Janice Lynch Schuster – Page 6 – I art, therefore I am…

Stillbirths: All Too Common, Too Much Unknown

To tell this story is to tell its end first. On Sept. 1, 2012, Makenna, the only child of Heather Thompson and Geoff Duff of Alexandria, Va., was born dead. She had been alive in her mother’s womb on Aug. 30, but no heartbeat could be found the next day. Her umbilical cord had knotted, … Continue reading “Stillbirths: All Too Common, Too Much Unknown”

To tell this story is to tell its end first. On Sept. 1, 2012, Makenna, the only child of Heather Thompson and Geoff Duff of Alexandria, Va., was born dead. She had been alive in her mother’s womb on Aug. 30, but no heartbeat could be found the next day. Her umbilical cord had knotted, then wrapped around her neck, and, at 39 weeks, she was stillborn. Until her baby’s heartbeat could not be found, Thompson says, the pregnancy had been medically uneventful.

Read the full article here.

ANGELS PASSING TIME

for Meme, 1920-2015 Birds flew, like checkmarks in the sky marking off the clouds. Where I stand, I can close one eye and squint. I find your face, drifting in the light. Birds travel so quickly and far, to a place I can only imagine, not know. Where I stand in the snow it is … Continue reading “ANGELS PASSING TIME”

for Meme, 1920-2015

Birds flew, like checkmarks in the sky
marking off the clouds. Where I stand,
I can close one eye and squint.
I find your face, drifting
in the light. Birds travel
so quickly and far, to a place
I can only imagine, not know.

Where I stand in the snow
it is cold. We once stood here,
together, eyes lifted to the sky
as it darkened for a storm.
You told me I had nothing to fear,
you were near and would not leave me.

Anyway, you added, thunder is only angels
bowling, and lightning, the devil’s anger.
He is a poor sport, you said.
And what about the rain, I demanded.
“Just rain,” you said,
so much magic could only go so far.

Have faith, you told me,
though you cannot see.
We were on a balcony
full of last summer’s flowers,
their dried heads nodding
in the wind.

KEY WORDS: grandmother, heaven, faith, angels, poetry

LAST WALTZ

for Grandmom Because she believed, I did, all those Sundays she filled me with forbidden fruits, a grandmother’s reward for having persevered. Everything tastes better with sugar, even oranges and secrets kept from home. In old St. Jerome’s church, we’d kneel for communion, long after my parish priest had dispensed with being an intermediary … Continue reading “LAST WALTZ”

for Grandmom

Because she believed, I did,
all those Sundays she filled me
with forbidden fruits,
a grandmother’s reward
for having persevered. Everything
tastes better with sugar,
even oranges and secrets
kept from home.

In old St. Jerome’s church,
we’d kneel for communion,
long after my parish priest
had dispensed with being
an intermediary for God,
and handed me a wafer
All that was holy
flourished in my palm.

The years sped by so fast,
time invisible as angels.
Now, though belief is less rote,
I mouth her prayers
to lift her journey
to its end. If there were candles
I would blaze a trail.

I smell her Noxzema kisses
and count pennies won
at gin rummy, and remember
how I danced on her toes
and she laughed.
“Step lively,” she’d say.
“Here’s your hat,
what’s your hurry?”

Surely, now, some light-
footed prince has freed
a card for her and swept
her away in a drift
of stars, a cascade of ‘wow’
a mystery that sets
her free.

Key words: poetry, end-of-life, vigil, grandmothers, family, grief

GARDEN IN WINTER

The gardening catalogues land with their beautiful images of what you could pull from the dirt if only you had the latest tools in this year’s Pantone colors, and sand delivered from some Holy Land. If only you outfitted the place with brilliant bottle trees in primary colors to remind you of an African sun … Continue reading “GARDEN IN WINTER”

If only you outfitted the place
with brilliant bottle trees
in primary colors to remind
you of an African sun
you have never glimpsed.

If only your beds
were smoothly made in boxes,
deer proofed. If only your kitchen
garden grew herbs fit
for the mouths of queens.

