It’s Thanksgiving morning, 2007, and before I start wailing about what isn’t right in my life, I think I should give thanks for what is right. First of all, of course, would be my husband, children and their children, without whom life would be empty for me. I often think how sad it would be, to be alone in this world. Then I thought back to the days when my children were finally giving me some long-awaited grandchildren. That, I hoped, guaranteed I’d have little ones around for a lot of years to give me lots of love and hugs. I thought back to my stress-free feelings at that time…
Grandchildren have a way of bringing life back into our lives. Mine do &ndash all fifteen of them. In a world of so many lonely people, I feel blessed that my life is filled with happy, energetic progeny; all so different, yet defined by drops of my DNA. I often look at them with utter amazement &ndash that from my genes (okay, maybe a few others) these rarefied beings sprang forth.
When our children get married, how we yearn for that first grandchild. How we look with envy (and secretly dislike) our friends who made the Big G before we did. Those mean-spirited grandmothers who whip out strings of pictures as long as a football field; how they drone on and on about their Mensa Club-intellect grandchildren, and prattle on about the little cherub’s accomplishments, ad nauseam.
But, oh, when ours do come along, it’s so different. No grandchild has ever been as beautiful at birth, as attentive and wide-eyed; even the birth weight and length become things to crow about. All of a sudden we’re sporting a backpack stuffed with pictures in every conceivable pose known to man.
But, aside from this constant need to push pictures of our grandchild into our friend’s faces, there is something else grandmothers have in common. After interviewing many women on the feelings they experienced at their grandchild’s birth, the final consensus was this: we all had an overwhelming emotional pull, but also a feeling of complete stress-free contentment.
Did we feel this same emotional pull when our children were born? Well, if we did it was smothered under anxiety and the fear of what to do with this baby when the nurse told us to get up so someone else could occupy the bed.
I think I’ve come up with a reasonable answer for this stress. As young mothers giving birth, we came face to face with this small blob of protoplasm and had no clue where to start. They might as well have put a blindfold over our eyes when they handed us this warm, stuffed blanket and wheeled us toward the hospital exit: “Goodbye. Good Luck!”
Unfortunately, babies don’t come with How-To books. There’s no user’s manual with instructions on operating this howling little person. No tag dangling from a tiny pink toe with instructions on care.
Now enter the grandmother. Here is this same tiny blob of protoplasm, only now it doesn’t fall on grandma’s shoulders to see that this child survives, walks, talks, eats, sleeps, matures into a perfect citizen, and is socially acceptable. We leave the hospital after visiting hours full of emotion, full of love, but absolutely free of stress.
As the baby grows from infant to toddler, we hold them close to inhale their milky-moist breath, search their faces for any resemblance of our own children, ourselves, our DNA. And it is totally stress-free. We get to love them, cuddle them, spoil them, and then send them home to the responsible party from whence they came.
At the end of a visit, how we hate to give up these soft, precious creations of God. We can taste their hello and goodbye kisses long after they’ve delivered them. How we look forward with such anticipation to see them again. We allow them to do things we never allowed our own children to get away with, which is pointed out to us by our children on a regular basis.
And, if this child develops traits not to our liking, well, of course we are duty-bound to tell their parents how we would have handled that in our day.
But, alas, children grow. And, we are only humans &ndash albeit older humans. I doubt there’s a grandparent who will ever admit to this, but after a weekend of running after the precious little toddlers, tripping over their toys, watching our spotless homes fill with smudges, drips and scuffs, the inimitable words of the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. come to mind as the taillights disappear down the street: “Free at last, free at last. . .”
Fast-forward a few years, and guess who takes credit for all the grandchildren’s accomplishments? Of course &ndash we do. Where else would that child have inherited that porcelain skin, that thick head of hair, that high I.Q.?
Fast-forward again. As we age, so do our grandchildren. But our love is unflagging. Now it seems there is scarcely any time for grandma. But we know we can catch a peek at them on a baseball diamond, soccer field, or class play, if only just to crow to the stranger sitting next to us “…that’s my grandchild!”
Next in this voyage to adulthood comes the dating game. Grandma Who? We might get calls every now and then asking if they can drop by to show us a new prom dress or a tux, their school pictures or report cards. Can we sew up a quickie little item for a school play or dance class? &ndash it won’t take long, Grammy. Or, “…ah Grams, got any extra bread?” As I head for the kitchen it dawns on me … oh, that kind of bread &ndash then I head for my purse.
