June 26, Tuesday

One of my favorite things about this spring and summer has been my Wednesday lunches with a new friend. By now it has made itself into a little ritual. We arrive at the Thai restaurant at 12:30. At 3 o'clock our dishes have been removed and the restaurant is empty except for us. I urgently have to pee from all the water I have been drinking since our waiter has filled my glass continually for the last two and a half hours. My friend and I haven't even noticed the time. We just talk and listen. In fact we could probably go on talking non-stop for another couple of hours. Getting to know a new friend has some of the same feelings as falling in love. We enjoy hearing the details of each others lives past and present as well as the details of our plans and dreams. It's energizing and fun.

This Wednesday we talked at length about gardening which is a mutual passion, about her overbooked schedule and decisions about which activities she could drop and which were serving her well, about where to buy fresh blueberries, about our respective challenges in our spiritual lives. We talked and listened and exchanged our best thinking on the matters at hand. Then at one point we talked about someone we know (a good friend of hers and someone I barely know) who is leaving her two children, ages ten and fourteen, in the care of her ex-husband and his new wife. She is leaving them essentially for four years while she joins the Air Force to pursue her career. My friend seemed to think that this was a difficult decision but probably necessary. I thought it was totally absurd, wrong, an unthinkable sin against Motherhood, stupid, crazy and insane. In other words, I kind of had a strong reaction. As I talked animatedly I could see my friend question her own acceptance of the "difficult decision". I said, "She didn't have to leave her kids! She could have taken a job at UPS or at Burger King, for God's sake!" Shortly after my little outburst we parted with no hard feelings, I believe. But she may have been a bit perplexed about my intense reaction.

On my drive home, thinking about the whole gamut of our conversation, I started to do some self-reflection about my strong reaction. I don't even know these kids that I assume will be devastated by their mother's departure. I don't know the woman really. In other words, it's none of my business, I am not involved. Yet, I can't really describe how strongly I felt that this was wrong. Well, a little reflection is usually a good thing when your emotions come charging out in righteous indignation.

I thought about the whole "idea" of a mother leaving her children. Can you think of anything worse save abuse or murder? Well, I can't. Just maybe that's because my grandmother left her children. This was in fact about 100 years ago. My father's mom, Emma Rose, according to the stories I have heard, was fed up with her life married to Moses Absalom Beauregard, my grandfather. He was a riverboat gambler on the Mississippi. They lived in the north woods of Minnesota near the town of Thief River Falls. Think isolated and very cold and harsh, 100 years ago. Moses came home every few months and they got pregnant about as often as possible in those early years. Sometimes he brought money and they celebrated. Often he was broke and ate the food she was doling out carefully to last through the winter.

They had five children, the oldest Del was eight, the youngest Warren was a baby and my Dad, Walter was three when Emma decided to take her children to the Catholic orphanage in Duluth and put them up for adoption. I always wanted to believe that she had no other options. But my only cousin who is twenty years older than me and remembers our grandmother, tells me that she was offered a house and job by people in her community, that she was in fact a very selfish woman. It's hard to know the truth of her life. We do know that she had decided to accept an offer of marriage from a devoutly religious man who said he would take her and the baby but not the other kids. So she left the oldest four children at the orphanage and went on about her life.

My dad spent four years at the orphanage. When he was seven a childless farm couple came looking for farm workers. They took my dad and his brother and said they would keep the one who worked the hardest. Dad's nine year old brother Harvey ran away the next day and was on his own the rest of his life. My dad stayed and worked for this couple until he too ran away at the age of fourteen. He joined the Army stating his age as sixteen. After two years in the Army he again found his brother Harvey. Along with many others they rode the rails across the country many times, working at whatever job was available and sleeping where they found a place.

My dad and his brothers and sisters had a pretty hard childhood. Yet he was a great father to me, loving, kind and gentle. But his deep sadness was palpable in our family. This kind of sadness is an inheritance almost like a genetic code passed along from parent to child. It's part of my heart and bones and every cell in my body. My parents sadness is and always will be part of my life. It all reminds me of a quote from the Old Testament in Exodus 34: 6,7 when God directed Moses to go to the top of Mt Sinai alone:

And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord, The God merciful and compassionate, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth. Keeping mercy for thousands of generations, forgiving sins and transgressions, who by no means justifies the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children's children, to the third and fourth generation.

Far from describing a vengeful God, from my current viewpoint I get an understanding of what some may call the Law of Karma, "what comes around goes around" or natural consequences of our actions. Some of our actions have such long arms. At my age I can see the lives of five generations, two before me and two following me. Seeing how my grandmother's actions influenced my own reaction in a conversation with a friend over 100 years later is sobering indeed.

This may be one reason why elders are so important in a community. They keep the memory of events past that are shaping the reactions of the present. So much of that valuable memory is languishing today, unappreciated. Perhaps, and I say just perhaps, that is why a young woman is leaving her two children to further her career; or why most of us in the developed world continue to consume, mindlessly depleting the Earth's riches meant to be shared with future generations; or why our nation's military can drop bombs on villages thousands of miles away, killing innocent people while we sleep peacefully in our beds, leaving the effects of our actions to be "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children's children to the third and fourth generation."

In the past I have always thought that this Bible verse portrayed a cruel and sadistic God punishing innocent children for the sins of their fore bearers. Now from the advantage of being able to see forward and back the five generations that have touched my life, what I see is not an external cruel God but rather that it is our innate connection with All which dictates that our actions positive or negative have long-reaching effect. We are not separate and our actions affect more than ourselves, more than we can even comprehend. This also happily means that our acts and words of love, compassion, creativity and wisdom have equally long reaching arms connecting us to generations to come and making our lives and actions bigger than we are.

I can't say what is really right for the young woman whose dilemma between career and family started my contemplation. But what is really valuable for me is to see my own strong reaction and where it might have come from. When I can do that, which is certainly not all the time, it helps me act and speak from awareness instead of ignorance. And that can't hurt.