As it is, just promises
of summer, empty as your head
that night in the bar
when the married man
tied his gold ring to his shoe
laces and told you he knew
how to make love grow.

key words: Gardeners Supply Outlet, Audobon Society, Homestead Gardens, Riva Gardens, gardening, flowers, love

The Taste of Christmas Past

For years now, I have harbored my great-grandmother’s cookbooks and order pads that date from the 30s and 40s, when she was a cook at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I have a half-baked notion that one day I might cook the many recipes and so have a taste of American foods, circa early 20th-century. … Continue reading “The Taste of Christmas Past”

I also have copies of correspondence between her and her three sons at the start of World War II, as they made cross-country journeys, and wrote to her of the thrill of Hollywood, the tedium of North Carolina. As the war progressed, the long lists of what she ordered to feed the students in her house grew shorter and shorter; the menus, which had been fairly lavish in 1940 or so, become quite stark by 1944. While my uncles’ letters are usually light and full of a sense of adventure, they are tempered by letter in which she writes of her sorrow when her eldest son, shot down and killed in a mission over France.

I have long wanted to write a book that blends these artifacts, and tells the story of one Irish immigrant family as it began to make its way through and into America.Instead I keep it all squirreled away, too engaged in making a living and raising a family to devote my imagination to such an endeavor.

This Christmas, though, my first as a grandmother, I’ve been thinking about my own grandmother and her mother, and the smells of my childhood, in the kitchen of the house where my grandmother sometimes lived with us, when she was not traveling the world.

She enjoyed a long career as a research scientist in Beltsville, a retirement to Australia, and globetrotting for many years. Between times, she sometimes lived with us. She had an extensive circle of women friends, people with whom she had worked or gone to church or played poker.

Every year, as Christmas neared, she would being her preparations for the epic task of making miniature fruitcakes as gifts for these friends. The process would begin with a stench – there is no other word for it – of boiling blackstrap molasses, a process which, in my memory, lasted for days. At the same time, she would set up shop at the kitchen table, where she would chop candied fruit into almost microscopic bits and pieces. Days of baking would then ensue, with hundreds of tiny fruitcakes arrayed in cookie tins that she would fill and stash in her room. She would mail some packages to her friends around the world, and deliver others in person as the holiday neared.

Her friends all had similar ideas, each with her own specialty, and my grandmother would often come home with baked delights—pfefferneuse, bird’s nests, sugar cookies and gingerbread. I remember feeling vaguely embarrassed for my grandmother, who had returned such gustatory delights with something as awful-smelling as fruitcake. Surely, it was one hot mess.

I have yet to try fruitcake –memories of the awful smell of boiling molasses has kept me from it. I felt vindicated in my ick-factor years later when I learned that fruitcakes originated in Ancient Egypt, where they were buried with the dead. Where they belong, I think. (In fact, my parents tell me that the smell that bothered me was the rum, and that everyone loved the 99 proof fruitcakes.)

This year, as a new grandmother, I thought I might try whipping up some treats from my great grandmothers’ recipe book. I had hoped that the fruitcake recipe would be there among the book’s crumbling treasures. Instead I have read how to make Northampton pudding and date and nut torte, and marveled at confections that require 10 pounds of sugar of 4 pounds of butter or 40 egg whites. My sweet tooth drools.

The back of the book includes a page of tips about working in the kitchen, and includes handy ideas, such as using milk to rinse eggs from a bowl, and never using two spoons when one would do. I am taken by my great-grandmother’s spidery handwriting, and the many names listed beside so many recipes I like the smell of the worn pages, the food stains, the simplicity of it.

My own heirloom recipe is one my mother clipped from the Washington Post years ago, for thimble cookies. During the inflationary 70s, we used margarine for everything – but the thimble cookies were so special, we actually used real butter. I was allowed to use my great-grandmother’s thimble to press holes in each cookie, which I filled with raspberry jam. I still do. If my grandmother was around when I made these, she would chide me to be sure to scrape every iota of butter from the wrappers.

I still do. And the cookies are as tasty as ever, more so because they are a rare treat. A batch of 40 usually lasts an afternoon.

I have an image of myself, with the ghosts of my grandmother and her mother looking down and over my reading glasses, as I measure out ingredients. I wonder what my granddaughter will like—and what will cause her to shrivel up her nose and turn to something more tasteful.

key words: Christmas, grandmother, fruitcake, thimble cookies, Massachusetts, Smith College, World War II, cookbooks, recipes

Possession

on hearing Jeffrey Harrison describe the shoulders of women My shoulders are not on display. If they ripple, it is strength from years of propping others up. If they are bare, it is that I had no time to cover myself. If they are strong it is because I made them so. They are not … Continue reading “Possession”

on hearing Jeffrey Harrison describe the shoulders of women

My shoulders are not on display.
If they ripple, it is strength from years
of propping others up.