I had an eye-opener on how one of my grandchildren views me: I was attending a ball game where my youngest grandson was playing. At the end of the game he came running up to me oozing sweat and smiles. “Grams, did you see the great throws I made? Did you see my home runs?”
“I did, honey. You were great. Are you going to keep playing baseball?”
“Heck yeah,” he answered, without hesitation. “When I’m older I’m gonna play Pro ball.”
I was most impressed. “How wonderful,” I said. “You know professional ballplayers make a lot of money. You can take care of Grams in my old age.”
He thought about that for a second, looked me straight in the eye and replied, “But Grams, you’re already old and I’m only eight!”
Oh, all right, maybe I’ll have to depend on some of my older grandchildren to help me in my dotage. But, I thank God everyday that I have them to depend on &ndash for stress-free love.
It’s Thanksgiving morning, 2007, and before I start wailing about what isn’t right in my life, I think I should give thanks for what is right. First of all, of course, would be my husband, children and their children, without whom life would be empty for me. I often think how sad it would be, to be alone in this world. Then I thought back to the days when my children were finally giving me some long-awaited grandchildren. That, I hoped, guaranteed I’d have little ones around for a lot of years to give me lots of love and hugs. I thought back to my stress-free feelings at that time…
Grandchildren have a way of bringing life back into our lives. Mine do &ndash all fifteen of them. In a world of so many lonely people, I feel blessed that my life is filled with happy, energetic progeny; all so different, yet defined by drops of my DNA. I often look at them with utter amazement &ndash that from my genes (okay, maybe a few others) these rarefied beings sprang forth.
When our children get married, how we yearn for that first grandchild. How we look with envy (and secretly dislike) our friends who made the Big G before we did. Those mean-spirited grandmothers who whip out strings of pictures as long as a football field; how they drone on and on about their Mensa Club-intellect grandchildren, and prattle on about the little cherub’s accomplishments, ad nauseam.
But, oh, when ours do come along, it’s so different. No grandchild has ever been as beautiful at birth, as attentive and wide-eyed; even the birth weight and length become things to crow about. All of a sudden we’re sporting a backpack stuffed with pictures in every conceivable pose known to man.
But, aside from this constant need to push pictures of our grandchild into our friend’s faces, there is something else grandmothers have in common. After interviewing many women on the feelings they experienced at their grandchild’s birth, the final consensus was this: we all had an overwhelming emotional pull, but also a feeling of complete stress-free contentment.
Did we feel this same emotional pull when our children were born? Well, if we did it was smothered under anxiety and the fear of what to do with this baby when the nurse told us to get up so someone else could occupy the bed.
I think I’ve come up with a reasonable answer for this stress. As young mothers giving birth, we came face to face with this small blob of protoplasm and had no clue where to start. They might as well have put a blindfold over our eyes when they handed us this warm, stuffed blanket and wheeled us toward the hospital exit: “Goodbye. Good Luck!”
Unfortunately, babies don’t come with How-To books. There’s no user’s manual with instructions on operating this howling little person. No tag dangling from a tiny pink toe with instructions on care.
Now enter the grandmother. Here is this same tiny blob of protoplasm, only now it doesn’t fall on grandma’s shoulders to see that this child survives, walks, talks, eats, sleeps, matures into a perfect citizen, and is socially acceptable. We leave the hospital after visiting hours full of emotion, full of love, but absolutely free of stress.
As the baby grows from infant to toddler, we hold them close to inhale their milky-moist breath, search their faces for any resemblance of our own children, ourselves, our DNA. And it is totally stress-free. We get to love them, cuddle them, spoil them, and then send them home to the responsible party from whence they came.
At the end of a visit, how we hate to give up these soft, precious creations of God. We can taste their hello and goodbye kisses long after they’ve delivered them. How we look forward with such anticipation to see them again. We allow them to do things we never allowed our own children to get away with, which is pointed out to us by our children on a regular basis.
And, if this child develops traits not to our liking, well, of course we are duty-bound to tell their parents how we would have handled that in our day.
But, alas, children grow. And, we are only humans &ndash albeit older humans. I doubt there’s a grandparent who will ever admit to this, but after a weekend of running after the precious little toddlers, tripping over their toys, watching our spotless homes fill with smudges, drips and scuffs, the inimitable words of the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. come to mind as the taillights disappear down the street: “Free at last, free at last. . .”
Fast-forward a few years, and guess who takes credit for all the grandchildren’s accomplishments? Of course &ndash we do. Where else would that child have inherited that porcelain skin, that thick head of hair, that high I.Q.?
