Indiana a teaching assistantship to remain available until I returned to the US to claim it, and let stand my acceptance of the second year Fulbright scholarship.

My first year in France had been my first opportunity to take stock of who I was and what direction I wished to pursue, after just barely holding things together in the wake of my rejection from the convent. I realized I was desolate and lonely, without friends in a foreign country and language. I was desperate to belong somewhere, to feel accepted somehow. Amazingly, I somehow found a sense of myself and then consciously figured out how to translate that self into French so that I could find friends who really understood me and weren’t just spending time with me because I was a fellow alien or because I was an American and they wanted to practice their English.

During the first three months of my year in Toulouse, I had become intensely ill with Hepatitis A. By the end of November, I was starting to recover physically, but had reached a psychotic level of despair. At that point, I realized I had to create a self and become integrated into a social group – it was urgent. By summer, I was ready to find friends, and moving to Nancy provided me the opportunity for a fresh start.

In Nancy, I joined a choir, which was to become a wonderful group of French friends for me. I changed majors, having decided that analyzing literature destroyed all possibility of enjoying it. I combined my interests in psychology, which I’d read but never had a chance to study, and language, and started a French doctorate in Applied Linguistics (teaching foreign languages). I enjoyed my advisor and his “lab” – his group of apprentices, of which I became one. I felt more integrated and accepted than I ever had before in my life.

My group of friends decided that they wanted to hike around Mont Blanc in the French Alps the following summer, and started a rigorous program of rock climbing and conditioning for the hike. I participated in all the sessions, but once again, as had happened with manual work in the convent and trying to learn to swim at summer camp, I was physically unable to acquire the strength needed to actually go on the expedition. My arms and hands, despite a whole year of attempted training, would not become strong enough to hold me as I clung to ledges. In experiences reminiscent of being rescued from the water with a buoy after failed swimming lessons, I had to be hauled up to safety over and over with the precautionary rope harness. A pattern was emerging. A doctor once wondered if I’d perhaps had polio as a child, and this history certainly suggests that possibility, although it was never diagnosed.

Like me in Nancy, Ellen had for the first time found her element while studying in Lausanne. She made friends and enjoyed her first serious relationship; she excelled in her studies and felt successful; she developed a close to native command of French language and Swiss culture and became integrated socially and in her work life as a student. She coped with physical disability, but nevertheless, for the first time in her life did not feel “other.” For both of us, our years as American students in French-speaking Europe provided the foundation for the rest of our lives, on all levels. Learning French as a second language to a quasi-native extent and becoming integrated into the surrounding French-speaking culture was formative for both of us.

Even though we met and joined together 35 or so years after our times separately in French speaking environments, that experience nevertheless provided a powerful shared basis for our thinking and our expression. I became aware after Ellen and I had been together for a while that both of us often transposed French semantics and thought structure into our English speaking. This allowed us to play with language together as we had never been able to do with anyone else. It delighted us both immensely. We had also thoroughly integrated French-based cultural and esthetic values that gave us a common ground transcending our radically different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Our joint francophone experience truly facilitated the development of a deep level of mutual understanding between us.