If they are bare, it is that I had no time
to cover myself. If they are strong
it is because I made them so.

They are not your wishbones.

If my hips curve, it is from bearing
down too hard to release new lives.
If my breasts swell, it is from feeding people.
If I walk with a sway, it is because I need
to be someplace, fast. There are places

I must be, alone.

This body was made for me, not you.
It is no one’s for the taking.
Just because you bit some shiny apple
doesn’t mean I’m yours.

Key words: writer’s almanac, poetry, possession, feminism

Lift Every Voice: Listen to Women Veterans

During last week’s Veteran’s Day inspired concerts and tributes to veterans, a Hill-gathering of Disruptive Women (and our man of the month, Rep. Tim Walz, (MN-OI) spoke truth with power. Gathered to discuss challenges faced by women veterans, the group included veterans, members of Congress and their spouses, congressional staff, state leaders, and filmmakers. The … Continue reading “Lift Every Voice: Listen to Women Veterans”

During last week’s Veteran’s Day inspired concerts and tributes to veterans, a Hill-gathering of Disruptive Women (and our man of the month, Rep. Tim Walz, (MN-OI) spoke truth with power. Gathered to discuss challenges faced by women veterans, the group included veterans, members of Congress and their spouses, congressional staff, state leaders, and filmmakers. The group had had enough of platitudes and promises. We were ready for disruption, and Rep. Walz delivered just that, saying he was done with “incremental change” (Washington’s latest, favorite buzz-word) and prepared to lead “seismic change.”

Walz speaks from a place of experience, knowledge, and passion: He is a retired soldier, and the highest ranking enlisted man to serve in Congress. During a 24-year stint in the Army National Guard, including a tour of duty in Operation Enduring Freedom, he also taught high school. The latter tour provided him some insight into chaos and disruption. In the 113^th Congress, he will serve in leadership roles that include the National Guard and Reserves Caucus, and the Congressional Veterans Jobs.

In his remarks, Walz noted that “it doesn’t take much to offer health care that people can’t access.” He added that although the VA has made some progress since the days when “the best thing the VA could say for what it had done for women was that the exam tables no longer face the door.” Later, he added that the VA system—staffed by dedicated people—still has far to go to really offer care for all, noting that, “it is much easier to put up a yellow ribbon than it is to step up care.”

As recent Veterans Health Administration scandals have revealed, its challenges go beyond exam room layout – and problems reflect deeper challenges within the system in particular and American culture in general.

The day’s two other panelists included Emmy award-winning filmmaker Patty Lee Stotter, whose award-winning documentary, Service: When Women Come Marching Home, uses women’s voices to tell their story. Director of Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs, Lourdes E. (Alfie) Alvarado-Ramos, detailed her state’s actions to address specific problems.

Stotter has crafted films to give women veterans a place to speak. Her presentation included quotes from several women veterans, and included poignant thoughts, such as these:

“Tell them how I had to file a congressional inquiry two years after my daughter was born because the VA was NOT paying my prenatal care bills, which impacted my credit score…Tell them that the stress of being billed throughout my pregnancy with no advocacy from the VA left me crippled with PTSD and physical pain.””

“Tell them I was told that I should leave my boots on while having a trans-vaginal ultrasound because the stirrups were so filthy.”

“Today, I am fighting for my life. I have an extreme case of PTSD that has rendered me housebound. I have been in the disability claims process for nearly 4 years…”

“I was raped in Iraq and when I went to report it I was told I was lying and probably wanted it. I was denied the right to get medical help.”
Alvarado-Ramos, a veteran herself, offered models from the other Washington that reflected possibilities for change and improvement. Washington State, she said, has, 70,000 women veterans, and, by 2040, projections are that there will be a much higher percentage of women veterans, as well as on active duty, as the numbers of men decline. She listed a dozen programs underway, most brand-new and inspired by her own service. These include: establishment of a women’s veterans committee; development of a veterans registry to better tracking and inform veterans; hiring more women service officers to help veterans of claims; and creation of a statewide information campaign to educate the the public and raise awareness of veterans’ ongoing struggles.