Fast-forward again. As we age, so do our grandchildren. But our love is unflagging. Now it seems there is scarcely any time for grandma. But we know we can catch a peek at them on a baseball diamond, soccer field, or class play, if only just to crow to the stranger sitting next to us “…that’s my grandchild!”
Next in this voyage to adulthood comes the dating game. Grandma Who? We might get calls every now and then asking if they can drop by to show us a new prom dress or a tux, their school pictures or report cards. Can we sew up a quickie little item for a school play or dance class? &ndash it won’t take long, Grammy. Or, “…ah Grams, got any extra bread?” As I head for the kitchen it dawns on me … oh, that kind of bread &ndash then I head for my purse.
I had an eye-opener on how one of my grandchildren views me: I was attending a ball game where my youngest grandson was playing. At the end of the game he came running up to me oozing sweat and smiles. “Grams, did you see the great throws I made? Did you see my home runs?”
“I did, honey. You were great. Are you going to keep playing baseball?”
“Heck yeah,” he answered, without hesitation. “When I’m older I’m gonna play Pro ball.”
I was most impressed. “How wonderful,” I said. “You know professional ballplayers make a lot of money. You can take care of Grams in my old age.”
He thought about that for a second, looked me straight in the eye and replied, “But Grams, you’re already old and I’m only eight!”
Oh, all right, maybe I’ll have to depend on some of my older grandchildren to help me in my dotage. But, I thank God everyday that I have them to depend on &ndash for stress-free love.
Feb
21
Love songs are everywhere. But does anyone have a definition of love, which &ndash people claim &ndash makes the world go around? Sure, it’s easy to tell when you’re in love with someone. [The heart pounds and you act like an idiot.] But it’s much harder to say if you actually love someone.
Enter the mind of Harry Jenkins, as he is about to make love to Natasha,
And then he laughed at himself as he sank beneath the covers. No sane man would question such free and voluptuous pleasure, as if it could only be valued through thought. Only an idiot or a fool would try to analyze love and passion.
Nonetheless, like the fool, I seek a definition. Perhaps it is the lawyer in me. On the subject of love, Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, is a sobering read. All of us, supposedly, carry within us, an animus [if you're female] and an anima [if you're male], which is the idealized image of the person you love. And so, when you are in love you are projecting this idealized image on a real, live person who might be naturally quite entitled to be different.
After the honeymoon, those annoying little cracks in the image appear, which could certainly explain the high divorce rate. When you find the real person doesn’t exactly match your superimposed ideal, what do you do?
All of these thoughts led me to explore people’s ideas of all kinds of love, not just the romantic variety, in Final Paradox, the second in The Osgoode Trilogy.
Harry Jenkins is the lawyer protagonist throughout the trilogy, which contain story lines of murder and fraud. He is in the thrall of the beautiful Natasha. His aging father, who abandoned him as a child, has just asked his forgiveness. Harry can’t seem to find that in his heart. Natasha asks him&ndash
What do you think love is?
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s about wanting someone as part of your life. Wanting them always with you.” He looked into her eyes. “Why? What do you think?”
“I think it’s about getting outside yourself and seeing another person’s life from their point of view. At least that’s a start,” Natasha replied.
Harry heard his father’s words. It’s all about you, is it? Would he always be the kid, he wondered?
Another character musing about love is Norma Dinnick &ndash an elderly client of Harry’s who trips back and forth between lucidity and madness. She recollects her stew of feelings for various men.
Going back to her hotel, Norma tried to understand. She knew about affection and caring from Arthur, her husband, who kept her safe from the emptiness. But she did not understand this business of love, which David talked about. She did know that such emotions gave her a sense of power. The sheer lust she experienced in the presence of George made her feel weak and vulnerable.
Norma simply doesn’t understand about love and neither does Bronwyn &ndash another character. An embittered soul, she has married a gay man and on her honeymoon - She wandered the narrow beach of sand and stone where the boats ferried back and forth to the grottos. No Peter. But then she saw him at a distance on the beach walking slowly with a younger man she did not know. Where had they come from? Right from the start, she had known. Of course, the bargain was unspoken, but well understood. For money and security, Bronwyn had sacrificed any chance for love.
