TALK GIVEN DECEMBER 2, 2016 NYC 

KEEP MOVING FORWARD:

THE ANN AND GERALD STEIN WOMEN’S CONFERENCE: FROM WEARING THE GLASS SLIPPER TO BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING (EDITED)

I am speaking from my inside experience of the Christian faith. I am speaking about the trauma of silencing in our lives as women and in our religious traditions as well as learning to break that silence by speaking truth about our own stories and experiences. Finally, I am speaking as a white, well-educated, feminist elder who honors indigenous wisdom.

This has not been an easy talk to prepare. My inner voice keeps asking questions, almost taunting me to remain silent. What can I safely say? Whose toes might I tread on? Whose ire might I stir up? What dare I say? And underneath is the question of fear: what will happen to me if I do speak what I have experienced and how my faith has evolved?

And my gratitude for this opportunity at this crone wisdom time of my life celebrates my determination to speak as deeply as I am able, to push the envelope for women everywhere. Actually the process turned out to be challenging and invigorating. I ended up with more questions than I have answers and I love questions which expand my understanding of the way the patriarchal institutions work to silence women—as well as their children and men of integrity.

My story of wearing the glass slipper is about the traumatic generational silencing of women in my mother line. Then as I discuss the story of Hagar and Sarah, I will note my discovery of parallels between my story and the traumatic silencing of women in Biblical stories. Finally, I will encourage as well as seek to empower us to break our silences so that our voices shatter the stained glass ceiling.
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My story begins when I am talking on the telephone with my mother. My brother called to tell me she was in the hospital. Talking with her I realized she was dying– but more than that happened. This is the part that I usually skip because it sounds peculiar, even uncanny. Our conversation seemed casual, even normal– except several times her voice turned away from the telephone as though she were talking to a roommate saying, “Now I understand the suffering of the Jews.” Then she returned to our conversation.

The next morning when I arrived at the hospital, my mother had no roommate. And she was bleeding out. Eventually, I would call her death a passive suicide. She had hidden the lump in her breast until the raw redness screamed cancer and my father insisted she see a doctor. The loss of her breast was the final insult to a life already broken. Given nerve damaging drugs as she struggled with profound depressions and over-medicated with estrogen for severe hot flashes, she developed grinding pain that reduced her teeth to little nubs which cut into her tongue until she could barely speak. Silenced as a child by the emotional pain of being born unwanted to competitive and cold immigrant German parents; as an adult self-medicating with alcohol against the traumas of her mother’s suicide followed by her father’s disinheriting her, she had given up on being able to live a productive life. As we three children left home, she gradually became wracked by inescapable physical and emotional pain, telling my younger brother, “The pain begins before I am awake.” Two weeks before she died, all the nubs of her teeth were taken out. We had our first lively conversation in years.

Now in the hospital bed, her blood draining through various tubes, she was peaceful and smiled easily as though she were saying to me, “This is my death. Don’t replay how things could have been different; this is my choice. I am letting you go so that you can live a fuller life.”

She did let me go AND she left me her legacy: “Now I understand the suffering of the Jews.” These words became my marching orders: to piece together the snippets of her story so that I could weave our mother-daughter stories together to find some meaning and break the silence so that I can speak our reality. The place to begin was confronting my grandmother’s traumatic silencing, piecing together what I could of her narrative.

At the end of the 18th century, my grandmother’s Huguenot family fled horrific religious persecution in France for Mainz, Germany. A hundred years later, my grandmother, her mother, sister, and kid brother Jacob immigrated to the United States. Over the next 25 years the women created a flourishing seamstress shop in Philadelphia, earning enough to put Jacob—the male child– through Penn Law School.

My grandparents married when they were 36. An independent woman pressured to marry the successful, domineering, 36 year old German businessman. The oft-told tale says that four years later my grandmother was preparing to go back to Europe to help WWI refugees– or was she actually leaving her marriage??– when she found out she was pregnant with their only child. Occasionally my mother alluded to her miserable childhood. Her trunk would be packed for a summer at camp, away from her parents; then the night before she was to leave, my grandmother would say, “Oh, you will become homesick.” And the trunk would be unpack, my mother’s respite denied. When my mother gave the valedictory speech at her Quaker high school graduation, her parents hid in the back of the auditorium, fearing she would falter and embarrass them.

In December 1940 my parents had been married six months and were living—blissfully, my father always said– as newlyweds in New York City when they found out my grandmother had committed suicide. When she returned to Philadelphia, my grandfather told her, “If you come home and take care of my house [where her mother had hanged herself in the basement] for me, everything I have will be yours.” My mother kept her side of the promise. Born over the next three years, my two brothers and I were brought home to live in that house where our grandmother had hanged herself, where my grandfather sat in his gold chair wreathed in cigar smoke listening to news of Germany’s victories and eventual defeat. It took me until I was 50 to realize I was named Joy because my father hoped as a girl child I would bring Joy back into my mother’s life.

Then in April 1945—I was 2 ½, my younger brother born Aril 24th– as the concentration camps were being opened, my Quaker-educated mother fought uncompromisingly with my German, Nazi sympathizing? grandfather. I must have been frightened by the fighting, I must have sensed the danger as well as my mother’s persistence. In September 10 days before he died, my grandfather used his last weapon to punish my mother; he wrote her out of his will. His lawyer told him, “I refuse to disinherit your only child who has cared for you. You will have to find another lawyer.”

My mother could live in the house where my grandmother had hanged herself, but my parents would have to pay $35 each month, exactly what my father weekly salary. If my mother divorced my father or he died, she could live there rent free.

My mother kept up her fiery resistance: she sued his estate all the way to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania– and lost. Inexorably silenced by her father’s will.
She never told my brothers and me a coherent story about my grandmother’s suicide or grandfather’s betrayal; only the occasional sentence or two when she was drinking. Without a story, I too was silenced. I could not understand what had happened, only experiencing my mother’s agony. Putting her sentences together into a narrative with some continuity became my mission. I was determined to break the spell of my heritage: my grandmother’s suicide and my mother’s passive suicide. Late in his life in response to my insistent questioning, my father reluctantly said, “Yes, your grandfather was a misanthrope.” A people hater.

I imagine my hearing my mother’s resisting my grandfather’s misogyny; then when the concentration camps were liberated, her outrage by his either defending the Nazis or denying the truth about the concentration camps. I am certain this is when I learned to want to seek and to speak the truth as my mother had. After my grandfather died, I also learned I would be punished, abandoned and disinherited if I challenged those with authority over me. My lifetime dilemma with which I struggle even today. (continued)