All of these programs represent a step toward addressing shameful situations that our veterans encounter – including homelessness, food insecurity, incarceration, mental health problems, sexual assault and economic hard times.

In a follow-up interview with Disruptive Women, Stotter talked about gender stereotyping and discrimination, and its toll on women veterans. I told her about the work of MacArthur genius Ai-jen Poo to organize domestic workers in New York City: When Ai-jen talks about women work—particularly paid housekeeping and babysitting–she notes that says simply do not value or compensate the people who do the work that allows the rest of us to do our work

“Exactly!” Patty said. “We don’t even value the work that allows the rest of us to be free.” She continued, “I am furious that hard-working people who are soldiers get so little. Going to war, we see the worst of what the universe has to offer. In our response to women veterans, I fear that we are losing our soul.”

It was the first time in a decade of attending DC panel discussions that I went home and spent three hours writing a poem about what I had heard. Earlier in the week I’d written an essay about Bruce Springsteen’s performance at The Concert for Valor, and my appalling realization that our veterans must rely on the national equivalent of bake sales to resume civilian life.

I am proud to join this movement to advocate for women veterans. Not a veteran myself, I cannot imagine what women veterans have endured. But as a midlife woman, I know too well what it means to have a voice that is silenced. A voice that gets shouted down or shamed or discounted. A voice that gets shoved against the wall with a knife. A voice that does not dominate the room.

As a Disruptive Woman, I know what it means to reclaim your voice, to use it for good, to launch seismic change that echoes for many, and that helps people build new and safer shelters within their own minds, bodies, and lives.

Each and every Disruptive Woman should join our sisters in this battle. We can all sing in this chorus. Perhaps not from the same page or even the same score, but in a song that raises our voices and lifts them for those who, just now, cannot do it for themselves.

key words: Disruptive Women in Health Care, Tim Walz, women veterans, military sexual trauma, rape, wounded warriors, Ai-jen Poo, Bruce Springsteen, Concert for Valor

This post originally ran on Disruptive Women in Health Care on Tuesday, November 18, 2014.

Balance of Power in the Pharmacy

I meet a boy who carries a notebook in his breast pocket. “That’s quite a weapon,” I tease, pointing to the blue stain spreading across his lab coat. He is a man, but so clean-shaven and slim, he seems young enough to be a child. High school job, I think, or between classes. We wait … Continue reading “Balance of Power in the Pharmacy”

I meet a boy who carries a notebook in his breast pocket.
“That’s quite a weapon,” I tease, pointing to the blue stain
spreading across his lab coat. He is a man, but so clean-shaven
and slim, he seems young enough to be a child.
High school job, I think, or between classes.
We wait for my pain pills, which the pharmacist measures
so slowly, he could be using coffeespoons.
His lilting accent assures me I will be relieved.
We are close to done, he says, counting pills.

We are far from it.

The man-child says he is two years
past the Navy, where he worked on ships that lined
the suffering shores of the world, witness to the worst
humans could visit on the living.

He tells me his thoughts move faster
than debris in a hurricane, and he gathers them
in the notebook, trying to piece
his life together again. If only he could collect
them all in one place, put a lid on them,
bury them deep, and move on.
Then, he says, he might find sense
in this incomprehensible place.

What is poetry that does not save nations
but souls? The kid mentions that he is a lefty,
able to spot four-leaf clovers in fields of grass and weeds.
He collects them in his wallet.

Life shoots dreams down. To him, I am one more old woman
with pain pills and worry and grey temples and belly fat.
I want to hold his smooth young hand in mine
and tell him how little we know but this:

words, gathered like storm clouds
on a horizon can unleash a torrent
that changes the landscape of this world.
What’s in his mind, he says, he cannot see.
But it is there, and ready.
He did not sail so many seas, he promises,
for his voice to be lost in the wind.

key words: Janice Lynch Schuster, veterans, dreams, writing, creativity, poetry

Still Waiting on a Dream: Veterans are Veterans All Year Long

As a native Washingtonian and lifelong fan of Bruce Springsteen, I was disappointed in the way the irony of his all-acoustic set flew over the heads of many who sat in or tuned in for Tuesday night’s HBO broadcast, Concert for Valor. In the early 80s, Ronald Reagan and his crowd tried to appropriate Born … Continue reading “Still Waiting on a Dream: Veterans are Veterans All Year Long”

As a native Washingtonian and lifelong fan of Bruce Springsteen, I was disappointed in the way the irony of his all-acoustic set flew over the heads of many who sat in or tuned in for Tuesday night’s HBO broadcast, Concert for Valor. In the early 80s, Ronald Reagan and his crowd tried to appropriate Born in the USA as an anthem for a campaign that also promised us that it was “morning again in America.”

