The Total Femme

In-between library books, I grabbed something off my shelf (note to self: do this more often!) and I’m so glad I did.

We Stood Alone,a memoir by Dorothy Adams, was published in the US in 1944, one of those wartime editions that says in the front: This complete copyright edition is produced in full compliance with the Government’s regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials.

Here’s the story: when she visits to Warsaw in 1925, traveling with a group of delegates from the League of Nations Association, a Boston girl falls in love with a Polish boy against all her better judgement. At the time, according to Adams, Poland was thought to be horribly backwards and deserving of all the ways in which Germany kept trying to “modernize” and “help.” Between the wars, especially in America, Adams says, Poland was seen as a negligible and uninteresting country – something that always happens when those with power ignore the deep and layered history of places about which they are uninterested.

Of course, Adams utterly falls in love with Poland, more and more, the longer she lives there. Throughout the book, she describes the things about her new country that surprise her the most, arguing its case for her readers, the indifferent Americans who have so summarily dismissed an entire, complicated, wonderful place.

The schools, for example. “Corporal punishment, freely practiced in other parts of the continent, was not allowed in Poland,” writes Adams.  “Once, when she was preparing a Friday talk on punishment, Miss “Book” (a teacher friend) showed me with horror a booklet of regulations in German for German state schools, which sanctioned not only beating, but locking children in dark rooms (p. 85).”.

Adams also describes the health care system – something much on my mind as I navigate a miserable new health challenge. Basically, everyone is given free medical care and is included without having to jump through hoops or answer to brutal insurance and hospital and drug businesses.

Then WWII ramps up. Adams’ mother-in-law and husband die tragically in a plane crash. At the urging of friends and family Adams makes the difficult decision to return to America, mostly in order to protect her young son. She doesn’t want to leave. Poland is home to her heart. The storks roosting on the thatches of the houses, the care taken with gardens and food and community and art and music, the quiet perseverence despite adversity, and so much more that she’s come to love – all this she has to leave because war is coming, war is already begun.

She stops there, on the brink of leaving everything she loves, everything she has come to expect from life.

“Our space suits just continue to unravel,” a friend recently said. Diagnoses, world events, accidents, war, natural and human-brought disasters, we are at their mercy and there is no holding them back, no matter our national mania with personal control.

Way back when, I remember my father sitting on the kitchen floor with a magnet, getting rid of all our aluminum cookware after reading something about aluminum and Alzheimer’s. Guess what he died of?

I never in a million years worried about coming down with type 1 inuslin-dependent diabetes. Why would I? No one in my family has any kind of diabetes and I seemed to be doing fine. But guess what I was just in the ICU for?

Happens to me, happens to you. Something or other most assuredly does.

Adams wrote a book.

After spending his whole life driven and moving at the speed of light, my dad lived deeply and happily in the present his last few years. “Look at those clouds,” he would say, gazing out the car window as we drove to the doctor. “Look at that important little dog!”

As for me, I’m staying alive every day, even during those darkest moments when the seismic shift in my life has me in the deepest mourning. I’m writing this post. I’m reading, and sometimes the universe gives me just the book I need.

Usually it does.

Sweet and dandy, lovers and oh-so-alive my darlings, my femme sisters, we are not alone out here. We are accompanied by ancestors, siblings, family, friends. What happens looks very different, how we maintain, survive, go on, revive, repair, despair and then look up again, all very different the one from the other but don’t we do it, don’t we sometimes still lift up our spirits and soar again?

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com