But in letting go of the purple and green theme, I discovered that I had a little picture frame that was purple and green with a photo of the girls, and it went into my closet by the Barbie dolls. I am not giving it up. For one thing, it is near impossible to find green and purple together accessories. I found purple, and I found green, but not both, not very often.
The frame says: Sisters are different flowers from the same garden.
A sister in Arkansas, Heather, is a pansy. She loves them. When the post office issued pansy stamps last year I had to send her a card just to use one of them on the envelope. Kim likes roses. I wish she didn't. My mother's favorite flowers are yellow roses. I promised her husband I would send her yellow roses on their anniversary every year after he died and now I don't do it. We went to visit her a few months later and she threw us out of her house, literally, and I can't do it even for him. So I wish that Kim liked something else, but that is not based on the flower, but my experience with them. Life is stupid a lot.
Carly likes poppies even though they are red. Red is not her favorite color. She's into greens and blues. Purple and black. For years, my favorite flowers were tulips. I want to like peonies. I love the white and green of a row of them. When my parents bought their first (and only) house together when I was 12, my mother planted a row of white peonies in the front yard by the porch. They were so pretty! I had never heard of peonies before that. It is one of very few peaceful memories I have of my mother, and for that reason I want to blame the peonies and not like them either.
Imagine getting all the sisters in the world together and then dividing them into sections based on their favorite flower. What on earth for? It might be interesting to see who you ended up sitting by, but it is still a crazy idea. But we divide people up by how much money they have, and what color skin they have, and hair and eyes, and education and height and brains and looks.
No, we don't do that in our organization. But the world does, and it rubs off on us sometimes. Here's an example. Let's use the metaphor of walking down a hallway full of doors to figure out who we are, how we see ourselves and thus those around us. There are big doors that lead to smaller and smaller doors until I could end up in a room with fat redheaded girls well versed in poetry who liked tulips and spoke English.
The hallway always starts with the big doors: race, gender, class. The question is in which order do we go through the doors? I always go through the gender door. I always see the world in those terms, female, not male. Oprah does not go through the woman door first. She goes through the black door. She identifies herself first as black, and second as female. She thinks she has more in common with black males than white women. She may be right. It isn't for me to decide. I wish we all just sorted ourselves through the HUMAN door.
Carly was watching a John Grisham movie this weekend starring Matthew McConaughey. A verdict is being rendered by a jury in a racially charged capital case. Around the courthouse, members of the KKK have placards reading: God is White.
No he isn't, and he isn't a guy either, ya'll. It's just useful in patriarchal society to view God as having the qualities of a good father. But spiritual creatures do not have gender nor race. Classifications, yes. Seraphs, cherubs, messengers, et al.
I learned this door early. I had Barbies and Kens. I had a little brother. I had the life I had that focused on little girls. I write this blog for me, to focus me on something spiritual every day, but I don't ever think of any males reading it or being interested in it and I have no desire to reach such an audience. It's about sisters. My PhD is in gender studies. I like brothers, sometimes too much as you know, but they have their own resources and we have fewer. They have so many privileges and we have a smaller number.
I don't mean that we have a lesser place in the congregation or with Jehovah. But it is obvious Satan has some profoundly wicked acts to use in the gender wars to exploit us. Someone sent me an email last week with a parody book cover picture. I am not sure how I felt about it, because it parodied a book published by our faithful discreet slave. But it was funny. It had a beer-bellied brother and a gray-haired sister on the cover, and a few other pictures of adults on it, and the title was: Questions Middle Aged People Ask, Answers that Work.
Well, that might be a good topic. But I thought how about one just for sisters? My husband always had money for fishing equipment. I would go without to make sure the girls had everything. One day I bought a book and a blouse at regular price. We must have gotten a tax refund or something for me to be so extravagant, but I did it.
Of course, he questioned our ability to afford such a thing. I said: "You like it? It's my new Zebco rod and reel." And he shut up. That makes me not a very good wife, but I figured out finally that no one was going to take care of me except me.
I still feel that way about marriage, that if someone is not going to take care of me, I'm not interested. I'm not baking all the pies and cleaning all the toilets and someone isn't looking for a way to make me happy. And when someone makes a mistake, I don't want excuses for why it isn't his fault. I want an apology. If you don't start out with that, and you are a woman like me, you end up being the one who does all the apologizing, and as Grandma always said, it takes two to tango. I'm not going to dance alone the next go around.
Someone else emailed me and said can I share your blog link address with a dear sister in Oregon - you and she would get along famously.
Yes. Of course. Send me to everyone you know and love if they have time to read. I love roses and tulips and zinnias and dahlia and baby breath and poppies and pansies and peonies. I love dandelions and daisies, both shastas and gerbers. I love all flowers. Sisters are different flowers in the same garden.
Once, someone gave me a card with lotus blossoms on the cover. Inside, she wrote that lotus blossoms will thrive even in mud, and that I reminded her of lotus blossoms, because I have bloomed despite a muddy beginning. One of my favorite poems is by Gwendolyn Brooks, where she speaks of a Chicago gang girl by saying: Mary is a rose in a glass full of whiskey.
You pick a flower, it lives a while in a glass of water. But if you put it in whiskey, poison to flowers (and humans in the right quantity) it will absorb the liquor and die faster
Satan picked us all and here we exist in mud, in whiskey, in water at best, when Jehovah meant for us to be in Eden. Whatever we can do to help each other thrive, let us do.
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