Back then, Springsteen and his fans reacted quickly to put a stop to such use. The song was anything but Springsteen’s rendition of America the Beautiful. When Springsteen sings, “Born down in a dead man’s town/the first kick I took was when I hit the ground,” he is not telling the story of purple mountains’ majesty.

The song, nearly 40 years on, rings true today, even in the lines where the “VA man” retorts, “son, don’t you understand?”

Apparently not, judging from the Twitter feeds that paid homage to Springsteen and his performance Tuesday. In today’s America, we don’t shame our veterans as we did after the Vietnam war, but we surely, as a nation, ignore what becomes of (mostly) young people sent to repeated and seemingly endless rounds of battle.

To be sure we admire their service, their bravery, and their sacrifice. When we see video montages of happy soldiers and Marines reunited with their families, we shed are grateful tears. For 95 percent of us, the wars in far-away places are far from our lives and our experiences.

We expressed the requisite outrage over recent VA scandals, and admired the struggles of wounded warriors who, like the amazing Master Sergeant Cedric King, find the will to flourish within and despite their maimed bodies. For the most part, though, we don’t see that too many of our veterans come home with a “fire still raging within”, and a war that plays out for years in brains injured by bomb blasts. We do not march in noisy crowds demanding that more of our tax dollars be directed to veterans and their families. Instead, we elect Republicans who are now beating the drums of war against ISIS.

Meanwhile, the veterans we laud and thank are really just symbols of the people we ignore and avoid. Record numbers of young veterans will now live with chronic pain syndromes for the rest of their lives. At the same time, we support policies that are barriers to accessing pain relief treatments, both traditional and complementary.

We give a handful of folding chairs to veterans on the Mall and seats in our sports venues, while we have no shelter for the thousands of veterans who are now homeless. And while we go on holding our national versions of bake sales for our national defense, we withhold funds that would provide meaningful training and education to veterans trying to rebuild their lives and find their purpose.

Bruce Springsteen, a man who recently pointed to Flannery O’Connor’s writing as having made him the man he is, knows irony. When he opened with Promised Land as a prayer for active-duty military and veterans, Springsteen knew just what he was doing. For those lost to injury, poverty, addiction, pain, and suicide, we have yet to build a promised land.

“Mr. I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man/and I believe in the promised land,” the Boss sings. So do I—and so do the men and women who volunteer their lives for the sake of our freedom. To them, freedom is not just another song lyric—but it is often still just a word to those who come home and vanish under our lip service.

key words: Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA, Concert for Valor, veterans, homelessness, pain, addiction

All Soul’s Day

For Grandmom June 26, 1915-November 4, 1994 I was born into a golden dream of an old woman’s heart. She held me when others could not, rubbed my ear, whispered lullabyes, rocked me hard or soft. I thought I’d always be her doll. What I held for granted vanished that November, all the gold in … Continue reading “All Soul’s Day”

For Grandmom
June 26, 1915-November 4, 1994

I was born into a golden dream
of an old woman’s heart.
She held me when others could not,
rubbed my ear, whispered lullabyes,
rocked me hard or soft.

I thought I’d always be her doll.

What I held for granted vanished
that November, all the gold
in the world could not have saved us.

My turn to whisper, then, holding
her rosary in both our hands,
my incantations some lament
I could not name. I thought she’d always
be mine to love. Our souls surely rested
together in worlds that do not end.

What would I trade
for one more moment
in the corona of her love,
science of her affection,
calculation of her black pen
working problems in ink
until I understood what ‘x’ equaled?

I would always be her doll.
We could pack the car again,
drive out into the night,
just over the speed limit,
me in my pink seersucker skirt,
her with a map and quarters
enough for any toll.

What river could we not cross,
to get back on that highway
that lasted beyond night?

tags: grandmothers, love, grief