But in the end, Harry does begin to get it. In bed with the lovely Natasha, he was
…transported outside his own body, he was overcome with the desire to know the dreams, fantasies and mysteries she held within. He would enter her world with love and understanding and never leave. The awe he felt in her closeness made his breathing slow and deepen in rhythm with hers. He watched his hand reach out of the shadows to smooth the sheet. She was at last in his bed and, fearing a mirage, he dared not wake her. In the past two weeks, his world had been shaken. His mind had become a jumble of colliding, conflicting events and consequences. Now he felt her power to draw his life together. A still peace gently settled over him like a silken web of meaning.
(Reprinted from Final Paradox by Mary E. Martin with permission).
Feb
16
Is it possible to achieve a higher romantic love than the resigned complacency we see all around us? If so, can it be sustained for long? Would many people really want it? Sure, nonfiction literature is replete with books, courses, and seminars on how to achieve romantic or marital bliss. But few of us seem to achieve it, and fewer still ever sustain it. Worse yet is that many people seem disinterested or, worse yet, disheartened.
Far fewer are works of fiction that explore such higher love as literature for readers to savor and enjoy. Coinage of Commitment was written to explore this rarified territory. It attempts to go where few have dared to tread, testing the limits of what a couple can achieve, the altitude of orbit they might be able to soar to.
Don’t be misled. This is not an easy topic. Life imposes a lot of restraints on reaching the emotional altitude we are discussing. And it cannot be obtained for free. It requires thinking as well as feeling, planning as well as carefree fulfillment. It requires risk taking, and there are payments and sacrifices that have to be made. So would it be worth it? What would you be willing to give to obtain it? What if there was just a chance to obtain it? What then?
How does this particular romantic ambition affect story production? Well, for one thing, at least in my view, it means that the main characters need to take an intellectual as well as an emotional journey to attain the level they seek. They need this just to get prepared and be capable of what they want to experience emotionally. And this opens up all sorts of literary issues to explore. How do our characters come to want such an exalted level of fulfillment for themselves? What conditions in their lives produce a hunger for it? What do they do to nourish its development? Just how do they find their way? How are they different from their peers?
Deciding to write a novel featuring higher love made the manuscript harder to sell. This is not standard fare; it defines a new category, hence it was viewed with suspicion as a risky project. Many agents dismissed it out of hand and refused to read sample chapters. Others who did, refused to change their mindset, and misunderstood the work. One criticism I got was that the characters didn’t seem quite…typical. Duh? Of course they’re not typical. How could they be?
Another criticism was writing style. Coinage has plenty of plot movement, including some exciting heroics, but it features more reflection on the main characters’ feelings and their emotional evolution and turning points. Agents and editors who criticized this approach as unfashionable had nothing to offer as an alternate to describing characters loving at a higher level. Simply describing plot developments from an action standpoint won’t cut it for a work with this ambition.
I portray higher love as something feasible, but difficult to achieve, hence likely to be attained by very few. When Wayne and Nancy achieve it, they feel that they have no one to compare themselves with. I think that is the correct answer for our current culture and societal situation, but there is no data on this that I am aware of, hence it is difficult to rely on anything but your own experience. I heartily welcome reader views on this topic.
Feb
15
Love songs are everywhere. But does anyone have a definition of love, which &ndash people claim &ndash makes the world go around? Sure, it’s easy to tell when you’re in love with someone. [The heart pounds and you act like an idiot.] But it’s much harder to say if you actually love someone.
Enter the mind of Harry Jenkins, as he is about to make love to Natasha,
And then he laughed at himself as he sank beneath the covers. No sane man would question such free and voluptuous pleasure, as if it could only be valued through thought. Only an idiot or a fool would try to analyze love and passion.
Nonetheless, like the fool, I seek a definition. Perhaps it is the lawyer in me. On the subject of love, Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, is a sobering read. All of us, supposedly, carry within us, an animus [if you're female] and an anima [if you're male], which is the idealized image of the person you love. And so, when you are in love you are projecting this idealized image on a real, live person who might be naturally quite entitled to be different.
After the honeymoon, those annoying little cracks in the image appear, which could certainly explain the high divorce rate. When you find the real person doesn’t exactly match your superimposed ideal, what do you do?
All of these thoughts led me to explore people’s ideas of all kinds of love, not just the romantic variety, in Final Paradox, the second in The Osgoode Trilogy.
Harry Jenkins is the lawyer protagonist throughout the trilogy, which contain story lines of murder and fraud. He is in the thrall of the beautiful Natasha. His aging father, who abandoned him as a child, has just asked his forgiveness. Harry can’t seem to find that in his heart. Natasha asks him&ndash
What do you think love is?
