Strong women

I’ve had the flu for over a week now; sometimes hungry, yet sick at the thought of food; sleeping for hours, waking for a drink and bathroom break and perhaps to check email; then back to bed again.

As I write this, it’s very early in the morning on March 7th, my sister’s birthday. I’ve been thinking about her; then thinking about a commitment I made to write a post for International Women’s Day on March 8th.

The women in my family are strong. In her 20s, my sister was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a terribly painful disease that flares up; then calms for no apparent reason, like my fibromyalgia. There are very few foods she can eat that won’t cause symptoms, and it’s taken trial and error to learn what they are. And although medication is controlling her disease, she knows it may not always work. Like me, she wonders how having children could affect her body, and struggles with the future: will she be able to do all she dreams of doing? When will the next shoe drop? Still, she teaches and volunteers and loves.

Our mother too is strong woman, giving up her career and devoting her life fully to her daughters and husband, all the while feeling that she was never good enough. My parents met and married so quickly that their marriage until very recently was one of fighting and staying together for the kids. My mom must have felt horribly disappointed with what her life had become. Yet she stayed with my dad throughout his years of anxiety and depression that began when I was 16. She knew I thought of her as weak, yet she’s been there for me through it all. Both my dad and I now know: she’s put up with so much less than she deserves.

Her own mom, my Gram, waited for years to marry the man she loved, just because her mother wanted her to stay at home and help on the farm. She must have resented those years she lost when my grandpa died unexpectedly when he was 71. She was devastated, alone in the home they’d built together, yet kept on. Her own mother, the woman she never felt good enough for, lived to be 98, and Gram continued to visit and love her. I can’t imagine how she’s lived for so long without my grandpa. All I know is that she’s part of my family–that she’s a stronger woman than me.

My dad’s mother lived a largely unhappy life, and although she doesn’t say much, we hear bits and pieces: brothers locking her in the closet; a brother gone missing in the war; marriage to a man who later became an alcoholic. She lost her husband when I was just a baby, and now lives in a nursing home, suffering from dementia. She may have become bitter, but perhaps it was the only way she knew how to survive. After years wasted in squabbles with her six sons and daughters, she sits alone, watching TV. Somehow she’s survived; somehow she’s been strong.

My great-grandmother got pregnant at 16, in a time when this was horribly frowned upon. Her third child drowned in a water reservoir on the farm; there was nothing they could do to save her. In her late 70s, she fell, broke her hip and pelvis, and had a series of strokes, leaving her paralyzed in a wheelchair; in a nursing home alone. All she wanted was to die, let she lived to be 98–the overwhelming strength of the genes in my family’s women.

I never knew my grandfather’s mom, but she, too, was an example of strength. She spent a lifetime reading and collecting books, filling them with underlining and her own scrawled insights. Trained to be a teacher, she was married with two boys under 10 when she found her husband in the barn, mauled to death by a bull. She survived, raising her children and keeping the farm afloat. I never knew her, but before she died, she met her newest great-grandchild, leaving an intricately embroidered version of “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep” that hung for years above my bed.

I compare myself to this heritage of strong women, tearing myself down, believing that I could never be strong enough to survive what they survived. Yet here I am, their genes, their stories, all a part of me. And I have to think that maybe–just maybe–I’m stronger than I think I am.