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s about wanting someone as part of your life. Wanting them always with you.” He looked into her eyes. “Why? What do you think?”
“I think it’s about getting outside yourself and seeing another person’s life from their point of view. At least that’s a start,” Natasha replied.
Harry heard his father’s words. It’s all about you, is it? Would he always be the kid, he wondered?
Another character musing about love is Norma Dinnick &ndash an elderly client of Harry’s who trips back and forth between lucidity and madness. She recollects her stew of feelings for various men.
Going back to her hotel, Norma tried to understand. She knew about affection and caring from Arthur, her husband, who kept her safe from the emptiness. But she did not understand this business of love, which David talked about. She did know that such emotions gave her a sense of power. The sheer lust she experienced in the presence of George made her feel weak and vulnerable.
Norma simply doesn’t understand about love and neither does Bronwyn &ndash another character. An embittered soul, she has married a gay man and on her honeymoon - She wandered the narrow beach of sand and stone where the boats ferried back and forth to the grottos. No Peter. But then she saw him at a distance on the beach walking slowly with a younger man she did not know. Where had they come from? Right from the start, she had known. Of course, the bargain was unspoken, but well understood. For money and security, Bronwyn had sacrificed any chance for love.
But in the end, Harry does begin to get it. In bed with the lovely Natasha, he was
…transported outside his own body, he was overcome with the desire to know the dreams, fantasies and mysteries she held within. He would enter her world with love and understanding and never leave. The awe he felt in her closeness made his breathing slow and deepen in rhythm with hers. He watched his hand reach out of the shadows to smooth the sheet. She was at last in his bed and, fearing a mirage, he dared not wake her. In the past two weeks, his world had been shaken. His mind had become a jumble of colliding, conflicting events and consequences. Now he felt her power to draw his life together. A still peace gently settled over him like a silken web of meaning.
(Reprinted from Final Paradox by Mary E. Martin with permission).
Feb
12
Is it possible to achieve a higher romantic love than the resigned complacency we see all around us? If so, can it be sustained for long? Would many people really want it? Sure, nonfiction literature is replete with books, courses, and seminars on how to achieve romantic or marital bliss. But few of us seem to achieve it, and fewer still ever sustain it. Worse yet is that many people seem disinterested or, worse yet, disheartened.
Far fewer are works of fiction that explore such higher love as literature for readers to savor and enjoy. Coinage of Commitment was written to explore this rarified territory. It attempts to go where few have dared to tread, testing the limits of what a couple can achieve, the altitude of orbit they might be able to soar to.
Don’t be misled. This is not an easy topic. Life imposes a lot of restraints on reaching the emotional altitude we are discussing. And it cannot be obtained for free. It requires thinking as well as feeling, planning as well as carefree fulfillment. It requires risk taking, and there are payments and sacrifices that have to be made. So would it be worth it? What would you be willing to give to obtain it? What if there was just a chance to obtain it? What then?
How does this particular romantic ambition affect story production? Well, for one thing, at least in my view, it means that the main characters need to take an intellectual as well as an emotional journey to attain the level they seek. They need this just to get prepared and be capable of what they want to experience emotionally. And this opens up all sorts of literary issues to explore. How do our characters come to want such an exalted level of fulfillment for themselves? What conditions in their lives produce a hunger for it? What do they do to nourish its development? Just how do they find their way? How are they different from their peers?
Deciding to write a novel featuring higher love made the manuscript harder to sell. This is not standard fare; it defines a new category, hence it was viewed with suspicion as a risky project. Many agents dismissed it out of hand and refused to read sample chapters. Others who did, refused to change their mindset, and misunderstood the work. One criticism I got was that the characters didn’t seem quite…typical. Duh? Of course they’re not typical. How could they be?
Another criticism was writing style. Coinage has plenty of plot movement, including some exciting heroics, but it features more reflection on the main characters’ feelings and their emotional evolution and turning points. Agents and editors who criticized this approach as unfashionable had nothing to offer as an alternate to describing characters loving at a higher level. Simply describing plot developments from an action standpoint won’t cut it for a work with this ambition.
I portray higher love as something feasible, but difficult to achieve, hence likely to be attained by very few. When Wayne and Nancy achieve it, they feel that they have no one to compare themselves with. I think that is the correct answer for our current culture and societal situation, but there is no data on this that I am aware of, hence it is difficult to rely on anything but your own experience. I heartily welcome reader views on this topic.